new being is conceived in the womb, or a seed sinks into the earth, we do know the inner form of this new life-course; and we know that the quiet course of its development and fulfilment may be disturbed by the pressure of external powers, but never altered.
This experience teaches, further, that the Civilization which at this present time has gripped the earth's whole surface is not a third age, but a stage — a necessary stage — of the Western Culture, distinguished from its analogues only by the forcefulness of its extension-tendency. Here experience ends, and all speculation on what new forms will govern the life of future mankind (or, for that matter, whether there will be any such new forms) all building of majestic card-houses on the foundation of "it should be, it shall be" is mere trifling — far too futile, it seems to me, to justify one single life of any value being expended on it.
The group of the high Cultures is not, as a group, an organic unit. That they have happened in just this number, at just these places and times, is, for the human eye, an incident without deeper intelligibility. The ordering of the individual Cultures, on the contrary, has stood out so distinctly that the historical technique of the Chinese, the Magian, and the Western worlds — often, indeed, the mere common consent of the educated in these Cultures — has been able to fashion a set of names upon which it would be impossible to improve.[1]
Historical thought, therefore, has the double task of dealing comparatively with the individual life-courses of the Cultures, and of examining the incidental and irregular relations of the Cultures amongst themselves in respect of their meaning. The necessity of the first of these tasks, obvious enough, has yet been overlooked hitherto. The second has been handled, but only by the lazy and shallow method of imposing causality over the whole tangle and laying it out tidily along the "course" of a hypothetical "world "-history, thereby making it impossible to discover either the psychology of these difficult, but richly suggestive, relations or to discover that of the inner life of any particular Culture. In truth, the condition for solving the first problem is that the second has been solved already. The relations are very different, even under the simple aspect of time and space. The Crusades brought a Springtime face to face with an old and ripe Civilization; in the Cretan-Mycenæan world seed-time and golden autumn are seen together. A Civilization may stream over from immense remoteness, as the Indian streamed into the Arabian from the East, or lie senile and stifling over an infancy, as the Classical lay upon its other side. But there are differences, too, of kind and strength; the Western Culture seeks out relations, the Egyptian tries to avoid them; the former is beaten by them
- ↑ Goethe, in his little essay "Geistesepochen," has characterized the four parts of a Culture — its preliminary, early, late, and civilized stages — with such a depth of insight that even today there is nothing to add. See the tables at the end of Vol. I, which agree with this exactly.
