Objective and scientific consciousness of the past and of civilizations would be impossible had I not, through the intermediary of my society, my cultural world and their horizons, at least a possible communication with them, and if the place of the Athenian Republic or the Roman Empire were not somewhere marked out on the borders of my own history, and if they were not there as so many individuals to be known, indeterminate but pre existing, and if I did not find in my own life the basic structures of history.