How is this possible? Each is an eye-picture, but in the one the seer is giving himself up to the never-to-be-repeated facts, and in the other he is striving to catch truths for an ever-valid system. In the history-picture, that in which knowledge is simply an _auxiliary_, the cosmic makes use of the microcosmic. In the picture which we call memory and recollection, things are present to us as bathed in an inner light and swept by the pulsation of our existence. But the chronological element[19] tells us that history, as soon as it becomes _thought_ history, is no longer immune from the basic conditions of all waking-consciousness. In the nature- (or science-) picture it is the ever-present subjective that is alien and illusive, but in the history-picture it is the equally ineliminable objective, Number, that leads into error. When we are working in the domain of Nature (science), our settings and self-adjustments should be and can be up to a certain point impersonal--one “forgets oneself”--but every man, class, nation, or family sees the picture of history _in relation to itself_. The mark of Nature is an extension that is inclusive of everything, but History is that which comes up out of the darkness of the past, presents itself to the _seer_, and from him sweeps onward into the future. He, as the present, is always its middle point, and it is quite impossible for him to order the facts with any meaning if he ignores their direction--which is an element proper to life and not to thought. Every time, every land, every living aggregate has its own historical horizon, and it is the mark of the genuine historical thinker that he actualizes the picture of history that his time demands. Thus Nature and History are distinguishable like pure and impure criticism--meaning by “criticism” the opposite of lived experience. Natural science _is_ criticism and nothing else. But in History, criticism can do no more than scientifically prepare the field over which the historian’s eye is to sweep. _History is that ranging glance itself_, whatever the direction in which it ranges. He who possesses such an eye can understand every fact and every situation “historically.” Nature is a system, and systems can be learnt.