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Title: The Decline of the West : Form and Actuality
Author: Spengler, Oswald
Language: English
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE DECLINE
OF THE WEST
[Illustration]
THE DECLINE
OF THE WEST
FORM AND ACTUALITY
BY
OSWALD SPENGLER
_AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION
WITH NOTES BY_
CHARLES FRANCIS ATKINSON
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THIS TRANSLATION IS
DEDICATED TO
ELLINOR JAMES
A FRIEND
_Wenn im Unendlichen dasselbe
Sich wiederholend ewig fliesst,
Das tausendfältige Gewölbe
Sich kräftig ineinander schliesst;
Strömt Lebenslust aus allen Dingen,
Dem kleinsten wie dem grössten Stern,
Und alles Drängen, alles Ringen
Ist ewige Ruh in Gott dem Herrn._
—GOETHE.
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
It must be left to critics to say whether it was Destiny or Incident—
using these words in the author’s sense—that Spengler’s “Untergang des
Abendlandes” appeared in July, 1918, that is, at the very turning-point
of the four years’ World-War. It was conceived, the author tells us,
before 1914 and fully worked out by 1917. So far as he is concerned,
then, the impulse to create it arose from a view of our civilization not
as the late war left it, but (as he says expressly) as the _coming_ war
would find it. But inevitably the public impulse to read it arose in and
from post-war conditions, and thus it happened that this severe and
difficult philosophy of history found a market that has justified the
printing of 90,000 copies. Its very title was so apposite to the moment
as to predispose the higher intellectuals to regard it as a work of the
moment—the more so as the author was a simple Oberlehrer and unknown to
the world of authoritative learning.
Spengler’s was not the only, nor indeed the most “popular,”
philosophical product of the German revolution. In the graver
conjunctures, sound minds do not dally with the graver questions—they
either face and attack them with supernormal resolution or thrust them
out of sight with an equally supernormal effort to enjoy or to endure
the day as it comes. Even after the return to normality, it is no longer
possible for men—at any rate for Western men—not to know that these
questions exist. And, if it is none too easy even for the victors of the
struggle to shake off its sequelæ, to turn back to business as the
normal and to give no more than amateur effort and dilettantish
attention to the very deep things, for the defeated side this is
impossible. It goes through a period of material difficulty (often
extreme difficulty) and one in which pride of achievement and humility
in the presence of unsuccess work dynamically together. So it was with
sound minds in the post-Jena Germany of Jahn and Fichte, and so it was
also with such minds in the Germany of 1919-1920.
To assume the rôle of critic and to compare Spengler’s with other
philosophies of the present phase of Germany, as to respective intrinsic
weights, is not the purpose of this note nor within the competence of
its writer. On the other hand, it is unconditionally necessary for the
reader to realize that the book before him has not only acquired this
large following amongst thoughtful laymen, but has forced the attention
and taxed the scholarship of every branch of the learned world.
Theologians, historians, scientists, art critics—all saw the challenge,
and each brought his _apparatus criticus_ to bear on that part of the
Spengler theory that affected his own domain. The reader who is familiar
with German may be referred to Manfred Schroeter’s “Der Streit um
Spengler” for details; it will suffice here to say that Schroeter’s
index of critics’ names contains some 400 entries. These critics are not
only, or even principally, general reviewers, most of them being
specialists of high standing. It is, to say the least, remarkable that a
volcanically assertive philosophy of history, visibly popular and
produced under a catchy title (Reklamtitel) should call forth, as it
did, a special number of _Logos_ in which the Olympians of scholarship
passed judgment on every inaccuracy or unsupported statement that they
could detect. (These were in fact numerous in the first edition and the
author has corrected or modified them in detail in the new edition, from
which this translation has been done. But it should be emphasized that
the author has not, in this second edition, receded in any essentials
from the standpoint taken up in the first.)
The conspicuous features in this first burst of criticism were, on the
one hand, want of adequate critical equipment in the general critic,
and, on the other, inability to see the wood for the trees in the man of
learning. No one, reading Schroeter’s book (which by the way is one-
third as large as Spengler’s first volume itself), can fail to agree
with his judgment that notwithstanding paradoxes, overstrainings, and
inaccuracies, the work towers above all its commentators. And it was
doubtless a sense of this greatness that led many scholars—amongst them
some of the very high—to avoid expressing opinions on it at all. It
would be foolish to call their silence a “sitting on the fence”; it is a
case rather of reserving judgment on a philosophy and a methodology that
challenge all the canons and carry with them immense implications. For
the very few who combine all the necessary depth of learning with all
the necessary freedom and breadth of outlook, it will not be the
accuracy or inaccuracy of details under a close magnifying-glass that
will be decisive. The very idea of accuracy and inaccuracy presupposes
the selection or acceptance of co-ordinates of reference, and therefore
the selection or acceptance of a standpoint as “origin.” That is mere
elementary science—and yet the scholar-critic would be the first to
claim the merit of scientific rigour for his criticisms! It is, in
history as in science, impossible to draw a curve through a mass of
plotted observations when they are looked at closely and almost
individually.
Criticism of quite another and a higher order may be seen in Dr. Eduard
Meyer’s article on Spengler in the _Deutsche Literaturzeitung_, No. 25
of 1924. Here we find, in one of the great figures of modern
scholarship, exactly that large-minded judgment that, while noting minor
errors—and visibly attaching little importance to them—deals with the
Spengler thesis fairly and squarely on the grand issues alone. Dr. Meyer
differs from Spengler on many serious questions, of which perhaps the
most important is that of the scope and origin of the Magian Culture.
But instead of cataloguing the errors that are still to be found in
Spengler’s vast ordered multitude of facts, Eduard Meyer honourably
bears testimony to our author’s “erstaunlich umfangreiches, _ihm ständig
präsentes, Wissen_” (a phrase as neat and as untranslatable as Goethe’s
“exakte sinnliche Phantasie”). He insists upon the fruitfulness of
certain of Spengler’s ideas such as that of the “Second Religiousness.”
Above all, he adheres to and covers with his high authority the basic
idea of the parallelism of organically-living Cultures. It is not
necessarily Spengler’s structure of the Cultures that he accepts—parts
of it indeed he definitely rejects as wrong or insufficiently
established by evidences—but on the question of their being _an_ organic
structure of the Cultures, _a_ morphology of History, he ranges himself
frankly by the side of the younger thinker, whose work he sums up as a
“bleibendez und auf lange Zeit hinaus nachhaltig wirkendes Besitz
unserer Wissenschaft und Literatur.” This last phrase of Dr. Meyer’s
expresses very directly and simply that which for an all-round student
(as distinct from an erudite specialist) constitutes the peculiar
_quality_ of Spengler’s work. Its influence is far deeper and subtler
than any to which the conventional adjective “suggestive” could be
applied. It cannot in fact be described by adjectives at all, but only
denoted or adumbrated by its result, which is that, after studying and
mastering it, “one finds it nearly if not quite impossible to approach
any culture-problem—old or new, dogmatic or artistic, political or
scientific—without conceiving it primarily as ‘morphological.’”
The work comprises two volumes—under the respective sub-titles “Form and
Reality” and “World-historical Perspectives”—of which the present
translation covers the first only. Some day I hope to have the
opportunity of completing a task which becomes—such is the nature of
this book—more attractive in proportion to its difficulty. References to
Volume II are, for the present, necessarily to the pages of the German
original; if, as is hoped, this translation is completed later by the
issue of the second volume, a list of the necessary adjustments of page
references will be issued with it. The reader will notice that
translator’s foot-notes are scattered fairly freely over the pages of
this edition. In most cases these have no pretensions to being critical
annotations. They are merely meant to help the reader to follow up in
more detail the points of fact which Spengler, with his “ständig
präsentes Wissen,” sweeps along in his course. This being their object,
they take the form, in the majority of cases, of references to
appropriate articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica, which is the only
single work that both contains reasonably full information on the varied
(and often abstruse) matters alluded to, and is likely to be accessible
wherever this book may penetrate. Every reader no doubt will find these
notes, where they appertain to his own special subject, trivial and even
annoying, but it is thought that, for example, an explanation of the
mathematical Limit may be helpful to a student who knows all about the
Katharsis in Greek drama, and _vice versa_.
In conclusion I cannot omit to put on record the part that my wife,
Hannah Waller Atkinson, has taken in the work of translation and
editing. I may best describe it by saying that it ought perhaps to have
been recorded on the title page instead of in this place.
C. F. A.
_January, 1926._
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
At the close of an undertaking which, from the first brief sketch to the
final shaping of a complete work of quite unforeseen dimensions, has
spread itself over ten years, it will not be out of place to glance back
at what I intended and what I have achieved, my standpoint then and my
standpoint to-day.
In the Introduction to the 1918 edition—inwardly and outwardly a
fragment—I stated my conviction that an idea had now been irrefutably
formulated which no one would oppose, once the idea had been put into
words. I ought to have said: once that idea had been understood. And for
that we must look—as I more and more realize—not only in this instance
but in the whole history of thought—to the new generation that is _born_
with the ability to do it.
I added that this must be considered as a first attempt, loaded with all
the customary faults, incomplete and not without inward opposition. The
remark was not taken anything like as seriously as it was intended.
Those who have looked searchingly into the hypotheses of living thought
will know that it is not given to us to gain insight into the
fundamental principles of existence without conflicting emotions. A
thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his
vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to
think. Truth in the long run is to him the picture of the world which
was born at his birth. It is that which he does not invent but rather
discovers within himself. It is himself over again: his being expressed
in words; the meaning of his personality formed into a doctrine which so
far as concerns his life is unalterable, because truth and his life are
identical. This symbolism is the one essential, the vessel and the
expression of human history. The learned philosophical works that arise
out of it are superfluous and only serve to swell the bulk of a
professional literature.
I can then call the essence of what I have discovered “true”—that is,
_true for me_, and as I believe, true for the leading minds of the
coming time; not true in itself as dissociated from the conditions
imposed by blood and by history, for that is impossible. But what I
wrote in the storm and stress of those years was, it must be admitted, a
very imperfect statement of what stood clearly before me, and it
remained to devote the years that followed to the task of correlating
facts and finding means of expression which should enable me to present
my idea in the most forcible form.
To perfect that form would be impossible—life itself is only fulfilled
in death. But I have once more made the attempt to bring up even the
earliest portions of the work to the level of definiteness with which I
now feel able to speak; and with that I take leave of this book with its
hopes and disappointments, its merits and its faults.
The result has in the meantime justified itself as far as I myself am
concerned and—judging by the effect that it is slowly beginning to
exercise upon extensive fields of learning—as far as others are
concerned also. Let no one expect to find everything set forth here. It
is _but one side_ of what I see before me, a new outlook on _history and
the philosophy of destiny_—the first indeed of its kind. It is intuitive
and depictive through and through, written in a language which seeks to
present objects and relations illustratively instead of offering an army
of ranked concepts. It addresses itself solely to readers who are
capable of living themselves into the word-sounds and pictures as they
read. Difficult this undoubtedly is, particularly as our awe in face of
mystery—the respect that Goethe felt—denies us the satisfaction of
thinking that dissections are the same as penetrations.
Of course, the cry of “pessimism” was raised at once by those who live
eternally in yesterday (_Ewiggestrigen_) and greet every idea that is
intended for the pathfinder of to-morrow only. But I have not written
for people who imagine that delving for the springs of action is the
same as action itself; those who make definitions do not know destiny.
By understanding the world I mean being equal to the world. It is the
hard reality of living that is the essential, not the concept of life,
that the ostrich-philosophy of idealism propounds. Those who refuse to
be bluffed by enunciations will not regard this as pessimism; and the
rest do not matter. For the benefit of serious readers who are seeking a
glimpse at life and not a definition, I have—in view of the far too
great concentration of the text—mentioned in my notes a number of works
which will carry that glance into more distant realms of knowledge.
And now, finally, I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe
practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method,
Nietzsche the questioning faculty—and if I were asked to find a formula
for my relation to the latter I should say that I had made of his
“outlook” (_Ausblick_) an “overlook” (_Überblick_). But Goethe was,
without knowing it, a disciple of Leibniz in his whole mode of thought.
And, therefore, that which has at last (and to my own astonishment)
taken shape in my hands I am able to regard and, despite the misery and
disgust of these years, proud to call _a German philosophy_.
OSWALD SPENGLER.
_Blankenburg am Harz,
December, 1922._
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
The complete manuscript of this book—the outcome of three years’ work—
was ready when the Great War broke out. By the spring of 1917 it had
been worked over again and—in certain details—supplemented and cleared
up, but its appearance in print was still delayed by the conditions then
prevailing.
Although a philosophy of history is its scope and subject, it possesses
also a certain deeper significance as a commentary on the great epochal
moment of which the portents were visible when the leading ideas were
being formed.
The title, which had been decided upon in 1912, expresses quite
literally the intention of the book, which was to describe, in the light
of the decline of the Classical age, one world-historical phase of
several centuries upon which we ourselves are now entering.
Events have justified much and refuted nothing. It became clear that
these ideas must necessarily be brought forward at just this moment and
in Germany, and, more, that the war itself was an element in the
premisses from which the new world-picture could be made precise.
For I am convinced that it is not merely a question of writing one out
of several possible and merely logically justifiable philosophies, but
of writing _the_ philosophy of our time, one that is to some extent a
natural philosophy and is dimly presaged by all. This may be said
without presumption; for an idea that is historically essential—that
does not occur within an epoch but itself makes that epoch—is only in a
limited sense the property of him to whose lot it falls to parent it. It
belongs to our time as a whole and influences all thinkers, without
their knowing it; it is but the accidental, private attitude towards it
(without which no philosophy can exist) that—with its faults and its
merits—is the destiny and the happiness of the individual.
OSWALD SPENGLER.
_Munich,
December, 1917._
CONTENTS OF VOLUME I
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE ix
AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION xiii
AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xv
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1
Scope of the work, p. 3. Morphology of World-History, a new
philosophy, p. 5. For whom is History? p. 8. Classical and Indian
mankind ahistorical, p. 9. The Egyptian mummy and the burning of
the dead, p. 13. The conventional scheme of World-History
(ancient, mediæval, modern), p. 15. Its origin, p. 18. Its
breakdown, p. 22. Europe not a centre of gravity, p. 23. The only
historical method is Goethe’s, p. 25. Ourselves and the Romans,
p. 26. Nietzsche and Mommsen, p. 28. The problem of Civilization,
p. 31. Imperialism the last phase, p. 36. The necessity and range
of our basic idea, p. 39. Its relation to present-day philosophy,
p. 41. Philosophy’s last task, p. 45. The origin of this work, p.
46.
CHAPTER II. THE MEANING OF NUMBERS 51
Fundamental notions, p. 53. Numbers as the sign of delimitation, p.
56. Every Culture has its own Mathematic, p. 59. Number as
magnitude in the Classical world, p. 64. Aristarchus, p. 68.
Diophantus and Arabian number, p. 71. Number as Function in the
Western Culture, p. 74. World-fear and world-longing, p. 78.
Geometry and arithmetic, p. 81. The Limit idea, p. 86. Visual
limits transcended; symbolical space worlds, p. 86. Final
possibilities, p. 87.
CHAPTER III. THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY. (1) PHYSIOGNOMIC AND
SYSTEMATIC 91
Copernican methods, p. 93. History and Nature, p. 94. Form and Law,
p. 97. Physiognomic and Systematic, p. 100. Cultures as
organisms, p. 104. Inner form, tempo, duration, p. 108. Homology,
p. 111. What is meant by “contemporary,” p. 112.
CHAPTER IV. THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY. (2) THE DESTINY-IDEA
AND THE CAUSALITY-PRINCIPLE 115
Logic, organic and inorganic, p. 117. Time and Destiny, p. 119.
Space and Causality, p. 119. The problem of Time, p. 121. Time a
counter-conception to Space, p. 126. The symbols of Time—tragedy,
time reckoning, disposal of the dead, p. 130. Care (sex, the
State, works), p. 136. Destiny and Incident, p. 139. Incident and
Cause, p. 141. Incident and Style of existence, p. 142. Anonymous
and personal epochs, p. 148. Direction into the future and Image
of the Past, p. 152. Is there a Science of History? p. 155. The
new enunciation of the problem, p. 159.
CHAPTER V. MAKROKOSMOS. (1) THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE
AND THE PROBLEM OF SPACE 161
The Macrocosm as the sum total of symbols referred to a Soul, p.
163. Space and Death, p. 165. “Alles vergängliche ist nur ein
Gleichnis,” p. 167. The space problem (only Depth is space-
forming), p. 169. Depth as Time, p. 172. The world-idea of a
Culture born out of its prime symbol, p. 174. Classical Body,
Magian Cavern, Western Infinity, p. 174.
CHAPTER VI. MAKROKOSMOS. (2) APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN
SOUL 181
Prime symbol, architecture, divinities, p. 183. The Egyptian prime
symbol of the path, p. 188. Expression-language of art:
Ornamentation and Imitation, p. 191. Ornament and early
architecture, p. 196. The window, p. 199. The grand style, p.
200. The history of a Style as organism, p. 205. On the history
of the Arabian style, p. 207. Psychology of art-technique, p.
214.
CHAPTER VII. MUSIC AND PLASTIC. (1) THE ARTS OF FORM 217
Music one of the arts of form, p. 219. Classification of the arts
impossible except from the historical standpoint, p. 221. The
choice of particular arts itself an expression-means of the
higher order, p. 222. Apollinian and Faustian art-groups, p. 224.
The stages of Western Music, p. 226. The Renaissance an anti-
Gothic and anti-musical movement, p. 232. Character of the
Baroque, p. 236. The Park, p. 240. Symbolism of colours, p. 245.
Colours of the Near and of the Distance, p. 246. Gold background
and Rembrandt brown, p. 247. Patina, p. 253.
CHAPTER VIII. MUSIC AND PLASTIC. (2) ACT AND PORTRAIT 257
Kinds of human representation, p. 259. Portraiture, Contrition,
Syntax, p. 261. The heads of Classical statuary, p. 264.
Portrayal of children and women, p. 266. Hellenistic portraiture,
p. 269. The Baroque portrait, p. 272. Leonardo, Raphael and
Michelangelo overcome the Renaissance, p. 273. Victory of
Instrumental Music over Oil-Painting, corresponding to the
victory of Statuary over Fresco in the Classical, p. 282.
Impressionism, p. 285. Pergamum and Bayreuth, p. 291. The finale
of Art, p. 293.
CHAPTER IX. SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING. (1) ON THE FORM OF THE
SOUL 297
Soul-image as function of World-image, p. 299. Psychology of a
counter-physics, p. 302. Apollinian, Magian and Faustian soul-
image, p. 305. The “Will” in Gothic space, p. 308. The “inner”
mythology, p. 312. Will and Character, p. 314. Classical posture
tragedy and Faustian character tragedy, p. 317. Symbolism of the
drama-image, p. 320. Day and Night Art, p. 324. Popular and
esoteric, p. 326. The astronomical image, p. 329. The
geographical horizon, p. 332.
CHAPTER X. SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING. (2) BUDDHISM, STOICISM,
AND SOCIALISM 339
The Faustian morale purely dynamic, p. 341. Every Culture has a
form of morale proper to itself, p. 345. Posture-morale and will-
morale, p. 347. Buddha, Socrates, Rousseau as protagonists of the
dawning Civilizations, p. 351. Tragic and plebeian morale, p.
354. Return to Nature, Irreligion, Nihilism, p. 356. Ethical
Socialism, p. 361. Similarity of structure in the philosophical
history of every Culture, p. 364. The Civilized philosophy of the
West, p. 365.
CHAPTER XI. FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 375
Theory as Myth, p. 377. Every Natural Science depends upon a
preceding Religion, p. 391. Statics, Alchemy, Dynamics as the
theories of three Cultures, p. 382. The Atomic theory, p. 384.
The problem of motion insoluble, p. 388. The style of causal
process and experience, p. 391. The feeling of God and the
knowing of Nature, p. 392. The great Myth, p. 394. Classical,
Magian and Faustian _numina_, p. 397. Atheism, p. 408. Faustian
physics as a dogma of force, p. 411. Limits of its theoretical
(as distinct from its technical) development, p. 417. Self-
destruction of Dynamics, and invasion of historical ideas; theory
dissolves into a system of morphological relationships, p. 420.
INDEX _Following page_ 428
TABLES ILLUSTRATING THE COMPARATIVE _At end of volume_
MORPHOLOGY OF HISTORY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
I
In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of
predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the
destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time
and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment—the West-
European-American.
Hitherto the possibility of solving a problem so far-reaching has
evidently never been envisaged, and even if it had been so, the means of
dealing with it were either altogether unsuspected or, at best,
inadequately used.
Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and
incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call
a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is
essentially independent of the outward forms—social, spiritual and
political—which we see so clearly? Are not these actualities indeed
secondary or derived from that something? Does world-history present to
the seeing eye certain grand traits, again and again, with sufficient
constancy to justify certain conclusions? And if so, what are the limits
to which reasoning from such premisses may be pushed?
Is it possible to find in life itself—for human history is the sum of
mighty life-courses which already have had to be endowed with ego and
personality, in customary thought and expression, by predicating
entities of a higher order like “the Classical” or “the Chinese
Culture,” “Modern Civilization”—a series of stages which must be
traversed, and traversed moreover in an ordered and obligatory sequence?
For everything organic the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime
are fundamentals—may not these notions, in this sphere also, possess a
rigorous meaning which no one has as yet extracted? In short, is all
history founded upon general biographic archetypes?
The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the
corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in
time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when
comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great
question of Being.
If therefore we are to discover in what form the destiny of the Western
Culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to what culture
_is_, what its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul, to
nature, to intellect, what the forms of its manifestation are and how
far these forms—peoples, tongues and epochs, battles and ideas, states
and gods, arts and craft-works, sciences, laws, economic types and
world-ideas, great men and great events—may be accepted and pointed to
as symbols.
II
The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means
whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means we are
enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.
It is, and has always been, a matter of knowledge that the expression-
forms of world-history are limited in number, and that eras, epochs,
situations, persons are ever repeating themselves true to type. Napoleon
has hardly ever been discussed without a side-glance at Cæsar and
Alexander—analogies of which, as we shall see, the first is
morphologically quite inacceptable and the second is correct—while
Napoleon himself conceived of his situation as akin to Charlemagne’s.
The French Revolutionary Convention spoke of Carthage when it meant
England, and the Jacobins styled themselves Romans. Other such
comparisons, of all degrees of soundness and unsoundness, are those of
Florence with Athens, Buddha with Christ, primitive Christianity with
modern Socialism, the Roman financial magnate of Cæsar’s time with the
Yankee. Petrarch, the first passionate archæologist (and is not
archæology itself an expression of the sense that history is
repetition?) related himself mentally to Cicero, and but lately Cecil
Rhodes, the organizer of British South Africa, who had in his library
specially prepared translations of the classical lives of the Cæsars,
felt himself akin to the Emperor Hadrian. The fated Charles XII of
Sweden used to carry Quintus Curtius’s life of Alexander in his pocket,
and to copy that conqueror was his deliberate purpose.
Frederick the Great, in his political writings—such as his
_Considérations_, 1738—moves among analogies with perfect assurance.
Thus he compares the French to the Macedonians under Philip and the
Germans to the Greeks. “Even now,” he says, “the Thermopylæ of Germany,
Alsace and Lorraine, are in the hands of Philip,” therein exactly
characterizing the policy of Cardinal Fleury. We find him drawing
parallels also between the policies of the Houses of Habsburg and
Bourbon and the proscriptions of Antony and of Octavius.
Still, all this was only fragmentary and arbitrary, and usually implied
rather a momentary inclination to poetical or ingenious expressions than
a really deep sense of historical forms.
Thus in the case of Ranke, a master of artistic analogy, we find that
his parallels of Cyaxares and Henry the Fowler, of the inroads of the
Cimmerians and those of the Hungarians, possess morphologically no
significance, and his oft-quoted analogy between the Hellenic city-
states and the Renaissance republics very little, while the deeper truth
in his comparison of Alcibiades and Napoleon is accidental. Unlike the
strict mathematician, who finds inner relationships between two groups
of differential equations where the layman sees nothing but
dissimilarities of outward form, Ranke and others draw their historical
analogies with a Plutarchian, popular-romantic, touch, and aim merely at
presenting comparable scenes on the world-stage.
It is easy to see that, at bottom, it is neither a principle nor a sense
of historic necessity, but simple inclination, that governs the choice
of the tableaux. From any _technique_ of analogies we are far distant.
They throng up (to-day more than ever) without scheme or unities, and if
they do hit upon something which is true—in the essential sense of the
word that remains to be determined—it is thanks to luck, more rarely to
instinct, never to a principle. In this region no one hitherto has set
himself to work out a _method_, nor has had the slightest inkling that
there is here a root, in fact the only root, from which can come a broad
solution of the problems of History.
Analogies, in so far as they laid bare the organic structure of history,
might be a blessing to historical thought. Their technique, developing
under the influence of a comprehensive idea, would surely eventuate in
inevitable conclusions and logical mastery. But as hitherto understood
and practised they have been a curse, for they have enabled the
historians to follow their own tastes, instead of soberly realizing that
their first and hardest task was concerned with the symbolism of history
and its analogies, and, in consequence, the problem has till now not
even been comprehended, let alone solved. Superficial in many cases (as
for instance in designating Cæsar as the creator of the official
newspaper), these analogies are worse than superficial in others (as
when phenomena of the Classical Age that are not only extremely complex
but utterly alien to us are labelled with modern catchwords like
Socialism, Impressionism, Capitalism, Clericalism), while occasionally
they are bizarre to the point of perversity—witness the Jacobin clubs
with their cult of Brutus, that millionaire-extortioner Brutus who, in
the name of oligarchical doctrine and with the approval of the patrician
senate, murdered the Man of the Democracy.
III
Thus our theme, which originally comprised only the limited problem of
present-day civilization, broadens itself into a new philosophy—_the_
philosophy of the future, so far as the metaphysically-exhausted soil of
the West can bear such, and in any case the only philosophy which is
within the _possibilities_ of the West-European mind in its next stages.
It expands into the conception of a _morphology of world history_, of
the world-as-history in contrast to the morphology of the world-as-
nature that hitherto has been almost the only theme of philosophy. And
it reviews once again the forms and movements of the world in their
depths and final significance, but this time according to an entirely
different ordering which groups them, not in an ensemble picture
inclusive of everything known, but in a picture of _life_, and presents
them not as things-become, but as things-becoming.
The _world-as-history_, conceived, viewed and given form from out of its
opposite the _world-as-nature_—here is a new aspect of human existence
on this earth. As yet, in spite of its immense significance, both
practical and theoretical, this aspect has not been realized, still less
presented. Some obscure inkling of it there may have been, a distant
momentary glimpse there has often been, but no one has deliberately
faced it and taken it in with all its implications. We have before us
two possible ways in which man may inwardly possess and experience the
world around him. With all rigour I distinguish (as to form, not
substance) the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content
of images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and
the system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible, the
intents and purposes of imagination ordering according to plan from the
intents and purposes of experience dissecting according to scheme; and—
to mention even thus early an opposition that has never yet been noted,
in spite of its significance—the domain of _chronological_ from that of
_mathematical number_.[1]
Consequently, in a research such as that lying before us, there can be
no question of taking spiritual-political events, as they become visible
day by day on the surface, at their face value, and arranging them on a
scheme of “causes” or “effects” and following them up in the obvious and
intellectually easy directions. Such a “pragmatic” handling of history
would be nothing but a piece of “natural science” in disguise, and for
their part, the supporters of the materialistic idea of history make no
secret about it—it is their adversaries who largely fail to see the
similarity of the two methods. What concerns us is not what the
historical facts which appear at this or that time _are_, per se, but
what they signify, what they point to, _by appearing_. Present-day
historians think they are doing a work of supererogation in bringing in
religious and social, or still more art-history, details to “illustrate”
the political sense of an epoch. But the decisive factor—decisive, that
is, in so far as visible history is the expression, sign and embodiment
of soul—they forget. I have not hitherto found one who has carefully
considered the _morphological relationship_ that inwardly binds together
the expression-forms of _all_ branches of a Culture, who has gone beyond
politics to grasp the ultimate and fundamental ideas of Greeks,
Arabians, Indians and Westerners in mathematics, the meaning of their
early ornamentation, the basic forms of their architecture,
philosophies, dramas and lyrics, their choice and development of great
arts, the detail of their craftsmanship and choice of materials—let
alone appreciated the decisive importance of these matters for the form-
problems of history. Who amongst them realizes that between the
Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in the age
of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean
geometry, between the space-perspective of Western oil-painting and the
conquest of space by railroad, telephone and long-range weapon, between
contrapuntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities?
Yet, viewed from this morphological standpoint, even the humdrum facts
of politics assume a symbolic and even a metaphysical character, and—
what has perhaps been impossible hitherto—things such as the Egyptian
administrative system, the Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the
cheque, the Suez Canal, the book-printing of the Chinese, the Prussian
Army, and the Roman road-engineering can, as symbols, be made
_uniformly_ understandable and appreciable.
But at once the fact presents itself that as yet there exists no theory-
enlightened art of historical treatment. What passes as such draws its
methods almost exclusively from the domain of that science which alone
has completely disciplined the methods of cognition, viz., physics, and
thus we imagine ourselves to be carrying on historical research when we
are really following out objective connexions of cause and effect. It is
a remarkable fact that the old-fashioned philosophy never imagined even
the possibility of there being any other relation than this between the
conscious human understanding and the world outside. Kant, who in his
main work established the formal rules of cognition, took _nature_ only
as the object of reason’s activity, and neither he himself, nor anyone
after him, noted the reservation. Knowledge, for Kant, is mathematical
knowledge. He deals with innate intuition-forms and categories of the
reason, but he never thinks of the wholly different mechanism by which
historical impressions are apprehended. And Schopenhauer, who,
significantly enough, retains but one of the Kantian categories, viz.,
causality, speaks contemptuously of history.[2] That there is, besides a
necessity of cause and effect—which I may call the _logic of space_—
another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny—the
_logic of time_—is a fact of the deepest inward certainty, a fact which
suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic thought and
constitutes the essence and kernel of all history (in contradistinction
to nature) but is unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the
“Critique of Pure Reason” investigates. This fact still awaits its
theoretical formulation. As Galileo says in a famous passage of his
_Saggiatore_, philosophy, as Nature’s great book, is written “in
mathematical language.” We await, to-day, the philosopher who will tell
us in what language history is written and how it is to be read.
Mathematics and the principle of Causality lead to a naturalistic,
Chronology and the idea of Destiny to a historical ordering of the
phenomenal world. Both orderings, each on its own account, cover the
_whole_ world. The difference is only in the eyes by which and through
which this world is realized.
-----
Footnote 1:
Kant’s error, an error of very wide bearing which has not even yet
been overcome, was first of all in bringing the outer and inner Man
into relation with the ideas of space and time by pure scheme, though
the meanings of these are numerous and, above all, not unalterable;
and secondly in allying arithmetic with the one and geometry with the
other in an utterly mistaken way. It is not between arithmetic and
geometry—we must here anticipate a little—but between chronological
and mathematical number that there is fundamental opposition.
Arithmetic and geometry are _both_ spatial mathematics and in their
higher regions they are no longer separable. _Time-reckoning_, of
which the plain man is capable of a perfectly clear understanding
through his senses, answers the question “When,” not “What” or “How
Many.”
Footnote 2:
One cannot but be sensible how little depth and power of abstraction
has been associated with the treatment of, say, the Renaissance or the
Great Migrations, as compared with what is obviously required for the
theory of functions and theoretical optics. Judged by the standards of
the physicist and the mathematician, the historian becomes _careless_
as soon as he has assembled and ordered his material and passes on to
interpretation.
-----
IV
Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and
interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from
which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the
world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a
deeper reality. Whether he is capable of creating these shapes, which of
them it is that dominates his waking consciousness, is a primordial
problem of all human existence.
Man, thus, has before him two _possibilities_ of world-formation. But it
must be noted, at the very outset, that these possibilities are not
necessarily _actualities_, and if we are to enquire into the sense of
all history we must begin by solving a question which has never yet been
put, viz., _for whom_ is there History? The question is seemingly
paradoxical, for history is obviously for everyone to this extent, that
every man, with his whole existence and consciousness, is a part of
history. But it makes a great difference whether anyone lives under the
constant impression that his life is an element in a far wider life-
course that goes on for hundreds and thousands of years, or conceives of
himself as something rounded off and self-contained. For the latter type
of consciousness there is certainly no world-history, no _world-as-
history_. But how if the self-consciousness of a whole nation, how if a
whole Culture rests on this ahistoric spirit? How must actuality appear
to it? The world? Life? Consider the Classical Culture. In the world-
consciousness of the Hellenes all experience, not merely the personal
but the common past, was immediately transmuted into a timeless,
immobile, mythically-fashioned background for the particular momentary
present; thus the history of Alexander the Great began even before his
death to be merged by Classical sentiment in the Dionysus legend, and to
Cæsar there seemed at the least nothing preposterous in claiming descent
from Venus.
Such a spiritual condition it is practically impossible for us men of
the West, with a sense of time-distances so strong that we habitually
and unquestioningly speak of so many years before or after Christ, to
reproduce in ourselves. But we are not on that account entitled, in
dealing with the problems of History, simply to ignore the fact.
What diaries and autobiographies yield in respect of an individual, that
historical research in the widest and most inclusive sense—that is,
every kind of psychological comparison and analysis of alien peoples,
times and customs—yields as to the soul of a Culture as a whole. But the
Classical culture possessed no _memory_, no organ of history in this
special sense. The memory of the Classical man—so to call it, though it
is somewhat arbitrary to apply to alien souls a notion derived from our
own—is something different, since past and future, as arraying
perspectives in the working consciousness, are absent and the “pure
Present,” which so often roused Goethe’s admiration in every product of
the Classical life and in sculpture particularly, fills that life with
an intensity that to us is perfectly unknown.
This pure Present, whose greatest symbol is the Doric column, in itself
predicates the _negation of time_ (of direction). For Herodotus and
Sophocles, as for Themistocles or a Roman consul, the past is subtilized
instantly into an impression that is timeless and changeless, _polar and
not periodic_ in structure—in the last analysis, of such stuff as myths
are made of—whereas for our world-sense and our inner eye the past is a
definitely periodic and purposeful organism of centuries or millennia.
But it is just this background which gives the life, whether it be the
Classical or the Western life, its special colouring. What the Greek
called Kosmos was the image of a world that is not continuous but
complete. _Inevitably_, then, the Greek man himself was not a series but
a term.[3]
For this reason, although Classical man was well acquainted with the
strict chronology and almanac-reckoning of the Babylonians and
especially the Egyptians, and therefore with that eternity-sense and
disregard of the present-as-such which revealed itself in their broadly-
conceived operations of astronomy and their exact measurements of big
time-intervals, none of this ever became _intimately_ a part of him.
What his philosophers occasionally told him on the subject they had
heard, not experienced, and what a few brilliant minds in the Asiatic-
Greek cities (such as Hipparchus and Aristarchus) discovered was
rejected alike by the Stoic and by the Aristotelian, and outside a small
professional circle not even noticed. Neither Plato nor Aristotle had an
observatory. In the last years of Pericles, the Athenian people passed a
decree by which all who propagated astronomical theories were made
liable to impeachment (εἰσαγγελία). This last was an act of the deepest
symbolic significance, expressive of the determination of the Classical
soul to banish distance, in every aspect, from its world-consciousness.
As regards Classical history-writing, take Thucydides. The mastery of
this man lies in his truly Classical power of making alive and self-
explanatory the events of the _present_, and also in his possession of
the magnificently _practical outlook_ of the born statesman who has
himself been both general and administrator. In virtue of this quality
of _experience_ (which we unfortunately confuse with the historical
sense proper), his work confronts the merely learned and professional
historian as an inimitable model, and quite rightly so. But what is
absolutely hidden from Thucydides is perspective, the power of surveying
the history of centuries, that which for us is implicit in the very
conception of a historian. The fine pieces of Classical history-writing
are invariably those which set forth matters within the political
present of the writer, whereas for us it is the direct opposite, our
historical masterpieces without exception being those which deal with a
distant past. Thucydides would have broken down in handling even the
Persian Wars, let alone the general history of Greece, while that of
Egypt would have been utterly out of his reach. He, as well as Polybius
and Tacitus (who like him were practical politicians), loses his
sureness of eye from the moment when, in looking backwards, he
encounters motive forces in any form that is unknown in his practical
experience. For Polybius even the First Punic War, for Tacitus even the
reign of Augustus, are inexplicable. As for Thucydides, his lack of
historical feeling—in our sense of the phrase—is conclusively
demonstrated on the very first page of his book by the astounding
statement that before his time (about 400 B.C.) no events of importance
had occurred (oὐ μεγάλα γενέσθαι) in the world![4]
Consequently, Classical history down to the Persian Wars and for that
matter the structure built up on traditions at much later periods, are
the product of an essentially mythological thinking. The constitutional
history of Sparta is a poem of the Hellenistic period, and Lycurgus, on
whom it centres and whose “biography” we are given in full detail, was
probably in the beginning an unimportant local god of Mount Taygetus.
The invention of pre-Hannibalian Roman history was still going on even
in Cæsar’s time. The story of the expulsion of the Tarquins by Brutus is
built round some contemporary of the Censor Appius Claudius (310 B.C.).
The names of the Roman kings were at that period made up from the names
of certain plebeian families which had become wealthy (K. J. Neumann).
In the sphere of constitutional history, setting aside altogether the
“constitution” of Servius Tullius, we find that even the famous land law
of Licinius (367 B.C.) was not in existence at the time of the Second
Punic War (B. Niese). When Epaminondas gave freedom and statehood to the
Messenians and the Arcadians, these peoples promptly provided themselves
with an early history. But the astounding thing is not that history of
this sort was produced, but that there was practically none of any other
sort; and the opposition between the Classical and the modern outlook is
sufficiently illustrated by saying that Roman history before 250 B.C.,
as known in Cæsar’s time, was substantially a forgery, and that the
little that we know has been established by ourselves and was entirely
unknown to the later Romans. In what sense the Classical world
understood the word “history” we can see from the fact that the
Alexandrine romance-literature exercised the strongest influence upon
serious political and religious history, even as regards its matter. It
never entered the Classical head to draw any distinction of principle
between history as a story and history as documents. When, towards the
end of the Roman republic, Varro set out to stabilize the religion that
was fast vanishing from the people’s consciousness, he classified the
deities _whose cult was exactly and minutely observed by the State_,
into “certain” and “uncertain” gods, i.e., into gods of whom something
was still known and gods that, in spite of the unbroken continuity of
official worship, had survived in name only. In actual fact, the
religion of Roman society in Varro’s time, the poet’s religion which
Goethe and even Nietzsche reproduced in all innocence, was mainly a
product of Hellenistic literature and had almost no relation to the
ancient practices, which no one any longer understood.
Mommsen clearly defined the West-European attitude towards this history
when he said that “the Roman historians,” meaning especially Tacitus,
“were men who said what it would have been meritorious to omit, and
omitted what it was essential to say.”
In the Indian Culture we have the perfectly ahistoric soul. Its decisive
expression is the Brahman Nirvana. There is no pure Indian astronomy, no
calendar, and therefore no history so far as history is the track of a
conscious spiritual evolution. Of the visible course of their Culture,
which as regards its organic phase came to an end with the rise of
Buddhism, we know even less than we do of Classical history, rich though
it must have been in great events between the 12th and 8th centuries.
And this is not surprising, since it was in dream-shapes and
mythological figures that both came to be fixed. It is a full millennium
after Buddha, about 500 A.D., when Ceylon first produces something
remotely resembling historical work, the “Mahavansa.”
The world-consciousness of Indian man was so ahistorically built that it
could not even treat the appearance of a book written by a single author
as an event determinate in time. Instead of an organic series of
writings by specific persons, there came into being gradually a vague
mass of texts into which everyone inserted what he pleased, and notions
such as those of intellectual individualism, intellectual evolution,
intellectual epochs, played no part in the matter. It is in this
_anonymous_ form that we possess the Indian philosophy—which is at the
same time all the Indian history that we have—and it is instructive to
compare with it the philosophy-history of the West, which is a perfectly
definite structure made up of individual books and personalities.
Indian man forgot everything, but Egyptian man forgot _nothing_. Hence,
while the art of portraiture—which is biography in the kernel—was
unknown in India, in Egypt it was practically the artist’s only theme.
The Egyptian soul, conspicuously historical in its texture and impelled
with primitive passion towards the infinite, perceived past and future
as its _whole_ world, and the present (which is identical with waking
consciousness) appeared to him simply as the narrow common frontier of
two immeasurable stretches. The Egyptian Culture is an embodiment of
_care_—which is the spiritual counterpoise of distance—care for the
future expressed in the choice of granite or basalt as the craftsman’s
materials,[5] in the chiselled archives, in the elaborate administrative
system, in the net of irrigation works,[6] and, necessarily _bound up
therewith_, care for the past. The Egyptian mummy is a symbol of the
first importance. The body of the dead man was _made everlasting_, just
as his personality, his “Ka,” was immortalized through the portrait-
statuettes, which were often made in many copies and to which it was
conceived to be attached by a transcendental likeness.
There is a deep relation between the attitude that is taken towards the
historic past and the conception that is formed of death, and this
relation is expressed in the _disposal of the dead_. The Egyptian denied
mortality, the Classical man affirmed it in the whole symbolism of his
Culture. The Egyptians embalmed even their history in chronological
dates and figures. From pre-Solonian Greece nothing has been handed
down, not a year-date, not a true name, not a tangible event—with the
consequence that the later history, (which alone we know) assumes undue
importance—but for Egypt we possess, from the 3rd millennium and even
earlier, the names and even the exact reign-dates of many of the kings,
and the New Empire must have had a complete knowledge of them. To-day,
pathetic symbols of the will to endure, the bodies of the great Pharaohs
lie in our museums, their faces still recognizable. On the shining,
polished-granite peak of the pyramid of Amenemhet III we can read to-day
the words “Amenemhet looks upon the beauty of the Sun” and, on the other
side, “Higher is the soul of Amenemhet than the height of Orion, and it
is united with the underworld.” Here indeed is victory over Mortality
and the mere present; it is to the last degree un-Classical.
-----
Footnote 3:
In the original, these fundamental antitheses are expressed simply by
means of _werden_ and _sein_. Exact renderings are therefore
impossible in English.—_Tr._
Footnote 4:
The attempts of the Greeks to frame something like a calendar or a
chronology after the Egyptian fashion, besides being very belated
indeed, were of extreme _naïveté_. The Olympiad reckoning is not an
era in the sense of, say, the Christian chronology, and is, moreover,
a late and purely literary expedient, without popular currency. The
people, in fact, had no general need of a numeration wherewith to date
the experiences of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, though a
few learned persons might be interested in the calendar question. We
are not here concerned with the soundness or unsoundness of a
calendar, but with its currency, with the question of whether men
regulated their lives by it or not; but, incidentally, even the list
of Olympian victors before 500 is quite as much of an invention as the
lists of earlier Athenian archons or Roman consuls. Of the
colonizations, we possess not one single authentic date (E. Meyer.
_Gesch. d. Alt._ II, 442. Beloch. _Griech. Gesch._ I, 2, 219) “in
Greece before the fifth century, no one ever thought of noting or
reporting historical events.” (Beloch. I, 1, 125). We possess an
inscription which sets forth a treaty between Elis and Heraea which
“was to be valid for a hundred years from this year.” What “this year”
was, is however not indicated. After a few years no one would have
known how long the treaty had still to run. Evidently this was a point
that no one had taken into account at the time—indeed, the very “men
of the moment” who drew up the document, probably themselves soon
forgot. Such was the childlike, fairy-story character of the Classical
presentation of history that any ordered dating of the events of, say,
the Trojan War (which occupies in their series the same position as
the Crusades in ours) would have been felt as a sheer solecism.
Equally backward was the geographical science of the Classical world
as compared with that of the Egyptians and the Babylonians. E. Meyer
(_Gesch. d. Alt._ II, 102) shows how the Greeks’ knowledge of the form
of Africa degenerated from Herodotus (who followed Persian
authorities) to Aristotle. The same is true of the Romans as the heirs
of the Carthaginians; they first repeated the information of their
alien forerunners and then slowly forgot it.
Footnote 5:
Contrast with this the fact, symbolically of the highest importance
and unparalleled in art-history, that the Hellenes, though they had
before their eyes the works of the Mycenæan Age and their land was
only too rich in stone, _deliberately reverted to wood_; hence the
absence of architectural remains of the period 1200-600. The Egyptian
plant-column was from the outset of stone, whereas the Doric column
was wooden, a clear indication of the intense antipathy of the
Classical soul towards duration.
Footnote 6:
Is there any Hellenic city that ever carried out one single
comprehensive work that tells of care for future generations? The road
and water systems which research has assigned to the Mycenæan—i.e.,
the pre-Classical—age fell into disrepair and oblivion from the birth
of the Classical peoples—that is, from the Homeric period. It is a
remarkably curious fact, proved beyond doubt by the lack of epigraphic
remains, that the Classical alphabet did not come into use till after
900, and even then only to a limited extent and for the most pressing
economic needs. Whereas in the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Mexican
and the Chinese Cultures the formation of a script begins in the very
twilight of dawn, whereas the Germans made themselves a Runic alphabet
and presently developed that respect for writing as such which led to
the successive refinements of ornamental calligraphy, the Classical
primitives were entirely ignorant of the numerous alphabets that were
current in the South and the East. We possess numerous inscriptions of
Hittite Asia Minor and of Crete, but not one of Homeric Greece. (See
Vol. II, pp. 180 et seq.)
-----
V
In opposition to this mighty group of Egyptian life-symbols, we meet at
the threshold of the Classical Culture the custom, typifying the ease
with which it could forget every piece of its inward and outward past,
of _burning the dead_. To the Mycenæan age the elevation into a ritual
of this particular funerary method amongst all those practised in turn
by stone-age peoples, was essentially alien; indeed its Royal tombs
suggest that earth-burial was regarded as peculiarly honourable. But in
Homeric Greece, as in Vedic India, we find a change, so sudden that its
origins must necessarily be psychological, from burial to that burning
which (the Iliad gives us the full pathos of the symbolic act) was the
ceremonial completion of death and the denial of all historical
duration.
From this moment the plasticity of the individual spiritual evolution
was at an end. Classical drama admitted truly historical motives just as
little as it allowed themes of inward evolution, and it is well known
how decisively the Hellenic instinct set itself against portraiture in
the arts. Right into the imperial period Classical art handled only the
matter that was, so to say, natural to it, the myth.[7] Even the “ideal”
portraits of Hellenistic sculpture are mythical, of the same kind as the
typical biographies of Plutarch’s sort. No great Greek ever wrote down
any recollections that would serve to fix a phase of experience for his
inner eye. Not even Socrates has told, regarding his inward life,
anything important in our sense of the word. It is questionable indeed
whether for a Classical mind it was even possible to react to the motive
forces that are presupposed in the production of a Parzeval, a Hamlet,
or a Werther. In Plato we fail to observe any conscious evolution of
doctrine; his separate works are merely treatises written from very
different standpoints which he took up from time to time, and it gave
him no concern whether and how they hung together. On the contrary, a
work of deep self-examination, the _Vita Nuova_ of Dante, is found at
the very outset of the spiritual history of the West. How little
therefore of the Classical pure-present there really was in Goethe, the
man who forgot nothing, the man whose works, as he avowed himself, are
only fragments of a _single great confession_!
After the destruction of Athens by the Persians, all the older art-works
were thrown on the dustheap (whence we are now extracting them), and we
do not hear that anyone in Hellas ever troubled himself about the ruins
of Mycenæ or Phaistos for the purpose of ascertaining historical facts.
Men read Homer but never thought of excavating the hill of Troy as
Schliemann did; for what they wanted was myth, not history. The works of
Æschylus and those of the pre-Socratic philosophers were already
partially lost in the Hellenistic period. In the West, on the contrary,
the piety inherent in and peculiar to the Culture manifested itself,
five centuries before Schliemann, in Petrarch—the fine collector of
antiquities, coins and manuscripts, the very type of historically-
sensitive man, viewing the distant past and scanning the distant
prospect (was he not the first to attempt an Alpine peak?), living in
his time, yet essentially not of it. The soul of the collector is
intelligible only by having regard to his conception of Time. Even more
passionate perhaps, though of a different colouring, is the collecting-
bent of the Chinese. In China, whoever travels assiduously pursues “old
traces” (Ku-tsi) and the untranslatable “Tao,” the basic principle of
Chinese existence, derives all its meaning from a deep historical
feeling. In the Hellenistic period, objects were indeed collected and
displayed everywhere, but they were curiosities of mythological appeal
(as described by Pausanias) as to which questions of date or purpose
simply did not arise—and this too in the very presence of Egypt, which
even by the time of the great Thuthmosis had been transformed into one
vast museum of strict tradition.
Amongst the Western peoples, it was the Germans who discovered the
mechanical _clock_, the dread symbol of the flow of time, and the chimes
of countless clock towers that echo day and night over West Europe are
perhaps the most wonderful expression of which a historical world-
feeling is capable.[8] In the timeless countrysides and cities of the
Classical world, we find nothing of the sort. Till the epoch of
Pericles, the time of day was estimated merely by the length of shadow,
and it was only from that of Aristotle that the word ὥρα received the
(Babylonian) significance of “hour”; prior to that there was no exact
subdivision of the day. In Babylon and Egypt water-clocks and sun-dials
were discovered in the very early stages, yet in Athens it was left to
Plato to introduce a practically useful form of clepsydra, and this was
merely a minor adjunct of everyday utility which could not have
influenced the Classical life-feeling in the smallest degree.
It remains still to mention the corresponding difference, which is very
deep and has never yet been properly appreciated, between Classical and
modern mathematics. The former conceived of things _as they are_, as
_magnitudes_, timeless and purely present, and so it proceeded to
Euclidean geometry and mathematical statics, rounding off its
intellectual system with the theory of conic sections. We conceive
things as they _become_ and _behave_, as _function_, and this brought us
to dynamics, analytical geometry and thence to the Differential
Calculus.[9] The modern theory of functions is the imposing marshalling
of this whole mass of thought. It is a bizarre, but nevertheless
psychologically exact, fact that the physics of the Greeks—being statics
and not dynamics—neither knew the use nor felt the absence of the time-
element, whereas we on the other hand work in thousandths of a second.
The one and only evolution-idea that is timeless, ahistoric, is
Aristotle’s entelechy.
This, then, is our task. We men of the Western Culture are, with our
historical sense, an exception and not a rule. World-history is _our_
world picture and not all mankind’s. Indian and Classical man formed no
image of a world in progress, and perhaps when in due course the
civilization of the West is extinguished, there will never again be a
Culture and a human type in which “world-history” is so potent a form of
the waking consciousness.
-----
Footnote 7:
From Homer to the tragedies of Seneca, a full thousand years, the same
handful of myth-figures (Thyestes, Clytæmnestra, Heracles and the
like) appear time after time without alteration, whereas in the poetry
of the West, Faustian Man figures, first as Parzeval or Tristan, then
(modified always into harmony with the epoch) as Hamlet, Don Quixote,
Don Juan, and eventually Faust or Werther, and now as the hero of the
modern world-city romance, but is always presented in the atmosphere
and under the conditions of a particular century.
Footnote 8:
It was about 1000 A.D. and therefore contemporaneously with the
beginning of the Romanesque style and the Crusades—the first symptoms
of a new Soul—that Abbot Gerbert (Pope Sylvester II), the friend of
the Emperor Otto III, invented the mechanism of the chiming wheel-
clock. In Germany too, the first tower-clocks made their appearance,
about 1200, and the pocket watch somewhat later. Observe the
significant association of time measurement with the edifices of
religion.
Footnote 9:
Newton’s choice of the name “fluxions” for his calculus was meant to
imply a standpoint towards certain metaphysical notions as to the
nature of time. In Greek mathematics time figures not at all.
-----
VI
What, then, _is_ world-history? Certainly, an ordered presentation of
the past, an inner postulate, the expression of a capacity for feeling
form. But a feeling for form, however definite, is not the same as form
itself. No doubt we feel world-history, experience it, and believe that
it is to be read just as a map is read. But, even to-day, it is only
forms of it that we know and not _the_ form of it, which is the mirror-
image of _our own_ inner life.
Everyone of course, if asked, would say that he saw the inward form of
History quite clearly and definitely. The illusion subsists because no
one has seriously reflected on it, still less conceived doubts as to his
own knowledge, for no one has the slightest notion how wide a field for
doubt there is. In fact, the _lay-out_ of world-history is an unproved
and subjective notion that has been handed down from generation to
generation (not only of laymen but of professional historians) and
stands badly in need of a little of that scepticism which from Galileo
onward has regulated and deepened our inborn ideas of nature.
Thanks to the subdivision of history into “Ancient,” “Mediæval” and
“Modern”—an incredibly jejune and _meaningless_ scheme, which has,
however, entirely dominated our historical thinking—we have failed to
perceive the true position in the general history of higher mankind, of
the little part-world which has developed on West-European[10] soil from
the time of the German-Roman Empire, to judge of its relative importance
and above all to estimate its direction. The Cultures that are to come
will find it difficult to believe that the validity of such a scheme
with its simple rectilinear progression and its meaningless proportions,
becoming more and more preposterous with each century, incapable of
bringing into itself the new fields of history as they successively come
into the light of our knowledge, was, in spite of all, never whole-
heartedly attacked. The criticisms that it has long been the fashion of
historical researchers to level at the scheme mean nothing; they have
only obliterated the one existing plan without substituting for it any
other. To toy with phrases such as “the Greek Middle Ages” or “Germanic
antiquity” does not in the least help us to form a clear and inwardly-
convincing picture in which China and Mexico, the empire of Axum and
that of the Sassanids have their proper places. And the expedient of
shifting the initial point of “modern history” from the Crusades to the
Renaissance, or from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th
Century, only goes to show that the scheme _per se_ is regarded as
unshakably sound.
It is not only that the scheme circumscribes the area of history. What
is worse, it rigs the stage. The ground of West Europe is treated as a
steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no
better reason, it seems, than because we live on it—and great histories
of millennial duration and mighty far-away Cultures are made to revolve
around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of
sun and planets! We select a single bit of ground as the natural centre
of the historical system, and make it the central sun. From it all the
events of history receive their real light, from it their importance is
judged in _perspective_. But it is in our own West-European conceit
alone that this phantom “world-history,” which a breath of scepticism
would dissipate, is acted out.
We have to thank that conceit for the immense optical illusion (become
natural from long habit) whereby distant histories of thousands of
years, such as those of China and Egypt, are made to shrink to the
dimensions of mere episodes while in the neighbourhood of our own
position the decades since Luther, and particularly since Napoleon, loom
large as Brocken-spectres. We know quite well that the slowness with
which a high cloud or a railway train in the distance seems to move is
only apparent, yet we believe that the _tempo_ of all early Indian,
Babylonian or Egyptian history was really slower than that of our own
recent past. And we think of them as less substantial, more damped-down,
more diluted, because we have not learned to make the allowance for
(inward and outward) distances.
It is self-evident that for the Cultures of the West the existence of
Athens, Florence or Paris is more important than that of Lo-Yang or
Pataliputra. But is it permissible to found a scheme of world-history on
estimates of such a sort? If so, then the Chinese historian is quite
entitled to frame a world-history in which the Crusades, the
Renaissance, Cæsar and Frederick the Great are passed over in silence as
insignificant. How, _from the morphological point of view_, should our
18th Century be more important than any other of the sixty centuries
that preceded it? Is it not ridiculous to oppose a “modern” history of a
few centuries, and that history to all intents localized in West Europe,
to an “ancient” history which covers as many millennia—incidentally
dumping into that “ancient history” the whole mass of the pre-Hellenic
cultures, unprobed and unordered, as mere appendix-matter? This is no
exaggeration. Do we not, for the sake of keeping the hoary scheme,
dispose of Egypt and Babylon—each as an individual and self-contained
history quite equal in the balance to our so-called “world-history” from
Charlemagne to the World-War and well beyond it—as a _prelude_ to
classical history? Do we not relegate the vast complexes of Indian and
Chinese culture to foot-notes, with a gesture of embarrassment? As for
the great American cultures, do we not, on the ground that they do not
“fit in” (with what?), entirely ignore them?
The most appropriate designation for this current West-European scheme
of history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow orbits round
_us_ as the presumed centre of all world-happenings, is the _Ptolemaic
system_ of history. The system that is put forward in this work in place
of it I regard as the _Copernican discovery_ in the historical sphere,
in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the
Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt,
the Arabs, Mexico—separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of
mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the
Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual
greatness and soaring power.
-----
Footnote 10:
Here the historian is gravely influenced by preconceptions derived
from geography, which assumes a _Continent_ of Europe, and feels
himself compelled to draw an ideal frontier corresponding to the
physical frontier between “Europe” and “Asia.” The word “Europe” ought
to be struck out of history. There is historically no “European” type,
and it is sheer delusion to speak of the Hellenes as “European
Antiquity” (were Homer and Heraclitus and Pythagoras, then, Asiatics?)
and to enlarge upon their “mission” as such. These phrases express no
realities but merely a sketchy interpretation of the map. It is thanks
to this word “Europe” alone, and the complex of ideas resulting from
it, that our historical consciousness has come to link Russia with the
West in an utterly baseless unity—a mere abstraction derived from the
reading of books—that has led to immense real consequences. In the
shape of Peter the Great, this word has falsified the historical
tendencies of a primitive human mass for two centuries, whereas the
Russian _instinct_ has very truly and fundamentally divided “Europe”
from “Mother Russia” with the hostility that we can see embodied in
Tolstoi, Aksakov or Dostoyevski. “East” and “West” are notions that
contain real history, whereas “Europe” is an empty sound. Everything
great that the Classical world created, it created in pure denial of
the existence of any continental barrier between Rome and Cyprus,
Byzantium and Alexandria. Everything that we imply by the term
European Culture came into existence between the Vistula and the
Adriatic and the Guadalquivir and, even if we were to agree that
Greece, the Greece of Pericles, lay in Europe, the Greece of to-day
certainly does not.
-----
VII
The scheme “ancient-mediæval-modern” in its first form was a creation of
the Magian world-sense. It first appeared in the Persian and Jewish
religions after Cyrus,[11] received an apocalyptic sense in the teaching
of the Book of Daniel on the four world-eras, and was developed into a
world-history in the post-Christian religions of the East, notably the
Gnostic systems.[12]
This important conception, within the very narrow limits which fixed its
intellectual basis, was unimpeachable. Neither Indian nor even Egyptian
history was included in the scope of the proposition. For the Magian
thinker the expression “world-history” meant a unique and supremely
dramatic act, having as its theatre the lands between Hellas and Persia,
in which the strictly dualistic world-sense of the East expressed itself
not by means of polar conceptions like the “soul and spirit,” “good and
evil” of contemporary metaphysics, but by the figure of a catastrophe,
an epochal change of phase between world-creation and world-decay.[13]
No elements beyond those which we find stabilized in the Classical
literature, on the one hand, and the Bible (or other sacred book of the
particular system), on the other, came into the picture, which presents
(as “The Old” and “The New,” respectively) the easily-grasped contrasts
of Gentile and Jewish, Christian and Heathen, Classical and Oriental,
idol and dogma, nature and spirit _with a time connotation_—that is, as
a drama in which the one prevails over the other. The historical change
of period wears the characteristic dress of the religious “Redemption.”
This “world-history” in short was a conception narrow and provincial,
but within its limits logical and complete. Necessarily, therefore, it
was specific to this region and this humanity, and incapable of any
_natural_ extension.
But to these two there has been added a third epoch, the epoch that we
call “modern,” on Western soil, and it is this that for the first time
gives the picture of history the look of a progression. The oriental
picture was _at rest_. It presented a self-contained antithesis, with
equilibrium as its outcome and a unique divine act as its turning-point.
But, adopted and assumed by a wholly new type of mankind, it was quickly
transformed (without anyone’s noticing the oddity of the change) into a
conception of a _linear progress_: from Homer or Adam—the modern can
substitute for these names the Indo-German, Old Stone Man, or the
Pithecanthropus—through Jerusalem, Rome, Florence and Paris according to
the taste of the individual historian, thinker or artist, who has
unlimited freedom in the interpretation of the three-part scheme.
This third term, “modern times,” which in form asserts that it is the
last and conclusive term of the series, has in fact, ever since the
Crusades, been stretched and stretched again to the elastic limit at
which it will bear no more.[14] It was at least implied if not stated in
so many words, that here, beyond the ancient and the mediæval, something
definitive was beginning, a Third Kingdom in which, somewhere, there was
to be fulfilment and culmination, and which had an objective point.
As to what this objective point is, each thinker, from Schoolman to
present-day Socialist, backs his own peculiar discovery. Such a view
into the course of things may be both easy and flattering to the
patentee, but in fact he has simply taken the spirit of the West, as
reflected in his own brain, for the meaning of the world. So it is that
great thinkers, making a metaphysical virtue of intellectual necessity,
have not only accepted without serious investigation the scheme of
history agreed “by common consent” but have made of it the basis of
their philosophies and dragged in God as author of this or that “world-
plan.” Evidently the mystic number three applied to the world-ages has
something highly seductive for the metaphysician’s taste. History was
described by Herder as the education of the human race, by Kant as an
evolution of the idea of freedom, by Hegel as a self-expansion of the
world-spirit, by others in other terms, but as regards its ground-plan
everyone was quite satisfied when he had thought out some abstract
meaning for the conventional threefold order.
On the very threshold of the Western Culture we meet the great Joachim
of Floris (c. 1145-1202),[15] the first thinker of the Hegelian stamp
who shattered the dualistic world-form of Augustine, and with his
essentially Gothic intellect stated the new Christianity of his time in
the form of a third term to the religions of the Old and the New
Testaments, expressing them respectively as the Age of the Father, the
Age of the Son and the Age of the Holy Ghost. His teaching moved the
best of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, Dante, Thomas Aquinas, in
their inmost souls and awakened a world-outlook which slowly but surely
took entire possession of the historical sense of our Culture. Lessing—
who often designated his own period, with reference to the Classical as
the “after-world”[16] (Nachwelt)—took his idea of the “education of the
human race” with its three stages of child, youth and man, from the
teaching of the Fourteenth Century mystics. Ibsen treats it with
thoroughness in his _Emperor and Galilean_ (1873), in which he directly
presents the Gnostic world-conception through the figure of the wizard
Maximus, and advances not a step beyond it in his famous Stockholm
address of 1887. It would appear, then, that the Western consciousness
feels itself urged to predicate a sort of finality inherent in its own
appearance.
But the creation of the Abbot of Floris was a _mystical_ glance into the
secrets of the divine world-order. It was bound to lose all meaning as
soon as it was used in the way of reasoning and made a hypothesis of
_scientific_ thinking, as it has been—ever more and more frequently—
since the 17th Century.
It is a quite indefensible method of presenting world-history to begin
by giving rein to one’s own religious, political or social convictions
and endowing the sacrosanct three-phase system with tendencies that will
bring it exactly to one’s own standpoint. This is, in effect, making of
some formula—say, the “Age of Reason,” Humanity, the greatest happiness
of the greatest number, enlightenment, economic progress, national
freedom, the conquest of nature, or world-peace—a criterion whereby to
judge whole millennia of history. And so we judge that they were
ignorant of the “true path,” or that they failed to follow it, when the
fact is simply that their will and purposes were not the same as ours.
Goethe’s saying, “What is important in life is life and not a result of
life,” is the answer to any and every senseless attempt to solve the
riddle of historical form by means of a _programme_.
It is the same picture that we find when we turn to the historians of
each special art or science (and those of national economics and
philosophy as well). We find:
“Painting” from the Egyptians (or the cave-men) to the
Impressionists, or
“Music” from Homer to Bayreuth and beyond, or
“Social Organization” from Lake Dwellings to Socialism, as the case
may
be,
presented as a linear graph which steadily rises in conformity with the
values of the (selected) arguments. No one has seriously considered the
possibility that arts may have an allotted span of life and may be
attached as forms of self-expression to particular regions and
particular types of mankind, and that therefore the total history of an
art may be merely an additive compilation of separate developments, of
special arts, with no bond of union save the name and some details of
craft-technique.
We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form and
duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as
well, are determined by the _properties of its species_. No one, looking
at the oak, with its millennial life, dare say that it is at this
moment, now, about to start on its true and proper course. No one as he
sees a caterpillar grow day by day expects that it will go on doing so
for two or three years. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified
certainty, a _limit_, and this sense of the limit is identical with our
sense of the inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the
contrary, we take our ideas as to the course of the future from an
unbridled optimism that sets at naught all historical, i.e., _organic_,
experience, and everyone therefore sets himself to discover in the
accidental present terms that he can expand into some striking
progression-series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof
but on predilection. He works upon unlimited possibilities—never a
natural end—and from the momentary top-course of his bricks plans
artlessly the continuation of his structure.
“Mankind,” however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the
family of butterflies or orchids. “Mankind” is a zoological expression,
or an empty word.[17] But conjure away the phantom, break the magic
circle, and at once there emerges an astonishing wealth of _actual_
forms—the Living with all its immense fullness, depth and movement—
hitherto veiled by a catchword, a dryasdust scheme, and a set of
personal “ideals.” I see, in place of that empty figment of _one_ linear
history which can only be kept up by shutting one’s eyes to the
overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of _a number_ of mighty
Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a
mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole
life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in _its own image_;
each having _its own_ idea, _its own_ passions, _its own_ life, will and
feeling, _its own_ death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements,
that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples,
languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the
stone-pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves—but there is no ageing
“Mankind.” Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression
which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not _one_
sculpture, _one_ painting, _one_ mathematics, _one_ physics, but many,
each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in
duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its
peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline. These
cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb
aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants
and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead
Nature of Newton. I see world-history as a picture of endless formations
and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic
forms. The professional historian, on the contrary, sees it as a sort of
tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one epoch after another.
But the series “ancient-mediæval-modern history” has at last exhausted
its usefulness. Angular, narrow, shallow though it was as a scientific
foundation, still we possessed no other form that was not wholly
unphilosophical in which our data could be arranged, and world-history
(as hitherto understood) has to thank it for filtering our classifiable
solid residues. But the number of centuries that the scheme can by any
stretch be made to cover has long since been exceeded, and with the
rapid increase in the volume of our historical material—especially of
material that cannot possibly be brought under the scheme—the picture is
beginning to dissolve into a chaotic blur. Every historical student who
is not quite blind knows and feels this, and it is as a drowning man
that he clutches at the only scheme which he knows of. The word “Middle
Age,”[18] invented in 1667 by Professor Horn of Leyden, has to-day to
cover a formless and constantly extending mass which can only be
defined, negatively, as every thing not classifiable under any pretext
in one of the other two (tolerably well-ordered) groups. We have an
excellent example of this in our feeble treatment and hesitant judgment
of modern Persian, Arabian and Russian history. But, above all, it has
become impossible to conceal the fact that this so-called history of the
world is a limited history, first of the Eastern Mediterranean region
and then,—with an abrupt change of scene at the Migrations (an event
important only to us and therefore greatly exaggerated by us, an event
of purely Western and not even Arabian significance),—of West-Central
Europe. When Hegel declared so naïvely that he meant to ignore those
peoples which did not fit into his scheme of history, he was only making
an honest avowal of methodic premisses that every historian finds
necessary for his purpose and every historical work shows in its lay-
out. In fact it has now become an affair of scientific tact to determine
which of the historical developments shall be _seriously_ taken into
account and which not. Ranke is a good example.
-----
Footnote 11:
See Vol. II, pp. 31, 175.
Footnote 12:
Windelband, _Gesch. d. Phil._ (1903), pp. 275 ff.
Footnote 13:
In the New Testament the polar idea tends to appear in the dialectics
of the Apostle Paul, while the periodic is represented by the
Apocalypse.
Footnote 14:
As we can see from the expression, at once desperate and ridiculous,
“newest time” (_neueste Zeit_).
Footnote 15:
K. Burdach, _Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus_, 1918, pp. 48 et
seq. (English readers may be referred to the article _Joachim of
Floris_ by Professor Alphandery in the Encyclopædia Britannica, XI
ed., _Tr._)
Footnote 16:
The expression “antique”—meant of course in the dualistic sense—is
found as early as the _Isagoge_ of Porphyry (c. 300 A.D.).
Footnote 17:
“Mankind? It is an abstraction. There are, always have been, and
always will be, men and only men.” (Goethe to Luden.)
Footnote 18:
“Middle Ages” connotes the history of the space-time region in which
_Latin was the language of the Church and the learned_. The mighty
course of Eastern Christianity, which, long before Boniface, spread
over Turkestan into China and through Sabæa into Abyssinia, was
entirely excluded from this “world-history.”
-----
VIII
To-day we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and
historians who have not realized that we do so. Of what significance to
us, then, are conceptions and purviews that they put before us as
universally valid, when in truth their furthest horizon does not extend
beyond the intellectual atmosphere of Western Man?
Examine, from this point of view, our best books. When Plato speaks of
humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians, which is
entirely consonant with the ahistoric mode of the Classical life and
thought, and his premisses take him to conclusions that _for Greeks_
were complete and significant. When, however, Kant philosophizes, say on
ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his theses for men of all
times and places. He does not say this in so many words, for, for
himself and his readers, it is something that goes without saying. In
his æsthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias’s art, or
Rembrandt’s art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary
forms of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought,
though a glance at Aristotle and his essentially different conclusions
should have sufficed to show that Aristotle’s intellect, not less
penetrating than his own, was of different structure from it. The
categories of the Westerner are just as alien to Russian thought as
those of the Chinaman or the ancient Greek are to him. For us, the
effective and complete comprehension of Classical root-words is just as
impossible as that of Russian[19] and Indian, and for the modern Chinese
or Arab, with their utterly different intellectual constitutions,
“philosophy from Bacon to Kant” has only a curiosity-value.
It is _this_ that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in
whom we might have expected to find it—insight into the _historically
relative_ character of his data, which are expressions of one _specific
existence and one only_; knowledge of the necessary limits of their
validity; the conviction that his “unshakable” truths and “eternal”
views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty
of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have
with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That and nothing else
will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, and only
through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the
symbolism of history. Here there is nothing constant, nothing universal.
We must cease to speak of the forms of “Thought,” the principles of
“Tragedy,” the mission of “The State.” Universal validity involves
always the fallacy of arguing from particular to particular.
But something much more disquieting than a logical fallacy begins to
appear when the centre of gravity of philosophy shifts from the
abstract-systematic to the practical-ethical and our Western thinkers
from Schopenhauer onward turn from the problem of cognition to the
problem of life (the will to life, to power, to action). Here it is not
the ideal abstract “man” of Kant that is subjected to examination, but
actual man as he has inhabited the earth during historical time,
grouped, whether primitive or advanced, by peoples; and it is more than
ever futile to define the structure of his highest ideas in terms of the
“ancient-mediæval-modern” scheme with its local limitations. But it is
done, nevertheless.
Consider the historical horizon of Nietzsche. His conceptions of
decadence, militarism, the transvaluation of all values, the will to
power, lie deep in the essence of Western civilization and are for the
analysis of that civilization of decisive importance. But what, do we
find, was the foundation on which he built up his creation? Romans and
Greeks, Renaissance and European present, with a fleeting and
uncomprehending side-glance at Indian philosophy—in short “ancient,
mediæval and modern” history. Strictly speaking, he never once moved
outside the scheme, not did any other thinker of his time.
What correlation, then, is there or can there be of his idea of the
“Dionysian” with the inner life of a highly-civilized Chinese or an up-
to-date American? What is the significance of his type of the
“Superman”—for the world of Islam? Can image-forming antitheses of
Nature and Intellect, Heathen and Christian, Classical and Modern, have
any meaning for the soul of the Indian or the Russian? What can Tolstoi—
who from the depths of his humanity rejected the whole Western world-
idea as something alien and distant—_do_ with the “Middle Ages,” with
Dante, with Luther? What can a Japanese do with Parzeval and
“Zarathustra,” or an Indian with Sophocles? And is the thought-range of
Schopenhauer, Comte, Feuerbach, Hebbel or Strindberg any wider? Is not
their whole psychology, for all its intention of world-wide validity,
one of purely West-European significance?
How comic seem Ibsen’s woman-problems—which also challenge the attention
of all “humanity”—when, for his famous Nora, the lady of the North-west
European city with the horizon that is implied by a house-rent of £100
to £300 a year and a Protestant upbringing, we substitute Cæsar’s wife,
Madame de Sévigné, a Japanese or a Turkish peasant woman! But, for that
matter, Ibsen’s own circle of vision is that of the middle class in a
great city of yesterday and to-day. His conflicts, which start from
spiritual premisses that did not exist till about 1850 and can scarcely
last beyond 1950, are neither those of the great world nor those of the
lower masses, still less those of the cities inhabited by non-European
populations.
All these are local and temporary values—most of them indeed limited to
the momentary “intelligentsia” of cities of West-European type. World-
historical or “eternal” values they emphatically are not. Whatever the
substantial importance of Ibsen’s and Nietzsche’s generation may be, it
infringes the very meaning of the word “world-history”—which denotes the
totality and not a selected part—to subordinate, to undervalue, or to
ignore the factors which lie outside “modern” interests. Yet in fact
they are so undervalued or ignored to an amazing extent. What the West
has said and thought, hitherto, on the problems of space, time, motion,
number, will, marriage, property, tragedy, science, has remained narrow
and dubious, because men were always looking for _the_ solution of _the_
question. It was never seen that many questioners implies many answers,
that any philosophical question is really a veiled desire to get an
explicit affirmation of what is implicit in the question itself, that
the great questions of any period are fluid beyond all conception, and
that therefore it is only by obtaining a _group of historically limited
solutions_ and measuring it by _utterly impersonal_ criteria that the
final secrets can be reached. The real student of mankind treats no
standpoint as absolutely right or absolutely wrong. In the face of such
grave problems as that of Time or that of Marriage, it is insufficient
to appeal to personal experience, or an inner voice, or reason, or the
opinion of ancestors or contemporaries. These may say what is true for
the questioner himself and for his time, but that is not all. In other
Cultures the phenomenon talks a different language, for other men there
are different truths. The _thinker_ must admit the validity of all, or
of none.
How greatly, then, Western world-criticism can be widened and deepened!
How immensely far beyond the innocent relativism of Nietzsche and his
generation one must look—how fine one’s sense for form and one’s
psychological insight must become—how completely one must free oneself
from limitations of self, of practical interests, of horizon—before one
dare assert the pretension to understand world-history, the _world-as-
history_.
-----
Footnote 19:
See Vol. II, p. 362, foot-note. To the true Russian the basic
proposition of Darwinism is as devoid of meaning as that of Copernicus
is to a true Arab.
-----
IX
In opposition to all these arbitrary and narrow schemes, derived from
tradition or personal choice, into which history is forced, I put
forward the natural, the “Copernican,” form of the historical process
which lies deep in the essence of that process and reveals itself only
to an eye perfectly free from prepossessions.
Such an eye was Goethe’s. That which Goethe called _Living Nature_ is
exactly that which we are calling here world-history, _world-as-
history_. Goethe, who as artist portrayed the life and development,
always the life and development, of his figures, the thing-becoming and
not the thing-become (“Wilhelm Meister” and “Wahrheit und Dichtung”)
hated Mathematics. For him, the world-as-mechanism stood opposed to the
world-as-organism, dead nature to living nature, law to form. As
naturalist, every line he wrote was meant to display the image of a
thing-becoming, the “impressed form” living and developing. Sympathy,
observation, comparison, immediate and inward certainty, intellectual
_flair_—these were the means whereby he was enabled to approach the
secrets of the phenomenal world in motion. _Now these are the means of
historical research_—precisely these and no others. It was this
_godlike_ insight that prompted him to say at the bivouac fire on the
evening of the Battle of Valmy: “Here and now begins a new epoch of
world history, and you, gentlemen, can say that you ‘were there.’” No
general, no diplomat, let alone the philosophers, ever so directly felt
history “becoming.” It is the deepest judgment that any man ever uttered
about a great historical act in the moment of its accomplishment.
And just as he followed out the development of the plant-form from the
leaf, the birth of the vertebrate type, the process of the geological
strata—_the Destiny in nature and not the Causality_—so here we shall
develop the form-language of human history, its periodic structure, its
_organic logic_ out of the profusion of all the challenging details.
In other aspects, mankind is habitually, and rightly, reckoned as one of
the organisms of the earth’s surface. Its physical structure, its
natural functions, the whole phenomenal conception of it, all belong to
a more comprehensive unity. Only in _this_ aspect is it treated
otherwise, despite that deeply-felt relationship of plant destiny and
human destiny which is an eternal theme of all lyrical poetry, and
despite that similarity of human history to that of any other of the
higher life-groups which is the refrain of endless beast-legends, sagas
and fables.
But only bring analogy to bear on this aspect as on the rest, letting
the world of human Cultures intimately and unreservedly work upon the
imagination instead of forcing it into a ready-made scheme. Let the
words youth, growth, maturity, decay—hitherto, and to-day more than
ever, used to express subjective valuations and entirely personal
preferences in sociology, ethics and æsthetics—be taken at last as
objective descriptions of organic states. Set forth the Classical
Culture as a self-contained phenomenon embodying and expressing the
Classical soul, put it beside the Egyptian, the Indian, the Babylonian,
the Chinese and the Western, and determine for each of these higher
individuals what is typical in their surgings and what is necessary in
the riot of incident. And then at last will unfold itself the picture of
world-history that is natural to us, men of the West, and to us alone.
X
Our narrower task, then, is primarily to determine, from such a world-
survey, the state of West Europe and America as at the epoch of 1800-
2000—to establish the chronological position of this period in the
ensemble of Western culture-history, its significance as a chapter that
is in one or other guise necessarily found in the biography of every
Culture, and the organic and symbolic meaning of its political,
artistic, intellectual and social expression-forms.
Considered in the spirit of analogy, this period appears as
chronologically parallel—“contemporary” in our special sense—with the
phase of Hellenism, and its present culmination, marked by the World-
War, corresponds with the transition from the Hellenistic to the Roman
age. _Rome_, with its rigorous realism—uninspired, barbaric,
disciplined, practical, Protestant, _Prussian_—will always give us,
working as we must by analogies, the key to understanding our own
future. The _break of destiny that we express by hyphening the words
“Greeks = Romans” is occurring for us also, separating that which is
already fulfilled from that which is to come_. Long ago we might and
should have seen in the “Classical” world a development which is the
complete counterpart of our own Western development, differing indeed
from it in every detail of the surface but entirely similar as regards
the inward power driving the great organism towards its end. We might
have found the constant _alter ego_ of our own actuality in establishing
the correspondence, item by item, from the “Trojan War” and the
Crusades, Homer and the Nibelungenlied, through Doric and Gothic,
Dionysian movement and Renaissance, Polycletus and John Sebastian Bach,
Athens and Paris, Aristotle and Kant, Alexander and Napoleon, to the
world-city and the imperialism common to both Cultures.
Unfortunately, this requires an interpretation of the picture of
Classical history very different from the incredibly one-sided,
superficial, prejudiced, limited picture that we have in fact given to
it. We have, in truth been only too conscious of our near relation to
the Classical Age, and only too prone in consequence to unconsidered
assertion of it. Superficial similarity is a great snare, and our entire
Classical study fell a victim to it as soon as it passed from the
(admittedly masterly) ordering and critique of the discoveries to the
interpretation of their spiritual meaning. That close inward relation in
which we conceive ourselves to stand towards the Classical, and which
leads us to think that we are its pupils and successors (whereas in
reality we are simply its adorers), is a venerable prejudice which ought
at last to be put aside. The whole religious-philosophical, art-
historical and social-critical work of the 19th Century has been
necessary to enable us, not to _understand_ Æschylus, Plato, Apollo and
Dionysus, the Athenian state and Cæsarism (which we are far indeed from
doing), but to begin to realize, once and for all, how immeasurably
alien and distant these things are from our inner selves—more alien,
maybe, than Mexican gods and Indian architecture.
Our views of the Græco-Roman Culture have always swung between two
extremes, and our standpoints have invariably been defined for us by the
“ancient-mediæval-modern” scheme. One group, public men before all else—
economists, politicians, jurists—opine that “present-day mankind” is
making excellent progress, assess it and its performances at the very
highest value and measure everything earlier by its standards. There is
no modern party that has not weighed up Cleon, Marius, Themistocles,
Catiline, the Gracchi, according to its own principles. On the other
hand we have the group of artists, poets, philologists and philosophers.
These feel themselves to be out of their element in the aforesaid
present, and in consequence choose for themselves in this or that past
epoch a standpoint that is in its way just as absolute and dogmatic from
which to condemn “to-day.” The one group looks upon Greece as a “not
yet,” the other upon modernity as a “nevermore.” Both labour under the
obsession of a scheme of history which treats the two epochs as part of
the same straight line.
In this opposition it is the two souls of Faust that express themselves.
The danger of the one group lies in a clever superficiality. In its
hands there remains finally, of all Classical Culture, of all
reflections of the Classical soul, nothing but a bundle of social,
economic, political and physiological facts, and the rest is treated as
“secondary results,” “reflexes,” “attendant phenomena.” In the books of
this group we find not a hint of the mythical force of Æschylus’s
choruses, of the immense mother-earth struggle of the early sculpture,
the Doric column, of the richness of the Apollo-cult, of the real depth
of the Roman Emperor-worship. The other group, composed above all of
belated romanticists—represented in recent times by the three Basel
professors Bachofen, Burckhardt and Nietzsche—succumb to the usual
dangers of ideology. They lose themselves in the clouds of an antiquity
that is really no more than the image of their own sensibility in a
philological mirror. They rest their case upon the only evidence which
they consider worthy to support it, viz., the relics of the old
literature, yet there never was a Culture so incompletely represented
for us by its great writers.[20] The first group, on the other hand,
supports itself principally upon the humdrum material of law-sources,
inscriptions and coins (which Burckhardt and Nietzsche, very much to
their own loss, despised) and subordinates thereto, often with little or
no sense of truth and fact, the surviving literature. Consequently, even
in point of critical foundations, neither group takes the other
seriously. I have never heard that Nietzsche and Mommsen had the
smallest respect for each other.
But neither group has attained to that higher method of treatment which
reduces this opposition of criteria to ashes, although it was within
their power to do so. In their self-limitation they paid the penalty for
taking over the causality-principle from natural science. Unconsciously
they arrived at a pragmatism that sketchily copied the world-picture
drawn by physics and, instead of revealing, obscured and confused the
quite other-natured forms of history. They had no better expedient for
subjecting the mass of historical material to critical and normative
examination than to consider one complex of phenomena as being primary
and causative and the rest as being secondary, as being consequences or
effects. And it was not only the matter-of-fact school that resorted to
this method. The romanticists did likewise, for History had not revealed
even to their dreaming gaze its specific logic; and yet they _felt_ that
there was an immanent necessity in it to determine this somehow, rather
than turn their backs upon History in despair like Schopenhauer.
-----
Footnote 20:
This is conclusively proved by the selection that determined survival,
which was governed not by mere chance but very definitely by a
deliberate tendency. The Atticism of the Augustan Age, tired, sterile,
pedantic, back-looking, conceived the hall-mark “classical” and
allowed only a very small group of Greek works up to Plato to bear it.
The rest, including the whole wealth of Hellenistic literature, was
rejected and has been almost entirely lost. It is this pedagogue’s
anthology that has survived (almost in its entirety) and so fixed the
imaginary picture of “Classical Antiquity” alike for the Renaissance
Florentine and for Winckelmann, Hölderlin, and even Nietzsche.
[In this English translation, it should be mentioned, the word
“Classical” has almost universally been employed to translate the
German _antike_, as, in the translator’s judgment, no literal
equivalent of the German word would convey the specific meaning
attached to _antike_ throughout the work, “antique,” “ancient” and the
like words having for us a much more general connotation.—_Tr._]
-----
XI
Briefly, then, there are two ways of regarding the Classical—the
materialistic and the ideological. By the former, it is asserted that
the sinking of one scale-pan has its cause in the rising of the other,
and it is shown that this occurs invariably (truly a striking theorem);
and in this juxtaposing of cause and effect we naturally find the social
and sexual, at all events the purely political, facts classed as causes
and the religious, intellectual and (so far as the materialist tolerates
them as facts at all) the artistic as effects. On the other hand, the
ideologues show that the rising of one scale-pan follows from the
sinking of the other, which they are able to prove of course with equal
exactitude; this done, they lose themselves in cults, mysteries,
customs, in the secrets of the strophe and the line, throwing scarcely a
side-glance at the commonplace daily life—for them an unpleasant
consequence of earthly imperfection. Each side, with its gaze fixed on
causality, demonstrates that the other side either cannot or will not
understand the true linkages of things and each ends by calling the
other blind, superficial, stupid, absurd or frivolous, oddities or
Philistines. It shocks the ideologue if anyone deals with Hellenic
finance-problems and instead of, for example, telling us the deep
meanings of the Delphic oracle, describes the far-reaching money
operations which the Oracle priests undertook with their accumulated
treasures. The politician, on the other hand, has a superior smile for
those who waste their enthusiasm on ritual formulæ and the dress of
Attic youths, instead of writing a book adorned with up-to-date
catchwords about antique class-struggles.
The one type is foreshadowed from the very outset in Petrarch; it
created Florence and Weimar and the Western classicism. The other type
appears in the middle of the 18th Century, along with the rise of
civilized,[21] economic-megalopolitan[22] politics, and England is
therefore its birthplace (Grote). At bottom, the opposition is between
the conceptions of culture-man and those of civilization-man, and it is
too deep, too essentially human, to allow the weaknesses of _both
standpoints alike_ to be seen or overcome.
The materialist himself is on this point an idealist. He too, without
wishing or desiring it, has made his views dependent upon his wishes. In
fact all our finest minds without exception have bowed down reverently
before the picture of the Classical, abdicating in this one instance
alone their function of unrestricted criticism. The freedom and power of
Classical research are always hindered, and its data obscured, by a
certain almost religious awe. In all history there is no analogous case
of one Culture making a passionate cult of the memory of another. Our
devotion is evidenced yet again in the fact that since the Renaissance,
a thousand years of history have been undervalued so that an ideal
“Middle” Age may serve as a link between ourselves and antiquity. We
Westerners have sacrificed on the Classical altar the purity and
independence of our art, for we have not dared to create without a side-
glance at the “sublime exemplar.” We have projected our own deepest
spiritual needs and feelings on to the Classical picture. Some day a
gifted psychologist will deal with this most fateful illusion and tell
us the story of the “Classical” that we have so consistently reverenced
since the days of Gothic. Few theses would be more helpful for the
understanding of the Western soul from Otto III, the first victim of the
South, to Nietzsche, the last.
Goethe on his Italian tour speaks with enthusiasm of the buildings of
Palladio, whose frigid and academic work we to-day regard very
sceptically: but when he goes on to Pompeii he does not conceal his
dissatisfaction in experiencing “a strange, half-unpleasant impression,”
and what he has to say on the temples of Pæstum and Segesta—masterpieces
of Hellenic art—is embarrassed and trivial. Palpably, when Classical
antiquity in its full force met him face to face, he did not recognize
it. It is the same with all others. Much that was Classical they chose
not to see, and so they saved their inward image of the Classical—which
was in reality the background of a life-ideal that they themselves had
created and nourished with their heart’s blood, a vessel filled with
their own world-feeling, a phantom, an idol. The audacious descriptions
of Aristophanes, Juvenal or Petronius of life in the Classical cities—
the southern dirt and riff-raff, terrors and brutalities, pleasure-boys
and Phrynes, phallus worship and imperial orgies—excite the enthusiasm
of the student and the dilettante, who find the same realities in the
world-cities of to-day too lamentable and repulsive to face. “In the
cities life is bad; there are too many of the lustful.”—_also sprach
Zarathustra_. They commend the state-sense of the Romans, but despise
the man of to-day who permits himself any contact with public affairs.
There is a type of scholar whose clarity of vision comes under some
irresistible spell when it turns from a frock-coat to a toga, from a
British football-ground to a Byzantine circus, from a transcontinental
railway to a Roman road in the Alps, from a thirty-knot destroyer to a
trireme, from Prussian bayonets to Roman spears—nowadays, even, from a
modern engineer’s Suez Canal to that of a Pharaoh. He would admit a
steam-engine as a symbol of human passion and an expression of
intellectual force if it were Hero of Alexandria who invented it, not
otherwise. To such it seems blasphemous to talk of Roman central-heating
or book-keeping in preference to the worship of the Great Mother of the
Gods.
But the other school sees _nothing but_ these things. It thinks it
exhausts the essence of this Culture, alien as it is to ours, by
treating the Greeks as simply equivalent, and it obtains its conclusions
by means of simple factual substitutions, ignoring altogether the
Classical _soul_. That there is not the slightest inward correlation
between the things meant by “Republic,” “freedom,” “property” and the
like then and there and the things meant by such words here and now, it
has no notion whatever. It makes fun of the historians of the age of
Goethe, who honestly expressed their own political ideals in classical
history forms and revealed their own personal enthusiasms in
vindications or condemnations of lay-figures named Lycurgus, Brutus,
Cato, Cicero, Augustus—but it cannot itself write a chapter without
reflecting the party opinion of its morning paper.
It is, however, much the same whether the past is treated in the spirit
of Don Quixote or in that of Sancho Panza. Neither way leads to the end.
In sum, each school permits itself to bring into high relief that part
of the Classical which best expresses its own views—Nietzsche the pre-
Socratic Athens, the economists the Hellenistic period, the politicians
Republican Rome, poets the Imperial Age.
Not that religious and artistic phenomena are more primitive than social
and economic, any more than the reverse. For the man who in these things
has won his unconditional freedom of outlook, beyond _all_ personal
interests whatsoever, there is no dependence, no priority, no relation
of cause and effect, no differentiation of value or importance. That
which assigns relative ranks amongst the individual detail-facts is
simply the greater or less purity and force of their form-language,
their symbolism, beyond all questions of good and evil, high and low,
useful and ideal.
-----
Footnote 21:
As will be seen later, the words _zivilisierte_ and _Zivilisation_
possess in this work a special meaning.—_Tr._
Footnote 22:
English not possessing the adjective-forming freedom of German, we are
compelled to coin a word for the rendering of _grossstädtisch_, an
adjective not only frequent but of emphatic significance in the
author’s argument.—_Tr._
-----
XII
Looked at in this way, the “Decline of the West” comprises nothing less
than the problem of _Civilization_. We have before us one of the
fundamental questions of all higher history. What is Civilization,
understood as the organic-logical sequel, fulfilment and finale of a
culture?
For every Culture has _its own_ Civilization. In this work, for the
first time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more
or less ethical, distinction, are used in a _periodic_ sense, to express
a strict and necessary _organic succession_. The Civilization is the
inevitable _destiny_ of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the
viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical
morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the most
external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity
is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the
thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion,
intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following
mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are
an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again.
So, for the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as the
_successors_ of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest
secrets of the late-Classical period. What, but this, can be the meaning
of the fact—which can only be disputed by vain phrases—that the Romans
were barbarians who did not _precede_ but _closed_ a great development?
Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of
brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand between
the Hellenic Culture and nothingness. An imagination directed purely to
practical objects—they had religious laws governing godward relations as
they had other laws governing human relations, but there was no
specifically Roman saga of gods—was something which is not found at all
in Athens. In a word, Greek _soul_—Roman _intellect_; and this
antithesis is the differentia between Culture and Civilization. Nor is
it only to the Classical that it applies. Again and again there appears
this type of strong-minded, completely non-metaphysical man, and in the
hands of this type lies the intellectual and material destiny of each
and every “late” period. Such are the men who carried through the
Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the Chinese, the Roman
Civilizations, and in such periods do Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism
ripen into definitive world-conceptions which enable a moribund humanity
to be attacked and re-formed in its intimate structure. _Pure_
Civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive
_taking-down_ of forms that have become inorganic or dead.
The transition from Culture to Civilization was accomplished for the
Classical world in the 4th, for the Western in the 19th Century. From
these periods onward the great intellectual decisions take place, not as
in the days of the Orpheus-movement or the Reformation in the “whole
world” where not a hamlet is too small to be unimportant, but in three
or four world-cities that have absorbed into themselves the whole
content of History, while the old wide landscape of the Culture, become
merely provincial, serves only to feed the cities with what remains of
its higher mankind.
_World-city and province_[23]—the two basic ideas of every civilization—
bring up a wholly new form-problem of History, the very problem that we
are living through to-day with hardly the remotest conception of its
immensity. In place of a world, there is a _city, a point_, in which the
whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In
place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a
new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical
city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless,
clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially
that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. This is a very
great stride towards the inorganic, towards the end—what does it
signify? France and England have already taken the step and Germany is
beginning to do so. After Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome.
After Madrid, Paris, London come Berlin and New York. It is the destiny
of whole regions that lie outside the radiation-circle of one of these
cities—of old Crete and Macedon and to-day the Scandinavian North[24]—to
become “provinces.”
Of old, the field on which the opposed conception of an epoch came to
battle was some world-problem of a metaphysical, religious or dogmatic
kind, and the battle was between the soil-genius of the countryman
(noble, priest) and the “worldly” patrician genius of the famous old
small towns of Doric or Gothic springtime. Of such a character were the
conflicts over the Dionysus religion—as in the tyranny of Kleisthenes of
Sikyon[25]—and those of the Reformation in the German free cities and
the Huguenot wars. But just as these cities overcame the country-side
(already it is a purely civic world-outlook that appears in even
Parmenides and Descartes), so in turn the world-city overcame them. It
is the common intellectual process of later periods such as the Ionic
and the Baroque, and to-day—as in the Hellenistic age which at its
outset saw the foundation of artificial, land-alien Alexandria—Culture-
cities like Florence, Nürnberg, Salamanca, Bruges and Prag, have become
provincial towns and fight inwardly a lost battle against the world-
cities. The world-city means cosmopolitanism in place of “home,”[26]
cold matter-of-fact in place of reverence for tradition and age,
scientific irreligion as a fossil representative of the older religion
of the heart, “society” in place of the state, natural instead of hard-
earned rights. It was in the conception of _money_ as an inorganic and
abstract magnitude, entirely disconnected from the notion of the
fruitful earth and the primitive values, that the Romans had the
advantage of the Greeks. Thenceforward any high ideal of life becomes
largely a question of money. Unlike the Greek stoicism of Chrysippus,
the Roman stoicism of Cato and Seneca presupposes a private income;[27]
and, unlike that of the 18th Century, the social-ethical sentiment of
the 20th, if it is to be realized at a higher level than that of
professional (and lucrative) agitation, is a matter for millionaires. To
the world-city belongs not a folk but a mass. Its uncomprehending
hostility to all the traditions representative of the Culture (nobility,
church, privileges, dynasties, convention in art and limits of knowledge
in science), the keen and cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom of
the peasant, the new-fashioned naturalism that in relation to all
matters of sex and society goes back far beyond Rousseau and Socrates to
quite primitive instincts and conditions, the reappearance of the _panem
et circenses_ in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds—all
these things betoken the definite closing-down of the Culture and the
opening of a quite new phase of human existence—anti-provincial, late,
futureless, but quite inevitable.
This is what has to be _viewed_, and viewed not with the eyes of the
partisan, the ideologue, the up-to-date novelist, not from this or that
“standpoint,” but in a high, time-free perspective embracing whole
millenniums of historical world-forms, if we are really to comprehend
the great crisis of the present.
To me it is a symbol of the first importance that in the Rome of
Crassus—triumvir and all-powerful building-site speculator—the Roman
people with its proud inscriptions, the people before whom Gauls,
Greeks, Parthians, Syrians afar trembled, lived in appalling misery in
the many-storied lodging-houses of dark suburbs,[28] accepting with
indifference or even with a sort of sporting interest the consequences
of the military expansion: that many famous old-noble families,
descendants of the men who defeated the Celts and the Samnites, lost
their ancestral homes through standing apart from the wild rush of
speculation and were reduced to renting wretched apartments; that, while
along the Appian Way there arose the splendid and still wonderful tombs
of the financial magnates, the corpses of the people were thrown along
with animal carcases and town refuse into a monstrous common grave—till
in Augustus’s time it was banked over for the avoidance of pestilence
and so became the site of Mæcenas’s renowned park; that in depopulated
Athens, which lived on visitors and on the bounty of rich foreigners,
the mob of parvenu tourists from Rome gaped at the works of the
Periclean age with as little understanding as the American globe-trotter
in the Sistine Chapel at those of Michelangelo, every removable art-
piece having ere this been taken away or bought at fancy prices to be
replaced by the Roman buildings which grew up, colossal and arrogant, by
the side of the low and modest structures of the old time. In such
things—which it is the historian’s business not to praise or to blame
but to consider morphologically—there lies, plain and immediate enough
for one who has learnt to see, an _idea_.
For it will become manifest that, from this moment on, all great
conflicts of world-outlook, of politics, of art, of science, of feeling
will be under the influence of this one opposition. What is the hall-
mark of a politic of Civilization to-day, in contrast to a politic of
Culture yesterday? It is, for the Classical rhetoric, and for the
Western journalism, both serving that abstract which represents the
power of Civilization—_money_.[29] It is the money-spirit which
penetrates unremarked the historical forms of the people’s existence,
often without destroying or even in the least disturbing these forms—the
form of the Roman state, for instance, underwent very much less
alteration between the elder Scipio and Augustus than is usually
imagined. Though forms subsist, the great political parties nevertheless
cease to be more than reputed centres of decision. The decisions in fact
lie elsewhere. A small number of superior heads, whose names are very
likely not the best-known, settle everything, while below them are the
great mass of second-rate politicians—rhetors, tribunes, deputies,
journalists—selected through a provincially-conceived franchise to keep
alive the illusion of popular self-determination. And art? Philosophy?
The ideals of a Platonic or those of a Kantian age had for the higher
mankind concerned a general validity. But those of a Hellenistic age, or
those of our own, are valid exclusively for the brain of the
Megalopolitan. For the villager’s or, generally, the nature-man’s world-
feeling our Socialism—like its near relation Darwinism (how utterly un-
Goethian are the formulæ of “struggle for existence” and “natural
selection”!), like its other relative the woman-and-marriage problem of
Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw, like the impressionistic tendencies of
anarchic sensuousness and the whole bundle of modern longings,
temptations and pains expressed in Baudelaire’s verse and Wagner’s
music—are simply non-existent. The smaller the town, the more unmeaning
it becomes to busy oneself with painting or with music of these kinds.
To the Culture belong gymnastics, the tournament, the agon, and to the
Civilization belongs Sport. This is the true distinction between the
Hellenic palæstra and the Roman circus.[30] Art itself becomes a sport
(hence the phrase “art for art’s sake”) to be played before a highly-
intelligent audience of connoisseurs and buyers, whether the feat
consist in mastering absurd instrumental tone-masses and taking harmonic
fences, or in some _tour de force_ of colouring. Then a new fact-
philosophy appears, which can only spare a smile for metaphysical
speculation, and a new literature that is a necessity of life for the
megalopolitan palate and nerves and both unintelligible and ugly to the
provincials. Neither Alexandrine poetry nor _plein-air_ painting is
anything to the “people.” And, then as now, the phase of transition is
marked by a series of scandals only to be found at such moments. The
anger evoked in the Athenian populace by Euripides and by the
“Revolutionary” painting of Apollodorus, for example, is repeated in the
opposition to Wagner, Manet, Ibsen, and Nietzsche.
It is possible to understand the Greeks without mentioning their
economic relations; the Romans, on the other hand, can _only_ be
understood through these. Chæronea and Leipzig were the last battles
fought about an idea. In the First Punic War and in 1870 economic
motives are no longer to be overlooked. Not till the Romans came with
their practical energy was slave-holding given that big collective
character which many students regard as the die-stamp of Classical
economics, legislation and way of life, and which in any event vastly
lowered both the value and the inner worthiness of such free labour as
continued to exist side by side with gang-labour. And it was not the
Latin, but the Germanic peoples of the West and America who developed
out of the steam-engine a big industry that transformed the face of the
land. The relation of these phenomena to Stoicism and to Socialism is
unmistakable. Not till the Roman Cæsarism—foreshadowed by C. Flaminius,
shaped first by Marius, handled by strong-minded, large-scale men of
fact—did the Classical World learn the _pre-eminence of money_. Without
this fact neither Cæsar, nor “Rome” generally, is understandable. In
every Greek is a Don Quixote, in every Roman a Sancho Panza factor, and
these factors are dominants.
-----
Footnote 23:
See Vol. II, pp. 117 et seq.
Footnote 24:
One cannot fail to notice this in the development of Strindberg and
especially in that of Ibsen, who was never quite at home in the
civilized atmosphere of his problems. The motives of “Brand” and
“Rosmersholm” are a wonderful mixture of innate provincialism and a
theoretically-acquired megalopolitan outlook. Nora is the very type of
the provincial derailed by reading.
Footnote 25:
Who forbade the cult of the town’s hero Adrastos and the reading of
the Homeric poems, with the object of cutting the Doric nobility from
its spiritual roots (c. 560 B.C.).
Footnote 26:
A profound word which obtains its significance as soon as the
barbarian becomes a culture-man and loses it again as soon as the
civilization-man takes up the motto “_Ubi bene, ibi patria_.”
Footnote 27:
Hence it was that the first to succumb to Christianity were the Romans
who could _not afford_ to be Stoics. See Vol. II, pp. 607 et seq.
Footnote 28:
In Rome and Byzantium, lodging-houses of six to ten stories (with
street-widths of ten feet at most!) were built without any sort of
official supervision, and frequently collapsed with all their inmates.
A great part of the _cives Romani_, for whom _panem et circenses_
constituted all existence, possessed no more than a high-priced
sleeping-berth in one of the swarming ant-hills called _insulæ_.
(Pohlmann, _Aus Altertum und Gegenwart_, 1911, pp. 199 ff.)
Footnote 29:
See Vol. II, 577.
Footnote 30:
German gymnastics, from the intensely provincial and natural forms
imparted to it by Jahn, has since 1813 been carried by a very rapid
development into the sport category. The difference between a Berlin
athletic ground on a big day and a Roman circus was even by 1914 very
slight.
-----
XIII
Considered in itself, the Roman world-dominion was a negative
phenomenon, being the result not of a surplus of energy on the one side—
that the Romans had never had since Zama—but of a deficiency of
resistance on the other. That the Romans did _not_ conquer the world is
certain;[31] they merely took possession of a booty that lay open to
everyone. The _Imperium Romanum_ came into existence not as the result
of such an extremity of military and financial effort as had
characterized the Punic Wars, but because the old East forwent all
external self-determinations. We must not be deluded by the appearance
of brilliant military successes. With a few ill-trained, ill-led, and
sullen legions, Lucullus and Pompey conquered whole realms—a phenomenon
that in the period of the battle of Ipsus would have been unthinkable.
The Mithradatic danger, serious enough for a system of material force
which had never been put to any real test, would have been nothing to
the conquerors of Hannibal. After Zama, the Romans never again either
waged or were capable of waging a war against a great military
Power.[32] Their classic wars were those against the Samnites, Pyrrhus
and Carthage. Their grand hour was Cannæ. To maintain the heroic posture
for centuries on end is beyond the power of any people. The Prussian-
German people have had three great moments (1813, 1870 and 1914), and
that is more than others have had.
Here, then, I lay it down that _Imperialism_, of which petrifacts such
as the Egyptian empire, the Roman, the Chinese, the Indian may continue
to exist for hundreds or thousands of years—dead bodies, amorphous and
dispirited masses of men, scrap-material from a great history—is to be
taken as the typical symbol of the passing away. Imperialism is
Civilization unadulterated. In this phenomenal form the destiny of the
West is now irrevocably set. The energy of culture-man is directed
inwards, that of civilization-man outwards. And thus I see in Cecil
Rhodes the first man of a new age. He stands for the political style of
a far-ranging, Western, Teutonic and especially German future, and his
phrase “expansion is everything” is the Napoleonic reassertion of the
indwelling tendency of _every_ Civilization that has fully ripened—
Roman, Arab or Chinese. It is not a matter of choice—it is not the
conscious will of individuals, or even that of whole classes or peoples
that decides. The expansive tendency is a doom, something daemonic and
immense, which grips, forces into service, and uses up the late mankind
of the world-city stage, willy-nilly, aware or unaware.[33] Life is the
process of effecting possibilities, and for the brain-man there are
_only extensive_ possibilities.[34] Hard as the half-developed Socialism
of to-day is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-
expansionist with all the vehemence of destiny. Here the form-language
of politics, as the direct intellectual expression of a certain type of
humanity, touches on a deep metaphysical problem—on the fact, affirmed
in the grant of unconditional validity to the causality-principle, that
_the soul is the complement of its extension_.
When, between 480 and 230,[35] the Chinese group of states was tending
towards imperialism, it was entirely futile to combat the principle of
Imperialism (Lien-heng), practised in particular by the “Roman” state of
Tsin[36] and theoretically represented by the philosopher Dschang Yi, by
ideas of a League of Nations (Hoh-tsung) largely derived from Wang Hü, a
profound sceptic who had no illusions as to the men or the political
possibilities of this “late” period. Both sides opposed the anti-
political idealism of Lao-tse, but as between themselves it was Lien-
heng and not Hoh-tsung which swam with the natural current of expansive
Civilization.[37]
Rhodes is to be regarded as the first precursor of a Western type of
Cæsars, whose day is to come though yet distant. He stands midway
between Napoleon and the force-men of the next centuries, just as
Flaminius, who from 232 B.C. onward pressed the Romans to undertake the
subjugation of Cisalpine Gaul and so initiated the policy of colonial
expansion, stands between Alexander and Cæsar. Strictly speaking,
Flaminius was a private person—for his real power was of a kind not
embodied in any constitutional office—who exercised a dominant influence
in the state at a time when the state-idea was giving way to the
pressure of economic factors. So far as Rome is concerned, he was the
archetype of opposition Cæsarism; with him there came to an end the
_idea of state-service_ and there began the “will to power” which
ignored traditions and reckoned only with forces. Alexander and Napoleon
were romantics; though they stood on the threshold of Civilization and
in its cold clear air, the one fancied himself an Achilles and the other
read Werther. Cæsar, on the contrary, was a pure man of fact gifted with
immense understanding.
But even for Rhodes political success means territorial and financial
success, and only that. Of this Roman-ness within himself he was fully
aware. But Western Civilization has not yet taken shape in such strength
and purity as this. It was only before his maps that he could fall into
a sort of poetic trance, this son of the parsonage who, sent out to
South Africa without means, made a gigantic fortune and employed it as
the engine of political aims. His idea of a trans-African railway from
the Cape to Cairo, his project of a South African empire, his
intellectual hold on the hard metal souls of the mining magnates whose
wealth he forced into the service of his schemes, his capital Bulawayo,
royally planned as a future Residence by a statesman who was all-
powerful yet stood in no definite relation to the State, his wars, his
diplomatic deals, his road-systems, his syndicates, his armies, his
conception of the “great duty to civilization” of the man of brain—all
this, broad and imposing, is the prelude of a future which is still in
store for us and with which the history of West-European mankind will be
definitely _closed_.
He who does not understand that this outcome is obligatory and
insusceptible of modification, that our choice is between willing _this_
and willing nothing at all, between cleaving to _this_ destiny or
despairing of the future and of life itself; he who cannot feel that
there is grandeur also in the realizations of powerful intelligences, in
the energy and discipline of metal-hard natures, in battles fought with
the coldest and most abstract means; he who is obsessed with the
idealism of a provincial and would pursue the ways of life of past ages—
must forgo all desire to comprehend history, to live through history or
to make history.
Thus regarded, the Imperium Romanum appears no longer as an isolated
phenomenon, but as the normal product of a strict and energetic,
megalopolitan, predominantly practical spirituality, as typical of a
final and irreversible condition which has occurred often enough though
it has only been identified as such in this instance.
Let it be realized, then:
That the secret of historical form does not lie on the surface, that it
cannot be grasped by means of similarities of costume and setting, and
that in the history of men as in that of animals and plants there occur
phenomena showing deceptive similarity but inwardly without any
connexion—e.g., Charlemagne and Haroun-al-Raschid, Alexander and Cæsar,
the German wars upon Rome and the Mongol onslaughts upon West Europe—and
other phenomena of extreme outward dissimilarity but of identical
import—e.g., Trajan and Rameses II, the Bourbons and the Attic Demos,
Mohammed and Pythagoras.
That the 19th and 20th centuries, hitherto looked on as the highest
point of an ascending straight line of world-history, are in reality a
stage of life which may be observed in every Culture that has ripened to
its limit—a stage of life characterized not by Socialists,
Impressionists, electric railways, torpedoes and differential equations
(for these are only body-constituents of the time), but by a civilized
spirituality which possesses not only these but also quite other
creative possibilities.
That, as our own time represents a transitional phase which occurs with
certainty under particular conditions, there are perfectly well-defined
states (such as have occurred more than once in the history of the past)
_later_ than the present-day state of West Europe, and therefore that
The future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and onwards
for all time towards our present ideals, but a single phenomenon of
history, strictly limited and defined as to form and duration, which
covers a few centuries and can be viewed and, in essentials, calculated
from available precedents.
