All these “pictures,” developed in the same man, have the same structure. Even the history of plants and animals, even that of the earth’s crust or that of the stars, is a _fable convenue_ and mirrors in outward actuality the inward tendency of the ego’s being. The student of the animal world or of stratification is a man, living in a period and having a nationality and a social status, and it is no more possible to eliminate his subjective standpoint from his treatment of these things than it would be to obtain a perfectly abstract account of the French Revolution or the World War. The celebrated theories of Kant, Laplace, Cuvier, Lyell, Darwin, have also a politico-economic tinting, and their very power and impressiveness for the lay public show that the mode of outlook upon all these historical planes proceeds from a single source. And what is accomplishing itself to-day is the final achievement of which Faustian history-thinking is capable--the organic linking and disposition of these historical planes in a single vast world-history of uniform physiognomic that shall enable our glance to range from the life of the individual man without a break to the first and last destinies of the universe. The nineteenth century--in mechanistic (i.e., unhistorical) form--enunciated the problem. It is one of the preordained tasks of the twentieth to solve it. III The picture that we possess of the history of the Earth’s crust and of life is at present still dominated by the ideas which civilized[32] English thought has developed, since the Age of Enlightenment, out of the English habit of life--Lyell’s “phlegmatic” theory of the formation of the geological strata, and Darwin’s of the origin of species, are actually but derivatives of the development of England herself. In place of the incalculable catastrophes and metamorphoses such as von Buch and Cuvier[33] admitted, they put a methodical evolution over very long periods of time and recognize as causes only _scientifically calculable_ and indeed _mechanical utility-causes_. This “English” type of causality is not only shallow, but also far too narrow. It limits possible causal connexions, in the first place, to those which work out their _entire_ course on the earth’s surface; but this immediately excludes all great cosmic relations between earthly life-phenomena and the events of the solar system and the stellar universe, and assumes the impossible postulate that the exterior face of the earth-ball is a completely insulated region of natural phenomena. And, secondly, it assumes that connexions which are not comprehensible by the means at present available to the human consciousness--namely, sensation refined by instruments and thought precised by theory--do not even exist.