whose wonderful rooms and furniture are far less well known in Germany than they ought to be. Classicism was at work already in Canada and at the Cape, and presently there were no limits at all. It was just the same in every other domain of form; the relation between this forceful young Civilization and the still remaining old ones--is that it covers them, all alike, with ever-thickening layers of West-European-American life-forms under which, slowly, the ancient native form disappears. VI In the presence of this picture of the world of man--which is destined to displace the older one of “Ancient-Mediæval-Modern” that is still firmly established even in the best minds--it will become possible, too, to give a new answer (and for our Civilization, I think, a final answer) to the old question: What is History? Ranke, in the preface of his _World History_ says: “History only begins when the monuments become intelligible, and trustworthy written evidences are available.” This is the answer of a collector and arranger of data; obviously, it confuses that which has happened with that which happened within the field of view open at the particular time to the particular student. Mardonius was defeated at Platæa--has this ceased to be history if two thousand years later it has somehow dropped out of the ken of the historians? For a fact to be a fact, must it be mentioned in books? The weightiest historian since Ranke, Eduard Meyer,[56] says: “Historic is that which is, or has been, effective.... Only through historical treatment does the individual process, lifted by history from among the infinite mass of contemporary processes, become the historical event.” The remark is thoroughly in the manner and spirit of Hegel. Firstly, its starting-point is the fact and not any accidental knowledge or ignorance of the fact, and if there is any mode of picturing history which necessarily imposes such a starting-point, it is that presented in these pages, since it compels us to assume the existence of facts of the first order in majestic sequences, even when we do not (and never will) know them in the scientific sense. We have to learn to handle the unknown in the most comprehensive way. Secondly, truths exist for the mind, facts only in relation to life. Historical treatment--in my terminology, _physiognomic fact_--is decided by the _blood_, the gift of judging men broadened out into past and future, the innate flair for persons and situations, for the event, for that which had to be, must have been. It does _not_ consist in bare scientific criticism and knowing of data. The scientific mode of experience is, for every true historian, something additional or subordinate. It addresses to the waking-consciousness, by the way of understanding and imparting, laborious and repetitive proof of that which _one moment_ of illumination has already, and instantly, demonstrated to Being.