-----
Footnote 31:
See Vol. II, 529.
Footnote 32:
The conquest of Gaul by Cæsar was frankly a colonial, i.e., a one-
sided, war; and the fact that it is the highest achievement in the
later military history of Rome only shows that the well of real
achievement was rapidly drying up.
Footnote 33:
The modern Germans are a conspicuous example of a people that has
become expansive without knowing it or willing it. They were already
in that state while they still believed themselves to be the people of
Goethe. Even Bismarck, the founder of the new age, never had the
slightest idea of it, and believed himself to have reached the
_conclusion_ of a political process (cf. Vol. II, 529).
Footnote 34:
This is probably the meaning of Napoleon’s significant words to
Goethe: “What have we to-day to do with destiny? Policy is destiny.”
Footnote 35:
Corresponding to the 300-50 B.C. phase of the Classical world.
Footnote 36:
Which in the end gave its name to the Empire (Tsin = China).
Footnote 37:
See Vol. II, 521-539.
-----
XIV
This high plane of contemplation once attained, the rest is easy. To
this _single_ idea one can refer, and by it one can solve, without
straining or forcing, all those separate problems of religion, art-
history, epistemology, ethics, politics, economics with which the modern
intellect has so passionately—and so vainly—busied itself for decades.
This idea is one of those truths that have only to be expressed with
full clarity to become indisputable. It is one of the inward necessities
of the Western Culture and of its world-feeling. It is capable of
entirely transforming the world-outlook of one who fully understands it,
i.e., makes it intimately his own. It immensely deepens the world-
picture natural and necessary to us in that, already trained to regard
world-historical evolution as an organic unit seen backwards from our
standpoint in the present, we are enabled by its aid to follow the broad
lines into the future—a privilege of dream-calculation till now
permitted only to the physicist. It is, I repeat, in effect the
substitution of a Copernican for a Ptolemaic aspect of history, that is,
an immeasurable widening of horizon.
Up to now everyone has been at liberty to hope what he pleased about the
future. Where there are no facts, sentiment rules. But henceforward it
will be every man’s business to inform himself of what _can_ happen and
therefore of what with the unalterable necessity of destiny and
irrespective of personal ideals, hopes or desires, _will_ happen. When
we use the risky word “freedom” we shall mean freedom to do, not this or
that, but the necessary or nothing. The feeling that this is “just as it
should be” is the hall-mark of the man of fact. To lament it and blame
it is not to alter it. To birth belongs death, to youth age, to life
generally its form and its allotted span. The present is a civilized,
emphatically not a cultured time, and _ipso facto_ a great number of
life-capacities fall out as impossible. This may be deplorable, and may
be and will be deplored in pessimist philosophy and poetry, but it is
not in our power to make otherwise. It will not be—already it is not—
permissible to defy clear historical experience and to expect, merely
because we hope, that this will spring or that will flourish.
It will no doubt be objected that such a world-outlook, which in giving
this certainty as to the outlines and tendency of the future cuts off
all far-reaching hopes, would be unhealthy for all and fatal for many,
once it ceased to be a mere theory and was adopted as a practical scheme
of life by the group of personalities effectively moulding the future.
Such is not my opinion. We are civilized, not Gothic or Rococo, people;
we have to reckon with the hard cold facts of a _late_ life, to which
the parallel is to be found not in Pericles’s Athens but in Cæsar’s
Rome. Of great painting or great music there can no longer be, for
Western people, any question. Their architectural possibilities have
been exhausted these hundred years. Only _extensive_ possibilities are
left to them. Yet, for a sound and vigorous generation that is filled
with unlimited hopes, I fail to see that it is any disadvantage to
discover betimes that some of these hopes must come to nothing. And if
the hopes thus doomed should be those most dear, well, a man who is
worth anything will not be dismayed. It is true that the issue may be a
tragic one for some individuals who in their decisive years are
overpowered by the conviction that in the spheres of architecture,
drama, painting, there is nothing left for _them_ to conquer. What
matter if they do go under! It has been the convention hitherto to admit
no limits of any sort in these matters, and to believe that each period
had its own task to do in each sphere. Tasks therefore were found by
hook or by crook, leaving it to be settled posthumously whether or not
the artist’s faith was justified and his life-work necessary. Now,
nobody but a pure romantic would take this way out. Such a pride is not
the pride of a Roman. What are we to think of the individual who,
standing before an exhausted quarry, would rather be told that a new
vein will be struck to-morrow—the bait offered by the radically false
and mannerized art of the moment—than be shown a rich and virgin clay-
bed near by? The lesson, I think, would be of benefit to the coming
generations, as showing them what is possible—and therefore necessary—
and what is excluded from the inward potentialities of their time.
Hitherto an incredible total of intellect and power has been squandered
in false directions. The West-European, however historically he may
think and feel, is at a certain stage of life invariably uncertain of
his own direction; he gropes and feels his way and, if unlucky in
environment, he loses it. But now at last the work of centuries enables
him to view the disposition of his own life in relation to the general
culture-scheme and to test his own powers and purposes. And I can only
hope that men of the new generation may be moved by this book to devote
themselves to technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of the paint-
brush, and politics instead of epistemology. Better they could not do.
XV
It still remains to consider the relation of a morphology of world-
history to Philosophy. All genuine historical work is philosophy, unless
it is mere ant-industry. But the operations of the systematic
philosopher are subject to constant and serious error through his
assuming the permanence of his results. He overlooks the fact that every
thought lives in a historical world and is therefore involved in the
common destiny of mortality. He supposes that higher thought possesses
an everlasting and unalterable objectiveness (Gegenstand), that the
great questions of all epochs are identical, and that therefore they are
capable in the last analysis of unique answers.
But question and answer are here one, and the great questions are made
great by the very fact that unequivocal answers to them are so
passionately demanded, so that it is as life-symbols only that they
possess significance. There are no eternal truths. Every philosophy is
the expression of its own and only its own time, and—if by philosophy we
mean effective philosophy and not academic triflings about judgment-
forms, sense-categories and the like—no two ages possess the same
philosophic intentions. The difference is not between perishable and
imperishable doctrines but between doctrines which live their day and
doctrines which never live at all. The immortality of thoughts-become is
an illusion—the essential is, what kind of man comes to expression in
them. The greater the man, the truer the philosophy, with the inward
truth that in a great work of art transcends all proof of its several
elements or even of their compatibility with one another. At highest,
the philosophy may absorb the entire content of an epoch, realize it
within itself and then, embodying it in some grand form or personality,
pass it on to be developed further and further. The scientific dress or
the mark of learning adopted by a philosophy is here unimportant.
Nothing is simpler than to make good poverty of ideas by founding a
system, and even a good idea has little value when enunciated by a
solemn ass. Only its necessity to life decides the eminence of a
doctrine.
For me, therefore, the test of value to be applied to a thinker is his
eye for the great facts of his own time. Only this can settle whether he
is merely a clever architect of systems and principles, versed in
definitions and analyses, or whether it is the very soul of his time
that speaks in his works and his intuitions. A philosopher who cannot
grasp and command actuality as well will never be of the first rank. The
Pre-Socratics were merchants and politicians _en grand_. The desire to
put his political ideas into practice in Syracuse nearly cost Plato his
life, and it was the same Plato who discovered the set of geometrical
theorems that enabled Euclid to build up the Classical system of
mathematics. Pascal—whom Nietzsche knows only as the “broken Christian”—
Descartes, Leibniz were the first mathematicians and technicians of
their time.
The great “Pre-Socratics” of China from Kwan-tsi (about 670) to
Confucius (550-478) were statesmen, regents, lawgivers like Pythagoras
and Parmenides, like Hobbes and Leibniz. With Lao-tsze—the opponent of
all state authority and high politics and the enthusiast of small
peaceful communities—unworldliness and deed-shyness first appear,
heralds of lecture-room and study philosophy. But Lao-tsze was in his
time, the _ancien régime_ of China, an exception in the midst of sturdy
philosophers for whom epistemology meant the knowledge of the important
relations of actual life.
And herein, I think, all the philosophers of the newest age are open to
a serious criticism. What they do not possess is real standing in actual
life. Not one of them has intervened effectively, either in higher
politics, in the development of modern technics, in matters of
communication, in economics, or in any other _big_ actuality, with a
single act or a single compelling idea. Not one of them counts in
mathematics, in physics, in the science of government, even to the
extent that Kant counted. Let us glance at other times. Confucius was
several times a minister. Pythagoras was the organizer of an important
political movement[38] akin to the Cromwellian, the significance of
which is even now far underestimated by Classical researchers. Goethe,
besides being a model executive minister—though lacking, alas! the
operative sphere of a great state—was interested in the Suez and Panama
canals (the dates of which he foresaw with accuracy) and their effects
on the economy of the world, and he busied himself again and again with
the question of American economic life and its reactions on the Old
World, and with that of the dawning era of machine-industry. Hobbes was
one of the originators of the great plan of winning South America for
England, and although in execution the plan went no further than the
occupation of Jamaica, he has the glory of being one of the founders of
the British Colonial Empire. Leibniz, without doubt the greatest
intellect in Western philosophy, the founder of the differential
calculus and the _analysis situs_, conceived or co-operated in a number
of major political schemes, one of which was to relieve Germany by
drawing the attention of Louis XIV to the importance of Egypt as a
factor in French world-policy. The ideas of the memorandum on this
subject that he drew up for the Grand Monarch were so far in advance of
their time (1672) that it has been thought that Napoleon made use of
them for his Eastern venture. Even thus early, Leibniz laid down the
principle that Napoleon grasped more and more clearly after Wagram,
viz., that acquisitions on the Rhine and in Belgium would not
permanently better the position of France and that the neck of Suez
would one day be the key of world-dominance. Doubtless the King was not
equal to these deep political and strategic conceptions of the
Philosopher.
Turning from men of this mould to the “philosophers” of to-day, one is
dismayed and shamed. How poor their personalities, how commonplace their
political and practical outlook! Why is it that the mere idea of calling
upon one of them to prove his intellectual eminence in government,
diplomacy, large-scale organization, or direction of any big colonial,
commercial or transport concern is enough to evoke our pity? And this
insufficiency indicates, not that they possess inwardness, but simply
that they lack weight. I look round in vain for an instance in which a
modern “philosopher” has made a name by even one deep or far-seeing
pronouncement on an important question of the day. I see nothing but
provincial opinions of the same kind as anyone else’s. Whenever I take
up a work by a modern thinker, I find myself asking: has he any idea
whatever of the actualities of world-politics, world-city problems,
capitalism, the future of the state, the relation of technics to the
course of civilization, Russia, Science? Goethe would have understood
all this and revelled in it, but there is not one living philosopher
capable of taking it in. This sense of actualities is of course not the
same thing as the content of a philosophy but, I repeat, it is an
infallible symptom of its inward necessity, its fruitfulness and its
symbolic importance.
We must allow ourselves no illusions as to the gravity of this negative
result. It is palpable that we have lost sight of the final significance
of effective philosophy. We confuse philosophy with preaching, with
agitation, with novel-writing, with lecture-room jargon. We have
descended from the perspective of the bird to that of the frog. It has
come to this, that the very _possibility_ of a real philosophy of to-day
and to-morrow is in question. If not, it were far better to become a
colonist or an engineer, to do something, no matter what, that is true
and real, than to chew over once more the old dried-up themes under
cover of an alleged “new wave of philosophic thought”—far better to
construct an aero-engine than a new theory of apperception that is not
wanted. Truly it is a poor life’s work to restate once more, in slightly
different terms, views of a hundred predecessors on the Will or on
psycho-physical parallelism. This may be a profession, but a philosophy
it emphatically is not. A doctrine that does not attack and affect the
life of the period in its inmost depths is no doctrine and had better
not be taught. And what was possible even yesterday is, to-day, at least
not indispensable.
To me, the depths and refinement of mathematical and physical theories
are a joy; by comparison, the æsthete and the physiologist are fumblers.
I would sooner have the fine mind-begotten forms of a fast steamer, a
steel structure, a precision-lathe, the subtlety and elegance of many
chemical and optical processes, than all the pickings and stealings of
present-day “arts and crafts,” architecture and painting included. I
prefer one Roman aqueduct to all Roman temples and statues. I love the
Colosseum and the giant vault of the Palatine, for they display for me
to-day in the brown massiveness of their brick construction the _real_
Rome and the grand practical sense of her engineers, but it is a matter
of indifference to me whether the empty and pretentious marblery of the
Cæsars—their rows of statuary, their friezes, their overloaded
architraves—is preserved or not. Glance at some reconstruction of the
Imperial Fora—do we not find them the true counterpart of a modern
International Exhibition, obtrusive, bulky, empty, a boasting in
materials and dimensions wholly alien to Periclean Greece and the Rococo
alike, but exactly paralleled in the Egyptian modernism that is
displayed in the ruins of Rameses II (1300 B.C.) at Luxor and Karnak? It
was not for nothing that the genuine Roman despised the _Græculus
histrio_, the kind of “artist” and the kind of “philosopher” to be found
on the soil of Roman Civilization. The time for art and philosophy had
passed; they were exhausted, used up, superfluous, and his instinct for
the realities of life told him so. _One_ Roman law weighed more than all
the lyrics and school-metaphysics of the time together. And I maintain
that to-day many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a
sounder philosopher than all those who practise the dull craft of
experimental psychology. This is a situation which regularly repeats
itself at a certain historical level. It would have been absurd in a
Roman of intellectual eminence, who might as Consul or Prætor lead
armies, organize provinces, build cities and roads, or even be the
Princeps in Rome, to want to hatch out some new variant of post-Platonic
school philosophy at Athens or Rhodes. Consequently no one did so. It
was not in harmony with the tendency of the age, and therefore it only
attracted third-class men of the kind that always advances as far as the
_Zeitgeist_ of the day before yesterday. It is a very grave question
whether this stage has or has not set in for us already.
A century of purely extensive effectiveness, excluding big artistic and
metaphysical production—let us say frankly an irreligious time which
coincides exactly with the idea of the world-city—is a time of decline.
True. But we have not _chosen_ this time. We cannot help it if we are
born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the
golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time.
Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our _destiny_,
clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it
we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart,
ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either
a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.
Therefore, in approaching a problem of the present, one must begin by
asking one’s self—a question answered in advance by instinct in the case
of the genuine adept—what to-day is possible and what he must forbid
himself. Only a very few of the problems of metaphysics are, so to say,
allocated for solution to any epoch of thought. Even thus soon, a whole
world separates Nietzsche’s time, in which a last trace of romanticism
was still operative, from our own, which has shed every vestige of it.
Systematic philosophy closes with the end of the 18th Century. Kant put
its utmost possibilities in forms both grand in themselves and—as a
rule—final for the Western soul. He is followed, as Plato and Aristotle
were followed, by a specifically megalopolitan philosophy that was not
speculative but practical, irreligious, social-ethical. This philosophy—
paralleled in the Chinese civilization by the schools of the “Epicurean”
Yang-chu, the “Socialist” Mo-ti, the “Pessimist” Chuang-tsü, the
“Positivist” Mencius, and in the Classical by the Cynics, the Cyrenaics,
the Stoics and the Epicureans—begins in the West with Schopenhauer, who
is the first to make the _Will to life_ (“creative life-force”) the
centre of gravity of his thought, although the deeper tendency of his
doctrine is obscured by his having, under the influence of a great
tradition, maintained the obsolete distinctions of phenomena and things-
in-themselves and suchlike. It is the same creative will-to-life that
was Schopenhauer-wise denied in “Tristan” and Darwin-wise asserted in
“Siegfried”; that was brilliantly and theatrically formulated by
Nietzsche in “Zarathustra”; that led the Hegelian Marx to an economic
and the Malthusian Darwin to a biological hypothesis which together have
subtly transformed the world-outlook of the Western megalopolis; and
that produced a homogeneous series of tragedy-conceptions extending from
Hebbel’s “Judith” to Ibsen’s “Epilogue.” It has embraced, therefore, all
the possibilities of a true philosophy—and at the same time it has
exhausted them.
Systematic philosophy, then, lies immensely far behind us, and ethical
has been wound up. _But a third possibility, corresponding to the
Classical Scepticism, still remains to the soul-world_ of the present-
day West, and it can be brought to light by the hitherto unknown methods
of historical morphology. That which is a possibility is a necessity.
The Classical scepticism is ahistoric, it doubts by denying outright.
But that of the West, if it is an inward necessity, a symbol of the
autumn of our spirituality, is obliged to be historical through and
through. Its solutions are got by treating everything as relative, as a
historical phenomenon, and its procedure is psychological. Whereas the
Sceptic philosophy arose within Hellenism as the negation of philosophy—
declaring philosophy to be purposeless—we, on the contrary, regard the
_history of philosophy_ as, in the last resort, philosophy’s gravest
theme. This _is_ “skepsis,” in the true sense, for whereas the Greek is
led to renounce absolute standpoints by contempt for the intellectual
past, we are led to do so by comprehension of that past as an organism.
In this work it will be our task to sketch out this unphilosophical
philosophy—the last that West Europe will know. Scepticism is the
expression of a pure Civilization; and it dissipates the world-picture
of the Culture that has gone before. For us, its success will lie in
resolving all the older problems into one, the genetic. The conviction
that what _is_ also _has become_, that the natural and cognizable is
rooted in the historic, that the World as the actual is founded on an
Ego as the potential actualized, that the “when” and the “how long” hold
as deep a secret as the “what,” leads directly to the fact that
everything, whatever else it may be, must at any rate be _the expression
of something living_. Cognitions and judgments too are acts of living
men. The thinkers of the past conceived external actuality as produced
by cognition and motiving ethical judgments, but to the thought of the
future they are above all _expressions and symbols. The Morphology of
world-history becomes inevitably a universal symbolism._
With that, the claim of higher thought to possess general and eternal
truths falls to the ground. Truths are truths only in relation to a
particular mankind. Thus, my own philosophy is able to express and
reflect _only_ the Western (as distinct from the Classical, Indian, or
other) soul, and that soul _only_ in its present civilized phase by
which its conception of the world, its practical range and its sphere of
effect are specified.
-----
Footnote 38:
See Vol. II, 373 ff.
-----
XVI
In concluding this Introduction, I may be permitted to add a personal
note. In 1911, I proposed to myself to put together some broad
considerations on the political phenomena of the day and their possible
developments. At that time the World-War appeared to me both as imminent
and also as the inevitable outward manifestation of the historical
crisis, and my endeavour was to comprehend it from an examination of the
spirit of the preceding centuries—not years. In the course of this
originally small task,[39] the conviction forced itself on me that for
an effective understanding of the epoch the area to be taken into the
foundation-plan must be very greatly enlarged, and that in an
investigation of this sort, if the results were to be fundamentally
conclusive and necessary results, it was impossible to restrict one’s
self to a single epoch and its political actualities, or to confine
one’s self to a pragmatical framework, or even to do without purely
metaphysical and highly transcendental methods of treatment. It became
evident that a political problem could not be comprehended by means of
politics themselves and that, frequently, important factors at work in
the depths could only be grasped through their artistic manifestations
or even distantly seen in the form of scientific or purely philosophical
ideas. Even the politico-social analysis of the last decades of the 19th
century—a period of tense quiet between two immense and outstanding
events: the one which, expressed in the Revolution and Napoleon, had
fixed the picture of West-European actuality for a century and another
of at least equal significance that was visibly and ever more rapidly
approaching—was found in the last resort to be impossible without
bringing in _all_ the great problems of Being in all their aspects. For,
in the historical as in the natural world-picture, there is found
nothing, however small, that does not embody in itself the entire sum of
fundamental tendencies. And thus the original theme came to be immensely
widened. A vast number of unexpected (and in the main entirely novel)
questions and interrelations presented themselves. And finally it became
perfectly clear that no single fragment of history could be thoroughly
illuminated unless and until the secret of world-history itself, to wit
the story of higher mankind as an organism of regular structure, had
been cleared up. And hitherto this has not been done, even in the least
degree.
From this moment on, relations and connexions—previously often
suspected, sometimes touched on but never comprehended—presented
themselves in ever-increasing volume. The forms of the arts linked
themselves to the forms of war and state-policy. Deep relations were
revealed between political and mathematical aspects of the same Culture,
between religious and technical conceptions, between mathematics, music
and sculpture, between economics and cognition-forms. Clearly and
unmistakably there appeared the fundamental dependence of the most
modern physical and chemical theories on the mythological concepts of
our Germanic ancestors, the style-congruence of tragedy and power-
technics and up-to-date finance, and the fact (bizarre at first but soon
self-evident) that oil-painting perspective, printing, the credit
system, longrange weapons, and contrapuntal music in one case, and the
nude statue, the city-state and coin-currency (discovered by the Greeks)
in another were identical expressions of one and the same spiritual
principle. And, beyond and above all, there stood out the fact that
these great _groups of morphological relations_, each one of which
symbolically represents a particular sort of mankind in the whole
picture of world-history, are strictly symmetrical in structure. It is
this perspective that first opens out for us the true style of history.
Belonging itself as symbol and expression to one time and therefore
inwardly possible and necessary only for present-day Western man, it can
but be compared—distantly—to certain ideas of ultra-modern mathematics
in the domain of the Theory of Groups. These were thoughts that had
occupied me for many years, though dark and undefined until enabled by
this method to emerge in tangible form.
Thereafter I saw the present—the approaching World-War—in a quite other
light. It was no longer a momentary constellation of casual facts due to
national sentiments, personal influences, or economic tendencies endowed
with an appearance of unity and necessity by some historian’s scheme of
political or social cause-and-effect, but the type of _a historical
change of phase_ occurring within a great historical organism of
definable compass at the point preordained for it hundreds of years ago.
The mark of the great crisis is its innumerable passionate questionings
and probings. In our own case there were books and ideas by the
thousand; but, scattered, disconnected, limited by the horizons of
specialisms as they were, they incited, depressed and confounded but
could not free. Hence, though these questions are seen, their identity
is missed. Consider those art-problems that (though never comprehended
in their depths) were evinced in the disputes between form and content,
line and space, drawing and colour, in the notion of style, in the idea
of Impressionism and the music of Wagner. Consider the decline of art
and the failing authority of science; the grave problems arising out of
the victory of the megalopolis over the country-side, such as
childlessness and land-depopulation; the place in society of a
fluctuating Fourth Estate; the crisis in materialism, in Socialism, in
parliamentary government; the position of the individual _vis-à-vis_ the
State; the problem of private property with its pendant the problem of
marriage. Consider at the same time one fact taken from what is
apparently an entirely different field, the voluminous work that was
being done in the domain of folk-psychology on the origins of myths,
arts, religions and thought—and done, moreover, no longer from an ideal
but from a strictly morphological standpoint. It is my belief that every
one of these questions was really aimed in the same direction as every
other, viz., towards that _one_ Riddle of History that had never yet
emerged with sufficient distinctness in the human consciousness. The
tasks before men were not, as supposed, infinitely numerous—they were
one and the same task. Everyone had an inkling that this was so, but no
one from his own narrow standpoint had seen the single and comprehensive
solution. And yet it had been in the air since Nietzsche, and Nietzsche
himself had gripped all the decisive problems although, being a
romantic, he had not dared to look strict reality in the face.
But herein precisely lies the inward necessity of the _stock-taking_
doctrine, so to call it. It had to come, and it could only come at this
time. Our scepticism is not an attack upon, but rather the verification
of, our stock of thoughts and works. It _confirms_ all that has been
sought and achieved for generations past, in that it integrates all the
truly living tendencies which it finds in the special spheres, no matter
what their aim may be.
Above all, there discovered itself the _opposition of History and
Nature_ through which alone it is possible to grasp the essence of the
former. As I have already said, man as an element and representative of
the World is a member, not only of nature, but also of history—which is
a second Cosmos different in structure and complexion, entirely
neglected by Metaphysics in favour of the first. I was originally
brought to reflect on this _fundamental_ question of our world-
consciousness through noticing how present-day historians as they fumble
round tangible events, things-become, believe themselves to have already
grasped History, the happening, the becoming itself. This is a prejudice
common to all who proceed by reason and cognition, as against intuitive
perception.[40] And it had long ago been a source of perplexity to the
great Eleatics with their doctrine that through cognition there could be
no becoming, but only a being (or having-become). In other words,
History was seen as Nature (in the objective sense of the physicist) and
treated accordingly, and it is to this that we must ascribe the baneful
mistake of applying the principles of causality, of law, of system—that
is, the structure of rigid being—to the picture of happenings. It was
assumed that a human culture existed just as electricity or gravitation
existed, and that it was capable of analysis in much the same way as
these. The habits of the scientific researcher were eagerly taken as a
model, and if, from time to time, some student asked what Gothic, or
Islam, or the Polis _was_, no one inquired why such symbols of something
living _inevitably_ appeared just _then, and there, in that form, and
for that space of time_. Historians were content, whenever they met one
of the innumerable similarities between widely discrete historical
phenomena, simply to register it, adding some clever remarks as to the
marvels of coincidence, dubbing Rhodes the “Venice of Antiquity” and
Napoleon the “modern Alexander,” or the like; yet it was just these
cases, in which the _destiny-problem_ came to the fore as the true
problem of history (viz., the problem of time), that needed to be
treated with all possible seriousness and scientifically regulated
_physiognomic_ in order to find out what strangely-constituted
necessity, so completely alien to the causal, was at work. That every
phenomenon _ipso facto_ propounds a metaphysical riddle, that the time
of its occurrence is _never_ irrelevant; that it still remained to be
discovered what kind of a _living_ interdependence (apart from the
inorganic, natural-law interdependence) subsists within the world-
picture, which radiates from nothing less than the whole man and not
merely (as Kant thought) from the cognizing part of him; that a
phenomenon is not only a fact for the understanding but also an
expression of the spiritual, not only an object but a symbol as well, be
it one of the highest creations of religion or art or a mere trifle of
everyday life—all this was, philosophically, something new.
And thus in the end I came to see the solution clearly before me in
immense outlines, possessed of full inward necessity, a solution derived
from one single principle that though discoverable had never been
discovered, that from my youth had haunted and attracted me, tormenting
me with the sense that it was there and must be attacked and yet defying
me to seize it. Thus, from an almost accidental occasion of beginning,
there has arisen the present work, which is put forward as the
provisional expression of a new world-picture. The book is laden, as I
know, with all the defects of a first attempt, incomplete, and certainly
not free from inconsistencies. Nevertheless I am convinced that it
contains the incontrovertible formulation of an idea which, once
enunciated clearly, will (I repeat) be accepted without dispute.
If, then, the narrower theme is an analysis of the Decline of that West-
European Culture which is now spread over the entire globe, yet the
object in view is the development of a philosophy and of the operative
method peculiar to it, which is now to be tried, viz., the method of
comparative morphology in world-history. The work falls naturally into
two parts. The first, “Form and Actuality,” starts from the form-
language of the great Cultures, attempts to penetrate to the deepest
roots of their origin and so provides itself with the basis for a
science of Symbolic. The second part, “World-historical Perspectives,”
starts from the _facts of actual life_, and from the historical practice
of higher mankind seeks to obtain a quintessence of historical
experience that we can set to work upon the formation of our own future.
The accompanying tables[41] present a general view of what has resulted
from the investigation. They may at the same time give some notion both
of the fruitfulness and of the scope of the new methods.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
THE MEANING OF NUMBERS
CHAPTER II
THE MEANING OF NUMBERS
It is necessary to begin by drawing attention to certain basic terms
which, as used in this work, carry strict and in some cases novel
connotations. Though the metaphysical content of these terms would
gradually become evident in following the course of the reasoning,
nevertheless, the exact significance to be attached to them ought to be
made clear beyond misunderstanding from the very outset.
The popular distinction—current also in philosophy—between “being” and
“becoming” seems to miss the essential point in the contrast it is meant
to express. An endless becoming—“action,” “actuality”—will always be
thought of also as a condition (as it is, for example, in physical
notions such as uniform velocity and the condition of motion, and in the
basic hypothesis of the kinetic theory of gases) and therefore ranked in
the category of “being.” On the other hand, out of the results that we
do in fact obtain by and in consciousness, we may, with Goethe,
distinguish as final elements “becoming” and “the become” (_Das Werden_,
_das Gewordne_). In all cases, though the atom of human-ness may lie
beyond the grasp of our powers of abstract conception, the very clear
and definite _feeling_ of this contrast—fundamental and diffused
throughout consciousness—is the most elemental something that we reach.
It necessarily follows therefore that “the become” is always founded on
a “becoming” and not the other way round.
I distinguish further, by the words “proper” and “alien” (_das Eigne_,
_das Fremde_), those two basic facts of consciousness which for all men
in the waking (not in the dreaming) state are established with an
immediate inward certainty, without the necessity or possibility of more
precise definition. The element called “alien” is always related in some
way to the basic fact expressed by the word “perception,” i.e., the
outer world, the life of sensation. Great thinkers have bent all their
powers of image-forming to the task of expressing this relation, more
and more rigorously, by the aid of half-intuitive dichotomies such as
“phenomena and things-in-themselves,” “world-as-will and world-as-idea,”
“ego and non-ego,” although human powers of exact knowing are surely
inadequate for the task.
Similarly, the element “proper” is involved with the basic fact known as
feeling, i.e., the inner life, in some intimate and invariable way that
equally defies analysis by the methods of abstract thought.
I distinguish, again, “soul” and “world.” _The existence of this
opposition is identical with the fact of purely human waking
consciousness (Wachsein)._ There are degrees of clearness and sharpness
in the opposition and therefore grades of the consciousness, of the
spirituality, of life. These grades range from the feeling-knowledge
that, unalert yet sometimes suffused through and through by an inward
light, is characteristic of the primitive and of the child (and also of
those moments of religious and artistic inspiration that occur ever less
and less often as a Culture grows older) right to the extremity of
waking and reasoning sharpness that we find, for instance, in the
thought of Kant and Napoleon, for whom soul and world have become
subject and object. This elementary structure of consciousness, as a
fact of immediate inner knowledge, is not susceptible of conceptual
subdivision. Nor, indeed, are the two factors distinguishable at all
except verbally and more or less artificially, since they are always
associated, always intertwined, and present themselves as a unit, a
totality. The epistemological starting-point of the born idealist and
the born realist alike, the assumption that soul is to world (or world
to soul, as the case may be) as foundation is to building, as primary to
derivative, as “cause” to “effect,” has no basis whatever in the pure
fact of consciousness, and when a philosophic system lays stress on the
one or the other, it only thereby informs us as to the personality of
the philosopher, a fact of purely biographical significance.
Thus, by regarding waking-consciousness structurally as a tension of
contraries, and applying to it the notions of “becoming” and “the thing-
become,” we find for the word _Life_ a perfectly definite meaning that
is closely allied to that of “becoming.” We may describe becomings and
the things-become as the form in which respectively the facts and the
results of life exist in the waking consciousness. To man in the waking
state his proper life, progressive and constantly self-fulfilling, is
presented through the element of Becoming in his consciousness—_this
fact we call “the present”_—and it possesses that mysterious property of
_Direction_ which in all the higher languages men have sought to impound
and—vainly—to rationalize by means of the enigmatic word _time_. It
follows necessarily from the above that there is a fundamental connexion
between _the become_ (the _hard-set_) and _Death_.
If, now, we designate the Soul—that is, the Soul as it is felt, not as
it is reasonably pictured—as the _possible_ and the World on the other
hand as the _actual_ (the meaning of these expressions is unmistakable
to man’s inner sense), we see life as _the form in which the actualizing
of the possible is accomplished_. With respect to the property of
Direction, the possible is called the _Future_ and the actualized the
_Past_. The actualizing itself, the centre-of-gravity and the centre-of-
meaning of life, we call the _Present_. “Soul” is the still-to-be-
accomplished, “World” the accomplished, “life” the accomplishing. In
this way we are enabled to assign to expressions like moment, duration,
development, life-content, vocation, scope, aim, fullness and emptiness
of life, the definite meanings which we shall need for all that follows
and especially for the understanding of historical phenomena.
Lastly, the words _History_ and _Nature_ are here employed, as the
reader will have observed already, in a quite definite and hitherto
unusual sense. These words comprise _possible_ modes of understanding,
of comprehending the totality of knowledge—becoming as well as things-
become, life as well as things-lived—as a homogeneous, spiritualized,
well-ordered _world-picture_ fashioned out of an indivisible mass-
impression in this way or in that according as the becoming or the
become, direction (“time”) or extension (“space”) is the dominant
factor. And it is not a question of one factor being alternative to the
other. The possibilities that we have of possessing an “outer world”
that reflects and attests our proper existence are infinitely numerous
and exceedingly heterogeneous, and the purely organic and the purely
mechanical world-view (in the precise literal sense of that familiar
term[42]) are only the extreme members of the series. Primitive man (so
far as we can imagine his waking-consciousness) and the child (as we can
remember) cannot fully see or grasp these possibilities. One condition
of this higher world-consciousness is the possession of _language_,
meaning thereby not mere human utterance but a culture-language, and
such is non-existent for primitive man and existent but not accessible
in the case of the child. In other words, neither possesses any clear
and distinct notion of the world. They have an inkling but no real
knowledge of history and nature, being too intimately incorporated with
the ensemble of these. _They have no Culture._
And therewith that important word is given a positive meaning of the
highest significance which henceforward will be assumed in using it. In
the same way as we have elected to distinguish the Soul as the possible
and the World as the actual, we can now differentiate between _possible_
and _actual_ culture, i.e., culture as _an idea in the_ (general or
individual) _existence_ and culture as the _body_ of that idea, as the
total of its visible, tangible and comprehensible expressions—acts and
opinions, religion and state, arts and sciences, peoples and cities,
economic and social forms, speech, laws, customs, characters, facial
lines and costumes. _Higher history_, intimately related to life and to
becoming, _is the actualizing of possible Culture_.[43]
We must not omit to add that these basic determinations of meaning are
largely incommunicable by specification, definition or proof, and in
their deeper import must be reached by feeling, experience and
intuition. There is a distinction, rarely appreciated as it should be,
between experience as lived and experience as learned (zwischen Erleben
und Erkennen), between the immediate certainty given by the various
kinds of intuition—such as illumination, inspiration, artistic flair,
experience of life, the power of “sizing men up” (Goethe’s
“exact percipient fancy”)—and the product of rational procedure and
technical experiment.
The first are imparted by means of analogy, picture, symbol, the second
by formula, law, scheme. The become is experienced by learning—indeed,
as we shall see, the having-become is for the human mind identical with
the completed act of cognition. A becoming, on the other hand, can only
be experienced by living, felt with a deep wordless understanding. It is
on this that what we call “knowledge of men” is based; in fact the
understanding of history implies a superlative knowledge of men. The eye
which can see into the depths of an alien soul—owes nothing to the
cognition-methods investigated in the “Critique of Pure Reason,” yet the
purer the historical picture is, the less accessible it becomes to any
other eye. The mechanism of a pure nature-picture, such as the world of
Newton and Kant, is cognized, grasped, dissected in laws and equations
and finally reduced to system: the organism of a pure history-picture,
like the world of Plotinus, Dante and Giordano Bruno, is intuitively
seen, inwardly experienced, grasped as a form or symbol and finally
rendered in poetical and artistic conceptions. Goethe’s “living nature”
is a _historical_ world-picture.[44]
-----
Footnote 39:
The work referred to is embodied in Vol. II (pp. 521 et seq., 562 et
seq., 631 et seq.).
Footnote 40:
The philosophy of this book I owe to the philosophy of Goethe, which
is practically unknown to-day, and also (but in a far less degree) to
that of Nietzsche. The position of Goethe in West-European metaphysics
is still not understood in the least; when philosophy is being
discussed he is not even named. For unfortunately he did not set down
his doctrines in a rigid system, and so the systematic philosophy has
overlooked him. Nevertheless he was a philosopher. His place _vis-à-
vis_ Kant is the same as that of Plato—who similarly eludes the would-
be-systematizer—_vis-à-vis_ Aristotle. Plato and Goethe stand for the
philosophy of Becoming, Aristotle and Kant the philosophy of Being.
Here we have intuition opposed to analysis. Something that it is
practically impossible to convey by the methods of reason is found in
individual sayings and poems of Goethe, e.g., in the Orphische
Urworte, and stanzas like “Wenn im Unendlichen” and “Sagt es Niemand,”
which must be regarded as the expression of a _perfectly definite_
metaphysical doctrine. I would not have one single word changed in
this: "The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in
the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and
therefore, similarly, the reason (_Vernunft_) is concerned only to
strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the
understanding (_Verstand_) only to make use of the become and the set-
fast" (to Eckermann). This sentence comprises my entire philosophy.
Footnote 41:
At the end of the volume.
Footnote 42:
Weltanschauung im wörtlichen Sinne; Anschauung der Welt.
Footnote 43:
The case of mankind in the historyless state is discussed in Vol. II,
pp. 58 et seq.
Footnote 44:
With, moreover, a “biological horizon.” See Vol. II, p. 34.
-----
II
In order to exemplify the way in which a soul seeks to actualize itself
in the picture of its outer world—to show, that is, in how far Culture
in the “become” state can express or portray an idea of human existence—
I have chosen _number_, the primary element on which all mathematics
rests. I have done so because mathematics, accessible in its full depth
only to the very few, holds a quite peculiar position amongst the
creations of the mind. It is a science of the most rigorous kind, like
logic but more comprehensive and very much fuller; it is a true art,
along with sculpture and music, as needing the guidance of inspiration
and as developing under great conventions of form; it is, lastly, a
metaphysic of the highest rank, as Plato and above all Leibniz show us.
Every philosophy has hitherto grown up in conjunction with a mathematic
_belonging_ to it. Number is the symbol of causal necessity. Like the
conception of God, it contains the ultimate meaning of the world-as-
nature. The existence of numbers may therefore be called a mystery, and
the religious thought of every Culture has felt their impress.[45]
Just as all becoming possesses the original property of _direction_
(irreversibility), all things-become possess the property of
_extension_. But these two words seem unsatisfactory in that only an
artificial distinction can be made between them. The real secret of all
things-become, which are _ipso facto_ things extended (spatially and
materially), is embodied in mathematical number as contrasted with
chronological number. Mathematical number contains in its very essence
the notion of a _mechanical demarcation_, number being in that respect
akin to _word_, which, in the very fact of its comprising and denoting,
fences off world-impressions. The deepest depths, it is true, are here
both incomprehensible and inexpressible. But the actual number with
which the mathematician works, the figure, formula, sign, diagram, in
short the _number-sign which he thinks, speaks or writes exactly_, is
(like the exactly-used word) from the first a symbol of these depths,
something imaginable, communicable, comprehensible to the inner and the
outer eye, which can be accepted as representing the demarcation. The
origin of numbers resembles that of the myth. Primitive man elevates
indefinable nature-impressions (the “alien,” in our terminology) into
deities, _numina_, at the same time capturing and impounding them by a
_name_ which limits them. So also numbers are something that marks off
and captures nature-impressions, and it is by means of names and numbers
that the human understanding obtains power over the world. In the last
analysis, the number-language of a mathematic and the grammar of a
tongue are structurally alike. Logic is always a kind of mathematic and
vice versa. Consequently, in all acts of the intellect germane to
mathematical number—measuring, counting, drawing, weighing, arranging
and dividing[46]—men strive to delimit the extended in words as well,
i.e., to set it forth in the form of proofs, conclusions, theorems and
systems; and it is only through acts of this kind (which may be more or
less unintentioned) that waking man begins to be able to use numbers,
normatively, to specify objects and properties, relations and
differentiæ, unities and pluralities—briefly, that structure of the
world-picture which he feels as necessary and unshakable, calls “Nature”
and “cognizes.” _Nature is the numerable_, while History, on the other
hand, is the aggregate of that which has no relation to mathematics—
hence the mathematical certainty of the laws of Nature, the astounding
rightness of Galileo’s saying that Nature is “written in mathematical
language,” and the fact, emphasized by Kant, that exact natural science
reaches just as far as the possibilities of applied mathematics allow it
to reach. In number, then, as the _sign of completed demarcation_, lies
the _essence_ of everything actual, which is cognized, is delimited, and
has become all at once—as Pythagoras and certain others have been able
to see with complete inward certitude by a mighty and truly religious
intuition. Nevertheless, mathematics—meaning thereby the capacity to
think practically in figures—must not be confused with the far narrower
scientific mathematics, that is, the _theory_ of numbers as developed in
lecture and treatise. The mathematical vision and thought that a Culture
possesses within itself is as inadequately represented by its written
mathematic as its philosophical vision and thought by its philosophical
treatises. Number springs from a source that has also quite other
outlets. Thus at the beginning of every Culture we find an archaic
style, which might fairly have been called geometrical in other cases as
well as the Early Hellenic. There is a common factor which is expressly
mathematical in this early Classical style of the 10th Century B.C., in
the temple style of the Egyptian Fourth Dynasty with its absolutism of
straight line and right angle, in the Early Christian sarcophagus-
relief, and in Romanesque construction and ornament. Here every line,
every deliberately non-imitative figure of man and beast, reveals a
mystic number-thought in direct connexion with the mystery of death (the
hard-set).
Gothic cathedrals and Doric temples are _mathematics in stone_.
Doubtless Pythagoras was the first in the Classical Culture to conceive
number scientifically as the principle of a world-order of
comprehensible things—as _standard_ and as _magnitude_—but even before
him it had found expression, as a noble arraying of sensuous-material
units, in the strict canon of the statue and the Doric order of columns.
The great arts are, one and all, modes of interpretation by means of
limits based on number (consider, for example, the problem of space-
representation in oil painting). A high mathematical endowment may,
without any mathematical science whatsoever, come to fruition and full
self-knowledge in _technical_ spheres.
In the presence of so powerful a number-sense as that evidenced, even in
the Old Kingdom,[47] in the dimensioning of pyramid temples and in the
technique of building, water-control and public administration (not to
mention the calendar), no one surely would maintain that the valueless
arithmetic of Ahmes belonging to the New Empire represents the level of
Egyptian mathematics. The Australian natives, who rank intellectually as
thorough primitives, possess a mathematical instinct (or, what comes to
the same thing, a power of thinking in numbers which is not yet
communicable by signs or words) that as regards the interpretation of
pure space is far superior to that of the Greeks. Their discovery of the
boomerang can only be attributed to their having a sure feeling for
numbers of a class that we should refer to the higher geometry.
_Accordingly_—we shall justify the adverb later—they possess an
extraordinarily complicated ceremonial and, for expressing degrees of
affinity, such fine shades of language as not even the higher Cultures
themselves can show.
There is analogy, again, between the Euclidean mathematic and the
absence, in the Greek of the mature Periclean age, of any feeling either
for ceremonial public life or for loneliness, while the Baroque,
differing sharply from the Classical, presents us with a mathematic of
spatial analysis, a court of Versailles and a state system resting on
dynastic relations.
It is the style of a Soul that comes out in the world of numbers, and
the world of numbers includes something more than the science thereof.
-----
Footnote 45:
See Vol. II, pp. 327 et seq.
Footnote 46:
Also “thinking in money.” See Vol. II, pp. 603 et seq.
Footnote 47:
Dynasties I-VIII, or, effectively, I-VI. The Pyramid period coincides
with Dynasties IV-VI. Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus belong to the IV
dynasty, under which also great water-control works were carried out
between Abydos and the Fayum.—_Tr._
-----
III
From this there follows a fact of decisive importance which has hitherto
been hidden from the mathematicians themselves.
_There is not, and cannot be, number as such._ There are several number-
worlds as there are several Cultures. We find an Indian, an Arabian, a
Classical, a Western type of mathematical thought and, corresponding
with each, a type of number—each type fundamentally peculiar and unique,
an expression of a specific world-feeling, a symbol having a specific
validity which is even capable of scientific definition, a principle of
ordering the Become which reflects the central essence of one and only
one soul, viz., the soul of that particular Culture. Consequently, there
are more mathematics than one. For indubitably the inner structure of
the Euclidean geometry is something quite different from that of the
Cartesian, the analysis of Archimedes is something other than the
analysis of Gauss, and not merely in matters of form, intuition and
method but above all in essence, in the intrinsic and obligatory meaning
of number which they respectively develop and set forth. This number,
the horizon within which it has been able to make phenomena self-
explanatory, and therefore the whole of the “nature” or world-extended
that is confined in the given limits and amenable to its particular sort
of mathematic, are not common to all mankind, but specific in each case
to one definite sort of mankind.
The style of any mathematic which comes into being, then, depends wholly
on the Culture in which it is rooted, the sort of mankind it is that
ponders it. The soul can bring its inherent possibilities to scientific
development, can manage them practically, can attain the highest levels
in its treatment of them—but is quite impotent to alter them. The idea
of the Euclidean geometry is actualized in the earliest forms of
Classical ornament, and that of the Infinitesimal Calculus in the
earliest forms of Gothic architecture, centuries before the first
learned mathematicians of the respective Cultures were born.
A deep inward experience, the genuine _awakening of the ego_, which
turns the child into the higher man and initiates him into community of
his Culture, marks the beginning of number-sense as it does that of
language-sense. It is only after this that objects come to exist for the
waking consciousness as things limitable and distinguishable as to
number and kind; only after this that properties, concepts, causal
necessity, system in the world-around, _a form of the world_, and _world
laws_ (for that which is set and settled is _ipso facto_ bounded,
hardened, number-governed) are susceptible of exact definition. And
therewith comes too a sudden, almost metaphysical, feeling of anxiety
and awe regarding the deeper meaning of measuring and counting, drawing
and form.
Now, Kant has classified the sum of human knowledge according to
syntheses _a priori_ (necessary and universally valid) and _a
posteriori_ (experiential and variable from case to case) and in the
former class has included mathematical knowledge. Thereby, doubtless, he
was enabled to reduce a strong inward feeling to abstract form. But,
quite apart from the fact (amply evidenced in modern mathematics and
mechanics) that there is no such sharp distinction between the two as is
originally and unconditionally implied in the principle, the _a priori_
itself, though certainly one of the most inspired conceptions of
philosophy, is a notion that seems to involve enormous difficulties.
With it Kant postulates—without attempting to prove what is quite
incapable of proof—both _unalterableness of form_ in all intellectual
activity and _identity of form for all men_ in the same. And, in
consequence, a factor of incalculable importance is—thanks to the
intellectual prepossessions of his period, not to mention his own—simply
ignored. This factor is the _varying degree_ of this alleged “universal
validity.” There are doubtless certain characters of very wide-ranging
validity which are (seemingly at any rate) independent of the Culture
and century to which the cognizing individual may belong, but along with
these there is a quite particular necessity of form which underlies all
his thought as axiomatic and to which he is subject by virtue of
belonging to his own Culture and no other. Here, then, we have two very
different kinds of _a priori_ thought-content, and the definition of a
frontier between them, or even the demonstration that such exists, is a
problem that lies beyond all possibilities of knowing and will never be
solved. So far, no one has dared to assume that the supposed constant
structure of the intellect is an illusion and that the history spread
out before us contains more than one _style of knowing_. But we must not
forget that unanimity about things that have not yet become problems may
just as well imply universal error as universal truth. True, there has
always been a certain sense of doubt and obscurity—so much so, that the
correct guess might have been made from that non-agreement of the
philosophers which every glance at the history of philosophy shows us.
But that this non-agreement is not due to imperfections of the human
intellect or present gaps in a perfectible knowledge, in a word, is not
due to defect, but to destiny and historical necessity—this is a
_discovery_. Conclusions on the deep and final things are to be reached
not by predicating constants but by studying differentiæ and developing
the _organic logic_ of differences. The _comparative morphology of
knowledge forms_ is a domain which Western thought has still to attack.
IV
If mathematics were a mere science like astronomy or mineralogy, it
would be possible to define their object. This man is not and never has
been able to do. We West-Europeans may put our own scientific notion of
number to perform the same tasks as those with which the mathematicians
of Athens and Baghdad busied themselves, but the fact remains that the
theme, the intention and the methods of the like-named science in Athens
and in Baghdad were quite different from those of our own. _There is no
mathematic but only mathematics._ What we call “the history of
mathematics”—implying merely the progressive actualizing of a single
invariable ideal—is in fact, below the deceptive surface of history, a
complex of self-contained and independent developments, an ever-repeated
process of bringing to birth new form-worlds and appropriating,
transforming and sloughing alien form-worlds, a purely organic story of
blossoming, ripening, wilting and dying within the set period. The
student must not let himself be deceived. The mathematic of the
Classical soul sprouted almost out of nothingness, the historically-
constituted Western soul, already possessing the Classical science (not
inwardly, but outwardly as a thing learnt), had to win its own by
apparently altering and perfecting, but in reality destroying the
essentially alien Euclidean system. In the first case, the agent was
Pythagoras, in the second Descartes. In both cases the act is, at
bottom, the same.
The relationship between the form-language of a mathematic and that of
the cognate major arts,[48] is in this way put beyond doubt. The
temperament of the thinker and that of the artist differ widely indeed,
but the expression-methods of the waking consciousness are inwardly the
same for each. The sense of form of the sculptor, the painter, the
composer is essentially mathematical in its nature. The same inspired
ordering of an infinite world which manifested itself in the geometrical
analysis and projective geometry of the 17th Century, could vivify,
energize, and suffuse contemporary music with the harmony that it
developed out of the art of thoroughbass, (which is the geometry of the
sound-world) and contemporary painting with the principle of perspective
(the felt geometry of the space-world that only the West knows). This
inspired ordering is that which Goethe called “_The Idea, of which the
form is immediately apprehended in the domain of intuition_, whereas
pure science does not apprehend but observes and dissects.” The
Mathematic goes beyond observation and dissection, and in its highest
moments finds the way by vision, not abstraction. To Goethe again we owe
the profound saying: “the mathematician is only complete in so far as he
feels within himself the _beauty_ of the true.” Here we feel how nearly
the secret of number is related to the secret of artistic creation. And
so the born mathematician takes his place by the side of the great
masters of the fugue, the chisel and the brush; he and they alike
strive, and must strive, to actualize the grand order of all things by
clothing it in symbol and so to communicate it to the plain fellow-man
who hears that order within himself but cannot effectively possess it;
the domain of number, like the domains of tone, line and colour, becomes
an image of the world-form. For this reason the word “creative” means
more in the mathematical sphere than it does in the pure sciences—
Newton, Gauss, and Riemann were artist-natures, and we know with what
suddenness their great conceptions came upon them.[49] “A
mathematician,” said old Weierstrass “who is not at the same time a bit
of a poet will never be a full mathematician.”
The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style-
periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this
matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject
like every art to unnoticed changes from epoch to epoch. The development
of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not
unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics. In the very deep
relation between changes of musical theory and the analysis of the
infinite, the details have never yet been investigated, although
æsthetics might have learned a great deal more from these than from all
so-called “psychology.” Still more revealing would be a history of
musical instruments written, not (as it always is) from the technical
standpoint of tone-production, but as a study of the deep spiritual
bases of the tone-colours and tone-effects aimed at. For it was the
wish, intensified to the point of a longing, to fill a spatial infinity
with sound which produced—in contrast to the Classical lyre and reed
(lyra, kithara; aulos, syrinx) and the Arabian lute—the two great
families of keyboard instruments (organ, pianoforte, etc.) and bow
instruments, and that as early as the Gothic time. The development of
both these families belongs spiritually (and possibly also in point of
technical origin) to the Celtic-Germanic North lying between Ireland,
the Weser and the Seine. The organ and clavichord belong certainly to
England, the bow instruments reached their definite forms in Upper Italy
between 1480 and 1530, while it was principally in Germany that the
organ was developed into the _space-commanding_ giant that we know, an
instrument the like of which does not exist in all musical history. The
free organ-playing of Bach and his time was nothing if it was not
analysis—analysis of a strange and vast tone-world. And, similarly, it
is in conformity with the Western number-thinking, and in opposition to
the Classical, that our string and wind instruments have been developed
not singly but in great groups (strings, woodwind, brass), ordered
within themselves according to the compass of the four human voices; the
history of the modern orchestra, with all its discoveries of new and
modification of old instruments, is in reality the self-contained
history of one tone-world—a world, moreover, that is quite capable of
being expressed in the forms of the higher analysis.
V
When, about 540 B.C., the circle of the Pythagoreans arrived at the idea
that _number is the essence of all things_, it was not “a step in the
development of mathematics” that was made, but a wholly new mathematic
that was born. Long heralded by metaphysical problem-posings and
artistic form-tendencies, now it came forth from the depths of the
Classical soul as a formulated theory, a mathematic born in one act at
one great historical moment—just as the mathematic of the Egyptians had
been, and the algebra-astronomy of the Babylonian Culture with its
ecliptic co-ordinate system—and new—for these older mathematics had long
been extinguished and the Egyptian was never written down. Fulfilled by
the 2nd century A.D., the Classical mathematic vanished in its turn (for
though it seemingly exists even to-day, it is only as a convenience of
notation that it does so), and gave place to the Arabian. From what we
know of the Alexandrian mathematic, it is a necessary presumption that
there was a great movement within the Middle East, of which the centre
of gravity must have lain in the Persian-Babylonian schools (such as
Edessa, Gundisapora and Ctesiphon) and of which only details found their
way into the regions of Classical speech. In spite of their Greek names,
the Alexandrian mathematicians—Zenodorus who dealt with figures of equal
perimeter, Serenus who worked on the properties of a harmonic pencil in
space, Hypsicles who introduced the Chaldean circle-division, Diophantus
above all—were all without doubt Aramæans, and their works only a small
part of a literature which was written principally in Syriac. This
mathematic found its completion in the investigations of the Arabian-
Islamic thinkers, and after these there was again a long interval. And
then a perfectly new mathematic was born, the Western, _our own_, which
in our infatuation we regard as “Mathematics,” as the culmination and
the implicit purpose of two thousand years’ evolution, though in reality
its centuries are (strictly) numbered and to-day almost spent.
The most valuable thing in the Classical mathematic is its proposition
that number is the essence of all things _perceptible to the senses_.
Defining number as a measure, it contains the whole world-feeling of a
soul passionately devoted to the “here” and the “now.” Measurement in
this sense means the measurement of something near and corporeal.
Consider the content of the Classical art-work, say the free-standing
statue of a naked man; here every essential and important element of
Being, its whole rhythm, is exhaustively rendered by surfaces,
dimensions and the sensuous relations of the parts. The Pythagorean
notion of the harmony of numbers, although it was probably deduced from
music—a music, be it noted, that knew not polyphony or harmony, and
formed its instruments to render single plump, almost fleshy, tones—
seems to be the very mould for a sculpture that has this ideal. The
worked stone is only a something in so far as it has considered limits
and measured form; what it _is_ is what it _has become_ under the
sculptor’s chisel. Apart from this it is a _chaos_, something not yet
actualized, in fact for the time being a null. The same feeling
transferred to the grander stage produces, as an opposite to the state
of chaos, that of _cosmos_, which for the Classical soul implies a
cleared-up situation of the external world, a harmonic order which
includes each separate thing as a well-defined, comprehensible and
present entity. The sum of such things constitutes neither more nor less
than the whole world, and the interspaces between them, which for us are
filled with the impressive symbol of the Universe of Space, are for them
the nonent (τὸ μὴ ὅν).
Extension means, for Classical mankind body, and for us space, and it is
as a function of space that, to us, things “appear.” And, looking
backward from this standpoint, we may perhaps see into the deepest
concept of the Classical metaphysics, Anaximander’s ἄπειρον—a word that
is quite untranslatable into any Western tongue. It is that which
possesses no “number” in the Pythagorean sense of the word, no
measurable dimensions or definable limits, and therefore no being; the
measureless, the negation of form, the statue not yet carved out of the
block; the ἀρχὴ optically boundless and formless, which only becomes a
something (namely, the world) after being split up by the senses. It is
the underlying form _a priori_ of Classical cognition, bodiliness as
such, which is replaced exactly in the Kantian world-picture by that
Space out of which Kant maintained that all things could be “thought
forth.”
We can now understand what it is that divides one mathematic from
another, and in particular the Classical from the Western. The whole
world-feeling of the matured Classical world led it to see mathematics
only as the theory of relations of magnitude, dimension and form between
bodies. When, from out of this feeling, Pythagoras evolved and expressed
the decisive formula, number had come, for him, to be an _optical_
symbol—not a measure of form generally, an abstract relation, but a
frontier-post of the domain of the Become, or rather of that part of it
which the senses were able to split up and pass under review. By the
whole Classical world without exception numbers are conceived as units
of measure, as magnitude, lengths, or surfaces, and for it no other sort
of extension is imaginable. The whole Classical mathematic is at bottom
_Stereometry_ (solid geometry). To Euclid, who rounded off its system in
the third century, the triangle is of deep necessity the bounding
surface of a body, never a system of three intersecting straight lines
or a group of three points in three-dimensional space. He defines a line
as “length without breadth” (μῆκος ἀπλατές). In our mouths such a
definition would be pitiful—in the Classical mathematic it was
brilliant.
The Western number, too, is not, as Kant and even Helmholtz thought,
something proceeding out of Time as an _a priori_ form of conception,
but is something specifically spatial, in that it is an order (or
ordering) of like units. Actual time (as we shall see more and more
clearly in the sequel) has not the slightest relation with mathematical
things. Numbers belong exclusively to the domain of extension. But there
are precisely as many possibilities—and therefore necessities—of ordered
presentation of the extended as there are Cultures. Classical number is
a thought-process dealing not with spatial relations but with visibly
limitable and tangible units, and it follows naturally and necessarily
that the Classical knows only the “natural” (positive and whole)
numbers, which on the contrary play in our Western mathematics a quite
undistinguished part in the midst of complex, hypercomplex, non-
Archimedean and other number-systems.
On this account, the idea of irrational numbers—the unending decimal
fractions of our notation—was unrealizable within the Greek spirit.
Euclid says—and he ought to have been better understood—that
incommensurable lines are “_not related to one another like numbers_.”
In fact, it is the idea of irrational number that, once achieved,
separates the notion of number from that of magnitude, for the magnitude
of such a number (π, for example) can never be defined or exactly
represented by any straight line. Moreover, it follows from this that in
considering the relation, say, between diagonal and side in a square the
Greek would be brought up suddenly against a quite other sort of number,
which was fundamentally alien to the Classical soul, and was
consequently feared as a secret of its proper existence too dangerous to
be unveiled. There is a singular and significant late-Greek legend,
according to which the man who first published the hidden mystery of the
irrational perished by shipwreck, “for the unspeakable and the formless
must be left hidden for ever.”[50]
The fear that underlies this legend is the selfsame notion that
prevented even the ripest Greeks from extending their tiny city-states
so as to organize the country-side politically, from laying out their
streets to end in prospects and their alleys to give vistas, that made
them recoil time and again from the Babylonian astronomy with its
penetration of endless starry space,[51] and refuse to venture out of
the Mediterranean along sea-paths long before dared by the Phœnicians
and the Egyptians. It is the deep metaphysical fear that the sense-
comprehensible and present in which the Classical existence had
entrenched itself would collapse and precipitate its cosmos (largely
created and sustained by art) into unknown primitive abysses. And to
understand this fear is to understand the final significance of
Classical number—that is, _measure in contrast to the immeasurable_—and
to grasp the high ethical significance of its limitation. Goethe too, as
a nature-student, felt it—hence his almost terrified aversion to
mathematics, which as we can now see was really an involuntary reaction
against the _non-Classical_ mathematic, the Infinitesimal Calculus which
underlay the natural philosophy of his time.
Religious feeling in Classical man focused itself ever more and more
intensely upon physically present, _localized_ cults which alone
expressed a college of Euclidean deities. Abstractions, _dogmas_
floating homeless in the space of thought, were ever alien to it. A cult
of this kind has as much in common with a Roman Catholic dogma as the
statue has with the cathedral organ. There is no doubt that something of
cult was comprised in the Euclidean mathematic—consider, for instance,
the secret doctrines of the Pythagoreans and the Theorems of regular
polyhedrons with their esoteric significance in the circle of Plato.
Just so, there is a deep relation between Descartes’ analysis of the
infinite and contemporary dogmatic theology as it progressed from the
final decisions of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation to
entirely desensualized deism. Descartes and Pascal were mathematicians
and Jansenists, Leibniz a mathematician and pietist. Voltaire, Lagrange
and D’Alembert were contemporaries. Now, the Classical soul felt the
principle of the irrational, which overturned the statuesquely-ordered
array of whole numbers and the complete and self-sufficing world-order
for which these stood, as an impiety against the Divine itself. In
Plato’s “Timæus” this feeling is unmistakable. For the transformation of
a series of discrete numbers into a continuum challenged not merely the
Classical notion of number but the Classical world-idea itself, and so
it is understandable that even _negative_ numbers, which to us offer no
conceptual difficulty, were impossible in the Classical mathematic, let
alone _zero as a number_, that refined creation of a wonderful
abstractive power which, for the Indian soul that conceived it as base
for a positional numeration, was nothing more nor less than the key to
the meaning of existence. _Negative magnitudes_ have no existence. The
expression -2×-3=+6 is neither something perceivable nor a
representation of magnitude. The series of magnitudes ends with +1, and
in graphic representation of negative numbers
( + 3 + 2 + 1 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 )
— ･ — ･ — ･ ･ — ･ — ･ — ･
we have suddenly, from zero onwards, _positive_ symbols of something
negative; they _mean_ something, but they no longer _are_. But the
fulfilment of this act did not lie within the direction of Classical
number-thinking.
Every product of the waking consciousness of the Classical world, then,
is elevated to the rank of actuality by way of sculptural definition.
That which cannot be drawn is not “number.” Archytas and Eudoxus use the
terms surface- and volume-numbers to mean what we call second and third
powers, and it is easy to understand that the notion of higher integral
powers did not exist for them, for a fourth power would predicate at
once, for the mind based on the plastic feeling, an extension in four
dimensions, and four _material_ dimensions into the bargain, “which is
absurd.” Expressions like ε^{ix} which we constantly use, or even the
fractional index (e.g., 5^½) which is employed in the Western
mathematics as early as Oresme (14th Century), would have been to them
utter nonsense. Euclid calls the factors of a product its sides πλευραί
and fractions (finite of course) were treated as whole-number
relationships between two lines. Clearly, out of this no conception of
zero as a number could possibly come, for from the point of view of a
draughtsman it is meaningless. We, having minds differently constituted,
must not argue from our habits to theirs and treat their mathematic as a
“first stage” in the development of “Mathematics.” Within and for the
purposes of the world that Classical man evolved for himself, the
Classical mathematic was a complete thing—it is merely not so _for us_.
Babylonian and Indian mathematics had long contained, as essential
elements of _their_ number-worlds, things which the Classical number-
feeling regarded as nonsense—and not from ignorance either, since many a
Greek thinker was acquainted with them. It must be repeated,
“Mathematics” is an illusion. A mathematical, and, generally, a
scientific way of thinking is right, convincing, a “necessity of
thought,” when it completely expresses the life-feeling proper to it.
Otherwise it is either impossible, futile and senseless, or else, as we
in the arrogance of our historical soul like to say, “primitive.” The
modern mathematic, though “true” only for the Western spirit, is
undeniably a master-work of that spirit; and yet to Plato it would have
seemed a ridiculous and painful aberration from the path leading to the
“true”—to wit, the Classical—mathematic. And so with ourselves. Plainly,
we have almost no notion of the multitude of great ideas belonging to
other Cultures that we have suffered to lapse because _our_ thought with
its limitations has not permitted us to assimilate them, or (which comes
to the same thing) has led us to reject them as false, superfluous, and
nonsensical.
VI
The Greek mathematic, as a science of perceivable magnitudes,
deliberately confines itself to facts of the comprehensibly present, and
limits its researches and their validity to the near and the small. As
compared with this impeccable consistency, the position of the Western
mathematic is seen to be, practically, somewhat illogical, though it is
only since the discovery of Non-Euclidean Geometry that the fact has
been really recognized. Numbers are images of the perfectly
desensualized understanding, of pure thought, and contain their abstract
validity within themselves.[52] Their exact application to the actuality
of conscious experience is therefore a problem in itself—a problem which
is always being posed anew and never solved—and the congruence of
mathematical system with empirical observation is at present anything
but self-evident. Although the lay idea—as found in Schopenhauer—is that
mathematics rest upon the direct evidences of the senses, Euclidean
geometry, superficially identical though it is with the popular geometry
of all ages, is only in agreement with the phenomenal world
approximately and within very narrow limits—in fact, the limits of a
drawing-board. Extend these limits, and what becomes, for instance, of
Euclidean parallels? They meet at the line of the horizon—a simple fact
upon which all our art-perspective is grounded.
Now, it is unpardonable that Kant, a Western thinker, should have evaded
the mathematic of distance, and appealed to a set of figure-examples
that their mere pettiness excludes from treatment by the specifically
Western infinitesimal methods. But Euclid, as a thinker of the Classical
age, was entirely consistent with its spirit when he refrained from
proving the phenomenal truth of his axioms by referring to, say, the
triangle formed by an observer and two infinitely distant fixed stars.
For these can neither be drawn nor “intuitively apprehended” and his
feeling was precisely the feeling which shrank from the irrationals,
which did not dare to give nothingness a value as zero (i.e., a number)
and even in the contemplation of cosmic relations shut its eyes to the
Infinite and held to its symbol of Proportion.
Aristarchus of Samos, who in 288-277 belonged to a circle of astronomers
at Alexandria that doubtless had relations with Chaldaeo-Persian
schools, projected the elements of a heliocentric world-system.[53]
Rediscovered by Copernicus, it was to shake the metaphysical passions of
the West to their foundations—witness Giordano Bruno[54]—to become the
fulfilment of mighty premonitions, and to justify that Faustian, Gothic
world-feeling which had already professed its faith in infinity through
the forms of its cathedrals. But the world of Aristarchus received his
work with entire indifference and in a brief space of time it was
forgotten—designedly, we may surmise. His few followers were nearly all
natives of Asia Minor, his most prominent supporter Seleucus (about 150)
being from the Persian Seleucia on Tigris. In fact, the Aristarchian
system had no spiritual appeal to the Classical Culture and might indeed
have become dangerous to it. And yet it was differentiated from the
Copernican (a point always missed) by something which made it perfectly
conformable to the Classical world-feeling, viz., the assumption that
the cosmos is _contained_ in a materially finite and optically
appreciable _hollow sphere_, in the middle of which the planetary
system, arranged as such on Copernican lines, moved. In the Classical
astronomy, the earth and the heavenly bodies are consistently regarded
as entities of two different kinds, however variously their movements in
detail might be interpreted. Equally, the opposite idea that the earth
is _only a star among stars_[55] is not inconsistent in itself with
either the Ptolemaic or the Copernican systems and in fact was pioneered
by Nicolaus Cusanus and Leonardo da Vinci. But by this device of a
celestial sphere the principle of infinity which would have endangered
the sensuous-Classical notion of bounds was smothered. One would have
supposed that the infinity-conception was inevitably implied by the
system of Aristarchus—long before his time, the Babylonian thinkers had
reached it. But no such thought emerges. On the contrary, in the famous
treatise on the grains of sand[56] Archimedes proves that the filling of
this stereometric body (for that is what Aristarchus’s Cosmos is, after
all) with atoms of sand leads to very high, but _not_ to infinite,
figure-results. This proposition, quoted though it may be, time and
again, as being a first step towards the Integral Calculus, amounts to a
denial (implicit indeed in the very title) of everything that we mean by
the word analysis. Whereas in our physics, the constantly-surging
hypotheses of a material (i.e., directly cognizable) æther, break
themselves one after the other against our refusal to acknowledge
material limitations of any kind, Eudoxus, Apollonius and Archimedes,
certainly the keenest and boldest of the Classical mathematicians,
completely worked out, in the main with rule and compass, a _purely
optical_ analysis of things-become on the basis of sculptural-Classical
bounds. They used deeply-thought-out (and for us hardly understandable)
methods of integration, but these possess only a superficial resemblance
even to Leibniz’s definite-integral method. They employed geometrical
loci and co-ordinates, but these are always specified lengths and units
of measurement and never, as in Fermat and above all in Descartes,
unspecified spatial relations, values of points in terms of their
positions in space. With these methods also should be classed the
exhaustion-method of Archimedes,[57] given by him in his recently
discovered letter to Eratosthenes on such subjects as the quadrature of
the parabola section by means of inscribed rectangles (instead of
through similar polygons). But the very subtlety and extreme
complication of his methods, which are grounded in certain of Plato’s
geometrical ideas, make us realize, in spite of superficial analogies,
what an enormous difference separates him from Pascal. Apart altogether
from the idea of Riemann’s integral, what sharper contrast could there
be to these ideas than the so-called quadratures of to-day? The name
itself is now no more than an unfortunate survival, the “surface” is
indicated by a bounding function, and the _drawing_ as such, has
vanished. Nowhere else did the two mathematical minds approach each
other more closely than in this instance, and nowhere is it more evident
that the gulf between the two souls thus expressing themselves is
impassable.
In the cubic style of their early architecture the Egyptians, so to say,
concealed pure numbers, fearful of stumbling upon their secret, and for
the Hellenes too they were the key to the meaning of the become, the
stiffened, the mortal. The stone statue and the scientific system deny
life. Mathematical number, the formal principle of an extension-world of
which the phenomenal existence is only the derivative and servant of
waking human consciousness, bears the hall-mark of causal necessity and
so is linked with _death_ as chronological number is with becoming, with
_life_, with the necessity of destiny. This connexion of strict
mathematical form with the _end_ of organic being, with the phenomenon
of its organic remainder the corpse, we shall see more and more clearly
to be the origin of all great art. We have already noticed the
development of early ornament on funerary equipments and receptacles.
_Numbers are symbols of the mortal._ Stiff forms are the negation of
life, formulas and laws spread rigidity over the face of nature, numbers
make dead—and the “Mothers” of Faust II sit enthroned, majestic and
withdrawn, in
“The realms of Image unconfined.
... Formation, transformation,
Eternal play of the eternal mind
With semblances of all things in creation
For ever and for ever sweeping round.”[58]
Goethe draws very near to Plato in this divination of one of the final
secrets. For his unapproachable Mothers are Plato’s Ideas—the
possibilities of a spirituality, the unborn forms to be realized as
active and purposed Culture, as art, thought, polity and religion, in a
world ordered and determined by that spirituality. And so the number-
thought and the world-idea of a Culture are related, and by this
relation, the former is elevated above mere knowledge and experience and
becomes a view of the universe, there being consequently as many
mathematics—as many number-worlds—as there are higher Cultures. Only so
can we understand, as something _necessary_, the fact that the greatest
mathematical thinkers, the creative artists of the realm of numbers,
have been brought to the decisive mathematical discoveries of their
several Cultures by a deep religious intuition.
Classical, Apollinian number we must regard as the creation of
Pythagoras—_who founded a religion_. It was an instinct that guided
Nicolaus Cusanus, the great Bishop of Brixen (about 1450), from the idea
of the unendingness of God in nature to the elements of the
Infinitesimal Calculus. Leibniz himself, who two centuries later
definitely settled the methods and notation of the Calculus, was led by
purely metaphysical speculations about the divine principle and its
relation to infinite extent to conceive and develop the notion of an
_analysis situs_—probably the most inspired of all interpretations of
pure and emancipated space—the possibilities of which were to be
developed later by Grassmann in his _Ausdehnungslehre_ and above all by
Riemann, their real creator, in his symbolism of two-sided planes
representative of the nature of equations. And Kepler and Newton,
strictly religious natures both, were and remained convinced, like
Plato, that it was precisely through the medium of number that they had
been able to apprehend intuitively the essence of the divine world-
order.
VII
The Classical arithmetic, we are always told, was first liberated from
its sense-bondage, widened and extended by Diophantus, who did not
indeed create algebra (the science of undefined magnitudes) but brought
it to expression within the framework of the Classical mathematic that
we know—and so suddenly that we have to assume that there was a pre-
existent stock of ideas which he worked out. But this amounts, not to an
enrichment of, but a complete victory over, the Classical world-feeling,
and the mere fact should have sufficed in itself to show that, inwardly,
Diophantus does not belong to the Classical Culture at all. What is
active in him is a new number-feeling, or let us say a new limit-feeling
with respect to the actual and become, and no longer that Hellenic
feeling of sensuously-present limits which had produced the Euclidean
geometry, the nude statue and the coin. Details of the formation of this
new mathematic we do not know—Diophantus stands so completely by himself
in the history of so-called late-Classical mathematics that an Indian
influence has been presumed. But here also the influence it must really
have been that of those early-Arabian schools whose studies (apart from
the dogmatic) have hitherto been so imperfectly investigated. In
Diophantus, unconscious though he may be of his own essential antagonism
to the Classical foundations on which he attempted to build, there
emerges from under the surface of Euclidean _intention_ the new limit-
_feeling_ which I designate the “Magian.” He did not widen the idea of
number as magnitude, but (unwittingly) eliminated it. No Greek could
have stated anything about an _undefined_ number _a_ or an
_undenominated_ number 3—which are neither magnitudes nor lines—whereas
the new limit-feeling sensibly expressed by numbers of this sort at
least underlay, if it did not constitute, Diophantine treatment; and the
letter-notation which we employ to clothe our own (again transvalued)
algebra was first introduced by Vieta in 1591, an unmistakable, if
unintended, protest against the classicizing tendency of Renaissance
mathematics.
Diophantus lived about 250 A.D., _that is, in the third century of that
Arabian Culture_ whose organic history, till now smothered under the
surface-forms of the Roman Empire and the “Middle Ages,”[59] comprises
everything that happened after the beginning of our era in the region
that was later to be Islam’s. It was precisely in the time of Diophantus
that the last shadow of the Attic statuary art paled before the new
space-sense of cupola, mosaic and sarcophagus-relief that we have in the
Early-Christian-Syrian style. In that time there was once more _archaic_
art and strictly geometrical ornament; and at that time too Diocletian
completed the transformation of the now merely sham Empire into a
Caliphate. The four centuries that separate Euclid and Diophantus,
separate also Plato and Plotinus—the last and conclusive thinker, the
Kant, of a fulfilled Culture and the first schoolman, the Duns Scotus,
of a Culture just awakened.
It is here that we are made aware for the first time of the existence of
those higher individualities whose coming, growth and decay constitute
the _real substance of history_ underlying the myriad colours and
changes of the surface. The Classical spirituality, which reached its
final phase in the cold intelligence of the Romans and of which the
whole Classical Culture with all its works, thoughts, deeds and ruins
forms the “body,” had been born about 1100 B.C. in the country about the
Ægean Sea. The Arabian Culture, which, under cover of the Classical
Civilization, had been germinating in the East since Augustus, came
wholly out of the region between Armenia and Southern Arabia, Alexandria
and Ctesiphon, and we have to consider as expressions of this new soul
almost the whole “late-Classical” art of the Empire, all the young
ardent religions of the East—Mandæanism, Manichæism, Christianity, Neo-
Platonism, and in Rome itself, as well as the Imperial Fora, that
Pantheon which is the _first of all mosques_.
That Alexandria and Antioch still wrote in Greek and imagined that they
were thinking in Greek is a fact of no more importance than the facts
that Latin was the scientific language of the West right up to the time
of Kant and that Charlemagne “renewed” the Roman Empire.
In Diophantus, number has ceased to be the measure and essence of
_plastic things_. In the Ravennate mosaics man has ceased to be a
_body_. Unnoticed, Greek designations have lost their original
connotations. We have left the realm of Attic καλοκάγαθία the Stoic
ἀταραξία and γαλήνη. Diophantus does not yet know zero and negative
numbers, it is true, but he has _ceased_ to know Pythagorean numbers.
And this Arabian indeterminateness of number is, in its turn, something
quite different from the controlled variability of the later Western
mathematics, the variability of the _function_.
The Magian mathematic—we can see the outline, though we are ignorant of
the details—advanced through Diophantus (who is obviously not a
starting-point) boldly and logically to a culmination in the Abbassid
period (9th century) that we can appreciate in Al-Khwarizmi and
Alsidzshi. And as Euclidean geometry is to Attic statuary (the same
expression-form in a different medium) and the analysis of space to
polyphonic music, so this algebra is to the Magian art with its mosaic,
its arabesque (which the Sassanid Empire and later Byzantium produced
with an ever-increasing profusion and luxury of tangible-intangible
organic motives) and its Constantinian high-relief in which uncertain
deep-darks divide the freely-handled figures of the foreground. As
algebra is to Classical arithmetic and Western analysis, so is the
cupola-church to the Doric temple and the Gothic cathedral. It is not as
though Diophantus were one of the great mathematicians. On the contrary,
much of what we have been accustomed to associate with his name is not
his work alone. His accidental importance lies in the fact that, so far
as our knowledge goes, he was the first mathematician in whom the new
number-feeling is unmistakably present. In comparison with the masters
who _conclude_ the development of a mathematic—with Apollonius and
Archimedes, with Gauss, Cauchy, Riemann—Diophantus has, in his form-
language especially, something _primitive_. This something, which till
now we have been pleased to refer to “late-Classical” decadence, we
shall presently learn to understand and value, just as we are revising
our ideas as to the despised “late-Classical” art and beginning to see
in it the tentative expression of the nascent Early Arabian Culture.
Similarly archaic, primitive, and groping was the mathematic of Nicolas
Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux (1323-1382),[60] who was the first Western who
used co-ordinates so to say elastically[61] and, more important still,
to employ fractional powers—both of which presuppose a number-feeling,
obscure it may be but quite unmistakable, which is completely non-
Classical and _also_ non-Arabic. But if, further, we think of Diophantus
together with the early-Christian sarcophagi of the Roman collections,
and of Oresme together with the Gothic wall-statuary of the German
cathedrals, we see that the mathematicians as well as the artists have
something in common, which is, that they stand in their respective
Cultures at _the same_ (viz., the primitive) level of abstract
understanding. In the world and age of Diophantus the stereometric sense
of bounds, which had long ago reached in Archimedes the last stages of
refinement and elegance proper to the megalopolitan intelligence, had
passed away. Throughout that world men were unclear, longing, mystic,
and no longer bright and free in the Attic way; they were men rooted in
the earth of a young country-side, not megalopolitans like Euclid and
D’Alembert.[62] They no longer understood the deep and complicated forms
of the Classical thought, and their own were confused and new, far as
yet from urban clarity and tidiness. Their Culture was in the _Gothic_
condition, as all Cultures have been in their youth—as even the
Classical was in the early Doric period which is known to us now only by
its Dipylon pottery. Only in Baghdad and in the 9th and 10th Centuries
were the young ideas of the age of Diophantus carried through to
completion by ripe masters of the calibre of Plato and Gauss.
-----
Footnote 48:
As also those of law and of money. See Vol. II, pp. 68 et seq., pp.
616 et seq.
Footnote 49:
Poincaré in his _Science et Méthode_ (Ch. III), searchingly analyses
the “becoming” of one of his own mathematical discoveries. Each
decisive stage in it bears “_les mêmes caractères de brièveté, de
soudaineté et de certitude absolue_” and in most cases this
“_certitude_” was such that he merely registered the discovery and put
off its working-out to any convenient season.—_Tr._
Footnote 50:
One may be permitted to add that according to legend, both Hippasus
who took to himself public credit for the discovery of a sphere of
twelve pentagons, viz., the regular dodecahedron (regarded by the
Pythagoreans as the quintessence—or æther—of a world of real
tetrahedrons, octahedrons, icosahedrons and cubes), and Archytas the
eighth successor of the Founder are reputed to have been drowned at
sea. The pentagon from which this dodecahedron is derived, itself
involves incommensurable numbers. The “pentagram” was the recognition
badge of Pythagoreans and the ἄλογον (incommensurable) their special
secret. It would be noted, too, that Pythagoreanism was popular till
its initiates were found to be dealing in these alarming and
subversive doctrines, and then they were suppressed and lynched—a
persecution which suggests more than one deep analogy with certain
heresy-suppressions of Western history. The English student may be
referred to G. J. Allman, _Greek Geometry from Thales to Euclid_
(Cambridge, 1889), and to his articles “Pythagoras,” “Philolaus” and
“Archytas” in the _Ency. Brit._, XI Edition.—_Tr._
Footnote 51:
Horace’s words (Odes I xi): “Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas, quem mihi
quem tibi finem di dederint, Leuconoë, _nec Babylonios temptaris
numeros_ ... carpe diem, _quam minimum credula postero_.”—_Tr._
Footnote 52:
See Vol. II, pp. 11 et seq.
Footnote 53:
In the only writing of his that survives, indeed, Aristarchus
maintains the geocentric view; it may be presumed therefore that it
was only temporarily that he let himself be captivated by a hypothesis
of the Chaldaean learning.
Footnote 54:
Giordano Bruno (born 1548, burned for heresy 1600). His whole life
might be expressed as a crusade on behalf of God and the Copernican
universe against a degenerated orthodoxy and an Aristotelian world-
idea long coagulated in death.—_Tr._
Footnote 55:
F. Strunz, _Gesch. d. Naturwiss. im Mittelalter_ (1910), p. 90.
Footnote 56:
In the “Psammites,” or “Arenarius,” Archimedes framed a numerical
notation which was to be capable of expressing the number of grains of
sand _in a sphere of the size of our universe_.—_Tr._
Footnote 57:
This, for which the ground had been prepared by Eudoxus, was employed
for calculating the volume of pyramids and cones: “the means whereby
the Greeks were able _to evade_ the forbidden notion of infinity”
(Heiberg, _Naturwiss. u. Math. i. Klass. Alter._ [1912], p. 27).
Footnote 58:
Dr. Anster’s translation.—_Tr._
Footnote 59:
See Vol. II, Chapter III.
Footnote 60:
Oresme was, equally, prelate, church reformer, scholar, scientist and
economist—the very type of the philosopher-leader.—_Tr._
Footnote 61:
Oresme in his _Latitudines Formarum_ used ordinate and abscissa, not
indeed to specify numerically, but certainly to describe, change,
i.e., fundamentally, to express functions.—_Tr._
Footnote 62:
Alexandria ceased to be a world-city in the second century A.D. and
became a collection of houses left over from the Classical
civilization which harboured a primitive population of quite different
spiritual constitution. See Vol. II, pp. 122 et seq.
-----
VIII
The decisive act of Descartes, whose geometry appeared in 1637,
consisted not in the introduction of a new method or idea in the domain
of traditional geometry (as we are so frequently told), but in the
definitive conception of _a new number-idea_, which conception was
expressed in the emancipation of geometry from servitude to optically-
realizable constructions and to measured and measurable lines generally.
With that, the analysis of the infinite became a fact. The rigid, so-
called Cartesian, system of co-ordinates—a semi-Euclidean method of
ideally representing measurable magnitudes—had long been known (witness
Oresme) and regarded as of high importance, and when we get to the
bottom of Descartes’ thought we find that what he did was not to round
off the system but to overcome it. Its last historic representative was
Descartes’ contemporary Fermat.[63]
In place of the sensuous element of concrete lines and planes—the
specific character of the Classical feeling of bounds—there emerged the
abstract, spatial, un-Classical element of the _point_ which from then
on was regarded as a group of co-ordered pure numbers. The idea of
magnitude and of perceivable dimension derived from Classical texts and
Arabian traditions was destroyed and replaced by that of variable
relation-values between positions in space. It is not in general
realized that this amounted to the _supersession of geometry_, which
thenceforward enjoyed only a fictitious existence behind a façade of
Classical tradition. The word “geometry” has an inextensible Apollinian
meaning, and from the time of Descartes what is called the “new
geometry” is made up in part of synthetic work upon the _position_ of
_points_ in a space which is no longer necessarily three-dimensional (a
“manifold of points”), and in part of analysis, in which numbers are
defined through point-positions in space. And this replacement of
lengths by positions carries with it a purely spatial, and no longer a
material, conception of extension.
The clearest example of this destruction of the inherited optical-finite
geometry seems to me to be the conversion of angular functions—which in
the Indian mathematic had been numbers (in a sense of the word that is
hardly accessible to our minds)—into _periodic_ functions, and their
passage thence into an infinite number-realm, in which they become
series and not the smallest trace remains of the Euclidean figure. In
all parts of that realm the circle-number π, like the Napierian base ε,
generates relations of all sorts which obliterate all the old
distinctions of geometry, trigonometry and algebra, which are neither
arithmetical nor geometrical in their nature, and in which no one any
longer dreams of actually drawing circles or working out powers.
-----
Footnote 63:
Born 1601, died 1665. See Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article _Fermat_, and
references therein.—_Tr._
-----
IX
At the moment exactly corresponding to that at which (c. 540) the
Classical Soul in the person of Pythagoras discovered its own proper
Apollinian number, the measurable magnitude, the Western soul in the
persons of Descartes and his generation (Pascal, Fermat, Desargues)
discovered a notion of number that was the child of a passionate
_Faustian_ tendency towards the infinite. Number as _pure magnitude_
inherent in the material presentness of things is paralleled by numbers
as _pure relation_,[64] and if we may characterize the Classical
“world,” the cosmos, as being based on a deep need of visible limits and
composed accordingly as a sum of material things, so we may say that our
world-picture is an actualizing of an infinite space in which things
visible appear very nearly as realities of a lower order, limited in the
presence of the illimitable. The symbol of the West is an idea of which
no other Culture gives even a hint, the idea of _Function_. The function
is anything rather than an expansion of, it is complete emancipation
from, any pre-existent idea of number. With the function, not only the
Euclidean geometry (and with it the common human geometry of children
and laymen, based on everyday experience) but also the Archimedean
arithmetic, ceased to have any value for the really _significant_
mathematic of Western Europe. Henceforward, this consisted solely in
abstract analysis. For Classical man geometry and arithmetic were self-
contained and complete sciences of the highest rank, both phenomenal and
both concerned with magnitudes that could be drawn or numbered. For us,
on the contrary, those things are only practical auxiliaries of daily
life. Addition and multiplication, the two Classical methods of
reckoning magnitudes, have, like their sister geometrical-drawing,
utterly vanished in the infinity of functional processes. Even the
power, which in the beginning denotes numerically a set of
multiplications (products of equal magnitudes), is, through the
exponential idea (logarithm) and its employment in complex, negative and
fractional forms, dissociated from all connexion with magnitude and
transferred to a transcendent relational world which the Greeks, knowing
only the two positive whole-number powers that represent areas and
volumes, were unable to approach. Think, for instance, of expressions
like ε^{-x}, ^π√x, α^{1⁄i}.
Every one of the significant creations which succeeded one another so
rapidly from the Renaissance onward—imaginary and complex numbers,
introduced by Cardanus as early as 1550; infinite series, established
theoretically by Newton’s great discovery of the binomial theorem in
1666; the differential geometry, the definite integral of Leibniz; the
aggregate as a new number-unit, hinted at even by Descartes; new
processes like those of general integrals; the expansion of functions
into series and even into infinite series of other functions—is a
victory over the popular and sensuous number-feeling in us, a victory
which the new mathematic had to win in order to make the new world-
feeling actual.
In all history, so far, there is no second example of one Culture paying
to another Culture long extinguished such reverence and submission in
matters of science as ours has paid to the Classical. It was very long
before we found courage to think our proper thought. But though the wish
to emulate the Classical was constantly present, every step of the
attempt took us in reality further away from the imagined ideal. The
history of Western knowledge is thus one of _progressive emancipation_
from Classical thought, an emancipation never willed but enforced in the
depths of the unconscious. _And so the development of the new mathematic
consists of a long, secret and finally victorious battle against the
notion of magnitude._[65]
-----
Footnote 64:
Similarly, coinage and double-entry book-keeping play analogous parts
in the money-thinking of the Classical and the Western Cultures
respectively. See Vol. II, pp. 610 et seq.
Footnote 65:
The same may be said in the matter of Roman Law (see Vol. II, pp. 96
et seq.) and of coinage (see Vol. II, pp. 616 et seq.).
-----
X
One result of this Classicizing tendency has been to prevent us from
finding the new notation proper to our Western number as such. The
present-day sign-language of mathematics perverts its real content. It
is principally owing to that tendency that the belief in numbers as
magnitudes still rules to-day even amongst mathematicians, for is it not
the base of all our written notation?
But it is not the separate signs (e.g., χ, π, ς) serving to express the
functions _but the function itself as unit_, as element, the variable
relation no longer capable of being optically defined, that constitutes
the new number; and this new number should have demanded a new notation
built up with entire disregard of Classical influences. Consider the
difference between two equations (if the same word can be used of two
such dissimilar things) such as 3^x + 4^x = 5^x and x^n + y^n = z^n (the
equation of Fermat’s theorem). The first consists of several Classical
numbers—i.e., magnitudes—but the second is _one number_ of a different
sort, veiled by being written down according to Euclidean-Archimedean
tradition in the identical form of the first. In the first case, the
sign = establishes a rigid connexion between definite and tangible
magnitudes, but in the second it states that within a domain of variable
images there exists a relation such that from certain alterations
certain other alterations necessarily follow. The first equation has as
its aim the specification by measurement of a concrete magnitude, viz.,
a “result,” while the second has, in general, no result but is simply
the picture and sign of a relation which for n>2 (this is the famous
Fermat problem[66]) _can probably be shown to_ exclude integers. A Greek
mathematician would have found it quite impossible to understand the
purport of an operation like this, which was not meant to be “worked
out.”
As applied to the letters in Fermat’s equation, the notion of the
unknown is completely misleading. In the first equation _x_ is a
magnitude, defined and measurable, which it is our business to compute.
In the second, the word “defined” has no meaning at all for _x_, _y_,
_z_, _n_, and consequently we do not attempt to compute their “values.”
Hence they are not numbers at all in the plastic sense but signs
representing a connexion that is destitute of the hallmarks of
magnitude, shape and unique meaning, an infinity of possible positions
of like character, an ensemble unified and so attaining existence as a
_number_. The whole equation, though written in our unfortunate notation
as a plurality of terms, is actually _one single_ number, _x_, _y_, _z_
being no more numbers than + and = are.
In fact, directly the essentially anti-Hellenic idea of the irrationals
is introduced, the foundations of the idea of number as concrete and
definite collapse. Thenceforward, the series of such numbers is no
longer a visible row of increasing, discrete, numbers capable of plastic
embodiment but a unidimensional _continuum_ in which each “cut” (in
Dedekind’s sense) represents a number. Such a number is already
difficult to reconcile with Classical number, for the Classical
mathematic knows only _one_ number between 1 and 3, whereas for the
Western the totality of such numbers is an infinite aggregate. But when
we introduce further the imaginary (√-1 or _i_) and finally the complex
numbers (general form _a_ + _bi_), the linear continuum is broadened
into the highly transcendent form of a number-body, i.e., the content of
an aggregate of homogeneous elements in which a “cut” now stands for a
number-surface containing an infinite aggregate of numbers of a lower
“potency” (for instance, all the real numbers), and there remains not a
trace of number in the Classical and popular sense. These number-
surfaces, which since Cauchy and Riemann have played an important part
in the theory of functions, are _pure thought-pictures_. Even positive
irrational number (e.g., √2) could be conceived in a sort of negative
fashion by Classical minds; they had, in fact, enough idea of it to ban
it as ἄῤῥητος and ἄλογος. But expressions of the form _x_ + _yi_ lie
beyond every possibility of comprehension by Classical thought, whereas
it is on the extension of the mathematical laws over the whole region of
the complex numbers, within which these laws remain operative, that we
have built up the function theory which has at last exhibited the
Western mathematic in all purity and unity. Not until that point was
reached could this mathematic be unreservedly brought to bear in the
parallel sphere of our _dynamic_ Western physics; for the Classical
mathematic was fitted precisely to its own stereometric world of
individual objects and to _static_ mechanics as developed from Leucippus
to Archimedes.
The brilliant period of the Baroque mathematic—the counterpart of the
Ionian—lies substantially in the 18th Century and extends from the
decisive discoveries of Newton and Leibniz through Euler, Lagrange,
Laplace and D’Alembert to Gauss. Once this immense creation found wings,
its rise was miraculous. Men hardly dared believe their senses. The age
of refined scepticism witnessed the emergence of one seemingly
impossible truth after another.[67] Regarding the theory of the
differential coefficient, D’Alembert had to say: “Go forward, and faith
will come to you.” Logic itself seemed to raise objections and to prove
foundations fallacious. But the goal was reached.
This century was a very carnival of abstract and immaterial thinking, in
which the great masters of analysis and, with them, Bach, Gluck, Haydn
and Mozart—a small group of rare and deep intellects—revelled in the
most refined discoveries and speculations, from which Goethe and Kant
remained aloof; and in point of content it is exactly paralleled by the
ripest century of the Ionic, the century of Eudoxus and Archytas (440-
350) and, we may add, of Phidias, Polycletus, Alcamenes and the
Acropolis buildings—in which the form-world of Classical mathematic and
sculpture displayed the whole fullness of its possibilities, and so
ended.
And now for the first time it is possible to comprehend in full the
elemental opposition of the Classical and the Western souls. In the
whole panorama of history, innumerable and intense as historical
relations are, we find no two things so fundamentally alien to one
another as these. And it is because extremes meet—because it may be
there is some deep common origin behind their divergence—that we find in
the Western Faustian soul this yearning effort towards the Apollinian
ideal, the only alien ideal which we have loved and, for its power of
intensely living in the pure sensuous present, have envied.
XI
We have already observed that, like a child, a primitive mankind
acquires (as part of the inward experience that is the birth of the ego)
an understanding of number and _ipso facto_ possession of an external
world referred to the ego. As soon as the primitive’s astonished eye
perceives the dawning world of _ordered_ extension, and the
_significant_ emerges in great outlines from the welter of mere
impressions, and the irrevocable parting of the outer world from his
proper, his inner, world gives form and direction to his waking life,
there arises in the soul—instantly conscious of its loneliness—the root-
feeling of _longing_ (Sehnsucht). It is this that urges “becoming”
towards its goal, that motives the fulfilment and actualizing of every
inward possibility, that unfolds the idea of individual being. It is the
child’s longing, which will presently come into the consciousness more
and more clearly as a feeling of constant _direction_ and finally stand
before the mature spirit as the _enigma of Time_—queer, tempting,
insoluble. Suddenly, the words “past” and “future” have acquired a
fateful meaning.
But this longing which wells out of the bliss of the inner life is also,
in the intimate essence of every soul, a _dread_ as well. As all
becoming moves towards a having-become wherein it _ends_, so the prime
feeling of becoming—the longing—touches the prime feeling of having-
become, the dread. In the present we feel a trickling-away, the past
implies a passing. Here is the root of our eternal dread of the
irrevocable, the attained, the final—our dread of mortality, of the
world itself as a thing-become, where death is set as a frontier like
birth—our dread in the moment when the possible is actualized, the life
is inwardly fulfilled and consciousness stands at its _goal_. It is the
deep world-fear of the child—which never leaves the higher man, the
believer, the poet, the artist—that makes him so infinitely lonely in
the presence of the alien powers that loom, threatening in the dawn,
behind the screen of sense-phenomena. The element of direction, too,
which is inherent in all “becoming,” is felt owing to its inexorable
_irreversibility_ to be something alien and hostile, and the human will-
to-understanding ever seeks to bind the inscrutable by the spell of a
name. It is something beyond comprehension, this transformation of
future into past, and thus time, in its contrast with space, has always
a queer, baffling, oppressive ambiguity from which no serious man can
wholly protect himself.
This world-fear is assuredly the most _creative_ of all prime feelings.
Man owes to it the ripest and deepest forms and images, not only of his
conscious inward life, but also of the infinitely-varied external
culture which reflects this life. Like a secret melody that not every
ear can perceive, it runs through the form-language of every true art-
work, every inward philosophy, every important deed, and, although those
who can perceive it in that domain are the very few, it lies at the root
of the great problems of mathematics. Only the spiritually dead man of
the autumnal cities—Hammurabi’s Babylon, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Islamic
Baghdad, Paris and Berlin to-day—only the pure intellectual, the
sophist, the sensualist, the Darwinian, loses it or is able to evade it
by setting up a secretless “scientific world-view” between himself and
the alien. As the longing attaches itself to that impalpable something
whose thousand-formed elusive manifestations are comprised in, rather
than denoted by, the word “time,” so the other prime feeling, dread,
finds its expression in the intellectual, understandable, outlinable
symbols of _extension_; and thus we find that every Culture is aware
(each in its own special way) of an opposition of time and space, of
direction and extension, the former underlying the latter as becoming
precedes having-become. It is the longing that underlies the dread,
_becomes_ the dread, and not vice versa. The one is not subject to the
intellect, the other is its servant. The rôle of the one is purely to
experience, that of the other purely to know (erleben, erkennen). In the
Christian language, the opposition of the two world-feelings is
expressed by: “Fear God and love Him.”
In the soul of all primitive mankind, just as in that of earliest
childhood, there is something which impels it to find means of dealing
with the alien powers of the extension-world that assert themselves,
inexorable, in and through space. To bind, to bridle, to placate, to
“know” are all, in the last analysis, the same thing. In the mysticism
of all primitive periods, to _know God_ means to conjure him, to make
him favourable, to _appropriate_ him inwardly. This is achieved,
principally, by means of a word, the Name—the “nomen” which designates
and _calls up_ the “numen”—and also by ritual practices of secret
potency; and the subtlest, as well as the most powerful, form of this
defence is causal and systematic knowledge, delimitation by label and
number. In this respect man only becomes wholly man when he has acquired
_language_. When cognition has ripened to the point of words, the
original chaos of _impressions_ necessarily transforms itself into a
“Nature” that has laws and must obey them, and the world-in-itself
becomes a world-for-us.[68]
The world-fear is stilled when an intellectual form-language hammers out
brazen vessels in which the mysterious is captured and made
comprehensible. This is the _idea_ of “_taboo_,”[69] which plays a
decisive part in the spiritual life of all primitive men, though the
original content of the word lies so far from us that it is incapable of
translation into any ripe culture-language. Blind terror, religious awe,
deep loneliness, melancholy, hate, obscure impulses to draw near, to be
merged, to escape—all those _formed_ feelings of mature souls are in the
childish condition blurred in a monotonous indecision. The two senses of
the word “conjure” (verschwören), meaning to bind and to implore at
once, may serve to make clear the sense of the mystical process by which
for primitive man the formidable alien becomes “taboo.” Reverent awe
before that which is independent of one’s self, things ordained and
fixed by law, the alien powers of the world, is the source from which
the elementary formative acts, one and all, spring. In early times this
feeling is actualized in ornament, in laborious ceremonies and rites,
and the rigid laws of primitive intercourse. At the zeniths of the great
Cultures those formations, though retaining inwardly the mark of their
origin, the characteristic of binding and conjuring, have become the
complete form-worlds of the various arts and of religious, scientific
and, above all, _mathematical_ thought. The method common to all—the
only way of actualizing itself that the soul knows—is the _symbolizing
of extension_, of space or of things; and we find it alike in the
conceptions of absolute space that pervade Newtonian physics, Gothic
cathedral-interiors and Moorish mosques, and the atmospheric infinity of
Rembrandt’s paintings and again the dark tone-worlds of Beethoven’s
quartets; in the regular polyhedrons of Euclid, the Parthenon sculptures
and the pyramids of Old Egypt, the Nirvana of Buddha, the aloofness of
court-customs under Sesostris, Justinian I and Louis XIV, in the God-
idea of an Æschylus, a Plotinus, a Dante; and in the world-embracing
spatial energy of modern technics.
-----
Footnote 66:
That is, “it is impossible to part a cube into two cubes, a biquadrate
into two biquadrates, and generally any power above the square into
two powers having the same exponent.” Fermat claimed to possess a
proof of the proposition, but this has not been preserved, and no
general proof has hitherto been obtained.—_Tr._
Footnote 67:
Thus Bishop Berkeley’s _Discourse addressed to an infidel
mathematician_ (1735) shrewdly asked whether the mathematician were in
a position to criticize the divine for proceeding on the basis of
faith.—_Tr._
Footnote 68:
From the savage conjuror with his naming-magic to the modern scientist
who subjects things by attaching technical labels to them, the form
has in no wise changed. See Vol. II, pp. 116 et seq., 322 et seq.
Footnote 69:
See Vol. II, pp. 137 et seq.
-----
XII
To return to mathematics. In the Classical world the starting-point of
every formative act was, as we have seen, the ordering of the “become,”
in so far as this was present, visible, measurable and numerable. The
Western, Gothic, form-feeling on the contrary is that of an
unrestrained, strong-willed far-ranging soul, and its chosen badge is
pure, imperceptible, unlimited space. But we must not be led into
regarding such symbols as unconditional. On the contrary, they are
strictly conditional, though apt to be taken as having identical essence
and validity. Our universe of infinite space, whose existence, for us,
goes without saying, simply does not exist for Classical man. It is not
even capable of being presented to him. On the other hand, the Hellenic
cosmos, which is (as we might have discovered long ago) entirely foreign
to our way of thinking, was for the Hellene something self-evident. The
fact is that the infinite space of our physics is a form of very
numerous and extremely complicated elements tacitly assumed, which have
come into being only as the copy and expression of _our_ soul, and are
actual, necessary and natural only for _our_ type of waking life. The
simple notions are always the most difficult. They are simple, in that
they comprise a vast deal that not only is incapable of being exhibited
in words but does not even need to be stated, because _for men of the
particular group_ it is anchored in the intuition; and they are
difficult because for all alien men their real content is _ipso facto_
quite inaccessible. Such a notion, at once simple and difficult, is our
specifically Western meaning of the word “space.” The whole of our
mathematic from Descartes onward is devoted to the theoretical
interpretation of this great and wholly religious symbol. The aim of all
our physics since Galileo is identical; but in the Classical mathematics
and physics the content of this word is simply _not known_.
Here, too, Classical names, inherited from the literature of Greece and
retained in use, have veiled the realities. Geometry means the art of
measuring, arithmetic the art of numbering. The mathematic of the West
has long ceased to have anything to do with both these forms of
defining, but it has not managed to find new names for its own elements—
for the word “analysis” is hopelessly inadequate.
The beginning and end of the Classical mathematic is consideration of
the properties of individual bodies and their boundary-surfaces; thus
indirectly taking in conic sections and higher curves. _We_, on the
other hand, at bottom know only the abstract space-element of the point,
which can neither be seen, nor measured, nor yet named, but represents
simply a centre of reference. The straight line, for the Greeks a
measurable edge, is for us an infinite continuum of points. Leibniz
illustrates his infinitesimal principle by presenting the straight line
as one limiting case and the point as the other limiting case of a
circle having infinitely great or infinitely little radius. But for the
Greek the circle is a _plane_ and the problem that interested him was
that of bringing it into a commensurable condition. Thus the _squaring
of the circle became for the Classical intellect the supreme problem of
the finite_. The deepest problem of world-form seemed to it to be to
alter surfaces bounded by curved lines, without change of magnitude,
into rectangles and so to render them measureable. For us, on the other
hand, it has become the usual, and not specially significant, practice
to represent the number π by algebraic means, regardless of any
geometrical image.
The Classical mathematician knows only what he sees and grasps. Where
definite and defining visibility—the domain of his thought—ceases, his
science comes to an end. The Western mathematician, as soon as he has
quite shaken off the trammels of Classical prejudice, goes off into a
wholly abstract region of infinitely numerous “manifolds” of _n_ (no
longer 3) dimensions, in which his so-called geometry always can and
generally must do without every commonplace aid. When Classical man
turns to artistic expressions of his form-feeling, he tries with marble
and bronze to give the dancing or the wrestling human form that pose and
attitude in which surfaces and contours have all attainable proportion
and meaning. But the true artist of the West shuts his eyes and loses
himself in the realm of bodiless music, in which harmony and polyphony
bring him to images of utter “beyondness” that transcend all
possibilities of visual definition. One need only think of the meanings
of the word “figure” as used respectively by the Greek sculptor and the
Northern contrapuntist, and the opposition of the two worlds, the two
mathematics, is immediately presented. The Greek mathematicians ever use
the word σῶμα for their entities, just as the Greek lawyers used it for
persons as distinct from things (σώματα καὶ πράγματα: _personæ et res_).
Classical number, integral and corporeal, therefore inevitably seeks to
relate itself with the birth of bodily man, the σῶμα. The number 1 is
hardly yet conceived of as actual number but rather as ἀρχή, the prime
stuff of the number-series, the origin of all true numbers and therefore
all magnitudes, measures and materiality (Dinglichkeit). In the group of
the Pythagoreans (the date does not matter) its figured-sign was also
the symbol of the mother-womb, the origin of all life. The digit 2, the
first _true_ number, which doubles the 1, was therefore correlated with
the male principle and given the sign of the phallus. And, finally, 3,
the “holy number” of the Pythagoreans, denoted the act of union between
man and woman, the act of propagation—the erotic suggestion in adding
and multiplying (the only two processes of increasing, of _propagating_,
magnitude useful to Classical man) is easily seen—and its sign was the
combination of the two first. Now, all this throws quite a new light
upon the legends previously alluded to, concerning the sacrilege of
disclosing the irrational. The irrational—in our language the employment
of unending decimal fractions—implied the destruction of an organic and
corporeal and reproductive order that the gods had laid down. There is
no doubt that the Pythagorean reforms of the Classical religion were
themselves based upon the immemorial Demeter-cult. Demeter, Gæa, is akin
to Mother Earth. There is a deep relation between the honour paid to her
and this exalted conception of the numbers.
Thus, inevitably, the Classical became by degrees the Culture of the
_small_. The Apollinian soul had tried to tie down the meaning of
things-become by means of the principle of _visible limits_; its taboo
was focused upon the immediately-present and proximate alien. What was
far away, invisible, was _ipso facto_ “not there.” The Greek and the
Roman alike sacrificed to the gods of the place in which he happened to
stay or reside; all other deities were outside the range of vision. Just
as the Greek tongue—again and again we shall note the mighty symbolism
of such language-phenomena—possessed _no word for space_, so the Greek
himself was destitute of our feeling of landscape, horizons, outlooks,
distances, clouds, and of the idea of the far-spread fatherland
embracing the great nation. _Home_, for Classical man, is what he can
see from the citadel of his native town and no more. All that lay beyond
the visual range of this political atom was alien, and hostile to boot;
beyond that narrow range, fear set in at once, and hence the appalling
bitterness with which these petty towns strove to destroy one another.
The Polis is the smallest of all conceivable state-forms, and its policy
is frankly short-range, therein differing in the extreme from our own
cabinet-diplomacy which is the policy of the unlimited. Similarly, the
Classical temple, which can be taken in in one glance, is the smallest
of all first-rate architectural forms. Classical geometry from Archytas
to Euclid—like the school geometry of to-day which is still dominated by
it—concerned itself with small, manageable figures and bodies, and
therefore remained unaware of the difficulties that arise in
establishing figures of astronomical dimensions, which in many cases are
not amenable to Euclidean geometry.[70] Otherwise the subtle Attic
spirit would almost surely have arrived at some notion of the problems
of non-Euclidean geometry, for its criticism of the well-known
“parallel” axiom,[71] the doubtfulness of which soon aroused opposition
yet could not in any way be elucidated, brought it very close indeed to
the decisive discovery. The Classical mind as unquestioningly devoted
and limited itself to the study of the small and the near as ours has to
that of the infinite and ultra-visual. All the mathematical ideas that
the West found for itself or borrowed from others were automatically
subjected to the form-language of the Infinitesimal—and that long before
the actual Differential Calculus was discovered. Arabian algebra, Indian
trigonometry, Classical mechanics were incorporated as a matter of
course in analysis. Even the most “self-evident” propositions of
elementary arithmetic such as 2 × 2 = 4 become, when considered
analytically, problems, and the solution of these problems was only made
possible by deductions from the Theory of Aggregates, and is in many
points still unaccomplished. Plato and his age would have looked upon
this sort of thing not only as a hallucination but also as evidence of
an utterly nonmathematical mind. In a certain measure, geometry may be
treated algebraically and algebra geometrically, that is, the eye may be
switched off or it may be allowed to govern. We take the first
alternative, the Greeks the second. Archimedes, in his beautiful
management of spirals, touches upon certain general facts that are also
fundamentals in Leibniz’s method of the definite integral; but his
processes, for all their superficial appearance of modernity, are
subordinated to stereometric principles; in like case, an Indian
mathematician would naturally have found some trigonometrical
formulation.[72]
-----
Footnote 70:
A beginning is now being made with the application of non-Euclidean
geometries to astronomy. The hypothesis of curved space, closed but
without limits, filled by the system of fixed stars on a radius of
about 470,000,000 earth-distances, would lead to the hypothesis of a
counter-image of the sun which to us appears as a star of medium
brilliancy. (See translator’s footnote, p. 332.)
Footnote 71:
That only one parallel to a given straight line is possible through a
given point—a proposition that is incapable of proof.
Footnote 72:
It is impossible to say, with certainty, how much of the Indian
mathematics that we possess is old, i.e., before Buddha.
-----
XIII
From this fundamental opposition of Classical and Western numbers there
arises an equally radical difference in the relationship of element to
element in each of these number-worlds. The nexus of _magnitudes_ is
called _proportion_, that of _relations_ is comprised in the notion of
_function_. The significance of these two words is not confined to
mathematics proper; they are of high importance also in the allied arts
of sculpture and music. Quite apart from the rôle of proportion in
ordering the parts of the _individual_ statue, the typically Classical
artforms of the statue, the relief, and the fresco, admit _enlargements
and reductions of scale—words that in music have no meaning at all_—as
we see in the art of the gems, in which the subjects are essentially
reductions from life-sized originals. In the domain of Function, on the
contrary, it is the idea of _transformation of groups_ that is of
decisive importance, and the musician will readily agree that similar
ideas play an essential part in modern composition-theory. I need only
allude to one of the most elegant orchestral forms of the 18th Century,
the _Tema con Variazioni_.
