I repeat, every being livingly experiences every other being and its destiny _only in relation to itself_. A flock of pigeons is regarded by the farmer on whose fields it settles quite otherwise than by the nature-lover in the street or the hawk in the air. The peasant sees in his son the future and the heritage, but what the neighbour sees in him is a peasant, what the officer sees is a soldier, what the visitor sees is a native. Napoleon experienced men and things very differently as Emperor and as lieutenant. Put a man in a new situation, make the revolutionary a minister, the soldier a general, and at once history and the key men of history become for him something other than what they were. Talleyrand saw through the men of his time because he belonged with them, but had he been suddenly plumped down in the company of Crassus, Cæsar, Catiline, and Cicero, his understanding of their measures and views would have been either null or erroneous. There is no history-in-itself. The history of a family is taken differently by each member of it, that of a country differently by each party, that of the age by each nation. The German looks upon the World War otherwise than the Englishman, the workman upon economic history otherwise than the employer, and the historian of the West has a quite other world-history before his eyes than that of the great Arabian and Chinese historians. The history of an era could be handled objectively only if it were very distant in time, and the historian were radically disinterested; and we find that our best historians cannot judge of or describe even the Peloponnesian Wars and Actium without being in some measure influenced by present interests.

It is not incompatible with, rather it is essential to, a profound knowledge of men that the appraiser should see through glasses of his own colour. This knowledge, indeed, is exactly the component that we discern to be wanting in those generalizations that distort or altogether ignore that all-important fact, the uniqueness of the constituent event in history[21]--the worst example of this being the “materialistic” conception of history, about which we have said almost all there is to say when we have described it as physiognomic barrenness. But both in spite of this and on account of this[22] there is for every man, _because_ he belongs to a class and a time and a nation and a Culture, a typical picture of history as it ought to appear in relation to himself, and equally there are typical pictures specific to the time or class or Culture, _qua_ time or class or Culture. The supreme generalization possible to each Culture as a major being is a primary and, for it, symbolical image of its own world-as-history, and all self-attunements of the individual--or of the group livingly effective as individual--are with reference to that image. Whenever we describe another person’s ideas as profound or superficial, original or trivial, mistaken or obsolete, we are unwittingly judging them with reference to a picture which springs up to answer for the value at the moment of a continuous function of our time and our personality.[23]

Obviously, then, every man of the Faustian Culture possesses his own picture of history and, besides, innumerable other pictures from his youth upwards, which fluctuate and alter ceaselessly in response to the experiences of the day and the year. And how different, again, are the typical history-images of men and different eras and classes, the world of Otto the Great and that of Gregory VII, that of a Doge of Venice and that of a poor pilgrim! In what different worlds lived Lorenzo de’ Medici, Wallenstein, Cromwell, Marat, and Bismarck, a serf of the Gothic age, a savant of the Baroque, the army officer of the Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War, and the Wars of Liberation respectively! Or, to consider our own times alone, a Frisian peasant whose life of actuality is limited to his own countryside and its folk, a high merchant of Hamburg, and a professor of physics! And yet to all of these, irrespective of individual age, status, and period, there is a common basis that differentiates the ensemble of these figures, their prime-image, from that of every other Culture.

But, over and above this, there is a distinction of another kind which separates the Classical and the Indian history-pictures from those of the Chinese, the Arabian, and, most of all, the Western Cultures--the _narrow horizon_ of the two first-named. Whatever the Greeks may (and indeed must) have known of ancient Egyptian history, they never allowed it to penetrate into their peculiar history-picture, which for the majority was limited to the field of events that could be related by the oldest surviving participant, and which even for the finer minds stopped at the Trojan War, a frontier beyond which they would not concede that there had been historical life at all.[24]

The Arabian Culture,[25] on the other hand, very early dared the astounding gesture--we see it in the historical thought alike of the Jews and of the Persians from Cyrus’s time--of connecting the legend of creation to the present by means of a genuine chronology; the Persians indeed comprised the future as well in the sweep of the gesture, and predated the last judgment and the coming of the Messiah. This exact and very narrow definition of human history--the Persian reckoning allows twelve millennia from first to last, the Jewish counts less than six up to the present--is a necessary expression of the Magian world-feeling and fundamentally distinguishes the Judæo-Persian creation-sagas from those of the Babylonian Culture, from which so many of their external traits are derived.

Different, again, are the primary feelings which give historical thought in the Chinese and the Egyptian Cultures its characteristically wide and unbounded horizons, represented by chronologically stated sequences of dynasties which stretch over millennia and finally dissolve into a grey remoteness.

The Faustian picture of world-history, again, prepared in advance by the existence of a Christian chronology,[26] came into being suddenly, with an immense extension and deepening of the Magian picture which the Western Church had taken over, an extension and deepening that was to give Joachim of Floris[27] in the high Gothic the basis of his wonderful interpretation of all world-destinies as a sequence of three æons under the aspects of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Parallel with this there was an immense widening of the geographical horizon, which even in Gothic times (thanks to Vikings and Crusaders) came to extend from Iceland to the remotest ends of Asia;[28] and from 1500 onwards, the developed man of the Baroque is able to do what none of his peers in the other Cultures could do and--for the first time in human history--to regard the whole surface of the planet as its field. Thanks to compass and telescope, the savant of that mature age could for the first time not merely posit the sphericity of the earth as a matter of theory, but actually feel that he was living upon a sphere in space. The land-horizon is no more. So, too, time-horizons melt in the double endlessness of the calendar before and after Christ. And to-day, under the influence of this picture, which comprises the whole planet and will eventually embrace all the high Cultures, the old Gothic division of history into “ancient,” “mediæval,” and modern, long become trite and empty, is visibly dissolving.[29]

In all other Cultures the aspects of world-history and of man-history coincide. The beginning of the world is the beginning of man, and the end of man is the end of the world. But the Faustian infinity-craving for the first time separated the two notions during the Baroque, and now it has made human history, for all its immense and still unknown span, _a mere episode in world-history_, while the Earth--of which other Cultures had seen not even the whole, but only superficial fractions as “the world”--has become a little star amongst millions of solar systems.

