In the Indian Culture we have the perfectly ahistoric soul. Its decisive expression is the Brahman Nirvana. There is no pure Indian astronomy, no calendar, and therefore no history so far as history is the track of a conscious spiritual evolution. Of the visible course of their Culture, which as regards its organic phase came to an end with the rise of Buddhism, we know even less than we do of Classical history, rich though it must have been in great events between the 12th and 8th centuries. And this is not surprising, since it was in dream-shapes and mythological figures that both came to be fixed. It is a full millennium after Buddha, about 500 A.D., when Ceylon first produces something remotely resembling historical work, the “Mahavansa.” The world-consciousness of Indian man was so ahistorically built that it could not even treat the appearance of a book written by a single author as an event determinate in time. Instead of an organic series of writings by specific persons, there came into being gradually a vague mass of texts into which everyone inserted what he pleased, and notions such as those of intellectual individualism, intellectual evolution, intellectual epochs, played no part in the matter. It is in this _anonymous_ form that we possess the Indian philosophy—which is at the same time all the Indian history that we have—and it is instructive to compare with it the philosophy-history of the West, which is a perfectly definite structure made up of individual books and personalities. Indian man forgot everything, but Egyptian man forgot _nothing_. Hence, while the art of portraiture—which is biography in the kernel—was unknown in India, in Egypt it was practically the artist’s only theme. The Egyptian soul, conspicuously historical in its texture and impelled with primitive passion towards the infinite, perceived past and future as its _whole_ world, and the present (which is identical with waking consciousness) appeared to him simply as the narrow common frontier of two immeasurable stretches. The Egyptian Culture is an embodiment of _care_—which is the spiritual counterpoise of distance—care for the future expressed in the choice of granite or basalt as the craftsman’s materials,[5] in the chiselled archives, in the elaborate administrative system, in the net of irrigation works,[6] and, necessarily _bound up therewith_, care for the past. The Egyptian mummy is a symbol of the first importance. The body of the dead man was _made everlasting_, just as his personality, his “Ka,” was immortalized through the portrait- statuettes, which were often made in many copies and to which it was conceived to be attached by a transcendental likeness.