All proportion assumes the constancy, all transformation the variability
of the constituents. Compare, for instance, the congruence theorems of
Euclid, the proof of which depends in fact on the assumed ratio 1 : 1,
with the modern deduction of the same by means of angular functions.
XIV
The Alpha and Omega of the Classical mathematic is _construction_ (which
in the broad sense includes elementary arithmetic), that is, the
production of a single visually-present figure. The chisel, in this
second sculptural art, is the compass. On the other hand, in function-
research, where the object is not a result of the magnitude sort but a
discussion of general formal possibilities, the way of working is best
described as a sort of composition-procedure closely analogous to the
musical; and in fact, a great number of the ideas met with in the theory
of music (key, phrasing, chromatics, for instance) can be directly
employed in physics, and it is at least arguable that many relations
would be clarified by so doing.
Every _construction_ affirms, and every _operation_ denies appearances,
in that the one works out that which is optically given and the other
dissolves it. And so we meet with yet another contrast between the two
kinds of mathematic; the Classical mathematic of small things deals with
the concrete _individual instance_ and produces a once-for-all
construction, while the mathematic of the infinite handles whole
_classes_ of formal possibilities, _groups_ of functions, operations,
equations, curves, and does so with an eye, not to any result they may
have, but to their course. And so for the last two centuries—though
present-day mathematicians hardly realize the fact—there has been
growing up _the idea of a general morphology of mathematical
operations_, which we are justified in regarding as the real meaning of
modern mathematics as a whole. All this, as we shall perceive more and
more clearly, is one of the manifestations of a general tendency
inherent in the Western intellect, proper to the Faustian spirit and
Culture and found in no other. The great majority of the problems which
occupy our mathematic, and are regarded as “our” problems in the same
sense as the squaring of the circle was the Greeks’,—e.g., the
investigation of convergence in infinite series (Cauchy) and the
transformation of elliptic and algebraic integrals into multiply-
periodic functions (Abel, Gauss)—would probably have seemed to the
Ancients, who strove for simple and definite quantitative results, to be
an exhibition of rather abstruse virtuosity. And so indeed the popular
mind regards them even to-day. There is nothing less “popular” than the
modern mathematic, and it too contains its symbolism of the infinitely
far, of _distance_. _All_ the great works of the West, from the “Divina
Commedia” to “Parsifal,” are unpopular, whereas everything Classical
from Homer to the Altar of Pergamum was popular in the highest degree.
XV
Thus, finally, the whole content of Western number-thought centres
itself upon the historic _limit-problem_ of the Faustian mathematic, the
key which opens the way to the Infinite, that _Faustian infinite_ which
is so different from the infinity of Arabian and Indian world-ideas.
Whatever the guise—infinite series, curves or functions—in which number
appears in the particular case, the _essence_ of it is the _theory of
the limit_.[73] This limit is the absolute opposite of the limit which
(without being so called) figures in the Classical problem of the
quadrature of the circle. Right into the 18th Century, Euclidean popular
prepossessions obscured the real meaning of the differential principle.
The idea of infinitely small quantities lay, so to say, ready to hand,
and however skilfully they were handled, there was bound to remain a
trace of the Classical constancy, the _semblance of magnitude_, about
them, though Euclid would never have known them or admitted them as
such. Thus, zero is a constant, a whole number in the linear continuum
between +1 and -1; and it was a great hindrance to Euler in his
analytical researches that, like many after him, he treated the
differentials as zero. Only in the 19th Century was this relic of
Classical number-feeling finally removed and the Infinitesimal Calculus
made logically secure by Cauchy’s definitive elucidation of the _limit-
idea_; only the intellectual step from the “infinitely small quantity”
to the “lower limit of _every possible_ finite magnitude” brought out
the conception of a variable number which oscillates beneath any
assignable number that is not zero. A number of this sort has ceased to
possess any character of magnitude whatever: the limit, as thus finally
presented by theory, is no longer that which is approximated to, but
_the approximation, the process, the operation itself. It is not a
state, but a relation._ And so in this decisive problem of our
mathematic, we are suddenly made to see how _historical_ is the
constitution of the Western soul.[74]
-----
Footnote 73:
The technical difference (in German usage) between _Grenz_ and
_Grenzwert_ is in most cases ignored in this translation as it is only
the underlying conception of “number” common to both that concerns us.
_Grenz_ is the “limit” strictly speaking, i.e., the number _a_ to
which the terms _a__{1}₁, _a__{2}₂, _a_₃ ... of a particular _series_
approximate more and more closely, till nearer to _a_ than any
assignable number whatever. The _Grenzwert_ of a _function_, on the
other hand, is the “limit” of the value which the function takes for a
given value _a_ of the variable _x_. These methods of reasoning and
their derivatives enable solutions to be obtained for series such as
(1⁄_m_¹,) (1⁄_m_²,) (1⁄_m_³,) ... (1⁄_m_^{_x_}) or functions such as
_x_(2_x_ - 1)
_y_ = ———————————————
(_x_+ 2)(_x_- 3)
where _x_ is _infinite_ or _indefinite_.—_Tr._
Footnote 74:
“Function, rightly understood, is existence considered as an activity”
(Goethe). Cf. Vol. II, p. 618, for functional money.
-----
XVI
The liberation of geometry from the visual, and of algebra from the
notion of magnitude, and the union of both, beyond all elementary
limitations of drawing and counting, in the great structure of function-
theory—this was the grand course of Western number-thought. The constant
number of the Classical mathematic was dissolved into the variable.
Geometry _became_ analytical and dissolved all concrete forms, replacing
the mathematical bodies from which the rigid geometrical values had been
obtained, by abstract spatial relations which in the end ceased to have
any application at all to sense-present phenomena. It began by
substituting for Euclid’s optical figures geometrical loci referred to a
co-ordinate system of arbitrarily chosen “origin,” and reducing the
postulated objectiveness of existence of the geometrical object to the
one condition that during the operation (which itself was one of
equating and not of measurement) the selected co-ordinate system should
not be changed. But these co-ordinates immediately came to be regarded
as values pure and simple, serving not so much to determine as to
represent and replace the position of points as space-elements. Number,
the boundary of things-become, was represented, not as before
pictorially by a figure, but symbolically by an equation. “Geometry”
altered its meaning; the co-ordinate system as a picturing disappeared
and the point became an entirely abstract number-group. In architecture,
we find this inward transformation of Renaissance into Baroque through
the innovations of Michael Angelo and Vignola. Visually pure lines
became, in palace and church façades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In
place of the clear co-ordinates that we have in Romano-Florentine
colonnading and storeying, the “infinitesimal” appears in the graceful
flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The constructive
dissolves in the wealth of the decorative—in mathematical language, the
functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups and clusters,
break up the façades, gather and disperse again restlessly. The flat
surfaces of wall, roof, storey melt into a wealth of stucco work and
ornaments, vanish and break into a play of light and shade. The light
itself, as it is made to play upon the form-world of mature Baroque—
viz., the period from Bernini (1650) to the Rococo of Dresden, Vienna
and Paris—has become an essentially musical element. The Dresden
Zwinger[75] is a _sinfonia_. Along with 18th Century mathematics, 18th
Century architecture develops into a form-world of _musical_ characters.
-----
Footnote 75:
Built for August II, in 1711, as barbican or fore-building for a
projected palace.—_Tr._
-----
XVII
This mathematics of ours was bound in due course to reach the point at
which not merely the limits of artificial geometrical form but the
limits of the visual itself were felt by theory and by the soul alike as
limits indeed, as obstacles to the unreserved expression of inward
possibilities—in other words, the point at which the ideal of
transcendent extension came into fundamental conflict with the
limitations of immediate perception. The Classical soul, with the entire
abdication of Platonic and Stoic ἀταραξία, submitted to the sensuous and
(as the erotic under-meaning of the Pythagorean numbers shows) it rather
_felt_ than _emitted_ its great symbols. Of transcending the corporeal
here-and-now it was quite incapable. But whereas number, as conceived by
a Pythagorean, exhibited the essence of individual and discrete _data_
in “Nature” Descartes and his successors looked upon number as
_something to be conquered_, to be _wrung out_, an abstract relation
royally indifferent to all phenomenal support and capable of holding its
own against “Nature” on all occasions. The will-to-power (to use
Nietzsche’s great formula) that from the earliest Gothic of the Eddas,
the Cathedrals and Crusades, and even from the old conquering Goths and
Vikings, has distinguished the attitude of the Northern soul to its
world, appears also in the sense-transcending energy, the _dynamic_ of
Western number. In the Apollinian mathematic the intellect is the
servant of the eye, in the Faustian its master. Mathematical, “absolute”
space, we see then, is utterly un-Classical, and from the first,
although mathematicians with their reverence for the Hellenic tradition
did not dare to observe the fact, it was something different from the
indefinite spaciousness of daily experience and customary painting, the
_a priori_ space of Kant which seemed so unambiguous and sure a concept.
It is a pure abstract, an ideal and unfulfillable postulate of a soul
which is ever less and less satisfied with sensuous means of expression
and in the end passionately brushes them aside. _The inner eye has
awakened._
And then, for the first time, those who thought deeply were obliged to
see that the Euclidean geometry, which is the _true and only_ geometry
of the simple of all ages, is when regarded from the higher standpoint
nothing but a _hypothesis_, the general validity of which, since Gauss,
we know it to be quite impossible to prove in the face of other and
perfectly non-perceptual geometries. The critical proposition of this
geometry, Euclid’s axiom of parallels, is an _assertion_, for which we
are quite at liberty to substitute another assertion. We may assert, in
fact, that through a given point, no parallels, or two, or many
parallels may be drawn to a given straight line, and all these
assumptions lead to completely irreproachable geometries of three
dimensions, which can be employed in physics and even in astronomy, and
are in some cases preferable to the Euclidean.
Even the simple axiom that extension is boundless (boundlessness, since
Riemann and the theory of curved space, is to be distinguished from
endlessness) at once contradicts the essential character of all
immediate perception, in that the latter depends upon the existence of
light-resistances and _ipso facto_ has material bounds. But abstract
principles of boundary can be imagined which transcend, in an entirely
new sense, the possibilities of optical definition. For the deep
thinker, there exists even in the Cartesian geometry the tendency to get
beyond the three dimensions of _experiential_ space, regarded as an
unnecessary restriction on the symbolism of number. And although it was
not till about 1800 that the notion of _multi-dimensional space_ (it is
a pity that no better word was found) provided analysis with broader
foundations, the real first step was taken at the moment when powers—
that is, really, logarithms—were released from their original relation
with sensually realizable surfaces and solids and, through the
employment of irrational and complex exponents, brought within the realm
of function as perfectly general relation-values. It will be admitted by
everyone who understands anything of mathematical reasoning that
directly we passed from the notion of a³ as a natural maximum to that of
a^{_n_}, the unconditional necessity of three-dimensional space was done
away with.
Once the space-element or point had lost its last persistent relic of
visualness and, instead of being represented to the eye as a cut in co-
ordinate lines, was defined as a group of three independent numbers,
there was no longer any inherent objection to replacing the number 3 by
the general number _n_. The notion of dimension was radically changed.
It was no longer a matter of treating the properties of a point
metrically with reference to its position in a visible system, but of
representing the entirely abstract properties of a number-group by means
of any dimensions that we please. The number-group—consisting of _n_
independent ordered elements—is an _image_ of the point and it is
_called_ a point. Similarly, an equation logically arrived therefrom is
_called_ a plane and is the image of a plane. And the aggregate of all
points of _n_ dimensions is _called_ an _n_-dimensional space.[76] In
these transcendent space-worlds, which are remote from every sort of
sensualism, lie the relations which it is the business of analysis to
investigate and which are found to be consistently in agreement with the
data of experimental physics. This space of higher degree is a symbol
which is through-and-through the peculiar property of the Western mind.
That mind alone has attempted, and successfully too, to capture the
“become” and the extended in _these_ forms, to conjure and bind—to
“know”—the alien by _this_ kind of appropriation or taboo. Not until
such spheres of number-thought are reached, and not for any men but the
few who have reached them, do such imaginings as systems of hypercomplex
numbers (e.g., the quaternions of the calculus of vectors) and
apparently quite meaningless symbols like ∞^{_n_} acquire the character
of something actual. And here if anywhere it must be understood that
actuality is not only sensual actuality. The spiritual is in no wise
limited to perception-forms for the actualizing of its idea.
-----
Footnote 76:
From the standpoint of the theory of “aggregates” (or “sets of
points”), a well-ordered set of points, irrespective of the dimension
figure, is called a corpus; and thus an aggregate of _n_ - 1
dimensions is considered, _relatively_ to one of _n_ dimensions, as a
surface. Thus the limit (wall, edge) of an “aggregate” represents an
aggregate of lower “potentiality.”
-----
XVIII
From this grand intuition of symbolic space-worlds came the last and
conclusive creation of Western mathematic—the expansion and subtilizing
of the function theory in that of _groups_. Groups are aggregates or
sets of homogeneous mathematical images—e.g., the totality of all
differential equations of a certain type—which in structure and ordering
are analogous to the Dedekind number-bodies. Here are worlds, we feel,
of perfectly new numbers, which are nevertheless not utterly sense-
transcendent for the _inner_ eye of the adept; and the problem now is to
discover in those vast abstract form-systems certain elements which,
relatively to a particular group of operations (viz., of transformations
of the system), remain unaffected thereby, that is, possess invariance.
In mathematical language, the problem, as stated generally by Klein, is—
given an _n_-dimensional manifold (“space”) and a group of
transformations, it is required to examine the forms belonging to the
manifold in respect of such properties as are not altered by
transformation of the group.
And with this culmination our Western mathematic, having exhausted every
inward possibility and fulfilled its destiny as the _copy and purest
expression of the idea of the Faustian soul_, closes its development in
the same way as the mathematic of the Classical Culture concluded in the
third century. Both those sciences (the only ones of which the organic
structure can even to-day be examined historically) arose out of a
wholly new idea of number, in the one case Pythagoras’s, in the other
Descartes’. Both, expanding in all beauty, reached their maturity one
hundred years later; and both, after flourishing for three centuries,
completed the structure of their ideas at the same moment as the
Cultures to which they respectively belonged passed over into the phase
of megalopolitan Civilization. The deep significance of this
interdependence will be made clear in due course. It is enough for the
moment that for us the time of the _great_ mathematicians is past. Our
tasks to-day are those of preserving, rounding off, refining, selection—
in place of big dynamic creation, the same clever detail-work which
characterized the Alexandrian mathematic of late Hellenism.
A historical paradigm will make this clearer.
column 1
column two
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CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY
I
PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY
I
PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC
I
Now, at last, it is possible to take the decisive step of sketching an
image of history that is independent of the accident of standpoint, of
the period in which this or that observer lives—independent too of the
personality of the observer himself, who as an interested member of his
own Culture is tempted, by its religious, intellectual, political and
social tendencies, to order the material of history according to a
perspective that is limited as to both space and time, and to fashion
arbitrary forms into which the superficies of history can be forced but
which are entirely alien to its inner content.
What has been missing, till now, is _detachment_ from the objects
considered (die Distanz vom Gegenstande). In respect of Nature, this
detachment has long ago been attained, though of course it was
relatively easy of attainment, since the physicist can obviously
systematize the mechanical-causal picture of his world as impersonally
as though he himself did not exist in it.
It is quite possible, however, to do the same as regards the form-world
of History. We have merely been unaware of the possibility. The modern
historian, in the very act of priding himself on his “objectivity,”
naïvely and unconsciously reveals his prepossessions. For this reason it
is quite legitimate to say—and it will infallibly be said some day—that
so far a genuinely Faustian treatment of history has been entirely
lacking. By such a treatment is meant one that has enough detachment to
admit that any “present” is only such with reference to a particular
generation of men; that the number of generations is infinite, and that
the proper present must therefore be regarded just as something
infinitely distant and alien is regarded, and treated as an interval of
time neither more nor less significant in the whole picture of History
than others. Such a treatment will employ no distorting modulus of
personal ideals, set no personal origin of co-ordinates, be influenced
by none of the personal hopes and fears and other inward impulses which
count for so much in practical life; and such a detachment will—to use
the words of Nietzsche (who, be it said, was far from possessing enough
of it himself)—enable one to view the whole fact of Man from an immense
distance, to regard the individual Cultures, one’s own included, as one
regards the range of mountain peaks along a horizon.
Once again, therefore, there was an act like the act of Copernicus to be
accomplished, an act of emancipation from the evident present in the
name of infinity. This the Western soul achieved in the domain of Nature
long ago, when it passed from the Ptolemaic world-system to that which
is alone valid for it to-day, and treats the position of the observer on
one particular planet as accidental instead of normative.
A similar emancipation of world-history from the accidental standpoint,
the perpetually re-defined “modern period,” is both possible and
necessary. It is true that the 19th Century A.D. seems to us infinitely
fuller and more important than, say, the 19th Century B.C.; but the
moon, too, seems to us bigger than Jupiter or Saturn. The physicist has
long ago freed himself from prepossessions as to relative distance, the
historian not so. We permit ourselves to consider the Culture of the
Greeks as an “ancient” related to our own “modern.” Were they in their
turn “modern” in relation to the finished and historically mature
Egyptians of the court of the great Thuthmosis who lived a millennium
before Homer? For us, the events which took place between 1500 and 1800
on the soil of Western Europe constitute the most important third of
"world"-history; for the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks
back on and judges by 4000 years of Chinese history, those centuries
generally are a brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less
significant than the centuries of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220
A.D.), which in _his_ "world"-history are epoch-making.
To liberate History, then, from that thraldom to the observers’
prejudices which in our own case has made of it nothing more than a
record of a partial past leading up to an accidental present, with the
ideals and interests of that present as criteria of the achievement and
possibility, is the object of all that follows.
II
_Nature_ and _History_[77] are the opposite extreme terms of man’s range
of possibilities, whereby he is enabled to order the actualities about
him as a picture of the world. An actuality is Nature in so far as it
assigns things-becoming their place as things-become, and History in so
far as it orders things-become with reference to their becoming. An
actuality as an evocation of mind is contemplated, and as an assurance
of the senses is critically comprehended, the first being exemplified in
the worlds of Plato, Rembrandt, Goethe and Beethoven, the second in the
worlds of Parmenides, Descartes, Kant and Newton. Cognition in the
strict sense of the word is that act of experience of which the
completed issue is called “Nature.” The cognized and “Nature” are one
and the same. The symbol of mathematical number has shown us that the
aggregate of things cognized is the same as the world of things
mechanically defined, things correct once and for all, things brought
under law. _Nature is the sum of the law-imposed necessities._ There are
only laws of _Nature_. No physicist who understands his duty would wish
to transcend these limits. His task is to establish an ordered code
which not only includes all the laws that he can find in the picture of
Nature that is proper to himself but, further, represents that picture
exhaustively and without remainder.
Contemplation or vision (Anschauen), on the other hand—I may recall
Goethe’s words: “vision is to be carefully distinguished from seeing”—,
is that act of experience which _is itself history because it is itself
a fulfilling_. That which has been lived is that which has happened, and
it is history. (Erlebtes ist Geschehenes, ist Geschichte.)
Every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated. It carries
the hall-mark of Direction (“Time”), of _irreversibility_. That which
has happened is thenceforth counted with the become and not with the
becoming, with the stiffened and not the living, and belongs beyond
recall to the past. Our feeling of world-fear has its sources here.
Everything cognized, on the contrary, is _timeless_, neither past nor
future but simply “there,” and consequently permanently valid, as indeed
the very constitution of natural law requires that it should be. Law and
the domain of law are _anti-historical_. They exclude incident and
casuality. The laws of nature are forms of rigorous and therefore
inorganic necessity. It becomes easy to see why mathematics, as the
ordering of things-become by number, is _always and exclusively_
associated with laws and causality.
Becoming has no number. We can count, measure, dissect only the lifeless
and so much of the living as can be dissociated from livingness. Pure
becoming, pure life, is in this sense incapable of being bounded. It
lies beyond the domain of cause and effect, law and measure. No deep and
pure historical research seeks for conformities with causal laws—or, if
it does so, it does not understand its own essence.
At the same time, history as positively treated is not pure becoming: it
is an image, a world-form radiated from the waking consciousness of the
historian, in which the becoming _dominates_ the become. The possibility
of extracting results of any sort by scientific methods depends upon the
proportion of things-become present in the subject treated, and by
hypothesis there is in this case a defect of them; the higher the
proportion is, the more mechanical, reasonable, causal, history is made
to appear. Even Goethe’s “living nature,” utterly unmathematical world-
picture as it was, contained enough of the dead and stiffened to allow
him to treat at least his foreground scientifically. But when this
content of things-become dwindles to very little, then history becomes
approximately pure becoming, and contemplation and vision become an
experience which can only be rendered in forms of _art_. That which
Dante saw before his spiritual eyes as the destiny of the world, he
_could not possibly_ have arrived at by ways of science, any more than
Goethe could have attained by these ways to what he saw in the great
moments of his “Faust” studies, any more than Plotinus and Giordano
Bruno could have distilled their visions from researches. This contrast
lies at the root of all dispute regarding the inner form of history. In
the presence of the same object or corpus of facts, every observer
according to his own disposition has a different _impression_ of the
whole, and this impression, _intangible and incommunicable_, underlies
his judgment and gives it its personal colour. The degree in which
things-become are taken in differs from man to man, which is quite
enough in itself to show that they can never agree as to task or method.
Each accuses the other of a deficiency of “clear thinking,” and yet the
something that is expressed by this phrase is something not built with
hands, not implying superiority or a priority of degree but necessary
difference of kind. The same applies to all natural sciences.
Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the fact that at bottom the wish
to write history _scientifically_ involves a contradiction. True science
reaches just as far as the notions of truth and falsity have validity:
this applies to mathematics and it applies also to the science of
historical spade-work, viz., the collection, ordering and sifting of
material. But real historical vision (which only _begins_ at this point)
belongs to the domain of significances, in which the crucial words are
not “correct” and “erroneous,” but “deep” and “shallow.” The true
physicist is not deep, but _keen_: it is only when he leaves the domain
of working hypotheses and brushes against the final things that he can
be deep, but at this stage he is already a metaphysician. Nature is to
be handled scientifically, History poetically. Old Leopold von Ranke is
credited with the remark that, after all, Scott’s “Quentin Durward” was
the true history-writing. And so it is: the advantage of a good history
book is that it enables the reader to be his own Scott.
On the other hand, within the very realm of numbers and exact knowledge
there is that which Goethe called “living Nature,” an immediate vision
of pure becoming and self-shaping, in fact, history as above defined.
Goethe’s world was, in the first instance, an organism, an existence,
and it is easy therefore to see why his researches, even when
superficially of a physical kind, do not make numbers, or laws, or
causality captured in formulæ, or dissection of any sort their object,
but are morphology in the highest sense of the word; and why his work
neither uses nor needs to use the specifically Western and un-Classical
means of causal treatment, metrical experiment. His treatment of the
Earth’s crust is invariably geology, and never mineralogy, which he
called the science of something dead.
Let it be said, once more, that there are no exact boundaries set
between the two kinds of world-notion. However great the contrast
between becoming and the become, the fact remains that they are jointly
present in every kind of understanding. He who looks at the becoming and
fulfilling in them, experiences History; he who dissects them as become
and fulfilled cognizes Nature.
In every man, in every Culture, in every culture-phase, there is found
an inherent disposition, an inherent inclination and vocation to prefer
one of the two forms as an ideal of understanding the world. Western man
is in a high degree historically disposed,[78] Classical man far from
being so. We follow up what is given us with an eye to past and future,
whereas Classical man knew only the point-present and an ambiance of
myth. We have before us a symbol of becoming in every bar of our music
from Palestrina to Wagner, and the Greeks a symbol of the pure present
in every one of their statues. The rhythm of a body is based upon a
simultaneous relation of the parts, that of a fugue in the succession of
elements in time.
-----
Footnote 77:
See p. 55, also Vol. II, pp. 25 et seq.
Footnote 78:
“Anti-historical,” the expression which we apply to a decidedly
systematic valuation, is to be carefully distinguished from
“ahistorical.” The beginning of the IV Book (53) of Schopenhauer’s
_Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_ affords a good illustration of the
man who thinks anti-historically, that is, deliberately for
theoretical reasons suppresses and rejects the historical in himself—
something that is actually there. The ahistoric Greek nature, on the
contrary, neither possesses nor understands it.
-----
III
There emerge, then, as the two basic elements of all world-picturing,
the principle of Form (Gestalt) and the principle of Law (Gesetz). The
more decidedly a particular world-picture shows the traits of “Nature,”
the more unconditionally law and number prevail in it; and the more
purely intuitive the picture of the world as eternally becoming, the
more alien to numbers its manifold and intangible elements. “Form is
something mobile, something becoming, something passing. The doctrine of
formation is the doctrine of transformation. Metamorphosis is the key to
the whole alphabet of Nature,” so runs a note of Goethe’s, marking
already the methodic difference between his famous “exact percipient
fancy” which quietly lets itself be worked upon by the living,[79] and
the exact killing procedure of modern physics. But whatever the process,
a remainder consisting of so much of the alien element as is present is
always found. In strict natural sciences this remainder takes the form
of the inevitable _theories and hypotheses_ which are imposed on, and
leaven, the stiff mass of number and formula. In historical research, it
appears as _chronology_, the number-structure of dates and statistics
which, alien though number is to the essence of becoming, is so
thoroughly woven around and into the world of historical forms that it
is never felt to be intrusive. For it is devoid of mathematical import.
Chronological number distinguishes uniquely-occurring actualities,
mathematical number constant possibilities. The one sharpens the images
and works up the outlines of epoch and fact for the understanding eye.
But the other _is itself_ the law which it seeks to establish, the end
and aim of research. Chronological number is a scientific means of
pioneering borrowed from the science of sciences, mathematics, and used
as such without regard to its specific properties. Compare, for
instance, the meaning of the two symbols 12 × 8 = 96, and 18 October,
1813.[80] It is the same difference, in the use of figures, that prose
and poetry present in the use of words.
One other point remains to be noted.[81] As a becoming always lies at
the base of the become, and as the world-picture representative of
becoming is that which history gives us, therefore history is the
_original_ world-form, and Nature—the fully elaborated world-mechanism—
is the _late_ world-form that only the men of a mature Culture can
completely actualize. In fact, the darkness encompassing the simple soul
of primitive mankinds, which we can realize even to-day from their
religious customs and myths—that entirely organic world of pure
wilfulness, of hostile demons and kindly powers—was through-and-through
a living and swaying whole, ununderstandable, indefinable, incalculable.
We may call this Nature if we like, but it is not what _we_ mean by
“nature,” i.e., the strict image projected by a knowing intellect. Only
the souls of children and of great artists can now hear the echoes of
this long-forgotten world of nascent humanity, but it echoes still, and
not rarely, even in the inelastic "nature"-medium that the city-spirit
of the mature Culture is remorselessly building up round the individual.
Hence that acute antagonism between the scientific (“modern”) and the
artistic (“unpractical”) world-idea which every Late period knows; the
man of fact and the poet do not and cannot understand one another. Hence
comes, too, that tendency of historical study, which must inevitably
contain an element of the childish, the dreamy, the Goethian, to dress
up as a science, to be (using its own naïve word) “materialistic,” at
the imminent risk of becoming a mere physics of public life.
“Nature,” in the exact sense, is a way of possessing actuality which is
special to the few, restricted to the megalopolitans of the late periods
of great Cultures, masculine, perhaps even senatorial; while History is
the naïve, youthful, more or less instinctive way that is proper to
_all_ men alike. At least, that is the position of the number-based,
unmystical, dissectable and dissected “Nature” of Aristotle and Kant,
the Sophists and the Darwinians, modern physics and chemistry, _vis-à-
vis_ the lived, felt and unconfined “Nature” of Homer and the Eddas, of
Doric and Gothic man. To overlook this is to miss the whole essence of
historical treatment. It is history that is the truly natural, and the
exact mechanically-correct “Nature” of the scientist that is the
artificial conception of world by soul. Hence the paradox that modern
man finds "nature"-study easy and historical study hard.
Tendencies towards a mechanistic idea of the world proceeding wholly
from mathematical delimitation and logical differentiation, from law and
causality, appear quite early. They are found in the first centuries of
all Cultures, still weak, scattered and lost in the full tide of the
religious world-conception. The name to be recalled here is that of
Roger Bacon. But soon these tendencies acquire a sterner character: like
everything that is wrung out of the soul and has to defend itself
against human nature, they are not wanting in arrogance and
exclusiveness. Quietly the spatial and comprehensible (comprehension is
in its essence number, in its structure quantitative) becomes prepotent
throughout the outer world of the individual and, aiding and aided by
the simple impressions of sensuous-life, effects a mechanical synthesis
of the causal and legal sort, so that at long last the sharp
consciousness of the megalopolitan—be he of Thebes, Babylon, Benares,
Alexandria or a West European cosmopolis—is subjected to so consistent a
pressure of natural-law notions that, when scientific and philosophical
prejudice (it is no more than that) dictates the proposition that this
condition of the soul is _the_ soul and the mechanical world-picture is
_the_ world, the assertion is scarcely challenged. It has been made
predominant by logicians like Aristotle and Kant. But Plato and Goethe
have rejected it and refuted it.
IV
The task of world-knowing—for the man of the higher Cultures a need,
seen as a duty, of expressing his own essence—is certainly in every case
the same, though its process may be called science or philosophy, and
though its affinity to artistic creation and to faith-intuition may for
one be something felt and for another something questionable. It is to
present, without accretions, that form of the world-picture which to the
individual in each case is proper and significant, and for him (so long
as he does not _compare_) is in fact “the” world.
The task is necessarily a double one, in view of the distinction between
“Nature” and “History.” Each speaks its own form-language which differs
utterly from that of the other, and however the two may overlap and
confuse one another in an unsifted and ambiguous world-picture such as
that of everyday life, they are incapable of any inner unity.
Direction and Extension are the outstanding characters which
differentiate the historical and the scientific (naturhaft) kind of
impressibility, and it is totally impossible for a man to have both
working creatively within him at the same time. The double meaning of
the German word “Ferne” (distance, farness) is illuminating. In the one
order of ideas it implies futurity, in the other a spatial interval of
standing apart, and the reader will not fail to remark that the
historical materialist almost necessarily conceives time as a
mathematical dimension, while for the born artist, on the contrary,—as
the lyrics of every land show us—the distance-impressions made by deep
landscapes, clouds, horizon and setting sun attach themselves without an
effort to the sense of a future. The Greek poet denies the future, and
consequently he neither sees nor sings of the things of the future; he
cleaves to the near, as he belongs to the present, entirely.
The natural-science investigator, the productive reasoner in the full
sense of the word, whether he be an experimenter like Faraday, a
theorist like Galileo, a calculator like Newton, finds in his world only
directionless _quantities_ which he measures, tests and arranges. It is
only the quantitative that is capable of being grasped through figures,
of being causally defined, of being captured in a law or formula, and
when it has achieved this, pure nature-knowledge has shot its bolt. All
its laws are quantitative connexions, or as the physicist puts it, all
physical processes _run a course in space_, an expression which a Greek
physicist would have corrected—without altering the fact—into “all
physical processes _occur between bodies_” conformably to the space-
denying feeling of the Classical soul.
The historical kind of impression-process is alien to everything
quantitative, and affects a different organ. To World-as-Nature certain
modes of apprehension, as to World-as-History certain other modes, are
_proper_. We know them and use them every day, without (as yet) having
become aware of their opposition. There is _nature-knowledge_ and there
is _man-knowledge_; there is _scientific_ experience and there is
_vital_ experience. Let the reader track down this contrast into his own
inmost being, and he will understand what I mean.
All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis, be
described as Morphology. _The Morphology of the mechanical and the
extended, a science which discovers and orders nature-laws and causal
relations, is called Systematic. The Morphology of the organic, of
history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and destiny,
is called Physiognomic._
V
In the West, the Systematic mode of treating the world reached and
passed its culminating-point during the last century, while the great
days of Physiognomic have still to come. In a hundred years all sciences
that are still possible on this soil will be parts of a single vast
Physiognomic of all things human. This is what the “Morphology of World-
History” means. In every science, and in the aim no less than in the
content of it, man tells the story of himself. Scientific experience is
spiritual self-knowledge. It is from this standpoint, as a chapter of
Physiognomic, that we have just treated of mathematics. We were not
concerned with what this or that mathematician _intended_, nor with the
savant as such or his results as a contribution to an aggregate of
knowledge, but with the mathematician as a human being, with his work as
a part of the phenomenon of himself, with his knowledge and purposes as
a part of his expression. This alone is of importance to us here. He is
the mouthpiece of a Culture which tells us about itself through him, and
he belongs, as personality, as soul, as discoverer, thinker and creator,
to the physiognomy of that Culture.
Every mathematic, in that it brings out and makes visible to all the
idea of number that is proper to itself and inborn in its conscious
being, is, whether the expression-form be a scientific system or (as in
the case of Egypt) an architecture, the confession of a Soul. If it is
true that the intentional accomplishments of a mathematic belong only to
the surface of history, it is equally true that its unconscious element,
its number-as-such, and the style in which it builds up its self-
contained cosmos of forms are an expression of its existence, its blood.
Its life-history of ripening and withering, its deep relation to the
creative acts, the myths and the cults of the same Culture—such things
are the subject-matter of a second or historical morphology, though the
possibility of such a morphology is hardly yet admitted.
The visible foregrounds of history, therefore, have the same
significance as the outward phenomena of the individual man (his statue,
his bearing, his air, his stride, his way of speaking and writing), as
distinct from what he says or writes. In the “knowledge of men” these
things exist and matter. The body and all its elaborations—defined,
“become” and _mortal_ as they are—are an expression of the soul. But
henceforth “knowledge of men” implies also knowledge of those
superlative human organisms that I call Cultures, and of their mien,
their speech, their acts—these terms being meant as we mean them already
in the case of the individual.
Descriptive, creative, Physiognomic is the art of portraiture
transferred to the spiritual domain. Don Quixote, Werther, Julian Sorel,
are portraits of an epoch, Faust the portrait of a whole Culture. For
the nature-researcher, the morphologist as systematist, the portrayal of
the world is only a business of imitation, and corresponds to the
“fidelity to nature” and the “likeness” of the craftsman-painter, who,
at bottom, works on purely mathematical lines. But a real portrait in
the Rembrandt sense of the word is physiognomic, that is, _history_
captured in a moment. The set of his self-portraits is nothing else but
a (truly Goethian) autobiography. So should the biographies of the great
Cultures be handled. The “fidelity” part, the work of the professional
historian on facts and figures, is only a means, not an end. The
countenance of history is made up of all those things which hitherto we
have only managed to evaluate according to personal standards, i.e., as
beneficial or harmful, good or bad, satisfactory or unsatisfactory—
political forms and economic forms, battles and arts, science and gods,
mathematics and morals. Everything whatsoever that has _become_ is a
symbol, and the expression of a soul. Only to one having the knowledge
of men will it unveil itself. The restraint of a law it abhors. What it
demands is that its significance should be sensed. And thus research
reaches up to a final or superlative truth—Alles Vergängliche ist nur
ein Gleichnis.[82]
The nature-researcher can be educated, but the man who knows history is
born. He seizes and pierces men and facts with one blow, guided by a
feeling which cannot be acquired by learning or affected by persuasion,
but which only too rarely manifests itself in full intensity. Direction,
fixing, ordering, defining by cause and effect, are things that one can
do if one likes. These things are work, but the other is creation. Form
and law, portrayal and comprehension, symbol and formula, have different
organs, and their opposition is that in which life stands to death,
production to destruction. Reason, system and comprehension kill as they
“cognize.” That which is cognized becomes a rigid object, capable of
measurement and subdivision. Intuitive vision, on the other hand,
vivifies and incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity.
Poetry and historical study are kin. Calculation and cognition also are
kin. But, as Hebbel says somewhere, systems are not dreamed, and art-
works are not calculated or (what is the same thing) thought out. The
artist or the real historian sees the becoming of a thing (schaut, wie
etwas wird), and he can re-enact its becoming from its lineaments,
whereas the systematist, whether he be physicist, logician, evolutionist
or pragmatical historian, learns the thing that has become. The artist’s
soul, like the soul of a Culture, is something potential that may
actualize itself, something complete and perfect—in the language of an
older philosophy, a microcosm. The systematic spirit, narrow and
withdrawn “abs-tract”) from the sensual, is an autumnal and passing
phenomenon belonging to the ripest conditions of a Culture. Linked with
the _city_, into which its life is more and more herded, it comes and
goes with the city. In the Classical world, there is science only from
the 6th-century Ionians to the Roman period, but there was art in the
Classical world for just as long as there was existence.
Once more, a paradigm may help in elucidation.
_Soul_ _World_
Existence { potentiality → fulfilment → actuality
{ (_Life_)
{ becoming → the become
Consciousness { direction extension
{ organic mechanical
{ symbol, portrait, number,
notion.
[Crossed
↓ downward ↓
arrows]
{ _History_ _Nature_
World-image { Rhythm, form. Tension, law.
{ Physiognomic. Systematic.
{ Facts Truths
Seeking thus to obtain a clear idea of the unifying principle out of
which each of these two worlds is conceived, we find that
mathematically-controlled cognition relates always (and the purer it is,
the more directly) to a continuous present. The picture of nature dealt
with by the physicist is that which is deployed before his senses at the
given moment. It is one of the tacit, but none the less firm,
presuppositions of nature-research that “Nature” (_die_ Natur) is the
same for every consciousness and for all times. An experiment is
decisive for good and all; time being, not precisely denied, but
eliminated from the field of investigation. Real history rests on an
equally certain sense of the contrary; what it presupposes as its origin
is a nearly indescribable sensitive faculty within, which is
continuously labile under continuous impressions, and is incapable
therefore of possessing what may be called a centre of time.[83] (We
shall consider later what the physicist means by “time.”) The picture of
history—be it the history of mankind, of the world of organisms, of the
earth or of the stellar systems—is a _memory_-picture. “Memory,” in this
connexion, is conceived as a higher state (certainly not proper to every
consciousness and vouchsafed to many in only a low degree), a perfectly
definite kind of imagining power, which enables experience to traverse
each particular moment _sub specie æternitatis_ as one point in an
integral made up of all the past and all the future, and it forms the
necessary basis of all looking-backward, all self-knowledge and all
self-confession. In this sense, Classical man has no memory and
therefore no history, either in or around himself. “No man can judge
history but one who has himself experienced history,” says Goethe. In
the Classical world-consciousness all Past was absorbed in the instant
Present. Compare the entirely historical heads of the Nürnberg Cathedral
sculptures, of Dürer, of Rembrandt, with those of Hellenistic sculpture,
for instance the famous Sophocles statue. The former tell the whole
history of a soul, whereas the latter rigidly confines itself to
expressing the traits of a momentary being, and tells nothing of how
this being is the issue of a course of life—if indeed we can speak of
“course of life” at all in connexion with a purely Classical man, who is
always complete and never becoming.
-----
Footnote 79:
“There are prime phenomena which in their godlike simplicity we must
not disturb or infringe.”
Footnote 80:
The date of Napoleon’s defeat, and the liberation of Germany, on the
field of Leipzig.—_Tr._
Footnote 81:
See Vol. II, pp. 25 et seq., 327 et seq.
Footnote 82:
“All we see before us passing
Sign and symbol is alone.”
From the final stanza of Faust II (Anster’s translation).—_Tr._
Footnote 83:
This phrase, derived by analogy from the centre of gravity of
mechanics, is offered as a translation of “mithin in einim Zeitpunkte
ger nicht zusammengefasst werden können.”—_Tr._
-----
VI
And now it is possible to discover the ultimate elements of the
historical form-world.
Countless shapes that emerge and vanish, pile up and melt again, a
thousand-hued glittering tumult, it seems, of perfectly wilful chance—
such is the picture of world-history when first it deploys before our
inner eye. But through this seeming anarchy, the keener glance can
detect those pure forms which underlie all human becoming, penetrate
their cloud-mantle, and bring them unwillingly to unveil.
But of the whole picture of world-becoming, of that cumulus of grand
planes that the Faust-eye[84] sees piled one beyond another—the becoming
of the heavens, of the earth’s crust, of life, of man—we shall deal here
only with that very small morphological unit that we are accustomed to
call “world-history,” that history which Goethe ended by despising, the
history of higher mankind during 6000 years or so, without going into
the deep problem of the inward homogeneity of all these aspects. What
gives this fleeting form-world meaning and substance, and what has
hitherto lain buried deep under a mass of tangible “facts” and “dates”
that has hardly yet been bored through, is the _phenomenon of the Great
Cultures_. Only after these prime forms shall have been seen and felt
and worked out in respect of their physiognomic meaning will it be
possible to say that the essence and inner form of human History as
opposed to the essence of Nature are understood—or rather, that we
understand them. Only after this inlook and this outlook will a serious
philosophy of history become feasible. Only then will it be possible to
see each fact in the historical picture—each idea, art, war,
personality, epoch—according to its symbolic content, and to regard
history not as a mere sum of past things without intrinsic order or
inner necessity, but as an organism of rigorous structure and
significant articulation, an organism that does not suddenly dissolve
into a formless and ambiguous future when it reaches the accidental
present of the observer.
_Cultures are organisms_, and world-history is their collective
biography. Morphologically, the immense history of the Chinese or of the
Classical Culture is the exact equivalent of the petty history of the
individual man, or of the animal, or the tree, or the flower. For the
Faustian vision, this is not a postulate but an experience; if we want
to learn to recognize inward forms that constantly and everywhere repeat
themselves, the comparative morphology[85] of plants and animals has
long ago given us the methods. In the destinies of the several Cultures
that follow upon one another, grow up with one another, touch,
overshadow, and suppress one another, is compressed the whole content of
human history. And if we set free their shapes, till now hidden all too
deep under the surface of a trite “history of human progress,” and let
them march past us in the spirit, it cannot but be that we shall succeed
in distinguishing, amidst all that is special or unessential, the
primitive culture-form, _the_ Culture that underlies as ideal all the
individual Cultures.
I distinguish the _idea_ of a Culture, which is the sum total of its
inner possibilities, from its sensible _phenomenon_ or appearance upon
the canvas of history as a fulfilled actuality. It is the relation of
the soul to the living body, to its expression in the light-world
perceptible to our eyes. This history of a Culture is the progressive
actualizing of its possible, and the fulfilment is equivalent to the
end. In this way the Apollinian soul, which some of us can perhaps
understand and share in, is related to its unfolding in the realm of
actuality, to the “Classical” or “antique” as we call it, of which the
tangible and understandable relics are investigated by the archæologist,
the philologist, the æsthetic and the historian.
Culture is the _prime phenomenon_ of all past and future world-history.
The deep, and scarcely appreciated, idea of Goethe, which he discovered
in his “living nature” and always made the basis of his morphological
researches, we shall here apply—in its most precise sense—to all the
formations of man’s history, whether fully matured, cut off in the
prime, half opened or stifled in the seed. It is the method of living
into (erfühlen) the object, as opposed to dissecting it. “The highest to
which man can attain, is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him
wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing
further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.” The prime
phenomenon is that in which the idea of becoming is presented net. To
the spiritual eye of Goethe the idea of the prime plant was clearly
visible in the form of every individual plant that happened to come up,
or even that could possibly come up. In his investigation of the “os
intermaxillare” his starting-point was the _prime phenomenon of the
vertebrate type_; and in other fields it was geological stratification,
or the leaf as the prime form of the plant-organism, or the
metamorphosis of the plants as the prime form of all organic becoming.
“The same law will apply to everything else that lives,” he wrote, in
announcing his discovery to Herder. It was a look into the heart of
things that Leibniz would have understood, but the century of Darwin is
as remote from such a vision as it is possible to be.
At present, however, we look in vain for any treatment of history that
is entirely free from the methods of Darwinism—that is, of systematic
natural science based on causality. A physiognomic that is precise,
clear and sure of itself and its limits has never yet arisen, and it can
only arise through the discoveries of method that we have yet to make.
Herein lies the great problem set for the 20th Century to solve—to
explore carefully the inner structure of the organic units through and
in which world-history fulfils itself, to separate the morphologically
necessary from the accidental, and, by seizing the _purport_ of events,
to ascertain the languages in which they speak.
VII
A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; up-
stream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of
definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods
to hide away an eternally-unsolvable riddle; down-stream, a future even
so dark and timeless—such is the groundwork of the Faustian picture of
human history.
Over the expanse of the water passes the endless uniform wave-train of
the generations. Here and there bright shafts of light broaden out,
everywhere dancing flashes confuse and disturb the clear mirror,
changing, sparkling, vanishing. These are what we call the clans,
tribes, peoples, races which unify a series of generations within this
or that limited area of the historical surface. As widely as these
differ in creative power, so widely do the images that they create vary
in duration and plasticity, and when the creative power dies out, the
physiognomic, linguistic and spiritual identification-marks vanish also
and the phenomenon subsides again into the ruck of the generations.
Aryans, Mongols, Germans, Kelts, Parthians, Franks, Carthaginians,
Berbers, Bantus are names by which we specify some very heterogeneous
images of this order.
But over this surface, too, the great Cultures[86] accomplish their
majestic wave-cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines,
flatten again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a
sleeping waste.
A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the
proto-spirituality (_dem urseelenhaften Zustande_) of ever-childish
humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and
mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of
an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It
dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in
the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and
reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that sequence of
great epochs which define and display the stages of fulfilment, is an
inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of
Chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not
only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and
the stifling of the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply-
symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space,
in which and through which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once
attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled
and made externally actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies,
its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes
_Civilization_, the thing which we feel and understand in the words
Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such they may, like a worn-out
giant of the primeval forest, thrust their decaying branches towards the
sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in
the Islamic world. It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose
gigantic, in the Imperial age, with a false semblance of youth and
strength and fullness, and robbed the young Arabian Culture of the East
of light and air.[87]
This—the inward and outward fulfilment, the finality, that awaits every
living Culture—is the purport of all the historic “declines,” amongst
them that decline of the Classical which we know so well and fully, and
another decline, entirely comparable to it in course and duration, which
will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium but is heralded
already and sensible in and around us to-day—the decline of the
West.[88] Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual
man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age. It is a young
and trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, that reveals itself in the
morning of Romanesque and Gothic. It fills the Faustian landscape from
the Provence of the troubadours to the Hildesheim cathedral of Bishop
Bernward.[89] The spring wind blows over it. “In the works of the old-
German architecture,” says Goethe, “one sees the blossoming of an
extraordinary state. Anyone immediately confronted with such a
blossoming can do no more than wonder; but one who can see into the
secret inner life of the plant and its rain of forces, who can observe
how the bud expands, little by little, sees the thing with quite other
eyes and knows what he is seeing.” Childhood speaks to us also—and in
the same tones—out of early-Homeric Doric, out of early-Christian (which
is really early-Arabian) art and out of the works of the Old Kingdom in
Egypt that began with the Fourth Dynasty. There a mythic world-
consciousness is fighting like a harassed debtor against all the dark
and daemonic in itself and in Nature, while slowly ripening itself for
the pure, day-bright expression of the existence that it will at last
achieve and know. The more nearly a Culture approaches the noon
culmination of its being, the more virile, austere, controlled, intense
the form-language it has secured for itself, the more assured its sense
of its own power, the clearer its lineaments. In the spring all this had
still been dim and confused, tentative, filled with childish yearning
and fears—witness the ornament of Romanesque-Gothic church porches of
Saxony[90] and southern France, the early-Christian catacombs, the
Dipylon[91] vases. But there is now the full consciousness of ripened
creative power that we see in the time of the early Middle Kingdom of
Egypt, in the Athens of the Pisistratidæ, in the age of Justinian, in
that of the Counter-Reformation, and we find every individual trait of
expression deliberate, strict, measured, marvellous in its ease and
self-confidence. And we find, too, that everywhere, at moments, the
coming fulfilment suggested itself; in such moments were created the
head of Amenemhet III (the so-called “Hyksos Sphinx” of Tanis), the
domes of Hagia Sophia, the paintings of Titian. Still later, tender to
the point of fragility, fragrant with the sweetness of late October
days, come the Cnidian Aphrodite and the Hall of the Maidens in the
Erechtheum, the arabesques on Saracen horseshoe-arches, the Zwinger of
Dresden, Watteau, Mozart. At last, in the grey dawn of Civilization, the
fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-
successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is
common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in
Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary,
reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome,
wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of
protomysticism, in the womb of the mother, in the grave. The spell of a
“second religiousness”[92] comes upon it, and Late-Classical man turns
to the practice of the cults of Mithras, of Isis, of the Sun—those very
cults into which a soul just born in the East has been pouring a new
wine of dreams and fears and loneliness.
-----
Footnote 84:
Cf. Vol. II, p. 33 et seq.
Footnote 85:
Not the dissecting morphology of the Darwinian’s pragmatic zoology
with its hunt for causal connexions, but the seeing and overseeing
morphology of Goethe.
Footnote 86:
See Vol. II, pp. 41 et seq.
Footnote 87:
See Vol. II, pp. 227 et seq.
Footnote 88:
See Vol. II, pp. 116 et seq. What constitutes the downfall is not,
e.g., the catastrophe of the Great Migrations, which like the
annihilation of the Maya Culture by the Spaniards (see Vol. II, p. 51
et seq.) was a coincidence without any deep necessity, but the inward
undoing that began from the time of Hadrian, as in China from the
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220).
Footnote 89:
St. Bernward was Bishop of Hildesheim from 993 to 1022, and himself
architect and metal-worker. Three other churches besides the cathedral
survive in the city from his time or that of his immediate successors,
and Hildesheim of all North German cities is richest in monuments of
the Romanesque.—_Tr._
Footnote 90:
By “Saxony,” a German historian means not the present-day state of
Saxony (which was a small and comparatively late accretion), but the
whole region of the Weser and the lower Elbe, with Westphalia and
Holstein.—_Tr._
Footnote 91:
Vases from the cemetery adjoining the Dipylon Gate of Athens, the most
representative relics that we possess of the Doric or primitive age of
the Hellenic Culture (about 900 to 600 B.C.).—_Tr._
Footnote 92:
See Vol. II, pp. 381 et seq.
-----
VIII
The term “habit” (Habitus) is used of a plant to signify the special
way, proper to itself, in which it manifests itself, i.e., the
character, course and duration of its appearance in the light-world
where we can see it. By its habit each kind is distinguished, in respect
of each part and each phase of its existence, from all examples of other
species. We may apply this useful notion of “habit” in our physiognomic
of the grand organisms and speak of the habit of the Indian, Egyptian or
Classical Culture, history or spirituality. Some vague inkling of it has
always, for that matter, underlain the notion of _style_, and we shall
not be forcing but merely clearing and deepening that word if we speak
of the religious, intellectual, political, social or economic style[93]
of a Culture. This “habit” of existence in space, which covers in the
case of the individual man action and thought and conduct and
disposition, embraces in the case or the existence of whole Cultures the
totality of life-expressions of the higher order. The choice of
particular branches of art (e.g., the round and fresco by the Hellenes,
counterpoint and oil-painting by the West) and the out-and-out rejection
of others (e.g., of plastic by the Arabs); inclination to the esoteric
(India) or the popular (Greece and Rome); preference for oratory
(Classical) or for writing (China, the West) as the form of spiritual
communication, are all style-manifestations, and so also are the various
types of costume, of administration, of transport, of social courtesies.
All great personalities of the Classical world form a self-contained
group, whose spiritual habit is definitely different from that of all
great men of the Arabian or the Western groups. Compare even Goethe and
Raphael with Classical men, and Heraclitus, Sophocles, Plato,
Alcibiades, Themistocles, Horace and Tiberius rank themselves together
instantly as members of one family. Every Classical Cosmopolis—from
Hiero’s Syracuse to Imperial Rome the embodiment and sense-picture of
one and the same life-feeling—differs radically in lay-out and street-
plan, in the language of its public and private architecture, in the
type of its squares, alleys, courts, façades, in its colour, noises,
street-life and night-life, from the group of Indian or that of Arabian
or that of Western world-cities. Baghdad and Cairo could be felt in
Granada long after the conquest; even Philip II’s Madrid had all the
physiognomic hall-marks of modern London and Paris. There is a high
symbolism in every dissimilarity of this sort. Contrast the Western
tendency to straight-lined perspectives and street-alignments (such as
the grand tract of the Champs-Elysées from the Louvre, or the Piazza
before St. Peter’s) with the almost deliberate complexity and narrowness
of the Via Sacra, the Forum Romanum and the Acropolis, whose parts are
arranged without symmetry and with no perspective. Even the town-
planning—whether darkly as in the Gothic or consciously as in the ages
of Alexander and Napoleon—reflects the same principle as the mathematic—
in the one case the Leibnizian mathematic of infinite space, in the
other the Euclidean mathematic of separate bodies.[94] But to the
“habit” of a group belong, further, its definite _life-duration_ and its
definite tempo of development. Both of these are properties which we
must not fail to take into account in a historical theory of structure.
The rhythm (Takt) of Classical existence was different from that of
Egyptian or Arabian; and we can fairly speak of the _andante_ of Greece
and Rome and the _allegro con brio_ of the Faustian spirit.
The notion of life-duration as applied to a man, a butterfly, an oak, a
blade of grass, comprises a specific time-value, which is quite
independent of all the accidents of the individual case. Ten years are a
slice of life which is approximately equivalent for all men, and the
metamorphosis of insects is associated with a number of days exactly
known and predictable in individual cases. For the Romans the notions of
_pueritia_, _adolescentia_, _iuventus_, _virilitas_, _senectus_
possessed an almost mathematically precise meaning. Without doubt the
biology of the future will—in opposition to Darwinism and to the
exclusion in principle of causal fitness-motives for the origins of
species—take these _pre-ordained_ life durations as the starting-point
for a new enunciation of its problem.[95] The duration of a generation—
whatever may be its nature—is a fact of almost mystical significance.
Now, such relations are valid also, and to an extent never hitherto
imagined, for all the higher Cultures. _Every Culture, every adolescence
and maturing and decay of a Culture, every one of its intrinsically
necessary stages and periods, has a definite duration, always the same,
always recurring with the emphasis of a symbol._ In the present work we
cannot attempt to open up this world of most mysterious connexions, but
the facts that will emerge again and again as we go on will tell us of
themselves how much lies hidden here. What is the meaning of that
striking fifty-year period, the rhythm of the political, intellectual
and artistic “becoming” of all Cultures?[96] Of the 300-year period of
the Baroque, of the Ionic, of the great mathematics, of Attic sculpture,
of mosaic painting, of counterpoint, of Galileian mechanics? What does
the _ideal_ life of one millennium for each Culture mean in comparison
with the individual man’s "three-score years and ten"? As the plant’s
being is brought to expression in form, dress and carriage by leaves,
blossoms, twigs and fruit, so also is the being of a Culture manifested
by its religious, intellectual, political and economic formations. Just
as, say, Goethe’s individuality discourses of itself in such widely-
different forms as the _Faust_, the _Farbenlehre_, the _Reineke Fuchs_,
_Tasso_, _Werther_, the journey to Italy and the Friederike love, the
_Westöstliche Diwan_ and the _Römische Elegien_; so the individuality of
the Classical world displays itself in the Persian wars, the Attic
drama, the City-State, the Dionysia and not less in the Tyrannis, the
Ionic column, the geometry of Euclid, the Roman legion, and the
gladiatorial contests and “panem et circenses” of the Imperial age.
In this sense, too, every individual being that has any sort of
importance recapitulates,[97] of intrinsic necessity, all the epochs of
the Culture to which it belongs. In each one of us, at that decisive
moment when he begins to know that he is an ego, the inner life wakens
just where and just how that of the Culture wakened long ago. Each of us
men of the West, in his child’s day-dreams and child’s play, lives again
its Gothic—the cathedrals, the castles, the hero-sagas, the crusader’s
“Dieu le veult,” the soul’s oath of young Parzival. Every young Greek
had his Homeric age and his Marathon. In Goethe’s Werther, the image of
a tropic youth that every Faustian (but no Classical) man knows, the
springtime of Petrarch and the Minnesänger reappears. When Goethe
blocked out the _Urfaust_,[98] he was Parzival; when he finished _Faust
I_, he was Hamlet, and only with _Faust II_ did he become the world-man
of the 19th Century whom Byron could understand. Even the senility of
the Classical—the faddy and unfruitful centuries of very late Hellenism,
the second-childhood of a weary and blasé intelligence—can be studied in
more than one of its grand old men. Thus, much of Euripides’ _Bacchæ_
anticipates the life-outlook, and much of Plato’s _Timæus_ the religious
syncretism of the Imperial age; and Goethe’s _Faust II_ and Wagner’s
_Parsifal_ disclose to us in advance the shape that _our_ spirituality
will assume in our next (_in point of creative power our last_)
centuries.
Biology employs the term _homology_ of organs to signify morphological
equivalence in contradistinction to the term _analogy_ which relates to
functional equivalence. This important, and in the sequel most fruitful,
notion was conceived by Goethe (who was led thereby to the discovery of
the “os intermaxillare” in man) and put into strict scientific shape by
Owen;[99] this notion also we shall incorporate in our historical
method.
It is known that for every part of the bone-structure of the human head
an exactly corresponding part is found in all vertebrated animals right
down to the fish, and that the pectoral fins of fish and the feet, wings
and hands of terrestrial vertebrates are homologous organs, even though
they have lost every trace of similarity. The lungs of terrestrial, and
the swim-bladders of aquatic animals are homologous, while lungs and
gills on the other hand are analogous—that is, similar in point of
use.[100] And the trained and deepened morphological insight that is
required to establish such distinctions is an utterly different thing
from the present method of historical research, with its shallow
comparisons of Christ and Buddha, Archimedes and Galileo, Cæsar and
Wallenstein, parcelled Germany and parcelled Greece. More and more
clearly as we go on, we shall realize what immense views will offer
themselves to the historical eye as soon as the rigorous morphological
method has been understood and cultivated. To name but a few examples,
_homologous_ forms are: Classical sculpture and West European
orchestration, the Fourth Dynasty pyramids and the Gothic cathedrals,
Indian Buddhism and Roman Stoicism (Buddhism and Christianity are _not
even analogous_); the periods of “the Contending States” in China, the
Hyksos in Egypt and the Punic Wars; the age of Pericles and the age of
the Ommayads; the epochs of the Rigveda, of Plotinus and of Dante. The
Dionysiac movement is homologous with the Renaissance, analogous to the
Reformation. For us, "Wagner is the _résumé_ of modernity," as Nietzsche
rightly saw; and the equivalent that logically _must_ exist in the
Classical modernity we find in Pergamene art. (Some preliminary notion
of the fruitfulness of this way of regarding history, may be gathered
from studying the tables included in this volume.)
The application of the “homology” principle to historical phenomena
brings with it an entirely new connotation for the word “contemporary.”
I designate as contemporary two historical facts that occur in exactly
the same—relative—positions in their respective Cultures, and therefore
possess exactly equivalent importance. It has already been shown how the
development of the Classical and that of the Western mathematic
proceeded in complete congruence, and we might have ventured to describe
Pythagoras as the contemporary of Descartes, Archytas of Laplace,
Archimedes of Gauss. The Ionic and the Baroque, again, ran their course
_contemporaneously_. Polygnotus pairs in time with Rembrandt, Polycletus
with Bach. The Reformation, Puritanism and, above all, the turn to
Civilization appear simultaneously in all Cultures; in the Classical
this last epoch bears the names of Philip and Alexander, in our West
those of the Revolution and Napoleon. Contemporary, too, are the
building of Alexandria, of Baghdad, and of Washington; Classical coinage
and our double-entry book-keeping; the first Tyrannis and the Fronde;
Augustus and Shih-huang-ti;[101] Hannibal and the World War.
I hope to show that without exception all great creations and forms in
religion, art, politics, social life, economy and science appear, fulfil
themselves and die down _contemporaneously_ in all the Cultures; that
the inner structure of one corresponds strictly with that of all the
others; that there is not a single phenomenon of deep physiognomic
importance in the record of one for which we could not find a
counterpart in the record of every other; and that this counterpart is
to be found under a characteristic form and in a perfectly definite
chronological position. At the same time, if we are to grasp such
homologies of facts, we shall need to have a far deeper insight and a
far more critical attitude towards the visible foreground of things than
historians have hitherto been wont to display; who amongst them, for
instance, would have allowed himself to dream that the counterpart of
Protestantism was to be found in the Dionysiac movement, and that
English Puritanism was for the West what Islam was for the Arabian
world?
Seen from this angle, history offers possibilities far beyond the
ambitions of all previous research, which has contented itself in the
main with arranging the facts of the past so far as these were known
(and that according to a one-line scheme)—the possibilities, namely, of
Overpassing the present as a research-limit, and predetermining the
spiritual form, duration, rhythm, meaning and product of the _still
unaccomplished_ stages of our western history; and
Reconstructing long-vanished and unknown epochs, even whole Cultures
of the past, by means of morphological connexions, in much the same
way as modern palæontology deduces far-reaching and trustworthy
conclusions as to skeletal structure and species from a single
unearthed skull-fragment.
It is possible, given the physiognomic rhythm, to recover from scattered
details of ornament, building, script, or from odd political, economic
and religious data, the organic characters of whole centuries of
history, and from known elements on the scale of art-expression, to find
corresponding elements on the scale of political forms, or from that of
mathematical forms to read that of economic. This is a truly Goethian
method—rooted in fact in Goethe’s conception of the _prime phenomenon_—
which is already to a limited extent current in comparative zoology, but
can be extended, to a degree hitherto undreamed of, over the whole field
of history.
-----
Footnote 93:
In English the word “cast” will evidently satisfy the sense better on
occasion. The word “stil” will therefore not necessarily be always
rendered “style.”—_Tr._
Footnote 94:
See Vol. II, pp. 109 et seq.
Footnote 95:
See Vol. II, pp. 36 et seq.
Footnote 96:
I will only mention here the distances apart of the three Punic Wars,
and the series—likewise comprehensible only as rhythmic—Spanish
Succession War, Silesian wars, Napoleonic Wars, Bismarck’s wars, and
the World War (cf. Vol. II, p. 488). Connected with this is the
spiritual relation of grandfather and grandson, a relation which
produces in the mind of primitive peoples the conviction that the soul
of the grandfather returns in the grandson, and has originated the
widespread custom of giving the grandson the grandfather’s _name_,
which by its mystic spell binds his soul afresh to the corporeal
world.
Footnote 97:
The word is used in the sense in which biology employs it, viz., to
describe the process by which the embryo traverses all the phases
which its species has undergone.—_Tr._
Footnote 98:
The first draft of _Faust I_, discovered only comparatively recently.—
_Tr._
Footnote 99:
See Ency. Brit., XIth Ed., articles _Owen, Sir Richard; Morphology and
Zoology_ (p. 1029).—_Tr._
Footnote 100:
It is not superfluous to add that there is nothing of the causal kind
in these _pure phenomena_ of “Living Nature.” Materialism, in order to
get a system for the pedestrian reasoner, has had to adulterate the
picture of them with fitness-causes. But Goethe—who anticipated just
about as much of Darwinism as there will be left of it in fifty years
from Darwin—_absolutely_ excluded the causality-principle. And the
very fact that the Darwinians quite failed to notice its absence is a
clear indication that Goethe’s “Living Nature” belongs to actual life,
"cause"-less and "aim"-less; for the idea of the prime-phenomenon does
not involve causal assumptions of any sort unless it has been
misunderstood in advance in a mechanistic sense.
Footnote 101:
Reigned 246-210 B.C. He styled himself “first universal emperor” and
intended a position for himself and his successors akin to that of
“Divus” in Rome. For a brief account of his energetic and
comprehensive work see Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article _China_, p. 194.—
_Tr._
-----
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY
II
THE IDEA OF DESTINY AND THE PRINCIPLE
OF CAUSALITY
CHAPTER IV
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY
II
THE IDEA OF DESTINY AND THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSALITY
I
Following out this train of thought to the end, we come into the
presence of an opposition in which we perceive the key—the only key—
wherewith to approach, and (so far as the word has any meaning at all)
to solve, one of the oldest and gravest of man’s riddles. This is the
opposition of the _Destiny Idea_ and the _Causality Principle_—an
opposition which, it is safe to say, has never hitherto been recognized
for what it is, the necessary foundation of world-building.
Anyone who understands at all what is meant by saying that the soul is
the _idea of an existence_, will also divine a near relationship between
it and the _sure sense of a destiny_ and must regard Life itself (our
name for the form in which the actualizing of the possible is
accomplished) as directed, irrevocable in every line, fate-laden.
Primitive man feels this dimly and anxiously, while for the man of a
higher Culture it is definite enough to become his vision of the world—
though this vision is communicable only through religion and art, never
through notions and proofs.
Every higher language possesses a number of words such as luck, doom,
conjuncture, vocation, about which there is, as it were, a veil. No
hypothesis, no science, can ever get into touch with that which we feel
when we let ourselves sink into the meaning and sound of these words.
They are symbols, not notions. In them is the centre of gravity of that
world-picture that I have called the World-as-history as opposed to the
World-as-nature. The Destiny-idea demands life-experience and not
scientific experience, the power of seeing and not that of calculating,
depth and not intellect. There is an _organic logic_, an instinctive,
dream-sure logic of all existence as opposed to the _logic of the
inorganic_, the logic of understanding and of things understood—a logic
of direction as against a logic of extension—and no systematist, no
Aristotle or Kant, has known how to deal with it. They are on their own
ground when they tell us about “judgment,” “perception,” “awareness,”
and “recollection,” but as to what is in the words “hope,” “happiness,”
“despair,” “repentance,” “devotion,” and “consolation” they are silent.
He who expects here, in the domain of the living, to find reasons and
consequences, or imagines that an inward certainty as to the meaning of
life is the same thing as “Fatalism” or “Predestination,” simply knows
nothing of the matters in question, confusing experience lived with
experience acquired or acquirable. Causality is the reasonable, the law-
bound, the describable, the badge of our whole waking and reasoning
existence. But destiny is the word for an inner certainty that is _not_
describable. We bring out that which is in the causal by means of a
physical or an epistemological system, through numbers, by reasoned
classification; but the idea of destiny can be imparted only by the
artist working through media like portraiture, tragedy and music. The
one requires us to _distinguish_ and in distinguishing to dissect and
destroy, whereas the other is _creative_ through and through, and thus
destiny is related to life and causality to death.
In the Destiny-idea the soul reveals its world-longing, its desire to
rise into the light, to accomplish and actualize its vocation. To no man
is it entirely alien, and not before one has become the unanchored
“late” man of the megalopolis is original vision quite overpowered by
matter-of-fact feeling and mechanizing thought. Even then, in some
intense hour, the lost vision comes back to one with terrible clearness,
shattering in a moment all the causality of the world’s surface. For the
world as a system of causal connexions is not only a “late” but also a
highly rarefied conception and only the energetic intellects of high
Cultures are capable of possessing it—or perhaps we should say, devising
it—with conviction. The notion of causality is coterminous with the
notion of law: the only laws that are, are causal laws. But just as
there lies in the causal, according to Kant, a _necessity of the
thinking consciousness_ and the _basic form of its relation to the
essence of things_, so also, designated by the words destiny,
dispensation, vocation, there is a something that is an inevitable
_necessity of life_. Real history is heavy with fate but free of laws.
One can divine the future (there is, indeed, a certain insight that can
penetrate its secrets deeply) but one cannot reckon it. The physiognomic
flair which enables one to read a whole life in a face or to sum up
whole peoples from the picture of an epoch—and to do so without
deliberate effort or “system”—is utterly remote from all “cause and
effect.”
He who comprehends the light-world that is before his eyes not
physiognomically but systematically, and makes it intellectually his own
by the methods of _causal_ experience, must necessarily in the end come
to believe that every living thing can be understood by reference to
cause and effect—that there is no secret and no inner directedness. He,
on the other hand, who as Goethe did—and for that matter as everyone
does in nine out of ten of his waking moments—lets the impressions of
the world about him work merely upon his senses, absorbs these
impressions as a whole, feels the become in its becoming. The stiff mask
of causality is lifted by mere _ceasing to think_. Suddenly, Time is no
more a riddle, a notion, a “form” or “dimension” but becomes an inner
certainty, destiny itself; and in its directedness, its
_irreversibility_, its livingness, is disclosed the very meaning of the
historical world-picture. _Destiny and Causality are related as Time and
Space._
In the two possible world-forms then—History and Nature, the physiognomy
of all becoming and the system of all things become—destiny _or_
causality prevails. Between them there is all the difference between a
feeling of life and a method of knowledge. Each of them is the starting-
point of a complete and self-contained, but not _of a unique_ world.
Yet, after all, just as the become is founded upon a becoming, so the
_knowledge_ of cause and effect is founded upon the sure _feeling_ of a
destiny. Causality is—so to say—destiny become, destiny made inorganic
and modelled in reason-forms. Destiny itself (passed over in silence by
Kant and every other builder of rational world-systems because with
their armoury of _abstractions_ they could not touch _life_) stands
beyond and outside all comprehended Nature. Nevertheless, being itself
the original, it alone gives the stiff dead principle of cause-and-
effect the opportunity to figure in the later scenes of a culture-drama,
alive and historical, as the incarnation of a tyrannical thinking. The
existence of the Classical soul is the _condition_ for the appearance of
Democritus’s method, the existence of the Faustian soul for that of
Newton’s. We may well imagine that either of these Cultures might have
failed to produce a natural science of its own, but we cannot imagine
the systems without their cultural foundations.
Here again we see how becoming and the become, direction and extension,
include one another and are subordinated each to the other, according as
we are in the historical or in the “natural” focus. If history is that
kind of world-order in which all the become is fitted to the becoming,
then the products of scientific work must _inter alia_ be so handled;
and, in fact, for the historical eye there is only a _history_ of
physics. It was Destiny that the discoveries of oxygen, Neptune,
gravitation and spectrum analysis happened as and when they did. It was
Destiny that the phlogiston theory, the undulatory theory of light, the
kinetic theory of gases could arise at all, seeing that they were
elucidations of results and, as such, highly personal to their
respective authors, and that other theories (“correct” or “erroneous”)
might equally well have been developed instead. And it is again Destiny
and the result of strong personality when one theory vanishes and
another becomes the lodestar of the physicist’s world. Even the born
physicist speaks of the “fate” of a problem or the “history” of a
discovery.
Conversely, if “Nature” is that constitution of things in which the
becoming should logically be incorporated in the thing-become, and
living direction in rigid extension, history may best be treated as a
chapter of epistemology; and so indeed Kant would have treated it if he
had remembered to include it at all in his system of knowledge.
Significantly enough, he did not; for him as for every born systematist
Nature is _The_ World, and when he discusses time without noticing that
it has direction and is irreversible, we see that he is dealing with the
Nature-world and has no inkling of the possibility of another, the
history-world. Perhaps, for Kant, this other world _was_ actually
impossible.
Now, _Causality has nothing whatever to do with Time_. To the world of
to-day, made up of Kantians who know not how Kantian they are, this must
seem an outrageous paradox. And yet every formula of Western physics
exhibits the “how” and the “how long” as distinct in essence. As soon as
the question is pressed home, causality restricts its answer rigidly to
the statement _that_ something happens—and not _when_ it happens. The
“effect” must of necessity be put with the “cause.” The _distance_
between them belongs to a different order, it lies within the act of
understanding itself (which is an element of life) and not within the
thing or things understood. It is of the essence of the extended that it
overcomes directedness, and of Space that it contradicts Time, _and yet
the latter, as the more fundamental, precedes and underlies the former_.
Destiny claims the same precedence; we begin with the idea of Destiny,
and only later, when our waking-consciousness looks fearfully for a
spell that will bind in the sense-world and overcome the death that
cannot be evaded, do we conceive causality as an anti-Fate, and make it
_create another world to protect us from and console us for this_. And
as the web of cause and effect gradually spreads over the visible
surfaces there is formed a convincing picture of timeless duration—
essentially, Being, but Being endowed with attributes by the sheer force
of pure thought. This tendency underlies the feeling, well known in all
mature Cultures, that “Knowledge is Power,” the power that is meant
being power over Destiny. The abstract savant, the natural-science
researcher, the thinker in systems, whose whole intellectual existence
bases itself on the causality principle, are “late” manifestations of an
unconscious _hatred_ of the powers of incomprehensible Destiny. “Pure
Reason” denies all possibilities that are outside itself. Here strict
thought and great art are eternally in conflict. The one keeps its feet,
and the other lets itself go. A man like Kant must always feel himself
as superior to a Beethoven as the adult is to the child, but this will
not prevent a Beethoven from regarding the “Critique of Pure Reason” as
a pitiable sort of philosophy. _Teleology_, that nonsense of all
nonsenses within science, is a misdirected attempt to deal mechanically
with the _living_ content of scientific knowledge (for knowledge implies
someone to know, and though the substance of thought may be “Nature” the
_act_ of thought is history), and so with life itself as an inverted
causality. Teleology is a caricature of the Destiny-idea which
transforms the _vocation_ of Dante into the _aim_ of the savant. It is
the deepest and most characteristic tendency both of Darwinism—the
megalopolitan-intellectual product of the most abstract of all
Civilizations—and of the materialist conception of history which springs
from the same root as Darwinism and, like it, kills all that is organic
and fateful. Thus the morphological element of the Causal is a
_Principle_, and the morphological element of Destiny is an _Idea_, an
idea that is incapable of being “cognized,” described or defined, and
can only be felt and inwardly lived. This idea is something of which one
is either entirely ignorant or else—like the man of the spring and every
truly significant man of the late seasons, believer, lover, artist,
poet—entirely certain.
Thus Destiny is seen to be the true _existence-mode of the prime
phenomenon_, that in which the living idea of becoming unfolds itself
immediately to the intuitive vision. And therefore the Destiny-idea
dominates the whole world-picture of history, while causality, which is
the existence-mode of _objects_ and stamps out of the world of
sensations a set of well-distinguished and well-defined _things_,
_properties_ and _relations_, dominates and penetrates, as the form of
the understanding, the Nature-world that is the understanding’s “alter
ego.”
But inquiry into the degree of validity of causal connexions within a
presentation of nature, or (what is henceforth the same thing for us)
into the destinies involved in that presentation, becomes far more
difficult still when we come to realize that for primitive man or for
the child no comprehensive causally-ordered world exists at all as yet
and that we ourselves, though “late” men with a consciousness
disciplined by powerful speech-sharpened thought, can do no more, even
in moments of the most strained attention (the only ones, really, in
which we are exactly in the physical focus), than _assert_ that the
causal order which we see in such a moment is continuously present in
the actuality around us. Even waking, we take in the actual, “the living
garment of the Deity,” _physiognomically_, and we do so involuntarily
and by virtue of a power of experience that is rooted in the deep
sources of life.
A _systematic_ delineation, on the contrary, is the expression of an
understanding emancipated from perception, and by means of it we bring
the mental picture of all times and all men into conformity with the
moment’s picture of Nature as ordered by ourselves. But the mode of this
ordering, which has a history that we cannot interfere with in the
smallest degree, is not the working of a cause, but a destiny.
II
The way to the problem of Time, then, begins in the primitive
wistfulness and passes through its clearer issue the Destiny-idea. We
have now to try to outline, briefly, the content of that problem, so far
as it affects the subject of this book.
The _word_ Time is a sort of charm to summon up that intensely personal
something designated earlier as the “proper,” which with an inner
certainty we oppose to the “alien” something that is borne in upon each
of us amongst and within the crowding impressions of the sense-life.
“The Proper,” “Destiny” and “Time” are interchangeable words.
The problem of Time, like that of Destiny, has been completely
misunderstood by all thinkers who have confined themselves to the
systematic of the Become. In Kant’s celebrated theory there is not one
word about its character of directedness. Not only so, but the omission
has never even been noticed. But what _is_ time as a length, time
without direction? Everything living, we can only repeat, has “life,”
direction, impulse, will, a movement-quality (Bewegtheit) that is most
intimately allied to yearning and has not the smallest element in common
with the “motion” (Bewegung) of the physicists. The living is
indivisible and irreversible, once and uniquely occurring, and its
course is entirely indeterminable by mechanics. For all such qualities
belong to the essence of Destiny, and “Time”—that which we actually feel
at the sound of the word, which is clearer in music than in language,
and in poetry than in prose—has this _organic_ essence, while Space has
not. Hence, Kant and the rest notwithstanding, it is impossible to bring
Time _with Space_ under one general Critique. Space is a _conception_,
but time is a _word_ to indicate something inconceivable, a sound-
symbol, and to use it as a notion, scientifically, is utterly to
misconceive its nature. Even the word direction—which unfortunately
cannot be replaced by another—is liable to mislead owing to its visual
content. The vector-notion in physics is a case in point.
For primitive man the word “time” can have no meaning. He simply lives,
without any necessity of specifying an opposition to something else. He
_has_ time, but he _knows_ nothing of it. All of us are conscious, as
being aware, of space only, and not of time. Space “is,” (i.e. exists,
in and with our sense-world)—as a self-extension while we are living the
ordinary life of dream, impulse, intuition and conduct, and as space in
the strict sense in the moments of strained attention. “Time,” on the
contrary, is a _discovery_, which is only made by thinking. We create it
as an idea or notion and do not begin till much later to suspect that
_we ourselves are Time_, inasmuch as we live.[102] And only the higher
Cultures, whose world-conceptions have reached the mechanical-Nature
stage, are capable of deriving from their consciousness of a well-
ordered measurable and comprehensible Spatial, the projected image of
time, the _phantom_ time,[103] which satisfies their need of
comprehending, measuring and causally ordering all. And this impulse—a
sign of the sophistication of existence that makes its appearance quite
early in every Culture—fashions, outside and beyond the real life-
feeling, that which is called time in all higher languages and has
become for the town-intellect a completely _inorganic magnitude_, as
deceptive as it is current. But, if the characteristics, or rather the
characteristic, of extension—limit and causality—is really wizard’s gear
wherewith our proper soul attempts to conjure and bind alien powers—
Goethe speaks somewhere of the “principle of reasonable order that we
bear within ourselves and could impress as the seal of our power upon
everything that we touch”—if all law is a fetter which our world-dread
hurries to fix upon the incrowding sensuous, a deep necessity of self-
preservation, so also the invention of a time that is knowable and
spatially representable within causality is a later act of this same
self-preservation, an attempt to bind by the force of _notion_ the
tormenting inward riddle that is doubly tormenting to the intellect that
has attained power only to find itself defied. Always a subtle hatred
underlies the intellectual process by which anything is forced into the
domain and form-world of measure and law. The living is _killed_ by
being introduced into space, for space is dead and makes dead. With
birth is given death, with the fulfilment the end. Something _dies_
within the woman when she conceives—hence comes that eternal hatred of
the sexes, child of world-fear. The man destroys, in a very deep sense,
when he begets—by bodily act in the sensuous world, by “knowing” in the
intellectual. Even in Luther[104] the word “know” has the secondary
genital sense. And with the “knowledge” of life—which remains alien to
the lower animals—the knowledge of death has gained that power which
dominates man’s whole waking consciousness. By a _picture_ of time the
actual is changed into the transitory.[105]
The mere creation of the _name_ Time was an unparalleled deliverance. To
name anything by a name is to win power over it. This is the essence of
primitive man’s art of magic—the evil powers are constrained by naming
them, and the enemy is weakened or killed by coupling certain magic
procedures with his name.[106]
And there is something of this primitive expression of world-fear in the
way in which all systematic philosophies use mere names as a last resort
for getting rid of the Incomprehensible, the Almighty that is all too
mighty for the intellect. We name something or other the “Absolute,” and
we feel ourselves at once its superior. Philosophy, the _love_ of
Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible. What
is named, comprehended, measured is _ipso facto_ overpowered, made inert
and taboo.[107] Once more, “knowledge is power.” Herein lies one root of
the difference between the idealist’s and the realist’s attitude towards
the Unapproachable; it is expressed by the two meanings of the German
word _Scheu_—respect and abhorrence.[108] The idealist contemplates, the
realist would subject, mechanize, render innocuous. Plato and Goethe
accept the secret in humility, Aristotle and Kant would open it up and
destroy it. The most deeply significant example of this realism is in
its treatment of the Time problem. The dread mystery of Time, life
itself, must be spellbound and, by the magic of comprehensibility,
neutralized.
All that has been said about time in “scientific” philosophy, psychology
and physics—the supposed answer to a question that had better never have
been asked, namely what _is_ time?—touches, not at any point the secret
itself, but only a spatially-formed _representative_ phantom. The
livingness and directedness and fated course of real Time is replaced by
a figure which, be it never so intimately absorbed, is only a _line_,
measurable, divisible, reversible, and not a portrait of that which is
incapable of being portrayed; by a “time” that can be mathematically
expressed in such forms as √_t_, _t_², -_t_, from which the assumption
of a time of zero magnitude or of negative times is, to say the least,
_not_ excluded.[109] Obviously this is something quite outside the
domain of Life, Destiny, and living _historical_ Time; it is a purely
conceptual time-system that is remote even from the sensuous life. One
has only to substitute, in any philosophical or physical treatise that
one pleases, this word “Destiny” for the word “time” and one will
instantly see how understanding loses its way when language has
emancipated it from sensation, and how impossible the group “time and
space” is. What is not experienced and felt, what is merely _thought_,
necessarily takes a _spatial_ form, and this explains why no systematic
philosopher has been able to make anything out of the mystery-clouded,
far-echoing sound symbols “Past” and “Future.” In Kant’s utterances
concerning time they do not even occur, and in fact one cannot see any
relation which could connect them with what is said there. But only this
spatial form enables time and space to be brought into functional
interdependence as magnitudes _of the same_ order, as four-dimensional
vector analysis[110] conspicuously shows. As early as 1813 Lagrange
frankly described mechanics as a four-dimensional geometry, and even
Newton’s cautious conception of “tempus absolutum sive duratio” is not
exempt from this _intellectually inevitable_ transformation of the
living into mere extension. In the older philosophy I have found one,
and only one, profound and reverent presentation of Time; it is in
Augustine—“If no one questions me, I know: if I would explain to a
questioner, I know not.”[111]
When philosophers of the present-day West “hedge”—as they all do—by
saying that things _are_ in time as in space and that “outside” them
nothing is “conceivable,” they are merely putting another kind of space
(Räumlichkeit) beside the ordinary one, just as one might, if one chose,
call hope and electricity the two forces of the universe. It ought not,
surely, to have escaped Kant when he spoke of the “two forms” of
perception, that whereas it is easy enough to come to a scientific
understanding about space (though not to “explain” it, in the ordinary
sense of the word, for that is beyond human powers), treatment of time
on the same lines breaks down utterly. The reader of the “Critique of
Pure Reason” and the “Prolegomena” will observe that Kant gives a well-
considered proof for the connexion of space and geometry but carefully
avoids doing the same for time and arithmetic. There he did not go
beyond enunciation, and constant reassertion of analogy between the two
conceptions lured him over a gap that would have been fatal to his
system. _Vis-à-vis_ the Where and the How, the When forms a world of its
own as distinct as is metaphysics from physics. Space, object, number,
notion, causality are so intimately akin that it is impossible—as
countless mistaken systems prove—to treat the one independently of the
other. Mechanics is a copy of the logic of its day and vice versa. The
picture of thought as psychology builds it up and the picture of the
space-world as contemporary physics describes it are reflections of one
another. Conceptions and things, reasons and causes, conclusions and
processes coincide so nicely, as received by the consciousness, that the
abstract thinker himself has again and again succumbed to the temptation
of setting forth the thought-“process” graphically and schematically—
witness Aristotle’s and Kant’s tabulated categories. “Where there is no
scheme, there is no philosophy” is the objection of principle—
unacknowledged though it may be—that all professional philosophers have
against the “intuitives,” to whom inwardly they feel themselves far
superior. That is why Kant crossly describes the Platonic style of
thinking “as the art of spending good words in babble” (die Kunst,
wortreich zu schwatzen), and why even to-day the lecture-room
philosopher has not a word to say about Goethe’s philosophy. Every
logical operation is capable of being _drawn_, every system a
_geometrical_ method of handling thoughts. And therefore Time either
finds no place in the system at all, or is made its victim.
This is the refutation of that widely-spread misunderstanding which
connects time with arithmetic and space with geometry by superficial
analogies, an error to which Kant ought never to have succumbed—though
it is hardly surprising that Schopenhauer, with his incapacity for
understanding mathematics, did so. Because the living act of numbering
is somehow or other related to time, number and time are constantly
confused. But numbering is not number, any more than drawing is a
drawing. Numbering and drawing are a becoming, numbers and figures are
things become. Kant and the rest have in mind now the living act
(numbering) and now the result thereof (the relations of the finished
figure); but the one belongs to the domain of Life and Time, the other
to that of Extension and Causality. _That_ I calculate is the business
of organic, _what_ I calculate the business of inorganic, logic.
Mathematics as a whole—in common language, arithmetic and geometry—
answers the _How?_ and the _What?_—that is, the problem of the Natural
order of things. In opposition to this problem stands that of the
_When?_ of things, the specifically historical problem of destiny,
future and past; and all these things are comprised in the word
_Chronology_, which simple mankind understands fully and unequivocally.
Between arithmetic and geometry there is no opposition.[112] Every kind
of number, as has been sufficiently shown in an earlier chapter, belongs
entirely to the realm of the extended and the become, whether as a
Euclidean magnitude or as an analytical function; and to which heading
should we have to assign the cyclometric[113] functions, the Binomial
Theorem, the Riemann surfaces, the Theory of Groups? Kant’s scheme was
refuted by Euler and d’Alembert before he even set it up, and only the
unfamiliarity of his successors with the mathematics of their time—what
a contrast to Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz, who evolved the mathematics
of _their_ time from the depths of their own philosophy!—made it
possible for mathematical notions of a relation between time and
arithmetic to be passed on like an heirloom, almost uncriticized.
But between Becoming and any part whatsoever of mathematics there is not
the slightest contact. Newton indeed was profoundly convinced (and he
was no mean philosopher) that in the principles of his Calculus of
Fluxions[114] he had grasped the problem of Becoming, and therefore of
Time—in a far subtler form, by the way, than Kant’s. But even Newton’s
view could not be upheld, even though it may find advocates to this day.
Since Weierstrass proved that continuous functions exist which either
cannot be differentiated at all or are capable only of partial
differentiation, this most deep-searching of all efforts to close with
the Time-problem mathematically has been abandoned.
-----
Footnote 102:
The sensuous life and the intellectual life too are Time; it is only
sensuous _experience_ and intellectual _experience_, the “world,” that
is spatial nature. (As to the nearer affinity of the Feminine to Time,
see Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq.)
Footnote 103:
The expression “space of time” (Zeitraum) which is common to many
languages, is evidence of our inability to represent direction
otherwise than by extension.
Footnote 104:
I.e., the translated Bible.—_Tr._
Footnote 105:
See Vol. II, pp. 19 et seq.
Footnote 106:
See p. 80 of this volume, and Vol. II, pp. 166, 328.
Footnote 107:
See Vol. II, p. 137.
Footnote 108:
The nearest English equivalent is perhaps the word “fear.” “Fearful”
would correspond exactly but for the fact that in the second sense the
word is objective instead of subjective. The word “shy” itself bears
the second meaning in such trivial words as gun-shy, work-shy.—_Tr._
Footnote 109:
The Relativity theory, a working hypothesis which is on the way to
overthrowing Newton’s mechanics—which means at bottom his view of the
problem of motion—admits cases in which the words “earlier” and
“later” may be inverted. The mathematical foundation of this theory by
Minkowski uses _imaginary_ time units for measurement.
Footnote 110:
The dimensions are _x_, _y_, _z_ (in respect of space) and _t_ (in
respect of time), and all four appear to be regarded as perfectly
equivalent in transformations. [The English reader may be referred to
A. Einstein, “Theory of Relativity,” Ch. XI and appendices I, II.—
_Tr._]
Footnote 111:
Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicari velim, nescio.
(_Conf._ XI, 14.)
Footnote 112:
Save in elementary mathematics. (It may be remarked that most
philosophers since Schopenhauer have approached these questions with
the prepossessions of elementary mathematics.)
Footnote 113:
The “inverse circular functions” of English text-books.—_Tr._
Footnote 114:
The Newtonian form of the differential calculus was distinct from the
Leibnizian, which is now in general use. Without going into
unnecessary detail, the characteristic of Newton’s method was that it
was meant not for the calculation of quadratures and tangents (which
had occupied his predecessors), nor as an organ of functional theory
as such (as the differential calculus became much later), but quite
definitely as a method of dealing with _rate of change_ in pure
mechanics, with the “flowing” or “fluxion” of a dependent variable
under the influence of a variable which for Newton was the “fluent,”
and which we call the argument of a function.—_Tr._
-----
III
_Time is a counter-conception (Gegenbegriff) to Space_, arising out of
Space, just as the notion (as distinct from the fact) of Life arises
only in opposition to thought, and the notion (as distinct from the
fact) of birth and generation only in opposition to death.[115] This is
implicit in the very essence of all awareness. Just as any sense-
impression is only remarked when it detaches itself from another, so any
kind of understanding that is genuine critical activity[116] is only
made possible through the setting-up of a new concept as anti-pole to
one already present, or through the divorce (if we may call it so) of a
pair of inwardly-polar concepts which as long as they are mere
constituents, possess no actuality.[117] It has long been presumed—and
rightly, beyond a doubt—that all root-words, whether they express things
or properties, have come into being by pairs; but even later, even to-
day, the connotation that every new word receives is a reflection of
some other. And so, guided by language, the understanding, incapable of
fitting a sure inward subjective certainty of Destiny into its form-
world, created “time” out of space as its opposite. But for this we
should possess neither the word nor its connotation. And so far is this
process of word-formation carried that the particular style of extension
possessed by the Classical world led to a specifically Classical notion
of time, differing from the time-notions of India, China and the West
exactly as Classical space differs from the space of these
Cultures.[118]
For this reason, the notion of an art-form—which again is a “counter-
concept”—has only arisen when men became aware that their art-creations
had a connotation (Gehalt) at all, that is, when the expression-language
of the art, along with its effects, had ceased to be something perfectly
natural and taken-for-granted, as it still was in the time of the
Pyramid-Builders, in that of the Mycenæan strongholds and in that of the
early Gothic cathedrals. Men become suddenly aware of the existence of
“works,” and then for the first time the understanding eye is able to
distinguish a causal side and a destiny side in every living art.
In every work that displays the _whole_ man and the _whole_ meaning of
the existence, fear and longing lie close together, but they are and
they remain different. To the fear, to the Causal, belongs the whole
“taboo” side of art—its stock of motives, developed in strict schools
and long craft-training, carefully protected and piously transmitted;
all of it that is comprehensible, learnable, _numerical_; all the
_logic_ of colour, line, structure, order, which constitutes the mother-
tongue of every worthy artist and every great epoch. But the other side,
opposed to the “taboo” as the directed is to the extended and as the
development-destiny within a form-language to its syllogisms, comes out
in genius (namely, in that which is wholly personal _to the individual
artists_, their imaginative powers, creative passion, depth and
richness, as against all mere mastery of form) and, beyond even genius,
in that superabundance of creativeness in the race which conditions the
rise and fall of whole arts. This is the “totem” side, and owing to it—
notwithstanding all the æsthetics ever penned—there is no timeless and
solely-true way of art, but only a _history_ of art, marked like
everything that lives with the sign of irreversibility.[119]
And this is why architecture of the grand style—which is the only one of
the arts that handles the alien and fear-instilling itself, the
immediate Extended, the stone—is naturally _the_ early art in all
Cultures, and only step by step yields its primacy to the special arts
of the city with their more mundane forms—the statue, the picture, the
musical composition. Of all the great artists of the West, it was
probably Michelangelo who suffered most acutely under the constant
nightmare of world-fear, and it was he also who, alone among the
Renaissance masters, never freed himself from the architectural. He even
painted as though his surfaces were stone, become, stiff, _hateful_. His
work was a bitter wrestle with the powers of the cosmos which faced him
and challenged him in the form of material, whereas in the yearning
Leonardo’s colour we see, as it were, a glad materialization of the
spiritual. But in every large architectural problem an implacable causal
logic, not to say mathematic, comes to expression—in the Classical
orders of columns a Euclidean relation of _beam_ and _load_, in the
“analytically” disposed thrust-system of Gothic vaulting the dynamic
relation of _force_ and _mass_. Cottage-building traditions—which are to
be traced in the one and in the other, which are the necessary
background even of Egyptian architecture, which in fact develop in every
early period and are regularly lost in every later—contain the whole sum
of this logic of the extended. But the symbolism of direction and
destiny is beyond all the “technique” of the great arts and hardly
approachable by way of æsthetics. It lies—to take some instances—in the
contrast that is always felt (but never, either by Lessing or by Hebbel,
elucidated) between Classical and Western tragedy; in the succession of
scenes of old Egyptian relief and generally in the _serial_ arrangement
of Egyptian statues, sphinxes, temple-halls; in the choice, as distinct
from the treatment, of materials (hardest diorite to affirm, and softest
wood to deny, the future); in the occurrence, and not in the grammar, of
the individual arts, e.g., the victory of arabesque over the Early
Christian picture, the retreat of oil-painting before chamber music in
the Baroque; in the utter diversity of intention in Egyptian, Chinese
and Classical statuary. All these are not matters of “can” but of
“must,” and therefore it is not mathematics and abstract thought, but
the great arts in their kinship with the contemporary religions, that
give the key to the problem of Time, a problem that can hardly be solved
within the domain of history[120] alone.
-----
Footnote 115:
See Vol. II, pp. 13, 19.
Footnote 116:
See Vol. II, p. 16.
Footnote 117:
The original reads: “(So ist jede Art von Verstehen ... nur dadurch
möglich ...) dass ein Begriffspaar von innerem Gegensatz
gewissermassen durch Auseinandertreten erst Wirklichkeit erhält.”—
_Tr._
Footnote 118:
At this point the German text repeats the paragraph which in this
edition begins at “But inquiry” (p. 121) and ends at the close of
section I (p. 121).—_Tr._
Footnote 119:
See Vol. II, pp. 137, 159.
Footnote 120:
Here the author presumably means history in the ordinary acceptation
of the word.—_Tr._
-----
IV
It follows from the meaning that we have attached to the Culture as a
prime phenomenon and to destiny as the organic logic of existence, that
each Culture must necessarily possess its own destiny-idea. Indeed, this
conclusion is implicit from the first in the feeling that every great
Culture is nothing but the actualizing and form of a single, singularly-
constituted (einzigartig) soul. And what cannot be felt by one sort of
men exactly as it is felt by another (since the life of each is the
expression of the idea _proper_ to himself) and still less transcribed,
what is named by us “conjuncture,” “accident,” “Providence” or “Fate,”
by Classical man “Nemesis,” “Ananke,” “Tyche” or “Fatum,” by the Arab
“Kismet,” by everyone in some way of his own, is just that of which each
unique and unreproduceable soul-constitution, quite clear to those who
share in it, is a rendering.
The Classical form of the Destiny-idea I shall venture to call
Euclidean. Thus it is the sense-actual person of Œdipus, his “empirical
ego,” nay, his σῶμα that is hunted and thrown by Destiny. Œdipus
complains that Creon has misused his “body”[121] and that the oracle
applied to his “body.”[122] Æschylus, again, speaks of Agamemnon as the
“royal body, leader of fleets.”[123] It is this same word σῶμα that the
mathematicians employ more than once for the “bodies” with which they
deal. But the destiny of King Lear is of the “analytical” type—to use
here also the term suggested by the corresponding number-world—and
consists in dark inner relationships. The idea of fatherhood emerges;
spiritual threads weave themselves into the action, incorporeal and
transcendental, and are weirdly illuminated by the counterpoint of the
secondary tragedy of Gloster’s house. Lear is at the last a mere name,
the axis of something unbounded. _This_ conception of destiny is the
“infinitesimal” conception. It stretches out into infinite time and
infinite space. It touches the bodily, Euclidean existence not at all,
but affects only the Soul. Consider the mad King between the fool and
the outcast in the storm on the heath, and then look at the Laocoön
group; the first is the Faustian, the other the Apollinian way of
suffering. Sophocles, too, wrote a Laocoön drama; and we may be certain
that there was nothing of _pure soul-agony_ in it. Antigone goes below
ground in the body, because she has buried her brother’s body. Think of
Ajax and Philoctetes, and then of the Prince of Homburg and Goethe’s
Tasso—is not the difference between magnitude and relation traceable
right into the depths of artistic creation?
This brings us to another connexion of high symbolic significance. The
drama of the West is ordinarily designated _Character-Drama_. That of
the Greeks, on the other hand, is best described as _Situation-Drama_,
and in the antithesis we can perceive what it is that Western, and what
it is that Classical, man respectively feel as the basic life-form that
is imperilled by the onsets of tragedy and fate. If in lieu of
“direction” we say “irreversibility,” if we let ourselves sink into the
terrible meaning of those words “too late” wherewith we resign a
fleeting bit of the present to the _eternal_ past, we find the deep
foundation of every tragic crisis. It is Time that is the tragic, and it
is by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to Time that one Culture
is differentiated from another; and consequently “tragedy” of the grand
order has only developed in the Culture which has most passionately
affirmed, and in that which has most passionately denied, Time. The
sentiment of the ahistoric soul gives us a Classical tragedy of the
moment, and that of the ultrahistorical soul puts before us Western
tragedy that deals with the _development of a whole life_. Our tragedy
arises from the feeling of an _inexorable_ Logic of becoming, while the
Greek feels the _illogical, blind Casual of the moment_—the life of Lear
matures inwardly towards a catastrophe, and that of Œdipus stumbles
without warning upon a situation. And now one may perceive how it is
that synchronously with Western drama there rose and fell a mighty
portrait-art (culminating in Rembrandt), a kind of historical and
biographical art which (_because_ it was so) was sternly discountenanced
in Classical Greece at the apogee of Attic drama. Consider the veto on
likeness-statuary in votive offerings[124] and note how—from Demetrius
of Alopeke (about 400)[125]—a timid art of “ideal” portraiture began to
venture forth when, and only when, grand tragedy had been thrown into
the background by the light society-pieces of the “Middle Comedy.”[126]
Fundamentally all Greek statues were standard masks, like the actors in
the theatre of Dionysus; all bring to expression, in significantly
strict form, _somatic_ attitudes and positions. Physiognomically they
are _dumb_, corporeal and _of necessity_ nude—character-heads of
definite individuals came only with the Hellenistic age. Once more we
are reminded of the contrast between the Greek number-world, with its
computations of tangible results, and the other, our own, in which the
relations between groups of functions or equations or, generally,
formula-elements of the same order are investigated morphologically, and
the character of these relations fixed _as such_ in express laws.
-----
Footnote 121:
_Œd. Rex._, 642. κακῶς εἴληφα τοὐμὸν σῶμα σὺν τέχνῃ κακῇ. (Cf. Rudolf
Hirsch, _Die Person_ (1914), p. 9.)
Footnote 122:
_Œd. Col._, 355. μαντεῖα ... ἃ τοῦδ’ ἐχρήσθη σώματος.
Footnote 123:
_Choëphoræ_, 710. ἐπὶ ναυάρχῳ σώματι ... τῷ βασιλείῳ.
Footnote 124:
Phidias, and through him his patron Pericles, were attacked for
alleged introduction of portraits upon the shield of Athene Parthenos.
In Western religious art, on the contrary, portraiture was, as
everyone knows, a habitual practice. Every Madonna, for instance, is
more or less of a portrait.
With this may be compared again the growing resistance of Byzantine
art, as it matured, to portraiture in sacred surroundings, evidenced
for instance in the history of the _nimbus_ or halo—which was removed
from the insignia of the Prince to become the badge of the Saint—in
the legend of the miraculous effacement of Justinian’s pompous
inscription on Hagia Sophia, and in the banishment of the human patron
from the celestial part of the church to the earthly.—_Tr._
Footnote 125:
Who was criticized as “no god-maker but a man-maker” and as one who
spoilt the _beauty_ of his work by aiming at _likeness_.
Cresilas, the sculptor from whom the only existing portrait of
Pericles is derived, was a little earlier; in him, however, the
“ideal” was still the supreme aim.—_Tr._
Footnote 126:
The writers immediately succeeding Aristophanes.—_Tr._
-----
V
In the capacity of experientially living history and the way in which
history, particularly the history of personal becoming, is lived, one
man differs very greatly from another.
Every Culture possesses a wholly individual way of looking at and
comprehending the world-as-Nature; or (what comes to the same thing) it
_has_ its own peculiar “Nature” which no other sort of man can possess
in exactly the same form. But in a far greater degree still, every
Culture—including the individuals comprising it (who are separated only
by minor distinctions)—possesses a specific and peculiar sort of
history—and it is in the picture of this and the style of this that the
general and the personal, the inner and the outer, the world-historical
and the biographical becoming, are immediately perceived, felt and
lived. Thus the autobiographical tendency of Western man—revealed even
in Gothic times in the symbol of auricular confession[127]—is utterly
alien to Classical man; while his intense historical awareness is in
complete contrast to the almost dreamy unconsciousness of the Indian.
And when Magian man—primitive Christian or ripe scholar of Islam—uses
the words “world-history,” what is it that he sees before him?
But it is difficult enough to form an exact idea even of the “Nature”
proper to another kind of man, although in this domain things
specifically cognizable are causally ordered and unified in a
communicable system. And it is quite impossible for us to penetrate
completely a historical world-aspect of “becoming” formed by a soul that
is quite differently constituted from our own. Here there must always be
an intractable residue, greater or smaller in proportion to our
historical instinct, physiognomic tact and knowledge of men. All the
same, the solution of this very problem is the condition-precedent of
all really deep understanding of the world. The historical environment
of another is a part of his _essence_, and no such other can be
understood without the knowledge of his time-sense, his destiny-idea and
the style and degree of acuity of his inner life. In so far therefore as
these things are not directly confessed, we have to extract them from
the symbolism of the alien Culture. And as it is thus and only thus that
we can approach the incomprehensible, the style of an alien Culture, and
the great time-symbols belonging thereto acquire an immeasurable
importance.
As an example of these hitherto almost uncomprehended signs we may take
the _clock_, a creation of highly developed Cultures that becomes more
and more mysterious as one examines it. Classical man managed to do
without the clock, and his abstention was more or less deliberate. To
the Augustan period, and far beyond it, the time of day was estimated by
the length of one’s shadow,[128] although sun-dials and water-clocks,
designed in conformity with a strict time-reckoning and imposed by a
deep sense of past and future, had been in regular use in both the older
Cultures of Egypt and Babylonia.[129] Classical man’s existence—
Euclidean, relationless, point-formed—was wholly contained in the
instant. Nothing must remind him of past or future. For the true
Classical, archæology did not exist, nor did its _spiritual inversion_,
_astrology_. The Oracle and the Sibyl, like the Etruscan-Roman
“haruspices” and “augurs,” did not foretell any distant future but
merely gave indications on particular questions of immediate bearing. No
time-reckoning entered intimately into everyday life (for the Olympiad
sequence was a mere literary expedient) and what really matters is not
the goodness or badness of a calendar but the questions: “who uses it?”
and “does the life of the nation run by it?” In Classical cities nothing
suggested duration, or old times or times to come—there was no pious
preservation of ruins, no work conceived for the benefit of future
generations; in them we do not find that durable[130] material was
deliberately chosen. The Dorian Greek ignored the Mycenæan stone-
technique and built in wood or clay, though Mycenæan and Egyptian work
was before him and the country produced first-class building-stone. The
Doric style is a timber style—even in Pausanias’s day some wooden
columns still lingered in the Heræum of Olympia. The real organ of
history is “memory” in the sense which is always postulated in this
book, viz., that which preserves as a constant present the image of
one’s personal past and of a national and a world-historical past[131]
as well, and is conscious of the course both of personal and of super-
personal becoming. That organ was not present in the make-up of a
Classical soul. There was no “Time” in it. Immediately behind his proper
present, the Classical historian sees a background that is already
destitute of temporal and therefore of inward order. For Thucydides the
Persian Wars, for Tacitus the agitation of the Gracchi, were already in
this vague background;[132] and the great families of Rome had
traditions that were pure romance—witness Cæsar’s slayer, Brutus, with
his firm belief in his reputed tyrannicide ancestor. Cæsar’s reform of
the calendar may almost be regarded as a deed of emancipation from the
Classical life-feeling. But it must not be forgotten that Cæsar also
imagined a renunciation of Rome and a transformation of the City-State
into an empire which was to be dynastic—marked with the badge of
duration—and to have its centre of gravity in Alexandria, which in fact
is the birthplace of his calendar. His assassination seems to us a last
outburst of the antiduration feeling that was incarnate in the _Polis_
and the _Urbs Roma_.
Even then Classical mankind was still living every hour and every day
for itself; and this is equally true whether we take the individual
Greek or Roman, or the city, or the nation, or the whole Culture. The
hot-blooded pageantry, palace-orgies, circus-battles of Nero or
Caligula—Tacitus is a true Roman in describing only these and ignoring
the smooth progress of life in the distant provinces—are final and
flamboyant expressions of the Euclidean world-feeling that deified the
body and the present.
The Indians also have no sort of time-reckoning (the absence of it in
their case expressing their Nirvana) and no clocks, and _therefore_ no
history, no life memories, no care. What the conspicuously historical
West calls “Indian history” achieved itself without the smallest
consciousness of what it was doing.[133] The millennium of the Indian
Culture between the Vedas and Buddha seems like the stirrings of a
sleeper; here life was _actually_ a dream. From all this our Western
Culture is unimaginably remote. And, indeed, man has never—not even in
the “contemporary” China of the Chóu period with its highly-developed
sense of eras and epochs[134]—been so awake and aware, so deeply
sensible of time and conscious of direction and fate and movement as he
has been in the West. _Western history was willed and Indian history
happened._ In Classical existence years, in Indian centuries scarcely
counted, but here the hour, the minute, yea the second, is of
importance. Of the tragic tension of a historical crisis like that of
August, 1914, when even moments seem overpowering, neither a Greek nor
an Indian could have had any idea.[135] Such crises, too, a deep-feeling
man of the West can experience _within himself_, as a true Greek could
never do. Over our country-side, day and night from thousands of
belfries, ring the bells[136] that join future to past and fuse the
point-moments of the Classical present into a grand relation. The epoch
which marks the birth of our Culture—the time of the Saxon Emperors—
marks also the discovery of the wheel-clock.[137] Without exact time-
measurement, without a _chronology of becoming_ to correspond with his
imperative need of archæology (the preservation, excavation and
collection of _things-become_), Western man is unthinkable. The Baroque
age intensified the Gothic symbol of the belfry to the point of
grotesqueness, and produced the pocket watch that constantly accompanies
the individual.[138]
Another symbol, as deeply significant and as little understood as the
symbol of the clock, is that of the funeral customs which all great
Cultures have consecrated by ritual and by art. The grand style in India
begins with tomb-temples, in the Classical world with funerary urns, in
Egypt with pyramids, in early Christianity with catacombs and
sarcophagi. In the dawn, innumerable equally-possible forms still cross
one another chaotically and obscurely, dependent on clan-custom and
external necessities and conveniences. But every Culture promptly
elevates one or another of them to the highest degree of symbolism.
Classical man, obedient to his deep unconscious life-feeling, picked
upon burning, an act of annihilation in which the Euclidean, the here-
and-now, type of existence was powerfully expressed. He _willed_ to have
no history, no duration, neither past nor future, neither preservation
nor dissolution, and therefore he _destroyed_ that which no longer
possessed a present, the _body_ of a Pericles, a Cæsar, a Sophocles, a
Phidias. And the soul passed to join the vague crowd to which the living
members of the clan paid (but soon ceased to pay) the homage of
ancestor-worship and soul-feast, and which in its _formlessness_
presents an utter contrast to the ancestor-_series_, the _genealogical
tree_, that is eternalized with all the marks of historical order in the
family-vault of the West. In this (with one striking exception, the
Vedic dawn in India) no other Culture parallels the Classical.[139] And
be it noted that the Doric-Homeric spring, and above all the “Iliad,”
invested this act of burning with all the vivid feeling of a _new-born_
symbol; for those very warriors whose deeds probably formed the nucleus
of the epic were in fact buried almost in the Egyptian manner in the
graves of Mycenæ, Tiryns, Orchomenos and other places. And when in
Imperial times the sarcophagus or “flesh-consumer”[140] began to
supersede the vase of ashes, it was again, as in the time when the
Homeric urn superseded the shaft-grave of Mycenæ, a _changed sense of
Time_ that underlay the change of rite.
The Egyptians, who preserved their past in memorials of stone and
hieroglyph so purposefully that we, four thousand years after them, can
determine the order of their kings’ reigns, so thoroughly eternalized
their bodies that today the great Pharaohs lie in our museums,
recognizable in every lineament, a symbol of grim triumph—while of
Dorian kings not even the names have survived. For our own part, we know
the exact birthdays and deathdays of almost every great man since Dante,
and, moreover, we see nothing strange in the fact. Yet in the time of
Aristotle, the very zenith of Classical education, it was no longer
known with certainty if Leucippus, the founder of Atomism and a
contemporary of Pericles—i.e., hardly a century before—had ever existed
at all; much as though for us the existence of Giordano Bruno was a
matter of doubt[141] and the Renaissance had become pure saga.
