The typically Faustian separation of human history, as such, from the far wider history of the world has had the result that since the end of the Baroque our world-picture has contained several horizons disposed one behind the other in as many planes. For the exploration of these, individual sciences, more or less overtly historical in character, have taken shape. Astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, one after the other follow up the destinies of the star-world, the earth’s crust, life, and man, and only then do we come to the “world”-history--as it is still called even to-day--of the higher Cultures, to which, again, are attached the histories of the several cultural elements, family history, and lastly (that highly developed speciality of the West) biography. Each of these planes demands a particular self-focusing, and the moment the special focus becomes sharp the narrower and the broader planes cease to be live Being and become mere given facts. If we are investigating the battle of the Teutoburger Wald, the growing up of this forest in the plant-world of the North German plain is presupposed. If, on the other hand, we are examining into the history of the German tree-world, the geological stratification of the earth is the presupposition, though it is just a fact whose particular destiny need not be further followed out in this connexion. If, again, our question is the origin of the Cretaceous, the existence of the Earth itself as a planet in the solar system is a datum, not a problem. Or, to express it otherwise, that there is an Earth in the star-world, that the phenomenon “life” occurs in the Earth, that within this “life” there is the form “man,” that within the history of man there exists the organic form of the Culture, is in each case an incident in the picture of the next higher plane. In Goethe, from his Strassburg period to his first Weimar residence, the inclination to attune himself to “world”-history was very strong--as evidenced in his Cæsar, Mohammed, Socrates, Wandering Jew, and Egmont sketches. And after that painful renunciation of the prospect of high political achievement[31]--the pain which calls to us in _Tasso_ even through the sober resignedness of its final form--this precisely was the attunement that he chose to cut out of his life; and thereafter he limits himself, almost fiercely, to the picture-planes of plant-history, animal-history, and earth-history (his “living nature”) on the one hand and to biography on the other.