But the prime symbol does not actualize itself; it is operative through the form-sense of every man, every community, age and epoch and dictates the style of every life-expression. It is inherent in the form of the state, the religious myths and cults, the ethical ideals, the forms of painting and music and poetry, the fundamental notions of each science— but it is not presented by these. Consequently, it is not presentable by words, for language and words are themselves _derived_ symbols. Every individual symbol tells of it, but only to the inner feelings, not to the understanding. And when we say, as henceforth we shall say, that the prime-symbol of the Classical soul is the material and individual body, that of the Western pure infinite space, it must always be with the reservation that concepts cannot represent the inconceivable, and thus at the most a _significative feeling_ may be evoked by the sound of words. Infinite space is the ideal that the Western soul has always striven to find, and to see immediately actualized, in its world-around; and hence it is that the countless space-theories of the last centuries possess— over and above all ostensible “results”—a deep import as symptoms of a world-feeling. In how far does unlimited extension _underlie_ all objective things? There is hardly a single problem that has been more earnestly pondered than this; it would almost seem as if every other world-question was dependent upon the one problem of the nature of space. And is it not in fact so—_for us_? And how, then, has it escaped notice that the whole Classical world never expended one word on it, and indeed did not even possess a word[187] by which the problem could be exactly outlined? Why had the great pre-Socratics nothing to say on it? Did they overlook in their world just that which appears to us the problem of all problems? Ought we not, in fact, to have seen long ago that the answer is in the very fact of their silence? How is it that according to _our_ deepest feeling the “world” is nothing but that world-of-space which is the true offspring of our depth-experience, and whose grand emptiness is corroborated by the star-systems lost in it? Could a “world” of this sense have been made even comprehensible to a Classical thinker? In short, we suddenly discover that the “eternal problem” that Kant, in the name of humanity, tackled with a passion that itself is symbolic, is a _purely Western_ problem that simply does not arise in the intellects of other Cultures.