Description: Modern thought on meaning, direction of history; roots in eschatology, Augustine; flowering in progress, historicism: Hegel, Ranke, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Troeltsch, Spengler, Heidegger, Toynbee; cultural echo (de Chirico, Proust, Mann, Robbe-Grillet, Bu^uel, Bergman, Fellini).