In the Destiny-idea the soul reveals its world-longing, its desire to rise into the light, to accomplish and actualize its vocation. To no man is it entirely alien, and not before one has become the unanchored “late” man of the megalopolis is original vision quite overpowered by matter-of-fact feeling and mechanizing thought. Even then, in some intense hour, the lost vision comes back to one with terrible clearness, shattering in a moment all the causality of the world’s surface. For the world as a system of causal connexions is not only a “late” but also a highly rarefied conception and only the energetic intellects of high Cultures are capable of possessing it—or perhaps we should say, devising it—with conviction. The notion of causality is coterminous with the notion of law: the only laws that are, are causal laws. But just as there lies in the causal, according to Kant, a _necessity of the thinking consciousness_ and the _basic form of its relation to the essence of things_, so also, designated by the words destiny, dispensation, vocation, there is a something that is an inevitable _necessity of life_. Real history is heavy with fate but free of laws. One can divine the future (there is, indeed, a certain insight that can penetrate its secrets deeply) but one cannot reckon it. The physiognomic flair which enables one to read a whole life in a face or to sum up whole peoples from the picture of an epoch—and to do so without deliberate effort or “system”—is utterly remote from all “cause and effect.” He who comprehends the light-world that is before his eyes not physiognomically but systematically, and makes it intellectually his own by the methods of _causal_ experience, must necessarily in the end come to believe that every living thing can be understood by reference to cause and effect—that there is no secret and no inner directedness. He, on the other hand, who as Goethe did—and for that matter as everyone does in nine out of ten of his waking moments—lets the impressions of the world about him work merely upon his senses, absorbs these impressions as a whole, feels the become in its becoming. The stiff mask of causality is lifted by mere _ceasing to think_. Suddenly, Time is no more a riddle, a notion, a “form” or “dimension” but becomes an inner certainty, destiny itself; and in its directedness, its _irreversibility_, its livingness, is disclosed the very meaning of the historical world-picture. _Destiny and Causality are related as Time and Space._