At bottom, this mode of treatment rests upon that idea which inspired the great Gothics long ago, the idea of a significant singleness in the history of all mankind. They saw how, on earth, men and peoples changed, but ideas stayed, and the powerful impressiveness of the picture has not worn itself out even to-day. Originally it was seen as a plan that God was working out by means of the human instrument. And it could still be regarded as such at a far later stage, in fact so long as the spell of the “ancient-mediæval-modern” scheme lasted and its parade of permanence prevented us from noting that actuality was ever changing. But meantime our outlook also has altered and become cooler and wider. Our knowledge has long overpassed the limits of this chart, and those who are still trying to sail by it are beating about in vain. It is not products that “influence,” but creators that absorb. Being has been confused with waking-being, life with the means by which it expresses itself. The critical thought, or even simple waking-consciousness, sees everywhere theoretical units subjected to motion. That is truly dynamic and Faustian, for in no other Culture have men imagined history thus. The Greek, with his thoroughly corporeal understanding of the world, would never have traced “effects” of pure expression-units like “Attic drama” or “Egyptian art.” Originally what happens is that a name is given to a _system of expression-forms_ conjuring up in our minds a particular complex of relations. But this does not last long, and soon one is suppositing {sic} under the name a being, and under the relation an effect. When we speak to-day of Greek philosophy, or Buddhism, or Scholasticism, we mean something that is somehow living, a power-unit that has grown and grown until it is mighty enough to take possession of men, to subject their waking-consciousness and even their being, and in the end to force them into an active conformity, which prolongs the direction followed by its own “life.” It is a whole mythology, and, significantly, it is only men of the Western Culture--the only mankind that lives with and in this picture is the Western--whose myth contains plenty of dæmons of this sort--“electricity” and “positional energy,” for example.