Not only do events happen to us and change our condition, but with our own activity we are able to hold fast to these events, to give to them an inner permanence, to bring them ever anew from the dim distance into the living present. We do not drift onward with the stream of time, but withstand it; seek to wrest something fixed from "becoming" and change, and salvation in the eternal. We cannot do this without altering the whole view of things and manifesting a new spiritual capacity. The retention in mind of individual events by means of annals, monuments and similar methods is the beginning of a history of a higher kind: even so much shows a greater activity, since it involves a judgment of the significance of events, and on the basis of this judgment begins to wage war against the destroying power of "cormorant devouring time." The achievement is incomparably higher, if certain spiritual unities and tendencies are adhered to and are given permanent currency: thus religion in particular gave a stability to life and delivered men from the tyranny of the mere moment. The matter remains simple so long as the movement is within a single people or a definite sphere of culture. But in its progress it goes far beyond these limits. New peoples arise; the state of culture undergoes great changes, indeed revolutions; life is taken up from new starting points, from which everything of importance to earlier ages loses its value. But it is lost only for a time; a desire to return to it and to bring it into complete harmony with the new is soon felt. The circle of vision is thus increasingly widened, and all multiplicity is finally united into a whole. This retention of the past is primarily a matter of knowledge and of intellectual appropriation. But it is not limited to this; it would operate not only in the extension of knowledge but beyond this in the development of life. Whatever has been won by human power is to be preserved, unified, and used to advance the present. Thus, there arises a historical culture; an education on a historical basis; religion and philosophy, art and law derive power and content from the work of universal history, and life as a whole seems to win a greater comprehensiveness and stability. And so it has come to appear as though the past imparts its whole result to the present without any effort on the part of man and without incurring him in any risk.