1. THE CONCEPT 'HUMANITY' Herder's idea of humanity as the goal of history--The concepts 'mankind' and 'human nature'--Humanity as a value-concept--The idea of a cultural community of mankind and its developmental forms.
2. WORLD EMPIRES The empires of Egypt and of Western Asia--The monarch as ruler of the world--The ruler as deity--Apotheosis of deceased rulers--Underlying cause of formation of empires--Disappearance of world empires from history.
3. WORLD CULTURE The world dominion of Alexander--Greek as the universal language--Writing and speech as factors of culture--Travel as symptomatic of culture--Hellenistic world culture and its results--The culture of the Renaissance--Cosmopolitanism and individualism.
4. WORLD RELIGIONS Unity of the world of gods--Cult of Æsculapius and cults of the beyond--Their transition into redemption cults--Buddhism and Christianity--Development of the idea of a superpersonal deity--The incarnate god as the representative of this deity--Three aspects of the concept 'representative.'
5. WORLD HISTORY Twofold significance of the concept 'history'--History as self-conscious experience--The rôle of will in history--Prehistoric and historic periods--Influence of world culture and world religions on the rise of the historical consciousness--The philosophy of history--Its relation to a psychological history of the development of mankind.
