_Because that which one_ (here, the Renaissance artist) _wills to express is in him a priori_. Of the stock of dead forms that he had in front of him, he really saw only the few that he wanted to see, and saw them as he wanted them--namely, in line with his own intention and not with the intention of the original creator, for no living art ever seriously considers that. Try to follow, element by element, the “influence” of Egyptian plastic upon early Greek, and you will find in the end that there is none at all, but that the Greek will-to-form took out of the older art-stock some few characteristics that it would in any case have discovered in some shape for itself. All round the Classical landscape there were working, or had worked, Egyptians, Cretans, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, and Phœnicians, and the works of these peoples--their buildings, ornaments, art-works, cults, state-forms, scripts, and sciences--were known to the Greeks in profusion. But how much out of all this mass did the Classical soul extract as its own means of expression? I repeat, it is only the relations that are _accepted_ that we observe. But what of those that were _not_ accepted? Why, for example, do we fail to find in the former category the pyramid, pylon, and obelisk of Egypt, or hieroglyphic, or cuneiform? What of the stock of Byzantium and of the Moorish East was _not_ accepted by Gothic art and thought in Spain and Sicily? It is impossible to overpraise the wisdom (quite unconscious) that governed the choice and the unhesitating transvaluation of what was chosen. Every relation that was accepted was not only an exception, but also a misunderstanding, and the inner force of a Being is never so clearly evidenced as it is in this _art of deliberate misunderstanding_. The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in truth we have denatured it. Only consider the praises addressed by the West to Plato! From Bernard of Chartres and Marsilius Ficinus to Goethe and Schelling! And the more humble our acceptance of an alien religion, the more certain it is that that religion has already assumed the form of the new soul. Truly, someone ought to have written the history of the “three Aristotles”--Greek, Arabian, and Gothic--who had not one concept or thought in common. Or the history of the transformation of Magian Christianity into Faustian! We are told in sermon and book that this religion extended from the old Church into and over the Western field without change of essence. Actually, Magian man evolved out of the deepest depths of his dualistic world-consciousness a language of his own religious awareness that we call “the” Christian religion. So much of this experience as was communicable--words, formulæ, rites--was accepted by the man of the Late-Classical Civilization as a means of expression for his religious need; then it passed from man to man, even to the Germans of