As with the political, so with the other side of historical existence, the economic. The hand-to-mouth life corresponds to the love that begins and ends in the satisfaction of the moment. There was an economic organization on the grand scale in Egypt, where it fills the whole culture-picture, telling us in a thousand paintings the story of its industry and orderliness; in China, whose mythology of gods and legend- emperors turns entirely upon the holy tasks of cultivation; and in Western Europe, where, beginning with the model agriculture of the Orders, it rose to the height of a special science, “national economy,” which was in very principle a _working hypothesis_, purporting to show not what happens but what _shall_ happen. In the Classical world, on the other hand—to say nothing of India—men managed from day to day, in spite of the example of Egypt; the earth was robbed not only of its wealth but of its capacities, and the casual surpluses were instantly squandered on the city mob. Consider critically any great statesman of the Classical— Pericles and Cæsar, Alexander and Scipio, and even revolutionaries like Cleon and Tiberius Gracchus. Not one of them, economically, looked far ahead. No city ever made it its business to drain or to afforest a district, or to introduce advanced cultivation methods or new kinds of live stock or new plants. To attach a Western meaning to the “agrarian reform” of the Gracchi is to misunderstand its purport entirely. Their aim was to make their supporters _possessors_ of land. Of educating these into managers of land, or of raising the standard of Italian husbandry in general, there was not the remotest idea—one let the future come, one did not attempt to work upon it. Of this economic Stoicism of the Classical world the exact antithesis is Socialism, meaning thereby not Marx’s theory but Frederick William I’s Prussian practice which long preceded Marx and will yet displace him—the socialism, inwardly akin to the system of Old Egypt, that comprehends and cares for permanent economic relations, trains the individual in his duty to the whole, and glorifies hard work as an affirmation of Time and Future. VII The ordinary everyday man in all Cultures only observes so much of the physiognomy of becoming—his own and that of the living world around him— as is in the foreground and immediately tangible. The sum of his experiences, inner and outer, fills the course of his day merely as a series of facts. Only the outstanding (bedeutende) man feels behind the commonplace unities of the history-stirred surface a deep logic of becoming. This logic, manifesting itself in the idea of Destiny, leads him to regard the less significant collocations of the day and the surface as mere incidents.