Tendencies towards a mechanistic idea of the world proceeding wholly from mathematical delimitation and logical differentiation, from law and causality, appear quite early. They are found in the first centuries of all Cultures, still weak, scattered and lost in the full tide of the religious world-conception. The name to be recalled here is that of Roger Bacon. But soon these tendencies acquire a sterner character: like everything that is wrung out of the soul and has to defend itself against human nature, they are not wanting in arrogance and exclusiveness. Quietly the spatial and comprehensible (comprehension is in its essence number, in its structure quantitative) becomes prepotent throughout the outer world of the individual and, aiding and aided by the simple impressions of sensuous-life, effects a mechanical synthesis of the causal and legal sort, so that at long last the sharp consciousness of the megalopolitan—be he of Thebes, Babylon, Benares, Alexandria or a West European cosmopolis—is subjected to so consistent a pressure of natural-law notions that, when scientific and philosophical prejudice (it is no more than that) dictates the proposition that this condition of the soul is _the_ soul and the mechanical world-picture is _the_ world, the assertion is scarcely challenged. It has been made predominant by logicians like Aristotle and Kant. But Plato and Goethe have rejected it and refuted it. IV The task of world-knowing—for the man of the higher Cultures a need, seen as a duty, of expressing his own essence—is certainly in every case the same, though its process may be called science or philosophy, and though its affinity to artistic creation and to faith-intuition may for one be something felt and for another something questionable. It is to present, without accretions, that form of the world-picture which to the individual in each case is proper and significant, and for him (so long as he does not _compare_) is in fact “the” world. The task is necessarily a double one, in view of the distinction between “Nature” and “History.” Each speaks its own form-language which differs utterly from that of the other, and however the two may overlap and confuse one another in an unsifted and ambiguous world-picture such as that of everyday life, they are incapable of any inner unity.