And these museums themselves, in which we assemble everything that is
left of the corporeally-sensible past! Are not they a symbol of the
highest rank? Are they not intended to conserve in mummy the entire
“body” of cultural development?
As we collect countless data in milliards of printed books, do we not
also collect _all_ the works of _all_ the dead Cultures in these myriad
halls of West-European cities, in the mass of the collection depriving
each individual piece of that instant of actualized purpose that is its
own—the one property that the Classical soul would have respected—and
_ipso facto_ dissolving it into our unending and unresting Time?
Consider what it was that the Hellenes named Μουσεῖον;[142] how deep a
significance lies in the change of sense!
-----
Footnote 127:
See Vol. II, pp. 360 et seq.
Footnote 128:
Diels, _Antike Technik_ (1920), p. 159.
Footnote 129:
About 400 B.C. savants began to construct crude sun-dials in Africa
and Ionia, and from Plato’s time still more primitive clepsydræ came
into use; but in both forms, the Greek clock was a mere imitation of
the far superior models of the older East, and it had not the
slightest connexion with the Greek life-feeling. See Diels, _op.
cit._, pp. 160 et seq.
Footnote 130:
Horace’s _monumentum ære perennius_ (Odes III, 30) may seem to
conflict with this: but let the reader reconsider the whole of that
ode in the light of the present argument, and turn also to Leuconoe
and her “Babylonian” impieties (Odes I, 11) _inter alia_, and he will
probably agree that so far as Horace is concerned, the argument is
supported rather than impugned.—_Tr._
Footnote 131:
Ordered, for us, by the Christian chronology and the ancient-mediæval-
modern scheme. It was on those foundations that, from early Gothic
times, the images of religion and of art have been built up in which a
large part of Western humanity continues to live. To predicate the
same of Plato or Phidias is quite impossible, whereas the Renaissance
artists could and did project a classical past, which indeed they
permitted to dominate their judgments completely.
Footnote 132:
See pp. 9. et seq.
Footnote 133:
The Indian history of our books is a Western reconstruction from texts
and monuments. See the chapter on epigraphy in the “Indian Gazetteer,”
Vol. II.—_Tr._
Footnote 134:
See Vol. II, pp. 482, 521 et seq.
Footnote 135:
There is one famous episode in Greek history that may be thought to
contradict this—the race against time of the galley sent to Mitylene
to countermand the order of massacre (Thucydides, III, 49). But we
observe that Thucydides gives twenty times the space to the debates at
Athens that he gives to the drama of the galley-rowers pulling night
and day to save life. And we are told that it was the Mitylenean
ambassadors who spared no expense to make it worth the rowers’ while
to win, whereupon “there arose such a zeal of rowing that....” The
final comment is, strictly construing Thucydides’s own words: “Such
was the magnitude of the danger that Mitylene passed by” (παρὰ
τοσοῦτον μὲν ἡ Μυτιλήνη ἦλθε κινδύνου), a phrase which recalls
forcibly what has just been said regarding the “situation-drama.”—
_Tr._
Footnote 136:
Besides the clock, the bell itself is a Western “symbol.” The passing-
bell tolled for St. Hilda of Whitby in 680, and a century before that
time bells had come into general use in Gaul both for monasteries and
for parish churches. On the contrary, it was not till 865 that
Constantinople possessed bells, and these were presented in that year
by Venice. The presence of a belfry in a Byzantine church is accounted
a proof of “Western influence”: the East used and still largely uses
mere gongs and rattles for religious purposes. (British Museum
“Handbook of Early Christian Antiquities)”.—_Tr._
Footnote 137:
May we be permitted to guess that the Babylonian sun-dial and the
Egyptian water-clock came into being “simultaneously,” that is, on the
threshold of the third millennium before Christ? The history of clocks
is inwardly inseparable from that of the calendar; it is therefore to
be assumed that the Chinese and the Mexican Cultures also, with their
deep sense of history, very early devised and used methods of time-
measurement.
(The Mexican Culture developed the most intricate of all known systems
of indicating year and day. See British Museum “Handbook of May on
Antiquities.”—_Tr._)
Footnote 138:
Let the reader try to imagine what a Greek would feel when suddenly
made acquainted with this custom of ours.
Footnote 139:
The Chinese ancestor-worship honoured genealogical order with strict
ceremonies. And whereas here ancestor-worship by degrees came to be
the centre of all piety, in the Classical world it was driven entirely
into the background by the cults of _present_ gods; in Roman times it
hardly existed at all.
(Note the elaborate precautions taken in the Athenian “Anthesteria” to
keep the anonymous mass of ghosts at bay. This feast was anything but
an All Souls’ Day of re-communion with the departed spirits.—_Tr._)
Footnote 140:
With obvious reference to the resurrection of the flesh (ἐκ νεκρῶν).
But the meaning of the term “resurrection” has undergone, from about
1000 A.D., a profound—though hardly noticed—change. More and more it
has tended to become identified with “immortality.” But in the
resurrection from the dead, the implication is that time begins again
to repeat in space, whereas in “immortality” it is time that overcomes
space.
Footnote 141:
For English readers, the most conspicuous case of historic doubt is
the Shakespeare-Bacon matter. But even here, it is only the work of
Shakespeare that is in question, not his existence and personality,
for which we have perfectly definite evidence.—_Tr._
Footnote 142:
Originally a philosophical and scientific lecture-temple founded in
honour of Aristotle, and later the great University of Alexandria,
bore the title Μουσεῖον. Both Aristotle and the University amassed
collections but they were collections of (_a_) books, (_b_) natural
history specimens, living or taken from life. In the West, the
collection of _memorials of the past as such_ dates from the earliest
days of the Renaissance.—_Tr._
-----
VI
It is the _primitive feeling of Care_[143] which dominates the
physiognomy of Western, as also that of Egyptian and that of Chinese
history, and it creates, further, the symbolism of the erotic which
represents the flowing on of endless life in the form of the familial
series of individual existences. The point-formed Euclidean existence of
Classical man, in this matter as in others, conceived only the here-and-
now definitive act of begetting or of bearing, and thus it comes about
that we find the birth-pangs of the mother made the centre of Demeter-
worship and the Dionysiac symbol of the phallus (the sign of a sexuality
wholly concentrated on the moment and losing past and future in it) more
or less everywhere in the Classical. In the Indian world we find,
correspondingly, the sign of the Lingam and the sect of worshippers of
Paewati.[144] In the one case as in the other, man feels himself as
nature, as a plant, as a willless and care-less element of becoming (dem
Sinn des Werdens willenlos und sorglos hingegeben). The domestic
religion of Rome centred on the _genius_, i.e., the creative power of
the head of the family. To all this, the deep and thoughtful care of the
Western soul has opposed the sign of _mother-love_, a symbol which in
the Classical Culture only appeared above the horizon to the extent that
we see it in, say, the mourning for Persephone or (though this is only
Hellenistic) the seated statue of Demeter of Knidos.[145] The Mother
with the Child—the future—at her breast, the Mary-cult in the new
Faustian form, began to flourish only in the centuries of the Gothic and
found its highest expression in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna.[146] This
conception is not one belonging to Christianity generally. On the
contrary, Magian Christianity had elevated Mary as Theotokos, “she who
gave birth to God”[147] into a symbol felt quite otherwise than by us.
The lulling Mother is as alien to Early-Christian-Byzantine art as she
is to the Hellenic (though for other reasons) and most certainly Faust’s
Gretchen, with the deep spell of unconscious motherhood on her, is
nearer to the Gothic Madonna than all the Marys of Byzantine and
Ravennate mosaics. Indeed, the presumption of a spiritual relation
between them breaks down completely before the fact that the Madonna
with the Child answers exactly to the Egyptian Isis with Horus—both are
caring, nursing mothers—and that nevertheless this symbol had vanished
for a thousand years and more (for the whole duration of the Classical
and the Arabian Cultures) before it was reawakened by the Faustian
soul.[148]
From the maternal care the way leads to the paternal, and there we meet
with the highest of all the time-symbols that have come into existence
within a Culture, the State. The meaning of the child to the mother is
the future, the continuation, namely, of her own life, and mother-love
is, as it were, a welding of two discontinuous individual existences;
likewise, the meaning of the state to the man is comradeship in arms for
the protection of hearth and home, wife and child, and for the insurance
for the whole people of its future and its efficacy. The state is the
inward form of a nation, its “form” in the athletic sense, and history,
in the high meaning, is the State conceived as kinesis and not as kinema
(nicht als Bewegtes sondern als Bewegung gedacht). _The Woman as Mother
is, and the Man as Warrior and Politician makes, History._[149]
And here again the history of higher Cultures shows us three examples of
state-formations in which the element of care is conspicuous: the
Egyptian administration even of the Old Kingdom (from 3000 B.C.); the
Chinese state of the Chóu dynasty (1169-256 B.C.), of the organization
of which the Chóu Li gives such a picture that, later on, no one dared
to believe in the authenticity of the book; and the states of the West,
behind whose characteristic eye-to-the-future there is an unsurpassably
intense Will to the future.[150] And on the other hand we have in two
examples—the Classical and the Indian world—a picture of utterly care-
less submission to the moment and its incidents. Different in themselves
as are Stoicism and Buddhism (the old-age dispositions of these two
worlds), they are at one in their negation of the historical feeling of
care, their contempt of zeal, of organizing power, and of the duty-
sense; and therefore neither in Indian courts nor in Classical market-
places was there a thought for the morrow, personal or collective. The
_carpe diem_ of Apollinian man applies also to the Apollinian state.
As with the political, so with the other side of historical existence,
the economic. The hand-to-mouth life corresponds to the love that begins
and ends in the satisfaction of the moment. There was an economic
organization on the grand scale in Egypt, where it fills the whole
culture-picture, telling us in a thousand paintings the story of its
industry and orderliness; in China, whose mythology of gods and legend-
emperors turns entirely upon the holy tasks of cultivation; and in
Western Europe, where, beginning with the model agriculture of the
Orders, it rose to the height of a special science, “national economy,”
which was in very principle a _working hypothesis_, purporting to show
not what happens but what _shall_ happen. In the Classical world, on the
other hand—to say nothing of India—men managed from day to day, in spite
of the example of Egypt; the earth was robbed not only of its wealth but
of its capacities, and the casual surpluses were instantly squandered on
the city mob. Consider critically any great statesman of the Classical—
Pericles and Cæsar, Alexander and Scipio, and even revolutionaries like
Cleon and Tiberius Gracchus. Not one of them, economically, looked far
ahead. No city ever made it its business to drain or to afforest a
district, or to introduce advanced cultivation methods or new kinds of
live stock or new plants. To attach a Western meaning to the “agrarian
reform” of the Gracchi is to misunderstand its purport entirely. Their
aim was to make their supporters _possessors_ of land. Of educating
these into managers of land, or of raising the standard of Italian
husbandry in general, there was not the remotest idea—one let the future
come, one did not attempt to work upon it. Of this economic Stoicism of
the Classical world the exact antithesis is Socialism, meaning thereby
not Marx’s theory but Frederick William I’s Prussian practice which long
preceded Marx and will yet displace him—the socialism, inwardly akin to
the system of Old Egypt, that comprehends and cares for permanent
economic relations, trains the individual in his duty to the whole, and
glorifies hard work as an affirmation of Time and Future.
VII
The ordinary everyday man in all Cultures only observes so much of the
physiognomy of becoming—his own and that of the living world around him—
as is in the foreground and immediately tangible. The sum of his
experiences, inner and outer, fills the course of his day merely as a
series of facts. Only the outstanding (bedeutende) man feels behind the
commonplace unities of the history-stirred surface a deep logic of
becoming. This logic, manifesting itself in the idea of Destiny, leads
him to regard the less significant collocations of the day and the
surface as mere incidents.
At first sight, however, there seems to be only a difference of degree
in the connotations of “destiny” and “incident.” One feels that it is
more or less of an incident when Goethe goes to Sesenheim, but destiny
when he goes to Weimar;[151] one regards the former as an episode and
the latter as an epoch. But we can see at once that the distinction
depends on the inward quality of the man who is impressed. To the mass,
the whole life of Goethe may appear as a sequence of anecdotal
incidents, while a very few will become conscious, with astonishment, of
a symbolic necessity inherent even in its most trivial occurrences.
Perhaps, then, the discovery of the heliocentric system by Aristarchus
was an unmeaning incident for the Classical Culture, but its
supposed[152] rediscovery by Copernicus a destiny for the Faustian? Was
it a destiny that Luther was not a great organizer and Calvin was? And
if so, for whom was it a destiny—for Protestantism as a living unit, for
the Germans, or for Western mankind generally? Were Tiberius Gracchus
and Sulla incidents and Cæsar a destiny?
Questions like these far transcend the domain of the understanding that
operates through concepts (der begriffliche Verständigung). What is
destiny, what incident, the spiritual experiences of the individual
soul—and of the Culture-soul—decide. Acquired knowledge, scientific
insight, definition, are all powerless. Nay more, the very attempt to
grasp them epistemologically defeats its own object. For without the
inward certainty that destiny is something entirely intractable to
critical thought, we cannot perceive the world of becoming at all.
Cognition, judgment, and the establishment of _causal_ connexions within
the known (i.e., between things, properties, and positions that have
been distinguished) are one and the same, and he who approaches history
in the spirit of _judgment_ will only find “data.” But that—be it
Providence or Fate—which moves in the depths of present happening or of
represented past happening is lived, and only lived, and lived with that
same overwhelming and unspeakable certainty that genuine Tragedy awakens
in the uncritical spectator. Destiny and incident form an opposition in
which the soul is ceaselessly trying to clothe something which consists
_only_ of feeling and living and intuition, and can only be made plain
in the most subjective religious and artistic creations of those men who
are _called_ to divination. To evoke this root-feeling of living
existence which endows the picture of history with its meaning and
content, I know of no better way—for “name is mere noise and smoke”—than
to quote again those stanzas of Goethe which I have placed at the head
of this book to mark its fundamental intention.
“In the Endless, self-repeating
flows for evermore The Same.
Myriad arches, springing, meeting,
hold at rest the mighty frame.
Streams from all things love of living,
grandest star and humblest clod.
All the straining, all the striving
is eternal peace in God.”[153]
On the surface of history it is the _unforeseen_ that reigns. Every
individual event, decision and personality is stamped with its hall-
mark. No one foreknew the storm of Islam at the coming of Mohammed, nor
foresaw Napoleon in the fall of Robespierre. The coming of great men,
their doings, their fortune, are all incalculables. No one knows whether
a development that is setting in powerfully will accomplish its course
in a straight line like that of the Roman patrician order or will go
down in doom like that of the Hohenstaufen or the Maya Culture. And—
science notwithstanding—it is just the same with the destinies of every
single species of beast and plant within earth-history and beyond even
this, with the destiny of the earth itself and all the solar systems and
Milky Ways. The insignificant Augustus made an epoch, and the great
Tiberius passed away ineffective. Thus, too, with the fortunes of
artists, artworks and art-forms, dogmas and cults, theories and
discoveries. That, in the whirl of becoming, one element merely
succumbed to destiny when another became (and often enough has continued
and will continue to be) a destiny itself—that one vanishes with the
wave-train of the surface while the other _makes_ this, is something
that is not to be explained by any why-and-wherefore and yet is of
inward necessity. And thus the phrase that Augustine in a deep moment
used of Time is valid also of destiny—“if no one questions me, I know:
if I would explain to a questioner, I know not.”
So, also, the supreme ethical expression of Incident and Destiny is
found in the Western Christian’s idea of Grace—the grace, obtained
through the sacrificial death of Jesus, of being made free to will.[154]
The polarity of Disposition (original sin) and Grace—a polarity which
must ever be a projection of feeling, of the emotional life, and not a
precision of learned reasoning—embraces the existence of every truly
significant man of this Culture. It is, even for Protestants, even for
atheists, hidden though it may be behind a scientific notion of
“evolution” (which in reality is its direct descendant[155]), the
foundation of every confession and every autobiography; and it is just
its absence from the constitution of Classical man that makes
confession, by word or thought, impossible to him. It is the final
meaning of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and of music from Bach to
Beethoven. We may choose to call that something which correlates the
life-courses of all Western men disposition, Providence or “inner
evolution”[156] but it remains inaccessible to thought. “Free will” is
an inward certitude. But whatever one may will or do, that which
actually ensues upon and issues from the resolution—abrupt, surprising,
unforeseeable—_subserves_ a deeper necessity and, for the eye that
sweeps over the picture of the distant past, visibly conforms to a major
order. And when the Destiny of that which was willed has been Fulfilment
we are fain to call the inscrutable “Grace.” What did Innocent III,
Luther, Loyola, Calvin, Jansen, Rousseau and Marx will, and what came of
the things that they willed in the stream of Western history? Was it
Grace or Fate? Here all rationalistic dissection ends in nonsense. The
Predestination doctrine of Calvin and Pascal—who, both of them more
upright than Luther and Thomas Aquinas, dared to draw the causal
conclusion from Augustinian dialectic—is the _necessary_ absurdity to
which the pursuit of these secrets by the reason leads. They lost the
destiny-logic of the world-becoming and found themselves in the causal
logic of notion and law; they left the realm of direct intuitive vision
for that of a mechanical system of objects. The fearful soul-conflicts
of Pascal were the strivings of a man, at once intensely spiritual and a
born mathematician, who was determined to subject the last and gravest
problems of the soul both to the intuitions of a grand instinctive faith
and to the abstract precision of a no less grand mathematical plan. In
this wise the Destiny-idea—in the language of religion, God’s
Providence—is brought _within the schematic form of the Causality
Principle_, i.e., the Kantian form of mind activity (productive
imagination); _for that is what Predestination signifies_,
notwithstanding that thereby Grace—the causation-free, living Grace
which can only be experienced as an inward certainty—is made to appear
as a nature-force that is bound by irrevocable law and to turn the
religious world-picture into a rigid and gloomy system of machinery. And
yet was it not a Destiny again—for the world as well as for themselves—
that the English Puritans, who were filled with this conviction, were
ruined not through any passive self-surrender but through their hearty
and vigorous certainty that their will was the will of God?
-----
Footnote 143:
The connotation of “care” is almost the same as that of “Sorge,” but
the German word includes also a certain specific, _ad hoc_
apprehension, that in English is expressed by “concern” or “fear.”—
_Tr._
Footnote 144:
The _Lingayats_ are one of the chief sects of the Saivas (that is, of
the branch of Hinduism which devotes itself to Shiva) and Paewati
worshippers belong to another branch, having the generic name of
Saktas, who worship the “active female principle” in the persons of
Shiva’s consorts, of whom Paewati is one. Vaishnavism—the Vishnu
branch of Indian religion—also contains an erotic element in that form
which conceives Vishnu as Krishna. But in Krishna worship the erotic
is rather less precise and more amorous in character.
See “Imperial Gazetteer of India,” Vol. I, pp. 421 et seq., and Ency.
Brit., XI Edition, article _Hinduism_.—_Tr._
Footnote 145:
British Museum.—_Tr._
Footnote 146:
Dresden.—_Tr._
Footnote 147:
See Vol. II, p. 316.
Footnote 148:
In connexion with this very important link in the Author’s argument,
attention may be drawn to a famous wall-painting of very early date in
the Catacomb of St. Priscilla. In this, Mary is definitely and
unmistakably the _Stillende Mutter_. But she is, equally unmistakably,
different in soul and style from her “Early-Christian-Byzantine”
successor the Theotokos. Now, it is well known that the art of the
catacombs, at any rate in its beginnings, is simply the art of
contemporary Rome, and that this “Roman” art had its home in
Alexandria. See Woermann’s _Geschichte der Kunst_, III, 14-15, and
British Museum “Guide to Early Christian Art,” 72-74, 86. Woermann
speaks of this Madonna as the prototype of our grave, tenderly-
solicitous Mother-Madonnas. Dr. Spengler would probably prefer to
regard her as the last Isis. In any case it is significant that the
symbol disappears: in the very same catacomb is a Theotokos of perhaps
a century later date.—_Tr._
Footnote 149:
Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq.
Footnote 150:
See, further, the last two sections of Vol. II (_Der Staat_ and
_Wirtschaftsleben_).—_Tr._
Footnote 151:
Sesenheim is the home of Friederike, and a student’s holiday took him
thither: Weimar, of course, is the centre from which all the activity
of his long life was to radiate.—_Tr._
Footnote 152:
_Vermeintlich._ The allusion is presumably to the fact that
Copernicus, adhering to the hypothesis of circular orbits, was obliged
to retain some elements of Ptolemy’s geocentric machinery of
epicycles, so that Copernicus’s sun was not placed at the true centre
of any planetary orbit.—_Tr._
Footnote 153:
Sprüche in Reimen.
Footnote 154:
See Vol. II, pp. 294 et seq., 359 et seq.
Footnote 155:
The path from Calvin to Darwin is easily seen in English philosophy.
Footnote 156:
This is one of the eternal points of dispute in Western art-theory.
The Classical, ahistorical, Euclidean soul has no “evolution”; the
Western, on the contrary, extends itself in evolving like the
convergent function that it is. The one _is_, the other _becomes_. And
thus all Classical tragedy assumes the _constancy_ of the personality,
and all Western its _variability_, which essentially constitutes a
“character” in our sense, viz., a picture of being that consists in
continuous qualitative movement and an endless wealth of
relationships. _In Sophocles the grand gesture ennobles the suffering,
in Shakespeare the grand idea_ (Gesinnung) _ennobles the doing_. As
our æsthetic took its examples from _both_ Cultures, it was bound to
go wrong in the very enunciation of its problem.
-----
VIII
We can proceed to the further elucidation of the incidental (or casual)
without running the risk of considering it as an exception or a breach
in the causal continuity of “Nature,” for Nature is _not_ the world-
picture in which Destiny is operative. Wherever the sight emancipates
itself from the sensible-become, spiritualizes itself into Vision,
penetrates through the enveloping world and lets prime phenomena instead
of mere objects work upon it, we have the grand _historical_, trans-
natural, super-natural outlook, the outlook of Dante and Wolfram and
also the outlook of Goethe in old age that is most clearly manifested in
the finale of Faust II. If we linger in contemplation in this world of
Destiny and Incident, it will very likely seem to us incidental that the
episode of “world-history” should have played itself out in this or that
phase of one particular star amongst the millions of solar systems;
incidental that it should be men, peculiar animal-like creatures
inhabiting the crust of this star, that present the spectacle of
“knowledge” and, moreover, present it in just this form or in just that
form, according to the very different versions of Aristotle, Kant and
others; incidental that as the counter-pole of this “knowing” there
should have arisen just these codes of “natural law,” each supposedly
eternal and universally-valid and each evoking a supposedly general and
common picture of “Nature.” Physics—quite rightly—banishes incidentals
from its field of view, but it is incidental, again, that physics itself
should occur in the alluvial period of the earth’s crust, uniquely, as a
particular kind of intellectual composition.
_The world of incident is the world of once-actual facts that longingly
or anxiously we live forward to (entgegenleben) as Future, that raise or
depress us as the living Present, and that we contemplate with joy or
with grief as Past. The world of causes and effects is the world of the
constantly-possible, of the timeless truths which we know by dissection
and distinction._
The latter only are scientifically attainable—they are indeed
_identical_ with science. He who is blind to this other, to the world as
_Divina Commedia_ or drama for a god, can only find a senseless turmoil
of incidents,[157] and here we use the word in its most trivial sense.
So it has been with Kant and most other systematists of thought. But the
professional and inartistic sort of historical research too, with its
collecting and arranging of mere data, amounts for all its ingenuity to
little more than the giving of a _cachet_ to the banal-incidental. Only
the insight that can penetrate into the metaphysical is capable of
experiencing in data _symbols_ of that which happened, and so of
elevating an Incident into a Destiny. And he who is to himself a Destiny
(like Napoleon) does not need this insight, since between himself as a
fact and the other facts there is a harmony of metaphysical rhythm which
gives his decisions their dreamlike certainty.[158]
It is this insight that constitutes the singularity and the power of
Shakespeare. Hitherto, neither our research nor our speculation has hit
upon this in him—that he is _the Dramatist of the Incidental_. And yet
this Incidental is the very heart of Western tragedy, which is a true
copy of the Western history idea and with it gives the clue to that
which we understand in the world—so misconstrued by Kant—“Time.” It is
incidental that the political situation of “Hamlet,” the murder of the
King and the succession question impinge upon just that character that
Hamlet is. Or, take Othello—it is incidental that the man at whom Iago,
the commonplace rogue that one could pick up in any street, aims his
blow is one whose person possesses just this wholly special physiognomy.
And Lear! Could anything be more incidental (and therefore more
“natural”) than the conjunction of this commanding dignity with these
fateful passions and the inheritance of them by the daughters? No one
has even to-day realized all the significance of the fact that
Shakespeare took his stories as he found them and _in the very finding
of them_ filled them with the force of inward necessity, and never more
sublimely so than in the case of the Roman dramas. For the _will_ to
understand him has squandered itself in desperate efforts to bring in a
moral causality, a “therefore,” a connexion of “guilt” and “expiation.”
But all this is neither correct nor incorrect—these are words that
belong to the World-as-Nature and imply that something causal is being
judged—but _superficial_, shallow, that is, in contrast to the poet’s
deep subjectivizing of the mere fact-anecdote. Only one who feels this
is able to admire the grand naïveté of the entrances of Lear and
Macbeth. Now, Hebbel is the exact opposite, he destroys the depth of the
anecdote by a system of cause and effect. The arbitrary and abstract
character of his plots, which everyone feels instinctively, comes from
the fact that the causal scheme of his spiritual conflicts is in
contradiction with the historically-motived world-feeling and the quite
other logic proper to that feeling. These people do not live, they
_prove_ something by coming on. One feels the presence of a great
understanding, not that of a deep life. Instead of the Incident we get a
Problem.
Further, this _Western_ species of the Incidental is entirely alien to
the Classical world-feeling and therefore to its drama. Antigone has no
incidental character to affect her fortunes in any way. What happened to
Œdipus—unlike the fate of Lear—might just as well have happened to
anyone else. This is the Classical “Destiny,” the _Fatum_ which is
common to all mankind, which affects the “body” and in no wise depends
upon incidents of personality.
The kind of history that is commonly written must, even if it does not
lose itself in compilation of data, come to a halt before the
_superficially_ incidental—that is the ... destiny of its authors, who,
spiritually, remain more or less in the ruck. In their eyes nature and
history mingle in a cheap unity, and incident or accident, “sa sacrée
majesté le Hazard,” is for the man of the ruck the easiest thing in the
world to understand. For him the secret logic of history ‘which he does
not feel’ is replaced by a causal that is only waiting behind the scene
to come on and prove itself. It is entirely appropriate that the
anecdotal foreground of history should be the arena of all the
scientific causality-hunters and all the novelists and sketch-writers of
the common stamp. How many wars have been begun when they were because
some jealous courtier wished to remove some general from the proximity
of his wife! How many battles have been won and lost through ridiculous
incidents! Only think how Roman history was written in the 18th Century
and how Chinese history is written even to-day! Think of the Dey
smacking the Consul with his fly-flap[159] and other such incidents that
enliven the historical scene with comic-opera motives! Do not the deaths
of Gustavus Adolphus and of Alexander seem like expedients of a
nonplussed playwright; Hannibal a simple intermezzo, a surprise
intrusion in Classical history; or Napoleon’s “transit” more or less of
a melodrama? Anyone who looks for the inner form of history in any
causal succession of its visible detail-events must always, if he is
honest, find a comedy of burlesque inconsequence, and I can well imagine
that the dance-scene of the drunken Triumvirs in “Antony and Cleopatra”
(almost overlooked, but one of the most powerful in that immensely deep
work)[160] grew up out of the contempt of the prince of _historical_
tragedy for the pragmatic aspect of history. For this is the aspect of
it that has always dominated “the world,” and has encouraged ambitious
little men to interfere in it. It was because their eyes were set on
_this_, and its rationalistic structure, that Rousseau and Marx could
persuade themselves that they could alter the “course of the world” by a
theory. And even the social or economic interpretation of political
developments, to which present-day historical work is trying to rise as
to a peak-ideal (though its biological cast constantly leads us to
suspect foundations of the causal kind), is still exceedingly shallow
and trivial.
Napoleon had in his graver moments a strong feeling for the deep logic
of world-becoming, and in such moments could divine to what extent he
_was_, and to what extent he _had_, a destiny. “I feel myself driven
towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it,
as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter
me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against
me,” he said at the beginning of the Russian campaign. Here, certainly,
is not the thought of a pragmatist. In this moment he divined how little
the logic of Destiny needs particular instances, better men or
situations. Supposing that he himself, as “empirical person,” had fallen
at Marengo—then that which he _signified_ would have been actualized in
some other form. A melody, in the hands of a great musician, is capable
of a wealth of variations; it can be entirely transformed so far as the
simple listener is concerned without altering itself—which is quite
another matter—fundamentally. The epoch of German national union
accomplished itself through the person of Bismarck, that of the Wars of
Freedom through broad and almost nameless events; but either theme, to
use the language of music, could have been “worked out” in other ways.
Bismarck might have been dismissed early, the battle of Leipzig might
have been lost, and for the group of wars 1864—1866—1870 there might
have been substituted (as “modulations”) diplomatic, dynastic,
revolutionary or economic facts—though it must not be forgotten that
_Western history, under the pressure of its own physiognomic abundance_
(as distinct from physiognomic style, for even Indian history has that)
_demands, so to say, contrapuntally strong accents—wars or big
personalities—at the decisive points_. Bismarck himself points out in
his reminiscences that in the spring of 1848 national unity could have
been achieved on a broader base than in 1870 but for the policy (more
accurately, the personal taste) of the King of Prussia;[161] and yet,
again, according to Bismarck, this would have been so tame a working-out
that a coda of one sort or another (_da capo e poi la coda_) would have
been imperatively necessary. Withal, the Theme—the meaning of the epoch—
would have been entirely unaltered by the facts assuming this or that
shape. Goethe might—possibly—have died young, but _not_ his “idea.”
Faust and Tasso would not have been written, but they would have “been”
in a deeply mysterious sense, even though they lacked the poet’s
elucidation.
For if it is incidental that the history of higher mankind fulfils
itself in the form of great Cultures, and that one of these Cultures
awoke in West Europe about the year 1000; yet from the moment of
awakening it is bound by its charter. Within every epoch there is
unlimited abundance of surprising and unforeseeable possibilities of
self-actualizing in detail-facts, but the epoch itself is necessary, for
the life-unity is in it. That its inner form is precisely what it is,
constitutes its specific determination (Bestimmung). Fresh incidentals
can affect the shape of its development, can make this grandiose or
puny, prosperous or sorrowful, but alter it they cannot. An irrevocable
fact is not merely a special case but a special type; thus in the
history of the Universe we have the type of the “solar system” of sun
and circling planets; in the history of our planet we have the type
“life” with its youth, age, duration and reproduction; in the history of
“life” the type “humanity,” and in the world-historical stage of that
humanity the type of the great individual Culture.[162] And these
Cultures are essentially related to the plants, in that they are bound
for the whole duration of their life to the soil from which they sprang.
Typical, lastly, is the manner in which the men of a Culture understand
and experience Destiny, however differently the picture may be coloured
for this individual and that; what I say here about it is not “true,”
but inwardly necessary for this Culture and this time-phase of it, and
if it convinces you, it is not because there is only one “truth” but
because you and I belong to the same epoch.
For this reason, the Euclidean soul of the Classical Culture could only
experience its existence, bound as this was to present foregrounds, in
the form of _incidents of the Classical style_. If in respect of the
Western soul we can regard incident as a minor order of Destiny, in
respect of the Classical soul it is just the reverse. Destiny is
incident become immense—that is the very signification of Ananke,
Heimarmene, Fatum. As the Classical soul did not genuinely live through
history, it possessed no genuine feeling for a _logic_ of Destiny. We
must not be misled by words. The most popular goddess of Hellenism was
Tyche, whom the Greeks were practically unable to distinguish from
Ananke. But Incident and Destiny are felt by _us_ with all the intensity
of an opposition, and on the issue of this opposition we feel that
everything fundamental in our existence depends. _Our_ history is that
of great connexions, Classical history—its full actuality, that is, and
not merely the image of it that we get in the historian (e.g.,
Herodotus)—is that of anecdotes, of a series of plastic details. The
style of the Classical life generally, the style of every individual
life within it, is anecdotal, using the word with all seriousness. The
sense-perceivable side of events condenses on _anti-historical,
daemonic, absurd_ incidents; it is the denial and disavowal of all logic
of happening. The stories of the Classical master-tragedies one and all
_exhaust_ themselves in incidents that mock at any meaning of the world;
they are the exact denotation of what is connoted by the word
εἱμαρμένη[163] in contrast to the Shakesperian _logic_ of incident.
Consider Œdipus once more: that which happened to him was wholly
extrinsic, was neither brought about nor conditioned by anything
subjective to himself, and could just as well have happened to anyone
else. This is the very _form of the Classical myth_. Compare with it the
necessity—inherent in and governed by the man’s whole existence and the
relation of that existence to Time—that resides in the destiny of
Othello, of Don Quixote, of Werther. It is, as we have said before, the
difference of situation-tragedy and character-tragedy. And this
opposition repeats itself in history proper—every epoch of the West has
character, while each epoch of the Classical only presents a situation.
While the life of Goethe was one of fate-filled logic, that of Cæsar was
one of mythical indidentalness, and it was left to Shakespeare to
_introduce_ logic into it. Napoleon is a tragic character, Alcibiades
fell into tragic situations. Astrology, in the form in which from Gothic
to Baroque the Western soul knew it—was dominated by it even in denying
it—was the attempt to master one’s _whole_ future life-course; the
Faustian horoscope, of which the best-known example is perhaps that
drawn out for Wallenstein by Kepler, _presupposes_ a steady and
purposeful direction in the existence that has yet to be accomplished.
But the Classical oracle, always consulted for the _individual_ case, is
the genuine symbol of the meaningless incident and the moment; it
accepts the point-formed and the discontinuous as the elements of the
world’s course, and oracle-utterances were therefore entirely in place
in that which was written and experienced as history at Athens. Was
there one single Greek who possessed the notion of a historical
_evolution_ towards this or that or any aim? And _we_—should we have
been able to reflect upon history or to make it if we had _not_
possessed it? If we compare the destinies of Athens and of France at
corresponding times after Themistocles and Louis XIV, we cannot but feel
that the style of the historical feeling and the style of its
actualization are always one. In France logic _à outrance_, in Athens
un-logic.
The ultimate meaning of this significant fact can now be understood.
History is the actualizing of a soul, and the same style governs the
history one makes as governs the history one contemplates. The Classical
mathematic excludes the symbol of infinite space, and therefore the
Classical history does so too. It is not for nothing that the scene of
Classical existence is the smallest of any, the individual _Polis_, that
it lacks horizon and perspective—notwithstanding the episode of
Alexander’s expedition[164]—just as the Attic stage cuts them off with
its flat back-wall, in obvious contrast to the long-range efficacy of
Western Cabinet diplomacy and the Western capital city. And just as the
Greeks and the Romans neither knew nor (with their fundamental
abhorrence of the Chaldean astronomy) would admit as actual any cosmos
but that of the foreground; just as at bottom their deities are house-
gods, city-gods, field-gods but never star-gods,[165] so also what they
_depicted_ was only foregrounds. Never in Corinth or Athens or Sicyon do
we find a landscape with mountain horizon and driving clouds and distant
towns; every vase-painting has the same constituents, figures of
Euclidean separateness and artistic self-sufficiency. Every pediment or
frieze group is serially and not contrapuntally built up. But then,
life-experience itself was one strictly of foregrounds. Destiny was not
the “course of life” but something upon which one suddenly stumbles. And
this is how Athens produced, with Polygnotus’s fresco and Plato’s
geometry, _a fate-tragedy_ in which fate is precisely the fate that we
discredit in Schiller’s “Bride of Messina.” The complete unmeaning of
blind doom that is embodied, for instance, in the curse of the House of
Atreus, served to reveal to the ahistorical Classical soul the full
meaning of its own world.
-----
Footnote 157:
“The older one becomes, the more one is persuaded that His Sacred
Majesty Chance does three-quarters of the work of this miserable
Universe.” (Frederick the Great to Voltaire.) So, necessarily, must
the genuine rationalist conceive it.
Footnote 158:
See Vol. II, pp. 20 et seq.
Footnote 159:
The incident which is said to have precipitated the French war on
Algiers (1827).—_Tr._
Footnote 160:
Act. II, Scene VII.—_Tr._
Footnote 161:
In the general upheaval of 1848 a German national parliament was
assembled at Frankfurt, of a strongly democratic colour, and it chose
Frederick William IV of Prussia as hereditary emperor. Frederick
William, however, refused to “pick up a crown out of the gutter.” For
the history of this momentous episode, the English reader may be
referred to the Cambridge Modern History or to the article _Germany
(History)_ in the Ency. Brit., XI Edition.—_Tr._
Footnote 162:
It is the fact that a whole group of these Cultures is available for
our study that makes possible the “comparative” method used in the
present work. See Vol. II, pp. 42 et seq.
Footnote 163:
Derived from μείρομαι, to receive as one’s portion, to have allotted
to one, or, colloquially, to “come in for” or “step into.”—_Tr._
Footnote 164:
The expedition of the Ten Thousand into Persia is no exception. The
Ten Thousand indeed formed an ambulatory Polis, and its adventures are
truly Classical. It was confronted with a series of “situations.”—
_Tr._
Footnote 165:
Helios is only a poetical figure; he had neither temples nor cult.
Even less was Selene a moon-goddess.
-----
IX
We may now point our moral with a few examples, which, though hazardous,
ought not at this stage to be open to misunderstanding. Imagine Columbus
supported by France instead of by Spain, as was in fact highly probable
at one time. Had Francis I been the master of America, without doubt he
and not the Spaniard Charles V would have obtained the imperial crown.
The early Baroque period from the Sack of Rome to the Peace of
Westphalia, which was actually the _Spanish_ century in religion,
intellect, art, politics and manners, would have been shaped from Paris
and not from Madrid. Instead of the names of Philip, Alva, Cervantes,
Calderon, Velasquez we should be talking to-day of great Frenchmen who
in fact—if we may thus roundly express a very difficult idea—remained
unborn. The style of the Church which was definitively fixed in this
epoch by the Spaniard Loyola and the Council of Trent which he
spiritually dominated; the style of politics to which the war-technique
of Spanish captains, the diplomacy of Spanish cardinals and the courtly
spirit of the Escorial gave a stamp that lasted till the Congress of
Vienna and in essential points till beyond Bismarck; the architecture of
the Baroque; the great age of Painting; ceremonial and the polite
society of the great cities—all these would have been represented by
other profound heads, noble and clerical, by wars other than Philip II’s
wars, by another architect than Vignola, by another Court. The
Incidental chose the Spanish gesture for the late period of the West.
But the _inward logic_ of that age, which was _bound_ to find its
fulfilment in the great Revolution (or some event of the same
connotation), remained intact.
This French revolution might have been represented by some other event
of different form and occurring elsewhere, say in England or Germany.
But its “idea,”—which (as we shall see later) was the transition from
Culture to Civilization, the victory of the inorganic megalopolis over
the organic countryside which was henceforward to become spiritually
“the provinces,”—was necessary, and the moment of its occurrence was
also necessary. To describe such a moment we shall use the term (long
blurred, or misused as a synonym for period) _epoch_. When we say an
event is epoch-making we mean that it marks in the course of a Culture a
necessary and fateful turning-point. The merely incidental event, a
crystallization-form of the historical surface, may be represented by
other appropriate incidents, but the _epoch_ is necessary and
predeterminate. And it is evident that the question of whether, in
respect of a particular Culture and its course, an event ranks as an
epoch or as an episode is connected with its ideas of Destiny and
Incidents, and therefore also with its idea of the Tragic as “epochal”
(as in the West) or as “episodic” (as in the Classical world).
We can, further, distinguish between _impersonal_ or anonymous and
_personal_ epochs, according to their physiognomic type in the picture
of history. Amongst “incidents” of the first rank we include those great
persons who are endowed with such formative force that the destiny of
thousands, of whole peoples, and of ages, are incorporated in their
private destinies; but at the same time we can distinguish the
adventurer or successful man who is destitute of inward greatness (like
Danton or Robespierre) from the Hero of history by the fact that his
personal destiny displays only the traits of the common destiny. Certain
names may ring, but “the Jacobins” collectively and not individuals
amongst them were the type that dominated the time. The first part of
this epoch of the Revolution is therefore thoroughly anonymous, just as
the second or Napoleonic is in the highest degree personal. In a few
years the immense force of these phenomena accomplished what the
corresponding epoch of the Classical (c. 386-322), fluid and unsure of
itself, required decades of undermining-work to achieve. It is of the
essence of all Culture that at the outset of each stage the same
potentiality is present, and that necessity fulfils itself thereafter
either in the form of a great individual person (Alexander, Diocletian,
Mohammed, Luther, Napoleon) or in that of an almost anonymous happening
of powerful inward constitution (Peloponnesian War, Thirty Years’ War,
Spanish Succession War) or else in a feeble and indistinct evolution
(periods of the Diadochi and of the Hyksos, the Interregnum in Germany).
And the question which of these forms is the more likely to occur in any
given instance, is one that is influenced in advance by the historical
and therefore also the tragic style of the Culture concerned.[166]
The tragic in Napoleon’s life—which still awaits discovery by a poet
great enough to comprehend it and shape it—was that he, who rose into
effective being by fighting British policy and the British spirit which
that policy so eminently represented, completed by that very fighting
the continental victory of this spirit, which thereupon became strong
enough, in the guise of “liberated nations” to overpower him and to send
him to St. Helena to die. It was not Napoleon who originated the
expansion principle. That had arisen out of the Puritanism of Cromwell’s
_milieu_ which called into life the British Colonial Empire.[167]
Transmitted through the English-schooled intellects of Rousseau and
Mirabeau to the Revolutionary armies, of which English philosophical
ideas were essentially the driving force, it became their tendency even
from that day of Valmy which Goethe alone read aright. It was not
Napoleon who formed the idea, but the idea that formed Napoleon, and
when he came to the throne he was obliged to pursue it further against
the only power, England namely, whose purpose was _the same_ as his own.
His Empire was a creation of French blood but of English style. It was
in London, again, that Locke, Shaftesbury, Samuel Clarke and, above all,
Bentham built up the theory of “European Civilization”—the Western
Hellenism—which Bayle, Voltaire and Rousseau carried to Paris. Thus it
was in the name of _this_ England of Parliamentarianism, business
morality and journalism that Valmy, Marengo, Jena, Smolensk and Leipzig
were fought, and in _all_ these battles it was the English spirit that
defeated the French Culture of the West.[168] The First Consul had no
intention of incorporating West Europe in France; his primary object
was—note the Alexander-idea on the threshold of every Civilization!—to
replace the British Colonial Empire by a French one. Thereby, French
preponderance in the Western culture-region would have been placed on a
practically unassailable foundation; it would have been the Empire of
Charles V on which the sun never set, but managed from Paris after all,
in spite of Columbus and Philip, and organized as an economic-military
instead of as an ecclesiastical-chivalric unit. So far-reaching,
probably, was the destiny that was in Napoleon. But the Peace of Paris
in 1763 had already decided the question _against_ France, and
Napoleon’s great plans time and again came to grief in petty incidents.
At Acre a few guns were landed in the nick of time from the British
warships: there was a moment, again, just before the signature of the
Peace of Amiens, when the whole Mississippi basin was still amongst his
assets and he was in close touch with the Maratha powers that were
resisting British progress in India; but again a minor naval
incident[169] obliged him to abandon the whole of a carefully-prepared
enterprise: and, lastly, when by the occupation of Dalmatia, Corfu and
all Italy he had made the Adriatic a French lake, with a view to another
expedition to the East, and was negotiating with the Shah of Persia for
action against India, he was defeated by the whims of the Tsar
Alexander, who at times was undoubtedly willing to support a march on
India and whose aid would infallibly have secured its success. It was
only after the failure of all extra-European combinations that he chose,
as his _ultima ratio_ in the battle against England, the incorporation
of Germany and Spain, and so, raising against himself _his own_ English-
Revolutionary ideas, the very ideas of which he had been the
vehicle,[170] he took the step that made him “no longer necessary.”
At one time it falls to the Spanish spirit to outline, at another to the
British or the French to remould, the world-embracing colonial system. A
“United States of Europe,” actualized through Napoleon as founder of a
romantic and popular military monarchy, is the analogue of the Realm of
the Diadochi; actualized as a 21st-Century economic organism by a
matter-of-fact Cæsar, it is the counterpart of the _imperium Romanum_.
These are incidentals, but they are in the picture of history. But
Napoleon’s victories and defeats (which always hide a victory of England
and Civilization over Culture), his Imperial dignity, his fall, the
_Grande Nation_, the episodic liberation of Italy (in 1796, as in 1859,
essentially no more than a change of political costume for a people long
since become insignificant), the destruction of the Gothic ruin of the
Roman-German Empire, are mere surface phenomena, behind which is
marching the great logic of genuine and invisible History, and it was in
the sense of this logic that the West, having fulfilled its French-
formed Culture in the _ancien régime_, closed it off with the English
Civilization. As symbols of “contemporary” epochal moments, then, the
storming of the Bastille, Valmy, Austerlitz, Waterloo and the rise of
Prussia correspond to the Classical-history facts of Chæronea, Gaugamela
(Arbela), Alexander’s Indian expedition and the Roman victory of
Sentinum.[171] And we begin to understand that in wars and political
catastrophies—the chief material of our historical writings—victory is
not the essence of the fight nor peace the aim of a revolution.
-----
Footnote 166:
The original is somewhat obscure. It reads: "Welche Form die
Wahrscheinlichkeit für sich hat, ist bereits eine Frage des
historischen—und also des tragischen—Stils."—_Tr._
Footnote 167:
The words of Canning at the beginning of the XIXth century may be
recalled. “South America free! and if possible English!” The expansion
idea has never been expressed in greater purity than this.
Footnote 168:
The Western Culture of maturity was through-and-through a French
outgrowth of the Spanish, beginning with Louis XIV. But even by Louis
XVI’s time the English park had defeated the French, sensibility had
ousted wit, London costume and manners had overcome Versailles, and
Hogarth, Chippendale and Wedgwood had prevailed over Watteau, Boulle
and Sèvres.
Footnote 169:
The allusion is to the voyage of Linois’s small squadron to Pondichéry
in 1803, its confrontation by another small British squadron there,
and the counter-order which led Linois to retire to Mauritius.—_Tr._
Footnote 170:
Hardenberg’s reorganization of Prussia was thoroughly English in
spirit, and as such incurred the severe censure of the old Prussian
Von der Marwitz. Scharnhorst’s army reforms too, as a breakaway from
the professional army system of the eighteenth-century cabinet-wars,
are a sort of “return to nature” in the Rousseau-Revolutionary sense.
Footnote 171:
Where in 295 B.C. the Romans decisively defeated the last great
Samnite effort to resist their hegemony over Italy.—_Tr._
-----
X
Anyone who has absorbed these ideas will have no difficulty in
understanding how the causality principle is bound to have a fatal
effect upon the capacity for genuinely experiencing History when, at
last, it attains its rigid form in that “late” condition of a Culture to
which it is proper and in which it is able to tyrannize over the world-
picture. Kant, very wisely, established causality as a necessary form of
knowledge, and it cannot be too often emphasized that this was meant to
refer exclusively to the understanding of man’s environment by the way
of reason. But while the word “necessary” was accepted readily enough,
it has been overlooked that this limitation of the principle to a single
domain of knowledge is just what forbids its application to the
contemplation and experiencing of living history. Man-knowing and
Nature-knowing are in essence entirely incapable of being compared, but
nevertheless the whole Nineteenth Century was at great pains to abolish
the frontier between Nature and History in favour of the former. The
more historically men tried to think, the more they forgot that in this
domain they ought _not_ to think. In forcing the rigid scheme of a
spatial and anti-temporal relation of cause and effect upon something
alive, they disfigured the visible face of becoming with the
construction-lines of a physical nature-picture, and, habituated to
their own late, megalopolitan and causally-thinking _milieu_, they were
unconscious of the fundamental absurdity of a science that sought to
understand an organic becoming by methodically misunderstanding it as
the _machinery_ of the thing-become. Day is not the cause of night, nor
youth of age, nor blossom of fruit. Everything that we grasp
intellectually has a _cause_, everything that we live organically with
inward certitude has a _past_. The one recognizes the _case_, that which
is generally possible and has a fixed inner form which is the same
whenever and wherever and however often it occurs, the other recognizes
the _event_ which once was and will never recur. And, according as we
grasp something in our envelope-world critically and consciously or
physiognomically and involuntarily, we draw our conclusion from
technical or from living experience, and we relate it to a timeless
cause in space or to a direction which leads from yesterday to to-day
and to-morrow.
But the spirit of our great cities _refuses_ to be involuntary.
Surrounded by a machine-technique that it has itself created in
surprising Nature’s most dangerous secret, the “law,” it seeks to
conquer history also technically, “theoretically and practically.”
“Usefulness,” suitableness to purpose (Zweckmässigkeit), is the great
word which assimilates the one to the other. A materialist conception of
history, ruled by laws of causal Nature, leads to the setting up of
usefulness-ideals such as “enlightenment,” “humanity,” “world-peace,” as
aims of world-history, to be reached by the “march of progress.” But in
these schemes of old age the feeling of Destiny has died, and with it
the young reckless courage that, self-forgetful and big with a future,
presses on to meet a dark decision.
For only youth has a future, and _is_ Future, that enigmatic synonym of
directional Time and of Destiny. _Destiny is always young._ He who
replaces it by a mere chain of causes and effects, sees even in the not-
yet-actualized something, as it were, old and past—_direction_ is
wanting. But he who lives towards a something in the superabundant flow
of things need not concern himself with aims and abilities, for he feels
that he himself is the meaning of what is to happen. This was the faith
in the Star that never left Cæsar nor Napoleon nor the great doers of
another kind; and this it is that lies deepest of all—youthful
melancholy notwithstanding—in every childhood and in every young clan,
people, Culture, that extends forward over all their history for men of
act and of vision, who are young however white their hair, younger even
than the most juvenile of those who look to a timeless utilitarianism.
The feeling of a significance in the momentarily present world-around
discloses itself in the earliest days of childhood, when it is still
only the persons and things of the nearest environment that essentially
exist, and develops through silent and unconscious experience into a
comprehensive picture. This picture constitutes the general expression
of the whole Culture as it is at the particular stage, and it is only
the fine judge of life and the deep searcher of history who can
interpret it.
At this point a distinction presents itself between the _immediate
impression_ of the present and the _image_ of the past that is only
presented in the spirit, in other words between the world as happening
and the world as history. The eye of the man of action (statesman and
general) appreciates the first, that of the man of contemplation
(historian and poet) the second. Into the first one plunges practically
to do or to suffer; chronology,[172] that great symbol of irrevocable
past, claims the second. We look backwards, and we live forward towards
the unforeseen, but even in childhood our _technical_ experience soon
introduces into the image of the singular occurrence elements of the
foreseeable, that is, an image of regulated Nature which is subject not
to physiognomic fact but to calculation. We apprehend a “head of game”
as a living entity and immediately afterwards as food; we see a flash of
lightning as a peril and then as an electrical discharge. And this
second, later, petrifying projection of the world more and more tends to
overpower the first in the Megalopolis; the image of the past is
mechanized and materialized and from it is deduced a set of causal rules
for present and future. We come to believe in historical laws and in a
rational understanding of them.
Nevertheless science is always natural science. Causal knowledge and
technical experience refer only to the become, the extended, the
comprehended. As life is to history, so is knowledge (Wissen) to Nature,
viz., to the sensible world apprehended as an element, treated as in
space and subjected to the law of cause and effect. Is there, then, a
science of History at all? To answer this question, let us remember that
in every personal world-picture, which only approximates more or less to
the ideal picture, there is both something of Nature and something of
History. No Nature is without living, and no History without causal,
_harmonies_. For within the sphere of Nature, although two like
experiments, conformably to law, have the like result, yet each of these
experiments is a historical event possessing a date and not recurring.
And within that of History, the dates or data of the past (chronologies,
statistics, names, forms[173]) form a rigid web. “Facts are facts” even
if we are unaware of them, and all else is image, _Theoria_, both in the
one domain and in the other. But history is itself the condition of
being “in the focus” and the material is only an aid to this condition,
whereas in Nature the real aim is the winning of the material, and
theory is only the servant of this purpose.
There is, therefore, not a science _of_ history but an ancillary science
_for_ history, which ascertains that which has been. For the historical
outlook itself the data are always symbols. Scientific research, on the
contrary, is science and only science. In virtue of its technical origin
and purpose it sets out to find data and laws of the causal sort and
nothing else, and from the moment that it turns its glance upon
something else it becomes _Metaphysics_, something trans-scientific. And
just because this is so, historical and natural-science data are
different. The latter consistently repeat themselves, the former never.
The latter are _truths_, the former _facts_. However closely related
incidentals and causals may appear to be in the everyday picture,
fundamentally they belong to different worlds. As it is beyond question
that the shallowness of a man’s history-picture (the man himself,
therefore) is in proportion to the dominance in it of frank incidentals,
so it is beyond question that the emptiness of written history is in
proportion to the degree in which it makes the establishment of purely
factual relations its object. The more deeply a man lives History, the
more rarely will he receive “causal” impressions and the more surely
will he be sensible of their utter insignificance. If the reader
examines Goethe’s writings in natural science, he will be astounded to
find how “living nature” can be set forth without formulas, without
laws, almost without a trace of the causal. For him, Time is not a
distance but a feeling. But the experience of last and deepest things is
practically denied to the ordinary savant who dissects and arranges
purely critically and allows himself neither to contemplate nor to feel.
In the case of History, on the contrary, this power of experience is
_the_ requisite. And thus is justified the paradox that the less a
historical researcher has to do with real science, the better it is for
his history.
To elucidate once more by a diagram:
Soul ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯➛ World
\——————————————————————————————————v———————————————————————————————/
Life, Direction Extension
Destiny-Experience Causal Knowledge
The uniquely The
occurring and irrevocable constantly-possible
“Fact” “Truth”
Physiognomic tact (instinct) Systematic criticism (reason)
↓ [Crossed downward ↓
arrows]
Consciousness Consciousness
as _servant_ of Being as _master_ of Being
The world-image of “History” The world-image of "Nature"
_Life-experience_ _Scientific methods_
Image of the Past Religion. Natural Science
Constructive Contemplation Theoretical: Myth and Dogma.
Hypothesis
(Historian, Tragic Dramatist) Practical: Cult. Technique
to _investigate_ Destiny
Direction into the Future
Constructive Action
(Statesman)
to _be_ Destiny
XI
Is it permissible to fix upon one, any one, group of social, religious,
physiological or ethical facts as the “cause” of another? “Certainly,”
the rationalistic school of history, and still more the up-to-date
sociology, would reply. That, they would say, is what is meant by our
comprehending history and deepening our knowledge of it. But in reality,
with “civilized” man there is always the implicit postulate of an
underlying _rational_ purpose—without which indeed his world would be
meaningless. And there is something rather comic in the most
unscientific freedom that he allows himself in his _choice_ of his
fundamental causes. One man selects this, another that, group as _prima
causa_—an inexhaustible source of polemics—and all fill their works with
pretended elucidations of the “course of history” on natural-science
lines. Schiller has given us the classical expression of this method in
one of his immortal banalities, the verse in which the “Weltgetriebe” is
stat “durch Hunger und durch Liebe”; and the Nineteenth Century,
progressing from Rationalism to Materialism, has made this opinion
canonical. The cult of the useful was set up on high. To it Darwin, in
the name of his century, sacrificed Goethe’s Nature-theory. The organic
logic of the facts of life was supplanted by a mechanics in
physiological garb. Heredity, adaptation, natural selection, are
utility-causes of purely mechanical connotation. The historical
_dispensations_ were superseded by a naturalistic _movement_ “in space.”
(But _are there_ historical or spiritual “processes,” or life-
“processes” of any sort whatever? Have historical “movements” such as,
for example, the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment anything
whatever to do with the scientific notion of movement?) The word
“process” eliminated Destiny and unveiled the secret of becoming, and
lo! there was no longer a tragic but only an exact mathematical
structure of world-happening. And thereupon the “exact” historian
enunciated the proposition that in the history-picture we had before us
a sequence of “states” of mechanical type which were amenable to
rational analysis like a physical experiment or a chemical reaction, and
that therefore causes, means, methods and objects were capable of being
grouped together as a comprehensible system on the visible surface. It
all becomes astonishingly simple. And one is bound to admit that given a
sufficiently shallow observer, the hypothesis (so far as concerns _his_
personality and its world-picture) comes off.
Hunger and Love[174] thus become mechanical causes of mechanical
processes in the “life of peoples.” Social problems and sexual problems
(both belonging to a “physics” or “chemistry” of public—all-too-public—
existence) become the obvious themes of utilitarian history and
_therefore of the corresponding tragedy_. For the social drama
necessarily accompanies the materialist treatment of history, and that
which in Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften” was destiny in the highest
sense has become in Ibsen’s “Lady from the Sea” nothing but a sexual
problem. Ibsen and all the reason-poets of our great cities build—build
from their very first causes to their very last effect—but they do not
sing. As artist, Hebbel fought hard to overcome this merely prosaic
element in his more critical than intuitive temperament, to be a poet
_quand même_, hence his desperate and wholly un-Goethean effort to
_motive_ his events. In Hebbel, as in Ibsen, motiving means trying to
shape tragedy _causally_, and he dissected and re-dissected and
transformed and retransformed his Anecdote until he had made it into a
system that proved a case. Consider his treatment of the Judith story—
Shakespeare would have taken it as it was, and scented a world-secret in
the physiognomic charm of the pure adventure. But Goethe’s warning: “Do
not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. _They are themselves
their own lesson_ (sie selbst sind die Lehre)” had become
incomprehensible to the century of Marx and Darwin. The idea of trying
to read a destiny in the physiognomy of the past and that of trying to
represent unadulterated Destiny as a tragedy were equally remote from
them. In both domains, the cult of the useful had set before itself an
entirely different aim. Shapes were called into being, not to be, but to
prove something. “Questions” of the day were “treated,” social problems
suitably “solved,” and the stage, like the history-book, became a means
to that end. Darwinism, however unconscious of what it was doing, has
made biology politically effective. Somehow or other, democratic
stirrings happened in the protoplasm, and the struggle for existence of
the rain-worms is a useful lesson for the bipeds who have scraped
through.
With all this, the historians have failed to learn the lesson that our
ripest and strictest science, Physics, would have taught them, the
lesson of prudence. Even if we concede them their causal method, the
superficiality with which they apply it is an outrage. There is neither
the intellectual discipline nor the keen sight, let alone the scepticism
that is inherent in our handling of physical hypotheses.[175] For the
attitude of the physicist to his atoms, electrons, currents, and fields
of force, to æther and mass, is very far removed from the naïve faith of
the layman and the Monist in these things. They are _images_ which he
subjects to the abstract relationships of his differential equations, in
which he clothes trans-phenomenal numbers, and if he allows himself a
certain freedom to choose amongst several theories, it is because he
does not try to find in them any actuality but that of the “conventional
sign.”[176] He knows, too, that over and above an experimental
acquaintance with the technical structure of the world-around, all that
it is possible to achieve by this process (which is the only one open to
natural science) is a symbolic interpretation of it, no more—certainly
not “Knowledge” in the sanguine popular sense. For, the image of Nature
being a creation and copy of the Intellect, its “alter ego” in the
domain of the extended, to _know_ Nature means to know oneself.
If Physics is the maturest of our sciences, Biology, whose business is
to explore the picture of organic life, is in point both of content and
of methods the weakest. What historical investigation _really_ is,
namely pure Physiognomic, cannot be better illustrated than by the
course of Goethe’s nature-studies. He works upon mineralogy, and at once
his views fit themselves together into a conspectus of an earth-history
in which his beloved granite signifies nearly the same as that which I
call the proto-human signifies in man’s history. He investigates well-
known plants, and the prime phenomenon of metamorphosis, the original
form of the history of all plant existence, reveals itself; proceeding
further, he reaches those extraordinarily deep ideas of vertical and
spiral tendencies in vegetation which have not been fully grasped even
yet. His studies of ossature, based entirely on the contemplation of
life, lead him to the discovery of the “os intermaxillare” in man and to
the view that the skull-structure of the vertebrates developed out of
six vertebræ. Never is there a word of causality. He feels the necessity
of Destiny just as he himself expressed it in his _Orphische Urworte_:
“So must thou be. Thou canst not Self escape.
So erst the Sibyls, so the Prophets told.
Nor Time nor any Power can mar the shape
Impressed, that living must itself unfold.”
The mere chemistry of the stars, the mathematical side of physical
observations, and physiology proper interested him, the great historian
of Nature very little, because they belonged to Systematic and were
concerned with experiential learning of the become, the dead, and the
rigid. This is what underlies his anti-Newton polemic—a case in which,
it must be added, both sides were in the right, for the one had
“knowledge” of the regulated nature-process in the dead colour[177]
while the experiencing of the other, the artist, was intuitive-sensuous
“feeling.” Here we have the two worlds in plain opposition; and now
therefore the essentials of their opposition must be stated with all
strictness.
History carries the mark of the _singular-factual_, Nature that of the
_continuously possible_. So long as I scrutinize the image of the world-
around in order to see by what laws it _must_ actualize itself,
irrespective of whether it does happen or merely might happen—
irrespective, that is, of time—then I am working in a genuine science.
For the necessity of a nature-law (and there are no other laws) it is
utterly immaterial whether it becomes phenomenal infinitely often or
never. _That is, it is independent of Destiny._ There are thousands of
chemical combinations that never are and never will be produced, but
they are demonstrably possible and therefore they _exist_—for the fixed
System of Nature though not for the Physiognomy of the whirling
universe. A system consists of truths, a history rests on facts. Facts
follow one another, truths follow _from_ one another, and this is the
difference between “when” and “how.” That there has been a flash of
lightning is a fact and can be indicated, without a word, by the
pointing of a finger. “When there is lightning there is thunder,” on the
contrary, is something that must be communicated by a proposition or
sentence. Experience-lived may be quite wordless, while systematic
knowing can only be through words. “Only that which has no history is
capable of being defined,” says Nietzsche somewhere. But History is
present becoming that tends into the future and looks back on the past.
Nature stands beyond all time, its mark is extension, and it is without
directional quality. Hence, for the one, the necessity of the
mathematical, and for the other the necessity of the tragic.
In the actuality of waking existence both worlds, that of scrutiny and
that of acceptance (Hingebung), are interwoven, just as in a Brabant
tapestry warp and woof together effect the picture. Every law must, to
be _available_ to the understanding at all, once have been discovered
through some destiny-disposition in the history of an intellect—that is,
it must have once been in experiential life; and every destiny appears
in some sensible garb—as persons, acts, scenes and gestures—in which
Nature-laws are operative. Primitive life is submissive before the
daemonic unity of the fateful; in the consciousness of the mature
Culture this “early” world-image is incessantly in conflict with the
other, “late,” world-image; and in the civilized man the tragic world-
feeling succumbs to the mechanizing intellect. History and nature
_within ourselves_ stand opposed to one another as _life_ is to _death_,
as _ever-becoming time_ to _ever-become space_. In the waking
consciousness, becoming and become struggle for control of the world-
picture, and the highest and maturest forms of both sorts (possible only
for the great Cultures) are seen, in the case of the Classical soul, in
the opposition of Plato and Aristotle, and, in the case of our Western,
in that of Goethe and Kant—the pure physiognomy of the world
contemplated by the soul of an eternal child, and its pure system
comprehended by the reason of an eternal greybeard.
XII
Herein, then, I see the _last_ great task of Western philosophy, the
only one which still remains in store for the aged wisdom of the
Faustian Culture, the preordained issue, it seems, of our centuries of
spiritual evolution. No Culture is at liberty to _choose_ the path and
conduct of its thought, but here for the first time a Culture can
foresee the way that destiny has chosen for it.
Before my eyes there seems to emerge, as a vision, a hitherto unimagined
mode of superlative historical research that is truly Western,
necessarily alien to the Classical and to every other soul but ours—a
comprehensive Physiognomic of all existence, a morphology of becoming
for _all_ humanity that drives onward to the highest and last ideas; a
duty of penetrating the world-feeling not only of our proper soul but of
all souls whatsoever that have contained grand possibilities and have
expressed them in the field of actuality as grand Cultures. This
philosophic view—to which we and we alone are entitled in virtue of our
analytical mathematic, our contrapuntal music and our perspective
painting—in that its scope far transcends the scheme of the systematist,
presupposes the eye of an artist, and of an artist who can feel the
whole sensible and apprehensible environment dissolve into a deep
infinity of mysterious relationships. So Dante felt, and so Goethe felt.
To bring up, out of the web of world-happening, a millennium of organic
culture-history as an entity and person, and to grasp the conditions of
its inmost spirituality—such is the aim. Just as one penetrates the
lineaments of a Rembrandt portrait or a Cæsar-bust, so the new art will
contemplate and understand the grand, fateful lines in the visage of a
Culture as a superlative human individuality.
To attempt the interpretation of a poet or a prophet, a thinker or a
conqueror, is of course nothing new, but to enter a culture-soul—
Classical, Egyptian or Arabian—so intimately as to absorb into one’s
self, to make part of one’s own life, the totality expressed by typical
men and situations, by religion and polity, by style and tendency, by
thought and customs, is quite a new manner of experiencing life. Every
epoch, every great figure, every deity, the cities, the tongues, the
nations, the arts, in a word everything that ever existed and will
become existent, are physiognomic traits of high symbolic significance
that it will be the business of quite a new kind of “judge of men”
(Menschenkenner) to interpret. Poems and battles, Isis and Cybele,
festivals and Roman Catholic masses, blast furnaces and gladiatorial
games, dervishes and Darwinians, railways and Roman roads, “Progress”
and Nirvana, newspapers, mass-slavery, money, machinery—all these are
equally signs and symbols in the world-picture of the past that the soul
presents to itself and would interpret. "_Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein
Gleichnis._" Solutions and panoramas as yet unimagined await the
unveiling. Light will be thrown on the dark questions which underlie
dread and longing—those deepest of primitive human feelings—and which
the will-to-know has clothed in the “problems” of time, necessity,
space, love, death, and first causes. There is a wondrous music of the
spheres which _wills to be heard_ and which a few of our deepest spirits
will hear. The physiognomic of world-happening will become the _last
Faustian philosophy_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V
MAKROKOSMOS
I
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND THE
SPACE-PROBLEM
CHAPTER V
MAKROKOSMOS
I
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND THE SPACE-PROBLEM
I
The notion of a world-history of physiognomic type expands itself
therefore into the wider idea of an _all-embracing symbolism_.
Historical research, in the sense that we postulate here, has simply to
investigate the picture of the once-living past and to determine its
inner form and logic, and the Destiny-idea is the furthest limit to
which it can penetrate. But this research, however comprehensive the new
orientation tends to make it, cannot be more than a fragment and a
foundation of a still wider treatment. Parallel with it, we have a
Nature-investigation that is equally fragmentary and is limited to its
own causal system of relations. But neither tragic nor technical
“motion” (if we may distinguish by these words the respective bases of
the lived and the known) exhausts the living itself. We both live and
know when we are awake, but, in addition, we live when mind and senses
are asleep. Though night may close every eye, the blood does not sleep.
We are moving in the moving (so at least we try to indicate, by a word
borrowed from science, the inexpressible that in sleep-hours we feel
with inward certainty). But it is only in the waking existence that
“here” and “there” appear as an irreducible duality. Every impulse
proper to oneself has an expression and every impulse alien to oneself
makes an impression. And thus everything of which we are conscious,
whatever the form in which it is apprehended—“soul” and “world,” or life
and actuality, or History and Nature, or law and feeling, Destiny or
God, past and future or present and eternity—has for us a deeper meaning
still, a final meaning. And the one and only means of rendering this
incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of metaphysics which
regards _everything whatsoever_ as having significance as a _symbol_.
Symbols are sensible signs, final, indivisible and, above all, unsought
impressions of definite meaning. A symbol is a trait of actuality that
for the sensuously-alert man has an immediate and inwardly-sure
significance, and that is incommunicable by process of reason. The
detail of a Doric or Early-Arabic or Early-Romanesque ornament; the
forms of the cottage and the family, of intercourse, of costume and
rite; the aspect, gait and mien of a man and of whole classes of peoples
and men; the communication-and community-forms of man and beast; and
beyond all this the whole voiceless language of Nature with her woods
and pastures, flocks, clouds, stars, moonlight and thunderstorm, bloom
and decay, nearness and distance—all this is the emblematical impression
of the Cosmos upon us, who are both aware and in our reflective hours
quite capable of listening to this language. Vice versa, it is the sense
of a homogeneous understanding that raises up the family, the class, the
tribe, or finally the Culture, out of the general humanity and assembles
it as such.
Here, then, we shall not be concerned with what a world “is,” but with
what it signifies to the being that it envelops. When we wake up, at
once something extends itself between a “here” and a “there.” We live
the “here” as something proper, we experience the “there” as something
alien. There is a dualizing of soul and world as poles of actuality; and
in the latter there are both resistances which we grasp causally as
things and properties, and impulses in which we feel beings, _numina_
(“just like ourselves”) to be operative. But there is in it, further,
something which, as it were, eliminates the duality. Actuality—the world
_in relation to_ a soul—is for every individual the projection of the
Directed upon the domain of the Extended—the Proper mirroring itself on
the Alien; one’s _actuality then signifies oneself_. By an act that is
both creative and unconscious—for it is not “I” who actualize the
possible, but “it” actualizes itself through me—the bridge of symbol is
thrown between the living “here” and “there.” Suddenly, necessarily, and
completely “the” world comes into being out of the totality of received
and remembered elements: and as it is an individual who apprehends the
world, there is for each individual a singular world.
There are therefore as many worlds as there are waking beings and like-
living, like-feeling groups of beings. The supposedly single,
independent and external world that each believes to be common to all is
really an ever-new, uniquely-occurring and non-recurring experience in
the existence of each.
A whole series of grades of consciousness leads up from the root-
beginnings of obscure childish intuition, in which there is still no
clear world for a soul or self-conscious soul within a world, to the
highly intellectualized states of which only the men of fully-ripened
civilizations are capable. This gradation is at the same time an
expansion of symbolism from the stage in which there is an inclusive
meaning of _all_ things to one in which separate and specific signs are
distinguished. It is not merely when, after the manner of the child, the
dreamer and the artist, I am passive to a world full of dark
significances; or when I am awake without being in a condition of
extreme alertness of thought and act (such a condition is much rarer
even in the consciousness of the real thinker and man of action than is
generally supposed)—it is continuously and always, for as long as my
life can be considered to be a waking life at all, that I am endowing
that which is outside me with the _whole_ content that is in me, from
the half-dreamy impressions of world-coherence to the rigid world of
causal laws and number that overlies and binds them. And even in the
domain of pure number the symbolical is not lacking, for we find that
refined _thought_ puts inexpressible meanings into signs like the
triangle, the circle and the numbers 7 and 12.
This is the _idea of the Macrocosm, actuality as the sum total of all
symbols in relation to one soul_. From this property of being
significant nothing is exempt. All that is, symbolizes. From the
corporeal phenomena like visage, shape, mien (of individuals and classes
and peoples alike), which have always been known to possess meaning, to
the supposedly eternal and universally-valid forms of knowledge,
mathematics and physics, everything speaks out of the essence of one and
only one soul.
At the same time these individuals’ worlds as lived and experienced by
men of _one_ Culture or spiritual community are interrelated, and on the
greater or less degree of this interrelation depends the greater or less
communicability of intuitions, sensations and thoughts from one to
another—that is, the possibility of making intelligible what one has
created in the style of one’s own being, through expression-media such
as language or art or religion, by means of word-sounds or formulæ or
signs that are themselves also symbols. The degree of interrelation
between one’s world and another’s fixes the limit at which understanding
becomes self-deception. Certainly it is only very imperfectly that we
can understand the Indian or the Egyptian soul, as manifested in the
men, customs, deities, root-words, ideas, buildings and acts of it. The
Greeks, ahistoric as they were, could not even guess at the essence of
alien spiritualities—witness the naïveté with which they were wont to
rediscover their own gods and Culture in those of alien peoples. But in
our own case too, the current translations of the ἀρχή, or _Atman_, or
_Tao_ of alien philosophers presuppose our proper world-feeling, which
is that from which our “equivalents” claim their significance, as the
basis of an alien soul-expression. And similarly we elucidate the
characters of early Egyptian and Chinese portraits with reference to our
own life-experience. In both cases we deceive ourselves. That the
artistic masterpieces of all Cultures are still living for us—“immortal”
as we say—is another such fancy, kept alive by the unanimity with which
we understand the alien work in the proper sense. Of this tendency of
ours the effect of the Laocoön group on Renaissance sculpture and that
of Seneca on the Classicist drama of the French are examples.
II
Symbols, as being things actualized, belong to the domain of the
extended. They are become and not becoming (although they may stand for
a becoming) and they are therefore rigidly limited and subject to the
laws of space. There are _only_ sensible-spatial symbols. The very word
“form” designates something extended in the extended,—even the inner
forms of music are no exception, as we shall see. But extension is the
hall-mark of the fact “waking consciousness,” and this constitutes only
one side of the individual existence and is intimately bound up with
that existence’s destinies. Consequently, every trait of the actual
waking-consciousness, whether it be feeling or understanding, is in the
moment of our becoming aware of it, already _past_. We can only
_reflect_ upon impressions, “think them over” as our happy phrase goes,
but that which for the sensuous life of the animals is _past_, is for
the grammatical (wortgebundene) understanding of man _passing_,
_transient_. That which happens is, of course, transient, for a
happening is irrevocable, but every kind of significance is also
transient. Follow out the destiny of the Column, from the Egyptian tomb-
temple in which columns are ranked to mark the path for the traveller,
through the Doric peripteros in which they are held together by the body
of the building, and the Early-Arabian basilica where they support the
interior, to the façades of the Renaissance in which they provide the
upward-striving element. As we see, an old significance never returns;
that which has entered the domain of extension has begun and ended at
once. A deep relation, and one which is early felt, exists _between
space and death_. Man is the only being that knows death; all others
become old, but with a consciousness wholly limited to the moment which
must seem to them eternal. They live, but like children in those first
years in which Christianity regards them as still “innocent,” they know
nothing of life, and they die and they see death without knowing
anything about it. Only fully-awakened man, man proper, whose
understanding has been emancipated by the habit of language from
dependence on sight, comes to possess (besides sensibility) the _notion_
of transience, that is, a memory of the past as past and an experiential
conviction of irrevocability. We _are_ Time,[178] but we _possess_ also
an image of history and in this image death, and with death birth,
appear as the two riddles. For all other beings life pursues its course
without suspecting its limits, i.e., without conscious knowledge of
task, meaning, duration and object. It is because there is this deep and
significant identity that we so often find the awakening of the inner
life in a child associated with the death of some relation. The child
_suddenly_ grasps the lifeless corpse for what it is, something that has
become wholly matter, wholly space, and at the same moment it feels
itself as an individual _being_ in an alien extended world. “From the
child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the
child of five is an appalling distance,” said Tolstoi once. Here, in the
decisive moments of existence, when man first becomes man and realizes
his immense loneliness in the universal, the world-fear reveals itself
for the first time as the essentially human fear in the presence of
death, the limit of the light-world, rigid space. Here, too, the higher
thought originates as meditation upon death. Every religion, every
scientific investigation, every philosophy proceeds from it. Every great
symbolism attaches its form-language to the cult of the dead, the forms
of disposal of the dead, the adornment of the graves of the dead. The
Egyptian style begins with the tomb-temples of the Pharaohs, the
Classical with the geometrical decoration of the funerary urns, the
Arabian with catacomb and sarcophagus, the Western with the cathedral
wherein the sacrificial death of Jesus is re-enacted daily under the
hands of the priest. From this primitive fear springs, too, historical
sensitiveness in all its modes, the Classical with its cleaving to the
life-abundant present, the Arabian with its baptismal rite that wins new
life and overcomes death, the Faustian with its contrition that makes
worthy to receive the Body of Jesus and therewith immortality. Till we
have the constantly-wakeful concern for the life that is _not yet past_,
there is no concern for that which _is past_. The beast has only the
future, but man knows also the past. And thus every new Culture is
awakened in and with a new view of the world, that is, a sudden glimpse
of death as the secret of the perceivable world. It was when the idea of
the impending end of the world spread over Western Europe (about the
year 1000) that the Faustian soul of this religion was born.
Primitive man, in his deep amazement before death, sought with all the
forces of his spirit to penetrate and to spellbind this world of the
extended with the inexorable and always present limits of its causality,
this world filled with dark almightiness that continuously threatened to
make an end of him. This energetic defensive lies deep in unconscious
existence, but, as being the first impulse that genuinely projects soul
and world as parted and opposed, it marks the threshold of _personal_
conduct of life. Ego-feeling and world-feeling begin to work, and all
culture, inner or outer, bearing or performance, is as a whole only the
intensification of this being-human. Henceforward all that resists our
sensations is not mere resistance or thing or impression, as it is for
animals and for children also, but an expression as well. Not merely are
things actually contained in the world-around but also they possess
_meaning_, as phenomena in the world-_view_. Originally they possessed
only a relationship to men, but now there is also a relationship of men
to them. They have become emblems of his existence. And thus the essence
of every genuine—_unconscious and inwardly necessary_—symbolism proceeds
from the knowledge of death in which the secret of space reveals itself.
All symbolism implies a defensive; it is the expression of a deep
_Scheu_ in the old double sense of the word,[179] and its form-language
tells at once of hostility and of reverence.
_Every thing-become is mortal._ Not only peoples, languages, races and
Cultures are transient. In a few centuries from now there will no more
be a Western Culture, no more be German, English or French than there
were Romans in the time of Justinian. Not that the sequence of human
generations failed; it was the inner form of a people, which had put
together a number of these generations as a single gesture, that was no
longer there. The _Civis Romanus_, one of the most powerful symbols of
Classical being, had nevertheless, as a form, only a duration of some
centuries. But the primitive phenomenon of the great Culture will itself
have disappeared some day, and with it the drama of world-history; aye,
and man himself, and beyond man the phenomenon of plant and animal
existence on the earth’s surface, the earth, the sun, the whole world of
sun-systems. All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but
the arts themselves. One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last
bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—though possibly a coloured canvas
and a sheet of notes may remain—because the last eye and the last ear
accessible to their message will have gone. Every thought, faith and
science dies as soon as the spirits in whose worlds their “eternal
truths” were true and necessary are extinguished. Dead, even, are the
star-worlds which “appeared,” a proper world to the proper eye, to the
astronomers of the Nile and the Euphrates, for our eye is different from
theirs; and our eye in its turn is mortal. All this we know. The beast
does not know, and what he does not know does not exist in his
experienced world-around. But if the image of the past vanishes, the
longing to give a deeper meaning to the passing vanishes also. And so it
is with reference to the purely human macrocosm that we apply the oft-
quoted line, which shall serve as motto for all that follows: _Alles
Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis_.
From this we are led, without our noticing it, back to the space-
problem, though now it takes on a fresh and surprising form. Indeed, it
is as a corollary to these ideas that it appears for the first time as
capable of solution—or, to speak more modestly, of enunciation—just as
the time-problem was made more comprehensible by way of the Destiny-
idea. From the moment of our awakening, the fateful and directed life
appears in the phenomenal life as an experienced _depth_. Everything
extends itself, but it is not yet “space,” not something established in
itself but a self-extension continued from the moving here to the moving
there. World-experience is bound up with the essence of _depth_ (i.e.,
_far-ness_ or _distance_). In the abstract system of mathematics,
“depth” is taken along with “length” and “breadth” as a “third”
dimension; but this trinity of elements of like order is misleading from
the outset, for in our impression of the spatial world these elements
are unquestionably _not_ equivalents, let alone homogeneous. Length and
breadth are no doubt, experientially, a unit and not a mere sum, but
they are (the phrase is used deliberately) simply a form of reception;
they represent the purely sensuous impression. But depth is a
representation of _expression_, of _Nature_, and with it begins the
“world.”
This discrimination between the “third” and the other two dimensions, so
called, which needless to say is wholly alien to mathematics, is
inherent also in the opposition of the notions of sensation and
contemplation. Extension into depth converts the former into the latter;
in fact, depth is the first and genuine dimension in the literal sense
of the word.[180] In it the waking consciousness is active, whereas in
the others it is strictly passive. It is the _symbolic content of a
particular order_ as understood by one particular Culture that is
expressed by this original fundamental and unanalysable element. The
experiencing of depth (this is a premiss upon which all that follows is
dependent) is an act, as entirely involuntary and necessary as it is
creative, whereby the ego keeps its world, so to say, in subordination
(zudiktiert erhält). Out of the rain of impressions the ego fashions a
formal unit, a cinematic _picture_, which as soon as it is mastered by
the understanding is subjected to law and the causality principle; and
therefore, as the projection of an individual spirit it is transient and
mortal.
There is no doubt, however reason may contest it, that this extension is
capable of infinite variety, and that it operates differently not merely
as between child and man, or nature-man and townsman, or Chinese and
Romans, but as between individual and individual according as they
experience their worlds contemplatively or alertly, actively or
placidly. Every artist has rendered “Nature” by line and by tone, every
physicist—Greek, Arabian or German—has dissected “Nature” into ultimate
elements, and how is it that they have not all discovered the same?
Because every one of them has had his own Nature, though—with a naïveté
that was really the salvation of his world-idea and of his own self—
every one believed that he had it in common with all the rest. Nature is
a possession which is saturated through and through with the most
personal connotations. _Nature is a function of the particular Culture._
III
Kant believed that he had decided the great question of whether this _a
priori_ element was pre-existent or obtained by experience, by his
celebrated formula that Space is the form of perception which underlies
all world impressions. But the “world” of the careless child and the
dreamer undeniably possess this form in an insecure and hesitant
way,[181] and it is only the tense, practical, _technical_ treatment of
the world-around—imposed on the free-moving being which, unlike the
lilies of the fields, must care for its life—that lets sensuous self-
extension stiffen into rational tridimensionality. And it is only the
city-man of matured Cultures that really _lives_ in this glaring
wakefulness, and only for his thought that there is a Space wholly
divorced from sensuous life, “absolute,” dead and alien to Time; and it
exists not as a form of the intuitively-perceived but as a form of the
rationally-comprehended. There is no manner of doubt that the “space”
which Kant saw all around him with such unconditional certainty when he
was thinking out his theory, did not exist in anything like so rigorous
a form for his Carolingian ancestors. Kant’s greatness consists in his
having created the idea of a "form _a priori_," but not in the
application that he gave it. We have already seen that Time is not a
“form of perception” nor for that matter a form at all—forms exist only
in the extended—and that there is no possibility of defining it except
as a counter-concept to Space. But there is the further question—does
this word “space” exactly cover the formal content of the intuitively-
perceived? And beyond all this there is the plain fact that the “form of
perception” _alters with distance_. Every distant mountain range is
“perceived” as a scenic plane. No one will pretend that he sees the moon
as a body; for the eye it is a pure plane and it is only by the aid of
the telescope—i.e. when the distance is artificially reduced—that it
progressively obtains a spatial form. Obviously, then, the “form of
perception” is a function of distance. Moreover, when we reflect upon
anything, we do not exactly remember the impressions that we received at
the time, but “represent to ourselves” the picture of a space abstracted
from them. But this representation may and does deceive us regarding the
living actuality. Kant let himself be misled; he should certainly not
have permitted himself to distinguish between forms of perception and
forms of ratiocination, for _his_ notion of Space in principle embraced
both.[182]
Just as Kant marred the Time-problem by bringing it into relation with
an essentially misunderstood arithmetic and—on that basis—dealing with a
phantom sort of time that lacks the life-quality of direction and is
therefore a mere spatial scheme, so also he marred the Space-problem by
relating it to a common-place geometry.
It befell that a few years after the completion of Kant’s main work
Gauss discovered the first of the Non-Euclidean geometries. These,
irreproachably demonstrated as regards their own internal validity,
enable it to be proved that there are _several_ strictly mathematical
kinds of three-dimensional extension, all of which are _a priori_
certain, and none of which can be singled out to rank as the genuine
“form of perception.”
It was a grave, and in a contemporary of Euler and Lagrange an
unpardonable, error to postulate that the Classical school-geometry (for
it was that which Kant always had in mind) was to be found reproduced in
the forms of Nature around us. In moments of attentive observation at
very short range, and in cases in which the relations considered are
sufficiently small, the living impressions and the rules of customary
geometry are certainly in approximate agreement. But the _exact_
conformity asserted by philosophy can be demonstrated neither by the eye
nor by measuring-instruments. Both these must always stop short at a
certain limit of accuracy which is very far indeed below that which
would be necessary, say, for determining which of the Non-Euclidean
geometries is the geometry of “empirical” Space.[183] On the large
scales and for great distances, where the experience of depth completely
dominates the perception-picture (for example, looking on a broad
landscape as against a drawing) the form of perception is in fundamental
contradiction with mathematics. A glance down any avenue shows us that
parallels meet at the horizon. Western perspective and the otherwise
quite different perspective of Chinese painting are both alike based on
this fact, and the connexion of these perspectives with the root-
problems of their respective mathematics is unmistakable.
Experiential Depth, in the infinite variety of its modes, eludes every
sort of numerical definition. The whole of lyric poetry and music, the
entire painting of Egypt, China and the West by hypothesis deny any
strictly mathematical structure in space as felt and seen, and it is
only because all modern philosophers have been destitute of the smallest
understanding of painting that they have failed to note the
contradiction. The “horizon” _in and by which every visual image
gradually passes into a definitive plane_, is incapable of any
mathematical treatment. Every stroke of a landscape painter’s brush
refutes the assertions of conventional epistemology.
As mathematical magnitudes abstract from life, the “three dimensions”
have no natural limits. But when this proposition becomes entangled with
the surface-and-depth of experienced impression, the original
epistemological error leads to another, viz., that apprehended extension
is also without limits, although in fact our vision only comprises the
_illuminated_ portion of space and stops at the light-limit of the
particular moment, which may be the star-heavens or merely the bright
atmosphere. The “visual” world is the totality of _light-resistances_,
since vision depends on the presence of radiated or reflected light. The
Greeks took their stand on this and stayed there. It is the Western
world-feeling that has produced the idea of a limitless universe of
space—a space of infinite star-systems and distances that far transcends
all optical possibilities—and this was a creation of the _inner_ vision,
incapable of all actualization through the eye, and, even as an idea,
alien to and unachievable by the men of a differently-disposed Culture.
IV
The outcome, then, of Gauss’s discovery, which _completely_ altered the
course of modern mathematics,[184] was the statement that there are
severally equally valid structures of three-dimensional extension. That
it should even be asked which of them corresponds to actual perception
shows that the problem was not in the least comprehended. Mathematics,
whether or not it employs visible images and representations as working
conveniences, concerns itself with systems that are entirely emancipated
from life, time and distance, with form-worlds of pure numbers whose
validity—not _fact-foundation_—is timeless and like everything else that
is “known” is known by causal logic and not experienced.
With this, the difference between the living intuition-way and the
mathematical form-language became manifest and the secret of _spatial
becoming_ opened out.
As becoming is the foundation of the become, continuous living history
that of fulfilled dead nature, the organic that of the mechanical,
destiny that of causal law and the causally-settled, so too _direction
is the origin of extension. The secret of Life accomplishing itself
which is touched upon by the word Time forms the foundation of that
which, as accomplished, is understood by_ (or rather _indicated to an
inner feeling in us by_) _the word Space_. Every extension that is
actual has first been accomplished in and with an experience of depth,
and what is primarily indicated by the word Time is just this process of
extending, first sensuously (in the main, visually) and only later
intellectually, into depth and distance, i.e., the _step_ from the
planar semi-impression to the macrocosmically ordered world-picture with
its mysterious-manifest kinesis. We feel—and the feeling is what
constitutes the state of all-round awareness in us—that we are _in_ an
extension that encircles us; and it is only necessary to follow out this
original impression that we have of the worldly to see that in reality
there is only one true “dimension” of space, which is direction from
one’s self outwards into the distance, the “there” and the future, and
that the abstract system of three dimensions is a mechanical
representation and not a fact of life. By the depth-experience sensation
is _expanded_ into the world. We have seen already that the directedness
that is in life wears the badge of _irreversibility_, and there is
something of this same hall-mark of Time in our instinctive tendency to
feel the depth that is in the world uni-directionally also—viz., from
ourselves outwards, and never from the horizon inwards. The bodily
mobility of man and beast is disposed in this sense. We move _forward_—
towards the Future, nearing with every step not merely our aim but our
old age—and we feel every _backward_ look as a glance at something that
is past, that has already become history.[185]
If we can describe the basic form of the understood, viz., causality, as
_destiny become rigid_, we may similarly speak of spatial depth as a
_time become rigid_. That which not only man but even the beast _feels_
operative around him as destiny, he _perceives_ by touching, looking,
listening, scenting as movement, and under his intense scrutiny it
stiffens and becomes causal. We _feel_ that it is drawing towards spring
and we feel in advance how the spring landscape expands around us; but
we _know_ that the earth as it moves in space revolves and that the
duration of spring consists of ninety such revolutions of the earth, or
days. Time gives birth to Space, but Space gives death to Time.
Had Kant been more precise, he would, instead of speaking of the “two
forms of perception,” have called time the form of perception and space
the form of the perceived, and then the connexion of the two would
probably have revealed itself to him. The logician, mathematician, or
scientist in his moments of intense thought, knows only the Become—which
has been detached from the singular event by the very act of meditating
upon it—and true systematic space—in which everything possesses the
_property_ of a mathematically-expressible “duration.” But it is just
this that indicates to us how space is continuously “becoming.” While we
gaze into the distance with our senses, it floats around us, but when we
are startled, the alert eye sees a tense and rigid space. This space
_is_; the principle of its existing at all is that it is, outside time
and detached from it and from life. In it duration, a piece of perished
time, resides as a known property of things. And, as we know ourselves
too as _being_ in this space, we know that we also have a duration and a
limit, of which the moving finger of our clock ceaselessly warns us. But
the rigid Space itself is transient too—at the first relaxation of our
intellectual tension it vanishes from the many-coloured spread of our
world-around—and so it is a sign and symbol of _the most elemental and
powerful symbol_, of life itself.
For the involuntary and unqualified realization of depth, which
dominates the consciousness with the force of an elemental event
(_simultaneously with the awakening of the inner life_), marks the
frontier between child and ... Man. The symbolic experience of depth is
what is lacking in the child, who grasps at the moon and knows as yet no
meaning in the outer world but, like the soul of primitive man, dawns in
a dreamlike continuum of sensations (in traumhafter Verbundenheit mit
allem Empfindungshaften hindämmert). Of course the child is not without
experience of the extended, of a very simple kind, but there is no
_world-perception_; distance is felt, but it does not yet speak to the
soul. And with the soul’s awakening, direction, too, first reaches
living expression—Classical expression in steady adherence to the near-
present and exclusion of the distant and future; Faustian in direction-
energy which has an eye only for the most distant horizons; Chinese, in
free hither-and-thither wandering that nevertheless goes to the goal;
Egyptian in resolute march down the path once entered. Thus the Destiny-
idea manifests itself in every line of a life. With it alone do we
become members of a particular Culture, whose members are connected by a
common world-feeling and a common world-form derived from it. A deep
identity unites the awakening of the _soul_, its birth into clear
existence in the name of a Culture, with the sudden realization of
distance and time, the _birth of its outer world_ through the symbol of
extension; and thenceforth this symbol is and remains the _prime symbol_
of that life, imparting to it its specific style and the historical form
in which it progressively actualizes its inward possibilities. From the
specific directedness is derived the specific prime-symbol of extension,
namely, for the Classical world-view the near, strictly limited, self-
contained Body, for the Western infinitely wide and infinitely profound
three-dimensional Space, for the Arabian the world as a Cavern. And
therewith an old philosophical problem dissolves into nothing: this
prime form of the world is _innate_ in so far as it is an original
possession of the soul of that Culture which is expressed by our life as
a whole, and _acquired_ in so far that every individual soul re-enacts
for itself that creative act and unfolds in early childhood the symbol
of depth to which its existence is predestined, as the emerging
butterfly unfolds its wings. The first comprehension of depth is _an act
of birth_—the spiritual complement of the bodily.[186] In it the Culture
is born out of its mother-landscape, and the act is repeated by every
one of its individual souls throughout its life-course. This is what
Plato—connecting it with an early Hellenic belief—called anamnesis. The
definiteness of the world-form, which for each dawning soul _suddenly
is_, derives meaning from Becoming. Kant the systematic, however, with
his conception of the form _a priori_, would approach the interpretation
of this very riddle from a dead result instead of along a living way.
From now on, we shall consider the _kind of extension as the prime
symbol of a Culture_. From it we are to deduce the entire form-language
of its actuality, its physiognomy as contrasted with the physiognomy of
every other Culture and still more with the almost entire lack of
physiognomy in primitive man’s world-around. For now the interpretation
of depth rises to acts, to formative expression in works, to the
_trans_-forming of actuality, not now merely in order to subserve
necessities of life (as in the case of the animals) but above all to
create a picture out of extensional elements of all sorts (material,
line, colour, tone, motion)—a picture, often, that re-emerges with power
to charm after lost centuries in the world-picture of another Culture
and tells new men of the way in which its authors understood the world.
But the prime symbol does not actualize itself; it is operative through
the form-sense of every man, every community, age and epoch and dictates
the style of every life-expression. It is inherent in the form of the
state, the religious myths and cults, the ethical ideals, the forms of
painting and music and poetry, the fundamental notions of each science—
but it is not presented by these. Consequently, it is not presentable by
words, for language and words are themselves _derived_ symbols. Every
individual symbol tells of it, but only to the inner feelings, not to
the understanding. And when we say, as henceforth we shall say, that the
prime-symbol of the Classical soul is the material and individual body,
that of the Western pure infinite space, it must always be with the
reservation that concepts cannot represent the inconceivable, and thus
at the most a _significative feeling_ may be evoked by the sound of
words.
Infinite space is the ideal that the Western soul has always striven to
find, and to see immediately actualized, in its world-around; and hence
it is that the countless space-theories of the last centuries possess—
over and above all ostensible “results”—a deep import as symptoms of a
world-feeling. In how far does unlimited extension _underlie_ all
objective things? There is hardly a single problem that has been more
earnestly pondered than this; it would almost seem as if every other
world-question was dependent upon the one problem of the nature of
space. And is it not in fact so—_for us_? And how, then, has it escaped
notice that the whole Classical world never expended one word on it, and
indeed did not even possess a word[187] by which the problem could be
exactly outlined? Why had the great pre-Socratics nothing to say on it?
Did they overlook in their world just that which appears to us the
problem of all problems? Ought we not, in fact, to have seen long ago
that the answer is in the very fact of their silence? How is it that
according to _our_ deepest feeling the “world” is nothing but that
world-of-space which is the true offspring of our depth-experience, and
whose grand emptiness is corroborated by the star-systems lost in it?
Could a “world” of this sense have been made even comprehensible to a
Classical thinker? In short, we suddenly discover that the “eternal
problem” that Kant, in the name of humanity, tackled with a passion that
itself is symbolic, is a _purely Western_ problem that simply does not
arise in the intellects of other Cultures.
What then was it that Classical man, whose insight into his own world-
around was certainly not less piercing than ours, regarded as the prime
problem of all being? It was the problem of ἀρχή, the _material origin
and foundation_ of all sensuously-perceptible things. If we grasp this
we shall get close to the significance of the fact—not the fact of
space, but the fact that made it a necessity of destiny for the space-
problem to become the problem of the Western, and only the Western,
soul.[188] This very spatiality (Räumlichkeit) that is the truest and
sublimest element in the aspect of _our_ universe, that absorbs into
itself and begets out of itself the substantiality of all things,
Classical humanity (which knows no word for, and therefore has no idea
of, space) with one accord cuts out as the nonent, τὸ μὴ ὄν, that which
_is not_. The pathos of this denial can scarcely be exaggerated. The
whole passion of the Classical soul is in this act of excluding by
symbolic negation that which it _would_ not feel as actual, that in
which its own existence _could_ not be expressed. A world of other
colour suddenly confronts us here. The Classical statue in its splendid
bodiliness—all structure and expressive surfaces and no incorporeal
_arrière-pensée_ whatsoever—contains without remainder all that
Actuality is for the Classical eye. The material, the optically
definite, the comprehensible, the immediately present—this list exhausts
the characteristics of this kind of extension. The Classical universe,
the _Cosmos_ or well-ordered aggregate of all near and completely
viewable things, is concluded by the corporeal vault of heaven. More
there is not. The need that is in us to think of “space” as being behind
as well as before this shell was wholly absent from the Classical world-
feeling. The Stoics went so far as to treat even properties and
relations of things as “bodies.” For Chrysippus, the Divine Pneuma is a
“body,” for Democritus seeing consists in our being penetrated by
material particles of the things seen. The State is a body which is made
up of all the bodies of its citizens, the law knows only corporeal
persons and material things. And the feeling finds its last and noblest
expression in the stone body of the Classical temple. The windowless
interior is carefully concealed by the array of columns; but outside
there is not one truly straight line to be found. Every flight of steps
has a slight sweep outward, every step relatively to the next. The
pediment, the roof-ridge, the sides are all curved. Every column has a
slight swell and none stand truly vertical or truly equidistant from one
another. But swell and inclination and distance vary from the corners to
the centres of the sides in a carefully toned-off ratio, and so the
whole corpus is given a something that swings mysterious about a centre.
The curvatures are so fine that to a certain extent they are invisible
to the eye and only to be “sensed.” But it is just by these means that
direction in depth is eliminated. While the Gothic style _soars_, the
Ionic _swings_. The interior of the cathedral pulls up with primeval
force, but the temple is laid down in majestic rest. All this is equally
true as relating to the Faustian and Apollinian Deity, and likewise of
the fundamental ideas of the respective physics. To the principles of
position, material and form we have opposed those of straining movement,
force and mass, and we have defined the last-named as a constant ratio
between force and acceleration, nay, finally volatilized both in the
purely spatial elements of _capacity_ and _intensity_. It was an
obligatory consequence also of this way of conceiving actuality that the
instrumental music of the great 18th-Century masters should emerge as a
master-art—for it is the only one of the arts whose form-world is
inwardly related to the contemplative vision of pure space. In it, as
opposed to the statues of Classical temple and forum, we have bodiless
realms of tone, tone-intervals, tone-seas. The orchestra swells, breaks,
and ebbs, it depicts distances, lights, shadows, storms, driving clouds,
lightning flashes, colours etherealized and transcendent—think of the
instrumentation of Gluck and Beethoven. “Contemporary,” in our sense,
with the Canon of Polycletus, the treatise in which the great sculptor
laid down the strict rules of human body-build which remained
authoritative till beyond Lysippus, we find the strict canon (completed
by Stamitz about 1740) of the sonata-movement of four elements which
begins to relax in late-Beethoven quartets and symphonies and, finally,
in the lonely, utterly infinitesimal tone-world of the “Tristan” music,
frees itself from all earthly comprehensibleness. This prime feeling of
a loosing, Erlösung, solution, of the Soul in the Infinite, of a
liberation from all material heaviness which the highest moments of our
music always awaken, sets free also the energy of depth that is in the
Faustian soul: whereas the effect of the Classical art-work is to bind
and to bound, and the body-feeling secures, brings back the eye from
distance to a Near and Still that is saturated with beauty.
-----
Footnote 172:
Which, inasmuch as it has been detached from time, is able to employ
mathematical symbols. These rigid figures _signify_ for us a destiny
of yore. But their meaning is other than mathematical. Past is not a
cause, nor Fate a formula, and to anyone who handles them, as the
historical materialist handles them, mathematically, the past event as
such, as an actuality that has lived once and only once, is invisible.
Footnote 173:
That is, not merely conclusions of peaces or deathdays of persons, but
the Renaissance style, the _Polis_, the Mexican Culture and so forth—
are dates or data, facts that have been, even when we possess no
representation of them.
Footnote 174:
See Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq., 589 et seq.
Footnote 175:
The formation of hypotheses in Chemistry is much more thoughtless,
owing to the less close relation of that science to mathematics. A
house of cards such as is presented to us in the researches of the
moment on atom-structure (see, for example, M. Born, _Der Aufbau der
Materie_, 1920) would be impossible in the near neighbourhood of the
electro-magnetic theory of light, whose authors never for a moment
lost sight of the frontier between mathematical vision and its
representation by a picture, or of the fact that this was only a
picture.
Footnote 176:
There is no difference essentially between these representations and
the switchboard wiring-diagram.
Footnote 177:
Goethe’s theory of colour openly controverted Newton’s theory of
light. A long account of the controversy will be found in Chapter IX
of G. H. Lewes’s _Life of Goethe_—a work that, taken all in all, is
one of the wisest biographies ever written. In reading his critique of
Goethe’s theory, of course, it has to be borne in mind that he wrote
before the modern development of the electro-magnetic theory, which
has substituted a merely mathematical existence for the Newtonian
physical existence of colour-rays as such in white light. Now, this
physical existence was just what, in substance, Goethe denied. What he
affirmed, in the simpler language of his day, was that white light was
something simple and colourless that becomes coloured through
diminutions or modifications imposed upon it by “darkness.” The modern
physicist, using a subtler hypothesis than Newton’s and a more refined
“balance” than that which Lewes reproaches Goethe for “flinging away,”
has found in white light, not the Newtonian mixture of colour-rays,
but a surge of irregular wave-trains which are only regularized into
colour-vibrations through being acted upon by analysers of one sort
and another, from prisms to particulate matter. This necessity of a
counter-agent for the production of colour seems—to a critical
outsider at any rate—very like the necessity of an efficient negative
principle or “opaque” that Goethe’s intuitive interpretation of his
experiments led him to postulate. It is this that is the heart of the
theory, and not the “simplicity” of light _per se_.
So much it seems desirable to add to the text and the reference, in
order to expand the author’s statement that “both were right.” For
Lewes, with all his sympathetic penetration of the man and real
appreciation of his scientific achievement, feels obliged to regard
his methods and his theory as such as “erroneous.” And it is perhaps
not out of place in this book to adduce an instance of the peculiar
nature and power of intuitive vision (which entirely escapes direct
description) in which Vision frankly challenges Reason on its own
ground, meets with refutation (or contempt) from the Reason of its
day, and yet may come to be upheld in its specific rightness (its
rightness as vision, that is, apart from its technical enunciation by
the seer) by the Reason of a later day.—_Tr._
Footnote 178:
See p. 123.
Footnote 179:
See page 123.
Footnote 180:
The word _dimension_ ought only to be used in the singular. It means
extension but not extensions. The idea of the three directions is an
out-and-out abstraction and is not contained in the immediate
extension-feeling of the body (the “soul”). Direction as such, the
direction-essence, gives rise to the mysterious _animal_ sense of
right and left and also the _vegetable_ characteristic of below-to-
above, earth to heaven. The latter is a fact felt dream-wise, the
former a truth of waking existence to be learned and therefore capable
of being transmuted. Both find expression in architecture, to wit, in
the symmetry of the plan and the energy of the elevation, and it is
only because of this that we specially distinguish in the
“architecture” of the space around us the angle of 90° in preference,
for example, to that of 60°. Had not this been so, the conventional
number of our “dimensions” would have been quite different.
Footnote 181:
The want of perspective in children’s drawings is emphatically not
perceptible to the children themselves.
Footnote 182:
His idea that the _a priori_-ness of space was proved by and through
the unconditional validity of simple geometrical facts rests, as we
have already remarked, on the all-too-popular notion that mathematics
are either geometry or arithmetic. Now, even in Kant’s time the
mathematic of the West had got far beyond this naïve scheme, which was
a mere imitation of the Classical. Modern geometry bases itself not on
space but on multiply-infinite number-manifolds—amongst which the
three-dimensional is simply the undistinguished special case—and
within these groups investigates functional formations with reference
to their structure; that is, there is no longer any contact or even
possibility of contact between any possible kind of sense-perception
and mathematical facts in the domain of such extensions as these, and
yet the demonstrability of the latter is in no wise impaired thereby.
Mathematics, then, are independent of the perceived, and the question
now is, how much of this famous demonstrability of the forms of
perception is left when the artificiality of juxtaposing both in a
supposedly single process of experience has been recognized.
Footnote 183:
It is true that a geometrical theorem may be proved, or rather
demonstrated, by means of a drawing. But the theorem is differently
constituted in every kind of geometry, and that being so, the drawing
ceases to be a _proof_ of anything whatever.
Footnote 184:
So much so that Gauss said nothing about his discovery until almost
the end of his life for tear of “the clamour of the Bœotians.”
Footnote 185:
The distinction of right and left (see p. 169) is only conceivable as
the outcome of this directedness in the dispositions of the body. “In
front” has no meaning whatever for the body of a plant.
Footnote 186:
It may not be out of place here to refer to the enormous importance
attached in savage society to initiation-rites at adolescence.—_Tr._
Footnote 187:
Either in Greek or in Latin, τόπος (= _locus_) means spot, locality,
and also social position; χώρα (= _spatium_) means space-between,
distance, rank, and also ground and soil (e.g., τὰ ἐκ τῆς χώρας,
produce); τὸ κένον (_vacuum_) means quite unequivocally a hollow body,
and the stress is emphatically on the envelope. The literature of the
Roman Imperial Age, which attempted to render the _Magian_ world-
feeling through Classical words, was reduced to such clumsy versions
as ὁρατὸς τόπος (sensible world) or _spatium inane_ (“endless space,”
but also “wide surface”—the root of the word “spatium” means to swell
or grow fat). In the true Classical literature, the idea not being
there, there was no necessity for a word to describe it.
Footnote 188:
It has not hitherto been seen that this fact is implicit in Euclid’s
famous parallel axiom (“through a point only one parallel to a
straight line is possible”).
This was the only one of the Classical theorems which remained
unproved, and as we know now, it is incapable of proof. But it was
just that which made it into a dogma (as opposed to any experience)
_and therefore the metaphysical centre_ and main girder of that
geometrical system. Everything else, axiom or postulate, is merely
introductory or corollary to this. This one proposition is necessary
and universally-valid for the Classical intellect, _and yet not
deducible_. What does this signify?
It signifies that the statement is a _symbol_ of the first rank. It
contains the structure of Classical corporeality. It is just this
proposition, theoretically the weakest link in the Classical geometry
(objections began to be raised to it as early as Hellenistic times),
that reveals its soul, and it was just this proposition, self-evident
within the limits of routine experience, that the Faustian number-
thinking, derived from incorporeal spatial distances, fastened upon as
the centre of doubt. It is one of the deepest symbols of _our_ being
that we have opposed to the Euclidean geometry not one but _several_
other geometries all of which for us are equally true and self-
consistent. The specific tendency of the anti-Euclidean group of
geometries—in which there may be no parallel or two parallels or
several parallels to a line through a point—lies in the fact that by
their very plurality the corporeal sense of extension, which Euclid
_canonized_ by his principle, is entirely got rid of; for what they
reject is that which all corporeal postulates but all spatial denies.
The question of which of the three Non-Euclidean geometries is the
“correct” one (i.e., that which underlies actuality)—although Gauss
himself gave it earnest consideration—is in respect of world-feeling
entirely Classical and therefore it should not have been asked by a
thinker of our sphere. Indeed it prevents us from seeing the true and
deep meaning implicit in the plurality of these geometries. The
specifically Western symbol resides not in the reality of one or of
another, but in the true plurality of _equally possible_ geometries.
It is the _group_ of space-structures—in the abundance of which the
classical system is a mere particular case—that has dissolved the last
residuum of the corporeal into the pure space-feeling.
-----
V
Each of the great Cultures, then, has arrived at a secret language of
world-feeling that is only fully comprehensible by him whose soul
belongs to that Culture. We must not deceive ourselves. Perhaps we can
read a little way into the Classical soul, because its form-language is
almost the exact inversion of the Western; how far we have succeeded or
can ever succeed is a question which necessarily forms the starting-
point of all criticism of the Renaissance, and it is a very difficult
one. But when we are told that probably (it is at best a doubtful
venture to meditate upon so alien an expression of Being) the Indians
conceived numbers which according to our ideas possessed neither value
nor magnitude nor relativity, and which only became positive and
negative, great or small units in virtue of position, we have to admit
that it is impossible for us exactly to re-experience what spiritually
underlies this kind of number. For us, 3 is always _something_, be it
positive or negative; for the Greeks it was unconditionally a positive
magnitude, +3; but for the Indian it indicates a possibility without
existence, to which the word “something” is _not yet_ applicable,
outside both existence and non-existence which are _properties_ to be
introduced into it. +3, -3, ⅓, are thus emanating actualities of
subordinate rank which reside in the mysterious substance (3) in some
way that is entirely hidden from us. It takes a Brahmanic soul to
perceive these numbers as self-evident, as ideal emblems of a self-
complete world-form; to us they are as unintelligible as is the Brahman
Nirvana, for which, as lying beyond life _and_ death, sleep _and_
waking, passion, compassion _and_ dispassion and yet somehow actual,
words entirely fail us. Only this spirituality could originate the grand
conception of _nothingness as a true number, zero_, and even then this
zero is the Indian zero for which existent and non-existent are equally
external designations.[189]
Arabian thinkers of the ripest period—and they included minds of the
very first order like Alfarabi and Alkabi—in controverting the ontology
of Aristotle, _proved_ that the body as such did not necessarily assume
space for existence, and deduced the essence of this space—the _Arabian_
kind of extension, that is—from the characteristic of “one’s being in a
position.”
