At first sight, however, there seems to be only a difference of degree in the connotations of “destiny” and “incident.” One feels that it is more or less of an incident when Goethe goes to Sesenheim, but destiny when he goes to Weimar;[151] one regards the former as an episode and the latter as an epoch. But we can see at once that the distinction depends on the inward quality of the man who is impressed. To the mass, the whole life of Goethe may appear as a sequence of anecdotal incidents, while a very few will become conscious, with astonishment, of a symbolic necessity inherent even in its most trivial occurrences. Perhaps, then, the discovery of the heliocentric system by Aristarchus was an unmeaning incident for the Classical Culture, but its supposed[152] rediscovery by Copernicus a destiny for the Faustian? Was it a destiny that Luther was not a great organizer and Calvin was? And if so, for whom was it a destiny—for Protestantism as a living unit, for the Germans, or for Western mankind generally? Were Tiberius Gracchus and Sulla incidents and Cæsar a destiny? Questions like these far transcend the domain of the understanding that operates through concepts (der begriffliche Verständigung). What is destiny, what incident, the spiritual experiences of the individual soul—and of the Culture-soul—decide. Acquired knowledge, scientific insight, definition, are all powerless. Nay more, the very attempt to grasp them epistemologically defeats its own object. For without the inward certainty that destiny is something entirely intractable to critical thought, we cannot perceive the world of becoming at all. Cognition, judgment, and the establishment of _causal_ connexions within the known (i.e., between things, properties, and positions that have been distinguished) are one and the same, and he who approaches history in the spirit of _judgment_ will only find “data.” But that—be it Providence or Fate—which moves in the depths of present happening or of represented past happening is lived, and only lived, and lived with that same overwhelming and unspeakable certainty that genuine Tragedy awakens in the uncritical spectator. Destiny and incident form an opposition in which the soul is ceaselessly trying to clothe something which consists _only_ of feeling and living and intuition, and can only be made plain in the most subjective religious and artistic creations of those men who are _called_ to divination. To evoke this root-feeling of living existence which endows the picture of history with its meaning and content, I know of no better way—for “name is mere noise and smoke”—than to quote again those stanzas of Goethe which I have placed at the head of this book to mark its fundamental intention.