It subjects a historical personality's private life, letters, eye-witness accounts, medical records and the like to a minute scrutiny from a psychoanalytic, Freudian perspective. Similar historiographical trends nclude the application of modern sociometric devices to past communities, such as the study of neighborhoods, family interrelationships, classification by wealth, and so on, with more or less plausibility. One example is cyclical nistory, prominent through the writings of, for instance, Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee. It asserts plausibly that societies or nations move through cycles of birth, infancy, maturation, decline and death in a biological manner. Historical meaning is attributed to individual persons or events .nsofar as they indicate the stage at which a particular society or nation is supposed to nave arrived.
Cyclical historians believe that they have found a universal explanatory principle for history.
Cyclical history is complemented by unilinear, universal historiography, such as H.G. Wells's Outline of History This type of historiography must of necessity limit attention to details. This school is typified by Hegel and Marx. Both the cyclical and the historicist approach to writing history evaluate human action according to its place within or promotion of preconceived stages of advancement in the historical process. Geographical environment, natural resources, and relative location have a place as determining facts of history. Here we note a fuller method in the biblical creation account, where we are given a rather extensive description of the location and the natural resources of the garden of Eden, man's first habitat.