And therewith that important word is given a positive meaning of the highest significance which henceforward will be assumed in using it. In the same way as we have elected to distinguish the Soul as the possible and the World as the actual, we can now differentiate between _possible_ and _actual_ culture, i.e., culture as _an idea in the_ (general or individual) _existence_ and culture as the _body_ of that idea, as the total of its visible, tangible and comprehensible expressions—acts and opinions, religion and state, arts and sciences, peoples and cities, economic and social forms, speech, laws, customs, characters, facial lines and costumes. _Higher history_, intimately related to life and to becoming, _is the actualizing of possible Culture_.[43] We must not omit to add that these basic determinations of meaning are largely incommunicable by specification, definition or proof, and in their deeper import must be reached by feeling, experience and intuition. There is a distinction, rarely appreciated as it should be, between experience as lived and experience as learned (zwischen Erleben und Erkennen), between the immediate certainty given by the various kinds of intuition—such as illumination, inspiration, artistic flair, experience of life, the power of “sizing men up” (Goethe’s “exact percipient fancy”)—and the product of rational procedure and technical experiment. The first are imparted by means of analogy, picture, symbol, the second by formula, law, scheme. The become is experienced by learning—indeed, as we shall see, the having-become is for the human mind identical with the completed act of cognition. A becoming, on the other hand, can only be experienced by living, felt with a deep wordless understanding. It is on this that what we call “knowledge of men” is based; in fact the understanding of history implies a superlative knowledge of men. The eye which can see into the depths of an alien soul—owes nothing to the cognition-methods investigated in the “Critique of Pure Reason,” yet the purer the historical picture is, the less accessible it becomes to any other eye. The mechanism of a pure nature-picture, such as the world of Newton and Kant, is cognized, grasped, dissected in laws and equations and finally reduced to system: the organism of a pure history-picture, like the world of Plotinus, Dante and Giordano Bruno, is intuitively seen, inwardly experienced, grasped as a form or symbol and finally rendered in poetical and artistic conceptions. Goethe’s “living nature” is a _historical_ world-picture.[44] ----- Footnote 39: The work referred to is embodied in Vol. II (pp. 521 et seq., 562 et seq., 631 et seq.). Footnote 40: