It is a quite indefensible method of presenting world-history to begin by giving rein to one’s own religious, political or social convictions and endowing the sacrosanct three-phase system with tendencies that will bring it exactly to one’s own standpoint. This is, in effect, making of some formula—say, the “Age of Reason,” Humanity, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, enlightenment, economic progress, national freedom, the conquest of nature, or world-peace—a criterion whereby to judge whole millennia of history. And so we judge that they were ignorant of the “true path,” or that they failed to follow it, when the fact is simply that their will and purposes were not the same as ours. Goethe’s saying, “What is important in life is life and not a result of life,” is the answer to any and every senseless attempt to solve the riddle of historical form by means of a _programme_. It is the same picture that we find when we turn to the historians of each special art or science (and those of national economics and philosophy as well). We find: “Painting” from the Egyptians (or the cave-men) to the Impressionists, or “Music” from Homer to Bayreuth and beyond, or “Social Organization” from Lake Dwellings to Socialism, as the case may be, presented as a linear graph which steadily rises in conformity with the values of the (selected) arguments. No one has seriously considered the possibility that arts may have an allotted span of life and may be attached as forms of self-expression to particular regions and particular types of mankind, and that therefore the total history of an art may be merely an additive compilation of separate developments, of special arts, with no bond of union save the name and some details of craft-technique. We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form and duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well, are determined by the _properties of its species_. No one, looking at the oak, with its millennial life, dare say that it is at this moment, now, about to start on its true and proper course. No one as he sees a caterpillar grow day by day expects that it will go on doing so for two or three years. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified certainty, a _limit_, and this sense of the limit is identical with our sense of the inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the contrary, we take our ideas as to the course of the future from an unbridled optimism that sets at naught all historical, i.e., _organic_, experience, and everyone therefore sets himself to discover in the accidental present terms that he can expand into some striking progression-series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof but on predilection. He works upon unlimited possibilities—never a natural end—and from the momentary top-course of his bricks plans artlessly the continuation of his structure.