the beginning exists still. it does not lie behind us, as something long past, but it stands before us.
perhaps only three events emerge as truly ‘historical’ (geschichtlich) in the guise of a change in the fundamental sense of the world, in the ‘essence of truth’:
- the translation of the Greek world into Roman Latin.
- a second crucial shift in the history of being occurs as the entrenchment and transformation of that Roman stamp in medieval Christianity.
- the emergence of the modern metaphysics and science in the seventeenth century, the dominance of questions of method in all pursuit of truth, and the would-be mathematization of nature.
History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame.
I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard?
What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being?
The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.