_Vermeintlich._ The allusion is presumably to the fact that Copernicus, adhering to the hypothesis of circular orbits, was obliged to retain some elements of Ptolemy’s geocentric machinery of epicycles, so that Copernicus’s sun was not placed at the true centre of any planetary orbit.—_Tr._ Footnote 153: Sprüche in Reimen. Footnote 154: See Vol. II, pp. 294 et seq., 359 et seq. Footnote 155: The path from Calvin to Darwin is easily seen in English philosophy. Footnote 156: This is one of the eternal points of dispute in Western art-theory. The Classical, ahistorical, Euclidean soul has no “evolution”; the Western, on the contrary, extends itself in evolving like the convergent function that it is. The one _is_, the other _becomes_. And thus all Classical tragedy assumes the _constancy_ of the personality, and all Western its _variability_, which essentially constitutes a “character” in our sense, viz., a picture of being that consists in continuous qualitative movement and an endless wealth of relationships. _In Sophocles the grand gesture ennobles the suffering, in Shakespeare the grand idea_ (Gesinnung) _ennobles the doing_. As our æsthetic took its examples from _both_ Cultures, it was bound to go wrong in the very enunciation of its problem. ----- VIII We can proceed to the further elucidation of the incidental (or casual) without running the risk of considering it as an exception or a breach in the causal continuity of “Nature,” for Nature is _not_ the world- picture in which Destiny is operative. Wherever the sight emancipates itself from the sensible-become, spiritualizes itself into Vision, penetrates through the enveloping world and lets prime phenomena instead of mere objects work upon it, we have the grand _historical_, trans- natural, super-natural outlook, the outlook of Dante and Wolfram and also the outlook of Goethe in old age that is most clearly manifested in the finale of Faust II. If we linger in contemplation in this world of Destiny and Incident, it will very likely seem to us incidental that the episode of “world-history” should have played itself out in this or that phase of one particular star amongst the millions of solar systems; incidental that it should be men, peculiar animal-like creatures inhabiting the crust of this star, that present the spectacle of “knowledge” and, moreover, present it in just this form or in just that form, according to the very different versions of Aristotle, Kant and others; incidental that as the counter-pole of this “knowing” there should have arisen just these codes of “natural law,” each supposedly eternal and universally-valid and each evoking a supposedly general and common picture of “Nature.” Physics—quite rightly—banishes incidentals from its field of view, but it is incidental, again, that physics itself should occur in the alluvial period of the earth’s crust, uniquely, as a