It is not incompatible with, rather it is essential to, a profound knowledge of men that the appraiser should see through glasses of his own colour. This knowledge, indeed, is exactly the component that we discern to be wanting in those generalizations that distort or altogether ignore that all-important fact, the uniqueness of the constituent event in history[21]--the worst example of this being the “materialistic” conception of history, about which we have said almost all there is to say when we have described it as physiognomic barrenness. But both in spite of this and on account of this[22] there is for every man, _because_ he belongs to a class and a time and a nation and a Culture, a typical picture of history as it ought to appear in relation to himself, and equally there are typical pictures specific to the time or class or Culture, _qua_ time or class or Culture. The supreme generalization possible to each Culture as a major being is a primary and, for it, symbolical image of its own world-as-history, and all self-attunements of the individual--or of the group livingly effective as individual--are with reference to that image. Whenever we describe another person’s ideas as profound or superficial, original or trivial, mistaken or obsolete, we are unwittingly judging them with reference to a picture which springs up to answer for the value at the moment of a continuous function of our time and our personality.[23] Obviously, then, every man of the Faustian Culture possesses his own picture of history and, besides, innumerable other pictures from his youth upwards, which fluctuate and alter ceaselessly in response to the experiences of the day and the year. And how different, again, are the typical history-images of men and different eras and classes, the world of Otto the Great and that of Gregory VII, that of a Doge of Venice and that of a poor pilgrim! In what different worlds lived Lorenzo de’ Medici, Wallenstein, Cromwell, Marat, and Bismarck, a serf of the Gothic age, a savant of the Baroque, the army officer of the Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War, and the Wars of Liberation respectively! Or, to consider our own times alone, a Frisian peasant whose life of actuality is limited to his own countryside and its folk, a high merchant of Hamburg, and a professor of physics! And yet to all of these, irrespective of individual age, status, and period, there is a common basis that differentiates the ensemble of these figures, their prime-image, from that of every other Culture.