The Western Culture of maturity was through-and-through a French outgrowth of the Spanish, beginning with Louis XIV. But even by Louis XVI’s time the English park had defeated the French, sensibility had ousted wit, London costume and manners had overcome Versailles, and Hogarth, Chippendale and Wedgwood had prevailed over Watteau, Boulle and Sèvres. Footnote 169: The allusion is to the voyage of Linois’s small squadron to Pondichéry in 1803, its confrontation by another small British squadron there, and the counter-order which led Linois to retire to Mauritius.—_Tr._ Footnote 170: Hardenberg’s reorganization of Prussia was thoroughly English in spirit, and as such incurred the severe censure of the old Prussian Von der Marwitz. Scharnhorst’s army reforms too, as a breakaway from the professional army system of the eighteenth-century cabinet-wars, are a sort of “return to nature” in the Rousseau-Revolutionary sense. Footnote 171: Where in 295 B.C. the Romans decisively defeated the last great Samnite effort to resist their hegemony over Italy.—_Tr._ ----- X Anyone who has absorbed these ideas will have no difficulty in understanding how the causality principle is bound to have a fatal effect upon the capacity for genuinely experiencing History when, at last, it attains its rigid form in that “late” condition of a Culture to which it is proper and in which it is able to tyrannize over the world- picture. Kant, very wisely, established causality as a necessary form of knowledge, and it cannot be too often emphasized that this was meant to refer exclusively to the understanding of man’s environment by the way of reason. But while the word “necessary” was accepted readily enough, it has been overlooked that this limitation of the principle to a single domain of knowledge is just what forbids its application to the contemplation and experiencing of living history. Man-knowing and Nature-knowing are in essence entirely incapable of being compared, but nevertheless the whole Nineteenth Century was at great pains to abolish the frontier between Nature and History in favour of the former. The more historically men tried to think, the more they forgot that in this domain they ought _not_ to think. In forcing the rigid scheme of a spatial and anti-temporal relation of cause and effect upon something alive, they disfigured the visible face of becoming with the construction-lines of a physical nature-picture, and, habituated to their own late, megalopolitan and causally-thinking _milieu_, they were unconscious of the fundamental absurdity of a science that sought to understand an organic becoming by methodically misunderstanding it as the _machinery_ of the thing-become. Day is not the cause of night, nor youth of age, nor blossom of fruit. Everything that we grasp intellectually has a _cause_, everything that we live organically with inward certitude has a _past_.