Footnote 36: Which in the end gave its name to the Empire (Tsin = China). Footnote 37: See Vol. II, 521-539. ----- XIV This high plane of contemplation once attained, the rest is easy. To this _single_ idea one can refer, and by it one can solve, without straining or forcing, all those separate problems of religion, art- history, epistemology, ethics, politics, economics with which the modern intellect has so passionately—and so vainly—busied itself for decades. This idea is one of those truths that have only to be expressed with full clarity to become indisputable. It is one of the inward necessities of the Western Culture and of its world-feeling. It is capable of entirely transforming the world-outlook of one who fully understands it, i.e., makes it intimately his own. It immensely deepens the world- picture natural and necessary to us in that, already trained to regard world-historical evolution as an organic unit seen backwards from our standpoint in the present, we are enabled by its aid to follow the broad lines into the future—a privilege of dream-calculation till now permitted only to the physicist. It is, I repeat, in effect the substitution of a Copernican for a Ptolemaic aspect of history, that is, an immeasurable widening of horizon. Up to now everyone has been at liberty to hope what he pleased about the future. Where there are no facts, sentiment rules. But henceforward it will be every man’s business to inform himself of what _can_ happen and therefore of what with the unalterable necessity of destiny and irrespective of personal ideals, hopes or desires, _will_ happen. When we use the risky word “freedom” we shall mean freedom to do, not this or that, but the necessary or nothing. The feeling that this is “just as it should be” is the hall-mark of the man of fact. To lament it and blame it is not to alter it. To birth belongs death, to youth age, to life generally its form and its allotted span. The present is a civilized, emphatically not a cultured time, and _ipso facto_ a great number of life-capacities fall out as impossible. This may be deplorable, and may be and will be deplored in pessimist philosophy and poetry, but it is not in our power to make otherwise. It will not be—already it is not— permissible to defy clear historical experience and to expect, merely because we hope, that this will spring or that will flourish. It will no doubt be objected that such a world-outlook, which in giving this certainty as to the outlines and tendency of the future cuts off all far-reaching hopes, would be unhealthy for all and fatal for many, once it ceased to be a mere theory and was adopted as a practical scheme of life by the group of personalities effectively moulding the future.