But this does not prove that as against Aristotle and Kant they were in
error or that their thinking was muddled (as we so readily say of what
our own brains cannot take in). It shows that the Arabian spirit
possessed other world-categories than our own. They could have rebutted
Kant, or Kant them, with the same subtlety of proof—and both disputants
would have remained convinced of the correctness of their respective
standpoints.
When we talk of space to-day, we are all thinking more or less in the
same style, just as we are all using the same languages and word-signs,
whether we are considering mathematical space or physical space or the
space of painting or that of actuality, although all philosophizing that
insists (as it must) upon putting an _identity_ of understanding in the
place of such kinship of significance-feeling must remain somewhat
questionable. But no Hellene or Egyptian or Chinaman could re-experience
any part of those feelings of ours, and no artwork or thought-system
could possibly convey to him unequivocally what “space” means for us.
Again, the prime conceptions originated in the quite differently
constituted soul of the Greek, like ἀρχή, ὕλη, μορφἠ, comprise the whole
content of his world. But this world is differently constituted from
ours. It is, for us, alien and remote. We may take these words of Greek
and translate them by words of our own like “origin,” “matter” and
“form,” but it is mere imitation, a feeble effort to penetrate into a
world of feeling in which the finest and deepest elements, in spite of
all we can do, remain dumb; it is as though one tried to set the
Parthenon sculptures for a string quartet, or cast Voltaire’s God in
bronze. The master-traits of thought, life and world-consciousness are
as manifold and different as the features of individual men; in those
respects as in others there are distinctions of “races” and “peoples,”
and men are as unconscious of these distinctions as they are ignorant of
whether “red” and “yellow” do or do not mean the same for others as for
themselves. It is particularly the common symbolic of language that
nourishes the illusion of a homogeneous constitution of human inner-life
and an identical world-form; in this respect the great thinkers of one
and another Culture resemble the colour-blind in that each is unaware of
his own condition and smiles at the errors of the rest.
And now I draw the conclusions. There is a plurality of prime symbols.
It is the depth-experience through which the world becomes, through
which perception _extends itself_ to world. Its signification is for the
soul to which it belongs and only for that soul, and it is different in
waking and dreaming, acceptance and scrutiny, as between young and old,
townsmen and peasant, man and woman. It actualizes for every high
Culture the possibility of form upon which that Culture’s existence
rests and it does so of deep necessity. All fundamentals words like our
mass, substance, material, thing, body, extension (and multitudes of
words of the like order in other culture-tongues) are emblems,
obligatory and determined by destiny, that out of the infinite abundance
of world-possibilities evoke in the name of the individual Culture those
possibilities that alone are significant and therefore necessary for it.
None of them is exactly transferable just as it is into the experiential
living and knowing of another Culture. And none of these prime words
ever recurs. The _choice of prime symbol_ in the moment of the Culture-
soul’s awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil—a moment that
for one who can read world-history thus contains something catastrophic—
decides all.
Culture, as the soul’s total expression “become” and perceptible in
gestures and works, as its mortal transient body, obnoxious to
law, number and causality:
As the historical drama, a picture in the whole picture of world-
history:
As the sum of grand emblems of life, feeling and understanding:
—this is the language through which alone a soul can tell of what it
undergoes.
The macrocosm, too, is a property of the individual soul; we can never
know how it stands with the soul of another. That which is implied by
“infinite space,” the space that “passeth all understanding,” which is
the creative interpretation of depth-experience proper and peculiar to
us men of the West—the kind of extension that is nothingness to the
Greeks, the Universe to us—dyes our world in a colour that the
Classical, the Indian and the Egyptian souls had not on their palettes.
One soul listens to the world-experience in A flat major, another in F
minor; one apprehends it in the Euclidean spirit, another in the
contrapuntal, a third in the Magian spirit. From the purest analytical
Space and from Nirvana to the most somatic reality of Athens, there is a
series of prime symbols each of which is capable of forming a complete
world out of itself. And, as the idea of the Babylonian or that of the
Indian world was remote, strange and elusive for the men of the five or
six Cultures that followed, so also the Western world will be
incomprehensible to the men of Cultures yet unborn.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI
MAKROKOSMOS
II
APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN AND MAGIAN SOUL
CHAPTER VI
MAKROKOSMOS
II
APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN AND MAGIAN SOUL
I
Henceforth we shall designate the soul of the Classical Culture, which
chose the sensuously-present individual body as the ideal type of the
extended, by the name (familiarized by Nietzsche) of the _Apollinian_.
In opposition to it we have the _Faustian_ soul, whose prime-symbol is
pure and limitless space, and whose “body” is the Western Culture that
blossomed forth with the birth of the Romanesque style in the 10th
century in the Northern plain between the Elbe and the Tagus. The nude
statue is Apollinian, the art of the fugue Faustian. Apollinian are:
mechanical statics, the sensuous cult of the Olympian gods, the
politically individual city-states of Greece, the doom of Œdipus and the
phallus-symbol. Faustian are: Galileian dynamics, Catholic and
Protestant dogmatics, the great dynasties of the Baroque with their
cabinet diplomacy, the destiny of Lear and the Madonna-ideal from
Dante’s Beatrice to the last line of _Faust II_. The painting that
defines the individual body by contours is Apollinian, that which forms
space by means of light and shade is Faustian—this is the difference
between the fresco of Polygnotus and the oil painting of Rembrandt. The
Apollinian existence is that of the Greek who describes his ego as
_soma_ and who lacks all idea of an inner development and therefore all
real history, inward and outward; the Faustian is an existence which _is
led_ with a deep consciousness and introspection of the ego, and a
resolutely personal culture evidenced in memoirs, reflections,
retrospects and prospects and conscience. And in the time of Augustus,
in the countries between Nile and Tigris, Black Sea and South Arabia,
there appears—aloof but able to speak to us through forms borrowed,
adopted and inherited—the Magian soul of the Arabian Culture with its
algebra, astrology and alchemy, its mosaics and arabesques, its
caliphates and mosques, and the sacraments and scriptures of the
Persian, Jewish, Christian, “post-Classical” and Manichæan religions.
“Space”—speaking now in the Faustian idiom—is a spiritual something,
rigidly distinct from the momentary sense-present, which _could_ not be
represented in an Apollinian language, whether Greek or Latin. But the
created _expression-space_ of the Apollinian arts is equally alien to
ours. The tiny cella of the early-Classical temple was a dumb dark
nothingness, a structure (originally) of perishable material, an
envelope of the moment in contrast to the eternal vaults of Magian
cupolas and Gothic naves, and the closed ranks of columns were expressly
meant to convey that for the eye at any rate this body possessed no
_Inward_. In no other Culture is the firm footing, the socket, so
emphasized. The Doric column bores into the ground, the vessels are
always thought of from below upward (whereas those of the Renaissance
float above their footing), and the sculpture-schools feel the
stabilizing of their figures as their main problem. Hence in archaic
works the legs are disproportionately emphasized, the foot is planted on
the full sole, and if the drapery falls straight down, a part of the hem
is removed to show that the foot is standing. The Classical relief is
strictly stereometrically set on a plane, and there is an interspace
between the figures but no depth. A landscape of Claude Lorrain, on the
contrary, is _nothing but_ space, every detail being made to subserve
its illustration. All bodies in it possess an atmospheric and
perspective meaning purely as carriers of light and shade. The extreme
of this disembodiment of the world in the service of space is
Impressionism. Given this world-feeling, the Faustian soul in the
springtime necessarily arrived at an architectural problem which had its
centre of gravity in the spatial vaulting-over of vast, and from porch
to choir dynamically deep, cathedrals. This last expressed _its_ depth-
experience. But with it was associated, in opposition to the cavernous
Magian expression-space,[190] the element of a soaring into the broad
universe. Magian roofing, whether it be cupola or barrel-vault or even
the horizontal baulk of a basilica, _covers in_. Strzygowski[191] has
very aptly described the architectural idea of Hagia Sophia as an
introverted Gothic striving under a closed outer casing. On the other
hand, in the cathedral of Florence the cupola _crowns_ the long Gothic
body of 1367, and the same tendency rose in Bramante’s scheme for St.
Peter’s to a veritable towering-up, a magnificent “Excelsior,” that
Michelangelo carried to completion with the dome that floats high and
bright over the vast vaulting. To this sense of space the Classical
opposes the symbol of the Doric peripteros, wholly corporeal and
comprehensible in one glance.
The Classical Culture begins, then, with a great _renunciation_. A rich,
pictorial, almost over-ripe art lay ready to its hand. But this _could_
not become the expression of the young soul, and so from about 1100 B.C.
the harsh, narrow, and to our eyes scanty and barbaric, early-Doric
geometrical style appears in opposition to the Minoan.[192] For the
three centuries which correspond to the flowering of our Gothic, there
is no hint of an architecture, and it is only at about 650 B.C.,
“contemporarily” with Michelangelo’s transition into the Baroque, that
the Doric and Etruscan temple-type arises. All “Early” art is religious,
and this symbolic Negation is not less so than the Egyptian and the
Gothic Affirmation. The idea of _burning_ the dead accords with the
cult-site but not with the cult-building; and the Early Classical
religion which conceals itself from us behind the solemn names of
Calchas, Tiresias, Orpheus and (probably) Numa[193] possessed for its
rites simply that which is left of an architectural idea when one has
subtracted the architecture, viz., the sacred precinct. The original
cult-plan is thus the Etruscan templum, a sacred area merely staked off
on the ground by the augurs with an impassable boundary and a propitious
entrance on the East side.[194] A “templum” was created where a rite was
to be performed or where the representative of the state authority,
senate or army, happened to be. It existed only for the duration of its
use, and the spell was then removed. It was probably only about 700 B.C.
that the Classical soul so far mastered itself as to represent this
architectural Nothing in the sensible form of a built body. In the long
run the Euclidean feeling proved stronger than the mere antipathy to
duration.
Faustian architecture, on the contrary, begins on the grand scale
simultaneously with the first stirrings of a new piety (the Cluniac
reform, c. 1000) and a new thought (the Eucharistic controversy between
Berengar of Tours and Lanfranc 1050),[195] and proceeds at once to plans
of gigantic intention; often enough, as in the case of Speyer, the whole
community did not suffice to fill the cathedral,[196] and often again it
proved impossible to complete the projected scheme. The passionate
language of this architecture is that of the poems too.[197] Far apart
as may seem the Christian hymnology of the south and the Eddas of the
still heathen north, they are alike in the implicit space-endlessness of
prosody, rhythmic syntax and imagery. Read the _Dies Iræ_ together with
the Völuspá,[198] which is little earlier; there is the same adamantine
will to overcome and break all resistances of the visible. No rhythm
ever imagined radiates immensities of space and distance as the old
Northern does:
Zum Unheil werden—noch allzulange
Männer und Weiber—zur Welt geboren
Aber wir beide —bleiben zusammen
Ich und Sigurd.
The accents of the Homeric hexameter are the soft rustle of a leaf in
the midday sun, the rhythm of _matter_; but the “Stabreim” likes
“potential energy” in the world-pictures of modern physics, creates a
tense restraint in the void without limits, distant night-storms above
the highest peaks. In its swaying indefiniteness all words and things
dissolve themselves—it is the dynamics, not the statics, of language.
The same applies to the grave rhythm of _Media vita in morte sumus_.
Here is heralded the colour of Rembrandt and the instrumentation of
Beethoven—_here infinite solitude is felt as the home of the Faustian
soul_. What is Valhalla? Unknown to the Germans of the Migrations and
even to the Merovingian Age, it was conceived by the nascent Faustian
soul. It was conceived, no doubt, under Classic-pagan and Arabian-
Christian impressions, for the antique and the sacred writings, the
ruins and mosaics and miniatures, the cults and rites and dogmas of
these past Cultures reached into the new life at all points. _And yet_,
this Valhalla is something beyond all sensible actualities floating in
remote, dim, Faustian regions. Olympus rests on the homely Greek soil,
the Paradise of the Fathers is a magic garden somewhere in the Universe,
but Valhalla is nowhere. Lost in the limitless, it appears with its
inharmonious gods and heroes the supreme symbol of solitude. Siegfried,
Parzeval, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust are the loneliest heroes in all the
Cultures. Read the wondrous awakening of the inner life in Wolfram’s
Parzeval. The longing for the woods, the mysterious compassion, the
ineffable sense of forsakenness—it is all Faustian and only Faustian.
Every one of us knows it. The motive returns with all its profundity in
the Easter scene of Faust I.
“A longing pure and not to be described
drove me to wander over woods and fields,
and in a mist of hot abundant tears
I felt a world arise and live for me.”
Of this world-experience neither Apollinian nor Magian man, neither
Homer nor the Gospels, knows anything whatever. The climax of the poem
of Wolfram, that wondrous Good Friday morning scene when the hero, at
odds with God and with himself, meets the noble Gawan and resolves to go
on pilgrimage to Tevrezent, takes us to the heart of the _Faustian_
religion. Here one can feel the mystery of the Eucharist which binds the
communicant to a mystic company, to a Church that alone can give bliss.
In the myth of the Holy Grail and its Knights one can feel the inward
necessity of the German-Northern Catholicism. In opposition to the
Classical sacrifices offered to individual gods in separate temples,
there is here the _one never-ending_ sacrifice repeated everywhere and
every day. This is the Faustian idea of the 9th-11th Centuries, the Edda
time, foreshadowed by Anglo-Saxon missionaries like Winfried but only
then ripened. The Cathedral, with its High Altar enclosing the
accomplished miracle, is its expression in stone.[199]
The plurality of separate bodies which represents Cosmos for the
Classical soul, requires a similar pantheon—hence the antique
polytheism. The _single_ world-volume, be it conceived as cavern or as
space, demands the _single_ god of Magian or Western Christianity.
Athene or Apollo might be represented by a statue, but it is and has
long been evident to our feeling that the Deity of the Reformation and
the Counter-Reformation can only be “manifested” in the storm of an
organ fugue or the solemn progress of cantata and mass. From the rich
manifold of figures in the Edda and contemporary legends of saints to
Goethe our myth develops itself in steady opposition to the Classical—in
the one case a continuous disintegration of the divine that culminated
in the early Empire in an impossible multitude of deities, in the other
a process of simplification that led to the Deism of the 18th Century.
The Magian hierarchy of heaven—angels, saints, persons of the Trinity—
has grown paler and paler, more and more disembodied, in the sphere of
the Western pseudomorphosis,[200] supported though it was by the whole
weight of Church authority, and even the Devil—the great adversary in
the Gothic world-drama[201]—has disappeared unnoticed from among the
possibilities of the Faustian world-feeling. Luther could still throw
the inkpot at him, but he has been passed over in silence by perplexed
Protestant theologians long ago. For the _solitude_ of the Faustian soul
agrees not at all with a duality of world powers. God himself is the
All. About the end of the 17th Century this religiousness could no
longer be limited to pictorial expression, and instrumental music came
as its last and only form-language: we may say that the Catholic faith
is to the Protestant as an altar-piece is to an oratorio. But even the
Germanic gods and heroes are surrounded by this rebuffing immensity and
enigmatic gloom. They are steeped in music and in night, for daylight
gives visual bounds and therefore shapes bodily things. Night eliminates
body, day soul. Apollo and Athene have no souls. On Olympus rests the
eternal light of the transparent southern day, and Apollo’s hour is high
noon, when great Pan sleeps. But Valhalla is light-less, and even in the
Eddas we can trace that deep midnight of Faust’s study-broodings, the
midnight that is caught by Rembrandt’s etchings and absorbs Beethoven’s
tone colours. No Wotan or Baldur or Freya has “Euclidean” form. Of them,
as of the Vedic gods of India, it can be said that they suffer not “any
graven image or any likeness whatsoever”; and this impossibility carries
an implicit recognition that eternal space, and not the corporeal copy—
which levels them down, desecrates them, denies them—is the supreme
symbol. This is the deep-felt motive that underlies the iconoclastic
storms in Islam and Byzantium (_both_, be it noted, of the 7th century),
and the closely similar movement in our Protestant North. Was not
Descartes’s creation of the _anti-Euclidean_ analysis of space an
iconoclasm? The Classical geometry handles a number-world of day, the
function-theory is the genuine mathematic of night.
-----
Footnote 189:
This zero, which probably contains a suggestion of the _Indian_ idea
of extension—of that spatiality of the world that is treated in the
Upanishads and is entirely alien to our space-consciousness—was of
course wholly absent in the Classical. By way of the Arabian
mathematics (which completely transformed its meaning) it reached the
West, where it was only introduced in 1554 by Stipel, with its sense,
moreover, again fundamentally changed, for it became the mean of +1
and -1 as a cut in a linear continuum, i.e., it was assimilated to the
Western number-world in a wholly un-Indian sense of _relation_.
Footnote 190:
The word _Höhlengefühl_ is Leo Frobenius’s (_Paideuma_, p. 92). (The
Early-Christian Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem [A.D. 327] is
built over a natural cave.—_Tr._)
Footnote 191:
Strzygowski’s _Ursprung der Christlichen Kirchenkunst_ (1920), p. 80.
Footnote 192:
See Vol. II, p. 101 et seq.
Footnote 193:
See Vol. II, pp. 345 et seq.
Footnote 194:
Müller-Decker, _Die Etrusker_ (1877), II, pp. 128 et seq. Wissowa,
_Religion und Kultus der Römer_ (1912), p. 527. The oldest plan of
Roma Quadrata was a “templum” whose limits had nothing to do with the
building-up of the city but were connected with sacral rules, as the
significance of this precinct (the “Pomœrium”) in later times shows. A
“templum,” too, was the Roman camp whose rectangular outline is
visible to-day in many a Roman-founded town; it was the consecrated
area within which the army felt itself under the protection of its
gods, and originally had nothing whatever to do with fortification,
which is a product of Hellenistic times. (It may be added that Roman
camps retained their rigidity of outline even where obvious “military
considerations” of ground, etc., must have suggested its
modification.—_Tr._) Most Roman stone-temples ("_ædes_") were not
“templa” at all. On the other hand, the early Greek τέμενος of Homeric
times must have had a similar significance.
Footnote 195:
The student may consult the articles “Church History,” “Monasticism,”
“Eucharist” and other articles therein referred to in the Encyclopædia
Britannica, XI Edition.—_Tr._
Footnote 196:
English readers may remember that Cobbett (“Rural Rides,” passim) was
so impressed with the spaciousness of English country churches as to
formulate a theory that mediæval England must have been more populous
than modern England is.—_Tr._
Footnote 197:
Cf. my introduction to Ernst Droem’s _Gesänge_, p. ix.
Footnote 198:
The oldest and most mystical of the poems of the “Elder Edda.”—_Tr._
Footnote 199:
See Vol. II, p. 358 et seq.
Footnote 200:
See Vol. II, pp. 241 et seq.
Footnote 201:
See Vol. II, p. 354.
-----
II
That which is expressed by the soul of the West in its extraordinary
wealth of media—words, tones, colours, pictorial perspectives,
philosophical systems, legends, the spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals
and the formulæ of functions—namely its world-feeling, is expressed by
the soul of Old Egypt (which was remote from all ambitions towards
theory and literariness) almost exclusively by the immediate language of
_Stone_. Instead of spinning word-subtleties around its form of
extension, its “space” and its “time,” instead of forming hypotheses and
number-systems and dogmas, it set up its huge symbols in the landscape
of the Nile in all silence. Stone is the great emblem of the Timeless-
Become; space and death seem bound up in it. “Men have built for the
dead,” says Bachofen in his autobiography, “before they have built for
the living, and even as a perishable wooden structure suffices for the
span of time that is given to the living, so the housing of the dead for
ever demands the solid stone of the earth. The oldest cult is associated
with the stone that marks the place of burial, the oldest temple-
building with the tomb-structure, the origins of art and decoration with
the grave-ornament. Symbol has created itself in the graves. That which
is thought and felt and silently prayed at the grave-side can be
expressed by no word, but only hinted by the boding symbol that stands
in unchanging grave repose.” The dead strive no more. They are no more
Time, but only Space—something that stays (if indeed it stays at all)
but does _not_ ripen towards a Future; and hence it is stone, the
abiding stone, that expresses how the dead is mirrored in the waking
consciousness of the living. The Faustian soul looks for an immortality
to follow the bodily end, a sort of marriage with endless space, and it
disembodies the stone in its Gothic thrust-system (contemporary, we may
note, with the “consecutives” in Church music[202]) till at last nothing
remained visible but the indwelling depth- and height-energy of this
self-extension. The Apollinian soul would have its dead burned, would
see them annihilated, and so it remained averse from stone building
throughout the early period of its Culture. The Egyptian soul saw itself
as moving down a narrow and inexorably-prescribed life-path to come at
the end before the judges of the dead (“Book of the Dead,” cap. 125).
That was its _Destiny-idea_. The Egyptian’s existence is that of the
traveller who follows one unchanging direction, and the whole form-
language of his Culture is a translation into the sensible of this one
theme. And as we have taken _endless space_ as the prime symbol of the
North and _body_ as that of the Classical, so we may take the word _way_
as most intelligibly expressing that of the Egyptians. Strangely, and
for Western thought almost incomprehensibly, the one element in
extension that they emphasize is that of direction in depth. The tomb-
temples of the Old Kingdom and especially the mighty pyramid-temples of
the Fourth Dynasty represent, not a purposed organization of space such
as we find in the mosque and the cathedral, but a rhythmically ordered
_sequence_ of spaces. The sacred way leads from the gate-building on the
Nile through passages, halls, arcaded courts and pillared rooms that
grow ever narrower and narrower, to the chamber of the dead,[203] and
similarly the Sun-temples of the Fifth Dynasty are not “buildings” but a
path enclosed by mighty masonry.[204] The reliefs and the paintings
appear always as rows which with an impressive compulsion lead the
beholder in a definite direction. The ram and sphinx avenues of the New
Empire have the same object. For the Egyptian, the depth-experience
which governed his world-form was so emphatically directional that he
comprehended space more or less as a continuous process of
actualization. There is nothing rigid about distance as expressed here.
The man must move, and so become himself a symbol of life, in order to
enter into relation with the stone part of the symbolism. “Way”
signifies both Destiny and third dimension. The grand wall-surfaces,
reliefs, colonnades past which he moves are “length and breadth”; that
is, mere perceptions of the senses, and it is the forward-driving life
that _extends_ them into “world.” Thus the Egyptian experienced space,
we may say, in and by the processional march along its distinct
elements, whereas the Greek who sacrificed _outside_ the temple did not
feel it and the man of our Gothic centuries praying in the cathedral let
himself be immersed in the quiet infinity of it. And consequently the
art of these Egyptians must aim at _plane_ effects and nothing else,
even when it is making use of solid means. For the Egyptian, the pyramid
over the king’s tomb is a _triangle_, a huge, powerfully expressive
_plane_ that, whatever be the direction from which one approaches,
closes off the “way” and commands the landscape. For him, the columns of
the inner passages and courts, with their dark backgrounds, their dense
array and their profusion of adornments, appear entirely as vertical
strips which rhythmically accompany the march of the priests. Relief-
work is—in utter contrast to the Classical—carefully restricted in one
plane; in the course of development dated by the Third to the Fifth
dynasties it diminishes from the thickness of a finger to that of a
sheet of paper, and finally it is _sunk_ in the plane.[205] The
dominance of the horizontal, the vertical and the right angle, and the
avoidance of all foreshortening support the two-dimensional principle
and serve to insulate this directional depth-experience which coincides
with the way and the grave at its end. It is an art that admits of no
deviation for the relief of the tense soul.
Is not this an expression in the noblest language that it is possible to
conceive of what all our space-theories would like to put into words? Is
it not a metaphysic in stone by the side of which the written
metaphysics of Kant seems but a helpless stammering?
There is, however, another Culture that, different as it most
fundamentally is from the Egyptian, yet found a closely-related prime
symbol. This is the Chinese, with its intensely directional principle of
the Tao.[206] But whereas the Egyptian treads to the end a way that is
prescribed for him with an inexorable necessity, the Chinaman _wanders_
through his world; consequently, he is conducted to his god or his
ancestral tomb not by ravines of stone, between faultless smooth walls,
but by friendly Nature herself. Nowhere else has the _landscape_ become
so genuinely the material of the architecture. “Here, on religious
foundations, there has been developed a grand lawfulness and unity
common to all building, which, combined with the strict maintenance of a
north-south general axis, always holds together gate-buildings, side-
buildings, courts and halls in the same homogeneous plan, and has led
finally to so grandiose a planning and such a command over ground and
space that one is quite justified in saying that the artist builds and
reckons with the landscape itself.”[207] The temple is not a self-
contained building but a lay-out, in which hills, water, trees, flowers,
and stones in definite forms and dispositions are just as important as
gates, walls, bridges and houses. This Culture is the only one in which
the art of gardening is a grand religious art. There are gardens that
are reflections of particular Buddhist sects.[208] It is the
architecture of the landscape, and only that, which explains the
architecture of the buildings, with their flat extension and the
emphasis laid on the roof as the really expressive element. And just as
the devious ways through doors, over bridges, round hills and walls lead
at last to the end, so the paintings take the beholder from detail to
detail whereas Egyptian relief masterfully points him in the one set
direction. “The whole picture is _not_ to be taken at once. Sequence in
time presupposes a sequence of space-elements through which the eye is
to wander from one to the next.”[209] Whereas the Egyptian architecture
dominates the landscape, the Chinese espouses it. But in both cases it
is direction in depth that maintains the _becoming_ of space as a
continuously-present experience.
-----
Footnote 202:
This refers to the diaphonic chant of Church music in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries. The form of this chant is supposed to have been an
accompaniment of the “plain chant” by voices moving parallel to it at
a fourth, fifth, or octave.—_Tr._
Footnote 203:
Hölscher, _Grabdenkmal des Königs Chephren_; Borchardt, _Grabdenkmal
des Sahurê_; Curtius, _Die Antike Kunst_, p. 45.
Footnote 204:
See Vol. II, p. 342; Borchardt, _Re-Heiligtum des Newoserri_; Ed.
Mayer, _Geschichte des Altertums_, I, 251.
Footnote 205:
“Relief en creux”; compare H. Schäfer, _Von ägyptischer Kunst_ (1919),
I, p. 41.
Footnote 206:
See Vol. II, pp. 350 et seq.
Footnote 207:
O. Fischer, _Chinesische Landmalerei_ (1921), p. 24. What makes
Chinese—as also Indian—art so difficult a study for us is the fact
that all works of the early periods (namely, those of the Hwangho
region from 1300 to 800 B.C. and of pre-Buddhist India) have vanished
without a trace. But that which we now call “Chinese art” corresponds,
say, to the art of Egypt from the Twentieth Dynasty onward, and the
great schools of painting find their parallel in the sculpture schools
of the Saïte and Ptolemaic periods, in which an antiquarian preciosity
takes the place of the living inward development that is no longer
there. Thus from the examples of Egypt we are able to tell how far it
is permissible to argue backwards to conclusions about the art of Chóu
and Vedic times.
Footnote 208:
C. Glaser, _Die Kunst Ostasiens_ (1920), p. 181.
Footnote 209:
Glaser, _op. cit._, p. 43.
-----
III
All art is _expression-language_.[210] Moreover, in its very earliest
essays—which extend far back into the animal world—it is that of one
active existence speaking for itself only, and it is unconscious of
witnesses even though in the absence of such the impulse to expression
would not come to utterance. Even in quite “late” conditions we often
see, instead of the combination of artist and spectator, a crowd of art-
makers who _all_ dance or mime or sing. The idea of the “Chorus” as sum
total of persons present has never entirely vanished from art-history.
It is only the higher art that becomes decisively an art “before
witnesses” and especially (as Nietzsche somewhere remarks) before God as
the supreme witness.[211]
This expression is either _ornament_ or _imitation_. Both are _higher_
possibilities and their polarity to one another is hardly perceptible in
the beginnings. Of the two, imitation is definitely the earlier and the
closer to the producing race. Imitation is the outcome of a physiognomic
idea of a second person with whom (or which) the first is involuntarily
induced into resonance of vital rhythm (mitschwingen im); whereas
ornament evidences an ego conscious of its own specific character. The
former is widely spread in the animal world, the latter almost peculiar
to man.
Imitation is born of the secret rhythm of all things cosmic. For the
waking being the One appears as discrete and extended; there is a Here
and a There, a Proper and an Alien something, a Microcosm and a
Macrocosm that are polar to one another in the sense-life, and what the
rhythm of imitation does is to bridge this dichotomy. Every religion is
an effort of the waking soul to reach the powers of the world-around.
And so too is Imitation, which in its most devoted moments is wholly
religious, for it consists in an identity of inner activity between the
soul and body “here” and the world-around “there” which, vibrating as
one, become one. As a bird poises itself in the storm or a float gives
to the swaying waves, so our limbs take up an irresistible beat at the
sound of march-music. Not less contagious is the imitation of another’s
bearing and movements, wherein children in particular excel. It reaches
the superlative when we “let ourselves go” in the common song or parade-
march or dance that creates out of many units one unit of feeling and
expression, a “we.” But a “successful” picture of a man or a landscape
is also the outcome of a felt harmony of the pictorial motion with the
secret swing and sway of the living opposite; and it is this actualizing
of physiognomic rhythm that requires the executant to be an adept who
can reveal the idea, the _soul_, of the alien in the play of its
surface. In certain unreserved moments we are all adepts of this sort,
and in such moments, as we follow in an imperceptible rhythm the music
and the play of facial expression, we suddenly look over the precipice
and see great secrets. The aim of all imitation is effective simulation;
this means effective assimilation of ourselves into an alien something—
such a transposition and transubstantiation that the One lives
henceforth in the Other that it describes or depicts—and it is able to
awaken an intense feeling of unison over all the range from silent
absorption and acquiescence to the most abandoned laughter and down into
the last depths of the erotic, a unison which is inseparable from
creative activity. In this wise arose the popular circling-dances (for
instance, the Bavarian _Schuhplattler_ was originally imitated from the
courtship of the woodcocks) but this too is what Vasari means when he
praises Cimabue and Giotto as the first who returned to the imitation of
“Nature”—the Nature, that is, of springtime men, of which Meister Eckart
said: “God flows out in all creatures, and therefore all created is
God.” That which in this world-around presents itself to our
contemplation—and therefore contains meaning for our feelings—as
movement, we render by movement. Hence all imitation is in the broadest
sense dramatic; drama is presented in the movement of the brush-stroke
or the chisel, the melodic curve of the song, the tone of the
recitation, the line of poetry, the description, the dance. But
everything that we _experience_ with and in seeings and hearings is
always an alien soul to which we are uniting ourselves. It is only at
the stage of the Megalopolis that art, reasoned to pieces and de-
spiritualized, goes over to naturalism as that term is understood
nowadays; viz., imitation of the charm of visible appearances, of the
stock of sensible characters that are capable of being scientifically
fixed.
Ornament detaches itself now from Imitation as something which does not
follow the stream of life but rigidly _faces it_. Instead of
physiognomic traits overheard in the alien being, we have established
motives, _symbols_, which are impressed upon it. The intention is no
longer to pretend but to conjure. The “I” overwhelms the “Thou.”
Imitation is only a _speaking_ with means that are born of the moment
and unreproduceable—but Ornament _employs a language_ emancipated from
the speaking, a stock of forms that possesses duration and is not at the
mercy of the individual.[212]
Only the _living_ can be imitated, and it can be imitated only in
movements, for it is through these that it reveals itself to the senses
of artists and spectators. To that extent, imitation belongs to Time and
Direction. All the dancing and drawing and describing and portraying for
eye and ear is irrevocably “directional,” and hence the highest
possibilities of Imitation lie in the copying of a destiny, be it in
tones, verses, picture or stage-scene.[213] Ornament, on the contrary,
is something taken away from Time: it is pure extension, settled and
stable. Whereas an imitation expresses something by _accomplishing
itself_, ornament can only do so by presenting itself to the senses as a
finished thing. It is Being as such, wholly independent of origin. Every
imitation possesses beginning and end, while an ornament possesses only
duration, and therefore we can only imitate the destiny of an
_individual_ (for instance, Antigone or Desdemona), while by an ornament
or symbol only the generalized destiny-idea itself can be represented
(as, for example, that of the Classical world by the Doric column). And
the former presupposes a talent, while the latter calls for an
acquirable knowledge as well.
All strict arts have their grammar and syntax of form-language, with
rules and laws, inward logic and tradition. This is true not merely for
the Doric cabin-temple and Gothic cottage-cathedral, for the carving-
schools of Egypt[214] and Athens and the cathedral plastic of northern
France, for the painting-schools of the Classical world and those of
Holland and the Rhine and Florence, but also for the fixed rules of the
Skalds and Minnesänger which were learned and practised as a craft (and
dealt not merely with sentence and metre but also with gesture and the
choice of imagery[215]), for the narration-technique of the Vedic,
Homeric and Celto-Germanic Epos, for the composition and delivery of the
Gothic sermon (both vernacular and Latin), and for the orators’
prose[216] in the Classical, and for the rules of French drama. In the
ornamentation of an art-work is reflected the inviolable causality of
the macrocosm as the man of the particular kind sees and comprehends it.
Both have system. Each is penetrated with the religious side of life—
_fear_ and love.[217] A genuine symbol can instil fear or can set free
from fear; the “right” emancipates and the “wrong” hurts and depresses.
The imitative side of the arts, on the contrary, stands closer to the
real race-feelings of _hate_ and love, out of which arises the
opposition of _ugly_ and _beautiful_. This is in relation only with the
living, of which the inner rhythm repels us or draws us into phase with
it, whether it be that of the sunset-cloud or that of the tense breath
of the machine. An imitation is beautiful, an ornament _significant_,
and therein lies the difference between direction and extension, organic
and inorganic logic, life and death. That which we think beautiful is
“worth copying.” Easily it swings with us and draws us on to imitate, to
join in the singing, to repeat. Our hearts beat higher, our limbs
twitch, and we are stirred till our spirits overflow. But as it belongs
to Time, it “has its time.” A symbol endures, but everything beautiful
vanishes with the life-pulsation of the man, the class, the people or
the race that feels it as a specific beauty in the general cosmic
rhythm.[218] The “beauty” that Classical sculpture and poetry contained
for Classical eyes is something different from the beauty that they
contain for ours—something extinguished irrecoverably with the Classical
soul—while what we regard as beautiful in it is something that only
exists for us. Not only is that which is beautiful for one kind of man
neutral or ugly for another—e.g., the whole of our music for the
Chinese, or Mexican sculpture for us. For _one and the same life_ the
accustomed, the habitual, owing to the very fact of its possessing
duration, cannot possess beauty.
And now for the first time we can see the opposition between these two
sides of every art in all its depth. Imitation spiritualizes and
quickens, ornament enchants and kills. The one becomes, the other is.
And therefore the one is allied to love and, above all—in songs and riot
and dance—to the _sexual love_, which turns existence to face the
future; and the other to care of the past, to recollection[219] and to
the _funerary_. The beautiful is longingly pursued, the significant
instils dread, and there is no deeper contrast than that between the
house of the living and the house of the dead.[220] The peasant’s
cottage[221] and its derivative the country noble’s hall, the fenced
town and the castle are mansions of life, unconscious expressions of
circling blood, that no art produced and no art can alter. The idea of
the family appears in the plan of the proto-house, the inner form of the
stock in the plan of its villages—which after many a century and many a
change of occupation still show what race it was that founded them[222]—
the life of a nation and its social ordering in the plan (_not_ the
elevation or silhouette) of the city.[223] On the other hand,
Ornamentation of the high order develops itself on the stiff symbols of
death, the urn, the sarcophagus, the stele and the temple of the
dead,[224] and beyond these in gods’ temples and cathedrals _which are
Ornament through and through_, not the expressions of a race but the
language of a world-view. They are pure art through and through—just
what the castle and the cottage are not.[225]
For cottage and castle are _buildings in which_ art, and, specifically,
imitative art, is _made and done_, the home of Vedic, Homeric and
Germanic epos, of the songs of heroes, the dance of boors and that of
lords and ladies, of the minstrel’s lay. The cathedral, on the other
hand, _is_ art, and, moreover, the only art by which _nothing_ is
imitated; it alone is pure tension of persistent forms, pure three-
dimensional logic that expresses itself in edges and surfaces and
volumes. But the art of villages and castles is derived from the
inclinations of the moment, from the laughter and high spirit of feasts
and games, and to such a degree is it dependent on Time, so much is it a
thing of occasion, that the troubadour obtains his very name from
finding, while Improvisation—as we see in the Tzigane music to-day—is
nothing but race manifesting itself to alien senses under the influence
of the hour. To this free creative power all spiritual art opposes the
strict _school_ in which the individual—in the hymn as in the work of
building and carving—is the servant of a logic of timeless forms, and so
in all Cultures the seat of its style-history is in its early cult
architecture. In the castle it is the life and not the structure that
possesses style. In the town the plan is an image of the destinies of a
people, whereas the silhouette of emergent spires and cupolas tells of
the _logic in the builders’ world-picture_, of the “first and last
things” of their universe.
In the architecture of the living, stone _serves a_ worldly _purpose_,
but in the architecture of the cult _it is a symbol_.[226] Nothing has
injured the history of the great architectures so much as the fact that
it has been regarded as the history of architectural techniques instead
of as that of architectural ideas which took their technical expression-
means as and where they found them. It has been just the same with the
history of musical instruments,[227] which also were developed on a
foundation of tone-language. Whether the groin and the flying buttress
and the squinch-cupola were imagined specially for the great
architectures or were expedients that lay more or less ready to hand and
were taken into use, is for art-history a matter of as little importance
as the question of whether, technically, stringed instruments originated
in Arabia or in Celtic Britain. It may be that the Doric column was, as
a matter of workmanship, borrowed from the Egyptian temples of the New
Empire, or the late-Roman domical construction from the Etruscans, or
the Florentine court from the North-African Moors. Nevertheless the
Doric peripteros, the Pantheon, and the Palazzo Farnese belong to wholly
different worlds—they subserve the artistic expression of the prime-
symbol in three different Cultures.
-----
Footnote 210:
See Vol. II, pp. 135 et seq.
Footnote 211:
The monologue-art of very lonely natures is also in reality a
conversation with self in the second person. But it is only in the
intellectuality of the megalopolitan stages that the impulse to
express is overcome by the impulse to communicate (see Vol. II, p.
135) which gives rise to that tendencious art that seeks to instruct
or convert or prove views of a politico-social or moral character, and
provokes the antagonistic formula of “Art for Art’s sake”—which is
itself rather a view than a discipline, though it does at least serve
to recall the primitive significance of artistic expression.
Footnote 212:
See Vol. II, pp. 138 et seq., and Worringer, _Abstraktion und
Einführung_, pp. 66 et seq.
Footnote 213:
Imitation, being life, is past in the very moment of accomplishment.
The curtain falls, and it passes either into oblivion or, if the
product is a durable artifact, into art-history. Of the songs and
dances of old Cultures nothing remains, of their pictures and poems
little. And even this little contains, substantially, only the
ornamental side of the original imitation. Of a grand drama there
remains only the text, not the image and the sound; of a poem only the
words, not the recital; and of all their music the notes at most, not
the tone-colours of the instruments. The essential is irrevocably
gone, and every “reproduction” is in reality something new and
different.
Footnote 214:
For the workshop of Thothmes at Tell-el-Amarna, see _Mitteilungen der
Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft_, No. 52, pp. 28 et seq.
Footnote 215:
K. Burdach, _Deutsche Renaissance_, p. 11. The pictorial art of the
Gothic period also has its strict typism and symbolism.
Footnote 216:
E. Norden, _Antike Kunst-prosa_, pp. 8 et seq.
Footnote 217:
See Vol. II, p. 323.
Footnote 218:
The translation is so far a paraphrase here that it is desirable to
reproduce the German original: “Alles Schöne vergeht mit dem
Lebenspulsschlag (dessen) der es aus dem kosmischen Takt heraus als
solches empfindet.”
Footnote 219:
Hence the ornamental character of script.
Footnote 220:
See p. 188.
Footnote 221:
See Vol. II, p. 104.
Footnote 222:
E.g., the Slavonic round-villages and Teutonic street-villages east of
the Elbe. Similarly, conclusions can be drawn as to many of the events
of the Homeric age from the distribution of round and rectangular
buildings in ancient Italy.
Footnote 223:
See Vol. II, p. 109.
Footnote 224:
See p. 167.
Footnote 225:
See Vol. II, pp. 142 et seq.
Footnote 226:
See p. 128.
Footnote 227:
See p. 62.
-----
IV
In every springtime, consequently, there are _two_ definitely ornamental
and non-imitative arts, that of building and that of decoration. In the
longing and pregnant centuries before it, elemental expression belongs
exclusively to Ornamentation in the narrow sense. The Carolingian period
is represented only by its ornament, as its architecture, for want of
the _Idea_, stands between the styles. And similarly, as a matter of
art-history, it is immaterial that no buildings of the Mycenæan age have
survived.[228] But with the dawn of the great Culture, _architecture as
ornament_ comes into being suddenly and with such a force of expression
that for a century mere decoration-as-such shrinks away from it in awe.
The spaces, surfaces and edges of stone speak _alone_. The tomb of
Chephren is the culmination of mathematical simplicity—everywhere right
angles, squares and rectangular pillars, nowhere adornment, inscription
or desinence—and it is only after some generations have passed that
Relief ventures to infringe the solemn magic of those spaces and the
strain begins to be eased. And the noble Romanesque of Westphalia-Saxony
(Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella, Paderborn), of Southern France and
of the Normans (Norwich and Peterborough) managed to render the whole
sense of the world with indescribable power and dignity in _one_ line,
_one_ capital, _one_ arch.
When the form-world of the springtime is at its highest, and not before,
the ordained relation is that architecture is lord and ornament is
vassal. And the word “ornament” is to be taken here in the widest
possible sense. Even conventionally, it covers the Classical _unit_-
motive with its quiet poised symmetry or meander supplement, the _spun
surface_ of arabesque and the not dissimilar surface-patterning of Mayan
art, and the “Thunder-pattern”[229] and others of the early Chóu period
which prove once again the landscape basis of the old Chinese
architecture without a doubt. But the warrior figures of Dipylon vases
are also conceived in the spirit of ornament, and so, in a far higher
degree still, are the statuary _groups_ of Gothic cathedrals. “The
figures were composed pillarwise from the spectator, the figures of the
pillar being, with reference to the spectator, ranked upon one another
like rhythmic figures in a symphony that soars heavenward and expands
its sounds in every direction.”[230] And besides draperies, gestures,
and figure-types, even the structure of the hymn-strophe and the
parallel motion of the parts in church music are ornament in the service
of the all-ruling architectural idea.[231] The spell of the great
Ornamentation remains unbroken till in the beginning of a “late” period
architecture falls into a _group_ of civic and worldly special arts that
unceasingly devote themselves to pleasing and clever imitation and
become _ipso facto_ personal. To Imitation and Ornament the same applies
that has been said already of time and space. Time gives birth to space,
but space gives death to time.[232] In the beginning, rigid symbolism
had petrified everything alive; the Gothic statue was not permitted to
be a living body, but was simply a set of lines disposed in human form.
But now Ornament loses all its sacred rigour and becomes more and more
decoration for the architectural setting of a polite and mannered life.
It was purely as this, namely _as a beautifying_ element, that
Renaissance taste was adopted by the courtly and patrician world of the
North (and by it alone!). Ornament meant something quite different in
the Egyptian Old Kingdom from what it meant in the Middle; in the
geometric period from what it meant in the Hellenistic; at the end of
the 12th Century from what it meant at the end of Louis XIV’s reign. And
architecture too becomes pictorial and makes music, and its forms seem
always to be trying to imitate something in the picture of the world-
around. From the Ionic capital we proceed to the Corinthian, and from
Vignola through Bernini to the Rococo.
At the last, when Civilization sets in, true ornament and, with it,
great art as a whole are extinguished. The transition consists—in every
Culture—in Classicism and Romanticism of one sort or another, the former
being a sentimental regard for an Ornamentation (rules, laws, types)
that has long been archaic and soulless, and the latter a sentimental
Imitation, not of life, but of an older Imitation. In the place of
architectural style we find architectural taste. Methods of painting and
mannerisms of writing, old forms and new, home and foreign, come and go
with the fashion. The inward necessity is no longer there, there are no
longer “schools,” for everyone selects what and where it pleases him to
select. _Art becomes craft-art_ (_Kunstgewerbe_) in all its branches—
architecture and music, poetry and drama—and in the end we have a
pictorial and literary stock-in-trade which is destitute of any deeper
significance and is employed according to taste. This final or
industrial form of Ornament—no longer historical, no longer in the
condition of “becoming”—we have before us not only in the patterns of
oriental carpets, Persian and Indian metal work,` Chinese porcelain, but
also in Egyptian (and Babylonian) art as the Greeks and Romans met it.
The Minoan art of Crete is pure craft-art, a northern outlier of
Egyptian post-Hyksos taste; and its “contemporary,” Hellenistic-Roman
art from about the time of Scipio and Hannibal, similarly subserves the
habit of comfort and the play of intellect. From the richly-decorated
entablature of the Forum of Nerva in Rome to the later provincial
ceramics in the West, we can trace the same steady formation of an
unalterable craft-art that we find in the Egyptian and the Islamic
worlds, and that we have to presume in India after Buddha and in China
after Confucius.
V
Now, Cathedral and Pyramid-temple are different in spite of their deep
inward kinship, and it is precisely in these differences that we seize
the mighty phenomenon of the Faustian soul, whose depth-impulse refuses
to be bound in the prime symbol of a way, and from its earliest
beginnings strives to transcend every optical limitation. Can anything
be more alien to the Egyptian conception of the State—whose tendency we
may describe as a noble sobriety—than the political ambitions of the
great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen Emperors, who came to grief
because they overleapt all political actualities and for whom the
recognition of any bounds would have been a betrayal of the idea of
their rulership? Here the prime symbol of infinite space, with all its
indescribable power, entered the field of active political existence.
Beside the figures of the Ottos, Conrad II, Henry VI and Frederick II
stand the Viking-Normans, conquerors of Russia, Greenland, England,
Sicily and almost of Constantinople; and the great popes, Gregory VII
and Innocent III—all of whom alike aimed at making their visible spheres
of influence coincident with the whole known world. This is what
distinguishes the heroes of the Grail and Arthurian and Siegfried sagas,
ever roaming in the infinite, from the heroes of Homer with their
geographically modest horizon; and the Crusades, that took men from the
Elbe and the Loire to the limits of the known world, from the historical
events upon which the Classical soul built the “Iliad” and which from
the style of that soul we may safely assume to have been local, bounded,
and completely appreciable.
The Doric soul actualized the symbol of the corporally-present
individual thing, while deliberately rejecting all big and far-reaching
creations, and it is for this very good reason that the first post-
Mycenæan period has bequeathed nothing to our archæologists. The
expression to which this soul finally attained was the Doric temple with
its purely outward effectiveness, set upon the landscape as a massive
image but denying and artistically disregarding the space within as the
μὴ ὄv, that which was held to be incapable of existence. The ranked
columns of the Egyptians carried the roof of a hall. The Greek in
borrowing the motive invested it with a meaning proper to himself—he
turned the architectural type inside out like a glove. The outer column-
sets are, in a sense, relics of a denied interior.[233]
The Magian and the Faustian souls, on the contrary, built high. Their
dream-images became concrete as vaultings above significant inner-
spaces, structural anticipations respectively of the mathematic of
algebra and that of analysis. In the style that radiated from Burgundy
and Flanders rib-vaulting with its lunettes and flying buttresses
emancipated the contained space from the sense-appreciable surface[234]
bounding it. In the Magian interior "the window is merely a negative
component, a utility-form in no wise yet developed into an art-form—to
put it crudely, nothing but a hole in the wall."[235] When windows were
in practice indispensable, they were for the sake of artistic impression
concealed by galleries as in the Eastern basilica.[236] The _window as
architecture_, on the other hand, is peculiar to the Faustian soul and
the most significant symbol of its depth-experience. In it can be felt
the will to emerge from the interior into the boundless. The same will
that is immanent in contrapuntal music was native to these vaultings.
The incorporeal world of this music was and remained that of the first
Gothic, and even when, much later, polyphonic music rose to such heights
as those of the Matthew Passion, the Eroica, and Tristan and Parsifal,
it became of inward necessity _cathedral-like_ and returned to its home,
the stone language of the Crusade-time. To get rid of every trace of
Classical corporeality, there was brought to bear the full force of a
deeply significant Ornamentation, which defies the delimiting power of
stone with its weirdly impressive transformations of vegetal, animal and
human bodies (St. Pierre in Moissac), which dissolves all its lines into
melodies and variations on a theme, all its façades into many-voiced
fugues, and all the bodiliness of its statuary into a music of drapery-
folds. It is this spirituality that gave their deep meaning to the
gigantic glass-expanses of our cathedral-windows with their polychrome,
_translucent and therefore wholly bodiless_, painting—an art that has
never and nowhere repeated itself and forms the completest contrast that
can be imagined to the Classical fresco. It is perhaps in the Sainte-
Chapelle at Paris that this emancipation from bodiliness is most
evident. Here the stone practically vanishes in the gleam of the glass.
Whereas the fresco-painting is co-material with the wall on and with
which it has grown and its colour is effective as material, here we have
colours dependent on no carrying surface but as free in space as organ
notes, and shapes poised in the infinite. Compare with the Faustian
spirit of these churches—almost wall-less, loftily vaulted, irradiated
with many-coloured light, aspiring from nave to choir—the Arabian (that
is, the Early-Christian Byzantine) cupola-church. The pendentive cupola,
that seems to float on high above the basilica or the octagon, was
indeed also a victory over the principle of natural gravity which the
Classical expressed in architrave and column; it, too, was a defiance of
architectural body, of “exterior.” But the very absence of an exterior
emphasizes the more the unbroken coherence of the wall that shuts in the
Cavern and allows no look and no hope to emerge from it. An ingeniously
confusing interpenetration of spherical and polygonal forms; a load so
placed upon a stone drum that it seems to hover weightless on high, yet
closing the interior without outlet; all structural lines concealed;
vague light admitted, through a small opening in the heart of the dome
but only the more inexorably to emphasize the walling-in—such are the
characters that we see in the masterpieces of this art, S. Vitale in
Ravenna, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the Dome of the Rock[237]
in Jerusalem. Where the Egyptian puts reliefs that with their flat
planes studiously avoid any foreshortening suggestive of lateral depth,
where the Gothic architects put their pictures of glass to draw in the
world of space without, the Magian clothes his walls with sparkling,
predominantly golden, mosaics and arabesques and so drowns his cavern in
that unreal, fairy-tale light which for Northerners is always so
seductive in Moorish art.
-----
Footnote 228:
The same applies to the architecture of Thinite Egypt and to the
Seleucid-Persian sun and fire temples of the pre-Christian area.
Footnote 229:
The combination of scrolls and “Greek keys” with the Dragon or other
emblem of storm-power.—_Tr._
Footnote 230:
Dvorák, _Idealismus und Naturalismus in der got. Skulptur u. Malerei_
(_Hist. Zeitschrift_, 1918, pp. 44 et seq.).
Footnote 231:
And, finally, ornament in the highest sense includes _script_, and
with it, the Book, which is the true associate of the cult-building,
and as an art-work always appears and disappears with it. (See Vol.
II, pp. 182. et seq., pp. 298 et seq.) In writing, it is understanding
as distinct from intuition that attains to form: it is not essences
that those signs symbolize but notions abstracted therefrom by words,
and as for the speech-habituated human intellect rigid space is the
presented objective, the writing of a Culture is (after its stone-
building) the purest of all expressions of its prime-symbol. It is
quite impossible to understand the history of Arabesque if we leave
the innumerable Arabian scripts out of consideration, and it is no
less impossible to separate Egyptian and Chinese style-history from
the history of the corresponding writing-signs and their arrangement
and application.
Footnote 232:
See p. 173.
Footnote 233:
Certainly the Greeks at the time when they advanced from the Antæ to
the Peripteros were under the mighty influence of the Egyptian
_series_-columns—it was at this time that their sculpture in the
round, indisputably following Egyptian models, freed itself from the
relief manner which still clings to the Apollo figures. But this does
not alter the fact that the motive of the Classical column and the
Classical application of the rank-principle were wholly and peculiarly
Classical.
Footnote 234:
The surface of the space-volume itself, not that of the stone. Dvorák,
_Hist. Ztschr._, 1918, pp. 17 et seq.
Footnote 235:
Dehio, _Gesch. der deutschen Kunst_, I, p. 16.
Footnote 236:
For descriptions and illustrations of types of Doming and Vaulting,
see the article _Vault_ in Ency. Brit., XI Ed.—_Tr._
Footnote 237:
“Mosque of Omar.”—_Tr._
-----
VI
The phenomenon of the _great style_, then, is an emanation from the
essence of the Macrocosm, from the prime-symbol of a _great_ culture. No
one who can appreciate the connotation of the word sufficiently to see
that it designates not a form-aggregate but a form-history, will try to
aline the fragmentary and chaotic art-utterances of primitive mankind
with the comprehensive certainty of a style that consistently develops
over centuries. Only the art of great Cultures, the art that has ceased
to be only art and has begun to be an effective unit of expression and
significance, possesses style.
The organic history of a style comprises a "pre—," a "non—" and a "post—
." The bull tablet of the First Dynasty of Egypt[238] is not yet
“Egyptian.” Not till the Third Dynasty do the works acquire a style—but
then they do so suddenly and very definitely. Similarly the Carolingian
period stands “between-styles.” We see different forms touched on and
explored, but nothing of inwardly necessary expression. The creator of
the Aachen Minster “thinks surely and builds surely, but does not feel
surely.”[239] The Marienkirche in the Castle of Würzburg (c. 700) has
its counterpart in Salonika (St. George), and the Church of St. Germigny
des Près (c. 800) with its cupolas and horseshoe niches is almost a
mosque. For the whole of West Europe the period 850-950 is almost a
blank. And just so to-day Russian art stands between two styles. The
primitive wooden architecture with its steep eight-sided tent-roof
(which extends from Norway to Manchuria) is impressed with Byzantine
motives from over the Danube and Armenian-Persian from over the
Caucasus. We can certainly feel an “elective affinity” between the
Russian and the Magian souls, but as yet the prime symbol of Russia, the
_plane without limit_,[240] finds no sure expression either in religion
or in architecture. The church roof emerges, hillock-wise, but little
from the landscape and on it sit the tent-roofs whose points are coifed
with the “kokoshniks” that suppress and would abolish the upward
tendency. They neither tower up like the Gothic belfry nor enclose like
the mosque-cupola, but _sit_, thereby emphasizing the horizontality of
the building, which is meant to be regarded merely from the outside.
When about 1760 the Synod forbade the tent roofs and prescribed the
orthodox onion-cupolas, the heavy cupolas were set upon slender
cylinders, of which there may be any number[241] and which sit on the
roof-plane.[242] It is not yet a style, only the promise of a style that
will awaken when the real Russian religion awakens.
In the Faustian West, this awakening happened shortly before A.D. 1000.
In one moment, the Romanesque style was there. Instead of the fluid
organization of space on an insecure ground plan, there was, suddenly, a
strict dynamic of space. From the very beginning, inner and outer
construction were placed in a fixed relation, the wall was penetrated by
the form-language and the form worked into the wall in a way that no
other Culture has ever imagined. From the very beginning the window and
the belfry were invested with their meanings. The form was irrevocably
assigned. Only its development remained to be worked out.
The Egyptian style began with another such creative act, just as
unconscious, just as full of symbolic force. The prime symbol of the Way
came into being suddenly with the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty (2930
B.C.). The world-creating depth-experience of this soul gets its
substance from the direction-factor itself. Spatial depth as stiffened
Time, distance, death, Destiny itself dominate the expression, and the
merely sensuous dimensions of length and breadth become an escorting
plane which restricts and prescribes the Way of destiny. The Egyptian
flat-relief, which is designed to be seen at close quarters and arranged
serially so as to compel the beholder to pass along the wall-planes in
the prescribed direction, appears with similar suddenness about the
beginning of the Fifth Dynasty.[243] The still later avenues of sphinxes
and statues and the rock- and terrace-temples constantly intensify that
tendency towards the one distance that the world of Egyptian mankind
knows, the grave. Observe how soon the colonnades of the early period
come to be systems of huge, close-set pillars that _screen off_ all
side-view. This is something that has never reproduced itself in any
other architecture.
The grandeur of this style appears to us as rigid and unchanging. And
certainly it stands beyond the passion which is ever seeking and fearing
and so imparts to subordinate characters a quality of restless personal
movement in the flow of the centuries. But, vice versa, we cannot doubt
that to an Egyptian the Faustian style (which _is_ our style, from
earliest Romanesque to Rococo and Empire) would with its unresting
persistent search for a Something, appear far more uniform than we can
imagine. It follows, we must not forget, from the conception of style
that we are working on here, that Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance,
Baroque and Rococo are only _stages of one and the same style_, in which
it is naturally the variable that we and the constant that men of other
eyes remark. In actual fact, the inner unity of the Northern Renaissance
is shown in innumerable reconstructions of Romanesque work in Baroque
and of late Gothic work in Rococo that are not in the least startling.
In peasant art, Gothic and Baroque have been identical, and the streets
of old towns with their pure harmony of all sorts of gables and façades
(wherein definite attributions to Romanesque or Gothic Renaissance or
Baroque or Rococo are often quite impossible) show that the family
resemblance between the members is far greater than they themselves
realize.
The Egyptian style was purely architectural, and remained so till the
Egyptian soul was extinguished. It is the only one in which
Ornamentation as a decorative supplement to architecture is entirely
absent. It allowed of no divergence into arts of entertainment, no
display-painting, no busts, no secular music. In the Ionic phase, the
centre of gravity of the Classical style shifted from architecture to an
independent plastic art; in that of the Baroque the style of the West
passed into music, whose form-language in its turn ruled the entire
building art of the 18th Century; in the Arabian world, after Justinian
and Chosroes-Nushirvan, Arabesque dissolved all the forms of
architecture, painting and sculpture into style-impressions that
nowadays we should consider as craft-art. But in Egypt the sovereignty
of architecture remained unchallenged; it merely softened its language a
little. In the chambers of the pyramid-temple of the Fourth Dynasty
(Pyramid of Chephren) there are unadorned angular pillars. In the
buildings of the Fifth (Pyramid of Sahu-rê) the plant-column makes its
appearance. Lotus and papyrus branches turned into stone arise gigantic
out of a pavement of transparent alabaster that represents water,
enclosed by purple walls. The ceiling is adorned with birds and stars.
The sacred way from the gate-buildings to the tomb-chamber, the picture
of life, is a stream—it is the Nile itself become one with the prime-
symbol of direction. The spirit of the mother-landscape unites with the
soul that has sprung from it.
In China, in lieu of the awe-inspiring pylon with its massy wall and
narrow entrance, we have the “Spirit-wall” (yin-pi) that conceals the
way in. The Chinaman slips into life and thereafter follows the Tao of
life’s path; as the Nile valley is to the up-and-down landscape of the
Hwang Ho, so is the stone-enclosed temple-way to the mazy paths of
Chinese garden-architecture. And just so, in some mysterious fashion,
the Euclidean existence is linked with the multitude of little islands
and promontories of the Ægean, and the passionate Western, roving in the
infinite, with the broad plains of Franconia and Burgundy and Saxony.
VII
The Egyptian style is the expression of a _brave_ soul. The rigour and
force of it Egyptian man himself never felt and never asserted. He dared
all, but said nothing. In Gothic and Baroque, on the contrary, the
triumph over heaviness became a perfectly conscious motive of the form-
language. The drama of Shakespeare deals openly with the desperate
conflict of will and world. Classical man, again, was weak in the face
of the “powers.” The κάθαρσις of fear and pity, the _relief and
recovery_ of the Apollinian soul in the moment of the περιπέτεια was,
according to Aristotle, the effect deliberately aimed at in Attic
tragedy. As the Greek spectator watched _someone whom he knew_ (for
everyone knew the myth and its heroes and lived in them) senselessly
maltreated by fortune, without any conceivable possibility of resistance
to the Powers, and saw him go under with splendid mien, defiant, heroic,
his own Euclidean soul experienced a marvellous uplifting. If life was
worthless, at any rate the _grand gesture_ in losing it was not so. The
Greek willed nothing and dared nothing, but he found a stirring beauty
in _enduring_. Even the earlier figures of Odysseus the patient, and,
above all, Achilles the archetype of Greek manhood, have this
characteristic quality. The morale of the Cynics, that of the Stoics,
that of Epicurus, the common Greek ideals of σωφροσύνη and ἀταραξἰα,
Diogenes devoting himself to θεωρία in a tub—all this is masked
cowardice in the face of grave matters and responsibilities, and
different indeed from the pride of the Egyptian soul. Apollinian man
goes below ground out of life’s way, even to the point of suicide, which
_in this Culture alone_ (if we ignore certain related Indian ideals)
ranked as a high ethical act and was treated with the solemnity of a
ritual symbol.[244] The Dionysiac intoxication seems a sort of furious
drowning of uneasinesses that to the Egyptian soul were utterly unknown.
And consequently the Greek Culture is that of the small, the easy, the
simple. Its technique is, compared with Egyptian or Babylonian, a clever
nullity.[245] No ornamentation shows such a poverty of invention as
theirs, and their stock of sculptural positions and attitudes could be
counted on one’s fingers. “In its poverty of forms, which is conspicuous
even allowing that at the beginning of its development it may have been
better off than it was later, the Doric style pivoted everything on
proportions and on measure.”[246] Yet, even so, what adroitness in
avoiding! The Greek architecture with its commensuration of load and
support and its peculiar smallness of scale suggests a persistent
evasion of difficult architectural problems that on the Nile and, later,
in the high North were literally looked for, which moreover were known
and certainly not burked in the Mycenæan age. The Egyptian loved the
strong stone of immense buildings; it was in keeping with his self-
consciousness that he should choose only the hardest for his task. But
the Greek avoided it; his architecture first set itself small tasks,
then ceased altogether. If we survey it as a whole, and then compare it
with the totality of Egyptian or Mexican or even, for that matter,
Western architecture, we are astounded at the feeble development of the
style. A few variations of the Doric temple and it was exhausted. It was
already closed off about 400 when the Corinthian capital was invented,
and everything subsequent to this was merely modification of what
existed.
The result of this was an almost bodily standardization of form-types
and style-species. One might choose between them, but never overstep
their strict limits—that would have been in some sort an admission of an
infinity of possibilities. There were three orders of columns and a
definite disposition of the architrave corresponding to each; to deal
with the difficulty (considered, as early as Vitruvius, as a conflict)
which the alternation of triglyphs and metopes produced at the corners,
the nearest intercolumniations were narrowed—no one thought of imagining
new forms to suit the case. If greater dimensions were desired, the
requirements were met by superposition, juxtaposition, etc., of
additional elements. Thus the Colosseum possesses three rings, the
Didymæum of Miletus three rows of columns in front, and the Frieze of
the Giants of Pergamum an endless succession of individual and
unconnected motives. Similarly with the style-species of prose and the
types of lyric poetry, narrative and tragedy. Universally, the
expenditure of powers on the basic form is restricted to the minimum and
the creative energy of the artist directed to detail-fineness. It is a
statical treatment of static genera, and it stands in the sharpest
possible contrast to the dynamic fertility of the Faustian with its
ceaseless creation of new types and domains of form.
VIII
We are now able to see the _organism_ in a great style-course. Here, as
in so many other matters, Goethe was the first to whom vision came. In
his “Winckelmann” he says of Velleius Paterculus: “with his standpoint,
it was not given to him to see all art as a living thing (ζῶον) that
must have an inconspicuous beginning, a slow growth, a brilliant moment
of fulfilment and a gradual decline like every other organic being,
though it is presented in a set of individuals.” This sentence contains
the entire morphology of art-history. Styles do not follow one another
like waves or pulse-beats. It is not the personality or will or brain of
the artist that makes the style, but the style that makes the _type_ of
the artist. The style, like the Culture, is a prime phenomenon in the
strictest Goethian sense, be it the style of art or religion or thought,
or the style of life itself. It is, as “Nature” is, an ever-new
experience of waking man, his alter ego and mirror-image in the world-
around. And therefore in the general historical picture of a Culture
there can be but one style, _the style of the Culture_. The error has
lain in treating mere style-phases—Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo,
Empire—as if they were styles on the same level as units of quite
another order such as the Egyptian, the Chinese (or even a
“prehistoric”) style. Gothic and Baroque are simply the youth and age of
one and the same vessel of forms, the style of the West as ripening and
ripened. What has been wanting in our art-research has been detachment,
freedom from prepossessions, and the will to abstract. Saving ourselves
trouble, we have classed any and every form-domain that makes a strong
impression upon us as a “style,” and it need hardly be said that our
insight has been led astray still further by the Ancient-Mediæval-Modern
scheme. But in reality, even a masterpiece of strictest Renaissance like
the court of the Palazzo Farnese is infinitely nearer to the arcade-
porch of St. Patroclus in Soest, the interior of the Magdeburg
cathedral, and the staircases of South-German castles of the 18th
Century than it is to the Temple of Pæstum or to the Erechtheum. The
same relation exists between Doric and Ionic, and hence Ionic columns
can be as completely combined with Doric building forms as late Gothic
is with early Baroque in St. Lorenz at Nürnberg, or late Romanesque with
late Baroque in the beautiful upper part of the West choir at Mainz. And
our eyes have scarcely yet learned to distinguish within the Egyptian
style the Old Kingdom and Middle Empire elements corresponding to Doric
and Gothic youth and to Ionic and Baroque maturity, because from the
Twelfth Dynasty these elements interpenetrate in all harmony in the
form-language of all the greater works.
The task before art-history is to write the _comparative biographies of
the great styles_, all of which as organisms of the same genus possess
structurally cognate life histories.
In the beginning there is the timid, despondent, naked expression of a
newly-awakened soul which is still seeking for a relation between itself
and the world that, though its proper creation, yet is presented as
alien and unfriendly. There is the child’s fearfulness in Bishop
Bernward’s building at Hildesheim, in the Early-Christian catacomb-
painting, and in the pillar-halls of the Egyptian Fourth Dynasty. A
February of art, a deep presentiment of a coming wealth of forms, an
immense suppressed tension, lies over the landscape that, still wholly
rustic, is adorning itself with the first strongholds and townlets. Then
follows the joyous mounting into the high Gothic, into the Constantinian
age with its pillared basilicas and its domical churches, into the
relief-ornament of the Fifth-Dynasty temple. _Being_ is understood, a
sacred form-language has been completely mastered and radiates its
glory, and the Style ripens into a majestic symbolism of directional
depth and of Destiny. But fervent youth comes to an end, and
contradictions arise within the soul itself. The Renaissance, the
Dionysiac-musical hostility to Apollinian Doric, the Byzantine of 450
that looks to Alexandria and away from the overjoyed art of Antioch,
indicate a moment of resistance, of effective or ineffective impulse to
destroy what has been acquired. It is very difficult to elucidate this
moment, and an attempt to do so would be out of place here.
And now it is the manhood of the style-history that comes on. The
Culture is changing into the intellectuality of the great cities that
will now dominate the country-side, and _pari passu_ the style is
becoming intellectualized also. The grand symbolism withers; the riot of
superhuman forms dies down; milder and more worldly arts drive out the
great art of developed stone. Even in Egypt sculpture and fresco are
emboldened to lighter movement. The _artist_ appears, and “plans” what
formerly grew out of the soil. Once more existence becomes self-
conscious and now, detached from the land and the dream and the mystery,
stands questioning, and wrestles for an expression of its new duty—as at
the beginning of Baroque when Michelangelo, in wild discontent and
kicking against the limitations of his art, piles up the dome of St.
Peter’s—in the age of Justinian I which built Hagia Sophia and the
mosaic-decked domed basilicas of Ravenna—at the beginning of that
Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt which the Greeks condensed under the name of
Sesostris—and at the decisive epoch in Hellas (c. 600) whose
architecture probably, nay certainly, expressed that which is echoed for
us in its grandchild Æschylus.
Then comes the gleaming autumn of the style. Once more the soul depicts
its happiness, this time conscious of self-completion. The “return to
Nature” which already thinkers and poets—Rousseau, Gorgias and their
“contemporaries” in the other Cultures—begin to feel and to proclaim,
reveals itself in the form-world of the arts as a sensitive longing and
_presentiment of the end_. A perfectly clear intellect, joyous urbanity,
the sorrow of a parting—these are the colours of these last Culture-
decades of which Talleyrand was to remark later: “Qui n’a pas vécu avant
1789 ne connaît pas la douceur de vivre.” So it was, too, with the free,
sunny and superfine art of Egypt under Sesostris III (c. 1850 B.C.) and
the brief moments of satiated happiness that produced the varied
splendour of Pericles’s Acropolis and the works of Zeuxis and Phidias. A
thousand years later again, in the age of the Ommaiyads, we meet it in
the glad fairyland of Moorish architecture with its fragile columns and
horseshoe arches that seem to melt into air in an iridescence of
arabesques and stalactites. A thousand years more, and we see it in the
music of Haydn and Mozart, in Dresden shepherdesses, in the pictures of
Watteau and Guardi, and the works of German master-builders at Dresden,
Potsdam, Würzburg and Vienna.
Then the style fades out. The form-language of the Erechtheum and the
Dresden Zwinger, honeycombed with intellect, fragile, ready for self-
destruction, is followed by the flat and senile Classicism that we find
in the Hellenistic megalopolis, the Byzantium of 900 and the “Empire”
modes of the North. The end is a sunset reflected in forms revived for a
moment by pedant or by eclectic—semi-earnestness and doubtful
genuineness dominate the world of the arts. We to-day are in this
condition—playing a tedious game with dead forms to keep up the illusion
of a living art.
IX
No one has yet perceived that Arabian art is a single phenomenon. It is
an idea that can only take shape when we have ceased to be deceived by
the crust which overlaid the young East with post-Classical art-
exercises that, whether they were imitation-antique or chose their
elements from proper or alien sources at will, were in any case long
past all inward life; when we have discovered that Early Christian art,
together with every really living element in “late-Roman,” is in fact
the springtime of the _Arabian style_; and when we see the epoch of
Justinian I as exactly on a par with the Spanish-Venetian Baroque that
ruled Europe in the great days of Charles V or Philip II, and the
palaces of Byzantium and their magnificent battle-pictures and pageant-
scenes—the vanished glories that inspired the pens of courtly literati
like Procopius—on a par with the palaces of early Baroque in Madrid,
Vienna and Rome and the great decorative-painting of Rubens and
Tintoretto. This Arabian style embraces the entire first millennium of
our era. It thus stands at a critical position in the picture of a
general history of “Art,” and its organic connectedness has been
imperceptible under the erroneous conventions thereof.[247]
Strange and—if these studies have given us the eye for things latent—
moving it is to see how this young Soul, held in bondage to the
intellect of the Classical and, above all, to the political omnipotence
of Rome, dares not rouse itself into freedom but humbly subjects itself
to obsolete value-forms and tries to be content with Greek language,
Greek ideas and Greek art-elements. Devout acceptance of the powers of
the strong day is present in every young Culture and is the sign of its
youth—witness the humility of Gothic man in his pious high-arched spaces
with their pillar-statuary and their light-filled pictures in glass, the
high tension of the Egyptian soul in the midst of its world of pyramids,
lotus-columns and relief-lined halls. But in this instance there is the
additional element of an intellectual prostration before forms really
dead but supposedly eternal. Yet in spite of all, the taking-over and
continuance of these forms came to nothing. Involuntarily, unobserved,
not supported by an inherent pride as Gothic was, but felt, there in
Roman Syria, almost as a lamentable come-down, a whole new form-world
grew up. Under a mask of Græco-Roman conventions, it filled even Rome
itself. The master-masons of the Pantheon and the Imperial Fora were
_Syrians_. In no other example is the primitive force of a young soul so
manifest as here, where it has to make its own world by sheer conquest.
In this as in every other Culture, Spring seeks to express its
spirituality in a new ornamentation and, above all, in religious
architecture as the sublime form of that ornamentation. But of all this
rich form-world the only part that (till recently) has been taken into
account has been the Western edge of it, which consequently has been
assumed to be the true home and habitat of Magian style-history. In
reality, in matters of style as in those of religion, science and
social-political life, what we find there is only an irradiation from
outside the Eastern border of the Empire.[248] Riegl[249] and
Strzygowski[250] have discovered this, but if we are to go further and
arrive at a conspectus of the development of Arabian art we have to shed
many philological and religious prepossessions. The misfortune is that
our art-research, although it no longer recognizes the religious
frontiers, nevertheless unconsciously assumes them. For there is in
reality no such thing as a Late-Classical nor an Early-Christian nor yet
an Islamic art in the sense of an art proper to each of those faiths and
evolved by the community of believers as such. On the contrary, the
totality of these religions—from Armenia to Southern Arabia and Axum,
and from Persia to Byzantium and Alexandria—possess a broad uniformity
of artistic expression that overrides the contradictions of detail.[251]
_All_ these religions, the Christian, the Jewish, the Persian, the
Manichæan, the Syncretic,[252] possessed cult-buildings and (at any rate
in their script) an Ornamentation of the first rank; and however
different the items of their dogmas, they are all pervaded by an
homogeneous religiousness and express it in a homogeneous symbolism of
depth-experience. There is something in the basilicas of Christianity,
Hellenistic, Hebrew and Baal-cults, and in the Mithræum,[253] the
Mazdaist fire-temple and the Mosque, that tells of a like spirituality:
it is the _Cavern_-feeling.
It becomes therefore the bounden duty of research to seek to establish
the hitherto completely neglected architecture of the South-Arabian and
Persian temple, the Syrian and the Mesopotamian synagogue, the cult-
buildings of Eastern Asia Minor and even Abyssinia;[254] and in respect
of Christianity to investigate no longer merely the Pauline West but
also the Nestorian East that stretched from the Euphrates to China,
where the old records significantly call its buildings “Persian
temples.” If in all this building practically nothing has, so far,
forced itself specially upon our notice, it is fair to suppose that both
the advance of Christianity first and that of Islam later could change
the religion of a place of worship without contradicting its plan and
style. We know that this is the case with Late Classical temples: but
how many of the churches in Armenia may once have been fire-temples?
The artistic centre of this Culture was very definitely—as Strzygowski
has observed—in the triangle of cities Edessa, Nisibis, Amida.
To the westward of it is the domain of the Late-Classical
“Pseudomorphosis,”[255] the Pauline Christianity that conquered in the
councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon,[256] Western Judaism and the cults of
Syncretism. _The architectural type of the Pseudomorphosis_, both for
Jew and Gentile, is the Basilica.[257] It employs the means of the
Classical to express the opposite thereof, and is unable to free itself
from these means—that is the essence and the tragedy of
“Pseudomorphosis.” The more “Classical” Syncretism modifies a cult that
is resident in a Euclidean place into one which is _professed by a
community_ of indefinite estate, the more the interior of the temple
gains in importance over the exterior without needing to change either
plan or roof or columns very much. The space-feeling is different, but
not—at first—the means of expressing it. In the pagan religious
architecture of the Imperial Age there is a perceptible—though never yet
perceived—movement from the wholly corporeal Augustan temple, in which
the cella is the architectural expression of _nothingness_, to one in
which the interior _only_ possesses meaning. Finally the external
picture of the Peripteros of the Doric is transferred to the four inside
walls. Columns ranked in front of a windowless wall are a denial of
space beyond—that is, for the Classical beholder, of space within, and
for the Magian, of space without. It is therefore a question of minor
importance whether the entire space is covered in as in the Basilica
proper, or only the sanctuary as in the Sun-temple of Baalbek with the
great forecourt,[258] which later becomes a standing element of the
mosque and is probably of South Arabian origin.[259] That the Nave
originates in a court surrounded by halls is suggested not only by the
special development of the basilica-type in the East Syrian steppe
(particularly Hauran) but also by the basic disposition of porch, nave
and choir as stages leading to the altar—for the aisles (originally the
side-halls of the court) end blind, and only the nave proper corresponds
with the apse. This basic meaning is very evident in St. Paul at Rome,
albeit the Pseudomorphosis (inversion of the Classical temple) dictated
the technical means, viz., column and architrave. How symbolic is the
Christian reconstruction of the Temple of Aphrodisias in Caria, in which
the cella within the columns is abolished and replaced by a new wall
outside them.[260]
Outside the domain of the “Pseudomorphosis,” on the contrary, the
cavern-feeling was free to develop its own form-language, and here
therefore it is _the definite roof that is emphasized_ (whereas in the
other domain the protest against the Classical feeling led merely to the
development of an _interior_). When and where the various possibilities
of dome, cupola, barrel-vaulting, rib-vaulting, came into existence as
technical methods is, as we have already said, a matter of no
significance. What is of decisive importance is the fact that about the
time of Christ’s birth and the rise of the new world-feeling, the new
space-symbolism must have begun to make use of these forms and to
develop them further in expressiveness. It will very likely come to be
shown that the fire-temples and synagogues of Mesopotamia (and possibly
also the temples of Athtar in Southern Arabia) were originally cupola-
buildings.[261] Certainly the pagan marna-temple at Gaza was so, and
long before Pauline Christianity took possession of these forms under
Constantine, builders of Eastern origin had introduced them, as
novelties to please the taste of the Megalopolitans, into all parts of
the Roman Empire. In Rome itself, Apollodorus of Damascus was employed
under Trajan for the vaulting of the temple of “Venus and Rome,” and the
domed chambers of the Baths of Caracalla and the so-called “Minerva
Medica” of Gallienus’s time were built by Syrians. But the masterpiece,
_the earliest of all Mosques_, is the Pantheon as rebuilt by Hadrian.
Here, without a doubt, the emperor was imitating, for the satisfaction
of his own taste, cult-buildings that he had seen in the East.[262]
The architecture of the central-dome, in which the Magian world-feeling
achieved its purest expression, extended beyond the limits of the Roman
Empire. For the Nestorian Christianity that extended from Armenia even
into China it was the only form, as it was also for the Manichæns and
the Mazdaists, and it also impressed itself victoriously upon the
Basilica of the West when the Pseudomorphosis began to crumble and the
last cults of Syncretism to die out. In Southern France—where there were
Manichæan sects even as late as the Crusades—the form of the East was
domesticated. Under Justinian, the interpenetration of the two produced
the domical basilica of Byzantium and Ravenna. The pure basilica was
pushed into the Germanic West, there to be transformed by the energy of
the Faustian depth-impulse into the cathedral. The domed basilica,
again, spread from Byzantium and Armenia into Russia, where it came by
slow degrees to be felt as an element of exterior architecture belonging
to a symbolism concentrated in the roof. But in the Arabian world Islam,
the heir of Monophysite and Nestorian Christianity and of the Jews and
the Persians, carried the development through to the end. When it turned
Hagia Sophia into a mosque it only resumed possession of an old
property. Islamic domical building followed Mazdaist and Nestorian along
the same tracks to Shan-tung and to India. Mosques grew up in the far
West in Spain and Sicily, where, moreover, the style appears rather in
its East-Aramæan-Persian than in its West-Aramæan-Syrian mode.[263] And
while Venice looked to Byzantium and Ravenna (St. Mark), the brilliant
age of the Norman-Hohenstaufen rule in Palermo taught the cities of the
Italian west coast, and even Florence, to admire and to imitate these
Moorish buildings. More than one of the motives that the Renaissance
thought were Classical—e.g., the court surrounded by halls and the union
of column and arch—really originated thus.
What is true as regards architecture is even more so as regards
ornamentation, which in the Arabian world very early overcame all
figure-representation and swallowed it up in itself. Then, as
“arabesque,” it advanced to meet, to charm and to mislead the young art-
intention of the West.
The early-Christian-Late-Classical art of the Pseudomorphosis shows the
same ornament-_plus_-figure mixture of the inherited “alien” and the
inborn “proper” as does the Carolingian-Early Romanesque of (especially)
Southern France and Upper Italy. In the one case Hellenistic
intermingles with Early-Magian, in the other Mauro-Byzantine with
Faustian. The researcher has to examine line after line and ornament
after ornament to detect the form-feeling which differentiates the one
stratum from the other. In every architrave, in every frieze, there is
to be found a secret battle between the conscious old and the
unconscious, but victorious, new motives. One is confounded by this
general interpenetration of the Late-Hellenistic and the Early-Arabian
form-senses, as one sees it, for example, in Roman portrait-busts (here
it is often only in the treatment of the hair that the new way of
expression is manifested); in the acanthus-shoots which show—often on
one and the same frieze—chisel-work and drill-work side by side; in the
sarcophagi of the 3rd Century in which a childlike feeling of the Giotto
and Pisano character is entangled with a certain late and megalopolitan
Naturalism that reminds one more or less of David or Carstens; and in
buildings such as the Basilica of Maxentius[264] and many parts of the
Baths and the Imperial Fora that are still very Classical in conception.
Nevertheless, the Arabian soul was cheated of its maturity—like a young
tree that is hindered and stunted in its growth by a fallen old giant of
the forest. Here there was no brilliant instant _felt and experienced as
such_, like that of ours in which, simultaneously with the Crusades, the
wooden beams of the Cathedral roof locked themselves into rib-vaulting
and an interior was made to actualize and fulfil the idea of infinite
space. The political creation of Diocletian was shattered in its glory
upon the fact that, standing as he did on Classical ground, he had to
accept the whole mass of the administrative tradition of Urbs Roma; this
sufficed to reduce his work to a mere reform of obsolete conditions. And
yet he was the first of the Caliphs. With him, the idea of the Arabian
State emerges clearly into the light. It is Diocletian’s dispensation,
together with that of the Sassanids which preceded it somewhat and
served in all respects as its model, that gives us the first notion of
the ideal that ought to have gone on to fulfilment here. But so it was
in all things. To this very day we admire as last creations of the
Classical—because we cannot or will not regard them otherwise—the
thought of Plotinus and Marcus Aurelius, the cults of Isis, Mithras and
the Sun-God, the Diophantine mathematics and, lastly, the whole of the
art which streamed towards us from the Eastern marches of the Roman
Empire and for which Antioch and Alexandria were merely _points
d’appui_.
This alone is sufficient to explain the intense vehemence with which the
Arabian Culture, when released at length from artistic as from other
fetters, flung itself upon all the lands that had inwardly belonged to
it for centuries past. It is the sign of a soul that feels itself in a
hurry, that notes in fear the first symptoms of old age before it has
had youth. This emancipation of Magian mankind is without a parallel.
Syria is conquered, or rather _delivered_, in 634. Damascus falls in
637, Ctesiphon in 637. In 641 Egypt and India are reached, in 647
Carthage, in 676 Samarkand, in 710 Spain. And in 732 the Arabs stood
before Paris. Into these few years was compressed the whole sum of
saved-up passions, postponed hopes, reserved deeds, that in the slow
maturing of other Cultures suffice to fill the history of centuries. The
Crusaders before Jerusalem, the Hohenstaufen in Sicily, the Hansa in the
Baltic, the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic East, the Spaniards in
America, the Portuguese in the East Indies, the Empire of Charles V on
which the sun never set, the beginnings of England’s colonial power
under Cromwell—the equivalent of all this was shot out in _one_
discharge that carried the Arabs to Spain and France, India and
Turkestan.
True, all Cultures (the Egyptian, the Mexican and the Chinese excepted)
have grown up under the tutelage of some older Culture. Each of the
form-worlds shows certain alien traits. Thus, the Faustian soul of the
Gothic, already predisposed to reverence by the Arabian origin of
Christianity, grasped at the treasures of Late-Arabian art. An
unmistakably Southern, one might even say an Arabian, Gothic wove itself
over the façades of the Burgundian and Provençal cathedrals, dominated
with a magic of stone the outward language of Strassburg Minster, and
fought a silent battle in statues and porches, fabric-patterns, carvings
and metalwork—and not less in the intricate figures of scholastic
philosophy and in that intensely Western symbol, the Grail legend[265]—
with the Nordic prime-feeling of _Viking Gothic_ that rules the interior
of the Magdeburg Cathedral, the points of Freiburg Minster and the
mysticism of Meister Eckart. More than once the pointed arch threatens
to burst its restraining line and to transform itself into the horseshoe
arch of Moorish-Norman architecture.
So also the Apollinian art of the Doric spring—whose first efforts are
practically lost to us—doubtless took over Egyptian elements to a very
large extent, and by and through these came to its own proper symbolism.
But the Magian soul of the Pseudomorphosis had not the courage to
appropriate alien means _without yielding to them_. And this is why the
physiognomic of the Magian soul has still so much to disclose to the
quester.
X
The idea of the Macrocosm, then, which presents itself in the style-
problem as simplified and capable of treatment, poses a multitude of
tasks for the future to tackle. To make the form-world of the arts
available as a means of penetrating the spirituality of entire Cultures—
by handling it in a thoroughly physiognomic and symbolic spirit—is an
undertaking that has not hitherto got beyond speculations of which the
inadequacy is obvious. We are hardly as yet aware that there may be a
psychology of the metaphysical bases of all great architectures. We have
no idea what there is to discover in the change of meaning that a form
of _pure extension_ undergoes when it is taken over into another
Culture. The history of the column has never yet been written, nor have
we any notion of the deeply symbolic significances that reside in the
means and the instruments of art.
Consider mosaic. In Hellenic times it was made up of pieces of marble,
it was opaque and corporeal-Euclidean (e.g., the famous Battle of Issus
at Naples), and it adorned the floor. But with the awakening of the
Arabian soul it came to be built up of pieces of glass and set in fused
gold, and it simply covered the walls and roofs of the domed basilica.
This Early-Arabian Mosaic-picturing corresponds exactly, as to phase,
with the glass-picturing of Gothic cathedrals, both being “early” arts
ancillary to religious architectures. The one by letting in the light
enlarges the church-space into world-space, while the other transforms
it into the magic, gold-shimmering sphere which bears men away from
earthly actuality into the visions of Plotinus, Origen, the Manichæans,
the Gnostics and the Fathers, and the Apocalyptic poems.
Consider, again, the beautiful notion of _uniting the round arch and the
column_; this again is a Syrian, if not a North-Arabian, creation of the
third (or “high Gothic”) century.[266] The revolutionary importance of
this motive, which is specifically Magian, has never in the least degree
been recognized; on the contrary, it has always been assumed to be
Classical, and for most of us indeed it is even representatively
Classical. The Egyptians ignored any deep relation between the roof and
the column; the latter was for them a plant-column, and represented not
stoutness but growth. Classical man, in his turn, for whom the
monolithic column was the mightiest symbol of Euclidean existence—all
body, all unity, all steadiness—connected it, in the strictest
proportions of vertical and horizontal, of strength and load, with his
architrave. But here, in this union of arch and column which the
Renaissance in its tragicomic deludedness admired as expressly Classical
(though it was a notion that the Classical neither possessed nor could
possess), the bodily principle of load and inertia is rejected and the
arch is made to spring clear and open out of the slender column. The
idea actualized here is at once a liberation from all earth-gravity and
a capture of space, and between this element and that of the dome which
soars free but yet encloses the great “cavern,” there is the deep
relation of like meaning. The one and the other are eminently and
powerfully Magian, and they come to their logical fulfilment in the
“Rococo” stage of Moorish mosques and castles, wherein ethereally
delicate columns—often growing out of, rather than based on, the ground—
seem to be empowered by some secret magic to carry a whole world of
innumerable notched arcs, gleaming ornaments, stalactites, and vaultings
saturated with colours. The full importance of this basic form of
Arabian architecture may be expressed by saying that the combination of
column and architrave is the Classical, that of column and round arch
the Arabian, and that of pillar and pointed arch the Faustian Leitmotiv.
Take, further, the history of the Acanthus motive.[267] In the form in
which it appears, for example, on the Monument of Lysicrates at Athens,
it is one of the most distinctive in Classical ornamentation. It has
body, it is and remains individual, and its structure is capable of
being taken in at one glance. But already it appears heavier and richer
in the ornament of the Imperial Fora (Nerva’s, Trajan’s) and that of the
temple of Mars Ultor; the organic disposition has become so complicated
that, as a rule, it requires to be studied, and the tendency to _fill
up_ the surfaces appears. In Byzantine art—of which Riegl thirty years
ago noticed the “latent Saracenic character” though he had no suspicion
of the connexion brought to light here—the acanthus leaf was broken up
into endless tendril-work which (as in Hagia Sophia) is disposed quite
inorganically over whole surfaces. To the Classical motive are added the
old-Aramæan vine and palm leaves, which have already played a part in
Jewish ornamentation. The interlaced borders of “Late-Roman” mosaic
pavements and sarcophagus-edges, and even geometrical plane-patterns are
introduced, and finally, throughout the Persian-Anatolian world,
mobility and _bizarrerie_ culminate in the Arabesque. _This_ is the
genuine Magian motive—anti-plastic to the last degree, hostile to the
pictorial and to the bodily alike. Itself bodiless, it disembodies the
object over which its endless richness of web is drawn. A masterpiece of
this kind—a piece of architecture completely opened out into
Ornamentation—is the façade of the Castle of Mashetta in Moab built by
the Ghassanids.[268] The craft-art of Byzantine-Islamic style (hitherto
called Lombard, Frankish, Celtic or Old-Nordic) which invaded the whole
youthful West and dominated the Carolingian Empire, was largely
practised by Oriental craftsmen or imported as patterns for our own
weavers, metal-workers and armourers.[269] Ravenna, Lucca, Venice,
Granada, Palermo were the efficient centres of this then highly-
civilized form-language; in the year 1000, when in the North the forms
of a new Culture were already being developed and established, Italy was
still entirely dominated by it.
Take, lastly, the changed point of view towards the human body. With the
victory of the Arabian world-feeling, men’s conception of it underwent a
complete revolution. In almost every Roman head of the period 100-250
that the Vatican Collection contains, one may perceive the opposition of
Apollinian and Magian feeling, and of muscular position and “look” as
different bases of expression. Even in Rome itself, since Hadrian, the
sculptor made constant use of the drill, an instrument which was wholly
repugnant to the Euclidean feeling towards stone—for whereas the chisel
brings out the limiting surfaces and _ipso facto_ affirms the corporeal
and material nature of the marble block, the drill, in breaking the
surfaces and creating effects of light and shade, denies it; and
accordingly the sculptors, be they Christian or “pagan,” lose the old
feeling for the phenomenon of the naked body. One has only to look at
the shallow and empty Antinous statues—and yet these were quite
definitely “Classical.” Here it is only the head that is
physiognomically of interest—as it never is in Attic sculpture. The
drapery is given quite a new meaning, and simply dominates the whole
appearance. The consul-statues in the Capitoline Museum[270] are
conspicuous examples. The pupils are bored, and the eyes look into the
distance, so that the whole expression of the work lies no longer in its
body but in that Magian principle of the “Pneuma” which Neo-Platonism
and the decisions of the Church Councils, Mithraism and Mazdaism alike
presume in man.
The pagan “Father” Iamblichus, about 300, wrote a book concerning
statues of gods in which the divine is substantially present and working
upon the beholder.[271] Against this idea of the image—an idea of the
Pseudomorphosis—the East and the South rose in a storm of iconoclasm;
and the sources of this iconoclasm lay in a conception of artistic
creation that is nearly impossible for us to understand.
-----
Footnote 238:
H. Schäfer, _Von Aegyptischer Kunst_, I, pp. 15 et seq.
(The bulls are shown in Fig. 18 in the article _Egypt_ in the
Encyclopædia Britannica, XI Edition, Vol. IX, pp. 65-66.—_Tr._)
Footnote 239:
Frankl, _Baukunst des Mittelalters_ (1918), pp. 16 et seq.
Footnote 240:
See Vol. II, pp. 361 et seq. The lack of any vertical tendency in the
Russian life-feeling is perceptible also in the saga-figure of Ilya
Murometz (see Vol. II, p. 231). The Russian has not the smallest
relation with a _Father_-God. His ethos is not a filial but purely a
_fraternal_ love, radiating in all directions along the human plane.
Christ, even, is conceived as a Brother. The Faustian, wholly
vertical, tendency to strive up to fulfilment is to the real Russian
an incomprehensible pretension. The same absence of all vertical
tendency is observable in Russian ideas of the state and property.
Footnote 241:
The cemetery church of Kishi has 22.
Footnote 242:
J. Grabar, “History of Russian Art” (Russian, 1911), I-III. Eliasberg,
_Russ. Baukunst_ (1922), Introduction.
Footnote 243:
The disposition of Egyptian and that of Western history are so clear
as to admit of comparison being carried right down into the details,
and it would be well worth the expert’s while to carry out such an
investigation. The Fourth Dynasty, that of the strict Pyramid style,
B.C. 2930-2750 (Cheops, Chephren), corresponds to the Romanesque (980-
1100), the Fifth Dynasty (2750-2625, Sahu-rê) to the early Gothic
(1100-1230), and the Sixth Dynasty, prime of the archaic portraiture
(2625-2475, Phiops I and II), to the mature Gothic of 1230-1400.
Footnote 244:
That which differentiates the Japanese harakiri from this suicide is
its intensely purposeful and (so to put it) active and demonstrative
character.—_Tr._
Footnote 245:
See Vol. II, p. 626.
Footnote 246:
Koldewey-Puchstein, _Die griech. Tempel in Unter-Italien und
Sizilien_, I, p. 228.
Footnote 247:
See Vol. II, Chapter III.
Footnote 248:
See Vol. II, pp. 240 et seq.
Footnote 249:
_Stilfragen, Grundlage zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik_ (1893).
_Spatrömische Kunstindustrie_ (1901).
Footnote 250:
_Amida_ (1910). _Die bildende Kunst des Ostens_ (1916), _Altai-Iran_
(1917). _Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa_ (1918).
Footnote 251:
These contradictions of detail are not greater, after all, than those
between Doric, Attic and Etruscan art, and certainly less than those
which existed about 1450 between Florentine Renaissance, North French,
Spanish and East-German (brick) Gothic.
Footnote 252:
See Vol. II, pp. 304 et seq.
Footnote 253:
For a brief description of the components of a Mithræum, the student
may be referred to the Encyclopædia Britannica, XI Edition, art.
Mithras (Section II).—_Tr._
Footnote 254:
The oldest Christian designs in the Empire of Axum undoubtedly agree
with the pagan work of the Sabæans.
Footnote 255:
See Vol. II, pp. 143 et seq.
Footnote 256:
See Vol. II, pp. 316 et seq.
Footnote 257:
Kohl & Watzinger, _Antike Synagogen in Galilãa_ (1916). The Baal-
shrines in Palmyra, Baalbek and many other localities are basilicas:
some of them are older than Christianity and many of them were later
taken over into Christian use.
Footnote 258:
Frauberger, _Die Akropolis von Baalbek_, plate 22. (See Ency. Brit.,
XI Edition, art. “Baalbek,” for plan, etc.—_Tr._)
Footnote 259:
Diez, _Die Kunst der islamischen Völker_, pp. 8 et seq. In old Sabæan
temples the altar-court (mahdar) is in front of the oracle chapel
(makanat).
Footnote 260:
Wulff, _Altchristliche und byzantinische Kunst_, p. 227.
Footnote 261:
Pliny records that this region was rich in temples. It is probable
that the type of the transept-basilica—i.e., with the entrance in one
of the long sides—which is found in Hauran and is distinctly marked in
the tranverse direction of the altar space of St. Paul Without at
Rome, is derived from a South Arabian archetype. (For the Hauran type
of church see Ency. Brit., XI Ed., Vol. II, p. 390; and for St. Paul
Without, Vol. III, p. 474.—_Tr._
Footnote 262:
Neither technically nor in point of space-feeling has this piece of
purely _interior_ architecture any connexion whatever with Etruscan
round-buildings. (Altmann, _Die ital. Rundbauten_, 1906.) With the
cupolas of Hadrian’s Villa at Tibur (Tivoli), on the contrary, its
affinity is evident.
Footnote 263:
Probably synagogues of domical type reached these regions, and also
Morocco, long before Islam, through the missionary enterprise of
Mesopotamian Judaism (see Vol. II, p. 253), which was closely allied
in matters of taste to Persia. The Judaism of the Pseudomorphosis, on
the contrary, built basilicas; its Roman catacombs show that
artistically it was entirely on a par with Western Christianity. Of
the two, it is the Judæo-Persian style coming from Spain that has
become the pattern for the synagogues of the West—a point that has
hitherto entirely escaped the notice of art-research.
Footnote 264:
Generally called the “Basilica of Constantine.”—_Tr._
Footnote 265:
The Grail legend contains, besides old Celtic, well-marked Arabian
elements; but where Wolfram von Eschenbach goes beyond his model
Chrestien de Troyes, his Parzival is entirely Faustian. (See articles
_Grail_ and _Perceval_, Ency. Brit., XI Ed.)—_Tr._
Footnote 266:
The relation of column and arch spiritually corresponds to that of
wall and cupola, and the interposition of the drum between the
rectangle and the dome occurs “simultaneously” with that of the impost
between the column and the arch.
Footnote 267:
A. Riegl, _Stilfragen_ (1893), pp. 248 et seq., 272 et seq.
Footnote 268:
The Ghassanid Kingdom flourished in the extreme North-west of Arabia
during the sixth century of our reckoning. Its people were essentially
Arab, and probably came from the south; and an outlying cousinry
inhabited Medina in the time of the Prophet.—_Tr._
Footnote 269:
Dehio, _Gesch. der deutschen Kunst_, I, pp. 16 et seq.
Footnote 270:
Wulff, _Altchristl.-byzant. Kunst_, pp. 153 et seq.
Footnote 271:
See Vol. II, p. 315, Geffcken, _Der Ausgang des griech-röm.
Heidentums_ (1920), p. 113.
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CHAPTER VII | | MUSIC AND PLASTIC
I
THE ARTS OF FORM
CHAPTER VII
MUSIC AND PLASTIC
I
THE ARTS OF FORM
I
The clearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of
higher mankind has found for itself is (if we except the mathematical-
scientific domain of presentation and the symbolism of its basic ideas)
that of the arts of form,[272] of which the number is legion. _And with
these arts we count music_ in its many and very dissimilar kinds; had
these been brought within the domain of art-historical research instead
of being put in a class apart from that of the pictorial-plastic arts,
we should have progressed very much further in our understanding of the
import of this evolution towards an end. For the formative impulse that
is at work in the _wordless_[273] arts can never be understood until we
come to regard the distinction between optical and acoustic means as
only a superficial one. To talk of the art of the eye and the art of the
ear takes us no further. It is not such things that divide one art from
another. Only the 19th Century could so over-estimate the influence of
_physiological_ conditions as to apply it to expression, conception or
communion. A “singing” picture of Claude Lorrain or of Watteau does not
really address itself to the bodily eye any more than the space-
straining music since Bach addresses itself to the bodily ear. The
Classical relation between art-work and sense-organ—of which we so often
and so erroneously remind ourselves here—is something quite different
from, something far simpler and more material than ours. We _read_
“Othello” and “Faust” and we study orchestral scores—that is, we change
one sense-agency for another in order to let the undiluted spirit of
these works take effect upon us. Here there is always an appeal from the
outer senses to the “inner,” to the truly Faustian and wholly un-
Classical power of imagination. Only thus can we understand
Shakespeare’s ceaseless change of scene as against the Classical unity
of place. In extreme cases indeed, for instance in that of “Faust”
itself, no representation of the work (that is, of its full content) is
physically possible. But in music too—in the unaccompanied “A capella”
of the Palestrina style as well as _a fortiori_ in the Passions of
Heinrich Schütz, in the fugues of Bach, in the last quartets of
Beethoven, and in “Tristan”—we livingly experience _behind_ the sensuous
impressions a whole world of others. And it is only through these latter
that all the fullness and depth of the work begins to be present to us,
and it is only mediately—through the images of blond, brown, dusky and
golden colours, of sunsets and distant ranked mountain-summits, of
storms and spring landscapes, of foundered cities and strange faces
which harmony conjures up for us—that it tells us something of itself.
It is not an incident that Beethoven wrote his last works when he was
deaf—deafness merely released him from the last fetters. For this music,
sight and hearing _equally_ are bridges into the soul and nothing more.
To the Greek this visionary kind of artistic enjoyment was utterly
alien. He _felt_ the marble with his eye, and the thick tones of an
aulos moved him almost _corporally_. For him, eye and ear are the
receivers of the _whole_ of the impression that he wished to receive.
But for us this had ceased to be true even at the stage of Gothic.
In the actual, tones are something extended, limited and numerable just
as lines and colours are; harmony, melody, rhyme and rhythm no less so
than perspective, proportion, chiaroscuro and outline. The distance
separating two kinds of painting can be infinitely greater than that
separating the painting and the music of a period. Considered in
relation to a statue of Myron, the art of a Poussin landscape is the
same as that of a contemporary chamber-cantata; that of Rembrandt as
that of the organ works of Buxtehude, Pachelbel and Bach; that of Guardi
as that of the Mozart opera—the _inner_ form-language is so nearly
identical that the difference between optical and acoustic means is
negligible.
The importance which the “science of art” has always attached to a
timeless and conceptual delimitation of the individual art-spheres only
proves that the fundamentals of the problem have not been attacked. Arts
are living units, and the living is incapable of being dissected. The
first act of the learned pedant has always been to partition the
infinitely wide domain into provinces determined by perfectly
superficial criteria of medium and technique and to endow these
provinces with eternal validity and immutable (!) form-principles. Thus
he separated “Music” and “Painting,” “Music” and “Drama,” “Painting” and
“Sculpture.” And then he proceeded to define “the” art of Painting,
“the” art of Sculpture, and so on. But in fact the technical form-
language is no more than the _mask_ of the real work. Style is not what
the shallow Semper—worthy contemporary of Darwin and materialism—
supposed it to be, the product of material, technique, and purpose. It
is the very opposite of this, something inaccessible to art-reason, a
revelation of the metaphysical order, a mysterious “must,” a Destiny.
With the material boundaries of the different arts it has no concern
whatever.
To classify the arts according to the character of the sense-impression,
then, is to pervert the problem of form in its very enunciation. For how
is it possible to predicate a genus “Sculpture” of so general a
character as to admit of general laws being evolved from it? What _is_
“Sculpture?”
Take painting again. There is no such thing as “_the_” art of Painting,
and anyone who compares a drawing of Raphael, effected by outline, with
one of Titian, effected by flecks of light and shade, without feeling
that they belong to two different arts; any one who does not realize a
dissimilarity of essence between the works of Giotto or Mantegna—relief,
created by brushstroke—and those of Vermeer or Goya—music, created on
coloured canvas—such a one will never grasp the deeper questions. As for
the frescoes of Polygnotus and the mosaics of Ravenna, there is not even
the similarity of technical means to bring them within the alleged
genus, and what is there in common between an etching and the art of Fra
Angelico, or a proto-Corinthian vase-painting and a Gothic cathedral-
window, or the reliefs of Egypt and those of the Parthenon?
If an art has boundaries at all—boundaries of its soul-become-form—they
are historical and not technical or physiological boundaries.[274] An
art is an organism, not a system. There is no art-genus that runs
through all the centuries and all the Cultures. Even where (as in the
case of the Renaissance) supposed technical traditions momentarily
deceive us into a belief in the eternal validity of antique art-laws,
there is at bottom entire discrepance. There is _nothing_ in Greek and
Roman art that stands in any relation whatever to the form-language of a
Donatello statue or a painting of Signorelli or a façade of
Michelangelo. _Inwardly_, the Quattrocento is related to the
contemporary Gothic and to nothing else. The fact of the archaic Greek
Apollo-type being “influenced” by Egyptian portraiture, or early Tuscan
representation by Etruscan tomb-painting, implies precisely what is
implied by that of Bach’s writing a fugue upon an alien theme—he shows
what he can express with it. Every individual art—Chinese landscape or
Egyptian plastic or Gothic counterpoint—is _once existent_, and departs
with its soul and its symbolism never to return.
II
With this, the notion of Form opens out immensely. Not only the
technical instrument, not only the form-language, but also _the choice
of art-genus itself_ is seen to be an expression-means. What the
creation of a masterpiece means for an individual artist—the “Night
Watch” for Rembrandt or the “Meistersinger” for Wagner—that the creation
of a _species_ of art, comprehended as such, means for the life-history
of a Culture. It is epochal. Apart from the merest externals, each such
art is an individual organism without predecessor or successor. Its
theory, technique and convention all belong to its character, and
contain nothing of eternal or universal validity. When one of these arts
is born, when it is spent, whether it dies or is transmuted into
another, why this or that art is dominant in or absent from a particular
Culture—all these are questions of Form in the highest sense, just as is
that other question of why individual painters and musicians
unconsciously avoid certain shades and harmonies or, on the contrary,
show preferences so marked that authorship-attributions can be based on
them.
The importance of these groups of questions has not yet been recognized
by theory, even by that of the present day. And yet it is precisely from
this side, the side of their physiognomic, that the arts are accessible
to the understanding. Hitherto it has been supposed—without the
slightest examination of the weighty questions that the supposition
involves—that the several “arts” specified in the conventional
classification-scheme (the validity of which is assumed) are all
_possible_ at all times and places, and the absence of one or another of
them in particular cases is attributed to the accidental lack of
creative personalities or impelling circumstances or discriminating
patrons to guide “art” on its “way.” Here we have what I call a
transference of the causality-principle from the world of the become to
that of the becoming. Having no eye for the perfectly different logic
and necessity of the Living, for Destiny and the inevitableness and
_unique occurrence_ of its expression-possibilities, men had recourse to
tangible and obvious “causes” for the building of their art-history,
which thus came to consist of a series of events of only superficial
concordance.
I have already, in the earliest pages of this work, exposed the
shallowness of the notion of a linear progression of “mankind” through
the stages of “ancient,” “mediæval” and “modern,” a notion that has made
us blind to the true history and structure of higher Cultures. The
history of art is a conspicuous case in point. Having assumed as self-
evident the existence of a number of constant and well-defined provinces
of art, one proceeded to order the history of these several provinces
according to the—equally self-evident—scheme of ancient-mediæval-modern,
to the exclusion, of course, of Indian and East-Asiatic art, of the art
of Axum and Saba, of the Sassanids and of Russia, which if not omitted
altogether were at best relegated to appendices. It occurred to no one
that such results argued unsoundness in the method; the scheme was
there, demanded facts, and must at any price be fed with them. And so a
futile up-and-down course was stolidly traced out. Static times were
described as “natural pauses,” it was called “decline” when some great
art in reality died, and “renaissance” where an eye really free from
prepossessions would have seen another art being born in another
landscape to express another humanity. Even to-day we are still taught
that the Renaissance was a rebirth of the Classical. And the conclusion
was drawn that it is possible and right to take up arts that are found
weak or even dead (in this respect the present is a veritable battle-
field) and set them going again by conscious reformation-program or
forced “revival.”
And yet it is precisely in this problem of the end, the impressively
sudden end, of a great art—the end of the Attic drama in Euripides, of
Florentine sculpture with Michelangelo, of instrumental music in Liszt,
Wagner and Bruckner—that the organic character of these arts is most
evident. If we look closely enough we shall have no difficulty in
convincing ourselves that no _one_ art of any greatness has ever been
“reborn.”
Of the Pyramid style _nothing_ passed over into the Doric. _Nothing_
connects the Classical temple with the basilica of the Middle East, for
the mere taking over of the Classical column as a structural member,
though to a superficial observer it seems a fact of the first
importance, weighs no more in reality than Goethe’s employment of the
old mythology in the “Classical Walpurgis Night” scene of “Faust.” To
believe genuinely in a rebirth of Classical art, or any Classical art,
in the Western 15th Century requires a rare stretch of the imagination.
And that a great art may die not merely with the Culture but within it,
we may see from the fate of music in the Classical world.[275]
Possibilities of great music there must have been in the Doric
springtime—how otherwise can we account for the importance of old-
fashioned Sparta in the eyes of such musicians as there were later (for
Terpander, Thaletas and Alcman were effective there when elsewhere the
statuary art was merely infantile)?—and yet the Late-Classical world
refrained. In just the same fashion everything that the Magian Culture
had attempted in the way of frontal portraiture, deep relief and mosaic
finally succumbed before the Arabesque; and everything of the plastic
that had sprung up in the shade of Gothic cathedrals at Chartres, Reims,
Bamberg, Naumburg, in the Nürnberg of Peter Vischer and the Florence of
Verrocchio, vanished before the oil-painting of Venice and the
instrumental music of the Baroque.
III
The temple of Poseidon at Pæstum and the Minster of Ulm, works of the
ripest Doric and the ripest Gothic, differ precisely as the Euclidean
geometry of bodily bounding-surfaces differs from the analytical
geometry of the position of points in space referred to spatial axes.
All Classical building begins from the outside, all Western from the
inside. The Arabian also begins with the inside, but it stays there.
