Becoming has no number. We can count, measure, dissect only the lifeless and so much of the living as can be dissociated from livingness. Pure becoming, pure life, is in this sense incapable of being bounded. It lies beyond the domain of cause and effect, law and measure. No deep and pure historical research seeks for conformities with causal laws—or, if it does so, it does not understand its own essence. At the same time, history as positively treated is not pure becoming: it is an image, a world-form radiated from the waking consciousness of the historian, in which the becoming _dominates_ the become. The possibility of extracting results of any sort by scientific methods depends upon the proportion of things-become present in the subject treated, and by hypothesis there is in this case a defect of them; the higher the proportion is, the more mechanical, reasonable, causal, history is made to appear. Even Goethe’s “living nature,” utterly unmathematical world- picture as it was, contained enough of the dead and stiffened to allow him to treat at least his foreground scientifically. But when this content of things-become dwindles to very little, then history becomes approximately pure becoming, and contemplation and vision become an experience which can only be rendered in forms of _art_. That which Dante saw before his spiritual eyes as the destiny of the world, he _could not possibly_ have arrived at by ways of science, any more than Goethe could have attained by these ways to what he saw in the great moments of his “Faust” studies, any more than Plotinus and Giordano Bruno could have distilled their visions from researches. This contrast lies at the root of all dispute regarding the inner form of history. In the presence of the same object or corpus of facts, every observer according to his own disposition has a different _impression_ of the whole, and this impression, _intangible and incommunicable_, underlies his judgment and gives it its personal colour. The degree in which things-become are taken in differs from man to man, which is quite enough in itself to show that they can never agree as to task or method. Each accuses the other of a deficiency of “clear thinking,” and yet the something that is expressed by this phrase is something not built with hands, not implying superiority or a priority of degree but necessary difference of kind. The same applies to all natural sciences.