Every group of scientifically established elements, therefore, has a dual tendency, inherent and unchanged since primitive ages. The one tendency urges forwards the completest possible system of _technical_ knowledge, for the service of practical, economical, and warlike ends, which many kinds of animals have developed to a high degree of perfection, and which from them leads, through primitive man and his acquaintance with fire and metals, directly to the machine-technics of our Faustian Culture. The other tendency took shape only with the separation of strictly human thought from physical vision by means of language, and the aim of its effort has been an equally complete _theoretical_ knowledge, which we call in the earlier phases of the Culture _religious_, and in the later _scientific_. Fire is for the warrior a weapon, for the craftsman part of his equipment, for the priest a sign from God, and for the scientist a problem. But in all these aspects alike it is proper to the “natural,” the scientific, mode of waking-consciousness. In the world-as-history we do not find fire as such, but the conflagration of Carthage and the flames of the faggots heaped around John Hus and Giordano Bruno. II I repeat, every being livingly experiences every other being and its destiny _only in relation to itself_. A flock of pigeons is regarded by the farmer on whose fields it settles quite otherwise than by the nature-lover in the street or the hawk in the air. The peasant sees in his son the future and the heritage, but what the neighbour sees in him is a peasant, what the officer sees is a soldier, what the visitor sees is a native. Napoleon experienced men and things very differently as Emperor and as lieutenant. Put a man in a new situation, make the revolutionary a minister, the soldier a general, and at once history and the key men of history become for him something other than what they were. Talleyrand saw through the men of his time because he belonged with them, but had he been suddenly plumped down in the company of Crassus, Cæsar, Catiline, and Cicero, his understanding of their measures and views would have been either null or erroneous. There is no history-in-itself. The history of a family is taken differently by each member of it, that of a country differently by each party, that of the age by each nation. The German looks upon the World War otherwise than the Englishman, the workman upon economic history otherwise than the employer, and the historian of the West has a quite other world-history before his eyes than that of the great Arabian and Chinese historians. The history of an era could be handled objectively only if it were very distant in time, and the historian were radically disinterested; and we find that our best historians cannot judge of or describe even the Peloponnesian Wars and Actium without being in some measure influenced by present interests.