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[1] — 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
- ↑ During his Italian sojourn of 1786-8 Goethe made up his mind to resign his political offices at Weimar, retaining merely a non-executive seat on the Council and definitely devoting himself to art and science. This resolution he carried into effect on his return to Weimar in 1788; Tasso finally appeared in 1790. — Tr.