There is one and only one soul, the Faustian, that craves for a style
which drives through walls into the limitless universe of space and
makes both the exterior and the interior of the building complementary
images of one and the same world-feeling. The exterior of the basilica
and the domical building may be a _field for ornamentation_, but
_architecture_ it is not. The impression that meets the beholder as he
approaches is that of something shielding, something that hides a
secret. The form-language in the cavern-twilight exists for the faithful
only—that is the factor common to the highest examples of the style and
to the simplest Mithræa and Catacombs, the prime powerful utterance of a
new soul. Now, as soon as the Germanic spirit takes possession of the
basilical type, there begins a wondrous mutation of all structural
parts, as to both position and significance. Here in the Faustian North
the outer form of the building, be it cathedral or mere dwelling-house,
begins to be brought into relation with the meaning that governs the
arrangement of the interior, a meaning undisclosed in the mosque and
non-existent in the temple. The Faustian building has a _visage_ and not
merely a façade (whereas the front of a peripteros is, after all, only
one of four sides and the centre-domed building in principle has not
even a front) and with this visage, this head, is associated an
articulated trunk that draws itself out through the broad plain like the
cathedral at Speyer, or erects itself to the heavens like the
innumerable spires of the original design of Reims. The _motive of the
façade_, which greets the beholder and tells him the inner meaning of
the house, dominates not only individual major buildings but also the
whole aspect of our streets, squares and towns with their characteristic
wealth of windows.[276]
The great architecture of the early period is ever the mother of all
following arts; it determines the choice of them and the spirit of them.
Accordingly, we find that the history of the Classical shaping art is
one untiring effort to accomplish one single ideal, viz., the conquest
of the free-standing human body as the vessel of the pure real present.
The temple of the naked body was to it what the cathedral of voices was
to the Faustian from earliest counterpoint to the orchestral writing of
the 18th Century. We have failed hitherto to understand the emotional
force of this secular tendency of the Apollinian, because we have not
felt how the _purely material, soulless body_ (for the Temple of the
Body, too, has no "interior"!) is the object which archaic relief,
Corinthian painting on clay, and Attic fresco were all striving to
obtain until Polycletus and Phidias showed how to achieve it in full. We
have, with a wonderful blindness, assumed this kind of sculpture as both
authoritative and universally possible, as in fact, “the art of
sculpture.” We have written its history as one concerned with all
peoples and periods, and even to-day our sculptors, under the influence
of unproved Renaissance doctrines, speak of the naked human body as the
noblest and most genuine object of “the” art of sculpture. Yet in
reality this statue-art, the art of the naked body standing free upon
its footing and appreciable from all sides alike, existed in the
Classical and the Classical only, for it was that Culture alone which
quite decisively refused to transcend sense-limits in favour of space.
The Egyptian statue is always meant to be seen from the front—it is a
variant of plane-relief. And the _seemingly_ Classically-conceived
statues of the Renaissance (we are astounded, as soon as it occurs to us
to count them, to find how few of them there are[277]) are nothing but a
semi-Gothic reminiscence.
The evolution of this rigorously _non-spatial_ art occupies the three
centuries from 650 to 350, a period extending from the completion of the
Doric and the simultaneous appearance of a tendency to free the figures
from the Egyptian limitation of frontalness[278] to the coming of the
Hellenistic and its illusion-painting which closed-off the grand style.
This sculpture will never be rightly appreciated until it is regarded as
the last and highest Classical, as _springing from a plane art, first
obeying and then overcoming the fresco_. No doubt the technical origin
can be traced to experiments in figure-wise treatment of the pristine
column, or the plates that served to cover the temple wall,[279] and no
doubt there are here and there imitations of Egyptian works (seated
figures of Miletus), although very few Greek artists can ever have seen
one.[280] But as a _form-ideal_ the statue goes back through relief to
the archaic clay-painting in which fresco also originated. Relief, like
fresco, is tied to the bodily wall. All this sculpture right down to
Myron may be considered as relief detached from the plane. In the end,
the figure is treated as a self-contained body apart from the mass of
the building, but it remains essentially a silhouette in front of a
wall.[281] Direction in depth is excluded, and the work is spread out
frontally before the beholder. Even the Marsyas of Myron can be copied
upon vases or coins without much trouble or appreciable
foreshortenings.[282] Consequently, of the two major “late” arts after
650, fresco definitely has the priority. The small stock of types is
always to be found first in vase-figuring, which is often exactly
paralleled by quite late sculptures. We know that the Centaur group of
the West pediment at Olympia was worked out from a painting. On the
Ægina temple, the advance from the West to the East pediment is an
advance from the fresco-character to the body-character. The change is
completed about 460 with Polycletus, and thenceforward plastic groups
become the model for strict painting. But it is from Lysippus that the
wholly cubic and “all-ways” treatment becomes thoroughly veristic and
yields “fact.” Till then, even in the case of Praxiteles, we have still
a lateral or planar development of the subject, with a clear outline
that is only fully effective in respect of one or two standpoints. But
an undeviating testimony to the picture-origin of independent sculpture
is the practice of polychroming the marble—a practice unknown to the
Renaissance and to Classicism, which would have felt it as
barbaric[283]—and we may say the same of the gold-and-ivory statuary and
the enamel overlaying of bronze, a metal which already possesses a
shining golden tone of its own.
IV
The corresponding stage of Western art occupies the three centuries
1500-1800, between the end of late Gothic and the decay of Rococo which
marks the end of the great Faustian style. In this period, conformably
to the persistent growth into consciousness of the will to spatial
transcendence, it is instrumental music that develops into the ruling
art. At the beginning, in the 17th Century, music uses the
characteristic tone-colours of the instruments, and the contrasts of
strings and wind, human voices and instrumental voices, as means
wherewith to _paint_. Its (quite unconscious) ambition is to parallel
the great masters from Titian to Velasquez and Rembrandt. It makes
pictures (in the sonata from Gabrieli [d. 1612.] to Corelli [d. 1713]
every movement shows a theme embellished with graces and set upon the
background of a _basso continuo_), paints heroic landscapes (in the
pastoral cantata), and draws a portrait in lines of melody (in
Monteverde’s “Lament of Ariadne,” 1608). With the German masters, all
this goes. Painting can take music no further. Music becomes itself
_absolute_: it is music that (quite unconsciously again) dominates both
painting and architecture in the 18th Century. And, ever more and more
decisively, sculpture fades out from among the deeper possibilities of
this form-world.
What distinguishes painting as it was before, from painting as it was
after, the shift from Florence to Venice—or, to put it more definitely,
what separates the painting of Raphael and that of Titian as two
entirely distinct arts—is that the plastic spirit of the one associates
painting with relief, while the musical spirit of the other works in a
technique of visible brush-strokes and atmospheric depth-effects that is
akin to the chromatic of string and wind choruses. It is an opposition
and not a transition that we have before us, and the recognition of the
fact is vital to our understanding of the _organism_ of these arts.
Here, if anywhere, we have to guard against the abstract hypothesis of
“eternal art-laws.” “Painting” is a mere word. Gothic glass-painting was
an element of Gothic architecture, the servant of its strict symbolism
just as the Egyptian and the Arabian and every other art in this stage
was the servant of the stone-language. Draped figures were built up as
cathedrals were. Their folds were an _ornamentation_ of extreme
sincerity and severe expressiveness. To criticize their “stiffness” from
a naturalistic-imitative point of view is to miss the point entirely.
Similarly “music” is a mere word. Some music there has been everywhere
and always, even _before_ any genuine Culture, even among the beasts.
But the serious music of the Classical was nothing but a _plastic for
the ear_. The tetrachords, chromatic and enharmonic, have a structural
and not a harmonic meaning:[284] but this is the very difference between
body and space. This music was single-voiced. The few instruments that
it employed were all developed in respect of capacity for tone-plastic;
and naturally therefore it rejected the Egyptian harp, an instrument
that was probably akin in tone-colour to the harpsichord. But, above
all, the melody—like Classical verse from Homer to Hadrian’s time—was
treated quantitatively and not accentually; that is, the syllables,
their bodies and their _extent_, decided the rhythm. The few fragments
that remain suffice to show us that the sensuous charm of this art is
something outside our comprehension; but this very fact should cause us
also
to reconsider our ideas as to the impressions purposed and achieved by
the statuary and the fresco, for we do not and cannot experience the
charm that these exercised upon the Greek eye.
Equally incomprehensible to us is Chinese music: in which, according to
educated Chinese, we are never able to distinguish gay from grave.[285]
Vice versa, to the Chinese all the music of the West without distinction
is _march-music_. Such is the impression that the rhythmic dynamic of
our life makes upon the accentless Tao of the Chinese soul, and, indeed,
the impression that our entire Culture makes upon an alien humanity—the
directional energy of our church-naves and our storeyed façades, the
depth-perspectives of our pictures, the march of our tragedy and
narrative, not to mention our technics and the whole course of our
private and public life. We ourselves have _accent_ in our blood and
therefore do not notice it. But when our rhythm is juxtaposed with that
of an alien life, we find the discordance intolerable.
Arabian music, again, is quite another world. Hitherto we have only
observed it through the medium of the Pseudomorphosis, as represented by
Byzantine hymns and Jewish psalmody, and even these we know only in so
far as they have penetrated to the churches of the far West as
antiphons, responsorial psalmody and Ambrosian chants.[286] But it is
self-evident that not only the religious west of Edessa (the syncretic
cults, especially Syrian sun-worship, the Gnostic and the Mandæan) but
also those to the east (Mazdaists, Manichæans, Mithraists, the
synagogues of Irak and in due course the Nestorian Christians) must have
possessed a sacred music of the same style; that side by side with this
a gay secular music developed (above all, amongst the South-Arabian and
Sassanid chivalry[287]); and that both found their culmination in the
Moorish style that reigned from Spain to Persia.
Out of all this wealth, the Faustian soul borrowed only some few church-
forms and, moreover, in borrowing them, it instantly transformed them
root and branch (10th Century, Hucbald, Guido d’Arezzo). Melodic accent
and beat produced the “march,” and polyphony (like the rime of
contemporary poetry) the image of endless space. To understand this, we
have to distinguish between the imitative[288] and the ornamental sides
of music, and although owing to the fleeting nature of all tone-
creations[289] our knowledge is limited to the musical history of our
own West, yet this is quite sufficient to reveal that duality of
development which is one of the master-keys of all art-history. The one
is soul, landscape, feeling, the other strict form, style, school. West
Europe has an _ornamental music of the grand style_ (corresponding to
the full plastic of the Classical) which is associated with the
architectural history of the cathedral, which is closely akin to
Scholasticism and Mysticism, and which finds its laws in the motherland
of high Gothic between Seine and Scheldt. Counterpoint developed
simultaneously with the flying-buttress system, and its source was the
“Romanesque” style of the Fauxbourdon and the Discant with their simple
parallel and contrary motion.[290] It is an architecture of human voices
and, like the statuary-group and the glass-paintings, is only
conceivable in the setting of these stone vaultings. With them it is a
high art of space, of that space to which Nicolas of Oresme, Bishop of
Lisieux, gave mathematical meaning by the introduction of co-
ordinates.[291] _This_ is the genuine “rinascita” and “reformatio” as
Joachim of Floris saw it at the end of the 12th Century[292]—the birth
of a new soul mirrored in the form-language of a new art.
Along with this there came into being in castle and village a secular
_imitative_ music, that of troubadours, Minnesänger and minstrels. As
“ars nova” this travelled from the courts of Provence to the palaces of
Tuscan patricians about 1300, the time of Dante and Petrarch. It
consisted of simple melodies that appealed to the heart with their major
and minor, of canzoni, madrigals and caccias, and it included also a
type of _galante_ operetta (Adam de la Hale’s “Robin and Marion”). After
1400, these forms give rise to forms of collective singing—the rondeau
and the ballade. All this is “art” for a public.[293] Scenes are painted
from life, scenes of love, hunting, chivalry. The point of it is in the
melodic inventiveness, instead of in the symbolism of its linear
progress.
Thus, musically as otherwise, the castle and the cathedral are distinct.
The cathedral _is_ music and the castle _makes_ music. The one begins
with theory, the other with impromptu: it is the distinction between
waking consciousness and living existence, between the spiritual and the
knightly singer. Imitation stands nearest to life and direction and
therefore begins with melody, while the symbolism of counterpoint
belongs to extension and through polyphony signifies infinite space. The
result was, on the one side, a store of “eternal” rules and, on the
other, an inexhaustible fund of folk-melodies on which even the 18th
Century was still drawing. The same contrast reveals itself,
artistically, in the _class_-opposition of Renaissance and
Reformation.[294] The courtly taste of Florence was antipathetic to the
spirit of counterpoint; the evolution of strict musical form from the
Motet to the four-voice Mass through Dunstaple, Binchois and Dufay (c.
1430) proceeded wholly within the magic circle of Gothic architecture.
From Fra Angelico to Michelangelo the great Netherlanders ruled alone in
ornamental music. Lorenzo de’ Medici found no one in Florence who
understood the strict style, and had to send for Dufay. And while in
this region Leonardo and Raphael were painting, in the north Okeghem (d.
1495) and his school and Josquin des Prés (d. 1521) brought the formal
polyphony of human voices to the height of fulfilment.
The transition into the “Late” age was heralded in Rome and Venice. With
Baroque the leadership in music passes to Italy. But at the same time
architecture ceases to be the ruling art and there is formed a group of
Faustian special-arts in which oil-painting occupies the central place.
About 1560 the empire of the human voice comes to an end in the _a
cappella_ style of Palestrina and Orlando Lasso (both d. 1594). Its
powers could no longer express the passionate drive into the infinite,
and it made way for the chorus of instruments, wind and string. And
thereupon Venice produced Titian-music, the new madrigal that in its
flow and ebb follows the sense of the text. The music of the Gothic is
architectural and vocal, that of the Baroque pictorial and instrumental.
The one builds, the other operates by means of motives. For all the arts
have become urban and therefore secular. We pass from super-personal
Form to the personal expression of the Master, and shortly before 1600
Italy produces the _basso continuo_ which requires virtuosi and not
pious participants.
Thenceforward, the great task was to extend the tone-corpus into the
infinity, or rather to _resolve it into an infinite space of tone_.
Gothic had developed the instruments into families of definite timbre.
But the new-born “orchestra” no longer observes limitations imposed by
the human voice, but treats it as a voice to be combined with other
voices—at the same moment as our mathematic proceeds from the
geometrical analysis of Fermat to the purely functional analysis of
Descartes.[295] In Zarlino’s “Harmony” (1558) appears a genuine
perspective of pure tonal space. We begin to distinguish between
ornamental and fundamental instruments. Melody and embellishment join to
produce the Motive, and this in development leads to the rebirth of
counterpoint in the form of the fugal style, of which Frescobaldi was
the first master and Bach the culmination. To the vocal masses and
motets the Baroque opposes its grand, orchestrally-conceived forms of
the oratorio (Carissimi), the cantata (Viadana) and the opera
(Monteverde). Whether a bass melody be set against upper voices, or
upper voices be concerted against one another upon a background of
_basso continuo_, always sound-worlds of characteristic expression-
quality work reciprocally upon one another in the infinity of tonal
space, supporting, intensifying, raising, illuminating, threatening,
overshadowing—a music all of interplay, scarcely intelligible save
through ideas of contemporary Analysis.
From out of these forms of the early Baroque there proceeded, in the
17th Century, the sonata-like forms of suite, symphony and concerto
grosso. The inner structure and the sequence of movements, the thematic
working-out and modulation became more and more firmly established. And
thus was reached the great, immensely dynamic, form in which music—now
completely bodiless—was raised by Corelli and Handel and Bach to be the
ruling art of the West. When Newton and Leibniz, about 1670, discovered
the Infinitesimal Calculus, the fugal style was fulfilled. And when,
about 1740, Euler began the definitive formulation of functional
Analysis, Stamitz and his generation were discovering the last and
ripest form of musical ornamentation, the four-part movement[296] as
vehicle of pure and unlimited motion. For, at that time, there was still
this one step to be taken. The theme of the fugue “is,” that of the new
sonata-movement “becomes,” and the issue of its working out is in the
one case a picture, in the other a drama. Instead of a series of
pictures we get a cyclic succession,[297] and the real source of this
tone-language was in the possibilities, realized at last, of our deepest
and most intimate kind of music—the music of the strings. Certain it is
that the violin is the noblest of all instruments that the Faustian soul
has imagined and trained for the expression of its last secrets, and
certain it is, too, that it is in string quartets and violin sonatas
that it has experienced its most transcendent and most holy moments of
full illumination. Here, _in chamber-music, Western art as a whole
reaches its highest point_. Here our prime symbol of endless space is
expressed as completely as the Spearman of Polycletus expresses that of
intense bodiliness. When one of those ineffably yearning violin-melodies
wanders through the spaces expanded around it by the orchestration of
Tartini or Nardini, Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven, we know ourselves in the
presence of an art beside which that of the Acropolis is alone worthy to
be set.
With this, the Faustian music becomes dominant among the Faustian arts.
It banishes the plastic of the statue and tolerates only the minor art—
an entirely musical, refined, un-Classical and counter-Renaissance art—
of porcelain, which (as a discovery of the West) is contemporary with
the rise of chamber-music to full effectiveness. Whereas the statuary of
Gothic is through-and-through architectural ornamentation, human
espalier-work, that of the Rococo remarkably exemplifies the pseudo-
plastic that results from entire subjection to the form-language of
music, and shows to what a degree the technique governing the presented
foreground can be in contradiction with the real expression-language
that is hidden behind it. Compare Coysevox’s[298] (1686) crouching Venus
in the Louvre with its Classical prototype in the Vatican—in the one
plastic is understudying music, in the other plastic is itself. Terms
like “staccato,” “accelerando,” “andante” and “allegro” best describe
the kind of movements that we have here, the flow of the lines, the
fluidity in the being of the stone itself which like the porcelain has
more or less lost its fine compactness. Hence our feeling that the
granular marble is out of keeping. Hence, too, the wholly un-Classical
tendency to work with reference to effects of light and shade. This is
quite in conformity with the principles of oil-painting from Titian
onwards. That which in the 18th Century is called “colour” in an
etching, a drawing, or a sculpture-group really signifies music. Music
dominates the painting of Watteau and Fragonard and the art of Gobelins
and pastels, and since then, have we not acquired the habit of speaking
of colour-tones or tone-colours? And do not the very words imply a
recognition of a final _homogeneity_ between the two arts, superficially
dissimilar as they are? And are not these same words perfectly
meaningless as applied to _any and every_ Classical art? But music did
not stop there; it transmuted also the architecture of Bernini’s Baroque
into accord with its own spirit, and made of it Rococo, a style of
transcendent ornamentation upon which lights (or rather “tones”) play to
dissolve ceilings, walls and everything else constructional and actual
into polyphonies and harmonies, with architectural trills and cadences
and runs to complete the identification of the form-language of these
halls and galleries with that of the music imagined for them. Dresden
and Vienna are the homes of this late and soon-extinguished fairyland of
_visible_ chamber music, of curved furniture and mirror-halls, and
shepherdesses in verse and porcelain. It is the final brilliant autumn
with which the Western soul completes the expression of its high style.
And in the Vienna of the Congress-time it faded and died.
V
The Art of the Renaissance, considered from this particular one of its
many aspects,[299] is a _revolt against the spirit of the Faustian
forest-music_ of counterpoint, which at that time was preparing to
vassalize the whole form-language of the Western Culture. It was the
logical consequence of the open assertion of this will in matured
Gothic. It never disavowed its origin and it maintained the character of
a simple _counter-movement_; necessarily therefore it remained dependent
upon the forms of the original movement, and represented simply the
effect of these upon a hesitant soul. Hence, it was without true depth,
either ideal or phenomenal. As to the first, we have only to think of
the bursting passion with which the Gothic world-feeling discharged
itself upon the whole Western landscape, and we shall see at once what
sort of a movement it was that the handful of select spirits—scholars,
artists and humanists—initiated about 1420.[300] In the first the issue
was one of life and death for a new-born soul, in the second it was a
point of—taste. The Gothic gripped life in its entirety, penetrated its
most hidden corners. It created new men and a new world. From the idea
of Catholicism to the state-theory of the Holy Roman Emperors, from the
knightly tourney to the new city-form, from cathedral to cottage, from
language-building to the village maiden’s bridal attire, from oil-
painting to the Spielmann’s song, everything is hall-marked with the
stamp of one and the same symbolism. But the Renaissance, when it had
mastered some arts of word and picture, had shot its bolt. It altered
the ways of thought and the life-feeling of West Europe not one whit. It
could penetrate as far as costume and gesture, but the roots of life it
could not touch—even in Italy the world-outlook of the Baroque is
essentially a continuation of the Gothic.[301] It produced no wholly
great personality between Dante and Michelangelo, each of whom had one
foot outside its limits. And as for the other—phenomenal or manifested
depth—the Renaissance never touched the people, even in Florence itself.
The man for whom they had ears was Savonarola—a phenomenon of quite
another spiritual order and one which begins to be comprehensible when
we discern the fact that, all the time, the deep under-currents are
steadily flowing on towards the Gothic-musical Baroque. The Renaissance
as an anti-Gothic movement and a reaction against the spirit of
polyphonic music has its Classical equivalent in the Dionysiac movement.
This was a reaction against Doric and against the sculptural-Apollinian
world-feeling. It did _not_ “originate” in the Thracian Dionysus-cult,
but merely took this up as a weapon against and counter-symbol to the
Olympian religion, precisely as in Florence the cult of the antique was
called in for the justification and confirmation of a feeling already
there. The period of the great protest was the 7th Century in Greece and
(_therefore_) the 15th in West Europe. In both cases we have in reality
an outbreak of deep-seated discordances in the Culture, which
physiognomically dominates a whole epoch of its history and especially
of its artistic world—in other words, a stand that the soul attempts to
make against the Destiny that at last it comprehends. The inwardly
recalcitrant forces—_Faust’s second Soul that would separate itself from
the other_—are striving to deflect the sense of the Culture, to
repudiate, to get rid of or to evade its inexorable necessity; it stands
anxious in presence of the call to accomplish its historical fate in
Ionic and Baroque. This anxiety fastened itself in Greece to the
Dionysus-cult with its musical, dematerializing, body-squandering
orgasm, and in the Renaissance to the tradition of the Antique and its
cult of the bodily-plastic tradition. In each case, the alien
expression-means was brought in consciously and deliberately, in order
that the force of a directly-opposite form-language should provide the
suppressed feelings with a weight and a pathos of their own, and so
enable them to stand against the stream—in Greece the stream which
flowed from Homer and the Geometrical to Phidias, in the West that which
flowed from the Gothic cathedrals, through Rembrandt, to Beethoven.
It follows from the very character of a counter-movement that it is far
easier for it to define what it is opposing than what it is aiming at.
This is the difficulty of all Renaissance research. In the Gothic (and
the Doric) it is just the opposite—men are contending _for_ something,
not against it—but Renaissance art is nothing more nor less than anti-
Gothic art. Renaissance music, too, is a contradiction in itself; the
music of the Medicean court was the Southern French “ars nova,” that of
the Florentine Duomo was the Low-German counterpoint, both alike
essentially _Gothic_ and the property of the _whole_ West.
The view that is customarily taken of the Renaissance is a very clear
instance of how readily the proclaimed intentions of a movement may be
mistaken for its deeper meaning. Since Burckhardt,[302] criticism has
controverted every _individual_ proposition that the leading spirits of
the age put forward as to their own tendencies—and yet, this done, it
has continued to use the word Renaissance substantially in the former
sense. Certainly, one is conscious at once in passing to the south of
the Alps of a marked dissimilarity in architecture in particular and in
the look of the arts in general. But the very obviousness of the
conclusion that the impression prompts should have led us to distrust it
and to ask ourselves, instead, whether the supposed distinction of
Gothic and “antique” was not in reality merely a difference between
_Northern and Southern_ aspects of one and the same form-world. Plenty
of things in Spain give the impression of being “Classical” merely
because they are Southern, and if a layman were confronted with the
great cloister of S. Maria Novella or the façade of the Palazzo Strozzi
in Florence and asked to say if these were “Gothic” he would certainly
guess wrong. Otherwise, the sharp change of spirit ought to have set in
not beyond the Alps but only beyond the Apennines, for Tuscany is
artistically an island in Italian Italy. Upper Italy belongs entirely to
a Byzantine-tinted Gothic; Siena in particular is a genuine monument of
the _counter-Renaissance_, and Rome is already the home of Baroque. But,
in fact, it is the change of _landscape_ that coincides with the change
of feeling.
In the actual birth of the Gothic style Italy had indeed no inward
share. At the epoch of 1000 the country was still absolutely under the
domination of Byzantine taste in the East and Moorish taste in the
South. When Gothic first took root here it was the mature Gothic, and it
implanted itself with an intensity and force for which we look in vain
in any of the great Renaissance creations—think of the “Stabat Mater,”
the “Dies Iræ,” Catharine of Siena, Giotto and Simone Martini! At the
same time, it was lighted from the South and its strangeness was, as it
were, softened in acclimatization. That which it suppressed or expelled
was not, as has been supposed, some lingering strains of the Classical
but purely the Byzantine-_cum_-Saracen form-language that appealed to
the senses in familiar everyday life—in the buildings of Ravenna and
Venice but even more in the ornament of the fabrics, vessels and arms
imported from the East.
If the Renaissance had been a “renewal” (whatever that may mean) of the
Classical _world-feeling_, then, surely, would it not have had to
replace the symbol of embraced and rhythmically-ordered _space_ by that
of closed structural _body_? But there was never any question of this.
On the contrary, the Renaissance practised wholly and exclusively an
architecture of space prescribed for it by Gothic, from which it
differed _only_ in that in lieu of the Northern “Sturm und Drang” it
breathed the clear equable calm of the sunny, care-free and
unquestioning South. It produced _no_ new building-idea, and the extent
of its architectural achievement might almost be reduced to _façades and
courtyards_.
Now, this focussing of expressible effort upon the street-front of a
house or the side of a cloister—many-windowed and ever significant of
the spirit within—is characteristic of the Gothic (and deeply akin to
its art of portraiture); and the cloistered courtyard itself is, from
the Sun-temple of Baalbek to the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra, as
genuinely Arabian. And in the midst of this art the Poseidon temple of
Pæstum, all body, stands lonely and unrelated: no one saw it, no one
attempted to copy it. Equally un-Attic is the Florentine sculpture, for
Attic is _free_ plastic, “in the round” in the full sense of the words,
whereas every Florentine statue feels behind it the ghost of the niche
into which the Gothic sculptor had built its real ancestors. In the
relation of figure to background and in the build of the body, the
masters of the “Kings’ heads” at Chartres and the masters of the
“George” choir at Bamberg exhibit the same interpenetration of “Antique”
and Gothic expression-means that we have, neither intensified nor
contradicted, in the manner of Giovanni Pisano and Ghiberti and even
Verrocchio.
If we take away from the models of the Renaissance all elements that
originated later than the Roman Imperial Age—that is to say, those
belonging to the Magian form-world—nothing is left. Even from Late-Roman
architecture itself all elements derived from the great days of Hellas
had one by one vanished. Most conclusive of all, though, is that motive
which actually _dominates_ the Renaissance, which because of its
Southern-ness we regard as the noblest of the Renaissance characters,
viz., _the association of round-arch and column_. This association, no
doubt, is very un-Gothic, but in the Classical style it simply does not
exist, and in fact it represents the leitmotif of the Magian
architecture that originated in Syria.
But it was just then that the South received from the North those
decisive impulses which helped it first of all to emancipate itself
entirely from Byzantium and then to step from Gothic into Baroque. In
the region comprised between Amsterdam, Köln and Paris[303]—the counter-
pole to Tuscany in the style-history of our culture—counterpoint and
oil-painting had been created in association with the Gothic
architecture. Thence Dufay in 1428 and Willaert in 1516 came to the
Papal Chapel, and in 1527 the latter founded that Venetian school which
was decisive of Baroque music. The successor of Willaert was de Rore of
Antwerp. A Florentine commissioned Hugo van der Goes to execute the
Portinari altar for Santa Maria Nuova, and Memlinc to paint a Last
Judgment. And over and above this, numerous pictures (especially Low-
Countries portraits) were acquired and exercised an enormous influence.
In 1450 Rogier van der Weyden himself came to Florence, where his art
was both admired and imitated. In 1470 Justus van Gent introduced oil-
painting to Umbria, and Antonello da Messina brought what he had learned
in the Netherlands to Venice. How much “Dutch” and how little
“Classical” there is in the pictures of Filippino Lippi, Ghirlandaio and
Botticelli and especially in the engravings of Pollaiulo! Or in Leonardo
himself. Even to-day critics hardly care to admit the full extent of the
influence exercised by the Gothic North upon the architecture, music,
painting and plastic of the Renaissance.[304] It was just then, too,
that Nicolaus Cusanus, Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen (1401-1464),
brought into mathematics the “infinitesimal” principle, that
_contrapuntal method_ of number which he reached by deduction from the
idea of God as Infinite Being. It was from Nicholas of Cusa that Leibniz
received the decisive impulse that led him to work out his differential
calculus; and thus was forged the weapon with which dynamic, Baroque,
Newtonian, physics definitely overcame the static idea characteristic of
the Southern physics that reaches a hand to Archimedes and is still
effective even in Galileo.
The high period of the Renaissance is a moment of _apparent_ expulsion
of music from Faustian art. And in fact, for a few decades, in the only
area where Classical and Western landscapes touched, Florence did
uphold—with one grand effort that was essentially metaphysical and
essentially defensive—an image of the Classical so convincing that,
although its deeper characters were without exception mere anti-Gothic,
it lasted beyond Goethe and, if not for our criticism, yet for our
feelings, is valid to this day. The Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici and
the Rome of Leo the Tenth—that is what for us the Classical _is_, an
eternal goal of most secret longing, the only deliverance from our heavy
hearts and limit upon our horizon. And it is this because, and only
because, it is anti-Gothic. So clean-cut is the opposition of Apollinian
and Faustian spirituality.
But let there be no mistake as to the extent of this illusion. In
Florence men practiced fresco and relief in contradiction of Gothic
glass-painting and Byzantine gold-ground mosaic. This was the one moment
in the history of the West when sculpture ranked as the paramount art.
The dominant elements in the picture are the poised bodies, the ordered
groups, the structural side of architecture. The backgrounds possess no
intrinsic value, merely serving to fill up between and behind the self-
sufficient present of the foreground-figures. For a while here, painting
is actually under the domination of plastic; Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo and
Botticelli were goldsmiths. Yet, all the same, these frescoes have
nothing of the spirit of Polygnotus in them. Examine a collection of
Classical painted vases—not in individual specimens or copies (which
would give the wrong idea) but in the mass, for this is the one species
of Classical art in which originals are plentiful enough to impress us
effectively with the _will_ that is behind the art. In the light of such
a study, the utter un-Classicalness of the Renaissance-spirit leaps to
the eye. The great achievement of Giotto and Masaccio in creating a
fresco-art is only _apparently_ a revival of the Apollinian way of
feeling; but the depth-experience and idea of extension that underlies
it is not the Apollinian unspatial and self-contained body but the
_Gothic field_ (Bildraum). However recessive the backgrounds are, they
exist. Yet here again there was the fullness of light, the clarity of
atmosphere, the great noon-calm, of the South; dynamic space was changed
in Tuscany, and only in Tuscany, to the static space of which Piero
della Francesca was the master. Though fields of space were painted,
they were put, not as an existence unbounded and like music ever
striving into the depths, but as _sensuously definable_. Space was given
a sort of bodiliness and order in plane layers, and drawing, sharpness
of outline, definition of surface were studied with a care that
seemingly approached the Hellenic ideal. Yet there was always this
difference, that Florence depicted space perspectively as singular in
contrast with things as plural, whereas Athens presented things as
separate singulars in contrast to general nothingness. And in proportion
as the surge of the Renaissance smoothed down, the _hardness_ of this
tendency receded, from Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel to
Raphael’s in the Vatican Stanze, until the _sfumato_ of Leonardo, the
melting of the edges into the background, brings a musical ideal in
place of the relief-ideal into painting. The hidden dynamic is equally
unmistakable in the sculpture of Florence—it would be perfectly hopeless
to look for an Attic companion for Verrocchio’s equestrian statue.[305]
This art was a _mask_, a mode of the taste of an élite, and sometimes a
comedy—though never was comedy more gallantly played out. The
indescribable inward purity of Gothic form often causes us to forget
what an excess of native strength and depth it possessed. Gothic, it
must be repeated again, is the _only_ foundation of the Renaissance. The
Renaissance never even touched the real Classical, let alone understood
it or “revived” it. The consciousness of the Florentine élite, wholly
under literary influences, fashioned the deceptive name to positivize
the negative element of the movement—thereby demonstrating how little
such currents are aware of their own nature. There is not a single one
of their great works that the contemporaries of Pericles, or even those
of Cæsar, would not have rejected as utterly alien. Their palace
courtyards are Moorish courtyards, and their round arches on slender
pillars are of Syrian origin. Cimabue taught his century to imitate with
the brush the art of Byzantine mosaic. Of the two famous domical
buildings of the Renaissance, the domed cathedral of Florence is a
masterpiece of late Gothic, and St. Peter’s is one of early Baroque.
When Michelangelo set himself to build the latter as the “Pantheon
towering over the Basilica of Maxentius,” he was naming two buildings of
the purest early Arabian style. And ornament—is there indeed a genuine
Renaissance ornamentation? Certainly there is nothing comparable in
symbolic force with the ornamentation of Gothic. But what is the
provenance of that gay and elegant embellishment which has a real inward
unity of its own and has captivated all Europe? There is a great
difference between the home of a “taste” and the home of the expression-
means that it employs: one finds a great deal that is Northern in the
early Florentine motives of Pisano, Maiano, Ghiberti and Della Quercia.
We have to distinguish in all these chancels, tombs, niches and porches
between the outward and transferable forms (the Ionic column itself is
doubly a transfer, for it originated in Egypt) and the spirit of the
form-language that uses them as means and signs. One Classical element
or item is equivalent to another so long as something un-Classical is
being expressed—significance lies not in the thing but in the way in
which it is used. But even in Donatello such motives are far fewer than
in mature Baroque. As for a strict Classical capital, no such thing is
to be found.
And yet, at moments, Renaissance art succeeded in achieving something
wonderful that music _could not_ reproduce—a feeling for the bliss of
perfect _nearness_, for pure, restful and _liberating_ space-effects,
bright and tidy and free from the passionate movement of Gothic and
Baroque. It is not Classical, but it is a dream of Classical existence,
the only dream of the Faustian soul in which it was able to forget
itself.
VI
And now, with the 16th Century, the decisive epochal turn begins for
Western painting. The trusteeship of architecture in the North and that
of sculpture in Italy expire, and painting becomes polyphonic,
“picturesque,” infinity-seeking. The colours become tones. The art of
the brush claims kinship with the style of cantata and madrigal. The
technique of oils becomes the basis of an art that means to conquer
_space_ and to dissolve things in that space. With Leonardo and
Giorgione begins Impressionism.
In the actual picture there is transvaluation of all the elements. The
background, hitherto casually put in, regarded as a fill-up and, as
space, almost shuffled out of sight, gains a preponderant importance. A
development sets in that is paralleled in no other Culture, not even in
the Chinese which in many other respects is so near to ours. The
background as symbol of the infinite conquers the sense-perceptible
foreground, and at last (herein lies the distinction between the
depicting and the delineating styles) the depth-experience of the
Faustian soul is captured in the kinesis of a picture. The space-relief
of Mantegna’s plane layers dissolves in Tintoretto into directional
energy, and there emerges in the picture the great symbol of an
unlimited space-universe which comprises the individual things within
itself as incidentals—the _horizon_. Now, that a landscape painting
should have a horizon has always seemed so self-evident to us that we
have never asked ourselves the important question: _Is_ there always a
horizon, and if not, when not and why not? In fact, there is not a hint
of it, either in Egyptian relief or in Byzantine mosaic or in vase-
paintings and frescoes of the Classical age, or even in those of the
Hellenistic in spite of its spatial treatment of foregrounds. This line,
in the unreal vapour of which heaven and earth melt, the sum and potent
symbol of the far, contains the painter’s version of the “infinitesimal”
principle. It is out of the remoteness of this horizon that the _music_
of the picture flows, and for this reason the great landscape-painters
of Holland paint only backgrounds and atmospheres, just as for the
contrary reason “anti-musical” masters like Signorelli and especially
Mantegna, paint _only_ foregrounds and “reliefs.” It is in the horizon,
then, that Music triumphs over Plastic, the _passion_ of extension over
its _substance_. It is not too much to say that no picture by Rembrandt
has a foreground at all. In the North, the home of counterpoint, a deep
understanding of the meaning of horizons and high-lighted distances is
found very early, while in the South the flat conclusive gold-background
of the Arabic-Byzantine picture long remained supreme. The first
definite emergence of the pure space-feeling is in the Books of Hours of
the Duke of Berry (that at Chantilly and that at Turin) about 1416.
Thereafter, slowly and surely, it conquers the Picture.
The same symbolic meaning attaches to clouds. Classical art concerns
itself with them no more than with horizons, and the painter of the
Renaissance treats them with a certain playful superficiality. But very
early the Gothic looked at its cloud-masses, and through them, with the
long sight of mysticism; and the Venetians (Giorgione and Paolo Veronese
above all) discovered the full magic of the cloud-world, of the
thousand-tinted Being that fills the heavens with its sheets and wisps
and mountains. Grünewald and the Netherlanders heightened its
significance to the level of tragedy. El Greco brought the grand art of
cloud-symbolism to Spain.
It was at the same time that along with oil-painting and counterpoint
the _art of gardens_ ripened. Here, expressed on the canvas of Nature
itself by extended pools, brick walls, avenues, vistas and galleries, is
the same tendency that is represented in painting by the effort towards
the linear perspective that the early Flemish artists felt to be the
basic problem of their art and Brunellesco, Alberti and Piero della
Francesca formulated. We may take it that it was not entirely a
coincidence that this formulation of perspective, this mathematical
consecration of the picture (whether landscape or interior) as a field
limited at the sides but immensely increased in depth, was propounded
just at this particular moment. It was the proclamation of the Prime-
Symbol. The point at which the perspective lines coalesce is at
infinity. It was just because it avoided infinity and rejected distance
that Classical painting possessed no perspective. _Consequently_ the
Park, the deliberate manipulation of Nature so as to obtain space and
distance effects, is an impossibility in Classical art. Neither in
Athens nor in Rome proper was there a garden-art: it was only the
Imperial Age that gratified its taste with ground-schemes of Eastern
origin, and a glance at any of the plans of those “gardens” that have
been preserved[306] is enough to show the shortness of their range and
the emphasis of their bounds. And yet the first garden-theorist of the
West, L. B. Alberti, was laying down the relation of the surroundings to
the house (that is, to the spectators in it) as early as 1450, and from
his projects to the parks of the Ludovisi and Albani villas,[307] we can
see the importance of the perspective view into distance becoming ever
greater and greater. In France, after Francis I (Fontainebleau) the long
narrow lake is an additional feature having the same meaning.
The most significant element in the Western garden-art is thus the
_point de vue_ of the great Rococo park, upon which all its avenues and
clipped-hedge walks open and from which vision may travel out to lose
itself in the distances. This element is wanting even in the Chinese
garden-art. But it is exactly matched by some of the silver-bright
distance-pictures of the pastoral music of that age (in Couperin for
example). It is the _point de vue_ that gives us the key to a real
understanding of this remarkable mode of making nature itself speak the
form-language of a human symbolism. It is in principle akin to the
dissolution of finite number-pictures into infinite series in our
mathematic: as the remainder-expression[308] reveals the ultimate
meaning of the series, so the glimpse into the boundless is what, in the
garden, reveals to a Faustian soul the meaning of Nature. It was _we_
and not the Hellenes or the men of the high Renaissance that prized and
sought out high mountain tops for the sake of the limitless range of
vision that they afford. This is a Faustian craving—to be _alone_ with
endless space. The great achievement of Le Nôtre and the landscape-
gardeners of Northern France, beginning with Fouquet’s epoch-making
creation of Vaux-le-Vicomte, was that they were able to render this
symbol with such high emphasis. Compare the Renaissance park of the
Medicean age—capable of being taken in, gay, cosy, well-rounded—with
these parks in which all the water-works, statue-rows, hedges and
labyrinths are instinct with the suggestion of long range. It is the
Destiny of Western oil-painting told over again in a bit of garden-
history.
But the feeling for long range is at the same time one for history. At a
distance, space becomes time and the horizon signifies the future. _The
Baroque park is the park of the Late season_, of the approaching end, of
the falling leaf. A Renaissance park is meant for the summer and the
noonday. It is timeless, and nothing in its form-language reminds us of
mortality. It is perspective that begins to awaken a premonition of
something passing, fugitive and final. The very words of distance
possess, in the lyric poetry of all Western languages, a plaintive
autumnal accent that one looks for in vain in the Greek and Latin. It is
there in Macpherson’s “Ossian” and Hölderlin, and in Nietzsche’s
Dionysus-Dithyrambs, and lastly in Baudelaire, Verlaine, George and
Droem. The Late poetry of the withering garden avenues, the unending
lines in the streets of a megalopolis, the ranks of pillars in a
cathedral, the peak in a distant mountain chain—all tell us that the
depth-experience which constitutes our space-world for us is in the last
analysis our inward certainty of a Destiny, of a prescribed direction,
of _time_, of the irrevocable. Here, in the experience of horizon as
future, we become directly and surely conscious of the identity of Time
with the “third dimension” of that experienced space which is living
self-extension. And in these last days we are imprinting upon the plan
of our megalopolitan streets the same directional-destiny character that
the 17th Century imprinted upon the Park of Versailles. We lay our
streets as long arrow-flights into remote distance, regardless even of
preserving old and historic parts of our towns (for the symbolism of
these is not now prepotent in us), whereas a megalopolis of the
Classical world studiously maintained in its extension that tangle of
crooked lanes that enabled Apollinian man to feel himself a body in the
midst of bodies.[309] Herein, as always, practical requirements, so
called, are merely the mask of a profound inward compulsion.
With the rise of perspective, then, the deeper form and full
metaphysical significance of the picture comes to be concentrated upon
the horizon. In Renaissance art the painter had stated and the beholder
had accepted the contents of the picture for what they were, as self-
sufficient and co-extensive with the title. But henceforth the contents
became a _means_, the mere vehicle of a meaning that was beyond the
possibility of verbal expression. With Mantegna or Signorelli the pencil
sketch could have stood as the picture, without being carried out in
colour—in some cases, indeed, we can only regret that the artist did not
stop at the cartoon. In the statue-like sketch, colour is a mere
supplement. Titian, on the other hand, could be told by Michelangelo
that he did not know how to draw. The “object,” i.e., that which could
be exactly fixed by the drawn outline, the near and material, had in
fact lost its artistic actuality; but, as the theory of art was still
dominated by Renaissance impressions, there arose thereupon that strange
and interminable conflict concerning the “form” and the “content” of an
art-work. Mis-enunciation of the question has concealed its real and
deep significance from us. The first point for consideration should have
been whether painting was to be conceived of plastically or musically,
as a static of things or as a dynamic of space (for in this lies the
essence of the opposition between fresco and oil technique), and the
second point, the opposition of Classical and Faustian world-feeling.
Outlines define the material, while colour-tones interpret space.[310]
But the picture of the first order belongs to directly sensible nature—
it _narrates_. Space, on the contrary, is by its very essence
transcendent and addresses itself to our imaginative powers, and in an
art that is under its suzerainty, the narrative element enfeebles and
obscures the more profound tendency. Hence it is that the theorist, able
to feel the secret disharmony but misunderstanding it, clings to the
superficial opposition of content and form. The problem is purely a
Western one, and reveals most strikingly the complete inversion in the
significance of pictorial elements that took place when the Renaissance
closed down and instrumental music of the grand style came to the front.
For the Classical mind no problem of form and content in this sense
could exist; in an Attic statue the two are completely identical and
identified in the human body.
The case of Baroque painting is further complicated by the fact that it
involves an opposition of ordinary popular feeling and the finer
sensibility. Everything Euclidean and tangible is also popular, and the
genuinely popular art is therefore the Classical. It is very largely the
feeling of this popular character in it that constitutes its
indescribable charm for the Faustian intellects that have to _fight_ for
self-expression, to win their world by hard wrestling. For us, the
contemplation of Classical art and its intention is pure _refreshment_:
here nothing needs to be struggled for, everything offers itself freely.
And something of the same sort was achieved by the anti-Gothic tendency
of Florence. Raphael is, in many sides of his creativeness, distinctly
popular. But Rembrandt is not, cannot be, so. From Titian painting
becomes more and more esoteric. So, too, poetry. So, too, music. And the
Gothic _per se_ had been esoteric from its very beginnings—witness Dante
and Wolfram. The masses of Okeghem and Palestrina, or of Bach for that
matter, were never intelligible to the average member of the
congregation. Ordinary people are bored by Mozart and Beethoven, and
regard music generally as something for which one is or is not in the
mood. A certain degree of interest in these matters has been induced by
concert room and gallery since the age of enlightenment invented the
phrase “art for all.” But Faustian art is not, and by very essence
cannot be, “for all.” If modern painting has ceased to appeal to any but
a small (and ever decreasing) circle of connoisseurs, it is because it
has turned away from the painting of things that the man in the street
can understand. It has transferred the property of actuality from
contents to space—the space _through_ which alone, according to Kant,
things _are_. And with that a difficult metaphysical element has entered
into painting, and this element does not give itself away to the layman.
For Phidias, on the contrary, the word “lay” would have had no meaning.
His sculpture appealed entirely to the bodily and not to the spiritual
eye. _An art without space is a priori unphilosophical._
VII
With this is connected an important principle of _composition_. In a
picture it is possible to set the things inorganically above one another
or side by side or behind one another without any emphasis of
perspective or interrelation, i.e., without insisting upon the
dependence of their actuality upon the structure of space which does not
necessarily mean that this dependence is denied. Primitive men and
children draw thus, before their depth-experience has brought the sense-
impressions of their world more or less into fundamental order. But this
order differs in the different Cultures according to the prime symbols
of these Cultures. The sort of perspective composition that is so self-
evident to us is a particular case, and it is neither recognized nor
intended in the painting of any other Culture. Egyptian art chose to
represent simultaneous events in superposed ranks, thereby eliminating
the third dimension from the look of the picture. The Apollinian art
placed figures and groups separately, with a deliberate avoidance of
space-and-time relations in the plane of representation. Polygnotus’s
frescoes in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi are a celebrated
instance of this. There is no background to connect the individual
scenes—for such a background would have been a challenge to the
principle that things alone are actual and space non-existent. The
pediment of the Ægina temple, the procession of gods on the François
Vase and the Frieze of the Giants of Pergamum are all composed as
meander-syntheses of separate and interchangeable motives, without
organic character. It is only with the Hellenistic age (the Telephus
Frieze of the altar of Pergamum is the earliest example that has been
preserved) that the un-Classical motive of the consistent series comes
into existence. In this respect, as in others, the feeling of the
Renaissance was truly Gothic. It did indeed carry group-composition to
such a pitch of perfection that its work remains the pattern for all
following ages. But the order of it all proceeded out of space. In the
last analysis, it was a silent music of colour-illumined extension that
created within itself _light-resistances_, which the understanding eye
could grasp as things and as existence, and could set marching with an
invisible swing and rhythm out into the distance. And with this spatial
ordering, with its unremarked substitution of air-and light-perspective
for line-perspective, the Renaissance was already, in essence, defeated.
And now from the end of the Renaissance in Orlando Lasso and Palestrina
right up to Wagner, from Titian right up to Manet and Marées and Leibl,
great musicians and great painters followed close upon one another while
the plastic art sank into entire insignificance. Oil-painting and
instrumental music evolve organically towards aims that were
comprehended in the Gothic and achieved in the Baroque. Both arts—
Faustian in the highest sense—are within those limits _prime phenomena_.
They have a soul, a physiognomy and therefore a history. And in this
they are alone. All that sculpture could thenceforward achieve was a few
beautiful incidental pieces in the shadow of painting, garden-art, or
architecture. The art of the West had no real need of them. There was no
longer a _style_ of plastic in the sense that there were styles of
painting or music. No consistent tradition or necessary unity links the
works of Maderna, Goujon, Puget and Schlüter. Even Leonardo begins to
despise the chisel outright: at most he will admit the bronze cast, and
that on account of its pictorial advantages. Therein he differs from
Michelangelo, for whom the marble block was still the true element. And
yet even Michelangelo in his old age could no longer succeed with the
plastic, and none of the later sculptors are great in the sense that
Rembrandt and Bach are great. There were clever and tasteful
performances no doubt, but not one single _work_ of the same order as
the “Night Watch” or the “Matthew Passion,” nothing that expresses, as
these express, the whole depth of a whole mankind. This art had fallen
out of the destiny of the Culture. Its speech meant nothing now. What
there is in a Rembrandt portrait simply cannot be rendered in a bust.
Now and then a sculptor of power arises, like Bernini or the masters of
the contemporary Spanish school, or Pigalle or Rodin (none of whom,
naturally, transcended the decorative and attained the level of grand
symbolism), but such an artist is always visibly either a belated
imitator of the Renaissance like Thorwaldsen, a disguised painter like
Houdon or Rodin, an architect like Bernini and Schlüter or a decorator
like Coysevox. And his very appearance on the scene only shows the more
clearly that this art, incapable of carrying the Faustian burden, has no
longer a mission—and therefore no longer a soul or a life-history of
specific style-development—in the Faustian world. In the Classical
world, correspondingly, music was the art that failed. Beginning with
probably quite important advances in the earliest Doric, it had to give
way in the ripe centuries of Ionic (650-350) to the two truly Apollinian
arts, sculpture and fresco; renouncing harmony and polyphony, it had to
renounce therewith any pretensions to organic development as a higher
art.
VIII
The strict style in Classical painting limited its palette to yellow,
red, black and white. This singular fact was observed long ago, and,
since the explanation was only sought for in superficial and definitely
material causes, wild hypotheses were brought forward to account for it,
e.g., a supposed colour-blindness in the Greeks. Even Nietzsche
discussed this (_Morgenröte_, 426).
But why did this painting in its great days _avoid_ blue and even blue-
green, and only begin the gamut of permissible tones at greenish-yellow
and bluish-red? It is not that the ancient artists did not know of blue
and its effect. The metopes of many temples had blue backgrounds so that
they should appear deep in contrast with the triglyphs; and trade-
painting used _all_ the colours that were technically available. There
are authentic blue horses in archaic Acropolis work and Etruscan tomb-
painting; and a bright blue colouring of the hair was quite common. The
ban upon it in the higher art was, without a doubt, imposed upon the
Euclidean soul by its prime symbol.
Blue and green are the colours of the heavens, the sea, the fruitful
plain, the shadow of the Southern noon, the evening, the remote
mountains. They are essentially atmospheric and not substantial colours.
They are _cold_, they disembody, and they evoke impressions of expanse
and distance and boundlessness.
For this reason they were kept out of the frescoes of Polygnotus. And
for this reason also, an “infinitesimal” blue-to-green is the space-
creating element throughout the history of our perspective oil-painting,
from the Venetians right into the 19th Century; it is the basic and
supremely important tone which _supports_ the ensemble of the intended
colour-effect, as the _basso continuo_ supports the orchestra, whereas
the warm yellow and red tones are put on sparingly and in dependence
upon this basic tone. It is not the full, gorgeous and _familiar_ green
that Raphael and Dürer sometimes—and seldom at that—use for draperies,
but an indefinite blue-green of a thousand nuances into white and grey
and brown; something deeply musical, into which (notably in Gobelin
tapestry) the whole atmosphere is plunged. That quality which we have
named aerial perspective in contrast to linear—and might also have
called _Baroque_ perspective in contrast to Renaissance—rests almost
exclusively upon this. We find it with more and more intense depth-
effect in Leonardo, Guercino, Albani in the case of Italy, and in
Ruysdael and Hobbema in that of Holland, but, above all, in the great
French painters, from Poussin and Claude Lorrain and Watteau to Corot.
Blue, equally a perspective colour, always stands in relation to the
dark, the unillumined, the unactual. It does not press in on us, it
pulls us out into the remote. An “enchanting nothingness” Goethe calls
it in his _Farbenlehre_.
Blue and green are transcendent, spiritual, non-sensuous colours. They
are missing in the strict Attic fresco and _therefore dominant_ in oil-
painting. Yellow and red, the Classical colours, are the colours of the
material, the near, the full-blooded. Red is the characteristic colour
of sexuality—hence it is the only colour that works upon the beasts. It
matches best the Phallus-symbol—and therefore the statue and the Doric
column—but it is pure blue that etherealizes the Madonna’s mantle. This
relation of the colours has established itself in every great school as
a deep-felt necessity. Violet, a red succumbing to blue, is the colour
of women no longer fruitful and of priests living in celibacy.
Yellow and red are the _popular_ colours, the colours of the crowd, of
children, of women, and of savages. Amongst the Venetians and the
Spaniards high personages affected a splendid black or blue, with an
unconscious sense of the aloofness inherent in these colours. For red
and yellow, the _Apollinian, Euclidean-polytheistic_ colours, belong to
the foreground even in respect of social life; they are meet for the
noisy hearty market-days and holidays, the naïve immediateness of a life
subject to the blind chances of the Classical _Fatum_, the point-
existence. But blue and green—the Faustian, monotheistic colours—are
those of loneliness, of care, of a present that is related to a past and
a future, of destiny as the dispensation governing the universe from
within.
The relation of Shakespearian destiny to space and of Sophoclean to the
individual body has already been stated in an earlier chapter. All the
genuinely transcendent Cultures—that is all whose prime-symbol requires
the _overcoming_ of the apparent, the life of struggle and not that of
acceptance—have the same metaphysical inclination to space as to blues
and blacks. There are profound observations on the connexion between
ideas of space and the meaning of colour in Goethe’s studies of
“entoptic colours” in the atmosphere; the symbolism that is enunciated
by him in the _Farbenlehre_ and that which we have deduced here from the
ideas of Space and Destiny are in complete agreement.
The most significant use of dusky green as the colour of destiny is
Grünewald’s. The indescribable power of space in his _nights_ is
equalled only by Rembrandt’s. And the thought suggests itself here, is
it possible to say that his bluish-green, the colour in which the
interior of a great cathedral is so often clothed, is the specifically
_Catholic_ colour?—it being understood that we mean by “Catholic”
strictly the Faustian Christianity (with the Eucharist as its centre)
that was founded in the Lateran Council of 1215 and fulfilled in the
Council of Trent. This colour with its silent grandeur is as remote from
the resplendent gold-ground of Early Christian-Byzantine pictures as it
is from the gay, loquacious “pagan” colours of the painted Hellenic
temples and statues. It is to be noted that the effect of this colour,
entirely unlike that of yellow and red, depends upon work being
exhibited _indoors_. Classical painting is emphatically a public art,
Western just as emphatically a studio-art. The whole of our great oil-
painting, from Leonardo to the end of the 18th Century, is not meant for
the bright light of day. Here once more we meet the same opposition as
that between chamber-music and the free-standing statue. The climatic
explanation of the difference is merely superficial; the example of
Egyptian painting would suffice to disprove it if disproof were
necessary at all. Infinite space meant for Classical feeling complete
nothingness, and the use of blue and green, with their powers of
dissolving the near and creating the far, would have been a challenge to
the absolutism of the foreground and its unit-bodies, and therefore to
the very meaning and intent of Apollinian art. To the Apollinian eye,
pictures in the colours of Watteau would have been destitute of all
essence, things of almost inexpressible emptiness and untruth. By these
colours the visually-perceived light-reflecting surface of the picture
is made effectively to render, not circumscribed things, but
circumambient space. And that is why they are missing in Greece and
dominant in the West.
IX
Arabian art brought the Magian world-feeling to expression by means of
the _gold ground_ of its mosaics and pictures. Something of the uncanny
wizardry of this, and by implication of its symbolic purpose, is known
to us through the mosaics of Ravenna, in the work of the Early Rhenish
and especially North Italian masters who were still entirely under the
influence of Lombardo-Byzantine models, and last but not least in the
Gothic book-illustrations of which the archetypes were the Byzantine
purple codices.
In this instance we can study the soul of three Cultures working upon
very similar tasks in very dissimilar ways. The Apollinian Culture
recognized as actual only that which was immediately present in time and
place—and thus it repudiated the background as pictorial element. The
Faustian strove through all sensuous barriers towards infinity—and it
projected the centre of gravity of the pictorial idea into the distance
by means of perspective. The Magian felt all happening as an expression
of mysterious powers that filled the world-cavern with their spiritual
substance—and it shut off the depicted scene with a gold background,
that is, by something that stood beyond and outside all nature-colours.
Gold is not a colour. As compared with simple yellow, it produces a
complicated sense-impression, through the metallic, diffuse refulgence
that is generated by its glowing surface. Colours—whether coloured
substance incorporated with the smoothed wall-face (fresco) or pigment
applied with the brush—are natural. But the metallic gleam, which is
practically never found in natural conditions, is unearthly.[311] It
recalls impressively the other symbols of the Culture, Alchemy and
Kabbala, the Philosophers’ Stone, the Holy Scriptures, the Arabesque,
the inner form of the tales of the “Thousand and One Nights.” The
gleaming gold takes away from the scene, the life and the body their
substantial being. Everything that was taught in the circle of Plotinus
or by the Gnostics as to the nature of things, their independence of
space, their accidental causes—notions paradoxical and almost
unintelligible to _our_ world-feeling—is implicit also in the symbolism
of this mysterious hieratic background. The nature of bodies was a
principal subject of controversy amongst Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo-
Platonists, as it was later in the schools of Baghdad and Basra.
Suhrawardi distinguishes extension, as the primary existence of the
body, from width and height and depth as its accidents. Nazzâm
pronounced against the corporeal substantiality and space-filling
character of the atom. These and the like were the metaphysical notions
that, from Philo and Paul to the last great names of the Islamic
philosophy, manifested the Arabian world-feeling. They played a decisive
part in the disputes of the Councils upon the substantiality of
Christ.[312] And thus the gold background possesses, in the iconography
of the Western Church, an explicit dogmatic significance. It is an
express assertion of the existence and activity of the divine spirit. It
represents the _Arabian_ form of the Christian world-consciousness, and
with such a deep appropriateness that for a thousand years this
treatment of the background was held to be the only one metaphysically—
and even ethically—possible and seemly in representations of the
Christian legend. When “natural” backgrounds, with their blue-green
heavens, far horizons and depth perspective, began to appear in early
Gothic, they had at first the appearance of something profane and
worldly. The change of dogma that they implied was, if not acknowledged,
at any rate felt, witness the tapestry backgrounds with which the real
depth of space was covered up by a pious awe that disguised what it
dared not exhibit. We have seen how just at this time, when the
_Faustian_ (German-Catholic) Christianity attained to consciousness of
itself through the institution of the sacrament of Contrition—a new
religion in the old garb—the tendency to perspective, colour, and the
mastering of aerial space in the art of the Franciscans[313] transformed
the whole meaning of painting.
The Christianity of the West is related to that of the East as the
symbol of perspective to the symbol of gold-ground—and the final schism
took place almost at the same moment in Church and in Art. The
landscape-background of the depicted scene and the _dynamic_
infiniteness of God were comprehended at the same moment; and,
simultaneously with the gold ground of the sacred picture, there
vanished from the Councils of the West that Magian, ontological problem
of Godhead which had so passionately agitated Nicæa, Ephesus, Chalcedon
and all the Councils of the East.
X
The Venetians discovered, and introduced into oil-painting as a space-
forming and quasi-musical motive, the handwriting of the _visible brush-
stroke_. The Florentine masters had never at any time challenged the
fashion—would-be Classical and yet in Gothic employ—of smoothing out all
turns of the brush so as to produce pure, cleanly-outlined and even
colour-surfaces. In consequence, their pictures have a certain air of
_being_, something felt, unmistakably, as the opposite of the inherent
_motion_-quality of the Gothic expression-means that were storming in
from over the Alps. The 15th-Century manner of applying colour is a
denial of past and future. It is only in the brushwork, which remains
permanently visible and, in a way, perennially fresh, that the
_historical_ feeling comes out. Our desire is to see in the work of the
painter not merely something that _has become_ but something that _is
becoming_. And this is precisely what the Renaissance wanted to avoid. A
piece of Perugino drapery tells us nothing of its artistic origin; it is
ready-made, given, simply present. But the individual brush-strokes—
first met with as a complete new form-language in the later work of
Titian—are accents of a personal temperament, characteristic in the
orchestra-colours of Monteverde, melodically-flowing as a contemporary
Venetian madrigal: streaks and dabs, immediately juxtaposed, cross one
another, cover one another, entangle one another, and bring unending
movement into the plain element of colour. Just so the geometrical
Analysis of the time made its objects become instead of being. Every
painting has in its execution a history and does not disguise it; and a
Faustian who stands before it feels that he too has a spiritual
evolution. Before any great landscape by a Baroque master, the one word
“historical” is enough to make us feel that there is a meaning in it
wholly alien to the meaning of an Attic statue. As other melody, so also
this of the restless outlineless brush-stroke is part of the dynamic
stability of the universe of eternal Becoming, directional Time, and
Destiny. The opposition of painting-style and drawing-style is but a
particular aspect of the general opposition of historical and
ahistorical form, of assertion and denial of inner development, of
eternity and instantaneity. A Classical art-work is an event, a Western
is a deed. The one symbolizes the here-and-now point, the other the
living course. And the physiognomy of this script of the brush—an
ornamentation that is entirely new, infinitely rich and personal, and
peculiar to the Western Culture—is purely and simply _musical_. It is no
mere conceit to compare the _allegro feroce_ of Frans Hals with the
_andante con moto_ of Van Dyck, or the minor of Guercino with the major
of Velasquez. Henceforward the notion of _tempo_ is comprised in the
execution of a painting and steadily reminds us that this art is the art
of a soul which, in contrast to the Classical, forgets nothing and will
let nothing be forgotten that once was. The aëry web of brush-strokes
immediately dissolves the sensible surface of things. Contours melt into
chiaroscuro. The beholder has to stand a very long way back to obtain
any corporeal impression out of our coloured space values, and even so
it is always the chromatic and active air itself that gives birth to the
things.
At the same time with this, there appeared in Western painting another
symbol of highest significance, which subdued more and more the
actuality of all colour—the “studio-brown” (atelierbraun). This was
unknown to the early Florentines and the older Flemish and Rhenish
masters alike. Pacher, Dürer, Holbein, passionately strong as their
tendency towards spatial depth seems, are quite without it, and its
reign begins only with the last years of the 16th Century. This brown
does not repudiate its descent from the “infinitesimal” greens of
Leonardo’s, Schöngauer’s and Grünewald’s backgrounds, but it possesses a
mightier power over things than they, and it carries the battle of Space
against Matter to a decisive close. It even prevails over the more
primitive linear perspective, which is unable to shake off its
Renaissance association with architectural motives. Between it and the
Impressionist technique of the visible brush-stroke there is an enduring
and deeply suggestive connexion. Both in the end dissolve the tangible
existences of the sense-world—the world of moments and foregrounds—into
atmospheric semblances. Line disappears from the tone-picture. The
Magian gold-ground had only dreamed of a mystic power that controlled
and at will could thrust aside the laws governing corporeal existence
within the world-cavern. But the brown of these pictures opened a
prospect into an infinity of pure forms. And therefore its discovery
marks for the Western style a culmination in the process of its
becoming. _As contrasted with the preceding green, this colour has
something Protestant in it._ It anticipates the hyperbolic[314] Northern
pantheism of the 18th Century which the Archangels voice in the Prologue
of Goethe’s “Faust.”[315] The atmosphere of Lear and the atmosphere of
Macbeth are akin to it. The contemporary striving of instrumental music
towards freer and ever freer chromatics (de Rore, Luca Marenzio) and
towards the formation of bodies of tone by means of string and wind
choruses corresponds exactly with the new tendency of oil-painting to
create _pictorial chromatics_ out of pure colours, by means of these
unlimited brown shadings and the contrast-effect of immediately
juxtaposed colour-strokes. Thereafter both the arts spread through their
worlds of tones and colours—colour-tones and tone-colours—an atmosphere
of the purest spatiality, which enveloped and rendered, no longer body—
the human being as a shape—but the soul unconfined. And thus was
attained the inwardness that in the deepest works of Rembrandt and of
Beethoven is able to unlock the last secrets themselves—the inwardness
which Apollinian man had sought with his strictly somatic art to _keep
at bay_.
From now onward, the old foreground-colours yellow and red—the Classical
tones—are employed more and more rarely and always as deliberate
contrasts to the distances and depths that they are meant to set off and
emphasize (Vermeer in particular, besides of course Rembrandt). This
atmospheric brown, which was entirely alien to the Renaissance, is the
unrealest colour that there is. It is the one major colour that _does
not exist in the rainbow_. There is white light, and yellow and green,
and red and other light of the most entire purity. But a pure brown
light is outside the possibilities of the Nature that we know. All the
greenish-brown, silvery, moist brown, and deep gold tones that appear in
their splendid variety with Giorgione, grow bolder and bolder in the
great Dutch painters and lose themselves towards the end of the 18th
Century, have the common quality that they strip nature of her tangible
actuality. They contain, therefore, what is almost a religious
profession of faith; we feel that here we are not very far from Port
Royal, from Leibniz. With Constable on the other hand—who is the founder
of the painting of _Civilization_—it is a different will that seeks
expression; and the very brown that he had learnt from the Dutch meant
to him not what it had meant to them—Destiny, God, the meaning of life—
but simply romance, sensibility, yearning for something that was gone,
memorial of the great past of the dying art. In the last German masters
too—Lessing, Marées, Spitzweg, Diez, Leibl[316]—whose belated art is a
romantic retrospect, an epilogue, the brown tones appear simply as a
precious heirloom. Unwilling in their hearts to part with this last
relic of the great style, they preferred to set themselves against the
evident tendency of their generation—the soulless and soul-killing
generation of _plein-air_ and Haeckel. Rightly understood (as it has
never yet been), this battle of Rembrandt-brown and the _plein-air_ of
the new school is simply one more case of the hopeless resistance put up
by soul against intellect and Culture against Civilization, of the
opposition of symbolic necessary art and megalopolitan “applied” art
which affects building and painting and sculpture and poetry alike.
Regarded thus, the significance of the brown becomes manifest enough.
When it dies, an entire Culture dies with it.
It was the masters who were inwardly greatest—Rembrandt above all—who
best understood this colour. It is the enigmatic brown of his most
telling work, and its origin is in the deep lights of Gothic church-
windows and the twilight of the high-vaulted Gothic nave. And the gold
tone of the great Venetians—Titian, Veronese, Palma, Giorgione—is always
reminding us of that old perished Northern art of glass painting of
which they themselves know almost nothing. Here also the Renaissance
with its deliberate bodiliness of colour is seen as merely an episode,
an event of the very self-conscious surface, and not a product of the
underlying Faustian instinct of the Western soul, whereas this luminous
gold-brown of the Venetian painting links Gothic and Baroque, the art of
the old glass-painting and the dark music of Beethoven. And it coincides
precisely in time with the establishment of the Baroque style of colour-
music by the work of the Netherlanders Willaert and Cyprian de Rore, the
elder Gabrieli, and the Venetian music-school which they founded.
Brown, then, became the characteristic colour of the _soul_, and more
particularly of a historically-disposed soul. Nietzsche has, I think,
spoken somewhere of the “brown” music of Bizet, but the adjective is far
more appropriate to the music which Beethoven wrote for strings[317] and
to the orchestration that even as late as Bruckner so often fills space
with a browny-golden expanse of tone. All other colours are relegated to
ancillary functions—thus the bright yellow and the vermilion of Vermeer
intrude with the spatial almost as though from another world and with an
emphasis that is truly metaphysical, and the yellow-green and blood-red
lights of Rembrandt seem at most to play with the symbolism of space. In
Rubens, on the contrary—brilliant performer but no thinker—the brown is
almost destitute of idea, a shadow-colour. (In him and in Watteau, the
“Catholic” blue-green disputes precedence with the brown.) All this
shows how any particular means may, in the hands of men of inward depth,
become a symbol for the evocation of such high transcendence as that of
the Rembrandt landscape, while for other great masters it may be merely
a serviceable technical expedient—or in other words that (as we have
already seen) technical “form,” in the theoretical sense of something
opposed to “content,” has nothing whatever to do with the real and true
form of a great work.
I have called brown a historical colour. By this is meant that it makes
the atmosphere of the pictured space signify directedness and _future_,
and overpowers the assertiveness of any instantaneous element that may
be represented. The other colours of distance have also this
significance, and they lead to an important, considerable and distinctly
bizarre extension of the Western symbolism. The Hellenes had in the end
come to prefer bronze and even gilt-bronze to the painted marble, the
better to express (by the radiance of this phenomenon against a deep
blue sky) the idea of the individualness of any and every corporeal
thing.[318] Now, when the Renaissance dug these statues up, it found
them black and green with the patina of many centuries. The historic
spirit, with its piety and longing, fastened on to this—and from that
time forth our form-feeling has canonized this black and green of
distance. To-day our eye finds it indispensable to the enjoyment of a
bronze—an ironical illustration of the fact that this whole species of
art is something that no longer concerns us as such. What does a
cathedral dome or a bronze figure mean to us without the patina which
transmutes the short-range brilliance into the tone of remoteness of
time and place? Have we not got to the point of artificially producing
this patina?[319]
But even more than this is involved in the ennoblement of decay to the
level of an art-means of independent significance. That a Greek would
have regarded the formation of patina as the ruin of the work, we can
hardly doubt. It is not merely that the colour green, on account of its
“distant” quality, was avoided by him on spiritual grounds. Patina is a
symbol of _mortality_ and hence related in a remarkable way to the
symbols of time-measurement and the funeral rite. We have already in an
earlier chapter discussed the wistful regard of the Faustian soul for
ruins and evidences of the distant past, its proneness to the collection
of antiquities and manuscripts and coins, to pilgrimages to the Forum
Romanum and to Pompeii, to excavations and philological studies, which
appears as early as the time of Petrarch. When would it have occurred to
a Greek to bother himself with the ruins of Cnossus or Tiryns?[320]
Every Greek knew his “Iliad” but not one ever thought of digging up the
hill of Troy. We, on the contrary, are moved by a secret piety to
preserve the aqueducts of the Campagna, the Etruscan tombs, the ruins of
Luxor and Karnak, the crumbling castles of the Rhine, the Roman Limes,
Hersfeld and Paulinzella from becoming mere rubbish—but we keep them _as
ruins_, feeling in some subtle way that reconstruction would deprive
them of something, indefinable in terms, that can never be
reproduced.[321] Nothing was further from the Classical mind than this
reverence for the weather-beaten evidences of a once and a formerly. It
cleared out of sight everything that did not speak of the present; never
was the old preserved because it was old. After the Persians had
destroyed old Athens, the citizens threw columns, statues, reliefs,
broken or not, over the Acropolis wall, in order to start afresh with a
clean slate—and the resultant scrap-heaps have been our richest sources
for the art of the 6th Century. Their action was quite in keeping with
the style of a Culture that raised cremation to the rank of a major
symbol and refused with scorn to bind daily life to a chronology. _Our_
choice has been, as usual, the opposite. The heroic landscape of the
Claude Lorrain type is inconceivable without ruins. The English park
with its atmospheric suggestion, which supplanted the French about 1750
and abandoned the great perspective idea of the latter in favour of the
“Nature” of Addison, Pope and sensibility, introduced into its stock of
motives perhaps the most astonishing bizarrerie ever perpetrated, the
_artificial ruin_, in order to deepen the historical character in the
presented landscape.[322] The Egyptian Culture restored the works of its
early period, but it would never have ventured to _build_ ruins as the
symbols of the past. Again, it is not the Classical statue, but the
Classical _torso_ that we really love. It has had a destiny: something
suggestive of the past as past envelops it, and our imagination delights
to fill the empty space of missing limbs with the pulse and swing of
invisible lines. A good restoration—and the secret charm of endless
possibilities is all gone. I venture to maintain that it is only by way
of this _transposition into the musical_ that the remains of Classical
sculpture can really reach us. The green bronze, the blackened marble,
the fragments of a figure abolish for our inner eye the limitations of
time and space. “Picturesque” this has been called—the brand-new statue
and building and the too-well-groomed park are not picturesque—and the
word is just to this extent, that the deep meaning of this weathering is
the same as that of the studio-brown. But, at bottom, what both express
is the spirit of instrumental music. Would the Spearman of Polycletus,
standing before us in flashing bronze and with enamel eyes and gilded
hair, affect us as it does in the state of blackened age? Would not the
Vatican torso of Heracles lose its mighty impressiveness if, one fine
day, the missing parts were discovered and replaced? And would not the
towers and domes of our old cities lose their deep metaphysical charm if
they were sheathed in new copper? Age, for us as for the Egyptian,
ennobles all things. For Classical man, it depreciates them.
Lastly, consider Western tragedy; observe how the same feeling leads it
to prefer “historical” material—meaning thereby not so much demonstrably
actual or even possible, but _remote and crusted_ subjects. That which
the Faustian soul wanted, and must have, could not be expressed by any
event of purely momentary meaning, lacking in distance of time or place,
or by a tragic art of the Classical kind, or by a timeless myth. Our
tragedies, consequently, are tragedies of the past and of the future—the
latter category, in which men yet to be are shown as carriers of a
Destiny, is represented in a certain sense by “Faust,” “Peer Gynt” and
the “Götterdämmerung.” But tragedies of the present we have _not_, apart
from the trivial social drama of the 19th Century.[323] If Shakespeare
wanted on occasion to express anything of importance in the present, he
at least removed the scene of it to some foreign land—Italy for
preference—in which he had never been, and German poets likewise take
England or France—always for the sake of getting rid of that _nearness_
of time and place which the Attic drama emphasized even in the case of a
mythological subject.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VIII
MUSIC AND PLASTIC
II
ACT AND PORTRAIT
CHAPTER VIII
MUSIC AND PLASTIC
II
ACT AND PORTRAIT
I
The Classical has been characterized as a culture of the Body and the
Northern as a culture of the Spirit, and not without a certain _arrière-
pensée_ of disprizing the one in favour of the other. Though it was
mainly in trivialities that Renaissance taste made its contrasts between
Classical and Modern, Pagan and Christian, yet even this might have led
to decisive discoveries if only men had seen how to get behind formula
to origins.
If the environment of a man (whatever else it may be) is with respect to
him a macrocosm with respect to a microcosm, an immense aggregate of
symbols, then the man himself, in so far as he belongs to the fabric of
actuality, in so far as he is _phenomenal_, must be comprised in the
general symbolism. But, in the impress of him made upon men like
himself, what is it that possesses the force of Symbol, viz., the
capacity of summing within itself and intelligibly presenting the
essence of that man and the signification of his being? Art gives the
answer.
But this answer is necessarily different in different Cultures. As each
lives differently, so each is differently impressed by Life. For the
mode of human imagining—metaphysical, ethical, artistic imagining alike—
it is more than important, it is determinant that the individual feels
himself as a body amongst bodies or, on the contrary, as a centre in
endless space; that he subtilizes his ego into lone distinctness or, on
the contrary, regards it as substantially part of the general consensus,
that the directional character is asserted or, on the contrary, denied
in the rhythm and course of his life. In all these ways the prime-symbol
of the great Culture comes to manifestation: this is indeed a world-
feeling, but the life-ideal conforms to it. From the Classical ideal
followed unreserved acceptance of the sensuous instant, from the Western
a not less passionate wrestle to overcome it. The Apollinian soul,
Euclidean and point-formed, felt the empirical visible body as the
complete expression of its own way of being; the Faustian, roving into
all distances, found this expression not in _person_, σῶμα, but in
_personality_, _character_, call it what you will. “Soul” for the real
Hellene was in last analysis the form of his body—and thus Aristotle
defined it. “Body” for Faustian man was the vessel of the soul—and thus
Goethe felt it.
But the result of this is that Culture and Culture differ very greatly
in their selection and formation of their humane arts. While Gluck
expresses the woe of Armida by a melody combined with drear gnawing
tones in the instrumental accompaniment, the same is achieved in
Pergamene sculptures by making every muscle speak. The Hellenistic
portraiture tries to draw a spiritual _type_ in the structure of its
heads. In China the heads of the Saints of Ling-yan-si tell of a _wholly
personal_ inner life by their look and the play of the corners of the
mouth.
The Classical tendency towards making the body the sole spokesman is
emphatically not the result of any carnal overload in the race (to the
man of σωφροσύνη wantonness was not permitted[324]), it was _not_, as
Nietzsche thought, an orgiastic joy of untrammelled energy and perfervid
passion. This sort of thing is much nearer to the ideals of Germanic-
Christian or of Indian chivalry. What Apollinian man and Apollinian art
can claim as their very own is simply the apotheosis of the bodily
_phenomenon_, taking the word perfectly literally—the rhythmic
proportioning of limbs and harmonious build of muscles. This is _not_
Pagan as against Christian, it is Attic as against Baroque; for it was
Baroque mankind (Christian or unbeliever, monk or rationalist) that
first utterly put away the cult of the palpable σῶμα, carrying its
alienation indeed to the extremes of bodily uncleanliness that prevailed
in the entourage of Louis XIV,[325] whose full wigs and lace cuffs and
buckled shoes covered up Body with a whole web of ornament.
Thus the Classical plastic art, after liberating the form completely
from the actual or imaginary back-wall and setting it up in the open,
free and unrelated, to be seen as a body among bodies, moved on
logically till the _naked_ body became its only subject. And, moreover,
it is unlike every other kind of sculpture recorded in art-history in
that its treatment of the bounding surfaces of this body is
_anatomically convincing_. Here is the Euclidean world-principle carried
to the extreme; any envelope whatever would have been in contradiction,
however slightly, with the Apollinian phenomenon, would have indicated,
however timidly, the existence of the circum-space.
In this art, what is ornamental in the high sense resides entirely in
the proportions of the structure[326] and the equivalence of the axes in
respect of support and load. Standing, sitting, lying down but always
self-secure, the body has, like the peripteros, no interior, that is, no
“soul.” The significance of the muscle-relief, carried out absolutely in
the round, is the same as that of the self-closing array of the columns;
both contain the _whole_ of the form-language of the work.
It was a strictly metaphysical reason, the need of a supreme life-symbol
for themselves, that brought the later Hellenes to this art, which under
all the consummate achievement is a narrow one. It is not true that this
language of the outer surface is the completest, or the most natural, or
even the most obvious mode of representing the human being. Quite the
contrary. If the Renaissance, with its ardent theory and its immense
misconception of its own tendency, had not continued to dominate our
judgment—long after the plastic art itself had become entirely alien to
our inner soul—we should not have waited till to-day to observe this
distinctive character of the Attic style. No Egyptian or Chinese
sculptor ever dreamed of using external anatomy to express his meaning.
In Gothic image-work a language of the muscles is unheard of. The human
tracery that clothes the mighty Gothic framework with a web of countless
figures and reliefs (Chartres cathedral has more than _ten thousand_
such) is not merely ornament; as early as about 1200 it is employed for
the expression of schemes and purposes far grander than even the
grandest of Classical plastic. For these masses of figures constitute a
_tragic_ unit. Here, by the North even earlier than by Dante, the
historical feeling of the Faustian soul—of which the deep sacrament of
_Contrition_ is the spiritual expression and the rite of _Confession_
the grave teacher—is intensified to the tragic fullness of a world-
drama. That which Joachim of Floris, at this very time, was seeing in
his Apulian cell—the picture of the world, not as Cosmos, but as a
Divine History and succession of three world-ages[327]—the craftsmen
were expressing at Reims, Amiens and Paris in serial presentation of it
from the Fall to the Last Judgment. Each of the scenes, each of the
great symbolic figures, had its significant place in the sacred edifice,
each its rôle in the immense world-poem. Then, too, each individual man
came to feel how his life-course was fitted as ornament in the plan of
Divine history, and to experience this personal connexion with it in the
forms of Contrition and Confession. And thus these bodies of stone are
not mere servants of the architecture. They have a deep and particular
meaning of their own, the same meaning as the memorial-tomb brings to
expression with ever-increasing intensity from the Royal Tombs of St.
Denis onward; they speak of a _personality_. Just as Classical man
properly meant, with his perfected working-out of _superficial_ body
(for all the anatomical aspiration of the Greek artist comes to that in
the end), to exhaust the whole essence of the living phenomenon in and
by the rendering of its bounding surfaces, so Faustian man no less
logically found the most genuine, the only exhaustive, expression of his
life-feeling in the _Portrait_. The Hellenic treatment of the nude is
the great exceptional case; in this and in this only has it led to an
art of the high order.[328]
_Act_ and _Portrait_ have never hitherto been felt as constituting an
opposition, and consequently the full significance of their appearances
in art-history has never been appreciated. And yet it is in the conflict
of these two form-ideals that the contrast of two worlds is first
manifested in full. There, on the one hand, an existence is made to show
itself in the composition of the exterior structure; here, on the other
hand, the human interior, the Soul, is made to speak of itself, as the
interior of a church speaks to us through its façade or face. A mosque
had no face, and consequently the Iconoclastic movement of the Moslems
and the Paulicians—which under Leo III spread to Byzantium and beyond—
necessarily drove the portrait-element quite out of the arts of form, so
that thenceforward they possessed only a fixed stock of human
arabesques. In Egypt the face of the statue was equivalent to the pylon,
the face of the temple-plan; it was a mighty emergence out of the stone-
mass of the body, as we see in the “Hyksos Sphinx” of Tanis and the
portrait of Amenemhet III. In China the face is like a landscape, full
of wrinkles and little signs that mean something. But, for us, the
portrait is _musical_. The look, the play of the mouth, the pose of head
and hands—these things are a fugue of the subtlest meaning, a
composition of many voices that _sounds_ to the understanding beholder.
But in order to grasp the significance of the portraiture of the West
more specifically in contrast with that of Egypt and that of China, we
have to consider the deep change in the language of the West that began
in Merovingian times to foreshadow the dawn of a new life-feeling. This
change extended _equally_ over the old German and the vulgar Latin, but
it affected only the tongues spoken in the countries of the coming
Culture (for instance, Norwegian and Spanish, but not Rumanian). The
change would be inexplicable if we were to regard merely the spirit of
these languages and their “influence” of one upon another; the
explanation is in the spirit of the mankind that raised a mere way of
using words to the level of a symbol. Instead of _sum_, Gothic _im_, we
say _ich bin_, _I am_, _je suis_; instead of _fecisti_, we say _tu habes
factum_, _tu as fait_, _du habes gitân_; and again, _daz wîp_, _un
homme_, _man hat_. This has hitherto been a riddle[329] because families
of languages were considered as beings, but the mystery is solved when
we discover in the idiom the reflection of a soul. The Faustian soul is
here beginning to remould for its own use grammatical material of the
most varied provenance. The coming of this specific “I” is the first
dawning of that personality-idea which was so much later to create the
sacrament of Contrition and _personal_ absolution. This “ego habeo
factum,” the insertion of the auxiliaries “have” and “be” between a doer
and a deed, in lieu of the “feci” which expresses activated body,
replaces the world of bodies by one of functions between centres of
force, the static syntax by a dynamic. And this “I” and “Thou” is the
key to Gothic portraiture. A Hellenistic portrait is the type of an
attitude—a confession it is not, either to the creator of it or to the
understanding spectator. But our portraits depict something _sui
generis_, once occurring and never recurring, a life-history expressed
in a moment, a world-centre for which everything else is world-around,
exactly as the grammatical subject “I” becomes the centre of force in
the Faustian sentence.
It has been shown how the experience of the extended has its origin in
the living _direction_, _time_, _destiny_. In the perfected “being” of
the all-round nude body the depth-experience has been cut away, but the
“look” of a portrait leads this experience into the supersensuous
infinite. Therefore the Ancient art is an art of the near and tangible
and timeless, it prefers motives of brief, briefest, pause between two
movements, the last moment _before_ Myron’s athlete throws the discus,
or the first moment after Pæonius’s Nike has alighted from the air, when
the swing of the body is ending and the streaming draperies have not yet
fallen—attitudes devoid equally of duration and of direction, disengaged
from future and from past. “Veni, vidi, vici” is just such another
attitude. But in "I—came, I—saw, I—conquered" there is a becoming each
time in the very build of the sentence.
The depth-experience is a becoming and effects a become, signifies time
and evokes space, is at once cosmic and historical. Living direction
marches to the horizon as to the future. As early as 1230 the Madonna of
the St. Anne entrance of Notre-Dame dreams of this future: so, later,
the Cologne “Madonna with the Bean-blossom” of Meister Wilhelm. Long
before the Moses of Michelangelo, the Moses of Klaus Suter’s well in the
Chartreuse of Dijon meditates on destiny, and even the Sibyls of the
Sistine Chapel are forestalled by those of Giovanni Pisano in Sant’
Andrea at Pistoia (1300). And, lastly, there are the figures on the
Gothic tombs—how they rest from the long journey of Destiny and how
completely they contrast with the _timeless_ grave and gay that is
represented on the stelæ of Attic cemeteries.[330] The Western
portraiture is endless in every sense, for it begins to wake out of the
stone from about 1200 and it has become completely music in the 17th
Century. It takes its man not as a mere centre of the World-as-Nature
which as phenomenon receives shape and significance from his being, but,
above all, as a centre of the World-as-History. The Classical statue is
a piece of present “Nature” and nothing besides. The Classical poetry is
statuary in verse. Herein is the root of our feeling that ascribes to
the Greek an unreserved devotion to Nature. We shall never entirely
shake off the idea that the Gothic style as compared with the Greek is
“unnatural.” Of course it is, for it is _more than_ Nature; only we are
unnecessarily loath to realize that it is a deficiency in the Greek that
our feeling has detected. The Western form-language is richer—
portraiture belongs to Nature _and_ to history. A tomb by one of those
great Netherlanders who worked on the Royal graves of St. Denis from
1260, a portrait by Holbein or Titian or Rembrandt or Goya, is a
_biography_, and a self-portrait is a historical _confession_. To make
one’s confession is not to avow an act but to lay before the Judge the
inner history of that act. The act is patent, its roots the personal
secret. When the Protestant or the Freethinker opposes auricular
confession, it never occurs to him that he is rejecting merely the
outward form of the idea and not the idea itself. He declines to confess
to the priest, but he confesses to himself, to a friend, or to all and
sundry. The whole of Northern poetry is one outspoken confession. So are
the portraits of Rembrandt and the music of Beethoven. What Raphael and
Calderon and Haydn told to the priests, these men put into the language
of their works. One who is forced to be silent because the _greatness_
of form that can take in even the ultimate things has been denied him
... goes under like Hölderlin. Western man lives in the _consciousness_
of his becoming and his eyes are constantly upon past and future. The
Greek lives point-wise, ahistorically, somatically. No Greek would have
been capable of a genuine self-criticism. As the phenomenon of the nude
statue is the completely ahistoric copy of a man, so the Western self-
portrait is the exact equivalent of the “Werther” or “Tasso”
autobiography. To the Classical both are equally and wholly alien. There
is nothing so impersonal as Greek art; that Scopas or Polycletus should
make an image of himself is something quite inconceivable.
Looking at the work of Phidias, of Polycletus, or of any master later
than the Persian Wars, do we not see in the doming of the brow, the
lips, the set of the nose, the blind eyes, the expression of entirely
non-personal, plantlike, _soulless_ vitality? And may we not ask
ourselves whether this is the form-language that is capable even of
hinting at an inner experience? Michelangelo devoted himself with all
passion to the study of anatomy, but the phenomenal body that he works
out is always the expression of the activity of all bones, sinews and
organs of the _inside_; without deliberate intention, the living that is
under the skin comes out in the phenomenon. It is a physiognomy, and not
a system, of muscles that he calls to life. But this means at once that
the personal destiny and not the material body has become the starting-
point of the form-feeling. There is more psychology (and less “Nature”)
in the arm of one of his Slaves[331] than there is in the whole head of
Praxiteles’s Hermes.[332] Myron’s Discobolus,[333] on the other hand,
renders the exterior form purely as itself, without relation of any sort
to the inner organs, let alone to any “soul.” One has only to take the
best work of this period and compare it with the old Egyptian statues,
say the “Village Sheikh”[334] or King Phiops (Pepi), or again with
Donatello’s “David,”[335] to understand at once what it means to
recognize a body purely with reference to its material boundaries.
Everything in a head that might allow something intimate or spiritual to
become phenomenal the Greeks (and markedly this same Myron) most
carefully avoid. Once this characteristic has struck us, the best heads
of the great age sooner or later begin to pall. Seen in the perspective
of our world-feeling, they are stupid and dull, wanting in the
biographical element, devoid of any _destiny_. It was not out of caprice
that that age objected so strongly to votive images. The statues of
Olympian victors are representatives of a fighting attitude. Right down
to Lysippus there is not one single character-head, but only masks.
Again, considering the figure as a whole, with what skill the Greeks
avoid giving any impression that the head is the favoured part of the
body! That is why these heads are so small, so un-significant in their
pose, so un-thoroughly modelled. Always they are formed as a part of the
body like arms and legs, never as the seat and symbol of an “I.”
At last, even, we come to regard the feminine (not to say effeminate)
look of many of these heads of the 5th, and still more of the 4th,
Centuries[336] as the—no doubt unintentional—outcome of an effort to get
rid of personal character entirely. We should probably be justified in
concluding that the ideal facial type of this art—which was certainly
not an art for the people, as the later naturalistic portrait-sculpture
at once shows—was arrived at by rejecting all elements of an individual
or historical character; that is, by steadily narrowing down the field
of view to the pure Euclidean.
The portraiture of the great age of Baroque, on the contrary, applies to
historical distance all those means of pictorial counterpoint that we
already know as the fabric of their spatial distance—the brown-dipped
atmosphere, the perspective, the dynamic brush-stroke, the quivering
colour-tones and lights—and with their aid succeeds in treating body as
something intrinsically non-material, as the highly expressive envelope
of a space-commanding ego. (This problem the fresco-technique, Euclidean
that it is, is powerless to solve.) The whole painting has only one
theme, a soul. Observe the rendering of the hands and the brow in
Rembrandt (e.g., in the etching of Burgomaster Six or the portrait of an
architect at Cassel), and again, even so late, in Marées and Leibl[337]—
spiritual to the point of dematerializing them, visionary, lyrical.
Compare them with the hand and brow of an Apollo or a Poseidon of the
Periclean age!
The Gothic, too, had deeply and sincerely felt this. It had draped body,
not for its own sake but for the sake of developing in the ornament of
the drapery a form-language consonant with the language of the head and
the hands in a fugue of Life. So, too, with the relations of the voices
in counterpoint and, in Baroque, those of the “continuo” to the upper
voices of the orchestra. In Rembrandt there is always interplay of bass
melody in the costume and motives in the head.
Like the Gothic draped figure, the old Egyptian statue denies the
intrinsic importance of body. As the former, by treating the clothing in
a purely ornamental fashion, reinforces the expressiveness of head and
hands, so the latter, with a grandeur of idea never since equalled (at
any rate in sculpture), holds the body—as it holds a pyramid or an
obelisk—to a mathematical scheme and confines the personal element to
the head. The fall of draperies was meant in Athens to reveal the sense
of the body, in the North to conceal it; in the one case the fabric
becomes body, in the other it becomes music. And from this deep contrast
springs the silent battle that goes on in high-Renaissance work between
the consciously-intended and the unconsciously-insistent ideals of the
artist, a battle in which the first—anti-Gothic—often wins the
superficial, but the second—Gothic becoming Baroque—invariably wins the
fundamental victory.
II
The opposition of Apollinian and Faustian ideals of Humanity may now be
stated concisely. Act and Portrait are to one another as body and space,
instant and history, foreground and background, Euclidean and analytical
number, proportion and relation. The Statue is rooted in the ground,
Music (and the Western portrait _is_ music, soul woven of colour-tones)
invades and pervades space without limit. The fresco-painting is tied to
the wall, trained on it, but the oil-painting, the “picture” on canvas
or board or other table, is free from limitations of place. The
Apollinian form-language reveals only the become, the Faustian shows
above all a becoming.
It is for this reason that child-portraits and family groups are amongst
the finest and most intimately right achievements of the Western art. In
the Attic sculpture this motive is entirely absent, and although in
Hellenistic times the playful motive of the Cupid or Putto came into
favour, it was expressly as a being _different_ from the other beings
and not at all as a person growing or becoming. The child links past and
future. In every art of human representation that has a claim to
symbolic import, it signifies duration in the midst of phenomenal
change, the endlessness of Life. But the Classical Life exhausted itself
in the completeness of the moment. The individual shut his eyes to time-
distances; he comprehended in his thought the men like himself whom he
saw around him, but not the coming generations; and therefore there has
never been an art that so emphatically ignored the intimate
representation of children as the Greek art did. Consider the multitude
of child-figures that our own art has produced from early Gothic to
dying Rococo—and in the Renaissance above all—and find if you can in
Classical art right down to Alexander one work of importance that
intentionally sets by the side of the worked-out body of man or woman
any child-element with existence still before it.
Endless Becoming is comprehended in the idea of _Motherhood_, Woman as
Mother _is_ Time and _is_ Destiny. Just as the mysterious act of depth-
experience fashions, out of sensation, extension and world, so through
motherhood the bodily man is made an individual member of this world, in
which thereupon he _has_ a Destiny. All symbols of Time and Distance are
also symbols of maternity. _Care_ is the root-feeling of future, and all
care is motherly. It expresses itself in the formation and the idea of
Family and State and in the principle of Inheritance which underlies
both. Care may be either affirmed or denied—one can live care-filled or
care-free. Similarly, Time may be looked at in the light of eternity or
in the light of the instant, and the drama of begetting and bearing or
the drama of the nursing mother with her child may be chosen as the
symbol of Life to be made apprehensible by all the means of art. India
and the Classical took the first alternative, Egypt and the West the
second.[338] There is something of pure unrelated present in the Phallus
and the Lingam, and in the phenomenon of the Doric column and the Attic
statue as well. But the nursing Mother points into the future, and she
is just the figure that is entirely missing in the Classical art. She
could not possibly be rendered in the style of Phidias. One feels that
this form is opposed to the sense of the phenomenon.
But in the religious art of the West, the representation of Motherhood
is the noblest of all tasks. As Gothic dawns, the Theotokos of the
Byzantine changes into the Mater Dolorosa, the Mother of God. In German
mythology she appears (doubtless from Carolingian times only) as Frigga
and Frau Holle. The same feeling comes out in beautiful Minnesinger
fancies like Lady Sun, Lady World, Lady Love. The whole panorama of
early Gothic mankind is pervaded by something maternal, something caring
and patient, and Germanic-Catholic Christianity—when it had ripened into
full consciousness of itself and in one impulse settled its sacraments
and created its Gothic Style—placed _not the suffering Redeemer but the
suffering Mother_ in the centre of its world-picture. About 1250, in the
great epic of statuary of Reims Cathedral, the principal place in the
centre of the main porch, which in the cathedrals of Paris and Amiens
was still that of Christ, was assigned to the Madonna; and it was about
this time, too, that the Tuscan school at Arezzo and Siena (Guido da
Siena) began to infuse a suggestion of mother-love into the conventional
Byzantine Theotokos. And after that the Madonnas of Raphael led the way
to the purely human type of the Baroque, the mother in the sweetheart—
Ophelia, Gretchen—whose secret reveals itself in the glorious close of
Faust II and in its fusion with the early Gothic Mary.
As against these types, the imagination of the Greeks conceived
goddesses who are either Amazons like Athene or hetæræ like Aphrodite.
In the root-feeling which produced the Classical type of womanhood,
fruitfulness has a vegetal character—in this connexion as in others the
word σῶμα exhaustively expresses the meaning of the phenomenon. Think of
the masterpieces of this art, the three mighty female bodies of the East
Pediment of the Parthenon,[339] and compare with them that noblest image
of a mother, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. In the latter, all bodiliness
has disappeared. She is all distance and space. The Helen of the
“Iliad,” compared with Kriemhild, the motherly comrade of Siegfried, is
a courtesan, while Antigone and Clytæmnestra are Amazons. How strangely
even Æschylus passes over in silence the mother-tragic in Clytæmnestra!
The figure of Medea is nothing less than the mythic _inverse_ of the
Faustian “Mater Dolorosa”; her tragic is not one of future or children,
it is with her lover, the symbol of wholly-present life, that her
universe collapses. Kriemhild revenges her unborn children—it is _this_
future that has been murdered in her—but Medea revenges only a past
happiness. When the Classical sculpture, _late_ art that it is,[340]
arrives at secularizing[341] the pictures of the god, it creates the
antique ideal of female form in a Cnidian Aphrodite—merely a very
beautiful object, not a character or an ego but a piece of Nature. And
in the end Praxiteles finds the hardihood to represent a goddess
entirely naked. This innovation met with severe criticism, for it was
felt to be a sign of the decline of the Classical world-feeling;
suitable as it was to erotic symbolism, it was in sharp contradiction
with the dignity of the older Greek religion. But exactly then, too, a
portrait-art ventured to show itself, simultaneously with the invention
of a form that has never since been forgotten, the _bust_. Unfortunately
(here as elsewhere) art-research has made the mistake of discovering in
this the “beginnings” of “the” portrait. In reality, whereas a Gothic
visage speaks of an individual destiny, and even an Egyptian—in spite of
the rigid formalism of the figure—has the recognizable traits of the
individual person (since otherwise it could not serve as dwelling for
the higher soul of the dead, his _Ka_), the Greeks developed a taste for
typical representations just as the contemporary comedy produced
standard men and situations, to which any names whatever could be
affixed. The “portrait” is distinguishable not by personal traits but by
the label only. This is the general custom amongst children and
primitive men, and it is connected with name-magic. The name serves to
capture some essence of what is named and to bind it as an object which
thereupon becomes specific for every beholder. The statues of the
Tyrannicides,[342] the (Etruscan) statues of Kings in the Capitol and
the “iconic” portraits of victors at Olympia must have been portraits of
this sort, viz., not likenesses but figures with names. But now, in the
later phase, there was an additional factor—the tendency of the time
towards genre and applied art, which produced also the Corinthian
column. What the sculptors worked out was the _types_ of life’s stage,
the ἦθος which we mistranslate by character but which is really the
kinds and modes of public behaviour and attitude; thus there is “the”
grave Commander, “the” tragic poet, “the” passion-torn actor, “the”
absorbed philosopher. Here is the real key to the understanding of the
celebrated Hellenistic portraiture, for which the quite unjustifiable
claim has been set up that its products are expressions of a deep
spiritual life. It is not of much moment whether the work bears the name
of someone long dead—the Sophocles[343] was sculptured about 340—or of a
living man like the Pericles of Cresilas.[344] It was only in the 4th
Century that Demetrius of Alopeke began to emphasize individual traits
in the _external build_ of the man and Lysistratus the brother of
Lysippus to copy (as Pliny tells us) a plaster-of-paris cast of the
subject’s face without much subsequent modification. And how little such
portraiture is portraiture in Rembrandt’s sense should surely have been
obvious to anyone. The _soul_ is missing. The brilliant fidelity of
Roman busts especially has been mistaken for physiognomic depth. But
what really distinguishes the higher work from this craftsman’s and
virtuoso’s work is an intention that is the precise opposite of the
artistic intention of a Marées or a Leibl. That is, in such work the
important and significant is not _brought out_, it is _put in_. An
example of this is seen in the Demosthenes statue,[345] the artist of
which possibly saw the orator in life. Here the particulars of the body-
surface are emphasized, perhaps over-emphasized (“true to Nature,” they
called this then), but into the disposition so conceived he works the
character-type of the Serious Orator which we meet again on different
bases in the portraits of Æschines and Lysias at Naples. That is truth
to life, undoubtedly, but it is truth to life as Classical man felt it,
typical and impersonal. We have contemplated the result with _our_ eyes,
and have accordingly misunderstood it.
sp 2
III
In the oil-painting age that followed the end of the Renaissance, the
depth of an artist can be accurately measured by the content of his
portraits. To this rule there is hardly an exception. All forms in the
picture (whether single, or in scenes, groups or masses)[346] are
fundamentally felt as portraits; whether they are meant to be so or not
is immaterial, for the individual painter has no choice in the matter.
Nothing is more instructive than to observe how under the hands of a
real Faustian man even the Act transforms itself into a portrait-
study.[347] Take two German masters like Lucas Cranach and Tilmann
Riemenschneider who were untouched by any theory and (in contrast to
Dürer, whose inclination to æsthetic subtlety made him pliant before
alien tendencies) worked in unqualified naïveté. They seldom depict the
Act, and when they do so, they show themselves entirely unable to
concentrate their expression on the immediately-present plane-specified
bodiliness. The meaning of the human phenomenon, and therefore of the
representation of it, remains entirely in the head, and is consistently
physiognomical rather than anatomical. And the same may be said of
Dürer’s Lucrezia, notwithstanding his Italian studies and the quite
opposite intention. A Faustian _act_ is a contradiction in itself—hence
the character-heads that we so often see on feeble act-representations
(as far back as the Job of old French cathedral-sculpture) and hence
also the laborious, forced, equivocal character that arouses our dislike
in too manifest efforts to placate the Classical ideal—sacrifices
offered up not by the soul but by the cultivated understanding. In the
whole of painting after Leonardo there is not one important or
distinctive work that derives its meaning from the Euclidean being of
the nude body. It is mere incomprehension to quote Rubens here, and to
compare his unbridled dynamism of swelling bodies in any respect
whatever with the art of Praxiteles and even Scopas. It is owing
precisely to his splendid sensuality that he is so far from the _static_
of Signorelli’s bodies. If there ever was an artist who could put a
maximum of “becoming” into the beauty of naked bodies, who could treat
bodily floridness _historically_ and convey the (utterly un-Hellenic)
idea of an inexhaustible outflowing from within, it was Rubens. Compare
the horse’s head from the Parthenon pediment[348] with his horses’ heads
in the Battle of the Amazons,[349] and the deep metaphysical contrast
between the two conceptions of the same phenomenal element is felt at
once. In Rubens (recalling once more the characteristic opposition of
Apollinian and Faustian mathematics) the body is not magnitude but
relation. What matters is not the regimen of its external structure but
the fullness of life that streams out of it and the stride of its life
along the road from youth to age, where the Last Judgment that turns
bodies into flames takes up the motive and intertwines it in the
quivering web of active space. Such a synthesis is entirely un-
Classical; but even nymphs, when it is Corot who paints them, are
likewise shapes ready to dissolve into colour-patches reflecting endless
space. Such was _not_ the intention of the Classical artist when he
depicted the Act.
At the same time, the Greek form-ideal—the self-contained unit of being
expressed in sculpture—has equally to be distinguished from that of the
merely beautiful bodies on which painters from Giorgione to Boucher were
always exercising their cleverness, which are fleshly still-life, genre-
work expressing merely a certain gay sensuousness (e.g., “Rubens’s wife
in a fur cloak.”[350]) and in contrast with the high ethical
significance of the Classical Act have almost no symbolic force.[351]
Magnificent as these men’s painting is, therefore, they have not
succeeded in reaching the highest levels either of portraiture or of
space-representation in landscape. Their brown and their green and their
perspective lack “religiousness,” future, Destiny. They are masters only
in the domain of _elementary_ form, and when it has actualized this
their art is exhausted. It is they who constitute the substance-element
in the development-history of a great art. But when a great _artist_
pressed on beyond them to a form that was to be capable of embracing the
whole meaning of the world, he had necessarily to push to perfection the
treatment of the nude body if his world was the Classical, and _not_ to
do so if it was our North. Rembrandt never once painted an Act, in this
foreground sense, and if Leonardo, Titian, Velasquez (and, among
moderns, Menzel, Leibl, Marées and Manet) did so at all, it was very
rarely; and even then, so to say, they painted bodies as _landscapes_.
The portrait is ever the touchstone.[352]
But no one would ever judge masters like Signorelli, Mantegna,
Botticelli or even Verrocchio, by the quality of their portraits. The
equestrian statue of Can Grande[353] of 1330 is in a far higher sense a
portrait than the Bartolommeo Colleoni is; and Raphael’s portraits (the
best of which e.g., Pope Julius II were done under the influence of the
Venetian Sebastian del Piombo), could be ignored altogether in an
appreciation of his creative work. It is only with Leonardo that the
portrait begins to count seriously. Between fresco-technique and oil-
painting there is a subtle opposition. In fact, Giovanni Bellini’s
“Doge” (Loredano)[354] is the first great oil-portrait. Here too the
character of the Renaissance as a protest against the Faustian spirit of
the West betrays itself. The episode of Florence amounts to an attempt
to replace the Portrait of the Gothic style (as distinct from the
“ideal” portrait of late-Classical art, which was well known through the
Cæsar-busts) by the Act as human symbol. Logically, therefore, the
entire art of the Renaissance should be wanting in the physiognomic
traits. And yet the strong undercurrent of Faustian art-will kept alive,
not only in the smaller towns and schools of middle Italy, but also in
the instincts of the great masters themselves, a Gothic tradition that
was never interrupted. Nay, the physiognomic of Gothic art even made
itself master of the Southern nude body, alien as this element was. Its
creations are not bodies that speak to us through static definition of
their bounding surfaces. What we see is a _dumb-show_ that spreads from
the face over all parts of the body, and the appreciative eye detects in
this very _nudity_ of Tuscany a deep identity with the _drapery_ of the
Gothic. Both are envelopes, neither a limitation. The reclining nude
figures of Michelangelo in the Medici chapel are wholly and entirely the
visage and the utterance of a _soul_. But, above all, every head,
painted or modelled, became of itself a portrait, even when the heads
were of gods or saints. The whole of the portrait-work of A. Rossellino,
Donatello, Benedetto de Maiano, Mino da Fiesole, stands so near in
spirit to that of Van Eyck, Memlinc and the Early Rhenish masters as to
be often indistinguishable from theirs. There is not and there cannot
be, I maintain, any genuine Renaissance portraiture, that is, a
portraiture in which just that artistic sentiment which differentiates
the Court of the Palazzo Strozzi from the Loggia dei Lanzi and Perugino
from Cimabue applies itself to the rendering of a visage. In
architecture, little as the new work was Apollinian in spirit, it was
possible to create anti-Gothically, but in portraiture—no. It was too
specifically Faustian a symbol. Michelangelo declined the task:
passionately devoted as he was to his pursuit of a plastic ideal, he
would have considered it an abdication to busy himself with portraiture.
His Brutus bust is as little of a portrait as his de’ Medici, whereas
Botticelli’s portrait of the latter is actual, and frankly Gothic to
boot. Michelangelo’s heads are allegories in the style of dawning
Baroque, and their resemblance even to Hellenistic work is only
superficial. And however highly we may value the Uzzano bust of
Donatello[355]—which is perhaps the most important achievement of that
age and that circle—it will be admitted that by the side of the
portraits of the Venetians it hardly counts.
It is well worth noting that this overcoming of, or at least this desire
to overcome, the Gothic portrait with the Classical Act—the deeply
historical and biographical form by the completely ahistoric—appears
simultaneously with, and in association with, a decline in the capacity
for self-examination and artistic confession in the Goethian sense. The
true Renaissance man did not know what spiritual development meant. He
managed to live entirely outwardly, and this was the great good fortune
and success of the Quattrocento. Between Dante’s “Vita Nuova” and
Michelangelo’s sonnets there is no poetic confession, no self-portrait
of the high order. The Renaissance artist and humanist is the one single
type of Western man for whom the word “loneliness” remained unmeaning.
His life accomplished its course in the light of a _courtly_ existence.
His feelings and impressions were all public, and he had neither secret
discontents nor reserves, while the life of the great contemporary
Netherlanders, on the contrary, moved on in the shadow of their works.
Is it perhaps permissible to add that it was _because_ of this that that
other symbol of historic distance, duration, care and ponderation, _the
State_, also disappeared from the purview of the Renaissance, between
Dante and Michelangelo? In “fickle Florence”—whose great men one and all
were cruelly maltreated and whose incapacity for political creation
seems, by the side of other Western state-forms, to border on sheer
_bizarrerie_—and, more generally, wherever the anti-Gothic (which in
this connexion means anti-dynastic) spirit displayed itself vigorously
in art and public life, the State made way for a truly Hellenic
sorriness of Medicis, Sforzas, Borgias, Malatestas, and waste republics.
Only that city where sculpture gained _no_ foothold, where the Southern
music was at home, where Gothic and Baroque joined hands in Giovanni
Bellini and the Renaissance remained an affair of occasional
dilettantism, had an art of portraiture and therewith a subtle diplomacy
and a will to political duration—Venice.
IV
The Renaissance was born of defiance, and therefore it lacked depth,
width and sureness of creative instinct. It is the one and only epoch
which was more consistent in theory than in performance and—in sharp
contrast to Gothic and Baroque—the only one in which theoretically-
formulated intention preceded (often enough surpassed) the ability to
perform. But the fact that the individual arts were forced to become
satellites of a Classicist sculpture could not in the last analysis
alter the essence of them, and could only impoverish their store of
inward possibilities. For natures of medium size, the Renaissance theme
was not too big; it was attractive indeed from its very plainness, and
we miss consequently that Gothic wrestling with overpowering imprecise
problems which distinguishes the Rhenish and Flemish schools. The
seductive ease and clarity of the Renaissance rests very largely upon
evasion—the evasion of deeper reluctances by the aid of speciously
simple rule. To men of the inwardness of Memlinc or the power of
Grünewald such conditions as those of the Tuscan form-world would have
been fatal. They could not have developed their strength in and through
it, but only against it. Seeing as we do no weakness in the form of the
Renaissance masters, we are very prone to overrate their humanity. In
Gothic, and again in Baroque, an entirely great artist was fulfilling
his art in deepening and completing its language, but in Renaissance he
was necessarily only destroying it. “ So it was in the cases of
Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, the only really great men of Italy
after Dante. Is it not curious that between the masters of the Gothic—
who were nothing but silent workers in their art and yet achieved the
very highest that could be achieved within its convention and its field—
and the Venetians and Dutch of 1600—who again were purely workers—there
should be these three men who were not “sculptors” or "painters” but
_thinkers_, and thinkers who of necessity busied themselves not merely
with all the available means of artistic expression but with a thousand
other things besides, ever restless and dissatisfied, in their effort to
get at the real essence and aim of their being? Does it not mean—that in
the Renaissance they could not “find themselves”? Each in his own
fashion, each under his own tragic illusion, these three giants strove
to be “Classical” in the Medicean sense; and yet it was they themselves
who in one and another way—Raphael in respect of the line, Leonardo in
respect of the surface, Michelangelo in respect of the body—shattered
the dream. In them the misguided soul is finding its way back to its
Faustian starting-points. What they _intended_ was to substitute
proportion for relation, drawing for light-and-air effect, Euclidean
body for pure space. But neither they nor others of their time produced
a Euclidean-static sculpture—for that was possible once only, in Athens.
In all their work one feels a secret music, in all their forms the
movement-quality and the tending into distances and depths. They are on
the way, not to Phidias but to Palestrina, and they have come thither
not from Roman ruins but from the still music of the cathedral. Raphael
thawed the Florentine fresco, and Michelangelo the statue, and Leonardo
dreamed already of Rembrandt and Bach. The higher and more conscientious
the effort to actualize the ideas of the age, the more intangible it
became.
Gothic and Baroque, however, are something that _is_, while Renaissance
is only an ideal, unattainable like all ideals, that floats over the
will of a period. Giotto _is_ a Gothic, and Titian _is_ a Baroque,
artist. Michelangelo _would be_ a Renaissance artist, but fails.
Visibly, the plastic in him, for all its ambitiousness, is overpowered
by the pictorial spirit—and a pictorial spirit, too, in which the
Northern space-perspective is implicit. Even as soon as 1520 the
beautiful proportion, the pure rule—that is, the conscious Classical—are
felt as frigid and formal. The cornice which he put on to Sangallo’s
purely “Classical” façade of the Palazzo Farnese was no doubt, from the
strictly Renaissance standpoint, a disfigurement, but he himself and
many with him felt it to be far superior to the achievements of Greeks
and Romans.
As Petrarch was the first, so Michelangelo was the last Florentine who
gave himself up passionately to the Antique. But it was no longer an
entire devotion. The Franciscan Christianity of Fra Angelico, with its
subtle gentleness and its quiet, reflective piety—to which the Southern
refinement of ripe Renaissance work owes far more than has been
supposed[356]—came now to its end. The majestic spirit of the Counter-
Reformation, massive, animated, gorgeous, lives already in Michelangelo.
There is something in Renaissance work which at the time passed for
being “Classical” but is really only a deliberately noble dress for the
Christian-German world-feeling; as we have already mentioned, the
combination of round-arch and pillar, that favourite Florentine motive,
was of Syrian origin. But compare the pseudo-Corinthian column of the
15th Century with the columns of a real Roman ruin—remembering that
these ruins were known and on the spot! Michelangelo alone would
tolerate no half-and-half. Clarity he wanted and he would have. The
question of form was for him a religious matter; for him (and only for
him) it was all or nothing. And this is the explanation of the lonely
fearful wrestlings of this man, surely the unhappiest figure in our art;
of the fragmentary, the tortured, the unsatisfied, the _terribile_ in
his forms that frightened his contemporaries. The one half of his nature
drew him towards the Classical and therefore to sculpture—we all know
the effect produced upon him by the recently-discovered Laocoön. No man
ever made a more honest effort than he did to find a way with the chisel
into a buried world. Everything that he created he meant sculpturally—
sculpturally, that is, in a sense of the word that he and he alone stood
for. “The world, presented in the great Pan,” the element which Goethe
meant to render when he brought Helena into the Second Part of Faust,
the Apollinian world in all its powerful sensuous corporal presence—that
was what Michelangelo was striving with all his might to capture and to
fix in artistic being when he was painting the Sistine ceiling. Every
resource of fresco—the big contours, the vast surfaces, the immense
nearness of naked shapes, the materiality of colour—was here for the
last time strained to the utmost to liberate the paganism, the high-
Renaissance paganism, that was in him. But his second soul, the soul of
Gothic-Christian Dante and of the music of great expanses, is pulling in
the opposite sense; his scheme for the ensemble is manifestly
metaphysical in spirit.
His was the last effort, repeated again and again, to put the entirety
of the artist-personality into the language of stone. But the Euclidean
material failed him. His attitude to it was not that of the Greek. In
the very character of its being the chiselled statue contradicts the
world-feeling that tries to _find_ something by, and not to _possess_
something in, its art-works. For Phidias, marble is the cosmic stuff
that is crying for form. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea expresses
the very essence of that art. But for Michelangelo marble was the foe to
be subdued, the prison out of which he must deliver his idea as
Siegfried delivered Brunhilde. Everyone knows his way of setting to
work. He did not approach the rough block coolly from every aspect of
the intended form, but attacked it with a passionate frontal attack,
hewing into it as though into space, cutting away the material layer by
layer and driving deeper and deeper until his form emerged, while the
members slowly developed themselves out of the quarry. Never perhaps has
there been a more open expression of world-dread in the presence of the
become—Death—of the will to overpower and capture it in vibrant form.
There is no other artist of the West whose relation to the stone has
been that of Michelangelo—at once so intimate and so violently
masterful. It is his symbol of Death. In it dwells the hostile principle
that his daemonic nature is always striving to overpower, whether he is
cutting statues or piling great buildings out of it.[357] He is the one
sculptor of his age who dealt _only_ with marble. Bronze, as cast,
allows the modeller to compromise with pictorial tendencies, and it
appealed therefore to other Renaissance artists and to the softer
Greeks. The Giant stood aloof from it.
The instantaneous bodily _posture_ was what the Classical sculptor
created, and of this Faustian man was incapable. It is here just as it
is in the matter of love, in which Faustian man discovers, not primarily
the act of union between man and woman, but the great love of Dante and
beyond that the caring Mother. Michelangelo’s erotic—which is that of
Beethoven also—is as un-Classical as it is possible to be. It stands
_sub specie æternitatis_ and not under that of sense and the moment. He
produced acts—a sacrifice to the Hellenic idol—but the soul in them
denies or overmasters the visible form. He wills infinity as the Greek
willed proportion and rule, he embraces past and future as the Greek
embraced present. The Classical eye absorbs plastic form into itself,
but Michelangelo saw with the spiritual eye and broke through the
foreground-language of immediate sensuousness. And inevitably, in the
long run, he destroyed the conditions for this art. Marble became too
trivial for his will-to-form. He ceased to be sculptor and turned
architect. In full old age, when he was producing only wild fragments
like the Rondanini Madonna and hardly cutting his figures out of the
rough at all, the _musical_ tendency of his artistry broke through. In
the end the impulse towards contrapuntal form was no longer to be
repressed and, dissatisfied through and through with the art upon which
he had spent his life, yet dominated still by the unquenchable will to
self-expression, he shattered the canon of Renaissance architecture and
created the Roman Baroque. For relations of material and form he
substituted the contest of force and mass. He grouped the columns in
sheaves or else pushed them away into niches. He broke up the storeys
with huge pilasters and gave the façade a sort of surging and thrusting
quality. Measure yielded to melody, the static to the dynamic. And thus
Faustian music enlisted in its service the chief of all the other arts.
With Michelangelo the history of Western sculpture is at an end. What of
it there was after him was mere misunderstandings or reminiscences. His
real heir was _Palestrina_.
Leonardo speaks another language. In essentials his spirit reached
forward into the following century, and he was in nowise bound, as
Michelangelo was bound by every tie of heart, to the Tuscan ideal. He
alone had neither the ambition to be sculptor nor the ambition to be
architect. It was a strange illusion of the Renaissance that the
Hellenic feeling and the Hellenic cult of the exterior structure could
be got at by way of anatomical studies. But when Leonardo studied
anatomy it was not, as in Michelangelo’s case, foreground anatomy, the
_topography_ of human surfaces, studied for the sake of plastic, but
_physiology_ studied for the inward secrets. While Michelangelo tried to
force the whole meaning of human existence into the language of the
living body, Leonardo’s studies show the exact opposite. His much-
admired _sfumato_ is the first sign of the repudiation of corporeal
bounds, in the name of _space_, and as such it is the starting-point of
Impressionism. Leonardo begins with the inside, the spiritual space
within us, and not with the considered definition-line, and when he ends
(that is, if he ends at all and does not leave the picture unfinished),
the substance of colour lies like a mere breathing over the real
structure of the picture, which is something incorporeal and
indescribable. Raphael’s paintings fall into planes in which he disposes
his well-ordered groups, and he closes off the whole with a well-
proportioned background. But Leonardo knows only one space, wide and
eternal, and his figures, as it were, float therein. The one puts inside
a frame a sum of individual near things, the other a portion cut out of
the infinite.
_Leonardo discovered the circulation of the blood._ It was no
Renaissance spirit that brought him to that—on the contrary, the whole
course of his thought took him right outside the conceptions of his age.
Neither Michelangelo nor Raphael could have done it, for their painter’s
anatomy looks only at the form and position, not the function, of the
parts. In mathematical language, it is stereometry as against analysis.
Did not the Renaissance find it quite sufficient preparation for great
painted scenes to study _corpses_, suppressing the becoming in favour of
the become and calling on the dead to make Classical ἀταραξία accessible
to Northern creative energy? But Leonardo investigated the _life_ in the
body as Rubens did, and not the body-in-itself as Signorelli did. His
discovery was contemporary with that of Columbus, and the two have a
deep affinity, for they signify the victory of the infinite over the
material limitedness of the tangibly present. Would a Greek ever have
concerned himself with questions like theirs? The Greeks inquired as
little into the interior of their own organization as they sought for
the sources of the Nile; these were problems that might have jeopardized
the Euclidean constitution of their being. The Baroque, on the other
hand, is truly the _period of the great discoveries_. The very word
“discovery” has something bluntly un-Classical in it. Classical man took
good care not to take the cover, the material wrapping, off anything
cosmic, but to do _just this_ is the most characteristic impulse of a
Faustian nature. The discoveries of the New World, the circulation of
the blood, and the Copernican universe were achieved almost
simultaneously and, at bottom, are completely equivalent; and the
discovery of gunpowder (that is, the _long-range weapon_[358]) and of
printing (the _long-range script_) were little earlier.
Leonardo was a discoverer through-and-through, and discovery was the sum
in one word of his whole nature. Brush, chisel, dissecting-knife, pencil
for calculating and compasses for drawing—all were for him of equal
importance. They were for him what the Mariner’s Compass was for
Columbus. When Raphael completes with colour the sharp-drawn outline he
asserts the corporeal phenomenon in every brush-stroke, but Leonardo, in
his red-chalk sketches and his backgrounds reveals aerial secrets with
every line. He was the first, too, who set his mind to work on aviation.
To fly, to free one’s self from earth, to lose one’s self in the expanse
of the universe—is not this ambition Faustian in the highest degree? Is
it not in fact the fulfilment of our dreams? Has it never been observed
how the Christian legend became in Western painting a glorious
transfiguration of this motive? All the pictured ascents into heaven and
falls into hell, the divine figures floating above the clouds, the
blissful detachment of angels and saints, the insistent emphasis upon
freedom from earth’s heaviness, are emblems of soul-flight, peculiar to
the art of the Faustian, utterly remote from that of the Byzantine.
V
The transformation of Renaissance fresco-painting into Venetian oil-
painting is a matter of _spiritual history_. We have to appreciate very
delicate and subtle traits to discern the process of change. In almost
every picture from Masaccio’s “Peter and the Tribute Money” in the
Brancacci Chapel, through the soaring background that Piero della
Francesca gave to the figures of Federigo and Battista of Urbino,[359]
to Perugino’s “Christ Giving the Keys,”[360] the fresco manner is
contending with the invasive new form, though Raphael’s artistic
development in the course of his work on the Vatican “stanze” is almost
the only case in which we can see comprehensively the change that is
going on. The Florentine fresco aims at actuality in individual things
and produces a sum of such things in an architectonic setting. Oil-
painting, on the other hand, sees and handles with ever-growing sureness
extension as a whole, and treats all objects only as representatives
thereof. The Faustian world-feeling created the new technique that it
wanted. It rejected the drawing style, as, from Oresme’s time, co-
ordinate geometry rejected it. It transformed the linear perspective
associated with the architectural motive into a purely aerial
perspective rendered by imponderable gradations of tone. But the
condition of Renaissance art generally—its inability either to
understand its own deeper tendencies or to make good its anti-Gothic
principle—made the transition an obscure and difficult process. Each
artist followed the trend in a way of his own. One painted in oils on
the bare wall, and thereby condemned his work to perish (Leonardo’s
“Last Supper”). Another painted pictures as if they were wall-frescoes
(Michelangelo). Some ventured, some guessed, some fell by the way, some
shied. It was, as always, the struggle between hand and soul, between
eye and instrument, between the form willed by the artist and the form
willed by time—the struggle between Plastic and Music.
In the light of this, we can at last understand that gigantic effort of
Leonardo, the cartoon of the “Adoration of the Magi” in the Uffizi. It
is the grandest piece of artistic daring in the Renaissance. Nothing
like it was even imagined till Rembrandt. Transcending all optical
measures, everything then called drawing, outline, composition and
grouping, he pushes fearlessly on to challenge eternal space; everything
bodily floats like the planets in the Copernican system and the tones of
a Bach organ-fugue in the dimness of old churches. In the technical
possibilities of the time, so dynamic an image of distance could only
remain a torso.
In the Sistine Madonna, which is the very summation of the Renaissance,
Raphael causes the outline to draw into itself the entire content of the
work. It is the _last grand line_ of Western art. Already (and it is
this that makes Raphael the least intelligible of Renaissance artists)
convention is strained almost to breaking-point by the intensity of
inward feeling. He did not indeed wrestle with problems. He had not even
an inkling of them. But he brought art to the brink where it could no
longer shirk the plunge, and he lived to achieve the utmost
possibilities _within_ its form-world. The ordinary person who thinks
him flat simply fails to realize _what is going on_ in his scheme. Look
again, reader, at the hackneyed Madonna. Have you ever noticed the
little dawn-cloudlets, transforming themselves into baby heads, that
surround the soaring central figure?—these are the multitudes of the
unborn that the Madonna is drawing into Life. We meet these light clouds
again, with the same meaning, in the wondrous finale of Faust II.[361]
It is just that which does _not_ charm in Raphael, his sublime
unpopularity, that betrays the inner victory over the Renaissance-
feeling in him. We do understand Perugino at a glance, we merely think
we understand Raphael. His very line—that drawing-character that at
first sight seems so Classical—is something that floats in space,
supernal, Beethoven-like. In this work Raphael is the least obvious of
all artists, less obvious even than Michelangelo, whose intention is
manifest through all the fragmentariness of his works. In Fra
Bartolommeo the material bounding-line is still entirely dominant. It is
all foreground, and the whole sense of the work is exhaustively rendered
by the definition of bodies. But in Raphael line has become silent,
expectant, veiled, waiting in an extremity of tension for dissolution
into the infinite, into space and music.
Leonardo _is_ already over the frontier. The Adoration of the Magi _is_
already music. It is not a casual but a deeply significant circumstance
that in this work, as also in his St. Jerome,[362] he did not go beyond
the brown underpainting, the “Rembrandt” stage, the atmospheric brown of
the following century. For him, entire fullness and clearness of
intention was attained with the work in that state, and one step into
the domain of colour (for that domain was still under the metaphysical
limitations of the fresco style) would have destroyed the soul of what
he had created. Feeling, in all its depth, the symbolism of which oil-
painting was later to be the vehicle, he was afraid of the fresco
“slickness” (Fertigkeit) that must have ruined his idea. His studies for
this painting show how close was his relation to the Rembrandt
_etching_—an art whose home was also that of the art (unknown to
Florence) of counterpoint. Only it was reserved for the Venetians, who
stood outside the Florentine conventions, to achieve what he strove for
here, to fashion a colour-world subserving space instead of things.
For this reason, too, Leonardo (after innumerable attempts) decided to
leave the Christ-head in the “Last Supper” unfinished. The men of his
time were not even ripe for portraiture as Rembrandt understood the
word, the magistral building-up of a soul-history out of dynamic brush-
strokes and lights and tones. But only Leonardo was great enough to
experience this limitation as a Destiny. Others merely set themselves to
paint heads (in the modes prescribed by their respective schools) but
Leonardo—the first, here, to make the _hands_ also speak, and that with
a physiognomic maestria—had an infinitely wider purpose. His soul was
lost afar in the future, though his mortal part, his eye and hand,
obeyed the spirit of the age. Assuredly he was the freest of the three
great ones. From much of that which Michelangelo’s powerful nature
vainly wrestled with, he was already remote. Problems of chemistry,
geometrical analysis, physiology (Goethe’s “living Nature” was also
Leonardo’s), the technique of fire-arms—all were familiar to him. Deeper
than Dürer, bolder than Titian, more comprehensive than any single man
of his time, he was essentially the _artist of torsos_.[363]
Michelangelo the belated sculptor was so, too, but in another sense,
while in Goethe’s day that which had been unattainable for the painter
of the Last Supper had already been reached and overpassed. Michelangelo
strove to force life once more into a dead form-world, Leonardo felt a
new form-world in the future, Goethe divined that there could be no new
form-worlds more. Between the first and the last of these men lie the
ripe centuries of the Faustian Culture.
VI
It remains now to deal with the major characters of Western art during
the phase of accomplishment. In this we may observe the deep necessity
of all history at work. We have learned to understand arts as prime
phenomena. We no longer look to the operations of cause and effect to
give unity to the story of development. Instead, we have set up the idea
of the _Destiny_ of an art, and admitted arts to be _organisms_ of the
Culture, organisms which are born, ripen, age and _for ever_ die.
When the Renaissance—its last illusion—closes, the Western soul has come
to the ripe consciousness of its own strength and possibilities. It has
_chosen_ its arts. As a “late” period, the Baroque knows, just as the
Ionic had known, what the form-language of its arts has to mean. From
being a philosophical religion, art has to be a religious philosophy.
Great masters come forward in the place of anonymous schools. At the
culmination of every Culture we have the spectacle of a splendid _group
of great arts_, well-ordered and linked as a unit by the unity of the
prime symbol underlying them all. The _Apollinian group_, to which
belong vase-painting, fresco relief, the architecture of ranked columns,
the Attic drama and the dance, centres upon the naked statue. The
_Faustian group_ forms itself round the ideal of pure spatial infinity
and its centre of gravity is instrumental music. From this centre, fine
threads radiate out into all spiritual form-languages and weave our
infinitesimal mathematic, our dynamic physics, the propaganda of Jesuits
and the power of our famous slogan of “progress,” the modern machine-
technique, credit economics and the dynastic-diplomatic State—all into
one immense totality of spiritual expression. Beginning with the inward
rhythm of the cathedral and ending with Wagner’s “Tristan” and
“Parsifal,” the artistic conquest of endless space deploys its full
forces from about 1550. Plastic is dying with Michelangelo in Rome just
when planimetry, dominant hitherto, is becoming the least important
branch of our mathematic. At the same time, Venice is producing
Zarlino’s theories of harmony and counterpoint (1558) and the practical
method of the _basso continuo_—a perspective and an analysis of the
world of sound—and this music’s sister, the Northern mathematic of the
Calculus, is beginning to mount.
Oil-painting and instrumental music, the arts of space, are now entering
into their kingdom. So also—_consequently_, we say—the two essentially
material and Euclidean arts of the Classical Culture, viz., the all-
round statue and the strictly planar fresco, attain to their primacy at
the corresponding date of c. 600 B.C. And further, in the one and in the
other case, it is the painting that ripens _first_. For in either kind
painting on the plane is a less ambitious and more accessible art than
modelling in solid or composing in immaterial extension. The period
1550-1650 belongs as completely to oil-painting as fresco and vase-
painting belong to the 6th Century B.C. The symbolism of space and of
body, expressed in the one case by perspective and in the other by
proportion, are only indicated and not immediately displayed by
pictorial arts. These arts, which can only in each case produce their
respective prime-symbols (i.e., their possibilities in the extended) as
illusions on a painted surface, are capable indeed of denoting and
evoking the ideal—Classical or Western, as the case may be—but they are
not capable of _fulfilling_ it; they appear therefore in the path of the
“late” Culture as the ledges before the last summit. The nearer the
grand style comes to its point of fulfilment, the more decisive the
tendency to an ornamental language of inexorable clarity of symbolism.
The group of great arts is further simplified. About 1670, just when
Newton and Leibniz were discovering the Differential Calculus, oil-
painting had reached the limit of its possibilities. Its last great
masters were dead or dying—Velasquez 1660, Poussin 1665, Franz Hals
1666, Rembrandt 1669, Vermeer 1675, Murillo, Ruysdael and Claude Lorrain
1682—and one has only to name the few successors of any importance
(Watteau, Hogarth, Tiepolo) to feel at once the descent, the end, of an
art. In this time also, the great forms of _pictorial_ music expired.
Heinrich Schütz died in 1672, Carissimi in 1674, and Purcell in 1695—the
last great masters of the Cantata, who had played around image-themes
with infinite variety of vocal and instrumental colour and had painted
veritable pictures of fine landscape and grand legend-scene. With Lully
(1687) the heart of the heroic Baroque opera of Monteverde ceased to
beat. It was the same with the old “classical” sonata for orchestra,
organ and string trio, which was a development of image-themes in the
fugal style. Thereafter, the forms become those of final maturity, the
concerto grosso, the suite, and the three-part sonata for solo
instruments. Music frees itself from the relics of bodiliness inherent
in the human voice and becomes absolute. The theme is no longer an image
but a pregnant _function_, existent only in and by its own evolution,
for the fugal style as Bach practised it can only be regarded as a
ceaseless process of differentiation and integration. The victory of
pure music over painting stands recorded in the Passions which Heinrich
Schütz composed in his old age—the visible dawn of the new form-
language—in the sonatas of Dall’Abaco and Corelli, the oratorios of
Händel and the Baroque polyphony of Bach. Henceforth this music is _the_
Faustian art, and Watteau may fairly be described as a painter-Couperin,
Tiepolo as a painter-Händel.
In the Classical world the corresponding change occurred about 460, when
Polygnotus, the last of the great fresco-painters, ceded the inheritance
of the grand style to Polycletus and free sculpture in the round. Till
then—as late even as Polygnotus’s contemporaries Myron and the masters
of the Olympia pediment—the form-language of a purely planar art had
dominated that of statuary also; for, just as painting had developed its
form more and more towards the ideal of the _silhouette of colour with
internal drawing superposed_—to such an extent that at last there was
almost no difference between the painted relief and the flat picture—so
also the sculptor had regarded the frontal _outline_ as it presented
itself to the beholder as the true symbol of the Ethos, the cultural
type, that he meant his figure to represent. The field of the temple-
pediment constitutes a _picture_; seen from the proper distance, it
makes exactly the same impression as its contemporary the red-figure
vase-painting. In Polycletus’s generation the monumental wall-painting
gives place to the board-picture, the “picture” proper, in tempera or
wax—a clear indication that the great style has gone to reside
elsewhere. The ambition of Apollodorus’s shadow painting was not in any
sense what we call chiaroscuro and atmosphere, but sheer _modelling in
the round_ in the sculptor’s sense; and of Zeuxis Aristotle says
expressly that his work lacked “Ethos.” Thus, this newer Classical
painting with its cleverness and human charm is the equivalent of our
18th-Century work. Both lacked the inner greatness and both tried by
force of virtuosity to speak in the language of that single and final
Art which in each case stood for ornamentation in the higher sense.
Hence Polycletus and Phidias aline themselves with Bach and Händel; as
the Western masters liberated strict musical form from the executive
methods of the Painting, so the Greek masters finally delivered the
statue from the associations of the Relief.
And with this full plastic and this full music the two Cultures reach
their respective ends. A pure symbolism of mathematical rigour had
become possible. Polycletus could produce his “canon” of the proportions
of the human body, and his contemporary Bach the “Kunst der Fuge” and
“Wohltemperiertes Klavier.” In the two arts that ensued, we have the
last perfection of achievement that pure form saturated with meaning can
give. Compare the tone-body of Faustian instrumental music, and within
that system again the body of the strings (in Bach, too, the virtual
unity of the winds), with the bodies of Attic statuary. Compare the
meaning of the word “figure” to Haydn with its meaning to Praxiteles. In
the one case it is the figure of a rhythmic motive in a web of voices,
in the other the figure of an athlete. But in both cases the notion
comes from mathematics and it is made plain that the aim thus finally
attained is a union of the artistic and the mathematical spirit, for
analysis like music, and Euclidean geometry like plastic, have both come
to full comprehension of their tasks and the ultimate meaning of their
respective number-languages. The mathematics of beauty and the beauty of
mathematics are henceforth inseparable. The unending space of tone and
the all-round body of marble or bronze are _immediate_ interpretations
of the extended. They belong to number-as-relation and to number-as-
measure. In fresco and in oil-painting, in the laws of proportion and
those of perspective, the mathematical is only indicated, but the two
final arts _are_ mathematics, and on these peaks Apollinian art and
Faustian art are seen entire.
With the exit of fresco and oil-painting, the great masters of absolute
plastic and absolute music file on to the stage, man after man.
Polycletus is followed by Phidias, Pæonius, Alcamenes, Scopas,
Praxiteles, Lysippus. Behind Bach and Händel come Gluck, Stamitz, the
younger Bachs, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—in their hands an armoury of
wonderful and now long-forgotten instruments, a whole magician’s world
created by the discovering and inventing spirit of the West in the hope
of getting more and more tones and timbres for the service and
enhancement of musical expression—in their winds an abundance of grand,
solemn, ornate, dainty, ironic, laughing and sobbing forms of perfectly
regular structure, forms that no one now understands. In those days, in
18th-Century Germany especially, there was actually and effectively a
_Culture of Music_ that suffused all Life. Its type was Hoffmann’s
Kapellmeister Kreisler. To-day it is hardly even a memory.
And with the 18th Century, too, architecture died at last, submerged and
choked in the music of Rococo. On that last wonderful fragile growth of
the Western architecture criticism has blown mercilessly, failing to
realize that its origin is in the spirit of the fugue and that its non-
proportion and non-form, its evanescence and instability and sparkle,
its destruction of surface and visual order, are nothing else than a
victory of tones and melodies over lines and walls, the triumph of pure
space over material, of absolute becoming over the become. They are no
longer buildings, these abbeys and castles and churches with their
flowing façades and porches and “gingerbread” courts and their splendid
staircases, galleries, salons and cabinets; they are sonatas, minuets,
madrigals in stone, chamber-music in stucco, marble, ivory and fine
woods, cantilene of volutes and cartouches, cadences of fliers and
copings. The Dresden Zwinger is the most completely musical piece in all
the world’s architecture, with an ornamentation like the tone of an old
violin, an _allegro fugitivo_ for small orchestra.
Germany produced the great musicians _and therefore_ also the great
architects of this century (Poppelmann, Schlüter, Bähr, Naumann, Fischer
von Erlach, Dinzenhofer). In oil-painting she played no part at all: in
instrumental music, on the contrary, hers was the principal rôle.
VII
There is a word, “Impressionism,” which only came into general use in
Manet’s time (and then, originally, as a word of contempt like Baroque
and Rococo) but very happily summarizes the special quality of the
Faustian way of art that has evolved from oil-painting. But, as we
ordinarily speak of it, the idea has neither the width nor the depth of
meaning that it ought to have: we regard it as a sequel to or derivative
of the old age of an art which, in fact, belongs to it entirely and from
first to last. What is the imitation of an "impression"? Something
purely Western, something related to the idea of Baroque and even to the
unconscious purposes of Gothic architecture and diametrically opposed to
the deliberate aims of the Renaissance. Does it not signify the
tendency—the deeply-necessary tendency of a waking consciousness to feel
pure endless space as _the_ supreme and unqualified actuality, and all
sense-images as secondary and conditioned actualities "within it"? A
tendency that can manifest itself in artistic creations, but has a
thousand other outlets besides. Does not Kant’s formula "space as _a
priori_ form of perception" sound like a slogan for the whole movement
that began with Leonardo? Impressionism is the inverse of the Euclidean
world-feeling. It tries to get as far as possible from the language of
plastic and as near as possible to that of music. The effect that is
made upon us by things that receive and reflect light is made not
because the things _are_ there but as though they “in themselves” _are
not_ there. The things are not even bodies, but light-resistances in
space, and their illusive density is to be unmasked by the brush-stroke.
What is received and rendered is the _impression_ of such resistances,
which are tacitly evaluated as simple functions of a transcendent
extension. The artist’s inner eye penetrates the body, breaks the spell
of its material bounding surfaces and sacrifices it to the majesty of
Space. And with this impression, under its influence, he feels an
endless _movement-quality_ in the sensuous element that is in utter
contrast to the statuesque “Ataraxia” of the fresco. Therefore, there
was not and could not be any Hellenic impressionism; if there is one art
that _must_ exclude it on principle, it is Classical sculpture.
Impressionism is the comprehensive expression of a world-feeling, and it
must obviously therefore permeate the whole physiognomy of our “Late”
Culture. There is an impressionistic mathematic, which frankly and with
intent transcends all optical limitations. It is Analysis, as developed
after Newton and Leibniz, and to it belong the visionary images of
number-“bodies,” aggregates, and the multidimensional geometry. There is
again an impressionistic physics which “sees” in lieu of bodies systems
of mass-points—units that are evidently no more than constant relations
between variable efficients. There are impressionistic ethics, tragedy,
and logic, and even (in Pietism) an impressionistic Christianity.
Be the artist painter or musician, his art consists in creating with a
few strokes or spots or tones an image of inexhaustible content, a
microcosm meet for the eyes or ears of Faustian man; that is, in laying
the actuality of infinite space under enchantment by fleeting and
incorporeal indications of something objective which, so to say, forces
that actuality to become phenomenal. The daring of these arts of moving
the immobile has no parallel. Right from the later work of Titian to
Corot and Menzel, matter quivers and flows like a solution under the
mysterious pressure of brush-stroke and broken colours and lights. It
was in pursuit of the same object that Baroque music became “thematic”
instead of melodic and—reinforcing the “theme” with every expedient of
harmonic charm, instrumental colour, rhythm, and tempo—developed the
tone-picture from the imitative piece of Titian’s day to the leitmotiv-
fabric of Wagner, and captured a whole new world of feeling and
experience. When German music was at its culmination, this art
penetrated also into lyric poetry (German lyric, that is, for in French
it is impossible) and gave rise to a whole series of tiny masterpieces,
from Goethe’s “Urfaust” to Hölderlin’s last poems—passages of a few
lines apiece, which have never yet been noticed, let alone collected,
but include nevertheless whole worlds of experience and feeling. On a
small scale, it continually repeats the achievements of Copernicus and
Columbus. No other Culture possesses an ornament-language of such
dynamical impressiveness relatively to the means it employs. Every point
or stroke of colour, every scarce-audible tone releases some surprising
charm and continually feeds the imagination with fresh elements of
space-creating energy. In Masaccio and Piero della Francesca we have
_actual bodies_ bathed in air. Then Leonardo, the first, discovers the
transitions of _atmospheric_ light and dark, the soft edges, the
outlines that merge in the depth, the domains of light and shade in
which the individual figures are inseparably involved. Finally, in
Rembrandt, objects dissolve into mere coloured impressions, and forms
lose their specific humanness and become collocations of strokes and
patches that tell as elements of a passionate depth-rhythm. Distance, so
treated, comes to signify Future, for what Impressionism seizes and
holds is by hypothesis a unique and never-recurring instant, not a
landscape _in being_ but a fleeting moment of the _history_ thereof.
Just as in a Rembrandt portrait it is not the anatomical relief of the
head that is rendered, but the _second visage_ in it that is confessed;
just as the art of his brush-stroke captures not the eye but the look,
not the brow but the experience, not the lips but the sensuousness; so
also the impressionist picture in general presents to the beholder not
the Nature of the foreground but again a _second visage_, the look and
soul of the landscape. Whether we take the Catholic-heroic landscape of
Claude Lorrain, the “paysage intime” of Corot, the sea and river-banks
and villages of Cuyp and Van Goyen, we find always a portrait in the
physiognomic sense, something uniquely-occurring, unforeseen, brought to
light for the first and last time. In this love of the character and
physiognomy in landscape—just the motive that was unthinkable in fresco
art and permanently barred to the Classical—the art of portraiture
widens from the immediately human to the mediately human, to the
representation of the world as a part of the ego or the self-world in
which the painter paints himself and the beholder sees himself. For the
expansion of Nature into Distance reflects a _Destiny_. In this art of
tragic, daemonic, laughing and weeping landscapes there is something of
which the man of another Culture has no idea and for which he has no
organ. Anyone who in the presence of this form-world talks of
Hellenistic illusion-painting must be unable to distinguish between an
ornamentation of the highest order and a soulless imitation, an ape-
mimicry of the obvious. If Lysippus said (as Pliny tells us he said)
that he represented men as they appeared to him, his ambition was that
of a child, of a layman, of a savage, not that of an artist. The great
style, the meaning, the deep necessity, are absent; even the cave-
dwellers of the stone age painted thus. In reality, the Hellenistic
painters could do more when they chose. Even so late, the wall-paintings
of Pompeii and the “Odyssey” landscapes in Rome contain a _symbol_. In
each case it is a _group of bodies_ that is rendered—rocks, trees, even
“the Sea” as a body among bodies! There is no depth, but only
superposition. Of course, of the objects represented one or several had
necessarily to be furthest away (or rather _least near_) but this is a
mere technical servitude without the remotest affinity to the illumined
supernal distances of Faustian art.
VIII
I have said that oil-painting faded out at the end of the 17th Century,
when one after another all its great masters died, and the question will
naturally, therefore, be asked—is Impressionism (in the current narrow
sense) a creation of the 19th Century? Has painting lived, after all,
two centuries more? Is it still existing? But we must not be deceived by
appearances. Not only was there a dead space between Rembrandt and
Delacroix or Constable—for when we think of the living art of high
symbolism that was Rembrandt’s the purely decorative artists of the 18th
Century do not count—but, further, that which began with Delacroix and
Constable was, notwithstanding all technical continuity, something quite
different from that which had ended with Rembrandt. The new _episode_ of
painting that in the 19th Century (i.e., beyond the 1800 frontier and in
“Civilization”) has succeeded in awakening some illusion of a great
culture of painting, has itself chosen the word _Plein-air_
(_Freilicht_) to designate its special characteristic. The very
designation suffices to show the significance of the fleeting phenomenon
that it is. It implies the conscious, intellectual, cold-blooded
rejection of that for which a sudden wit invented the name “brown
sauce,” but which the great masters had, as we know, regarded as the one
truly metaphysical colour. On it had been built the painting-culture of
the schools, and especially the Dutch school, that had vanished
irretrievably in the Rococo. This brown, the symbol of a spatial
infinity, which had for Faustian mankind created a spiritual something
out of a mere canvas, now came to be regarded, quite suddenly, as an
offence to Nature. What had happened? Was it not simply this, that the
_soul_ for which this supernal colour was something religious, the sign
of wistfulness, the whole meaning of “Living Nature,” had quietly
slipped away? The materialism of a Western Cosmopolis blew into the
ashes and rekindled this curious brief flicker—a brief flicker of two
generations, for with the generation of Manet all was ended again. I
have (as the reader will recall) characterized the noble green of
Grünewald and Claude and Giorgione as the Catholic space-colour and the
transcendent brown of Rembrandt as the colour of the Protestant world-
feeling. On the other hand, _Plein-air_ and its new colour scale stand
for irreligion.[364] From the spheres of Beethoven and the stellar
expanses of Kant, Impressionism has come down again to the crust of the
earth. Its space is cognized, not experienced, seen, not contemplated;
there is tunedness in it, but not Destiny. It is the mechanical object
of physics and not the felt world of the pastorale that Courbet and
Manet give us in their landscapes. Rousseau’s tragically correct
prophecy of a “return to Nature” fulfils itself in this dying art—the
senile, too, return to Nature day by day. The modern artist is a
workman, not a creator. He sets unbroken spectrum-colours side by side.
The subtle script, the dance of brush-strokes, give way to crude
commonplaces, pilings and mixings and daubings of points, squares, broad
inorganic masses. The whitewasher’s brush and the trowel appear in the
painter’s equipment; the oil-priming of the canvas is brought into the
scheme of execution and in places left bare. It is a risky art,
meticulous, cold, diseased—an art for over-developed nerves, but
scientific to the last degree, energetic in everything that relates to
the conquest of technical obstacles, acutely assertive of programme. It
is the “satyric pendant” of the great age of oil-painting that stretches
from Leonardo to Rembrandt; it could only be at home in the Paris of
Baudelaire. Corot’s silvern landscapes, with their grey-greens and
browns, dream still of the spiritual of the Old Masters; but Courbet and
Manet conquer bare physical space, “factual” space. The meditative
discoverer represented by Leonardo gives way to the painting
experimentalist. Corot, the eternal child, French but not Parisian,
finds his transcendent landscapes anywhere and everywhere; Courbet,
Manet, Cézanne, portray over and over again, painfully, laboriously,
soullessly, the Forest of Fontainebleau, the bank of the Seine at
Argenteuil, or that remarkable valley near Arles. Rembrandt’s mighty
landscapes lie essentially in the universe, Manet’s near a railway
station. The plein-air painters, true megalopolitans, obtain as it were
specimens of the music of space from the least agitated sources of Spain
and Holland—from Velasquez, Goya, Hobbema, Franz Hals—in order (with the
aid of English landscapists and, later, the Japanese, “highbrows” all)
to restate it in empirical and scientific terms. It is natural science
as opposed to nature experience, head against heart, knowledge in
contrast to faith.
In Germany it was otherwise. Whereas in France it was a matter of
closing-off the great school, in Germany it was a case of catching up
with it. For in the picturesque style, as practised from Rottmann,
Wasmann, K. D. Friedrich and Runge to Marées and Leibl, an unbroken
evolution is the very basis of technique, and even a new-style school
requires a closed tradition behind it. Herein lies the weakness and the
strength of the last German painters. Whereas the French possessed a
continuous tradition of their own from early Baroque to Chardin and
Corot, whereas there was living connexion between Claude Lorrain and
Corot, Rubens and Delacroix, all the great Germans of the 18th Century
had been _musicians_. After Beethoven this music, without change of
inward essence, was diverted (one of the modalities of the German
Romantic movement) back into painting. And it was in painting that it
flowered longest and bore its kindliest fruits, for the portraits and
landscapes of these men are suffused with a secret wistful music, and
there is a breath of Eichendorff and Mörike left even in Thoma and
Böcklin. But a foreign teacher had to be asked to supply that which was
lacking in the native tradition, and so these painters one and all went
to Paris, where they studied and copied the old masters of 1670. So also
did Manet and his circle. But there was this difference, that the
Frenchmen found in these studies only reminiscences of something that
had been in their art for many generations, whereas the Germans received
fresh and wholly different impressions. The result was that, in the 19th
Century, the German arts of form (other than music) were a phenomenon
out of season—hasty, anxious, confused, puzzled as to both aim and
means. There was indeed no time to be lost. The level that German music
or French painting had taken centuries to attain had to be made good by
German painting in two generations. The expiring art demanded its last
phase, and this phase had to be reached by a vertiginous race through
the whole past. Hence the unsteadiness, in everything pertaining to
form, of high Faustian natures like Marées and Böcklin, an unsteadiness
that in German music with its sure tradition (think of Bruckner) would
have been impossible. The art of the French Impressionists was too
explicit in its programme and correspondingly too poor in soul to expose
them to such a tragedy. German literature, on the contrary, was in the
same condition as German painting; from Goethe’s time, every major work
was intended to found something _and_ obliged to conclude something.
Just as Kleist felt in himself both Shakespeare and Stendhal, and
laboured desperately, altering and discarding without end and without
result, to forge two centuries of psychological art into a unit; just as
Hebbel tried to squeeze all the problems from Hamlet to Rosmersholm into
one dramatic type; so Menzel, Leibl, and Marées sought to force the old
and new models—Rembrandt, Claude, Van Goyen, and Watteau, Delacroix,
Courbet and Manet—into a single form. While the little early interiors
of Menzel anticipated all the discoveries of the Manet circle and Leibl
not seldom succeeded where Courbet tried and failed, their pictures
renew the metaphysical browns and greens of the Old Masters and are
fully expressive of an inward experience. Menzel _actually_ re-
experienced and reawakened something of Prussian Rococo, Marées
something of Rubens, Leibl in his “Frau Gedon” something of Rembrandt’s
portraiture. Moreover, the studio-brown of the 17th Century had had by
its side a second art, the intensely Faustian art of etching. In this,
as in the other, Rembrandt is the greatest master of all time; this,
like the other, has something Protestant in it that puts it in a quite
different category from the work of the Southern Catholic painters of
blue-green atmospheres and the Gobelin tapestries. And Leibl, the last
artist in the brown, was the last great etcher whose plates possess that
Rembrandtesque infinity that contains and reveals secrets without end.
In Marées, lastly, there was all the mighty intention of the great
Baroque style, but, though Guéricault and Daumier were not too belated
to capture it in positive form, he—lacking just that strength that a
tradition would have given him—was unable to force it into the world of
painter’s actuality.
IX
The last of the Faustian arts died in “Tristan.” This work is the giant
keystone of Western music. Painting achieved nothing like this as a
finale—on the contrary, the effect of Manet, Menzel and Leibl, with
their combination of “free light” and resurrected old-master styles, is
weak.
“Contemporaneously,” in our sense, Apollinian art came to its end in
Pergamene sculpture. _Pergamum is the counterpart of Bayreuth._ The
famous altar itself,[365] indeed, is later, and probably not the most
important work of the epoch at that; we have to assume a century (330-
220 B.C.) of development now lost in oblivion. Nevertheless, all
Nietzsche’s charges against Wagner and Bayreuth, the “Ring” and
“Parsifal”—decadence, theatricalness and the like—could have been
levelled in the same words at the Pergamene sculpture. A masterpiece of
this sculpture—a veritable “Ring”—has come down to us in the
Gigantomachia frieze of the great altar. Here is the same theatrical
note, the same use of motives from ancient discredited mythology as
_points d’appui_, the same ruthless bombardment of the nerves, and also
(though the lack of inner power cannot altogether be concealed) the same
fully self-conscious force and towering greatness. To this art the
Farnese Bull and the older model of the Laocoön group certainly belong.
The symptom of decline in creative power is the fact that to produce
something round and complete the artist now requires to be emancipated
from form and proportion. Its most obvious, though not its most
significant, manifestation is the taste for the gigantic. Here size is
not, as in the Gothic and the Pyramid styles, the expression of inward
greatness, but the dissimulation of its absence. This swaggering in
_specious_ dimensions is common to all nascent Civilizations—we find it
in the Zeus altar of Pergamum, the Helios of Chares called the “Colossus
of Rhodes,” the architecture of the Roman Imperial Age, the New Empire
work in Egypt, the American skyscraper of to-day. But what is far more
indicative is the arbitrariness and immoderateness that tramples on and
shatters the conventions of centuries. In Bayreuth and in Pergamum, it
was the superpersonal Rule, the absolute mathematic of Form, the Destiny
immanent in the quietly-matured language of a great art, that was found
to be intolerable. The way from Polycletus to Lysippus and from Lysippus
to the sculptors of the groups of Gauls[366] is paralleled by the way
from Bach, by Beethoven, to Wagner. The earlier artists felt themselves
masters, the later uneasy slaves, of the great form. While even
Praxiteles and Haydn were able to speak freely and gaily within the
limits of the strictest canon, Lysippus and Beethoven could only produce
by straining their voices. The sign of all living art, the pure harmony
of “will,” “must” and “can,” the self-evidence of the aim, the un-self-
consciousness of the execution, the unity of the art and the Culture—all
that is past and gone. In Corot and Tiepolo, Mozart and Cimarosa, there
is still a real mastery of the mother-tongue. After them, the process of
mutilation begins, but no one is conscious of it because no one now can
speak it fluently. Once upon a time, Freedom and Necessity were
identical; but now what is understood by freedom is in fact
indiscipline. In the time of Rembrandt or Bach the “failures” that we
know only too well were quite unthinkable. The Destiny of the form lay
in the race or the school, not in the private tendencies of the
individual. Under the spell of a great tradition full achievement is
possible even to a minor artist, because the living art brings him in
touch with his task and the task with him. To-day, these artists can no
longer perform what they intend, for intellectual operations are a poor
substitute for the trained instinct that has died out. All of them have
experienced this. Marées was unable to complete any of his great
schemes. Leibl could not bring himself to let his late pictures go, and
worked over them again and again to such an extent that they became cold
and hard. Cézanne and Renoir left work of the best quality unfinished
because, strive as they would, they could do no more. Manet was
exhausted after he had painted thirty pictures, and his “Shooting of the
Emperor Maximilian,” in spite of the immense care that is visible in
every item of the picture and the studies for it, hardly achieved as
much as Goya managed without effort in its prototype the “shootings of
the 3rd of May.” Bach, Haydn, Mozart and a thousand obscure musicians of
the 18th Century could rapidly turn out the most finished work as a
matter of routine, but Wagner knew full well that he could only reach
the heights by concentrating all his energy upon “getting the last
ounce” out of the best moments of his artistic endowment.
Between Wagner and Manet there is a deep relationship, which is not,
indeed, obvious to everyone but which Baudelaire with his unerring flair
for the decadent detected at once. For the Impressionists, the end and
the culmination of art was the conjuring up of a world in space out of
strokes and patches of colour, and this was just what Wagner achieved
with three bars. A whole world of soul could crowd into these three
bars. Colours of starry midnight, of sweeping clouds, of autumn, of the
day dawning in fear and sorrow, sudden glimpses of sunlit distances,
world-fear, impending doom, despair and its fierce effort, hopeless
hope—all these impressions which no composer before him had thought it
possible to catch, he could paint with entire distinctness in the few
tones of a motive. Here the contrast of Western music with Greek plastic
has reached its maximum. Everything merges in bodiless infinity, no
longer even does a linear melody wrestle itself clear of the vague tone-
masses that in strange surgings challenge an imaginary space. The motive
comes up out of dark terrible deeps. It is flooded for an instant by a
flash of hard bright sun. Then, suddenly, it is so close upon us that we
shrink. It laughs, it coaxes, it threatens, and anon it vanishes into
the domain of the strings, only to return again out of endless
distances, faintly modified and in the voice of a single oboe, to pour
out a fresh cornucopia of spiritual colours. Whatever this is, it is
neither painting nor music, in any sense of these words that attaches to
previous work in the strict style. Rossini was asked once what he
thought of the music of the “Huguenots”; “Music?” he replied. “I heard
nothing resembling it.” Many a time must this judgment have been passed
at Athens on the new painting of the Asiatic and Sicyonian schools, and
opinions not very different must have been current in Egyptian Thebes
with regard to the art of Cnossus and Tell-el-Amarna.
All that Nietzsche says of Wagner is applicable, also, to Manet.
Ostensibly a return to the elemental, to Nature, as against
contemplation-painting (Inhaltsmalerei) and abstract music, their art
really signifies a concession to the barbarism of the Megalopolis, the
beginning of dissolution sensibly manifested in a mixture of brutality
and refinement. As a step, it is necessarily the last step. An
artificial art has no further organic future, it is the mark of the end.
And the bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the
arts of form of the West. The crisis of the 19th Century was the death-
struggle. Like the Apollinian, the Egyptian and every other, the
Faustian art dies of senility, having actualized its inward
possibilities and fulfilled its mission within the course of its
Culture.
What is practised as art to-day—be it music after Wagner or painting
after Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel—is impotence and falsehood. Look where
one will, can one find the great personalities that would justify the
claim that there is still an art of determinate necessity? Look where
one will, can one find the _self-evidently necessary_ task that awaits
such an artist? We go through all the exhibitions, the concerts, the
theatres, and find only industrious cobblers and noisy fools, who
delight to produce something for the market, something that will “catch
on” with a public for whom art and music and drama have long ceased to
be spiritual necessities. At what a level of inward and outward dignity
stand to-day that which is called art and those who are called artists!
In the shareholders’ meeting of any limited company, or in the technical
staff of any first-rate engineering works there is more intelligence,
taste, character and capacity than in the whole music and painting of
present-day Europe. There have always been, for one great artist, a
hundred superfluities who practised art, but so long as a great
tradition (and _therefore_ great art) endured even these achieved
something worthy. We can forgive this hundred for existing, for in the
ensemble of the tradition they were the footing for the individual great
man. But to-day we have only these superfluities, and ten thousand of
them, working art “for a living” (as if that were a justification!). One
thing is quite certain, that to-day every single art-school could be
shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all
we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in
order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year
200. There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions
of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of “the new style,” of
“unsuspected possibilities,” theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable
artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells—the “Literary Man” in
the Poet’s place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism which the art-
trade has organized as a “phase of art-history,” thinking and feeling
and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists
and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who
invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. What do
we possess to-day as "art"? A faked music, filled with artificial
noisiness of massed instruments; a faked painting, full of idiotic,
exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of
the form-wealth of millennia some new “style” which is in fact no style
at all since everyone does as he pleases; a lying plastic that steals
from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently. Yet this and only this,
the taste of the “man of the world,” can be accepted as the expression
and sign of the age; everything else, everything that “sticks to” old
ideals, is for provincial consumption.
The grand Ornamentation of the past has become as truly a dead language
as Sanskrit or Church Latin.[367] Instead of its symbolism being
honoured and obeyed, its mummy, its legacies of perfected forms, are put
into the pot anyhow, and recast in wholly inorganic forms. Every modern
age holds change to be development, and puts revivals and fusions of old
styles in the place of real becoming. Alexandria also had its Pre-
Raphaelite comedians with their vases, chairs, pictures and theories,
its symbolists, naturalists and expressionists. The fashion at Rome was
now Græco-Asiatic, now Græco-Egyptian, now (after Praxiteles) neo-Attic.
The relief of the XIXth Dynasty—the modern age in the Egyptian Culture—
that covered the monstrous, meaningless, inorganic walls, statues and
columns, seems like a sheer parody of the art of the Old Kingdom. The
Ptolemaic Horus-temple of Edfu is quite unsurpassed in the way of
vacuous eclecticism—so far, for we are only at the beginning of our own
development in this line, showy and assertive as the style of our
streets and squares already is.
In due course, even the strength to wish for change fades out. Rameses
the Great—so soon—appropriated to himself buildings of his predecessors
by cutting out their names and inserting his own in the inscriptions. It
was the same consciousness of artistic impotence that led Constantine to
adorn his triumphal arch in Rome with sculptures taken from other
buildings; but Classical craftsmanship had set to work long before
Constantine—as early, in fact, as 150—on the business of copying old
masterpieces, not because these were understood and appreciated in the
least, but because no one was any longer capable of producing originals.
It must not be forgotten that these copyists were the _artists_ of their
time; their work therefore (done in one style or another according to
the moment’s fashion) represent the maximum of creative power then
available. All the Roman portrait statues, male and female, go back for
posture and mien to a very few Hellenic types; these, copied more or
less true to style, served for torsos, while the heads were executed as
“Likenesses” by simple craftsmen who possessed the knack. The famous
statue of Augustus in armour, for example, is based on the Spearman of
Polycletus, just as—to name the first harbingers of the same phase in
our own world—Lenbach rests upon Rembrandt and Makart upon Rubens. For
1500 years (Amasis I to Cleopatra) Egypticism piled portrait on portrait
in the same way. Instead of the steady development that the great age
had pursued through the Old and Middle Kingdoms, we find _fashions_ that
change according to the taste of this or that dynasty. Amongst the
discoveries at Turfan are relics of Indian dramas, contemporary with the
birth of Christ, which are similar in all respects to the Kalidasa of a
later century. Chinese painting as we know it shows not an evolution but
an up-and-down of fashions for more than a thousand years on end; and
this unsteadiness must have set in as early as the Han period. The final
result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms
which we see to-day in Indian, Chinese, and Arabian-Persian art.
Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical
compositions—all is patternwork.[368] We cease to be able to date
anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its
ornamentation. So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures.
-----
Footnote 272:
_Die bildenden Künste._ The expression is a standard one in German,
but unfamiliar in English. Ordinarily, however, “die bildenden Künste”
(shaping arts, arts of form) are contrasted with “die redenden Künste”
(speaking arts)—music, as giving utterance rather than spatial form to
things, being counted among the latter.—_Tr._
Footnote 273:
As soon as the word, which is a transmission-agent of the
understanding, comes to be used as the expression-agent of an art, the
waking consciousness ceases to express or to take in a thing
integrally. Not to mention the _read_ word of higher Cultures—the
medium of literature proper—even the spoken word, when used in any
artificial sense, separates hearing from understanding, for the
ordinary meaning of the word also takes a hand in the process and, as
this art grows in power, the wordless arts themselves arrive at
expression-methods in which the motives are joined to word-meanings.
Thus arises the _Allegory_, or motive that _signifies a word_, as in
Baroque sculpture after Bernini. So, too, painting very often develops
into a sort of painting-writing, as in Byzantium after the second
Nicene Council (787) which took from the artist his freedom of choice
and arrangement. This also is what distinguishes the arias of Gluck,
in which the melody grew up out of the meaning of the libretto, from
those of Alessandro Scarlatti, in which the texts are in themselves of
no significance and mostly serve to carry the voices. The high-Gothic
counterpoint of the 13th Century is entirely free from any connexion
with words: it is a _pure architecture of human voices_ in which
several texts, Latin and vernacular, sacred and secular, were sung
together.
Footnote 274:
Our pedantic method has given us an art-history that excludes music-
history; and while the one has become a normal element of higher
education, the other has remained an affair solely for the expert. It
is just as though one tried to write a history of Greece without
taking Sparta into account. The result is a theory of “Art” that is a
pious fraud.
Footnote 275:
This sentence is not in the original. It has been inserted, and the
following sentence modified, for the sake of clarity.—_Tr._
Footnote 276:
See Vol. II, p. 110. The aspect of the streets of Old Egypt may have
been very similar to this, if we can draw conclusions from tesseræ
discovered in Cnossus (see H. Bossert, _Alt Kreta_ (1921), T. 14). And
the Pylon is an undoubted and genuine façade. (Such tesseræ, bearing
pictures of windowed houses, are illustrated in Art. “_Ægean
Civilization_,” Ency. Brit., XI Edition, Vol. I, p. 251, plate IV,
fig. 1.—_Tr._).
Footnote 277:
Ghiberti has not outgrown the Gothic, nor has even Donatello; and
already in Michelangelo the feeling is Baroque, i.e., musical.
Footnote 278:
The struggle to fix the problem is visible in the series of “Apollo-
figures.” See Déonna, _Les Apollons archaïques_ (1909).
Footnote 279:
Woermann, _Geschichte der Kunst, I_ (1915), p. 236. The first tendency
is seen in the Samian Hera of Cheramues and the persistent turning of
columns into caryatids; the second in the Delian figure dedicated to
Artemis by Nicandra, with its relation to the oldest metope-technique.
Footnote 280:
Miletus was in a particular relation with Egypt through Naucratis.—
_Tr._
Footnote 281:
Most of the works are pediment-groups or metopes. But even the Apollo-
figures and the “Maidens” of the Acropolis could not have stood free.
Footnote 282:
V. Salis, _Kunst der Griechen_ (1919), pp. 47, 98 et seq.
Footnote 283:
The decisive preference of the _white_ stone is itself significant of
the _opposition_ of Renaissance to Classical feeling.
Footnote 284:
All Greek scales are capable of reduction to “tetrachords” or four-
note scales of which the form E—note—note—A is typical. In the
diatonic the unspecified inner notes are F, G; in the chromatic they
are F, F sharp; and in the enharmonic they are E half-sharp, F. Thus,
the chromatic and enharmonic scales do not provide additional notes as
the modern chromatic does, but simply displace the inner members of
the scale downwards, altering the proportionate distances between the
same given total. In Faustian music, on the contrary, the meaning of
“enharmonic” is simply _relational_. It is applied to a change, say
from A flat to G sharp. The difference between these two is not a
quarter-tone but a “very small” interval (theory and practice do not
even agree as to which note is the higher, and in tempered instruments
with standardized scales the physical difference is eliminated
altogether). While a note is being sounded, even without any physical
change in it, its harmonic co-ordinates (i.e., substantially, the key
of the harmony) may alter, so that henceforth the note, from A flat,
has become G sharp.—_Tr._
Footnote 285:
In the same way the whole of Russian music appears to us infinitely
mournful, but real Russians assure us that it is not at all so for
themselves.
Footnote 286:
See articles under these headings in Grove’s “Dictionary of Music.”—
_Tr._
Footnote 287:
See Vol. II, p. 238.
Footnote 288:
In Baroque music the word “imitation” means something quite different
from this, viz., the exact repetition of a motive in a new colouring
(starting from a different note of the scale).
Footnote 289:
For all that survives performance is the notes, and these speak only
to one who still knows and can manage the tone and technique of the
expression-means appropriate to them.
Footnote 290:
See articles _Fauxbourdon_, _Discant_ and _Gimel_ in Grove’s
“Dictionary of Music.”—_Tr._
Footnote 291:
Note that Oresme was a contemporary of Machault and Philippe de Vitry,
in whose generation the rules and prohibitions of strict counterpoint
were definitively established.
Footnote 292:
See p. 19 and Vol. II, p. 357.
Footnote 293:
Even the first great troubadour, Guilhem of Poitiers, though a
reigning sovereign, made it his ambition to be regarded as a
“professional,” as we should say.—_Tr._
Footnote 294:
See also Vol. II, p. 365.
Footnote 295:
See p. 74.
Footnote 296:
A movement in sonata form consists essentially of (_a_) First Subject;
(_b_) Second Subject (in an allied key); (_c_) Working-out, or free
development of the themes grouped under (_a_) and (_b_); and (_d_)
Recapitulation, in which the two subjects are repeated in the key of
the tonic.
The English usage is to consider (_a_) and (_b_) with the bridge or
modulation connecting them, together as the “Exposition,” and the form
is consequently designated “three-part.”—_Tr._
Footnote 297:
Einstein, _Gesch. der Musik_, p. 67.
Footnote 298:
Coysevox lived 1640-1720. Much of the embellishment and statuary of
Versailles is his work.—_Tr._
Footnote 299:
See Vol. II, pp. 357 et seq., 365 et seq.
Footnote 300:
It was not merely national-Italian (for that Italian Gothic was also):
it was purely Florentine, and even within Florence the ideal of one
class of society. That which is called Renaissance in the Trecento has
its centre in Provence and particularly in the papal court at Avignon,
and is nothing whatever but the southern type of chivalry, that which
prevailed in Spain and Upper Italy and was so strongly influenced by
the Moorish polite society of Spain and Sicily.
Footnote 301:
Renaissance ornament is merely embellishment and self-conscious "art"-
inventiveness. It is only with the frank and outspoken Baroque that we
return to the necessities of high symbolism.
Footnote 302:
Jacob Burckhardt, _Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien_. (An English
translation was published in 1878.—_Tr._)
Footnote 303:
Inclusive of Paris itself. Even as late as the fifteenth century
Flemish was as much spoken there as French, and the architectural
appearance of the city in its oldest parts connects it with Bruges and
Ghent and not with Troyes and Poitiers.
Footnote 304:
A. Schmarsow, _Gotik in der Renaissance_ (1921); B. Haendke, _Der
niederl. Einfluss auf die Malerei Toskana-Umbriens_ (_Monatshefte für
Kunstwissensch._ 1912).
Footnote 305:
The colossal statue of Bartolommeo Colleone at Venice.—_Tr._
Footnote 306:
Svoboda, _Römische und Romanische Paläste_ (1919); Rostowzew,
_Pompeianische Landschaften und Römische Villen_ (_Röm. mitt._, 1904).
Footnote 307:
Environs of Rome. They date from the late 17th and the mid-18th
centuries respectively; the gardens of the V. Ludovisi were laid out
by Le Nôtre.—_Tr._
Footnote 308:
That is, the expression for the sum of a convergent series beyond any
specified term.—_Tr._
Footnote 309:
See Vol. II, pp. 117 et seq.
Footnote 310:
In Classical painting, light and shadow were first consistently
employed by Zeuxis, but _only for the shading of the thing itself_,
for the purpose of freeing the modelling of the body painted from the
restriction of the relief-manner, i.e., without any reference to the
relation of shadows to the _time of day_. But even with the earliest
of the Netherlanders light and shade are already _colour-tones_ and
affected by atmosphere.
Footnote 311:
The brilliant _polish_ of the stone in Egyptian art has a deep
symbolic significance of much the same kind. Its effect is to
dematerialize the statue by causing the eye to glide along its
exterior. Hellas on the contrary manifests, by its progress from
“Poros” stone, through Naxian, to the translucent Parian and Pentelic
marbles, how determined it is that the look shall sink right into the
material essence of the body.
Footnote 312:
See Vol. II, pp. 314 et seq.
Footnote 313:
The life and teaching of St. Francis were, morally and æsthetically
alike, the centres of inspiration for Cimabue, Giotto and the Italian
Gothic generally.—_Tr._
Footnote 314:
Der nordische im Grenzenlose schweifende Pantheismus.
Footnote 315:
On the following page is a translation of this chorus.—_Tr._
_Raphael._ The Sun outsings the brother-spheres
in olden rivalry of song,
and thunder-girt pursues the years
the preordainèd path along.
’Tis from his face the angels gain
their strength; but scan it no one may.
Thought is outranged and Works remain
sublime as on Creation-Day.
_Gabriel._ And, swift beyond description, flies
the circling scene of land and sea,
in alternance of Paradise
with dark and awful Mystery.
The ocean swings, the billows sway,
back from the cliff the waves are hurled.
But cliff and waves alike obey
the mightier movement of the World.
_Michael._ And storms arise and swell and ebb
o’er sea and mountain, lake and field,
in wild contention weave a web
of forces purposed though concealed.
The lightning is thy flaming sword,
the thunder veils thee on thy way,
yet ever spare thy envoys, Lord,
the gentle changing of thy day.
_The Three._ ’Tis from thy face the angels gain
their strength, but scan it no one may.
Beyond all thought thy Works remain
sublime as on Creation-Day.
Footnote 316:
His portrait of Frau Gedon, all steeped in brown, is the last _Old-
Master portrait_ of the West; it is painted entirely in the style of
the past.
Footnote 317:
The strings in the Orchestra represent, as a class, the colours of the
distance. The bluish green of Watteau is found already in the
Neapolitan _bel canto_ of about 1700, in Couperin, in Mozart and
Haydn; and the brown of the Dutch in Corelli, Handel and Beethoven.
The woodwind, too, calls up illumined distances. Yellow and red, on
the other hand, the colours of nearness, the _popular_ colours, are
associated with the brass timbre, the effect of which is corporeal
often to the point of vulgarity. The tone of an old fiddle is entirely
bodiless. It is worth remarking that the Greek music, insignificent as
it is, underwent an evolution from the Dorian lyre to the Ionian flute
(aulos and syrinx) and that even in the time of Pericles strict
Dorians blamed this as an enervating and lowering tendency.
(The horn is an exception, and is always treated as an exception, to
the brass generally. Its place is with the woodwind, and its colours
are those of the distance.—_Tr._)
Footnote 318:
The use of gold in this way, viz., to add brilliancy to bodies
standing freely in the open, has nothing in common with its employment
in Magian art to provide glittering backgrounds for figures seen in
dim interiors.
Footnote 319:
The Chinese also attach enormous importance to the patinas of their
old bronzes, which, owing to the different alloys used and the strong
chemical characters of the soil, are of infinite variety and natural
intricacy. They too, in later phases, have come to the production of
artificial patina.—_Tr._
Footnote 320:
Pausanias, it should be observed, was neither by date nor by origin a
Greek.—_Tr._
Footnote 321:
“In places, as you stand on it, the great towered and embattled
enceinte produces an illusion: it looks as if it were still equipped
and defended. One vivid challenge at any rate it flings down before
you; it compels you to make up your mind on the matter of restoration.
For myself, I have no hesitation; I prefer in every case the ruined,
however ruined, to the reconstructed however splendid.... After that,
I am free to say that the restoration of Carcassonne is a splendid
achievement.” (Henry James, “A Little Tour in France,” xxiii.) Yet if
ever there was a reconstruction carried out with piety and scholarship
as well as skill, it was Viollet-le-Duc’s reconstruction of these old
town-walls.—_Tr._
Footnote 322:
Home, an English philosopher of the 18th Century, declared in a
lecture on English parks that Gothic ruins represented the triumph of
_time over power_, Classical ruins that of barbarism over taste. It
was that age that first discovered the beauty of the ruin-studded
Rhine, which was thenceforward the _historic_ river of the Germans.
Footnote 323:
English readers will very likely think of the case of Shaw’s “Back to
Methuselah,” with its extreme contrast of the cheaply-satirical
present-day scene and the noble and tragic scenes of far past and far
future.—_Tr._
Footnote 324:
One need only contrast the Greek artist with Rubens and Rabelais.
Footnote 325:
Of whom one of his mistresses remarked that he “smelt like a carcass”
(qu’il puait comme une charogne). Note also how the musician generally
has a reputation for uncleanliness.
Footnote 326:
From the solemn canon of Polycletus to the elegance of Lysippus the
same process of lightening is going on in the body-build as that which
brought the column from the Doric to the Corinthian order. The
Euclidean feeling was beginning to relax.
Footnote 327:
See p. 19.—_Tr._
Footnote 328:
In other countries, e.g., old Egypt and Japan (to anticipate a
particularly foolish and shallow assertion), the sight of naked men
was a far more ordinary and commonplace thing than it was in Athens,
but the Japanese art-lover feels emphasized nudity as ridiculous and
vulgar. The act is depicted (as for that matter it is in the “Adam and
Eve” of Bamberg Cathedral), but merely as an object without any
significance of potential whatsoever.
Footnote 329:
Kluge, _Deutsche Sprachgesch._ (1920), pp. 202 et seq.
Footnote 330:
A. Conze, _Die Attischen Grabreliefs_ (1893 etc.).
Footnote 331:
Louvre. Replicas of the pair in the Vict. and Alb. Museum, London.—
_Tr._
Footnote 332:
Olympia—the only unquestioned original that we have from the “great
age.” References would be superfluous, for few, if any, Classical
works are better or more widely known.—_Tr._
Footnote 333:
Of the several copies that have survived, all imperfectly preserved,
that in the Palazzo Massimi is accounted the best. The restoration
which, once seen, convinces, is Professor Furtwängler’s (shown in
Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article _Greek Art_, fig. 68).—_Tr._
Footnote 334:
A cast of this is in the British Museum (illustrated in the Museum
Guide to Egypt. Antiq., pl. XXI).—_Tr._
Footnote 335:
In the Bargello, Florence. Replica in Vict. and Alb. Museum, London.—
_Tr._
Footnote 336:
The “Apollo with the lyre” at Munich was admired by Winckelmann and
his time as a Muse. Till quite recently a head of Athene (a copy of
Praxiteles) at Bologna passed as that of a general. Such errors would
be entirely impossible in dealing with a physiognomic art, e.g.,
Baroque.
Footnote 337:
In his portrait of Frau Gedon, already alluded to, p. 252.
Footnote 338:
See p. 136 and also Vol. II, p. 354.
Footnote 339:
The so-called “Three Fates” in the British Museum.—_Tr._
Footnote 340:
The Orphic springtime _contemplates_ the Gods and does not _see_ them.
See Vol. II, p. 345.
Footnote 341:
There was indeed a beginning of this in the aristocratic epic of
Homer—so nearly akin to the courtly narrative art of Boccaccio. But
throughout the Classical age strictly religious people felt it as a
profanation; the worship that shines through the Homeric poems is
quite without idolatry, and a further proof is the anger of thinkers
who, like Heraclitus and Plato, were in close touch with the temple
tradition. It will occur to the student that the unrestricted handling
of even the highest divinities in this very late art is not unlike the
theatrical Catholicism of Rossini and Liszt, which is already
foreshadowed in Corelli and Händel and had, earlier even, almost led
to the condemnation of Church music in 1564.
(The event alluded to in the last line is the dispute in and after the
Council of Trent as to the nature and conduct of Church music. If
Wagner’s suggestion that Pope Marcellus II tried to exclude it
altogether is exaggerated, it is certain at least that the complaints
were deep and powerful, and that the Council found it necessary to
forbid “unworthy music in the house of God” and to bring the subject
under the disciplinary control of the Bishops.—_Tr._)
Footnote 342:
Harmodius and Aristogiton. At Naples. Illustrated in Ency. Brit. XI
ed., article _Greek Art_, fig. 50. Cast in British Museum.—_Tr._
Footnote 343:
The famous statue now in the Lateran Museum, Rome.—_Tr._
Footnote 344:
See foot-note, p. 130. An antique copy is in the British Museum.—_Tr._
Footnote 345:
In the Vatican Museum.—_Tr._
Footnote 346:
Even the landscape of the Baroque develops from composed backgrounds
to portraits of definite localities, representations of the soul of
these localities which are thus endowed with _faces_.
Footnote 347:
It could be said of Hellenistic portrait art that it followed exactly
the opposite course.
Footnote 348:
British Museum.—_Tr._
Footnote 349:
Pinakothek, Munich.—_Tr._
Footnote 350:
Art Gallery, Vienna.—_Tr._
Footnote 351:
Nothing more clearly displays the decadence of Western art since the
middle of the 19th century than its absurd rendering of acts by
masses; the deeper meaning of act-study and the importance of the
motive have been entirely forgotten.
Footnote 352:
By that test Rubens, and, among moderns, especially Feuerbach and
Böcklin, lose, while Goya, Daumier, and, in Germany, Oldach, Wasmann,
Rayski and many another almost forgotten artist of the earlier 19th
Century, gain. And Marées passes to the rank of the very greatest.
Footnote 353:
Tombs of the Scaligers, Verona.—_Tr._
Footnote 354:
National Gallery, London.—_Tr._
Footnote 355:
Museo Nazionale, Florence.—_Tr._
Footnote 356:
It is the same “noble simplicity and quiet greatness”—to speak in the
language of the German Classicists—that produces such an impression of
the antique in the Romanesque of Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella and
Hersfeld. The ruined cloisters of Paulinzella, in fact, have much of
what Brunellesco so many centuries later strove to obtain in his
palace-courts. But the basic feeling that underlies these creations is
not something which we got from the Classical, but something that we
projected on to our own notion of Classical being. And our own notion
of peace is one of an _infinite_ peace. We feel the “Rest in God” to
be an _expanse_ of quietude. All Florentine work, in so far as
sureness does not turn into the Gothic challenge of Verrocchio, is
characterized by this feeling, with which Attic σωφροσύνη has nothing
whatever in common.
Footnote 357:
It has never been sufficiently noticed that the few sculptors who came
after Michelangelo had no more than a mere workaday relation with
marble. But we see at once that it is so when we think of the deeply
intimate relation of great musicians to their favourite instruments.
The story of Tartini’s violin, which shattered itself to pieces on the
death of the master—and there are a hundred such stories—is the
Faustian counterpart of the Pygmalion legend. Consider, too, E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s “Johannes Kreisler the Kapellmeister”; he is a figure
worthy to stand by the side of Faust, Werther and Don Juan. To see his
symbolic significance and the inward necessity of him, we have only to
compare him with the theatrical painter-characters in the works of
contemporary Romanticists, who are not in any relation whatever with
the idea of Painting. As the fate of 19th-Century art-romances shows—a
painter _cannot_ be made to stand for the destiny of Faustian art.
(E. T. A. Hoffmann, the strange many-sided genius who was at once
musician, caricaturist, novelist, critic, wit, able public official
and winebibber, at one time in his career wrote in the character of
“Johannes Kreisler.” See his _Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier_ and
_Der Kater Murr_, also Thomas Carlyle’s “Miscellanies” and the
biographical sketches of Hoffmann in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and
the Ency. Brit.—_Tr._)
Footnote 358:
Although gunpowder is much older than the Baroque, its application in
real earnest to long-ranging fire-arms was only accomplished during
the 16th Century. It cannot be said that there was any _technical_
reason why 100 years should have elapsed between the first use of
powder in European warfare and the first effective soldier’s fire-arm.
No careful student of this period of military history can fail to be
struck with this fact—the significance of which, not being technical,
must be cultural. Much the same could be said of printing, which, so
far as concerns technical factors, might just as well have been
invented in the 10th as in the 15th Century.—_Tr._
Footnote 359:
Uffizi, Florence.—_Tr._
Footnote 360:
Sistine Chapel, Rome.—_Tr._
Footnote 361:
“Doctor Marianus.”—_Tr._
Footnote 362:
Vatican.—_Tr._
Footnote 363:
In Renaissance work the finished product is often quite depressingly
complete. The absence of “infinity” is palpable. No secrets, no
discoveries.
Footnote 364:
Hence the impossibility of achieving a genuinely religious painting on
plein-air principles. The world-feeling that underlies it is so
thoroughly irreligious, so worthless for any but a “religion of
reason” so-called, that every one of its efforts in that direction,
even with the noblest intentions (Uhde, Puvis de Chavannes), strikes
us as hollow and false. One instant of plein-air treatment suffices to
secularize the interior of a church and degrade it into a showroom.
Footnote 365:
State Museum, Berlin.—_Tr._
Footnote 366:
I.e., the “giants” of the great frieze, who were in fact Galatians
playing the part. This Gigantomachia, a programme-work like the Ring,
represented a situation, as the Ring represented characters, under
mythological labels.—_Tr._
Footnote 367:
See Vol. II, pp. 138 et seq.
Footnote 368:
See pp. 197 et seq.
-----
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IX
SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING
I
ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IX
SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING
I
ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL
I
Every professed philosopher is forced to believe, without serious
examination, in the existence of a Something that in his opinion is
capable of being handled by the reason, for his whole spiritual
existence depends on the possibility of such a Something. For every
logician and psychologist, therefore, however sceptical he may be, there
is a point at which criticism falls silent and faith begins, a point at
which even the strictest analytical thinker must cease to employ his
method—the point, namely, at which analysis is confronted with itself
and with the question of whether its problem is soluble or even exists
at all. The proposition “it is possible by thought to establish the
forms of thought” was not doubted by Kant, dubious as it may appear to
the unphilosophical. The proposition “there is a soul, the structure of
which is scientifically accessible; and that which I determine, by
critical dissection of conscious existence-acts into the form of psychic
elements, functions, and complexes, _is_ my soul” is a proposition that
no psychologist has doubted hitherto. And yet it is just here that his
strongest doubts should have arisen. Is an abstract science of the
spiritual possible at all? Is that which one finds on this path
identical with that which one is seeking? Why has psychology—meaning
thereby not knowledge of men and experience of life but _scientific_
psychology—always been the shallowest and most worthless of the
disciplines of philosophy, a field so empty that it has been left
entirely to mediocre minds and barren systematists? The reason is not
far to seek. It is the misfortune of “experimental” psychology that it
does not even possess an _object_ as the word is understood in any and
every scientific technique. Its searches and solutions are fights with
shadows and ghosts. What is it—the Soul? If the mere reason could give
an answer to that question, the science would be _ab initio_
unnecessary.
Of the thousands of psychologists of to-day not one can give an actual
analysis or definition of “the” Will—or of regret, anxiety, jealousy,
disposition, artistic intention. Naturally, since only the systematic
can be dissected, and we can only define notions by notions. No
subtleties of intellectual play with notional distinctions, no plausible
observations of connexions between sensuous-corporeal states and “inward
processes” touch that which is in question here. Will—this is no notion,
but a name, a prime-word like God, a sign for something of which we have
an immediate inward certainty but which we are for ever unable to
describe.
We are dealing here with something eternally inaccessible to learned
investigation. It is not for nothing that every language presents a
baffling complexity of labels for the spiritual, warning us thereby that
it is something not susceptible of theoretical synthesis or systematic
ordering. Here there is nothing for us to order. Critical (i.e.,
literally, separating) methods apply only to the world-as-Nature. It
would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting-knife
or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought.
Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither aims nor ways in common.
The primitive man experiences “soul,” first in other men and then in
himself, as a _Numen_, just as he knows numina of the outer world, and
develops his impressions in mythological form. His words for these
things are symbols, sounds, not descriptive of the indescribable but
indicative of it for him who hath ears to hear. They evoke images,
_likenesses_ (in the sense of Faust II)—the only language of spiritual
intercourse that man has discovered to this day. Rembrandt can reveal
something of his soul, to those who are in inward kinship with him, by
way of a self-portrait or a landscape, and to Goethe “a god gave it to
say what he suffered.” Certain ineffable stirrings of soul can be
imparted by one man to the sensibility of another man through a look,
two bars of a melody, an almost imperceptible movement. That is the real
language of souls, and it remains incomprehensible to the outsider. The
word as utterance, as poetic element, may establish the link, but the
word as notion, as element of scientific prose, never.
“Soul,” for the man who has advanced from mere living and feeling to the
alert and observant state, is an _image_ derived from quite primary
experiences of life and death. It is as old as thought, i.e., as the
articulate separation of thinking (thinking-over) from seeing. We _see_
the world around us, and since every free-moving being must for its own
safety understand that world, the accumulating daily detail of technical
and empirical experience becomes a stock of permanent data which man, as
soon as he is proficient in speech, collects into an _image_ of what he
_understands_. This is the World-as-Nature.[369] What is not environment
we do not see, but we do divine “its” presence in ourselves and in
others, and by virtue of “its” physiognomic impressive power it evokes
in us the anxiety and the desire to know; and thus arises the meditated
or pondered _image of a counterworld_ which is our mode of visualizing
that which remains eternally alien to the physical eye. The image of the
soul is mythic and remains objective in the field of spiritual religion
so long as the image of Nature is contemplated in the spirit of
religion; and it transforms itself into a scientific notion and becomes
objective in the field of scientific criticism as soon as “Nature” comes
to be observed critically. As “Time” is a counter-concept[370] to space,
so the “soul” is a counterworld to “Nature” and therefore variable in
dependence upon the notion of Nature as this stands from moment to
moment. It has been shown how “Time” arose, out of the feeling of the
direction-quality possessed by ever-mobile Life, as a conceptual
_negative_ to a positive magnitude, as an incarnation of _that which is
not extension_; and that all the “properties” of Time, by the cool
analysis of which the philosophers believe they can solve the problem of
Time, have been gradually formed and ordered in the intellect as
inverses to the properties of space. In exactly the same way, the notion
of the spiritual has come into being as the inverse and _negative of the
notion of the world_, the spatial notion of polarity assisting
("outward"-“inward”) and the terms being suitably transvalued. _Every
psychology is a counter-physics._
To attempt to get an “exact” science out of the ever-mysterious soul is
futile. But the late-period City must needs have abstract thinking and
it forces the “physicist of the inner world” to elucidate a fictitious
world by ever more fictions, notions by more notions. He transmutes the
non-extended into the extended, builds up a system as “cause” for
something that is only manifested physiognomically, and comes to believe
that in this system he has the structure of “the” soul before his eyes.
But the very words that he selects, in all the Cultures, to notify to
others the results of his intellectual labours betray him. He talks of
functions, feeling-complexes, mainsprings, thresholds of consciousness;
course, breadth, intensity and parallelism in spiritual processes. All
these are words proper to the mode of representation that Natural
Science employs. “The Will is related to objects” is a spatial image
pure and simple. “Conscious” and “unconscious” are only too obviously
derivatives of “above-ground” and “below-ground.” In modern theories of
the Will we meet with all the vocabulary of electro-dynamics. Will-
functions and thought-functions are spoken of in just the same way as
the function of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up
a representative silhouette in its place and then to treat this
silhouette mathematically and by definition, partition, and measurement.
All soul-examination of this stamp, however remarkable as a study of
cerebral anatomy, is penetrated with the mechanical notion of locality,
and works without knowing it under imaginary co-ordinates in an
imaginary space. The “pure” psychologist is quite unaware that he is
copying the physicist, but it is not at all surprising that the naïvest
methods of experimental psychology give depressingly orthodox results.
Brain-paths and association-threads, as modes of representation, conform
entirely to an optical scheme—the “course” of the will or the feeling;
both deal with cognate _spatial_ phantoms. It does not make much
difference whether I define some psychic capacity conceptually or the
corresponding brain-region graphically. Scientific psychology has worked
out for itself a complete system of images, in which it moves with
entire conviction. Every individual pronouncement of every individual
psychologist proves on examination to be merely a variation of this
system conformable to the style of outer-world science of the day.
Clear thought, emancipated from all connexion with seeing, presupposes
as its organ a culture-language, which is created by the soul of the
Culture as a part supporting other parts of its expression;[371] and
presently this language itself creates a “Nature” of word-meanings, a
linguistic cosmos within which abstract notions, judgments and
conclusions—representations of number, causality, motion—can lead a
mechanically determinate existence. At any particular time, therefore,
the current image of the soul is a function of the _current language and
its inner symbolism_. All the Western, Faustian, languages possess the
notion of Will. This mythical entity manifested itself, simultaneously
in all, in that transformation of the verb[372] which decisively
differentiated our tongues from the Classical tongues and therefore our
soul from the Classical soul. When “ego habeo factum” replaced “feci,” a
new numen of the inner world spoke. And at the same time, under specific
label, there appeared in the scientific soul-pictures of all the Western
psychologies the figure of the Will, of a well-rounded capacity of which
the definition may be formulated in different ways by different schools,
but the existence is unquestionable.
II
I maintain, then, that scientific psychology (and, it may be added, the
psychology of the same kind that we all unconsciously practise when we
try to “figure to ourselves” the stirrings of our own or others’ souls)
has, in its inability to discover or even to approach the essence of the
soul, simply added one more to the symbols that collectively make up the
Macrocosm of the culture-man. Like everything else that is no longer
becoming but become, it has put a _mechanism_ in place of an _organism_.
We miss in its picture that which fills our feeling of life (and should
surely be “soul” if anything is) the Destiny-quality, the necessary
directedness of existence, the possibility that life in its course
actualizes. I do not believe that the word “Destiny” figures in any
psychological system whatsoever—and we know that nothing in the world
could be more remote from actual life-experience and knowledge of men
than a system without such elements. Associations, apperceptions,
affections, motives, thought, feeling, will—all are dead mechanisms, the
mere topography of which constitutes the insignificant total of our
“soul-science.” One looked for Life and one found an ornamental pattern
of notions. And the soul remained what it was, something that could
neither be thought nor represented, _the_ secret, _the_ ever-becoming,
_the_ pure experience.
This _imaginary soul-body_ (let it be called so outright for the first
time) is never anything but the exact mirror-image of the form in which
the matured culture-man looks on his outer world. In the one as in the
other, the depth-experience actualizes the extension-world.[373] Alike
out of the perception of the outside and the conception of the inside,
the secret that is hinted at in the root-word Time creates Space. The
soul-image like the world-image has its directional depth, its horizon,
and its boundedness or its unboundedness. An “inner eye” sees, an “inner
ear” hears. There exists a distinct idea of an inner order, and this
inner order like the outer wears the badge of _causal necessity_.
This being so, everything that has been said in this work regarding the
phenomenon of the high Cultures combines to demand an immensely wider
and richer sort of soul-study than anything worked upon so far. For
everything that our present-day psychologist has to tell us—and here we
refer not only to the systematic science but also in the wider sense to
the physiognomic knowledge of men—relates to the _present_ condition of
the _Western_ soul, and not, as hitherto gratuitously assumed, to “the
human soul” at large.
A soul-image is never anything but the image of one quite definite soul.
No observer can ever step outside the conditions and the limitations of
his time and circle, and whatever it may be that he “knows” or
“cognizes,” the very cognition itself involves in all cases choice,
direction and inner form, and is therefore _ab initio_ an expression of
his proper soul. The primitive himself appropriates a soul-image out of
facts of _his own_ life as subjected to the formative working of the
basic experiences of waking consciousness (distinction of ego and world,
of ego and tu) and those of being (distinction of body and soul, sense-
life and reflection, sex-life and sentiment). And as it is thoughtful
men who think upon these matters, an inner numen (Spirit, Logos, Ka,
Ruach) always arises as an opposite to the rest. But the dispositions
and relations of this numen in the individual case, and the conception
that is formed of the spiritual elements—layers of forces or substances,
unity or polarity or plurality—mark the thinker from the outset as a
part of his own specific Culture. When, therefore, one convinces one’s
self that one knows the soul of an alien Culture from its workings in
actuality, the soul-image underlying the knowledge is really _one’s own_
soul-image. In this wise new experiences are readily assimilated into
the system that is already there, and it is not surprising that in the
end one comes to believe that one has discovered forms of eternal
validity.
In reality, every Culture possesses its own systematic psychology just
as it possesses its own style of knowledge of men and experience of
life; and just as even each separate stage—the age of Scholasticism,
that of the Sophists, that of Enlightenment—forms special ideas of
number and thought and Nature that pertain to itself only, so even each
separate century mirrors itself in a soul-image of its own. The best
judge of men in the Western world goes wrong when he tries to understand
a Japanese, and vice versa. But the man of learning goes equally wrong
when he tries to translate basic words of Arabic or Greek by basic words
of his own tongue. “Nephesh” is not “animus” and “âtmân” is not “soul,”
and what we consistently discover under our label “will” Classical man
did not find in his soul-picture _at all_.
Taking one thing with another, it is no longer possible to doubt the
immense importance of the individual soul-images that have severally
arisen in the general history of thought. Classical, Apollinian man, the
man of Euclidean point-formed being, looked upon his soul as a Cosmos
ordered in a group of excellent parts. Plato called it νοῦς, θυμός,
ἐπιθυμία and compared it with man, beast and plant, in one place even
with Southern, Northern and Hellenic man. What seems to be copied here
is Nature as seen by the Classical age, a well-ordered sum of tangible
things, in contrast to a space that was felt as the non-existent, the
Nonent. Where in this field is "Will"? or the idea of functional
connexions? or the other creations of _our_ psychology? Do we really
believe that Plato and Aristotle were less sure in analysis than we are,
and did not see what is insistently obvious to every layman amongst us?
Or is it that Will is missing here for the same reason as space is
missing in the Classical mathematic and force in the Classical physics?
Take, on the contrary, any Western psychology that you please, and you
will always find a _functional_ and never a _bodily_ ordering. The basic
form of all impressions which we receive from within is _y_ = _f_(_x_),
and that, _because_ the function is the basis of our outer world.
Thinking, feeling, willing—no Western psychologist can step outside this
trinity, however much he may desire to do so; even in the controversies
of Gothic thinkers concerning the primacy of will or reason it already
emerges that the question is one of a relation between _forces_. It
matters not at all whether these old philosophers put forward their
theories as original or read them into Augustine or Aristotle.
Associations, apperceptions, will-processes, call them what you will,
the elements of our picture are without exception of the type of the
mathematico-physical Function, and in very form radically un-Classical.
Now, such psychology examines the soul, not physiognomically to indicate
its traits, but physically, as an object, to ascertain its elements, and
it is quite natural therefore to find psychology reduced to perplexity
when confronted with the problem of motion. Classical man, too, had his
inward _Eleatic_ difficulty,[374] and the inability of the Schoolmen to
agree as to the primacy of Will or Reason foreshadows the dangerous flaw
in Baroque physics—its inability to reach an unchallengeable statement
of the relation between force and movement. Directional energy, denied
in the Classical and also in the Indian soul-image (where all is settled
and rounded), is emphatically affirmed in the Faustian and in the
Egyptian (wherein all is systems and centres of forces); and yet,
precisely because this affirmation cannot but involve the element of
time, thought, which is alien to Time, finds itself committed to self-
contradictions.
The Faustian and the Apollinian images of the soul are in blunt
opposition. Once more all the old contrasts crop up. In the Apollinian
we have, so to call it, the soul-body, in the Faustian the soul-space,
as the imagination-unit. The body possesses parts, while the space is
the scene of processes. Classical man conceives of his inner world
plastically. Even Homer’s idiom betrays it; echoing, we may well
believe, immemorial temple-traditions, he shows us, for instance, the
dead in Hades as well-recognizable copies of the bodies that had been.
The Pre-Socratic philosophy, with its three well-ordered parts
λογιστικόν, ἐπιθυμητικόν, θυμοειδές, suggests at once the Laocoön group.
In our case the impress is a musical one; the sonata of the inner life
has the will as first subject, thought and feeling as themes of the
second subject; the movement is bound by the strict rules of a spiritual
counterpoint, and psychology’s business is to discover this
counterpoint. The simplest elements fall into antithesis like Classical
and Western number—on the one hand magnitudes, on the other spiritual
relations—and the _spiritual static_ of Apollinian existence, the
stereometric ideal of σωφροσύνη and ἀταραξία, stands opposed to the
_soul-dynamic_ of Faustian.
The Apollinian soul-image—Plato’s biga-team with νοῦς as charioteer—
takes to flight at once on the approach of the Magian soul. It is fading
out already in the later Stoa, where the principal teachers came
predominantly from the Aramaic East, and by the time of the Early Roman
Empire, even in the literature of the city itself, it has come to be a
mere reminiscence.
The hall-mark of the Magian soul-image is a strict _dualism of two
mysterious substances, Spirit and Soul_. Between these two there is
neither the Classical (static) nor the Western (functional) relation,
but an altogether differently constituted relation which we are obliged
to call merely “Magian” for want of a more helpful term, though we may
illustrate it by contrasting the physics of Democritus and the physics
of Galileo with Alchemy and the Philosopher’s Stone. On this
specifically Middle-Eastern soul-image rests, of inward necessity, all
the psychology and particularly the theology with which the “Gothic”
springtime of the Arabian Culture (0-300 A.D.) is filled. The Gospel of
St. John belongs thereto, and the writings of the Gnostics, the Early
Fathers, the Neoplatonists, the Manichæans, and the dogmatic texts in
the Talmud and the Avesta; so, too, does the tired spirit of the
Imperium Romanum, now expressed only in religiosity and drawing the
little life that is in its philosophy from the young East, Syria, and
Persia. Even in the 1st Century B.C. the great Posidonius, a true Semite
and young-Arabian in spite of the Classical dress of his immense
learning, was inwardly sensible of the complete opposition between the
Classical life-feeling and this Magian soul-structure which for him was
the true one. There is a patent difference of _value_ between a
Substance permeating the body and a Substance which falls from the
world-cavern into humanity, abstract and divine, making of all
participants a Consensus.[375] This “Spirit” it is which evokes the
higher world, and through this creation triumphs over mere life, “the
flesh” and Nature. This is the prime image that underlies all feeling of
ego. Sometimes it is seen in religious, sometimes in philosophical,
sometimes in artistic guise. Consider the portraits of the Constantinian
age, with their fixed stare into the infinite—_that look stands for the_
πνεῦμα. It is felt by Plotinus and by Origen. Paul distinguishes, for
example in I Cor., xv, 44, between σῶμα ψυχικόν and σῶμα πνευματικόν.
The conception of a double, bodily or spiritual, ecstasy and of the
partition of men into lower and higher, psychics and pneumatics, was
familiar currency amongst the Gnostics. Late-Classical literature
(Plutarch) is full of the dualistic psychology of νοῦς and ψυχή, derived
from Oriental sources. It was very soon brought into correlation with
the contrast between Christian and Heathen and that between Spirit and
Nature, and it issued in that scheme of world-history as man’s drama
from Creation to Last Judgment (with an intervention of God as means)
which is common to Gnostics, Christians, Persians and Jews alike, and
has not even now been altogether overcome.
This Magian soul-image received its rigorously scientific completion in
the schools of Baghdad and Basra.[376] Alfarabi and Alkindi dealt
thoroughly with the problems of this Magian psychology, which to us are
tangled and largely inaccessible. And we must by no means underrate its
influence upon the young and wholly abstract soul-theory (_as distinct
from the ego-feeling_) of the West. Scholastic and Mystic philosophy, no
less than Gothic art, drew upon Moorish Spain, Sicily and the East for
many of its forms. It must not be forgotten that the Arabian Culture is
the culture of the established revelation-religions, all of which assume
a dualistic soul-image. The Kabbala[377] and the part played by Jewish
philosophers in the so-called mediæval philosophy—i.e., late-Arabian
followed by early-Gothic—is well known. But I will only refer here to
the remarkable and little-appreciated Spinoza.[378] Child of the Ghetto,
he is, with his contemporary Schirazi, the last belated representative
of the Magian, a stranger in the form-world of the Faustian feeling. As
a prudent pupil of the Baroque he contrived to clothe his system in the
colours of Western thought, but at bottom he stands entirely under the
aspect of the Arabian dualism of two soul-substances. _And this is the
true and inward reason why he lacked the force-concept of Galileo and
Descartes._ This concept is the centre of gravity of a dynamic universe
and _ipso facto_ is alien to the Magian world-feeling. There is no link
between the idea of the Philosopher’s Stone (which is implicit in
Spinoza’s idea of Deity as “causa sui”) and the causal necessity of
_our_ Nature-picture. Consequently, his determinism is precisely that
which the orthodox wisdom of Baghdad had maintained—“Kismet.” It was
there that the home of the _more geometrico_[379] method was to be
looked for—it is common to the Talmud, the Zend Avesta and the Arabian
Kalaam;[380] but its appearance in Spinoza’s “Ethics” is a grotesque
freak in _our_ philosophy.
Once more this Magian soul-image was to be conjured up, for a moment.
German Romanticism found in magic and the tangled thought-threads of
Gothic philosophers the same attractiveness as it found in the Crusade-
ideals of cloisters and castles, and even more in Saracenic art and
poetry—without of course understanding very much of these remote things.
Schelling, Oken, Baader, Görres and their circle indulged in barren
speculations in the Arabic-Jewish style, which they felt with evident
self-satisfaction to be “dark” and “deep”—precisely what, for Orientals,
they were _not_—understanding them but partially themselves and hoping
for similar quasi-incomprehension in their audiences. The only
noteworthy point in the episode is the attractiveness of obscurity. We
may venture the conclusion that the clearest and most accessible
conceptions of Faustian thought—as we have it, for instance, in
Descartes or in Kant’s “Prolegomena”—would in the same way have been
regarded by an Arabian student as nebulous and abstruse. What for us is
true, for them is false, and vice versa; and this is valid for the soul-
images of the different Cultures as it is for every other product of
their scientific thinking.
III
The separation of its ultimate elements is a task that the Gothic world-
outlook and its philosophy leaves to the courage of the future. Just as
the ornamentation of the cathedral and the primitive contemporary
painting still shirk the decision between gold and wide atmosphere in
backgrounds—between the Magian and the Faustian aspects of God in
Nature—so this early, timid, immature soul-image as it presents itself
in this philosophy mingles characters derived from the Christian-Arabian
metaphysic and its dualism of Spirit and Soul with Northern inklings of
functional soul-forces not yet avowed. This is the discrepance that
underlies the conflict concerning the primacy of will or reason, the
_basic problem of the Gothic philosophy_, which men tried to solve now
in the old Arabian, now in the new Western sense. It is this myth of the
mind—which under ever-changing guises accompanies our philosophy
throughout its course—that distinguishes it so sharply from every other.
The rationalism of late Baroque, in all the pride of the self-assured
city-spirit, decided in favour of the greater power of the Goddess
Reason (Kant, the Jacobins); but almost immediately thereafter the 19th
Century (Nietzsche above all) went back to the stronger formula
_Voluntas superior intellectu_, and this indeed is in the blood of all
of us.[381] Schopenhauer, the last of the great systematists, has
brought it down to the formula “World as Will and Idea,” and it is only
his ethic and not his metaphysic that decides _against_ the Will.
Here we begin to see by direct light the deep foundations and meaning of
philosophizing within a Culture. For what we see here is the Faustian
soul trying in labour of many centuries to paint a _self-portrait_, and
one, moreover, that is in intimate concordance with its world-portrait.
The Gothic world-view with its struggle of will and reason is in fact an
expression of the life-feeling of the men of the Crusades, of the
Hohenstaufen empire, of the great cathedrals. _These men saw the soul
thus, because they were thus._
_Will and thought in the soul-image correspond to Direction and
Extension, History and Nature, Destiny and Causality in the image of the
outer world._ Both aspects of our basic characters emerge in our prime-
symbol which is infinite extension. Will links the future to the
present, thought the unlimited to the here. _The historic future is
distance-becoming, the boundless world-horizon distance-become_—this is
the meaning of the Faustian depth-experience. The direction-feeling as
“Will” and the space-feeling as “Reason” are imagined as entities,
almost as legend-figures; and out of them comes the picture that our
psychologists of necessity abstract from the inner life.
To call the Faustian Culture a _Will-Culture_ is only another way of
expressing the eminently historical disposition of its soul. Our first-
person idiom, our “ego habeo factum”—our dynamic syntax, that is—
faithfully renders the “way of doing things” that results from this
disposition and, with its positive directional energy, dominates not
only our picture of the World-as-History but our own history to boot.
This first person towers up in the Gothic architecture; the spire is an
“I,” the flying buttress is an “I.” And therefore the _entire Faustian
ethic_, from Thomas Aquinas to Kant, _is an “excelsior”_—fulfilment of
an “I,” ethical work upon an “I,” justification of an “I” by faith and
works; respect of the neighbour “Thou” for the sake of one’s “I” and its
happiness; and, lastly and supremely, immortality of the “I.”
Now this, precisely this, the genuine Russian regards as contemptible
vain-glory. The Russian soul, will-less, having the limitless _plane_ as
its prime-symbol,[382] seeks to grow up—serving, anonymous, self-
oblivious—in the brother-world of the plane. To take “I” as the
starting-point of relations with the neighbour, to elevate “I” morally
through “I’s” love of near and dear, to repent for “I’s” own sake, are
to him traits of Western vanity as presumptuous as is the upthrusting
challenge to heaven of our cathedrals that he compares with his plane
church-roof and its sprinkling of cupolas. Tolstoi’s hero Nechludov
looks after his moral “I” as he does after his finger-nails; this is
just what betrays Tolstoi as belonging to the pseudomorphosis of
Petrinism. But Raskolnikov is only something in a “we.” His fault is the
fault of all,[383] and even to regard his sin as special to himself is
pride and vanity. Something of the kind underlies the Magian soul-image
also. “If any man come to me,” says Jesus (Luke xiv, 26), “and hate not
his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, _yea, and
his own life_ (τὴν ἑαυτοῦ ψυχήν) _also_,[384] he cannot be my disciple”;
and it is the same feeling that makes him call himself by the title that
we mistranslate “Son of Man.”[385] The Consensus of the Orthodox too is
impersonal and condemns “I” as a sin. So too with the—truly Russian—
conception of truth as the anonymous agreement of the elect.
Classical man, belonging wholly to the present, is equally without that
directional energy by which our images of world and of soul are
dominated, which sums all our sense-impressions as a path towards
distance and our inward experiences as a feeling of future. He is will-
less. The Classical idea of destiny and the symbol of the Doric column
leave no doubt as to that. And the contest of thinking and willing that
is the hidden theme of every serious portrait from Jan van Eyck to
Marées is impossible in Classical portraiture, for in the Classical
soul-image thought (νοῦς), the inner Zeus, is accompanied by the wholly
ahistoric entities of animal and vegetative impulse (θυμός and
ἐπιθυμία), wholly somatic and wholly destitute of conscious direction
and drive towards an end.
The actual designation of the Faustian principle, which belongs to us
and to us alone, is a matter of indifference. A name is in itself mere
sound. Space, too, is a word that is capable of being employed with a
thousand nuances—by mathematicians and philosophers, poets and painters—
to express one and the same indescribable; a word that is ostensibly
common to all mankind and yet, carrying a metaphysical under-meaning
that we gave it and could not but give it, is in that sense valid only
for our Culture. It is not the notion of “Will,” but the circumstance
that we possess it while the Greeks _were entirely ignorant of it_, that
gives it high symbolic import. At the very bottom, there is no
distinction between space-as-depth and will. For the one, and
_therefore_ for the other also, the Classical languages had no
expression.[386] The pure space of the Faustian world-picture is not
mere extension, but efficient extension into the distance, as an
overcoming of the merely sensuous, as a strain and tendency, as a
spiritual will-to-power. I am fully aware how inadequate these
periphrases are. It is entirely impossible to indicate in exact terms
the difference between what we and what the men of the Indian or the
Arabian Culture call space, or feel or imagine in the word. But that
there _is_ some radical distinction is proved by the very different
fundamentals of the respective mathematics, arts of form, and, above
all, immediate utterances of _life_. We shall see how the identity of
space and will comes to expression in the acts of Copernicus and
Columbus—as well as in those of the Hohenstaufen and Napoleon—but it
underlies also, in another way, the physical notions of fields of force
and potential, ideas that it would be impossible to convey to the
comprehension of any Greek. "Space as _a priori_ form of perception,"
the formula in which Kant finally enunciated that for which Baroque
philosophy had so long and tirelessly striven, implies an assertion of
supremacy of soul over the alien; the ego, through the form, is to rule
the world.[387]
_This_ is brought to expression in the depth-perspective of oil-painting
which makes the space-field of the picture, conceived as infinite,
dependent on the observer, who in choosing his distance asserts his
dominion. It is this attraction of distance that produces the type of
the _heroic and historically-felt_ landscape that we have alike in the
picture and the park of the Baroque period, and that is expressed also
in the mathematico-physical concept of the vector. For centuries
painting fought passionately to reach this symbol, which contains all
that the words space, will and force are capable of indicating. And
correspondingly we find in our metaphysic the steady tendency to
formulate pairs of concepts (such as phenomena and things-in-themselves,
will and idea, ego and non-ego) all of the same purely dynamic content,
and—in utter contrast to Protagoras’s conception of man as the measure,
not the creator, of things—to establish a functional dependence of
things upon spirit. The Classical metaphysic regarded man as a body
among bodies, and knowledge as a sort of _contact_, passing from the
known to the knower and not vice versa. The optical theories of
Anaxagoras and Democritus were far from admitting any active
participation of the percipient in sense-perception. Plato never felt,
as Kant was driven to feel, the ego as centre of a transcendent sphere
of effect. The captives in his celebrated cave are really captives, the
_slaves_ and not the masters of outer impressions—recipients of light
from the common sun and not themselves suns which irradiate the
universe.
The relation of our will to our imaginary space is evidenced again in
the physical concept of space-energy—that utterly un-Classical idea in
which even _spatial interval_ figures as a form, and indeed as prime
form thereof, for the notions of “capacity” and “intensity” rest upon
it. We feel will and space, the dynamic world-picture of Galileo and
Newton and the dynamic soul-picture which has will as its centre of
gravity and centre of reference, as of identical significance. Both are
Baroque ideas, symbols of the fully-ripened Faustian Culture.
It is wrong, though it may be usual, to regard the cult of the “will” as
common, if not to mankind, at any rate to Christendom, and derived in
consequence from the Early-Arabian ethos. The connexion is merely a
phenomenon of the historical surface, and the deduction fails because it
confuses the (formal) history of words and ideas such as “voluntas” with
the course of their destiny, thereby missing the profoundly symbolical
changes of connotation that occur in that course. When Arabian
psychologists—Murtada for instance—discuss the possibility of several
“wills,” a will that hangs together with the act, another will that
independently precedes the act, another that has no relation to the act
at all, a will that is simply the parent of a willing, they are
obviously working in deeper connotations of the Arabic word and on the
basis of a soul-image that in structure differs entirely from the
Faustian.
For every man, whatever the Culture to which he belongs, the elements of
the soul are the deities of an _inner mythology_. What Zeus was for the
outer Olympus, νοῦς was for the inner world that every Greek was
entirely conscious of possessing—the throned lord of the other soul-
elements. What “God” is for us, God as Breadth of the world, the
Universal Power, the ever-present doer and provider, that also—reflected
from the space of world into the imaginary space of soul and necessarily
felt as an actual presence—is “Will.” With the microcosmic dualism of
the Magian Culture, with _ruach_ and _nephesh_, pneuma and psyche, is
necessarily associated the macrocosmic opposition of God and Devil—
Ormuzd and Ahriman for Persians, Yahwe and Beelzebub for Jews, Allah and
Eblis for Mohammedans—in brief, Absolute Good and Absolute Evil. And
note, further, how in the Western world-feeling _both_ these oppositions
pale _together_. In proportion as the Will emerges, out of the Gothic
struggle for primacy between “intellectus” and “voluntas,” as the
_centre of a spiritual monotheism_, the figure of the Devil fades out of
the real world. In the Baroque age the pantheism of the outer world
immediately resulted in one of the inner world also; and the word “God”
in antithesis to “world” has always—however interpreted in this or that
case—implied exactly what is implied in the word “will” with respect to
soul, viz., the power that moves all that is within its domain.[388]
Thought no sooner leaves Religion for Science than we get the double
myth of concepts, in physics and psychology. The concepts “force,”
“mass,” “will,” “passion” rest not on objective experience but on a
life-feeling. Darwinism is nothing but a specially shallow formulation
of this feeling. No Greek would have used the word “Nature” as our
biology employs it, in the sense of an absolute and methodical activity.
“The will of God” for us is a pleonasm—God (or “Nature,” as some say) is
nothing but will. After the Renaissance the notion of God sheds the old
sensuous and personal traits (omnipresence and omnipotence are almost
mathematical concepts), becomes little by little identical with the
notion of infinite space and in becoming so becomes transcendent world-
will. And _therefore_ it is that about 1700 painting has to yield to
instrumental music—the only art that in the end is capable of clearly
expressing what we feel about God. Consider, in contrast with this, the
gods of Homer. Zeus emphatically does _not_ possess full powers over the
world, but is simply “primus inter pares,” a body amongst bodies, as the
Apollinian world-feeling requires. Blind necessity, the Ananke immanent
in the cosmos of Classical consciousness, is in no sense dependent upon
him; on the contrary, the Gods are subordinate to It. Æschylus says so
outright in a powerful passage of the “Prometheus,”[389] but it is
perceptible enough even in Homer, e.g., in the Strife of the Gods and in
that decisive passage in which Zeus takes up the scales of destiny, not
to settle, but to learn, the fate of Hector.[390] The Classical soul,
therefore, with its parts and its properties, imagines itself as an
Olympus of little gods, and to keep these at peace and in harmony with
one another is the ideal of the Greek life-ethic of σωφροσύνη and
ἀταραξία. More than one of the philosophers betrays the connexion by
calling νοῦς, the highest part of the soul, Zeus. Aristotle assigns to
his deity the single function of θεωρία, contemplation, and this is
Diogenes’s ideal also—a completely-matured static of life in contrast to
the equally ripe dynamic of our 18th-Century ideal.
The enigmatic Something in the soul-image that is called “will,” the
_passion of the third dimension_, is therefore quite specially a
creation of the Baroque, like the perspective of oil-painting and the
force-idea of modern physics and the tone-world of instrumental music.
In every case the Gothic had foreshadowed what these intellectualizing
centuries brought to fullness. Here, where we are trying to take in the
_cast_ of Faustian life in contradiction to that of all other lives,
what we have to do is to keep a firm hold on the fact that the primary
words will, space, force, God, upborne by and permeated with
connotations of _Faustian_ feeling, are emblems, are the effective
framework that sustains the great and kindred form-worlds in which this
being expresses itself. It has been believed, hitherto, that in these
matters one was holding in one’s grip a body of eternal facts, of facts-
in-themselves, which sooner or later would be successfully treated,
“known,” and proved by the methods of critical research. This illusion
of natural science was shared by psychology also. But the view that
these “universally-valid” fundamentals belong merely _to the Baroque
style of apprehension and comprehension_, that as expression-forms they
are only of transitory significance, and that they are only “true” for
the Western type of intellect, alters the whole meaning of those
sciences and leads us to look upon them not only as subjects of
systematic cognition but also, and in a far higher degree, as _objects
of physiognomic study_.
Baroque architecture began, as we have seen, when Michelangelo replaced
the tectonic elements of the Renaissance, support and load, by those of
dynamics, force and mass. While Brunelleschi’s chapel of the Pazzi in
Florence expresses a bright composedness, Vignola’s façade of the Gesù
in Rome is _will become stone_. The new style in its ecclesiastical form
has been designated the “Jesuit,” and indeed there is an inward
connexion between the achievement of Vignola and Giacomo Della Porta and
the creation by Ignatius Loyola of the Order that stands for the pure
and abstract will of the Church,[391] just as there is between the
invisible operations and the unlimited range of the Order and the arts
of Calculus and Fugue.
Henceforward, then, the reader will not be shocked if we speak of _a
Baroque_, _and even of a Jesuit_, _style in psychology_, _mathematics_,
_and pure physics_. The form-language of dynamics, which puts the
energetic contrast of capacity and intensity in place of the
volitionless somatic contrast of material and form, is one common to all
the mind-creations of those centuries.
