In each of these Cultures, Mexican and Chinese, Indian and Egyptian, there is--whether our science is aware of it or not--_a group of great peoples of identical style_, which arises at the beginning of the springtime, forming states and carrying history, and throughout the course of its evolution bears its fundamental form onward to the goal. They are in the highest degree unlike amongst themselves--it is scarcely possible to conceive of a sharper contrast than that between Athenians and Spartans, Germans and Frenchmen, Tsin and Tsu--and all military history shows national hatred as the loftiest method of inducting historic decisions. But the moment that a people alien to the Culture makes an appearance in the field of history, there awakens everywhere an overpowering feeling of spiritual relationship, and the notion of the barbarian--meaning the man who inwardly does _not_ belong to the Culture--is as clear-cut in the peoples of the Egyptian settlements and the Chinese world of states as it is in the Classical. The energy of the form is so high that it grasps and recasts neighbouring peoples, witness the Carthaginians of Roman times with their half-Classical style, and the Russians who have figured as a people of Western style from Catherine the Great to the fall of Petrine Tsardom. Peoples in the style of their Culture we will call _Nations_, the word itself distinguishing them from the forms that precede and that follow them. It is not merely a strong feeling of “we” that forges the inward unity of its most significant of all major associations; _underlying the nation there is an Idea_. This stream of a collective being possesses a very deep relation to Destiny, to Time, and to History, a relation that is different in each instance and one, too, that determines the relation of the human material to race, language, land, state, and religion. As the styles of the Old Chinese and the Classical peoples differ, so also the styles of their histories.