It is largely taken for granted today that a greater historical sense or historical consciousness is a distinguishing feature of modern Western thought. To a large extent, this heightened sensitivity to history and to the “constructed” character of one's ideas and beliefs – historicism as it is generally called and as I shall call it – first developed among German scholars, in universities and academies, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. At this time, it is said, a secular historical consciousness freed itself from long-standing theological conceptions of history. Present-day intellectual and cultural historians have generally portrayed the process as fundamentally discontinuous: history triumphed over the “theological stranglehold” that it had languished under for centuries; the “modern mind” became historicized, emancipated from traditional, biblical-theological modi cognoscendi.