These souls have their special psychology,[17] and the knowledge of this psychology is for the public man an essential. A single soul is the mark of every genuine order or class, be it the chivalry and military orders of the Crusades, the Roman Senate or the Jacobin club, polite society under Louis XIV or the Prussian country “_Adel_,” peasantry or guilds, the masses of the big city or the folk of the secluded valley, the peoples and tribes of the migrations or the adherents of Mohammed and generally, of any new-founded religion or sect, the French of the Revolution or the Germans of the Wars of Liberation. The mightiest beings of this kind that we know are the higher Cultures, which are born in great spiritual upheavals, and in a thousand years of existence weld all aggregates of lower degree--nations, classes, towns, generations--into one unit. All grand events of history are carried by beings of the cosmic order, by peoples, parties, armies, and classes, while the history of the intellect runs its course in loose associations and circles, schools, levels of education, “tendencies” and “isms.” And here again it is a question of destiny whether such aggregates at the decisive moments of highest effectiveness find a leader or are driven blindly on, whether the chance headmen are men of the first order or men of no real significance tossed up, like Robespierre or Pompey, by the surge of events. It is the hall-mark of the statesman that he has a sure and penetrating eye for these mass-souls that form and dissolve on the tide of the times, their strength and their duration, their direction and purpose. And even so, it is a question of Incident[18] whether he is one who _can_ master them or one who is swept away by them. CHAPTER II ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE (B) THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES I Now, man--no matter whether it is for life or for thought that he is born into the world--so long as he is acting or is thinking, is awake and therefore _in focus_--i.e., adjusted to the one significance that for the moment his light-world holds for him. Everyone knows that it is almost sharply painful to switch off suddenly in the middle of, say, an experiment in physics, in order to think about some event of the day. I have said earlier that the innumerable settings that take turns in man’s waking consciousness fall into two distinct groups--the worlds of destiny and pulsation, and the worlds of causes and tensions. The two pictures I have called _world-as-history_ and _world-as-nature_. In the first, life makes use of critical understanding. It has the eye under command, the felt pulsation becomes the inwardly imagined wave-train, and the shattering spiritual experience becomes pictured as the epochal peak. In the second, thought itself rules, and its causal criticism turns life into a rigorous process, the living content of a fact into an abstract truth, and tension into formula.