And now I draw the conclusions. There is a plurality of prime symbols. It is the depth-experience through which the world becomes, through which perception _extends itself_ to world. Its signification is for the soul to which it belongs and only for that soul, and it is different in waking and dreaming, acceptance and scrutiny, as between young and old, townsmen and peasant, man and woman. It actualizes for every high Culture the possibility of form upon which that Culture’s existence rests and it does so of deep necessity. All fundamentals words like our mass, substance, material, thing, body, extension (and multitudes of words of the like order in other culture-tongues) are emblems, obligatory and determined by destiny, that out of the infinite abundance of world-possibilities evoke in the name of the individual Culture those possibilities that alone are significant and therefore necessary for it. None of them is exactly transferable just as it is into the experiential living and knowing of another Culture. And none of these prime words ever recurs. The _choice of prime symbol_ in the moment of the Culture- soul’s awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil—a moment that for one who can read world-history thus contains something catastrophic— decides all. Culture, as the soul’s total expression “become” and perceptible in gestures and works, as its mortal transient body, obnoxious to law, number and causality: As the historical drama, a picture in the whole picture of world- history: As the sum of grand emblems of life, feeling and understanding: —this is the language through which alone a soul can tell of what it undergoes. The macrocosm, too, is a property of the individual soul; we can never know how it stands with the soul of another. That which is implied by “infinite space,” the space that “passeth all understanding,” which is the creative interpretation of depth-experience proper and peculiar to us men of the West—the kind of extension that is nothingness to the Greeks, the Universe to us—dyes our world in a colour that the Classical, the Indian and the Egyptian souls had not on their palettes. One soul listens to the world-experience in A flat major, another in F minor; one apprehends it in the Euclidean spirit, another in the contrapuntal, a third in the Magian spirit. From the purest analytical Space and from Nirvana to the most somatic reality of Athens, there is a series of prime symbols each of which is capable of forming a complete world out of itself. And, as the idea of the Babylonian or that of the Indian world was remote, strange and elusive for the men of the five or six Cultures that followed, so also the Western world will be incomprehensible to the men of Cultures yet unborn. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VI MAKROKOSMOS