In this sense, too, every individual being that has any sort of importance recapitulates,[97] of intrinsic necessity, all the epochs of the Culture to which it belongs. In each one of us, at that decisive moment when he begins to know that he is an ego, the inner life wakens just where and just how that of the Culture wakened long ago. Each of us men of the West, in his child’s day-dreams and child’s play, lives again its Gothic—the cathedrals, the castles, the hero-sagas, the crusader’s “Dieu le veult,” the soul’s oath of young Parzival. Every young Greek had his Homeric age and his Marathon. In Goethe’s Werther, the image of a tropic youth that every Faustian (but no Classical) man knows, the springtime of Petrarch and the Minnesänger reappears. When Goethe blocked out the _Urfaust_,[98] he was Parzival; when he finished _Faust I_, he was Hamlet, and only with _Faust II_ did he become the world-man of the 19th Century whom Byron could understand. Even the senility of the Classical—the faddy and unfruitful centuries of very late Hellenism, the second-childhood of a weary and blasé intelligence—can be studied in more than one of its grand old men. Thus, much of Euripides’ _Bacchæ_ anticipates the life-outlook, and much of Plato’s _Timæus_ the religious syncretism of the Imperial age; and Goethe’s _Faust II_ and Wagner’s _Parsifal_ disclose to us in advance the shape that _our_ spirituality will assume in our next (_in point of creative power our last_) centuries. Biology employs the term _homology_ of organs to signify morphological equivalence in contradistinction to the term _analogy_ which relates to functional equivalence. This important, and in the sequel most fruitful, notion was conceived by Goethe (who was led thereby to the discovery of the “os intermaxillare” in man) and put into strict scientific shape by Owen;[99] this notion also we shall incorporate in our historical method.