 The method’s second contribution to (self-)understanding consists at its most basic level in showing two things: first, it shows that the concepts etc. in question, rather than, say, having been innate and therefore present in human minds all along or else having emerged ex nihilo fully formed at some point in history, are the products of historical developments before which they did not really exist at all and in the course of which they only existed in variant forms; second, it shows what exactly these historical developments that produced them have been. At a less basic level, it normally also includes a provision of one or another further sort of explanation that is more specific in character. For example, the method shows that lyric poetry began as, and then continued throughout its transformations to be, an expression of deep emotions; that languages developed gradually from primitive beginnings to achieve their striking later complexity; or that modern culture and its values arose through a series of accumulations and transformations of earlier cultures and their values.