At the same time these individuals’ worlds as lived and experienced by men of _one_ Culture or spiritual community are interrelated, and on the greater or less degree of this interrelation depends the greater or less communicability of intuitions, sensations and thoughts from one to another—that is, the possibility of making intelligible what one has created in the style of one’s own being, through expression-media such as language or art or religion, by means of word-sounds or formulæ or signs that are themselves also symbols. The degree of interrelation between one’s world and another’s fixes the limit at which understanding becomes self-deception. Certainly it is only very imperfectly that we can understand the Indian or the Egyptian soul, as manifested in the men, customs, deities, root-words, ideas, buildings and acts of it. The Greeks, ahistoric as they were, could not even guess at the essence of alien spiritualities—witness the naïveté with which they were wont to rediscover their own gods and Culture in those of alien peoples. But in our own case too, the current translations of the ἀρχή, or _Atman_, or _Tao_ of alien philosophers presuppose our proper world-feeling, which is that from which our “equivalents” claim their significance, as the basis of an alien soul-expression. And similarly we elucidate the characters of early Egyptian and Chinese portraits with reference to our own life-experience. In both cases we deceive ourselves. That the artistic masterpieces of all Cultures are still living for us—“immortal” as we say—is another such fancy, kept alive by the unanimity with which we understand the alien work in the proper sense. Of this tendency of ours the effect of the Laocoön group on Renaissance sculpture and that of Seneca on the Classicist drama of the French are examples. II