Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the fact that at bottom the wish to write history _scientifically_ involves a contradiction. True science reaches just as far as the notions of truth and falsity have validity: this applies to mathematics and it applies also to the science of historical spade-work, viz., the collection, ordering and sifting of material. But real historical vision (which only _begins_ at this point) belongs to the domain of significances, in which the crucial words are not “correct” and “erroneous,” but “deep” and “shallow.” The true physicist is not deep, but _keen_: it is only when he leaves the domain of working hypotheses and brushes against the final things that he can be deep, but at this stage he is already a metaphysician. Nature is to be handled scientifically, History poetically. Old Leopold von Ranke is credited with the remark that, after all, Scott’s “Quentin Durward” was the true history-writing. And so it is: the advantage of a good history book is that it enables the reader to be his own Scott. On the other hand, within the very realm of numbers and exact knowledge there is that which Goethe called “living Nature,” an immediate vision of pure becoming and self-shaping, in fact, history as above defined. Goethe’s world was, in the first instance, an organism, an existence, and it is easy therefore to see why his researches, even when superficially of a physical kind, do not make numbers, or laws, or causality captured in formulæ, or dissection of any sort their object, but are morphology in the highest sense of the word; and why his work neither uses nor needs to use the specifically Western and un-Classical means of causal treatment, metrical experiment. His treatment of the Earth’s crust is invariably geology, and never mineralogy, which he called the science of something dead. Let it be said, once more, that there are no exact boundaries set between the two kinds of world-notion. However great the contrast between becoming and the become, the fact remains that they are jointly present in every kind of understanding. He who looks at the becoming and fulfilling in them, experiences History; he who dissects them as become and fulfilled cognizes Nature. In every man, in every Culture, in every culture-phase, there is found an inherent disposition, an inherent inclination and vocation to prefer one of the two forms as an ideal of understanding the world. Western man is in a high degree historically disposed,[78] Classical man far from being so. We follow up what is given us with an eye to past and future, whereas Classical man knew only the point-present and an ambiance of myth. We have before us a symbol of becoming in every bar of our music from Palestrina to Wagner, and the Greeks a symbol of the pure present in every one of their statues. The rhythm of a body is based upon a simultaneous relation of the parts, that of a fugue in the succession of elements in time. ----- Footnote 77: