_Cultures are organisms_, and world-history is their collective biography. Morphologically, the immense history of the Chinese or of the Classical Culture is the exact equivalent of the petty history of the individual man, or of the animal, or the tree, or the flower. For the Faustian vision, this is not a postulate but an experience; if we want to learn to recognize inward forms that constantly and everywhere repeat themselves, the comparative morphology[85] of plants and animals has long ago given us the methods. In the destinies of the several Cultures that follow upon one another, grow up with one another, touch, overshadow, and suppress one another, is compressed the whole content of human history. And if we set free their shapes, till now hidden all too deep under the surface of a trite “history of human progress,” and let them march past us in the spirit, it cannot but be that we shall succeed in distinguishing, amidst all that is special or unessential, the primitive culture-form, _the_ Culture that underlies as ideal all the individual Cultures. I distinguish the _idea_ of a Culture, which is the sum total of its inner possibilities, from its sensible _phenomenon_ or appearance upon the canvas of history as a fulfilled actuality. It is the relation of the soul to the living body, to its expression in the light-world perceptible to our eyes. This history of a Culture is the progressive actualizing of its possible, and the fulfilment is equivalent to the end. In this way the Apollinian soul, which some of us can perhaps understand and share in, is related to its unfolding in the realm of actuality, to the “Classical” or “antique” as we call it, of which the tangible and understandable relics are investigated by the archæologist, the philologist, the æsthetic and the historian.