Now, man--no matter whether it is for life or for thought that he is born into the world--so long as he is acting or is thinking, is awake and therefore _in focus_--i.e., adjusted to the one significance that for the moment his light-world holds for him. Everyone knows that it is almost sharply painful to switch off suddenly in the middle of, say, an experiment in physics, in order to think about some event of the day. I have said earlier that the innumerable settings that take turns in man’s waking consciousness fall into two distinct groups--the worlds of destiny and pulsation, and the worlds of causes and tensions. The two pictures I have called _world-as-history_ and _world-as-nature_. In the first, life makes use of critical understanding. It has the eye under command, the felt pulsation becomes the inwardly imagined wave-train, and the shattering spiritual experience becomes pictured as the epochal peak. In the second, thought itself rules, and its causal criticism turns life into a rigorous process, the living content of a fact into an abstract truth, and tension into formula.

How is this possible? Each is an eye-picture, but in the one the seer is giving himself up to the never-to-be-repeated facts, and in the other he is striving to catch truths for an ever-valid system. In the history-picture, that in which knowledge is simply an _auxiliary_, the cosmic makes use of the microcosmic. In the picture which we call memory and recollection, things are present to us as bathed in an inner light and swept by the pulsation of our existence. But the chronological element[19] tells us that history, as soon as it becomes _thought_ history, is no longer immune from the basic conditions of all waking-consciousness. In the nature- (or science-) picture it is the ever-present subjective that is alien and illusive, but in the history-picture it is the equally ineliminable objective, Number, that leads into error.

When we are working in the domain of Nature (science), our settings and self-adjustments should be and can be up to a certain point impersonal--one “forgets oneself”--but every man, class, nation, or family sees the picture of history _in relation to itself_. The mark of Nature is an extension that is inclusive of everything, but History is that which comes up out of the darkness of the past, presents itself to the _seer_, and from him sweeps onward into the future. He, as the present, is always its middle point, and it is quite impossible for him to order the facts with any meaning if he ignores their direction--which is an element proper to life and not to thought. Every time, every land, every living aggregate has its own historical horizon, and it is the mark of the genuine historical thinker that he actualizes the picture of history that his time demands.

Thus Nature and History are distinguishable like pure and impure criticism--meaning by “criticism” the opposite of lived experience. Natural science _is_ criticism and nothing else. But in History, criticism can do no more than scientifically prepare the field over which the historian’s eye is to sweep. _History is that ranging glance itself_, whatever the direction in which it ranges. He who possesses such an eye can understand every fact and every situation “historically.” Nature is a system, and systems can be learnt.

The process of _historical_ self-adjustment begins for everyone with the earliest impressions of childhood. Children’s eyes are keen, and the facts of the nearest environment, the life of the family and the house and the street, are sensed and felt right down to the core, long before the city and its population come into their visual field, and while the words “people,” “country,” “state,” are still quite destitute of tangible meaning to them. Just so, and so thoroughly, primitive man knows all that is presented to his narrow field of view as history, as living--and above all Life itself, the drama of birth and death, sickness and eld; the history of passionate war and passionate love, as experienced in himself or observed in others; the fate of relatives, of the clan, of the village, their actions and their motives; tales of long enmity, of fights, victory, and revenge. The life-horizon widens, and shows not lives, but Life coming and going. The pageant is not now of villages and clans, but of remote races and countries; not of years, but of centuries. The history that is actually lived with and participated in never reaches over more than a grandfather’s span--neither for ancient Germans and present-day Negroes, nor for Pericles and Wallenstein. Here the horizon of living ends, and a new plane begins wherein the picture is based upon hearsay and historical tradition, a plane in which direct sympathies are adapted to a mind-picture that is both distinct and, from long use, stable. The picture so developed shows very different amplitudes for the men of the different Cultures. For us Westerners it is with this secondary picture that genuine history begins, for we live under the aspect of eternity, whereas for the Greeks and Romans it is just then that history ceases. For Thucydides[20] the events of the Persian Wars, for Cæsar those of the Punic Wars, were already devoid of living import.

And beyond this plane again, other historic unit-pictures rise to the view--pictures of the destinies of the plant world and the animal world, the landscape, the stars--which at the last fuse with the last pictures of natural science into mythic images of the creation and the end of the world.

The nature- (science-) picture of the child and the primitive develops out of the petty technique of every day, which perpetually forces both of them to turn away from the fearful contemplation of wide nature to the critique of the facts and situations of their near environment. Like the young animal, the child discovers its first truths through play. Examining the toy, cutting open the doll, turning the mirror round to see what is behind it, the feeling of triumph in having established something as correct for good and all--no nature-research whatsoever has got beyond this. Primitive man applies this critical experience, as he acquires it, to his arms and tools, to the materials for his clothing, food, and housing--i.e., to things _in so far as they are dead_. He applies it to animals as well when suddenly they cease to have meaning for him as living beings whose movements he watches and divines as pursuer or pursued, and are apprehended mechanically instead of vitally, as aggregates of flesh and bone for which he has a definite use--exactly as he is conscious of an event, now as the act of a dæmon and a moment afterwards as a sequence of cause and effect. The mature man of the Culture transposes in exactly the same way, every day and every hour. Here, too, is a “nature”-horizon, and beyond it lies the secondary plane formed of our impressions of rain, lightning, and tempest, summer and winter, moon-phases and star-courses. But at that plane religiousness, trembling with fear and awe, forces upon man criteria of a far higher kind. Just as in the history-picture he sounds the ultimate facts of life, so here he seeks to establish the ultimate truths of nature. What lies beyond any attainable frontier of knowledge he calls God, and all that lies within that frontier he strives to comprehend--as action, creation, and manifestation of God--causally.

Every group of scientifically established elements, therefore, has a dual tendency, inherent and unchanged since primitive ages. The one tendency urges forwards the completest possible system of _technical_ knowledge, for the service of practical, economical, and warlike ends, which many kinds of animals have developed to a high degree of perfection, and which from them leads, through primitive man and his acquaintance with fire and metals, directly to the machine-technics of our Faustian Culture. The other tendency took shape only with the separation of strictly human thought from physical vision by means of language, and the aim of its effort has been an equally complete _theoretical_ knowledge, which we call in the earlier phases of the Culture _religious_, and in the later _scientific_. Fire is for the warrior a weapon, for the craftsman part of his equipment, for the priest a sign from God, and for the scientist a problem. But in all these aspects alike it is proper to the “natural,” the scientific, mode of waking-consciousness. In the world-as-history we do not find fire as such, but the conflagration of Carthage and the flames of the faggots heaped around John Hus and Giordano Bruno.