The extension of the historical world-picture makes it even more necessary in this Culture than in any other to distinguish between the everyday self-attunements of ordinary people and that extreme self-attunement of which only the highest minds are capable, and which even in them holds only for moments. The difference between the historical view-field of Themistocles and that of an Attic husbandman is probably very small, but this difference is already immense as between Henry VI and a hind of his day,[30] and as the Faustian Culture mounts up and up, the power of self-focusing attains to such heights and depths that the circle of adepts grows ever smaller and smaller. In fact, there is formed a sort of pyramid of possibilities, in which individuals are graded according to their endowments; every individual, according to his constitution, stands at the level which he is capable at his best focus of holding. But it follows from this that between Western men there are limitations to the possibilities of reciprocal understanding of historical life-problems, limitations that do not apply to other Cultures, at any rate in such fateful rigour as they do to ours. Can a workman to-day really understand a peasant? Or a diplomat a craftsman? The historico-geographical horizon that determines for each of them the questions worth asking and the form in which these are asked is so different from the horizons of the others that what they can exchange is not a communication, but passing remarks. It is, of course, the mark of the real appraiser of man that he understands how “the other man” is adjusted and regulates his intercourse with him accordingly (as we all do in talking to children), but the art of appraising in this sense some man of the past (say Henry the Lion or Dante), of living oneself into his history-picture so thoroughly that his thoughts, feelings, and decisions take on a character of self-evidence, is, owing to the vast difference between the one’s and the other’s waking consciousness, so rare that up to the eighteenth century it was not even seen that the historian ought to attempt it. Only since 1800 has it become a desideratum for the writing of history, and it is one very seldom satisfied at that.

The typically Faustian separation of human history, as such, from the far wider history of the world has had the result that since the end of the Baroque our world-picture has contained several horizons disposed one behind the other in as many planes. For the exploration of these, individual sciences, more or less overtly historical in character, have taken shape. Astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, one after the other follow up the destinies of the star-world, the earth’s crust, life, and man, and only then do we come to the “world”-history--as it is still called even to-day--of the higher Cultures, to which, again, are attached the histories of the several cultural elements, family history, and lastly (that highly developed speciality of the West) biography.

Each of these planes demands a particular self-focusing, and the moment the special focus becomes sharp the narrower and the broader planes cease to be live Being and become mere given facts. If we are investigating the battle of the Teutoburger Wald, the growing up of this forest in the plant-world of the North German plain is presupposed. If, on the other hand, we are examining into the history of the German tree-world, the geological stratification of the earth is the presupposition, though it is just a fact whose particular destiny need not be further followed out in this connexion. If, again, our question is the origin of the Cretaceous, the existence of the Earth itself as a planet in the solar system is a datum, not a problem. Or, to express it otherwise, that there is an Earth in the star-world, that the phenomenon “life” occurs in the Earth, that within this “life” there is the form “man,” that within the history of man there exists the organic form of the Culture, is in each case an incident in the picture of the next higher plane.

In Goethe, from his Strassburg period to his first Weimar residence, the inclination to attune himself to “world”-history was very strong--as evidenced in his Cæsar, Mohammed, Socrates, Wandering Jew, and Egmont sketches. And after that painful renunciation of the prospect of high political achievement[31]--the pain which calls to us in _Tasso_ even through the sober resignedness of its final form--this precisely was the attunement that he chose to cut out of his life; and thereafter he limits himself, almost fiercely, to the picture-planes of plant-history, animal-history, and earth-history (his “living nature”) on the one hand and to biography on the other.

All these “pictures,” developed in the same man, have the same structure. Even the history of plants and animals, even that of the earth’s crust or that of the stars, is a _fable convenue_ and mirrors in outward actuality the inward tendency of the ego’s being. The student of the animal world or of stratification is a man, living in a period and having a nationality and a social status, and it is no more possible to eliminate his subjective standpoint from his treatment of these things than it would be to obtain a perfectly abstract account of the French Revolution or the World War. The celebrated theories of Kant, Laplace, Cuvier, Lyell, Darwin, have also a politico-economic tinting, and their very power and impressiveness for the lay public show that the mode of outlook upon all these historical planes proceeds from a single source. And what is accomplishing itself to-day is the final achievement of which Faustian history-thinking is capable--the organic linking and disposition of these historical planes in a single vast world-history of uniform physiognomic that shall enable our glance to range from the life of the individual man without a break to the first and last destinies of the universe. The nineteenth century--in mechanistic (i.e., unhistorical) form--enunciated the problem. It is one of the preordained tasks of the twentieth to solve it.