But only bring analogy to bear on this aspect as on the rest, letting the world of human Cultures intimately and unreservedly work upon the imagination instead of forcing it into a ready-made scheme. Let the words youth, growth, maturity, decay—hitherto, and to-day more than ever, used to express subjective valuations and entirely personal preferences in sociology, ethics and æsthetics—be taken at last as objective descriptions of organic states. Set forth the Classical Culture as a self-contained phenomenon embodying and expressing the Classical soul, put it beside the Egyptian, the Indian, the Babylonian, the Chinese and the Western, and determine for each of these higher individuals what is typical in their surgings and what is necessary in the riot of incident. And then at last will unfold itself the picture of world-history that is natural to us, men of the West, and to us alone. X Our narrower task, then, is primarily to determine, from such a world- survey, the state of West Europe and America as at the epoch of 1800- 2000—to establish the chronological position of this period in the ensemble of Western culture-history, its significance as a chapter that is in one or other guise necessarily found in the biography of every Culture, and the organic and symbolic meaning of its political, artistic, intellectual and social expression-forms. Considered in the spirit of analogy, this period appears as chronologically parallel—“contemporary” in our special sense—with the phase of Hellenism, and its present culmination, marked by the World- War, corresponds with the transition from the Hellenistic to the Roman age. _Rome_, with its rigorous realism—uninspired, barbaric, disciplined, practical, Protestant, _Prussian_—will always give us, working as we must by analogies, the key to understanding our own future. The _break of destiny that we express by hyphening the words “Greeks = Romans” is occurring for us also, separating that which is already fulfilled from that which is to come_. Long ago we might and should have seen in the “Classical” world a development which is the complete counterpart of our own Western development, differing indeed from it in every detail of the surface but entirely similar as regards the inward power driving the great organism towards its end. We might have found the constant _alter ego_ of our own actuality in establishing the correspondence, item by item, from the “Trojan War” and the Crusades, Homer and the Nibelungenlied, through Doric and Gothic, Dionysian movement and Renaissance, Polycletus and John Sebastian Bach, Athens and Paris, Aristotle and Kant, Alexander and Napoleon, to the world-city and the imperialism common to both Cultures.