One other point remains to be noted.[81] As a becoming always lies at the base of the become, and as the world-picture representative of becoming is that which history gives us, therefore history is the _original_ world-form, and Nature—the fully elaborated world-mechanism— is the _late_ world-form that only the men of a mature Culture can completely actualize. In fact, the darkness encompassing the simple soul of primitive mankinds, which we can realize even to-day from their religious customs and myths—that entirely organic world of pure wilfulness, of hostile demons and kindly powers—was through-and-through a living and swaying whole, ununderstandable, indefinable, incalculable. We may call this Nature if we like, but it is not what _we_ mean by “nature,” i.e., the strict image projected by a knowing intellect. Only the souls of children and of great artists can now hear the echoes of this long-forgotten world of nascent humanity, but it echoes still, and not rarely, even in the inelastic "nature"-medium that the city-spirit of the mature Culture is remorselessly building up round the individual. Hence that acute antagonism between the scientific (“modern”) and the artistic (“unpractical”) world-idea which every Late period knows; the man of fact and the poet do not and cannot understand one another. Hence comes, too, that tendency of historical study, which must inevitably contain an element of the childish, the dreamy, the Goethian, to dress up as a science, to be (using its own naïve word) “materialistic,” at the imminent risk of becoming a mere physics of public life. “Nature,” in the exact sense, is a way of possessing actuality which is special to the few, restricted to the megalopolitans of the late periods of great Cultures, masculine, perhaps even senatorial; while History is the naïve, youthful, more or less instinctive way that is proper to _all_ men alike. At least, that is the position of the number-based, unmystical, dissectable and dissected “Nature” of Aristotle and Kant, the Sophists and the Darwinians, modern physics and chemistry, _vis-à- vis_ the lived, felt and unconfined “Nature” of Homer and the Eddas, of Doric and Gothic man. To overlook this is to miss the whole essence of historical treatment. It is history that is the truly natural, and the exact mechanically-correct “Nature” of the scientist that is the artificial conception of world by soul. Hence the paradox that modern man finds "nature"-study easy and historical study hard.