And beyond this plane again, other historic unit-pictures rise to the view — pictures of the destinies of the plant world and the animal world, the landscape, the stars — which at the last fuse with the last pictures of natural science into mythic images of the creation and the end of the world.
The nature- (science-) picture of the child and the primitive develops out of the petty technique of every day, which perpetually forces both of them to turn away from the fearful contemplation of wide nature to the critique of the facts and situations of their near environment. Like the young animal, the child discovers its first truths through play. Examining the toy, cutting open the doll, turning the mirror round to see what is behind it, the feeling of triumph in having established something as correct for good and all — no nature-research whatsoever has got beyond this. Primitive man applies this critical experience, as he acquires it, to his arms and tools, to the materials for his clothing, food, and housing — i.e., to things in so far as they are dead. He applies it to animals as well when suddenly they cease to have meaning for him as living beings whose movements he watches and divines as pursuer or pursued, and are apprehended mechanically instead of vitally, as aggregates of flesh and bone for which he has a definite use — exactly as he is conscious of an event, now as the act of a dæmon and a moment afterwards as a sequence of cause and effect. The mature man of the Culture transposes in exactly the same way, every day and every hour. Here, too, is a "nature"-horizon, and beyond it lies the secondary plane formed of our impressions of rain, lightning, and tempest, summer and winter, moon-phases and star-courses. But at that plane religiousness, trembling with fear and awe, forces upon man criteria of a far higher kind. Just as in the history-picture he sounds the ultimate facts of life, so here he seeks to establish the ultimate truths of nature. What lies beyond any attainable frontier of knowledge he calls God, and all that lies within that frontier he strives to comprehend — as action, creation, and manifestation of God — causally.
Every group of scientifically established elements, therefore, has a dual tendency, inherent and unchanged since primitive ages. The one tendency urges forwards the completes t possible system of technical knowledge, for the service of practical, economical, and warlike ends, which many kinds of animals have developed to a high degree of perfection, and which from them leads, through primitive man and his acquaintance with fire and metals, directly to the machine-technics of our Faustian Culture. The other tendency took shape only with the separation of strictly human thought from physical vision by means of language, and the aim of its effort has been an equally complete theoretical knowledge, which we call in the earlier phases of the Culture religious, and in the later scientific. Fire is for the warrior a weapon, for the craftsman part of his equipment, for the priest a sign from God, and for the scientist a problem. But in all these aspects alike it is proper to the "natural," the
