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Annual circles of individual culture. Strength or weakness in intellectual productivity depends much less on inherited gift than on the inborn amount of resilience. Most young educated people thirty years of age go backwards at this spring solstice of their lives, and from then on are averse to new intellectual changes. That is why, for the health of a continually growing culture, a new generation is then necessary which, however, also does not get very far: for in order to catch up to the father's culture, the son must consume almost the same amount of inherited energy that the father himself possessed at that stage of life when he begot his son; with his little surplus, the son goes farther (for since the path is being taken for the second time, he goes a little faster; to learn what the father knew, the son does not use up quite so much energy). Very resilient men, like Goethe, for example, traverse almost more than four generations in a row can do; but for that reason they get ahead too quickly, so that other men catch up to them only in the next century, and perhaps never entirely, because frequent interruptions have weakened cultural unity and developmental consistency.
With ever greater speed, men are repeating the usual phases of the spiritual culture that has been attained in the course of history. Presently, they begin to enter the culture as children moved by religion, and in their tenth year of life, perhaps, those feelings attain the greatest vitality; then they make the transition to weaker forms (pantheism) as they approach science; they get quite beyond God, immortality, and the like, but yield to the spells of a metaphysical philosophy. This, too, they finally cease to find credible; art, on the other hand, seems to offer more and more, so that for a time metaphysics barely survives as a metamorphosis into art or as an artistically transfiguring mood. But the scientific sense grows ever more domineering, and leads the man on to natural science and history, and in particular to the most rigorous methods of knowledge, while art takes on an ever more subdued and modest meaning. All this tends to happen within a man's first thirty years. It is the recapitulation of a task at which mankind has been toiling for perhaps thirty thousand years.