A man of the stature of Jacob Burckhardt was not a great and genuine historian, instead of merely a scholar, on account of his conscientious mastery of sources, nor because he found a manuscript somewhere, but because of his projective essential view of the fate, greatness, and misery of man, of the conditions and limits of human action, in short, because of his anticipatory understanding of the occurrence we call history, of the being of these particular beings. This essential view illuminated research of so-called facts which others had described long before him.