Such an eye was Goethe’s. That which Goethe called _Living Nature_ is exactly that which we are calling here world-history, _world-as- history_. Goethe, who as artist portrayed the life and development, always the life and development, of his figures, the thing-becoming and not the thing-become (“Wilhelm Meister” and “Wahrheit und Dichtung”) hated Mathematics. For him, the world-as-mechanism stood opposed to the world-as-organism, dead nature to living nature, law to form. As naturalist, every line he wrote was meant to display the image of a thing-becoming, the “impressed form” living and developing. Sympathy, observation, comparison, immediate and inward certainty, intellectual _flair_—these were the means whereby he was enabled to approach the secrets of the phenomenal world in motion. _Now these are the means of historical research_—precisely these and no others. It was this _godlike_ insight that prompted him to say at the bivouac fire on the evening of the Battle of Valmy: “Here and now begins a new epoch of world history, and you, gentlemen, can say that you ‘were there.’” No general, no diplomat, let alone the philosophers, ever so directly felt history “becoming.” It is the deepest judgment that any man ever uttered about a great historical act in the moment of its accomplishment. And just as he followed out the development of the plant-form from the leaf, the birth of the vertebrate type, the process of the geological strata—_the Destiny in nature and not the Causality_—so here we shall develop the form-language of human history, its periodic structure, its _organic logic_ out of the profusion of all the challenging details. In other aspects, mankind is habitually, and rightly, reckoned as one of the organisms of the earth’s surface. Its physical structure, its natural functions, the whole phenomenal conception of it, all belong to a more comprehensive unity. Only in _this_ aspect is it treated otherwise, despite that deeply-felt relationship of plant destiny and human destiny which is an eternal theme of all lyrical poetry, and despite that similarity of human history to that of any other of the higher life-groups which is the refrain of endless beast-legends, sagas and fables.