uality,
reproduced in all their characteristic vivacity. Thus do the
peoples and languages of the past, their forms and beliefs,
their struggles for power and freedom, speak to us through the
mouth of history.

How different it is with the world which the natural sciences
have created for us! However concrete the materials with which
they started, the goal of these sciences is theories,
eventually mathematical formulations of laws of change.
Treating the individual, sensuous, changing objects as mere
unsubstantial appearances (phenomena), scientific investigation
becomes a search for the universal laws which rule the timeless
changes of events. Out of this colorful world of the senses,
science creates a system of abstract concepts, in which the
true nature of things is conceived to exist--a world of
colorless and soundless atoms, despoiled of all their earthly
sensuous qualities. Such is the triumph of thought over
perception. Indifferent to change, science casts her anchor in
the eternal and unchangeable. Not the change as such but the
unchanging form of change is what she seeks.

This raises the question: What is the more valuable for the
purposes of knowledge in general, a knowledge of law or a
knowledge of events? As far as that is concerned, both
scientific procedures may be equally justified. The knowledge
of the universal laws has everywhere a practical value in so
far as they make possible man's purposeful intervention in the
natural processes. That is quite as true of the movements of
the inner as of the outer world. In the latter case knowledge
of nature's laws has made it possible to create those tools
through which the control of mankind over external nature is
steadily being extended.

Not less for the purposes of the common life are we dependent
upon the results of historical knowledge. Man is, to change the
ancient form of the expression, the animal who has a history.
His cultural life rests on the transmission from generation to
generation of a constantly increasing body of historical
memories. Whoever proposes to take an active part in this
cultural process must have an understanding of history.
Wherever the thread is once broken--as history itself
proves--it must be painfully gathered up and knitted again