So it is with nations. One civilisation rises above the level of the rest, then sinks, yielding place to the fresh vigour of younger nations, to which it bequeaths its heritage of culture. For a while the elder mother-nation is held in remembrance as a teacher and model; but ultimately--when the new generation of nations has grown strong enough to maintain an independent existence--the elder vanishes to return no more. Such a stage we ourselves seem to have reached. The peoples of the Classic Age have long passed away, but in the Renaissance the culture of their time rose again from the dead. A bevy of daughters entered upon the heritage of this mother--Italy, France, England, Germany, and many others--and added to it, each after her own fashion. Then they outgrew the imitation and mere echo of the antique, passing on to express in act an independent culture of their own; and now the time seems to have come when the modern spirit claims absolute liberty of action in every sphere, without the slightest reference to the traditions of antiquity. For the modern technician, the modern naturalist, the modern historian, the modern artist, the modern poet, the ancient world has no message. It is dead--dead past recovery, as we may say. There is, however, one sphere in which it is not dead, where it still imparts fresh stimulus to the minds of men from day to day, in which it is still recognised as the guide to every fresh enterprise. This sphere is philosophy. The last and loftiest height to which thinking humanity can climb is that comprehensive vision of all things which we Germans call _Weltanschauung_, and which the Greeks called _Philosophia_. In speculation of this illimitable range we have made but little advance upon the Greeks; nay, even those most modern of philosophers who, on the basis of biological knowledge, have built up the most modern of all conceptions of the world, are in unconscious agreement with the rudiments of Greek natural science in the sixth century B.C. Let anyone compare the “cosmological perspective” to which Ernest Haeckel has attained in his book _Die Welträthsel_ [_The Riddle of the Universe_] (1900) p. 15, “from the highest point of monistic science yet reached,” with what Anaximandros taught in the reign of Cyrus, and he will perceive with amazement that modern times have hardly gone further by a single step. The eternity, infinity, and illimitability of the Cosmos; the substance thereof, with its attributes of matter and energy, which in perpetual motion occupy the boundless space; perpetual motion itself in its periodic changes of becoming and ceasing to be; the constant progress of decay and destruction in the innumerable celestial bodies which give place to fresh formations of a similar character; the process of biogenesis on our own planet, by which in the course of æons animal life was brought forth, and by which, through gradual metamorphoses,