eaning, can be used to explain facts, and anomalous facts need not be accepted at face value in order to reach meaning. Interpretation, not rote memorization, of facts is the key to a credible history. What is significant about history, rather than the mere facts of history, is the key to historical understanding.
Krochmal develops the idea that the historical record demonstrates that the persistence of national spirit, or a nation's essence or ultimate reality, has always been subject to the vicissitudes of temporal reality, owing to the corruption of "basic principles and institutions" among the people. As values have changed, so has the permanence of the concrete manifestations of such values; hence the decline and even disappearance of nations.
[E]very spiritual manifestation possesses an enduring the unlimited mode of existence. This is so since its spirit will be extinguished only to the degree that it is bound in space and time, i.e., peculiar to a specific land or generation. In this respect the manifestation of spirit is likewise finite a
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