This phrase, derived by analogy from the centre of gravity of mechanics, is offered as a translation of “mithin in einim Zeitpunkte ger nicht zusammengefasst werden können.”—_Tr._ ----- VI And now it is possible to discover the ultimate elements of the historical form-world. Countless shapes that emerge and vanish, pile up and melt again, a thousand-hued glittering tumult, it seems, of perfectly wilful chance— such is the picture of world-history when first it deploys before our inner eye. But through this seeming anarchy, the keener glance can detect those pure forms which underlie all human becoming, penetrate their cloud-mantle, and bring them unwillingly to unveil. But of the whole picture of world-becoming, of that cumulus of grand planes that the Faust-eye[84] sees piled one beyond another—the becoming of the heavens, of the earth’s crust, of life, of man—we shall deal here only with that very small morphological unit that we are accustomed to call “world-history,” that history which Goethe ended by despising, the history of higher mankind during 6000 years or so, without going into the deep problem of the inward homogeneity of all these aspects. What gives this fleeting form-world meaning and substance, and what has hitherto lain buried deep under a mass of tangible “facts” and “dates” that has hardly yet been bored through, is the _phenomenon of the Great Cultures_. Only after these prime forms shall have been seen and felt and worked out in respect of their physiognomic meaning will it be possible to say that the essence and inner form of human History as opposed to the essence of Nature are understood—or rather, that we understand them. Only after this inlook and this outlook will a serious philosophy of history become feasible. Only then will it be possible to see each fact in the historical picture—each idea, art, war, personality, epoch—according to its symbolic content, and to regard history not as a mere sum of past things without intrinsic order or inner necessity, but as an organism of rigorous structure and significant articulation, an organism that does not suddenly dissolve into a formless and ambiguous future when it reaches the accidental present of the observer.