We are now able to see the _organism_ in a great style-course. Here, as in so many other matters, Goethe was the first to whom vision came. In his “Winckelmann” he says of Velleius Paterculus: “with his standpoint, it was not given to him to see all art as a living thing (ζῶον) that must have an inconspicuous beginning, a slow growth, a brilliant moment of fulfilment and a gradual decline like every other organic being, though it is presented in a set of individuals.” This sentence contains the entire morphology of art-history. Styles do not follow one another like waves or pulse-beats. It is not the personality or will or brain of the artist that makes the style, but the style that makes the _type_ of the artist. The style, like the Culture, is a prime phenomenon in the strictest Goethian sense, be it the style of art or religion or thought, or the style of life itself. It is, as “Nature” is, an ever-new experience of waking man, his alter ego and mirror-image in the world- around. And therefore in the general historical picture of a Culture there can be but one style, _the style of the Culture_. The error has lain in treating mere style-phases—Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, Empire—as if they were styles on the same level as units of quite another order such as the Egyptian, the Chinese (or even a “prehistoric”) style. Gothic and Baroque are simply the youth and age of one and the same vessel of forms, the style of the West as ripening and ripened. What has been wanting in our art-research has been detachment, freedom from prepossessions, and the will to abstract. Saving ourselves trouble, we have classed any and every form-domain that makes a strong impression upon us as a “style,” and it need hardly be said that our insight has been led astray still further by the Ancient-Mediæval-Modern scheme. But in reality, even a masterpiece of strictest Renaissance like the court of the Palazzo Farnese is infinitely nearer to the arcade- porch of St. Patroclus in Soest, the interior of the Magdeburg cathedral, and the staircases of South-German castles of the 18th Century than it is to the Temple of Pæstum or to the Erechtheum. The same relation exists between Doric and Ionic, and hence Ionic columns can be as completely combined with Doric building forms as late Gothic is with early Baroque in St. Lorenz at Nürnberg, or late Romanesque with late Baroque in the beautiful upper part of the West choir at Mainz. And our eyes have scarcely yet learned to distinguish within the Egyptian style the Old Kingdom and Middle Empire elements corresponding to Doric and Gothic youth and to Ionic and Baroque maturity, because from the Twelfth Dynasty these elements interpenetrate in all harmony in the form-language of all the greater works. The task before art-history is to write the _comparative biographies of the great styles_, all of which as organisms of the same genus possess structurally cognate life histories.