IV
The question is now: How far is the man of this Culture himself
fulfilling what the soul-image that he has created requires of him? If
we can, to-day, state the theme of Western physics quite generally to be
efficient space, we have _ipso facto_ defined also the kind of
existence, the _content_ of existence as lived by contemporary man. We,
as Faustian natures, are accustomed to take note of the individual
according to his _effective_ and not according to his plastic-static
appearance in the field of our life-experience. We measure what a man is
by his activity, which may be directed inwardly or outwardly, and we
judge all intentions, reasons, powers, convictions and habits entirely
by this directedness. The word with which we sum up this aspect is
_character_. We habitually speak of the “character” of heads and
landscapes; of ornaments, brush-strokes and scripts; of whole arts and
ages and Cultures. The art of the characteristic is, above all, Baroque
music—alike in respect of its melody and its instrumentation. Here again
is a word indicating an indescribable, a something that emphasizes,
among all the Cultures, the Faustian in particular. And the deep
relation between this word “character” and the word “will” is
unmistakable; what will is in the soul-image, character is in the
picture of life as we see it, the Western life that is self-evident to
Western men. It is the fundamental postulate of all our ethical systems,
differ otherwise as they may in their metaphysical or practical
precepts, that man has character. Character, which forms itself _in the
stream of the world—the personality, the relation of living to doing_—is
a Faustian impression of the man made by the man; and, significantly
enough, just as in the physical world-picture it has proved impossible
(in spite of the most rigorous theoretical examination) to separate the
vectorial idea of forces from the idea of motion (because of the
inherent directional quality of the vector), so also it is impossible to
draw a strict distinction between will and soul, character and life. At
the height of our Culture, certainly since the 17th Century, we feel the
word “life” as a pure and simple synonym of willing. Expressions like
living force, life-will, active energy, abound in our ethical literature
and their import is taken for granted, whereas the Age of Pericles could
not even have translated them into its language.
Hitherto the pretension of each and every morale to universal validity
has obscured the fact that every Culture, as a homogeneous being of
higher order, possesses a _moral constitution proper to itself_. There
are as many morales as there are Cultures. Nietzsche was the first to
have an inkling of this; but he never came anywhere near to a really
objective morphology of morale “beyond good” (_all_ good) “and evil”
(_all_ evil). He evaluated Classical, Indian, Christian and Renaissance
morale by his own criteria instead of understanding the style of them as
a symbol. And yet if anything could detect the _prime-phenomenon_ of
Morale as such, it should have been the historical insight of a
Westerner. However, it appears that we are only now ripe enough for such
a study. The conception of mankind as an active, fighting, progressing
whole is (and has been since Joachim of Floris and the Crusades) so
necessary an idea for us that we find it hard indeed to realize that it
is an exclusively Western hypothesis, living and valid only for a
season. To the Classical spirit mankind appears as a stationary mass,
and correspondingly there is that quite dissimilar morale that we can
trace from the Homeric dawn to the time of the Roman Empire. And, more
generally, we shall find that the immense activity of the Faustian life-
feeling is most nearly matched in the Chinese and the Egyptian, and the
rigorous passivity of the Classical in the Indian.
If ever there was a group of nations that kept the “struggle for
existence” constantly before its eyes, it was the Classical Culture. All
the cities, big and little, fought one another to sheer extinction,
without plan or purpose, without mercy, body against body, under the
stimulus of a completely anti-historical instinct. But Greek ethics,
notwithstanding Heraclitus, were far from making struggle an ethical
principle. The Stoics and the Epicureans alike preached abstention from
it as an ideal. The overcoming of resistances may far more justly be
called the typical impulse of the Western soul. Activity, determination,
self-control, are postulates. To battle against the comfortable
foregrounds of life, against the impressions of the moment, against what
is near, tangible and easy, to win through to that which has generality
and duration and links past and future—these are the sum of all Faustian
imperatives from earliest Gothic to Kant and Fichte, and far beyond them
again to the Ethos of immense power and will exhibited in our States,
our economic systems and our technics. The _carpe diem_, the saturated
being, of the Classical standpoint is the most direct contrary of that
which is felt by Goethe and Kant and Pascal, by Church and Freethinker,
as alone possessing value—_active, fighting and victorious being_.[392]
As all the forms of Dynamic (whether pictorial, musical, physical,
social or political) are concerned with the working-out of infinite
relations and deal, not with the individual case and the sum of
individual cases as the Classical physics had done, but with the typical
course or process and its functional rule, “character” must be
understood as that which remains in principle constant in the working-
out of life; where there is no such constant we speak of “lack of
character.” It is character—the form in virtue of which a _moving_
existence can combine the highest constancy in the essential with the
maximum variability in the details—that makes telling biography (such as
Goethe’s “Wahrheit und Dichtung”), possible at all. Plutarch’s truly
Classical biographies are by comparison mere collections of anecdotes
strung together chronologically and not ordered pictures of historical
development, and it will hardly be disputed that only this second kind
of biography is imaginable in connexion with Alcibiades or Pericles or,
for that matter, any purely Apollinian figure. Their experiences lack,
not mass, but relation; there is something _atomic_ about them.
Similarly in the field of Science the Greek did not merely _forget_ to
look for general laws in the sum of his experiential data; in his cosmos
they were simply _not there to be found_.
It follows that the sciences of character-study, particularly
physiognomy and graphology, would not be able to glean much in the
Classical field. Its handwriting we do not know, but we do know that its
ornament, as compared with the Gothic, is of incredible simplicity and
feebleness of character-expression—think of the Meander and the
Acanthus-shoot. On the other hand, it has never been surpassed in
timeless evenness.
It goes without saying that we, when we turn to look into the Classical
life-feeling, must find there some basic element of ethical values that
is antithetical to “character” in the same way as the statue is
antithetical to the fugue. Euclidean geometry to Analysis, and body to
space. We find it in the _Gesture_. It is this that provides the
necessary foundation for a spiritual static. The word that stands in the
Classical vocabulary where “personality” stands in our own is προσῶπον,
“persona”—namely _rôle_ or _mask_. In late Greek or Roman speech it
means _the public aspect and mien_ of a man, which for Classical man is
tantamount to the essence and kernel of him. An orator was described as
speaking in the προσῶπον—not the character or the vein as we should say—
of a priest or a soldier. The slave was ἀπρόσωπος—that is, he had _no_
attitude or figure in the public life—but not ἀσώματος—that is, he did
have a _soul_. The idea that Destiny had assigned the rôle of king or
general to a man was expressed by Romans in the words _persona regis,
imperatoris_.[393] The Apollinian cast of life is manifest enough here.
What is indicated is not the personality (that is, an unfolding of
inward possibilities in _active striving_) but a permanent and self-
contained _posture_ strictly adapted to a so-to-say plastic ideal of
being. It is only in the Classical ethic that Beauty plays a distinct
rôle. However labelled—as σωφροσύνη, καλοκἀγαθία or ἀταραξία—it always
amounts to the well-ordered group of tangible and publicly evident
traits, defined for other men rather than specific to one’s self. A man
was the object and not the subject of outward life. The pure present,
the moment, the foreground were not conquered but worked up. The notion
of an inward life is impossible in this connexion. The significance of
Aristotle’s phrase ζῶον πολιτίκον—quite untranslatable and habitually
translated with a Western connotation—is that it refers to men who are
nothing when single and lonely (what could be more preposterous than an
Athenian Robinson Crusoe!) and only count for anything when in a
plurality, in agora or forum, where each reflects his neighbour and
thus, only thus, acquires a genuine reality. It is all implicit in the
phrase σώματα πόλεως, used for the burghers of the city. And thus we see
that the Portrait, the centre of Baroque art, is identical with the
representation of a man to the extent that he possesses character, and
that in the best age of Attic the representation of a man in respect of
his _attitude_, as _persona_, necessarily leans to the form-ideal of the
nude statue.
V
This opposition, further, has produced forms of tragedy that differ from
one another radically in every respect. The Faustian _character-drama_
and the Apollinian _drama of noble gesture_ have in fact nothing but
name in common.[394]
Starting, significantly enough, from Seneca and not from Æschylus and
Sophocles[395] (just as the contemporary architecture linked itself with
Imperial Rome and not with Pæstum), the Baroque drama with ever-
increasing emphasis makes character instead of occurrence its centre of
gravity, the origin of a system of spiritual co-ordinates (so to express
it) which gives the scenic facts position, sense, and value in relation
to itself. The outcome is a _tragedy of willing_, of efficient forces,
of inward movement not necessarily exhibited in visible form, whereas
Sophocles’s method was to employ a minimum of happening and to put it
behind the scenes particularly by means of the artifice of the
“messenger.” The Classical tragedy relates to general situations and not
particular personalities. It is specifically described by Aristotle as
μίμησίς οὐκ ἀνθρώπων ἀλλὰ πρᾶξεως καὶ βίου. That which in his _Poetica_—
assuredly the most fateful of all books for our poetry—he calls ἦθος,
namely the ideal _bearing_ of the ideal Hellene in a painful situation,
has as little in common with our notion of character (viz., a
constitution of the ego which determines events) as a surface in
Euclidean geometry has with the like-named concept in Riemann’s theory
of algebraic equations. It has, unfortunately, been our habit for
centuries past to translate ἦθος as “character” instead of paraphrasing
it (exact rendering is almost impossible) by “rôle,” “bearing” or
“gesture”; to reproduce myth, μῦθος, which is _timeless occurrence_, by
“action”; and to derive δρᾶμα from “doing.” It is Othello, Don Quixote,
Le Misanthrope, Werther and Hedda Gabler that are characters, and the
tragedy consists in the mere existence of human beings thus constituted
in their respective _milieux_. Their struggle—whether against this world
or the next, or themselves—is forced on them by their character and not
by anything coming from outside; a soul is placed in a web of
contradictory relations that admits of no net solution. Classical stage-
figures, on the contrary, are rôles and not characters; over and over
again the same figures appear—the old man, the slayer, the lover, all
slow-moving bodies under masks and on stilts. Thus in Classical drama—
even of the Late period—the mask is an element of profound symbolic
_necessity_, whereas our pieces would not be regarded as played at all
without the play of features. It is no answer to point to the great size
of the Greek theatre, for even the strolling player—even the portrait-
statue[396]—wore a mask, and had there been any spiritual need of a more
intimate setting the required architectural form would have been
forthcoming quickly enough.
In the tragedy of a character, what _happens_ is the outcome of a long
inner development. But in what _befalls_ Ajax and Philoctetes, Antigone
and Electra, their psychological antecedents (even supposing them to
have any) play no part. The decisive event comes upon them, brutally, as
accident, from without, and it might have befallen another in the same
way and with the same result. It would not be necessary even for that
other to be of the same sex.
It is not enough to distinguish Classical and Western tragedy merely as
action-drama and event-drama. Faustian tragedy is _biographical_,
Classical _anecdotal_; that is, the one deals with the sense of a whole
life and the other with the content of the single moment.[397] What
relation, for instance, has the entire _inward_ past of Œdipus or
Orestes to the shattering event that suddenly meets him on his way?[398]
There is one sort of destiny, then, that strikes like a flash of
lightning, and just as blindly, and another that interweaves itself with
the course of a life, an invisible thread[399] that yet distinguishes
this particular life from all others. There is not the smallest trait in
the past existence of Othello—that masterpiece of psychological
analysis—that has not some bearing on the catastrophe. Race-hatred, the
isolation of the upstart amongst the patricians, the Moor as soldier and
as child of Nature, the loneliness of the ageing bachelor—all these
things have their significance. Lear, too, and Hamlet—compare the
exposition of these characters with that of Sophoclean pieces. They are
psychological expositions through-and-through and not summations of
outward data. The psychologist, in our sense of the word, namely the
fine student (hardly nowadays to be distinguished from the poet) of
spiritual turning-points, was entirely unknown to the Greeks. They were
no more analytical in the field of soul than in that of number; _vis-à-
vis_ the Classical soul, how could they be so? “Psychology” in fact is
the proper designation for the _Western_ way of fashioning men; the word
holds good for a portrait by Rembrandt as for the music of “Tristan,”
for Stendhal’s Julian Sorel as for Dante’s “Vita Nuova.” The like of it
is not to be found in any other Culture. If there is anything that the
Classical arts scrupulously exclude it is this, for psychology is the
form in which art handles man as incarnate will and not as σῶμα. To call
Euripides a psychologist is to betray ignorance of what psychology is.
What an abundance of character there is even in the mere mythology of
the North with its sly dwarfs, its lumpy giants, its teasing elves, its
Loki, Baldr and the rest! Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, Ares are simply “men,”
Hermes the “youth,” Athene a maturer Aphrodite, and the minor gods—as
the later plastic shows—distinguishable only by the labels. And the same
is true without reservation of the figures of the Attic stage. In
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, the tragic is
individual, life develops from within outwards, dynamic, functional, and
the life-courses are only fully understandable with reference to the
historical background of the century. But in the great tragedians of
Athens it comes from outside, it is static, Euclidean. To repeat a
phrase already used in connexion with world-history, the shattering
event is _epochal_ in the former and merely _episodic_ in the latter,
even the finale of death being only the last bead in the string of sheer
accidents that makes up an existence.
A Baroque tragedy is nothing but this same directive character brought
into and developed in the light-world, and shown as a curve instead of
as an equation, as kinetic instead of as potential energy. The visible
person is the character as potential, the action the character at work.
This, under the heap of Classicist reminiscences and misunderstandings
that still hides it, is the whole meaning of our idea of Tragedy. The
tragic man of the Classical is a Euclidean body that is struck by the
Heimarmene in a position that it did not choose and cannot alter, but is
seen, in the light that plays from without upon its surfaces, to be
indeformable _quand même_. This is the sense in which Agamemnon is
ναύαρχον σῶμα βασίλειον and in which Œdipus’s σῶμα is subjected to the
Oracle.[400] Down to Alexander the significant figures of Greek history
astonish us with their inelasticity; not one of them, apparently,
undergoes in the battle of life any such inward transformation as those
which we know took place in Luther and Loyola. What we are prone—too
prone—to call “characterization” in Greek drama is nothing but the
reflection of events upon the ἦθος of the hero, never the reflection of
a personality on events.
Of deep necessity, therefore, we Faustians understand drama as a maximum
of activity; and, of deep necessity also, the Greek understood it as a
maximum of passivity.[401] Speaking generally, the Attic tragedy had no
“action” at all. The Mysteries were purely δράματα or δρώμενα, i.e.,
ritual performances, and it was from the Mystery-form with its
“peripeteia” that Æschylus (himself an Eleusinian) derived the high
drama that he created. Aristotle describes tragedy as the _imitation_ of
an occurrence. This imitation is identical with the “profanation” of the
mysteries; and we know that Æschylus went further and made the sacral
vestments of the Eleusinian priesthood the regular costume of the Attic
stage, and was accused on that account.[402] For the δρᾶμα proper, with
its reversal from lamentation to joy, consisted not in the fable that
was narrated but in the ritual action that lay behind it, and was
understood and felt by the spectator as deeply symbolic. With this
element of the non-Homeric early religion[403] there became associated
another, a boorish—the burlesque (whether phallic or dithyrambic) scenes
of the spring festivals of Demeter and Dionysus. The beast-dances[404]
and the accompanying song were the germ of the tragic Chorus which puts
itself before the actor or “answerer” of Thespis (534).
The genuine tragedy grew up out of the solemn death-lament (threnos,
nænia). At some time or other the joyous play of the Dionysus festival
(which also was a soul-feast) became a mourners’ chorus of men, the
Satyr-play being relegated to the end. In 494 Phrynichus produced the
“Fall of Miletus”—not a historical drama but a lament of the women of
Miletus—and was heavily fined for thus recalling the public calamity. It
was Æschylus’s introduction of the second actor that accomplished the
essential of Classical tragedy; the lament as _given theme_ was
thenceforward subordinated to the visual presentation of a great human
suffering as _present motive_. The foreground-story (μύθος) is not
“action” but the occasion for the songs of the Chorus, which still
constitutes the τραγῳδία proper. It is immaterial whether the occurrence
is indicated by narrative or exposition. The spectator was in solemn
mood and he felt himself and his own fate to be meant in the words of
pathos. It was in him that the περιπέτεια, the central element of the
holy pageant, took place. Whatever the environment of message and tale,
the liturgical lament for the woe of mankind remained always the centre
of gravity of the whole, as we see more particularly in the
“Prometheus,” the “Agamemnon” and the “Œdipus Rex.” But presently—at the
very time when in Polycletus the pure plastic was triumphing over the
fresco[405]—there emerges high above the lament the grandeur of human
endurance, the attitude, the ἦθος of the Hero. The theme is, not the
heroic Doer whose will surges and breaks against the resistance of alien
powers or the demons in his own breast, but the will-less Patient whose
somatic existence is—gratuitously—destroyed. The Prometheus trilogy of
Æschylus begins just where Goethe would in all probability have left
off. King Lear’s madness is the _issue_ of the tragic action, but
Sophocles’s Ajax is _made_ mad by Athene before the drama opens—here is
the difference between a character and an operated figure. Fear and
compassion, in fact, are, as Aristotle says, the necessary effect of
Greek tragedy upon the Greek (and only the Greek) spectator, as is
evident at once from his choice of the most effective scenes, which are
those of piteous crash of fortune (περιπέτεια) and of recognition
(ἀναγνώρισις). In the first, the ruling impression is φόβος (terror) and
in the second it is ἐλεός (pity), and the καθάρσις in the spectator
presupposes his existence-ideal to be that of ἀταραξία.[406] The
Classical soul is pure “present,” pure σῶμα, unmoved and point-formed
being. To see this imperilled by the jealousy of the Gods or by that
blind chance that may crash upon any man’s head without reason and
without warning, is the most fearful of all experiences. The very roots
of Greek being are struck at by what for the challenging Faustian is the
first stimulus to living activity. And then—to find one’s self
_delivered_, to see the sun come out again and the dark thunder clouds
huddle themselves away on the remote horizon, to rejoice profoundly in
the admired grand gesture, to see the tortured mythical soul breathe
again—that is the κάθαρσις. But it presupposes a kind of life-feeling
that is entirely alien to us, the very word being hardly translatable
into our languages and our sensations. It took all the æsthetic industry
and assertiveness of the Baroque and of Classicism, backed by the
meekest submissiveness before ancient texts, to persuade us that this is
the spiritual basis of our own tragedy as well. And no wonder. For the
fact is that the effect of our tragedy is precisely the opposite. It
does not deliver us from deadweight pressure of events, but evokes
active dynamic elements in us, stings us, stimulates us. It awakens the
primary feelings of an energetic human being, the fierceness and the joy
of tension, danger, violent deed, victory, crime, the triumph of
overcoming and destroying—feelings that have slumbered in the depths of
every Northern soul since the days of the Vikings, the Hohenstaufen and
the Crusades. _That_ is Shakespearian effect. A Greek would not have
tolerated Macbeth, nor, generally, would he have comprehended the
meaning of this mighty art of directional biography at all. That figures
like Richard III, Don Juan, Faust, Michael Kohlhaas, Golo—un-Classical
from top to toe—awaken in us not sympathy but a deep and strange envy,
not fear but a mysterious desire to suffer, to suffer-with (“compassion”
of quite another sort), is visibly—even to-day when Faustian tragedy in
its final form, the German, is dead at last—the standing motive of the
literature of our Alexandrian phase. In the “sensational” adventure- and
detective-story, and still more recently in the cinema-drama (the
equivalent of the Late-Classical mimes), a relic of the unrestrainable
Faustian impulse to conquer and discover is still palpable.
There are corresponding differences between the Apollinian and the
Faustian outlook in the forms of dramatic presentation, which are the
complement of the poetic idea. The antique drama is a piece of plastic,
a group of pathetic scenes conceived as reliefs, a pageant of gigantic
marionettes disposed against the definitive plane of the back-wall.[407]
Presentation is entirely that of grandly-imagined gestures, the meagre
facts of the fable being solemnly recited rather than presented. The
technique of Western drama aims at just the opposite—unbroken movement
and strict exclusion of flat static moments. The famous “three unities”
of place, time and action, as unconsciously evolved (though not
expressly formulated) in Athens, are a paraphrase of the type of the
Classical marble statue and, like it, an indication of what classical
man, the man of the Polis and the pure present and the gesture, felt
about life. The unities are all, effectively, _negative_, denials of
past and future, repudiation of all spiritual action-at-a-distance. They
can be summed in the one word ἀταραξία. The postulates of these
“unities” must not be confused with the superficially similar postulates
in the drama of the Romance peoples. The Spanish theatre of the 16th
Century bowed itself to the authority of “Classical” rules, but it is
easy to see the influence of _noblesse oblige_ in this; Castilian
dignity responded to the appeal without knowing, or indeed troubling to
find out, the original sense of the rules. The great Spanish dramatists,
Tirso da Molina above all, fashioned the “unities” of the Baroque, but
not as metaphysical negations, but purely as expressions of the spirit
of high courtesy, and it was as such that Corneille, the docile pupil of
Spanish “grandezza,” borrowed them. It was a fateful step. If Florence
threw herself into the imitation of the Classical sculpture—at which
everyone marvelled and of which no one possessed the final criteria—no
harm was done, for there was by then no Northern plastic to suffer
thereby. But with tragedy it was another matter. Here there was the
possibility of a mighty drama, purely Faustian, of unimagined forms and
daring. That this did _not_ appear, that for all the greatness of
Shakespeare the Teutonic drama never quite shook off the spell of
misunderstood convention, was the consequence of blind faith in the
authority of Aristotle. What might not have come out of Baroque drama
had it remained under the impression of the knightly epic and the Gothic
Easter-play and Mystery, in the near neighbourhood of Oratorios and
Passions, without ever hearing of the Greek theatre! A tragedy issuing
from the spirit of contrapuntal music, free of limitations proper to
plastic but here meaningless, a dramatic poetry that from Orlando Lasso
and Palestrina could develop—side by side with Heinrich Schütz, Bach,
Händel, Gluck and Beethoven, but entirely free—to a pure form of its
own: that was what was possible, and that was what did not happen; and
it is only to the fortunate circumstance that the whole of the fresco-
art of Hellas has been lost that we owe the inward freedom of our oil-
painting.
VI
The unities were not sufficient for the Attic drama. It demanded,
further, the rigid mask in lieu of facial play, thus forbidding
spiritual characterization in the same spirit as Attic sentiment forbade
likeness-statuary. It demanded more-than-life-sized figures and got them
by means of the cothurnus and by padding and draping the actor till he
could scarcely move, thus eliminating all his individuality. Lastly, it
required monotonous sing-song delivery, which it ensured by means of a
mouthpiece fixed in the mask.
The bare text as we read it to-day (not without reading into it the
spirit of Goethe and Shakespeare and of our perspective vision) conveys
little of the deeper significance of these dramas. Classical art-works
were created entirely for the eye, even the physical eye, of Classical
man, and the secrets reveal themselves only when put in sensuous forms.
And here our attention is drawn to a feature of Greek tragedy that any
true tragedy of the Faustian style must find intolerable, the continual
presence of the Chorus. The Chorus is the primitive tragedy, for without
it the ἦθος would be impossible. Character one possesses for one’s self,
but attitude has meaning only in relation to others.
This Chorus as crowd (the ideal opposite to the lonely or inward man and
the monologue of the West), this Chorus which is always there, the
witness of every “soliloquy,” this Chorus by which, in the stage-life as
in the real life, fear before the boundless and the void is banished, is
truly Apollinian. Self-review as a _public_ action, pompous public
mourning in lieu of the solitary anguish of the bedchamber, the tears
and lamentations that fill a whole series of dramas like the
“Philoctetes” and the “Trachiniæ,” the impossibility of being alone, the
feeling of the Polis, all the feminine of this Culture that we see
idealized in the Belvedere Apollo, betrays itself in this symbol of the
Chorus. In comparison with this kind of drama, Shakespeare’s is a single
monologue. Even in the conversations, even in the group-scenes we are
sensible of the immense _inner_ distance between the persons, each of
whom at bottom is only talking with himself. Nothing can overcome this
spiritual remoteness. It is felt in Hamlet as in “Tasso” and in Don
Quixote as in Werther, but even Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzeval is
filled with and stamped by the sense of infinity. The distinction holds
for all Western poetry against all Classical. All our lyric verse from
Walther von der Vogelweide to Goethe and from Goethe to the poems of our
dying world-cities is monologue, while the Classical lyric is a choral
lyric, a singing before witnesses. The one is received inwardly, in
wordless reading, as soundless music, and the other is publicly recited.
The one belongs to the still chamber and is spread by means of the book,
the other belongs to the place where it is voiced.
Thus, although the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Thracian festival of the
epiphany of Dionysus had been nocturnal celebrations, the art of Thespis
developed, as its inmost nature required, as a scene of the morning and
the full sunlight. On the contrary, our Western popular and Passion
plays, which originated in the sermon of allocated parts and were
produced first by priests in the church, and then by laymen in the open
square, on the _mornings_ of high festivals, led almost unnoticed to an
art of evening and night. Already in Shakespeare’s time performances
took place in the late afternoon, and by Goethe’s this mystical sense of
a proper relation between art-work and light-setting had attained its
object. In general, every art and every Culture has its significant
times of day. The music of the 18th Century is a music of the darkness
and the inner eye, and the plastic of Athens is an art of cloudless day.
That this is no superficial contrast we can see by comparing the Gothic
plastic, wrapped eternally in “dim religious light,” and the Ionic
flute, the instrument of high noon. The candle affirms and the sunlight
denies space as the opposite of things. At night the universe of space
triumphs over matter, at midday things and nearness assert themselves
and space is repudiated. The same contrast appears in Attic fresco and
Northern oil-painting, and in the symbols of Helios and Pan and those of
the starry night and red sunset. It is at midnight, too, and
particularly in the twelve long nights after Christmas, that the souls
of our dead walk abroad. In the Classical world, the souls belong to the
day—even the early Church still speaks of the δωδεκαήμερον, the twelve
dedicated days; but with the awakening of the Faustian soul these become
“Twelfth Night.”
The Classical vase-painting and fresco—though the fact has never been
remarked—has no time-of-day. No shadow indicates the state of the sun,
no heaven shows the stars. There is neither morning nor evening, neither
spring nor autumn, but _pure timeless brightness_.[408] For equally
obvious reasons our oil-painting developed in the opposite direction,
towards an imaginary darkness, also independent of time-of-day, which
forms the characteristic atmosphere of the Faustian soul-space. This is
all the more significant as the intention is from the outset to treat
the field of the picture with reference to a certain time-of-day, that
is, historically. There are early mornings, sunset-clouds, the last
gleams upon the sky-line of distant mountains, the candle-lighted room,
the spring meadows and the autumn woods, the long and short shadows of
bushes and furrows. But they are all penetrated through and through with
a subdued darkness that is _not_ derived from the motion of the heavenly
bodies. In fact, steady brightness and steady twilight are the
respective hall-marks of the Classical and the Western, alike in
painting and in drama; and may we not also describe Euclidean geometry
as a mathematic of the day and Analysis as a mathematic of the night?
Change of scene, undoubtedly regarded by the Greeks as a sort of
profanation, is for us almost a religious necessity, a postulate of our
world-feeling. There seems something pagan in the fixed scene of Tasso.
We _inwardly_ need a drama of perspectives and wide backgrounds, a stage
that shakes off sensuous limitations and draws the whole world into
itself. In Shakespeare, who was born when Michelangelo died and ceased
to write when Rembrandt came into the world, dramatic infinity, the
passionate overthrow of all static limitations, attained the maximum.
His woods, seas, alleys, gardens, battlefields lie in the afar, the
unbounded. Years fly past in the space of minutes. The mad Lear between
fool and reckless outcast on the heath, in the night and the storm, the
unutterably lonely ego lost in space—here is the Faustian life-feeling!
From such a scene as this it is but a step to the _inwardly_ seen and
_inwardly_ felt landscapes of the almost contemporary Venetian music;
for on the Elizabethan stage the whole thing was merely _indicated_, and
it was the inner eye that out of a few hints fashioned for itself an
image of the world in which the scenes—far-fetched always—played
themselves out. Such scenes the Greek stage could not have handled at
all. The Greek scene is never a landscape; in general, it is nothing,
and at best it may be described as a basis for movable statues. The
figures are everything, in drama, as in fresco. It is sometimes said
that Classical man lacked the feeling for Nature. Insensitive to
Faustian Nature, that of space and of landscape, Classical man certainly
was. _His_ Nature was the _body_, and if once we have let the sentiment
of this sink into us, we suddenly comprehend the eye with which the
Greek would follow the mobile muscle-relief of the nude body. This, and
not clouds and stars and horizon, was his “Living Nature.”
VII
Now, whatever is sensuously-near is understandable for all, and
therefore of all the Cultures that have been, the Classical is the most
popular, and the Faustian the least popular, in its expressions of life-
feeling. A creation is “popular” that gives itself with all its secrets
to the first comer at the first glance that incorporates its meaning in
its exterior and surface. In any Culture, that element is “popular”
which has come down unaltered from primitive states and imaginings,
which a man understands from childhood without having to _master by
effort_ any really novel method or standpoint—and, generally, that which
is immediately and frankly evident to the senses, as against that which
is merely hinted at and has to be discovered—by the few, and sometimes
the very, very few. There are popular ideas, works, men and landscapes.
Every Culture has its own quite definite sort of esoteric or popular
character that is immanent in all its doings, so far as these have
symbolic importance. The commonplace eliminates differences of spiritual
breadth as well as depth between man and man, while the esoteric
emphasizes and strengthens them. Lastly, considered in relation to the
primary depth-experience of this and that kind of awakening man—that is,
in relation to the prime-symbol of his existence and the cast of his
world-around—the purely “popular” and naïve associates itself with the
symbol of the bodily, while to the symbol of endless Space belongs a
frankly _un_-popular relation between the creations and the men of the
Culture.
The Classical geometry is that of the child, that of any layman—Euclid’s
Elements are used in England as a school-book to this day. The workaday
mind will always regard this as the only true and correct geometry. All
other kinds of natural geometry that are possible (and have in fact, by
an immense effort of overcoming the popular-obvious, been discovered)
are understandable only for the circle of the professional
mathematicians. The famous “four elements” of Empedocles are those of
every naïve man and his “instinctive” physics, while the idea of
isotopes which has come out of research into radioactivity is hardly
comprehensible even to the adept in closely-cognate sciences. Everything
that is Classical is comprehensible in _one_ glance, be it the Doric
temple, the statue, the Polis, the cults; backgrounds and secrets there
are none. But compare a Gothic cathedral-façade with the Propylæa, an
etching with a vase-painting, the policy of the Athenian people with
that of the modern Cabinet. Consider what it means that every one of our
epoch-making works of poetry, policy and science has called forth a
whole literature of explanations, and not indubitably successful
explanations at that. While the Parthenon sculptures were “there” for
every Hellene, the music of Bach and his contemporaries was only for
musicians. We have the types of the Rembrandt expert, the Dante scholar,
the expert in contrapuntal music, and it is a reproach—a justifiable
reproach—to Wagner that it was possible for far too many people to be
Wagnerians, that far too little of his music was for the trained
musician. But do we hear of Phidias-experts or even Homer-scholars?
Herein lies the explanation of a set of phenomena which we have hitherto
been inclined to treat—in a vein of moral philosophy, or, better, of
melodrama—as weaknesses common to humanity, but which are in fact
symptoms of the Western life-feeling, viz., the “misunderstood” artist,
the poet “left to starve,” the “derided discoverer,” the thinker who is
“centuries in advance of his time” and so on. These are types of an
esoteric Culture. Destinies of this sort have their basis in the passion
of distance in which is concealed the desire-to-infinity and the will-
to-power, and they are as necessary in the field of Faustian mankind—at
all stages—as they are unthinkable in the Apollinian.
Every high creator in Western history has in reality aimed, from first
to last, at something which only the few could comprehend. Michelangelo
made the remark that his style was ordained for the correction of fools.
Gauss concealed his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry for thirty
years, for fear of the “clamour of the Bœotians.” It is only to-day that
we are separating out the masters of Gothic cathedral art from the rank-
and-file. But the same applies also to every painter, statesman,
philosopher. Think of Giordano Bruno, or Leibniz, or Kant, as against
Anaximander, Heraclitus or Protagoras. What does it mean, that no German
philosopher worth mentioning can be understood by the man in the street,
and that the combination of simplicity with majesty that is Homer’s is
simply not to be found in any Western language? The Nibelungenlied is a
hard, reserved utterance, and as for Dante, in Germany at any rate the
pretension to understand him is seldom more than a literary pose. We
find everywhere in the Western what we find nowhere in the Classical—the
exclusive form. Whole periods—for instance, the Provençal Culture and
the Rococo—are in the highest degree select and uninviting, their ideas
and forms having no existence except for a small class of higher men.
Even the Renaissance is no exception, for though it purports to be the
rebirth of that Antique which is so utterly _non_-exclusive and caters
so frankly for all, it is in fact, through-and-through, the creation of
a circle or of individual chosen souls, a taste that rejects popularity
from the outset—and how deep this sense of detachment goes we can tell
from the case of Florence, where the generality of the people viewed the
works of the elect with indifference, or with open mouths, or with
dislike, and sometimes, as in the case of Savonarola, turned and rent
them. On the contrary, _every_ Attic burgher belonged to the Attic
Culture, which excluded nobody; and consequently, the distinctions of
deeps and shallows, which are so decisively important for us, did not
exist at all for it. For us, popular and shallow are synonymous—in art
as in science—but for Classical man it was not so.
Consider our sciences too. Every one of them, without exception, has
besides its elementary groundwork certain “higher” regions that are
inaccessible to the layman—symbols, these also, of our will-to-infinity
and directional energy. The public for whom the last chapters of up-to-
date physics have been written numbers at the utmost a thousand persons,
and certain problems of modern mathematics are accessible only to a much
smaller circle still—for our “popular” science is without value,
_détraquée_, and falsified. We have not only an art for artists, but
also a mathematic for mathematicians, a politic for politicians (of
which the _profanum vulgus_ of newspaper-readers has not the smallest
inkling,[409] whereas Classical politics never got beyond the horizon of
the Agora), a religion for the “religious genius” and a poetry for
philosophers. Indeed, we may take the craving for wide effect as a
sufficient index by itself of the commencing and already perceptible
decline of Western science. That the severe esoteric of the Baroque Age
is felt now as a burden, is a symptom of sinking strength and of the
dulling of that distance-sense which _confessed_ the limitation with
humility. The few sciences that have kept the old fineness, depth, and
energy of conclusion and deduction and have not been tainted with
journalism—and few indeed they are, for theoretical physics,
mathematics, Catholic dogma, and perhaps jurisprudence exhaust the list—
address themselves to a very narrow and chosen band of experts. _And it
is this expert, and his opposite the layman, that are totally lacking in
the Classical life, wherein everyone knows everything._ For us, the
polarity of expert and layman has all the significance of a high symbol,
and when the tension of this distance is beginning to slacken, there the
Faustian life is fading out.
The conclusion to be argued from this as regards the advances of Western
science in its last phase (which will cover, or quite possibly will
_not_ cover, the next two centuries) is, that in proportion as
megalopolitan shallowness and triviality drive arts and sciences on to
the bookstall and into the factory, the posthumous spirit of the Culture
will confine itself more and more to very narrow circles; and that
there, remote from advertisement, it will work in ideas and forms so
abstruse that only a mere handful of superfine intelligences will be
capable of attaching meanings to them.
VIII
In no Classical art-work is a relation with the beholder attempted, for
that would require the form-language of the individual object to affirm
and to make use of the existence of a relation between that object and
ambient unlimited space. An Attic statue is a completely Euclidean body,
timeless and relationless, wholly self-contained. It neither speaks nor
looks. _It is quite unconscious of the spectator._ Unlike the plastic
forms of every other Culture, it stands wholly for itself and fits into
no architectural order; it is an individual amongst individuals, a body
amongst bodies. And the living individuals merely perceive it _as a
neighbour_, and do not feel it as an invasive influence, an efficient
capable of traversing space. Thus is expressed the Apollinian life-
feeling.
The awakening Magian art at once reversed the meaning of these forms.
The eyes of the statues and portraits in the Constantinian style are big
and staring and very definitely directed. They represent the Pneuma, the
higher of the two soul-substances. The Classical sculptor had fashioned
the eyes as blind, but now the pupils are bored, the eye, unnaturally
enlarged, looks into the space that in Attic art it had not acknowledged
as existing. In the Classical fresco-painting, heads are turned towards
one another, but in the mosaics of Ravenna and even in the relief-work
of Early-Christian-Late-Roman sarcophagi they are always turned towards
the beholder, and their wholly spiritual look is fixed upon him.
Mysteriously and quite un-Classically the beholder’s sphere is invaded
by an action-at-a-distance from the world that is in the art-work.
Something of this magic can still be traced in early Florentine and
early Rhenish gold-ground pictures.
Consider, now, Western painting as it was after Leonardo, fully
conscious of its mission. How does it deal with infinite space as
something _singular_ which comprehends both picture and spectator as
mere centres of gravity of a spatial dynamic? The full Faustian life-
feeling, the passion of the third dimension, takes hold of the form of
the picture, the painted plane, and transforms it in an unheard-of way.
The picture no longer stands for itself, nor looks at the spectator, but
_takes him into its sphere_. The sector defined by the sides of the
frame—the peepshow-field, twin with the stage-field—represents universal
space itself. Foreground and background lose all tendency to materiality
and propinquity and disclose instead of marking off. Far horizons deepen
the field to infinity, and the colour-treatment of the close foreground
eliminates the ideal plane of separation formed by the canvas and thus
expands the field so that the spectator is _in_ it. It is not he, now,
who chooses the standpoint from which the picture is most effective; on
the contrary, the picture dictates position and distance to him. Lateral
limits, too, are done away with—from 1500 onwards overrunnings of the
frame are more and more frequent and daring. The Greek spectator stands
_before_ the fresco of Polygnotus. We _sink into_ a picture, that is, we
are pulled into it by the power of the space-treatment. Unity of space
being thus re-established, the infinity that is expanded in all
directions by the picture is ruled by the Western perspective;[410] and
from perspective there runs a road straight to the comprehension of our
astronomical world-picture and its passionate pioneering into unending
farness.
Apollinian man _did not want_ to observe the broad universe, and the
philosophical systems one and all are silent about it. They know only
problems concerned with tangible and actual things, and have never
anything positive or significant to say about what is between the
“things.” The Classical thinker takes the earth-sphere, upon which he
stands and which (even in Hipparchus) is enveloped in a fixed celestial
sphere, as the complete and _given_ world, and if we probe the depths
and secrets of motive here we are almost startled by the persistency
with which theory attempted time after time to attach the order of these
heavens to that of the earth in some way that would not impugn the
primacy of the latter.[411]
Compare with this the convulsive vehemence with which the discovery of
Copernicus—the “contemporary” of Pythagoras—drove through the soul of
the West, and the deep spirit of awe in which Kepler looked upon the
laws of planetary orbits which he had discovered as an immediate
revelation from God, not daring to doubt that they were circular because
any other form would have been too unworthy a symbol. Here the old
Northern life-feeling, the Viking infinity-wistfulness, comes into its
own. Here, too, is the meaning of the characteristically Faustian
discovery of the telescope which, penetrating into spaces hidden from
the naked eye and inaccessible to the will-to-power, _widens_ the
universe that we possess. The truly religious feeling that seizes us
even to-day when we dare to look into the depths of starry space for the
first time—the same feeling of power that Shakespeare’s greatest
tragedies aim at awakening—would to Sophocles appear as the impiety of
all impieties.
Our denial of the “vault” of heaven, then, is a _resolve_ and not a
sense-experience. The modern ideas as to the nature of starry space—or,
to speak more prudently, of an extension indicated by light-indices that
are communicated by eye and telescope—most certainly do not rest upon
sure knowledge, for what we see in the telescope is small bright disks
of different sizes. The photographic plate yields quite another picture—
not a _sharper_ one but a _different_ one—and the construction of a
consistent world-picture such as we crave depends upon connecting the
two by numerous and often very daring hypotheses (e.g., of distances,
magnitudes and movements) that we ourselves frame. The style of this
picture corresponds to the style of our own soul. In actual fact we do
not know how different the light-powers of one and another star may be,
nor whether they vary in different directions. We do not know whether or
not light is altered, diminished, or extinguished in the immensities of
space. We do not know whether our earthly conceptions of the nature of
light, and therefore all the theories and laws deduced from them, have
validity beyond the immediate environment of the earth. What we “see”
are merely light-_indices_; what we understand are symbols of ourselves.
The strong upspringing of the Copernican world-idea—which belongs
exclusively to our Culture and (to risk an assertion that even now may
seem paradoxical) would be and will be _deliberately forced into
oblivion_ whenever the soul of a coming Culture shall feel itself
endangered by it[412]—was founded on the certainty that the corporeal-
static, the imagined preponderance of the plastic _earth_, was
henceforth eliminated from the Cosmos. Till then, the heavens which were
thought of, or at any rate felt, as a substantial quantity, like the
earth, had been regarded as being in polar equilibrium with it. But now
it was _Space_ that ruled the universe. “World” signifies space, and the
stars are hardly more than mathematical points, tiny balls in the
immense, that as material no longer affect the world-feeling. While
Democritus, who tried (as on behalf of the Apollinian Culture he was
bound to try) to settle some limit of a bodily kind to it all, imagined
a layer of hook-shaped atoms as a skin over the Cosmos, an insatiable
hunger drives _us_ ever further and further into the remote. The solar
system of Copernicus, already expanded by Giordano Bruno to a thousand
such systems, grew immeasurably wider in the Baroque Age; and to-day we
“know” that the sum of all the solar systems, about 35,000,000,
constitutes a closed (and demonstrably finite[413]) stellar system which
forms an ellipsoid of rotation and has its equator approximately along
the band of the Milky Way. Swarms of solar systems traverse this space,
like flights of migrant birds, with the same velocity and direction. One
such group, with an apex in the constellation of Hercules, is formed by
our sun together with the bright stars Capella, Vega, Altair and
Betelgeuse. The axis of this immense system, which has its mid-point not
far from the present position of our sun, is taken as 470,000,000 times
as long as the distance from the earth to the sun. Any night, the starry
heavens give us at the same moment impressions that originated 3,700
years apart in time, for that is the distance in light-years from the
extreme outer limit to the earth. In the picture of history as it
unfolds before us here, this period corresponds to a duration covering
the whole Classical and Magian ages and going back to the zenith of the
Egyptian Culture in the XIIth Dynasty. This aspect—an _image_, I repeat,
and not a matter of experimental knowledge—is for the Faustian a high
and noble[414] aspect, but for the Apollinian it would have been woeful
and terrible, an annihilation of the most profound conditions of his
being. And he would have felt it as sheer salvation when after all a
limit, however remote, had been found. But we, driven by the deep
necessity that is in us, must simply ask ourselves the new question: Is
there anything _outside_ this system? Are there aggregates of such
systems, at such distances that even the dimensions established by our
astronomy[415] are small by comparison? As far as sense-observations are
concerned, it seems that an absolute limit has been reached; neither
light nor gravitation can give a sign of existence through this outer
space, void of mass. But for us it is a simple _necessity of thought_.
Our spiritual passion, our unresting need to actualize our existence-
idea in symbols, _suffers_ under this limitation of our sense-
perceptions.
IX
So also it was that the old Northern races, in whose primitive souls the
Faustian was already awakening, discovered in their grey dawn the art of
_sailing the seas_ which emancipated them.[416] The Egyptians knew the
sail, but only profited by it as a labour-saving device. They sailed, as
they had done before in their oared ships, along the coast to Punt and
Syria, but the _idea_ of the high-seas voyage—what it meant as a
liberation, a symbol—was not in them. Sailing, real sailing, is a
triumph over Euclidean land. At the beginning of our 14th Century,
almost coincident with each other (and with the formation-periods of
oil-painting and counterpoint!) came gunpowder and the compass, that is,
_long-range weapons and long-range intercourse_ (means that the Chinese
Culture[417] too had, necessarily, discovered for itself). It was the
spirit of the Vikings and the Hansa, as of those dim peoples, so unlike
the Hellenes with their domestic funerary urns, who heaped up great
barrows as memorials of the lonely soul on the wide plains. It was the
spirit of those who sent their dead kings to sea in their burning ships,
thrilling manifests of their dark yearning for the boundless. The spirit
of the Norsemen drove their cockle-boats—in the Tenth Century that
heralded the Faustian birth—to the coasts of America. But to the
circumnavigation of Africa, already achieved by Egyptians and
Carthaginians, Classical mankind was wholly indifferent. How statuesque
their existence was, even with respect to intercourse, is shown by the
fact that the news of the First Punic War—one of the most intense wars
of history—penetrated to Athens from Sicily merely as an indefinite
report. Even the souls of the Greeks were assembled in Hades as
unexcitable shadows (εἴδωλα) without strength, wish or feeling. But the
Northern dead gathered themselves in fierce unresting armies of the
cloud and the storm.
The event which stands at the same cultural level as the discoveries of
the Spaniards and Portuguese is that of the Hellenic colonizations of
the 8th Century B.C. But, while the Spaniards and the Portuguese were
possessed by the adventured-craving for uncharted distances and for
everything unknown and dangerous, the Greeks went carefully, point by
point, on the known tracks of the Phœnicians, Carthaginians and
Etruscans, and their curiosity in no wise extended to what lay beyond
the Pillars of Hercules and the Isthmus of Suez, easily accessible as
both were to them. Athens no doubt heard of the way to the North Sea, to
the Congo, to Zanzibar, to India—in Nero’s time the position of the
southern extremity of India was known, also that of the islands of
Sunda—but Athens shut its eyes to these things just as it did to the
astronomical knowledge of the old East. Even when the lands that we call
Morocco and Portugal had become Roman provinces, no Atlantic voyaging
ensued, and the Canaries remained forgotten. Apollinian man felt the
Columbus-longing as little as he felt the Copernican. Possessed though
the Greek merchants were with the desire of gain, a deep metaphysical
shyness restrained them from extending the horizon, and in geography as
in other matters they stuck to near things and foregrounds. The
existence of the Polis, that astonishing ideal of the State as statue,
was in truth nothing more nor less than a refuge from the wide world of
the sea-peoples—and that though the Classical, alone of all the Cultures
so far, had a ring of coasts about a sea of islands, and not a
continental expanse, as its motherland. Not even Hellenism, with all its
proneness to technical diversions,[418] freed itself from the oared ship
which tethered the mariner to the coasts. The naval architects of
Alexandria were capable of constructing giant ships of 260-ft.
length,[419] and, for that matter, the steamship was discovered in
principle. But there are some discoveries that have all the pathos of a
great and _necessary_ symbol and reveal depths within, and there are
others that are merely play of intellect. The steamship is for
Apollinians one of the latter and for Faustians one of the former class.
It is prominence or insignificance in the Macrocosm as a whole that
gives discovery and the application thereof the character of depth or
shallowness.
The discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama extended the geographical
horizon without limit, and the world-sea came into the same relation
with land as that of the universe of space with earth. And then first
the political tension within the Faustian world-consciousness discharged
itself. For the Greeks, Hellas was and remained the important part of
the earth’s surface, but with the discovery of America West-Europe
became a province in a gigantic whole. Thenceforward the history of the
Western Culture has a _planetary_ character.
Every Culture possesses a proper conception of home and fatherland,
which is hard to comprehend, scarcely to be expressed in words, full of
dark metaphysical relations, but nevertheless unmistakable in its
tendency. The Classical home-feeling which tied the individual
corporally and Euclidean-ly to the Polis[420] is the very antithesis of
that enigmatic “Heimweh” of the Northerner which has something musical,
soaring and unearthly in it. Classical man felt as “Home” just what he
could see from the Acropolis of his native city. Where the horizon of
Athens ended, the alien, the hostile, the “fatherland” of another began.
Even the Roman of late Republican times understood by “patria” nothing
but Urbs Roma, not even Latium, still less Italy. The Classical world,
as it matured, dissolved itself into a large number of point-patriæ, and
the need of bodily separation between them took the form of hatreds far
more intense than any hatred that there was of the Barbarian. And it is
therefore the most convincing of all evidences of the victory of the
Magian world-feeling that Caracalla[421] in 212 A.D. granted Roman
citizenship to all provincials. For this grant simply abolished the
ancient, statuesque, idea of the citizen. There was now a Realm and
consequently a new kind of membership. The Roman notion of an army, too,
underwent a significant change. In genuinely Classical times there had
been no Roman Army in the sense in which we speak of the Prussian Army,
but only “armies,” that is, definite formations (as we say) created as
corps, limited and visibly present bodies, by the appointment of a
Legatus to command—an _exercitus Scipionis_, _Crassi_ for instance—but
never an _exercitus Romanus_. It was Caracalla, the same who abolished
the idea of “civis Romanus” by decree and wiped out the Roman civic
deities by making all alien deities equivalent to them, who created the
un-Classical and _Magian_ idea of an Imperial Army, something
_manifested_ in the separate legions. These now meant something, whereas
in Classical times they _meant_ nothing, but simply _were_. The old
“fides exercituum” is replaced by “fides exercitus” in the inscriptions
and, instead of individual bodily-conceived deities special to each
legion and ritually honoured by its Legatus, we have a spiritual
principle common to all. So also, and in the same sense, the
"fatherland"-feeling undergoes a change of meaning for Eastern men—_and
not merely Christians_—in Imperial times. Apollinian man, so long as he
retained any effective remnant at all of his proper world-feeling,
regarded “home” in the genuinely corporeal sense as the ground on which
his city was built—a conception that recalls the “unity of place” of
Attic tragedy and statuary. But to Magian man, to Christians, Persians,
Jews, “Greeks,”[422] Manichæans, Nestorians and Mohammedans, it means
nothing that has any connexion with geographical actualities. And for
ourselves it means an impalpable unity of nature, speech, climate,
habits and history—not earth but “country,” not point-like presence but
historic past and future, not a unit made up of men, houses and gods but
an _idea_, the idea that takes shape in the restless wanderings, the
deep loneliness, and that ancient German impulse towards the South which
has been the ruin of our best, from the Saxon Emperors to Hölderlin and
Nietzsche.
The bent of the Faustian Culture, therefore, was overpoweringly towards
_extension_, political, economic or spiritual. It overrode all
geographical-material bounds. It sought—without any practical object,
merely for the Symbol’s own sake—to reach North Pole and South Pole. It
ended by transforming the entire surface of the globe into a single
colonial and economic system. Every thinker from Meister Eckhardt to
Kant willed to subject the “phenomenal” world to the asserted domination
of the cognizing ego, and every leader from Otto the Great to Napoleon
did it. The _genuine_ object of their ambitions was the boundless, alike
for the great Franks and Hohenstaufen with their world-monarchies, for
Gregory VII and Innocent III, for the Spanish Habsburgs “on whose empire
the sun never set,” and for the Imperialism of to-day on behalf of which
the World-War was fought and will continue to be fought for many a long
day. Classical man, for inward reasons, could not be a conqueror,
notwithstanding Alexander’s romantic expedition—for we can discern
enough of the inner hesitations and unwillingnesses of his companions
not to need to explain it as an “exception proving the rule.”[423] The
never-stilled desire to be liberated from the binding element, to range
far and free, which is the essence of the fancy-creatures of the North—
the dwarfs, elves and imps—is utterly unknown to the Dryads and Oreads
of Greece. Greek daughter-cities were planted by the hundred along the
rim of the Mediterranean, but not one of them made the slightest real
attempt to conquer and penetrate the hinterlands. To settle far from the
coast would have meant to lose sight of “home,” while to settle in
_loneliness_—the ideal life of the trapper and prairie-man of America as
it had been of Icelandic saga-heroes long before—was something entirely
beyond the possibilities of Classical mankind. Dramas like that of the
emigration to America—man by man, each on his own account, driven by
deep promptings to loneliness—or the Spanish Conquest, or the
Californian gold-rush, dramas of uncontrollable longings for freedom,
solitude, immense independence, and of giantlike contempt of all
limitations whatsoever upon the home-feeling—these dramas are Faustian
and only Faustian. No other Culture, not even the Chinese, knows them.
The Hellenic emigrant, on the contrary, clung as a child clings to its
mother’s lap. To make a new city out of the old one, exactly like it,
with the same fellow citizens, the same gods, the same customs, with the
linking sea never out of sight, and there to pursue in the Agora the
familiar life of the ζῷον πολιτικόν—this was the limit of change of
scene for the Apollinian life. To us, for whom freedom of movement (if
not always as a practical, yet in any case as an ideal, right) is
indispensable, such a limit would have been the most crying of all
slaveries. It is from the Classical point of view that the oft-
misunderstood expansion of Rome must be looked at. It was anything
rather than an _extension_ of the fatherland; it confined itself exactly
within fields that had already been taken up by other culture-men whom
they dispossessed. Never was there a hint of dynamic world-schemes of
the Hohenstaufen or Habsburg stamp, or of an imperialism comparable with
that of our own times. The Romans made no attempt to penetrate the
interior of Africa. Their later wars were waged only for the
_preservation_ of what they already possessed, not for the sake of
ambition nor under a significant stimulus from within. They could give
up Germany and Mesopotamia without regret.
If, in fine, we look at it all together—the expansion of the Copernican
world-picture into that aspect of stellar space that we possess to-day;
the development of Columbus’s discovery into a worldwide command of the
earth’s surface by the West; the perspective of oil-painting and of
tragedy-scene; the sublimed home-feeling; the passion of our
Civilization for swift transit, the conquest of the air, the exploration
of the Polar regions and the climbing of almost impossible mountain-
peaks—we see, emerging everywhere the prime-symbol of the Faustian soul,
Limitless Space. And those specially (in form, uniquely) Western
creations of the soul-myth called “Will,” “Force” and “Deed” must be
regarded as derivatives of this prime-symbol.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER X
SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING
II
BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM
CHAPTER X
SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING
II
BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM
I
We are now at last in a position to approach the phenomenon of
_Morale_,[424] the intellectual interpretation of Life by itself, to
ascend the height from which it is possible to survey the widest and
gravest of all the fields of human thought. At the same time, we shall
need for this survey an objectivity such as no one has as yet set
himself seriously to gain. Whatever we may take Morale to be, it is no
part of Morale to provide its own _analysis_; and we shall get to grips
with the problem, not by considering what _should_ be our acts and aims
and standards, but only by diagnosing the Western feeling in the very
form of the enunciation.
In this matter of morale, Western mankind, without exception, is under
the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone _demands_
something of the rest. We say “thou shalt” in the conviction that so-
and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged
conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in
our title to give, such orders is unshakable. _That_, and nothing short
of it, _is_, for us, morale. In the ethics of the West everything is
direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. Here Luther is
completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with
Jesuits; for one and all, the beginning of morale is a claim to general
and permanent validity. It is a necessity of the Faustian soul that this
should be so. He who thinks or teaches “otherwise” is sinful, a
backslider, a _foe_, and he is fought down without mercy. You “shall,”
the State “shall,” society “shall”—this form of morale is to us self-
evident; it represents the only real meaning that we can attach to the
word. But it was not so either in the Classical, or in India, or in
China. Buddha, for instance, gives a pattern to take or to leave, and
Epicurus offers counsel. Both undeniably are forms of high morale, and
neither contains the will-element.
What we have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral
_dynamic_. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic,
sense) is that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on
behalf of all, then we are all without exception, willingly or no,
wittingly or no, Socialists. Even Nietzsche, that most passionate
opponent of “herd morale,” was perfectly incapable of limiting his zeal
to himself in the Classical way. He thought only of “mankind,” and he
attacked everyone who differed from himself. Epicurus, on the contrary,
was heartily indifferent to others’ opinions and acts and never wasted
one thought on the “transformation” of mankind. He and his friends were
content that _they_ were as they were and not otherwise. The Classical
ideal was indifference (ἀπάθεια) to the course of the world—the very
thing which it is the whole business of Faustian mankind to master—and
an important element both of Stoic and of Epicurean philosophy was the
recognition of a category of things neither preferred nor rejected[425]
(ἀδιάφορα). In Hellas there was a pantheon of morales as there was of
deities, as the peaceful coexistence of Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics
shows, but the Nietzschean Zarathustra—though professedly standing
beyond good and evil—breathes from end to end the pain of seeing men to
be other than as he would have them be, and the deep and utterly un-
Classical desire to devote a life to their reformation—his own sense of
the word, naturally, being the only one. It is just this, the _general_
transvaluation, that makes ethical monotheism and—using the word in a
novel and deep sense—socialism. All world-improvers are Socialists. And
consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.
The moral imperative as the form of morale is Faustian and only
Faustian. It is wholly without importance that Schopenhauer denies
theoretically the will to live, or that Nietzsche will have it affirmed—
these are superficial differences, indicative of personal tastes and
temperaments. The important thing, that which makes Schopenhauer the
progenitor of ethical modernity, is that he too _feels_ the whole world
as Will, as movement, force, direction. This basic feeling is not merely
the foundation of our ethics, _it is itself our whole ethics_, and the
rest are bye-blows. That which we call not merely activity but
action[426] is a historical conception through-and-through, saturated
with directional energy. It is the proof of being, the dedication of
being, in that sort of man whose ego possesses the tendency to Future,
who feels the momentary present not as saturated being but as epoch, as
turning-point, in a great complex of becoming—and, moreover, feels it so
of both his personal life and of the life of history as a whole.
Strength and distinctness of this consciousness are the marks of higher
Faustian man, but it is not wholly absent in the most insignificant of
the breed, and it distinguishes his smallest acts from those of any and
every Classical man. It is the distinction between character and
attitude, between conscious becoming and simple accepted statuesque
becomeness, between will and suffering in tragedy.
In the world as seen by the Faustian’s eyes, everything is motion with
an aim. He himself _lives_ only under that condition, for to him life
means struggling, overcoming, winning through. The struggle for
existence as ideal form of existence is implicit even in the Gothic age
(of the architecture of which it is visibly the foundation) and the 19th
Century has not invented it but merely put it into mechanical-
utilitarian form. In the Apollinian world there is no such directional
motion—the purposeless and aimless see-saw of Heraclitus’s “becoming” (ἡ
ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω) is irrelevant here—no “Protestantism,” no “Sturm und
Drang,” no ethical, intellectual or artistic “revolution” to fight and
destroy the existent. The Ionic and Corinthian styles appear by the side
of the Doric without setting up any claim to sole and general validity,
but the Renaissance expelled the Gothic and Classicism expelled the
Baroque styles, and the history of every European literature is filled
with battles over form-problems. Even our monasticism, with its
Templars, Franciscans, Dominicans and the rest, takes shape as an order-
_movement_, in sharp contrast to the “askesis” of the Early-Christian
hermit.
To go back upon this basic form of his existence, let alone transform
it, is entirely beyond the power of Faustian man. It is presupposed even
in efforts to resist it. One fights against “advanced” ideas, but all
the time he looks on his fight itself as an advance. Another agitates
for a “reversal,” but what he intends is in fact a continuance of
development. “Immoral” is only a new kind of “moral” and sets up the
same claim to primacy. The will-to-power is intolerant—all that is
Faustian wills to reign alone. The Apollinian feeling, on the contrary,
with its world of coexistent individual things, is tolerant as a matter
of course. But, if toleration is in keeping with will-less Ataraxia, it
is for the Western world with its oneness of infinite soul-space and the
singleness of its fabric of tensions the sign either of self-deception
or of fading-out. The Enlightenment of the 18th Century was tolerant
towards—that is, careless of—differences between the various Christian
creeds, but in respect of its own relation to the Church as a whole, it
was anything but tolerant as soon as the power to be otherwise came to
it. The Faustian instinct, active, strong-willed, as vertical in
tendency as its own Gothic cathedrals, as upstanding as its own “ego
habeo factum,” looking into distance and Future, demands toleration—
_that is, room, space_—for its proper activity, but only for that.
Consider, for instance, how much of it the city democracy is prepared to
accord to the Church in respect of the latter’s management of religious
powers, while claiming for itself unlimited freedom to exercise its own
and adjusting the “common” law to conform thereto whenever it can. Every
“movement” means to _win_, while every Classical “attitude” only wants
to _be_ and troubles itself little about the Ethos of the neighbour. To
fight for or against the trend of the times, to promote Reform or
Reaction, construction, reconstruction or destruction—all this is as un-
Classical as it is un-Indian. It is the old antithesis of Sophoclean and
Shakespearian tragedy, the tragedy of the man who only wants to exist
and that of the man who wants to win.
It is quite wrong to bind up Christianity with the moral imperative. It
was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who
transformed Christianity—and he not only made it a new religion but also
gave it a new moral direction. The “it” became “I,” the passion-charged
centre of the world, the foundation of the great Sacrament of _personal_
contrition. Will-to-power even in ethics, the passionate striving to set
up a proper morale as a universal truth, and to enforce it upon
humanity, to reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise
constituted—nothing is more characteristically our own than this is. And
in virtue of it the Gothic springtime proceeded to a profound—and never
yet appreciated—_inward transformation_ of the morale of Jesus. A quiet
spiritual morale welling from Magian feeling—a morale or conduct
recommended as potent for salvation, a morale the knowledge of which was
communicated as a special act of grace[427]—was recast as a _morale of
imperative command_.[428]
Every ethical system, whether it be of religious or of philosophical
origin, has associations with the great arts and especially with that of
architecture. It is in fact a structure of propositions of causal
character. Every truth that is intended for practical application is
propounded with a “because” and a “therefore.” There is mathematical
logic in them—in Buddha’s “Four Truths” as in Kant’s “Critique of
Practical Reason”[429] and in every popular catechism. What is _not_ in
these doctrines of acquired truth is the uncritical logic of the blood,
which generates and matures those conduct-standards (Sitten) of social
classes and of practical men (e.g., the chivalry-obligations in the time
of the Crusades) that we only consciously realize when someone infringes
them. A systematic morale is, as it were, an Ornament, and it manifests
itself not only in precepts but also in the style of drama and even in
the choice of art-motives. The Meander, for example, is a Stoic motive.
The Doric column is the very embodiment of the Antique life-ideal. And
just _because_ it was so, it was the one Classical “order” which the
Baroque style necessarily and frankly excluded; indeed, even Renaissance
art was warned off it by some very deep spiritual instinct. Similarly
with the transformation of the Magian dome into the Russian roof-
cupola,[430] the Chinese landscape-architecture of devious paths, the
Gothic cathedral-tower. Each is an image of the particular and unique
morale which arose out of the waking-consciousness of the Culture.
II
The old riddles and perplexities now resolve themselves. There are as
many morales as there are Cultures, no more and no fewer. Just as every
painter and every musician has something in him which, by force of
inward necessity, never emerges into consciousness but dominates _a
priori_ the form-language of his work and differentiates that work from
the work of every other Culture, so every conception of Life held by a
Culture-man possesses _a priori_ (in the very strictest Kantian sense of
the phrase) a constitution that is deeper than all momentary judgments
and strivings and impresses the _style_ of these with the hall-mark of
the particular Culture. The individual may act morally or immorally, may
do “good” or “evil” with respect to the primary feeling of his Culture,
but the theory of his actions is not a result but a datum. Each Culture
possesses its own standards, the validity of which begins and ends with
it. There is no general morale of humanity.
It follows that there is not and cannot be any true “conversion” in the
deeper sense. Conscious behaviour of any kind that rests upon
convictions is a primary phenomenon, the basic tendency of an existence
developed into a “timeless truth.” It matters little what words or
pictures are employed to express it, whether it appears as the
predication of a deity or as the issue of philosophic meditation, as
proposition or as symbol, as proclamation of proper or confutation of
alien convictions. It is enough that it is _there_. It can be wakened
and it can be put theoretically in the form of doctrine, it can change
or improve its intellectual vehicle but it cannot be begotten. Just as
we are incapable of altering our world-feeling—so incapable that even in
trying to alter it we have to follow the old lines and confirm instead
of overthrowing it—so also we are powerless to alter the ethical basis
of our waking being. A certain verbal distinction has sometimes been
drawn between ethics the science and morale the duty, but, as we
understand it, the point of duty does not arise. We are no more capable
of converting a man to a morale alien to his being than the Renaissance
was capable of reviving the Classical or of making anything but a
Southernized Gothic, an anti-Gothic, out of Apollinian motives. We may
talk to-day of transvaluing all our values; we may, as Megalopolitans,
“go back to” Buddhism or Paganism or a romantic Catholicism; we may
champion as Anarchists an individualist or as Socialists a collectivist
ethic—but in spite of all we do, will and feel the same. A conversion to
Theosophy or Freethinking or one of the present-day transitions from a
supposed Christianity to a supposed Atheism (or vice versa) is an
alteration of words and notions, of the religious or intellectual
surface, no more. None of our “movements” have changed _man_.
A strict morphology of all the morales is a task for the future. Here,
too, Nietzsche has taken the first and essential step towards the new
standpoint. But he has failed to observe his own condition that the
thinker shall place himself “beyond good and evil.” He tried to be at
once sceptic _and_ prophet, moral critic _and_ moral gospeller. It
cannot be done. One cannot be a first-class psychologist as long as one
is still a Romantic. And so here, as in all his crucial penetrations, he
got as far as the door—and stood outside it. And so far, no one has done
any better. We have been blind and uncomprehending before the immense
wealth that there is in the moral as in other form-languages. Even the
sceptic has not understood his task; at bottom he, like others, sets up
his own notion of morale, drawn from his particular disposition and
private taste, as standard by which to measure others. The modern
revolutionaires—Stirner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw—are just the same; they
have only managed to hide the facts (from themselves as well as from
others) behind new formulæ and catchwords.
But a morale, like a sculpture, a music, a painting-art, is a self-
contained form-world expressing a life-feeling; it is a datum,
fundamentally unalterable, an inward necessity. It is ever true within
its historical circle, ever untrue outside it. As we have seen
already,[431] what his several works are to the poet or musician or
painter, that its several art-genera are for the higher individual that
we call the Culture, viz., _organic units_; and that oil-painting as a
whole, act-sculpture as a whole and contrapuntal music as a whole, and
rhymed lyric and so on are all epoch-making, and as such take rank as
major symbols of Life. In the history of the Culture as in that of the
individual existence, we are dealing with the actualization of the
possible; it is the story of an inner spirituality becoming the _style
of a world_. By the side of these great form-units, which grow and
fulfil themselves and close down within a predeterminate series of human
generations, which endure for a few centuries and pass irrevocably into
death, we see the group of Faustian morals and the sum of Apollinian
morals also as individuals of the higher order. That they _are_, is
Destiny. They are data, and revelation (or scientific insight, as the
case may be) only put them into shape for the consciousness.
There is something, hardly to be described, that assembles all the
theories from Hesiod and Sophocles to Plato and the Stoa and opposes
them collectively to _all_ that was taught from Francis of Assisi and
Abelard to Ibsen and Nietzsche, and even the morale of Jesus is only the
noblest expression of a general morale that was put into other forms by
Marcion and Mani, by Philo and Plotinus, by Epictetus, Augustine and
Proclus. All Classical ethic is an ethic of attitude, all Western an
ethic of deed. And, likewise, the sum of all Indian and the sum of all
Chinese systems forms each a world of its own.
III
Every Classical ethic that we know or can conceive of constitutes man an
individual static entity, a body among bodies, and all Western
valuations relate to him as a centre of effect in an infinite
generality. Ethical Socialism is neither more nor less than the
sentiment of action-at-a-distance, the moral pathos of the third
dimension; and the root-feeling of Care—care for those who are with us,
and for those who are to follow—is its emblem in the sky. Consequently
there is for us something socialistic in the aspect of the Egyptian
Culture, while the opposite tendency to immobile attitude, to non-
desire, to static self-containedness of the individual, recalls the
Indian ethic and the man formed by it. The seated Buddha-statue
(“looking at its navel”) and Zeno’s Ataraxia are not altogether alien to
one another. The ethical ideal of Classical man was that which is led up
to in his tragedy, and revealed in its Katharsis. This in its last
depths means the purgation of the Apollinian soul from its burden of
what is _not_ Apollinian, not free from the elements of distance and
direction, and to understand it we have to recognize that Stoicism is
simply the mature form of it. That which the drama effected in a solemn
hour, the Stoa wished to spread over the whole field of life; viz.,
statuesque steadiness and will-less ethos. Now, is not this conception
of κάθαρσις closely akin to the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana, which as a
formula is no doubt very “late” but as an essence is thoroughly Indian
and traceable even from Vedic times? And does not this kinship bring
ideal Classical man and ideal Indian man very close to one another and
separate them both from that man whose ethic is manifested in the
Shakespearian tragedy of dynamic evolution and catastrophe? When one
thinks of it, there is nothing preposterous in the idea of Socrates,
Epicurus, and especially Diogenes, sitting by the Ganges, whereas
Diogenes in a Western megalopolis would be an unimportant fool. Nor, on
the other hand, is Frederick William I of Prussia, the prototype of the
Socialist in the grand sense, unthinkable in the polity of the Nile,
whereas in Periclean Athens he is impossible.
Had Nietzsche regarded his own times with fewer prejudices and less
disposition to romantic championship of certain ethical creations, he
would have perceived that a specifically Christian morale of compassion
in _his_ sense does not exist on West-European soil. We must not let the
words of humane formulæ mislead us as to their real significance.
Between the morale that one has and the morale that one thinks one has,
there is a relation which is very obscure and very unsteady, and it is
just here that an incorruptible psychology would be invaluable.
Compassion is a dangerous word, and neither Nietzsche himself—for all
his maestria—nor anyone else has yet investigated the meaning—conceptual
and effective—of the word at different times. The Christian morale of
Origen’s time was quite different from the Christian morale of St.
Francis’s. This is not the place to enquire what _Faustian_ compassion—
sacrifice or ebullience or again race-instinct in a chivalrous
society[432]—means as against the fatalistic Magian-Christian kind, how
far it is to be conceived as action-at-a-distance and _practical
dynamic_, or (from another angle) as a proud soul’s demand upon itself,
or again as the utterance of an imperious distance-feeling. A fixed
stock of ethical phrases, such as we have possessed since the
Renaissance, has to cover a multitude of different ideas and a still
greater multitude of different meanings. When a mankind so historically
and retrospectively disposed as we are accepts the superficial as the
real sense, and regards ideals as subject-matter for mere knowing, it is
really evidencing its veneration for the past—in this particular
instance, for religious tradition. The _text_ of a conviction is never a
test of its _reality_, for man is rarely conscious of his own beliefs.
Catchwords and doctrines are always more or less popular and external as
compared with deep spiritual actualities. Our theoretical reverence for
the propositions of the New Testament is in fact of the same order as
the theoretical reverence of the Renaissance and of Classicism for
antique art; the one has no more transformed the spirit of men than the
other has transformed the spirit of works. The oft-quoted cases of the
Mendicant Orders, the Moravians and the Salvation Army prove by their
very rarity, and even more by the slightness of the effects that they
have been able to produce, that they are exceptions in a quite different
generality—namely, the _Faustian-Christian_ morale. That morale will not
indeed be found formulated, either by Luther or by the Council of Trent,
but all Christians of the great style—Innocent III and Calvin, Loyola
and Savonarola, Pascal and St. Theresa—have had it in them, even in
unconscious contradiction to their own formal teachings.
We have only to compare the purely Western conception of the manly
virtue that is designated by Nietzsche’s “moralinfrei” _virtù_, the
_grandezza_ of Spanish and the _grandeur_ of French Baroque, with that
very feminine ἀρετή of the Hellenic ideal, of which the practical
application is presented to us as capacity for enjoyment (ἡδονή),
placidity of disposition (γαλήνη, ἀπάθεια), absence of wants and
demands, and, above all, the so typical ἀταραξία. What Nietzsche called
the Blond Beast and conceived to be embodied in the type of Renaissance
Man that he so overvalued (for it is really only a jackal counterfeit of
the great Hohenstaufen Germans) is the utter antithesis to the type that
is presented in every Classical ethic without exception and embodied in
every Classical man of worth. The Faustian Culture has produced a long
series of granite-men, the Classical never a one. For Pericles and
Themistocles were soft natures in tune with Attic καλοκἀγαθία, and
Alexander was a Romantic who never woke up, Cæsar a shrewd reckoner.
Hannibal, the alien, was the only “Mann” amongst them all. The men of
the early time, as Homer presents them to our judgment—the Odysseuses
and Ajaxes—would have cut a queer figure among the chevaliers of the
Crusades. Very feminine natures, too, are capable of brutality—a
rebound-brutality of their own—and Greek cruelty was of this kind. But
in the North the great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen emperors
appear on the very threshold of the Culture, surrounded by giant-men
like Henry the Lion and Gregory VII. Then come the men of the
Renaissance, of the struggle of the two Roses, of the Huguenot Wars, the
Spanish Conquistadores, the Prussian electors and kings, Napoleon,
Bismarck, Rhodes. What other Culture has exhibited the like of these?
Where in all Hellenic history is so powerful a scene as that of 1176—the
Battle of Legnano as foreground, the suddenly-disclosed strife of the
great Hohenstaufen and the great Welf as background? The heroes of the
Great Migrations, the Spanish chivalry, Prussian discipline, Napoleonic
energy—how much of the Classical is there in these men and things? And
where, on the heights of Faustian morale, from the Crusades to the World
War, do we find anything of the “slave-morale,” the meek resignation,
the deaconess’s Caritas?[433] Only in pious and honoured words, nowhere
else. The type of the very priesthood is Faustian; think of those
magnificent bishops of the old German empire who on horseback led their
flocks into the wild battle,[434] or those Popes who could force
submission on a Henry IV and a Frederick II, of the Teutonic Knights in
the Ostmark, of Luther’s challenge in which the old Northern heathendom
rose up against old Roman, of the great Cardinals (Richelieu, Mazarin,
Fleury) who shaped France. _That_ is Faustian morale, and one must be
blind indeed if one does not see it efficient in the whole field of
West-European history. And it is only through such grand instances of
worldly passion which express the consciousness of a _mission_ that we
are able to understand those of grand spiritual passion, of the upright
and forthright Caritas which nothing can resist, the dynamic charity
that is so utterly unlike Classical moderation and Early-Christian
mildness. There is a _hardness_ in the sort of com-passion that was
practised by the German mystics, the German and Spanish military Orders,
the French and English Calvinists. In the Russian, the Raskolnikov, type
of charity a soul melts into the fraternity of souls, in the Faustian it
arises out of it. Here too “ego habeo factum” is the formula. Personal
charity is the justification before God of the Person, the individual.
This is the reason why "compassion"-morale, in the everyday sense,
always respected by us so far as words go, and sometimes hoped for by
the thinker, is _never_ actualized. Kant rejected it with decision, and
in fact it is in profound contradiction with the Categorical Imperative,
which sees the meaning of Life to lie in actions and not in surrender to
soft opinions. Nietzsche’s “slave-morale” is a phantom, _his master-
morale is a reality_. It does not require formulation to be effective—it
is there, and has been from of old. Take away his romantic Borgia-mask
and his nebulous vision of supermen, and what is left of his man is
Faustian man himself, as he is to-day and as he was even in saga-days,
the type of an energetic, imperative and dynamic Culture. However it may
have been in the Classical world, _our_ great well-doers are the great
_doers_ whose forethought and care affects millions, the great statesmen
and organizers. "A higher sort of men, who thanks to their preponderance
of will, knowledge, wealth and influence make use of democratic Europe
as their aptest and most mobile tool, in order to bring into their own
hands the destinies of the Earth and as artists to shape ‘man’ himself.
Enough—the time is coming when men will unlearn and relearn the art of
politics." So Nietzsche delivered himself in one of the unpublished
drafts that are so much more concrete than the finished works. “We must
either breed political capacities, or else be ruined by the democracy
that has been forced upon us by the failure of the older
alternatives,”[435] says Shaw in _Man and Superman_. Limited though his
philosophic horizon is in general, Shaw has the advantage over Nietzsche
of more practical schooling and less ideology, and the figure of the
multimillionaire Undershaft in _Major Barbara_ translates the Superman-
ideal into the unromantic language of the modern age (which in truth is
its real source for Nietzsche also, though it reached him indirectly
through Malthus and Darwin). It is these fact-men of the grand style who
are the representatives to-day of the Will-to-Power over other men’s
destinies and therefore of the Faustian ethic generally. Men of this
sort do not broadcast their millions to dreamers, “artists,” weaklings
and “down-and-outs” to satisfy a boundless benevolence; they employ them
for those who like themselves count as material for the Future. They
pursue a purpose with them. They make a centre of force for the
existence of generations which outlives the single lives. The mere
money, too, can develop ideas and make history, and Rhodes—precursor of
a type that will be significant indeed in the 21st Century—provided, in
disposing of his possessions by will, that it should do so. It is a
shallow judgment, and one incapable of inwardly understanding history,
that cannot distinguish the literary chatter of popular social-moralists
and humanity-apostles from the deep ethical instincts of the West-
European Civilization.
Socialism—in its highest and not its street-corner sense—is, like every
other Faustian ideal, exclusive. It owes its popularity only to the fact
that it is completely misunderstood even by its exponents, who present
it as a sum of rights instead of as one of duties, an abolition instead
of an intensification of the Kantian imperative, a slackening instead of
a tautening of directional energy. The trivial and superficial tendency
towards ideals of “welfare,” “freedom,” “humanity,” the doctrine of the
“greatest happiness of the greatest number,” are mere negations of the
Faustian ethic—a very different matter from the tendency of Epicureanism
towards the ideal of “happiness,” for the condition of happiness was the
actual sum and substance of the Classical ethic. Here precisely is an
instance of sentiments, to all outward appearance much the same, but
meaning in the one case everything and in the other nothing. From this
point of view, we might describe the content of the Classical ethic as
_philanthropy_, a boon conferred by the individual upon himself, his
_soma_. The view has Aristotle on its side, for it is exactly in this
sense that he uses the word φιλάνθρωπος, which the best heads of the
Classicist period, above all Lessing, found so puzzling. Aristotle
describes the effect of the Attic tragedy on the Attic spectator as
philanthropic. Its Peripeteia relieves him from compassion with himself.
A sort of theory of master-morale and slave-morale existed also in the
early Hellenism, in Callicles for example—naturally, under strictly
corporeal-Euclidean postulates. The ideal of the first class is
Alcibiades. He did exactly what at the moment seemed to him best for his
own person, and he is felt to be, and admired as, the type of Classical
Kalokagathia. But Protagoras is still more distinct, with his famous
proposition—essentially ethical in intention—that man (each man for
himself) is the measure of things. That is master-morale in a statuesque
soul.
IV
When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase “transvaluation of all values” for
the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are
living found at last its formula. Transvaluation of all values is the
most fundamental character of _every_ civilization. For it is the
beginning of a Civilization that it remoulds all the forms of the
Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practises them in
a different way. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, and herein
lies the negativeness common to all periods of this character. It
assumes that the genuine act of creation has already occurred, and
merely enters upon an inheritance of big actualities. In the Late-
Classical, we find the event taking place inside Hellenistic-Roman
Stoicism, that is, the long death-struggle of the Apollinian soul. In
the interval from Socrates—who was the spiritual father of the Stoa and
in whom the first signs of inward impoverishment and city-
intellectualism became visible—to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, every
existence-ideal of the old Classical underwent transvaluation. In the
case of India, the transvaluation of Brahman life was complete by the
time of King Asoka (250 B.C.), as we can see by comparing the parts of
the Vedanta put into writing before and after Buddha. And ourselves?
Even now the ethical socialism of the Faustian soul, its fundamental
ethic, as we have seen, is being worked upon by the process of
transvaluation as that soul is walled up in the stone of the great
cities. _Rousseau is the ancestor of this socialism; he stands, like
Socrates and Buddha, as the representative spokesman of a great
Civilization._ Rousseau’s rejection of all great Culture-forms and all
significant conventions, his famous “Return to the state of Nature,” his
practical rationalism, are unmistakable evidences. Each of the three
buried a millennium of spiritual depth. Each proclaimed his gospel to
mankind, but it was to the mankind of the city intelligentsia, which was
tired of the town and the Late Culture, and whose “pure” (i.e.,
soulless) reason longed to be free from them and their authoritative
form and their hardness, from the symbolism with which it was no longer
in living communion and which therefore it detested. The Culture was
annihilated by discussion. If we pass in review the great 19th-Century
names with which we associate the march of this great drama—
Schopenhauer, Hebbel, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg—we comprehend
in a glance that which Nietzsche, in a fragmentary preface to his
incomplete master-work, deliberately and correctly called the _Coming of
Nihilism_. Every one of the great Cultures knows it, for it is of deep
necessity inherent in the finale of these mighty organisms. Socrates was
a nihilist, and Buddha. There is an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese
de-souling of the human being, just as there is a Western. This is a
matter not of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and
artistic, transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change
whatsoever, but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its
possibilities in full. It is easy, but useless, to point to the bigness
of Hellenistic and of modern European achievement. Mass slavery and mass
machine-production, “Progress” and Ataraxia, Alexandrianism and modern
Science, Pergamum and Bayreuth, social conditions as assumed in
Aristotle and as assumed in Marx, are merely symptoms on the historical
surface. Not external life and conduct, not institutions and customs,
but deepest and last things are in question here—the inward
_finishedness_ (Fertigsein) of megalopolitan man, _and_ of the
provincial as well.[436] For the Classical world this condition sets in
with the Roman age; for us it will set in from about the year 2000.
Culture and Civilization—the living body of a soul and the mummy of it.
For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800—on the
one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself,
formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from
Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal,
artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by
the intellect. Culture and Civilization—the organism born of Mother
Earth, and the mechanism proceeding from hardened fabric. Culture-man
lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and
“facts.” That which the one feels as Destiny the other understands as a
linkage of causes and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist—in
the sense of the word valid for, and only valid for, Civilization—
whether he wills it or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist
doctrines wear the garb of religion or not.
To Gothic and Doric men, Ionic and Baroque men, the whole vast form-
world of art, religion, custom, state, knowledge, social life was easy.
They could carry it and actualize it without “knowing” it. They had over
the symbolism of the Culture that unstrained mastery that Mozart
possessed in music. Culture is the self-evident. The feeling of
strangeness in these forms, the idea that they are a burden from which
creative freedom requires to be relieved, the impulse to overhaul the
stock in order by the light of reason to turn it to better account, the
fatal imposition of thought upon the inscrutable quality of
creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is beginning to tire. Only
the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical
religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a “natural law” is set
up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of
_the_ style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men conceive
of the State as an “order of society” which not only can be but must be
altered[437]—then it is evident that something has definitely broken
down. The Cosmopolis itself, the supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in
the midst of the Culture-landscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing
into itself and using up.
Scientific worlds are superficial worlds, practical, soulless and purely
extensive worlds. The ideas of Buddhism, of Stoicism, and of Socialism
alike rest upon them.[438] Life is no longer to be lived as something
self-evident—hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone choice—or to be
accepted as God-willed destiny, but is to be treated as a problem,
presented as the intellect sees it, judged by “utilitarian” or
“rational” criteria. This, at the back, is what all three mean. The
brain rules, because the soul abdicates. Culture-men live unconsciously,
Civilization-men consciously. The Megalopolis—sceptical, practical,
artificial—_alone_ represents Civilization to-day. The soil-peasantry
before its gates does not count. The “People” means the city-people, an
inorganic mass, something fluctuating. The peasant is _not_ democratic—
this again being a notion belonging to mechanical and urban
existence[439]—and he is therefore overlooked, despised, detested. With
the vanishing of the old “estates”—gentry and priesthood—he is the only
organic man, the sole relic of the Early Culture. There is no place for
him either in Stoic or in Socialistic thought.
Thus the Faust of the First Part of the tragedy, the passionate student
of solitary midnights, is logically the progenitor of the Faust of the
Second Part and the new century, the type of a purely practical, far-
seeing, outward-directed activity. In him Goethe presaged,
psychologically, the whole future of West Europe. He is Civilization in
the place of Culture, external mechanism in place of internal organism,
intellect as the petrifact of extinct soul. As the Faust of the
beginning is to the Faust of the end, so the Hellene of Pericles’s age
is to the Roman of Cæsar’s.
V
So long as the man of a Culture that is approaching its fulfilment still
continues to live straight before him naturally and unquestioningly, his
life has a settled conduct. This is the _instinctive_ morale, which may
disguise itself in a thousand controversial forms but which he himself
does not controvert, because he _has_ it. As soon as Life is fatigued,
as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities—which
are intellectual worlds to themselves—and needs a theory in which
suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a _problem_.
Culture-morale is that which a man has, Civilization-morale that which
he looks for. The one is too deep to be exhaustible by logical means,
the other is a _function_ of logic. As late as Plato and as late as Kant
ethics are still mere dialectics, a game with concepts, or the rounding-
off of a metaphysical system, something that at bottom would not be
thought really necessary. The Categorical Imperative is merely an
abstract statement of what, for Kant, was not in question at all. But
with Zeno and with Schopenhauer this is no longer so. It had become
necessary to discover, to invent or to squeeze into form, as a rule of
being, that which was no longer anchored in instinct; and at this point
therefore begin the civilized ethics that are no longer the reflection
of Life but the reflection of Knowledge upon Life. One feels that there
is something artificial, soulless, half-true in all these _considered_
systems that fill the first centuries of all the Civilizations. They are
not those profound and almost unearthly creations that are worthy to
rank with the great arts. All metaphysic of the high style, all pure
intuition, vanishes before the one need that has suddenly made itself
felt, the need of a _practical_ morale for the governance of a Life that
can no longer govern itself. Up to Kant, up to Aristotle, up to the Yoga
and Vedanta doctrines, philosophy had been a sequence of grand world-
systems in which _formal_ ethics occupied a very modest place. But now
it became “moral philosophy” with a metaphysic as background. The
enthusiasm of epistemology had to give way to hard practical needs.
Socialism, Stoicism and Buddhism are philosophies of this type.
To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Æschylus, Plato,
Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualities
is _to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s_. This exchange is
a fair measure of the fall from Culture to Civilization. Every ethic is
a formulation of a soul’s view of its destiny—heroic or practical, grand
or commonplace, manly or old-manly. I distinguish, therefore, between a
_tragic_ and a _plebeian_ morale. The tragic morale of a Culture knows
and grasps the heaviness of being, but it draws therefrom the feeling of
pride that enables the burden to be borne. So Æschylus, Shakespeare, the
thinkers of the Brahman philosophy felt it; so Dante and German
Catholicism. It is heard in the stern battle-hymn of Lutheranism “Ein’
feste Burg ist unser Gott,” and it echoes still in the Marseillaise. The
plebeian morale of Epicurus and the Stoa, the sects of Buddha’s day and
the 19th Century made rather battle-plans for the outmanœuvring of
destiny. What Æschylus did in grand, the Stoa did in little—no more
fullness, but poverty, coldness and emptiness of life—and all that Roman
bigness achieved was to intensify this same intellectual chill and void.
And there is the same relation between the ethical passion of the great
Baroque masters—Shakespeare, Bach, Kant, Goethe—the manly will to
_inward mastery_ of natural things that it felt to be far below itself,
and modern Europe’s state-provision, humanity-ideals, world-peace,
“greatest happiness of greatest number,” etc., which express the will to
an _outward clearance from the path_ of things that are on the same
level. This, no less than the other, is a manifestation of the will-to-
power, as against the Classical endurance of the inevitable, but the
fact remains that material bigness is not the same as metaphysical
majesty of achievement. The former lacks depth, lacks that which former
men had called God. The Faustian world-feeling of _deed_, which had been
efficient in every great man from the Hohenstaufen and the Welf to
Frederick the Great, Goethe and Napoleon, smoothes itself down to a
philosophy of _work_. Whether such a philosophy attacks or defends work
does not affect its inward value. The Culture-idea of Deed and the
Civilization-idea of Work are related as the attitude of Æschylus’s
Prometheus and that of Diogenes. The one suffers and bears, the other
lolls. It was _deeds_ of science that Galileo, Kepler and Newton
performed, but it is _scientific work_ that the modern physicist carries
out. And, in spite of all the great words from Schopenhauer to Shaw, it
is the plebeian morale of every day and “sound human reason” that is the
basis of all our expositions and discussions of Life.
VI
Each Culture, further, has _its own mode of spiritual extinction_, which
is that which follows of necessity from its life as a whole. And hence
Buddhism, Stoicism and Socialism are morphologically equivalent as end-
phenomena.
For even Buddhism is such. Hitherto the deeper meaning of it has always
been misunderstood. It was _not_ a Puritan movement like, for instance,
Islamism and Jansenism, _not_ a Reformation as the Dionysiac wave was
for the Apollinian world, and, quite generally, _not_ a religion like
the religions of the Vedas or the religion of the Apostle Paul,[440] but
a final and purely practical world-sentiment of tired megalopolitans who
had a closed-off Culture behind them and no future before them. It was
the basic feeling of the Indian Civilization and as such both equivalent
to and “contemporary” with Stoicism and Socialism. The quintessence of
this thoroughly worldly and unmetaphysical thought is to be found in the
famous sermon near Benares, the Four Noble Truths that won the prince-
philosopher his first adherents.[441] Its roots lay in the rationalist-
atheistic Sankhya philosophy, the world-view of which it tacitly
accepts, just as the social ethic of the 19th Century comes from the
Sensualism and Materialism of the 18th and the Stoa (in spite of its
superficial exploitation of Heraclitus) is derived from Protagoras and
the Sophists. In each case it is the all-power of Reason that is the
starting-point from which to discuss morale, and religion (in the sense
of belief in anything metaphysical) does not enter into the matter.
Nothing could be more irreligious than these systems in their original
forms—and it is these, and not derivatives of them belonging to later
stages of the Civilizations, that concern us here.
Buddhism rejects all speculation about God and the cosmic problems; only
self and the conduct of actual life are important to it. And it
definitely did not recognize a soul. The standpoint of the Indian
psychologist of early Buddhism was that of the Western psychologist and
the Western “Socialist” of to-day, who reduce the inward man to a bundle
of sensations and an aggregation of electrochemical energies. The
teacher Nagasena tells King Milinda[442] that the parts of the car in
which he is journeying are not the car itself, that “car” is only a word
and that so also is the soul. The spiritual elements are designated
_Skandhas_, groups, and are impermanent. Here is complete correspondence
with the ideas of association-psychology, and in fact the doctrines of
Buddha contain much materialism.[443] As the Stoic appropriated
Heraclitus’s idea of Logos and flattened it to a materialist sense, as
the Socialism based on Darwin has mechanicalized (with the aid of Hegel)
Goethe’s deep idea of development, so Buddhism treated the Brahman
notion of _Karma_, the idea (hardly achievable in our thought) of a
being actively completing itself. Often enough it regarded this quite
materially as a world-stuff under transformation.
What we have before us is three forms of Nihilism, using the word in
Nietzsche’s sense. In each case, the ideals of yesterday, the religious
and artistic and political forms that have grown up through the
centuries, are undone; yet even in this last act, this self-repudiation,
each several Culture employs the prime-symbol of its whole existence.
The Faustian nihilist—Ibsen or Nietzsche, Marx or Wagner—shatters the
ideals. The Apollinian—Epicurus or Antisthenes or Zeno—watches them
crumble before his eyes. And the Indian withdraws from their presence
into himself. Stoicism is directed to _individual self-management_, to
statuesque and purely present being, without regard to future or past or
neighbour. Socialism is the dynamic treatment of the same theme; it is
defensive like Stoicism, but what it defends is not the pose but the
working-out of the life; and more, it is offensive-defensive, for with a
powerful thrust into distance it spreads itself into all future and over
all mankind, which shall be brought under one single regimen. Buddhism,
which only a mere dabbler in religious research could compare with
Christianity,[444] is hardly reproducible in words of the Western
languages. But it is permissible to speak of a Stoic Nirvana and point
to the figure of Diogenes, and even the notion of a Socialist Nirvana
has its justification in so far that European weariness covers its
flight from the struggle for existence under catchwords of world-peace,
Humanity and brotherhood of Man. Still, none of this comes anywhere near
the strange profundity of the Buddhist conception of Nirvana. It would
seem as though the soul of an old Culture, when from its last
refinements it is passing into death, clings, as it were, jealously to
the property that is most essentially its own, to its form-content and
the innate prime-symbol. There is nothing in Buddhism that could be
regarded as “Christian,” nothing in Stoicism that is to be found in the
Islam of A.D. 1000, nothing that Confucius shares with Socialism. The
phrase “si duo faciunt idem, non est idem”—which ought to appear at the
head of every historical work that deals with living and uniquely-
occurring Becomings and not with logically, causally and numerically
comprehensible Becomes—is specially applicable to these final
expressions of Culture-movements. In all Civilizations being ceases to
be suffused with soul and comes to be suffused with intellect, but in
each several Civilization the intellect is of a particular structure and
subject to the form-language of a particular symbolism. And just because
of all this individualness of the Being which, working in the
unconscious, fashions the last-phase creations on the historical
surface, relationship of the instances to one another _in point of
historical position_ becomes decisively important. What they bring to
expression is different in each case, but the fact that they bring it to
expression _so_ marks them as “contemporary” with one another. The
Buddhistic abnegation of full resolute life has a Stoic flavour, the
Stoic abnegation of the same a Buddhistic flavour. Allusion has already
been made to the affinity between the Katharsis of the Attic drama and
the Nirvana-idea. One’s feeling is that ethical Socialism, although a
century has already been given to its development, has not yet reached
the clear hard resigned form of its own that it will finally possess.
Probably the next decades will impart to it the ripe formulation that
Chrysippus imparted to the Stoa. But even now there is a look of the
Stoa in Socialism, when it is that of the higher order and the narrower
appeal, when its tendency is the Roman-Prussian and entirely unpopular
tendency to self-discipline and self-renunciation from sense of great
duty; and a look of Buddhism in its contempt for momentary ease and
_carpe diem_. And, on the other hand, it has unmistakably the Epicurean
look in that mode of it which alone makes it effective downward and
outward as a popular ideal, in which it is a hedonism (not indeed of
each-for-himself, but) of individuals in the name of all.
Every soul has religion, which is only another word for its existence.
All living forms in which it expresses itself—all arts, doctrines,
customs, all metaphysical and mathematical form-worlds, all ornament,
every column and verse and idea—are ultimately religious, and _must_ be
so. But from the setting-in of Civilization they _cannot_ be so any
longer. As the essence of every Culture is religion, so—and
_consequently_—the essence of every Civilization is irreligion—the two
words are synonymous. He who cannot feel this in the creativeness of
Manet as against Velasquez, of Wagner as against Haydn, of Lysippus as
against Phidias, of Theocritus as against Pindar, knows not what the
best means in art. Even Rococo in its worldliest creations is still
religious. But the buildings of Rome, even when they are temples, are
irreligious; the one touch of religious architecture that there was in
old Rome was the intrusive Magian-souled Pantheon, first of the mosques.
The megalopolis itself, as against the old Culture-towns—Alexandria as
against Athens, Paris as against Bruges, Berlin as against Nürnberg—is
irreligious[445] down to the last detail, down to the look of the
streets, the dry intelligence of the faces.[446] And, correspondingly,
the ethical sentiments belonging to the form-language of the megalopolis
are irreligious and soulless also. Socialism is the Faustian world-
feeling become irreligious; “Christianity,” so called (and qualified
even as “true Christianity”), is always on the lips of the English
Socialist, to whom it seems to be something in the nature of a “dogma-
less morale.” Stoicism also was irreligious as compared with Orphic
religion, and Buddhism as compared with Vedic, and it is of no
importance whatever that the Roman Stoic approved and conformed to
Emperor-worship, that the later Buddhist sincerely denied his atheism,
or that the Socialist calls himself an earnest Freethinker or even goes
on believing in God.
It is this extinction of living inner religiousness, which gradually
tells upon even the most insignificant element in a man’s being, that
becomes phenomenal in the historical world-picture at the turn from the
Culture to the Civilization, the _Climacteric_ of the Culture, as I have
already called it, the time of change in which a mankind loses its
spiritual fruitfulness for ever, and building takes the place of
begetting. Unfruitfulness—understanding the word in all its direct
seriousness—marks the brain-man of the megalopolis, as the sign of
fulfilled destiny, and it is one of the most impressive facts of
historical symbolism that the change manifests itself not only in the
extinction of great art, of great courtesy, of great formal thought, of
the great style in all things, but also quite carnally in the
childlessness and “race-suicide” of the civilized and rootless strata, a
phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed and deplored—
and of course not remedied—in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.[447]
VII
As to the living representatives of these new and purely intellectual
creations, the men of the “New Order” upon whom every decline-time
founds such hopes, we cannot be in any doubt. They are the fluid
megalopolitan Populace, the rootless city-mass (οἱ πολλοί, as Athens
called it) that has replaced the People, the Culture-folk that was
sprung from the soil and peasantlike even when it lived in towns. They
are the market-place loungers of Alexandria and Rome, the newspaper-
readers of our own corresponding time; the “educated” man who then and
now makes a cult of intellectual mediocrity and a church of
advertisement;[448] the man of the theatres and places of amusement, of
sport and “best-sellers.” It is this late-appearing mass and _not_
“mankind” that is the object of Stoic and Socialist propaganda, and one
could match it with equivalent phenomena in the Egyptian New Empire,
Buddhist India and Confucian China.
Correspondingly, there is a characteristic form of public effect, the
_Diatribe_.[449] First observed as a Hellenistic phenomenon, it is an
efficient form in _all_ Civilizations. Dialectical, practical and
plebeian through and through, it replaces the old meaningful and far-
ranging Creation of the great man by the unrestrained Agitation of the
small and shrewd, ideas by aims, symbols by programs. The expansion-
element common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of
outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also. Quantity
replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening. We must not confuse this
hurried and shallow activity with the Faustian will-to-power. All it
means is that creative inner life is at an end and intellectual
existence can only be kept up materially, by outward effect in the space
of the City. Diatribe belongs necessarily to the “religion of the
irreligious” and is the characteristic form that the “cure of souls”
takes therein. It appears as the Indian preaching, the Classical
rhetoric, and the Western journalism. It appeals not to the best but to
the most, and it values its means according to the number of successes
obtained by them. It substitutes for the old thoughtfulness an
_intellectual male-prostitution_ by speech and writing, which fills and
dominates the halls and the market-places of the megalopolis. As the
whole of Hellenistic philosophy is rhetorical, so the social-ethic
system of Zola’s novel and Ibsen’s drama is journalistic. If
Christianity in its original expansion became involved with this
spiritual prostitution, it must not be confounded with it. The essential
point of Christian missionarism has almost always been missed.[450]
Primitive Christianity was a _Magian_ religion and the soul of its
Founder was utterly incapable of this brutal activity without tact or
depth. And it was the Hellenistic practice of Paul[451] that—against the
determined opposition of the original community, as we all know—
introduced it into the noisy, urban, demagogic publicity of the Imperium
Romanum. Slight as his Hellenistic tincture may have been, it sufficed
to make him outwardly a part of the Classical Civilization. Jesus had
drawn unto himself fishermen and peasants, Paul devoted himself to the
market-places of the great cities and the megalopolitan form of
propaganda. The word “pagan” (man of the heath or country-side) survives
to this day to tell us who it was that this propaganda affected _last_.
What a difference, indeed what diametrical opposition, between Paul and
Boniface the passionate Faustian of woods and lone valleys, the joyous
cultivating Cistercians, the Teutonic Knights of the Slavonic East!
_Here_ was youth once more, blossoming and yearning in a peasant
landscape, and not until the 19th Century, when that landscape and all
pertaining to it had aged into a world based on the megalopolis and
inhabited by the masses, did Diatribe appear in it. A true peasantry
enters into the field of view of Socialism as little as it did into
those of Buddha and the Stoa. It is only now, in the Western
megalopolis, that the equivalent of the Paul-type emerges, to figure in
Christian or anti-Christian, social or theosophical “causes,” Free
Thought or the making of religious fancy-ware.
This decisive turn towards the one remaining kind of life—that is, life
as a fact, seen biologically and under causality-relations instead of as
Destiny—is particularly manifest in the ethical passion with which men
now turn to philosophies of digestion, nutrition and hygiene. Alcohol-
questions and Vegetarianism are treated with religious earnestness—such,
apparently, being the gravest problems that the “men of the New Order,”
the generations of frog-perspective, are capable of tackling. Religions,
as they are when they stand new-born on the threshold of the new
Culture—the Vedic, the Orphic, the Christianity of Jesus and the
Faustian Christianity of the old Germany of chivalry—would have felt it
degradation even to glance at questions of this kind. Nowadays, one
_rises_ to them. Buddhism is unthinkable without a bodily diet to match
its spiritual diet, and amongst the Sophists, in the circle of
Antisthenes, in the Stoa and amongst the Sceptics such questions became
ever more and more prominent. Even Aristotle wrote on the alcohol-
question, and a whole series of philosophers took up that of
vegetarianism. And the only difference between Apollinian and Faustian
methods here is that the Cynic theorized about his own digestion while
Shaw treats of “everybody’s.” The one disinterests himself, the other
dictates. Even Nietzsche, as we know, handled such questions with relish
in his _Ecce Homo_.
VIII
Let us, once more, review Socialism (independently of the economic
movement of the same name) as the Faustian example of Civilization-
ethics. Its friends regard it as the form of the future, its enemies as
a sign of downfall, and both are equally right. We are all Socialists,
wittingly or unwittingly, willingly or unwillingly. Even resistance to
it wears its form.
Similarly, and equally necessarily, all Classical men of the Late period
were Stoics unawares. The whole Roman people, as a body, has a Stoic
soul. The genuine Roman, the very man who fought Stoicism hardest, was a
Stoic of a stricter sort than ever a Greek was. The Latin language of
the last centuries before Christ was the mightiest of Stoic creations.
_Ethical Socialism is the maximum possible of attainment to a life-
feeling under the aspect of Aims_;[452] for the directional movement of
Life that is felt as Time and Destiny, when it hardens, takes the form
of an intellectual machinery of means and end. Direction is the living,
aim the dead. The passionate energy of the advance is generically
Faustian, the mechanical remainder—“Progress”—is specifically
Socialistic, the two being related as body and skeleton. And of the two
it is the generic quality that distinguishes Socialism from Buddhism and
Stoicism; these, with their respective ideals of Nirvana and Ataraxia,
are no less mechanical in design than Socialism is, but they know
nothing of the latter’s dynamic energy of expansion, of its will-to-
infinity, of its passion of the third dimension.
In spite of its foreground appearances, ethical Socialism is _not_ a
system of compassion, humanity, peace and kindly care, but one of will-
to-power. Any other reading of it is illusory. The aim is through and
through imperialist; welfare, but welfare in the expansive sense, the
welfare not of the diseased but of the energetic man who ought to be
given and must be given _freedom to do_, regardless of obstacles of
wealth, birth and tradition. Amongst us, sentimental morale, morale
directed to happiness and usefulness, is _never_ the final instinct,
however we may persuade ourselves otherwise. The head and front of moral
modernity must ever be Kant, who (in this respect Rousseau’s pupil)
excludes from his ethics the motive of Compassion and lays down the
formula “_Act_, so that....” All ethic in this style expresses and is
meant to express the will-to-infinity, and this will demands conquest of
the moment, the present, and the foreground of life. In place of the
Socratic formula “Knowledge is Virtue” we have, even in Bacon, the
formula “Knowledge is Power.” The Stoic takes the world as he finds it,
but the Socialist wants to organize and recast it in form and substance,
to fill it with _his own_ spirit. The Stoic adapts himself, the
Socialist commands. He would have the whole world bear the form of _his_
view, thus transferring the idea of the “Critique of Pure Reason” into
the ethical field. This is the ultimate meaning of the Categorical
Imperative, which he brings to bear in political, social and economic
matters alike—act as though the maxims that you practise _were to become
by your will the law for all_. And this tyrannical tendency is not
absent from even the shallowest phenomena of the time.
It is not attitude and mien, but activity that is to be given form. As
in China and in Egypt, life only counts in so far as it is deed. And it
is the mechanicalizing of the organic concept of Deed that leads to the
concept of _work_ as commonly understood, _the civilised form of
Faustian effecting_. This morale, the insistent tendency to give to Life
the most active forms imaginable, is stronger than reason, whose moral
programs—be they never so reverenced, inwardly believed or ardently
championed—are only _effective_ in so far as they either lie, or are
mistakenly supposed to lie, in the direction of this force. Otherwise
they remain mere words. We have to distinguish, in all modernism,
between the popular side with its _dolce far niente_, its solicitude for
health, happiness, freedom from care, and universal peace—in a word, its
supposedly Christian ideals—and the higher Ethos which values deeds
only, which (like everything else that is Faustian) is neither
understood nor desired by the masses, which _grandly idealizes the Aim
and therefore Work_. If we would set against the Roman “panem et
circenses” (the final life-symbol of Epicurean-Stoic existence, and, at
bottom, of Indian existence also) some corresponding symbol of the North
(and of Old China and Egypt) it would be _the_ “_Right to Work_.” This
was the basis of Fichte’s thoroughly Prussian (and now European)
conception of State-Socialism, and in the last terrible stages of
evolution it will culminate in the _Duty to Work_.
Think, lastly, of the Napoleonic in it, the "_ære perennius_," the will-
to-duration. Apollinian man looked _back_ to a Golden Age; this relieved
him of the trouble of thinking upon what was still to come. The
Socialist—the dying Faust of Part II—is the man of historical care, who
feels the Future as his task and aim, and accounts the happiness of the
moment as worthless in comparison. The Classical spirit, with its
oracles and its omens, wants only to _know_ the future, but the
Westerner would _shape_ it. _The Third Kingdom is the Germanic ideal._
From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen—arrows of yearning to the
other bank, as the Zarathustra says—every great man has linked his life
to an eternal _morning_. Alexander’s life was a wondrous paroxysm, a
dream which conjured up the Homeric ages from the grave. Napoleon’s life
was an immense toil, not for himself nor for France, but for the Future.
It is well, at this point, to recall once more that each of the
different great Cultures has pictured _world-history_ in its own special
way. Classical man only saw himself and his fortunes as statically
present with himself, and did not ask “whence” or “whither.” Universal
history was for him an impossible notion. This is the static way of
looking at history. Magian man sees it as the great cosmic drama of
creation and foundering, the struggle between Soul and Spirit, Good and
Evil, God and Devil—a strictly-defined happening with, as its
culmination, _one single Peripeteia_—the appearance of the Saviour.
Faustian man sees in history a tense unfolding towards an _aim_; its
“ancient-mediæval-modern” sequence is a _dynamic_ image. He _cannot_
picture history to himself in any other way. This scheme of three parts
is not indeed world-history as such, general world-history. But it _is_
the image of world-history as it is conceived in the Faustian style. It
begins to be true and consistent with the beginning of the Western
Culture and ceases with its ceasing; and Socialism in the highest sense
is logically the crown of it, the form of its conclusive state that has
been implicit in it from Gothic onwards.
And here Socialism—in contrast to Stoicism and Buddhism—becomes tragic.
It is of the deepest significance that Nietzsche, so completely clear
and sure in dealing with what should be destroyed, what transvalued,
loses himself in nebulous generalities as soon as he comes to discuss
the Whither, the Aim. His criticism of decadence is unanswerable, but
his theory of the Superman is a castle in the air. It is the same with
Ibsen—“Brand” and “Rosmersholm,” “Emperor and Galilean” and “Master-
builder”—and with Hebbel, with Wagner and with everyone else. And
therein lies a deep necessity; for, from Rousseau onwards, Faustian man
has nothing more to hope for in anything pertaining to the grand style
of Life. Something has come to an end. The Northern soul has exhausted
its inner possibilities, and of the dynamic force and insistence that
had expressed itself in world-historical visions of the future—visions
of millennial scope—nothing remains but the mere pressure, the passion
yearning to create, the form without the content. This soul was Will and
nothing but Will. It needed an aim for its Columbus-longing; it _had_ to
give its inherent activity at least the illusion of a meaning and an
object. And so the keener critic will find a trace of Hjalmar Ekdal in
all modernity, even its highest phenomena. Ibsen called it the lie of
life. There is something of this lie in the entire intellect of the
Western Civilization, so far as this applies itself to the future of
religion, of art or of philosophy, to a social-ethical aim, a Third
Kingdom. For deep down beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be
repressed, that all this hectic zeal is the effort of a soul that may
not and cannot rest to deceive itself. This is the tragic situation—the
inversion of the Hamlet motive—that produced Nietzsche’s strained
conception of a “return,” which nobody really believed but he himself
clutched fast lest the feeling of a mission should slip out of him. This
Life’s lie is the foundation of Bayreuth—which _would be_ something
whereas Pergamum _was_ something—and a thread of it runs through the
entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which
forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final
implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical
necessity of its own existence.
IX
It remains, now, to say a word as to the _morphology of a history of
philosophy_.
There is no such thing as Philosophy “in itself.” Every Culture has its
own philosophy, which is a part of its total symbolic expression and
forms with its posing of problems and methods of thought an intellectual
ornamentation that is closely related to that of architecture and the
arts of form. From the high and distant standpoint it matters very
little what “truths” thinkers have managed to formulate in words within
their respective schools, for, here as in every great art, it is the
schools, conventions and repertory of forms that are the basic elements.
Infinitely more important than the answers are the _questions_—the
choice of them, the inner form of them. For it is the _particular_ way
in which a macrocosm presents itself to the understanding man of a
_particular_ Culture that determines _a priori_ the whole necessity of
asking them, and the way in which they are asked.
The Classical and the Faustian Cultures, and equally the Indian and the
Chinese, have each their proper ways of asking, and further, in _each_
case, all the great questions have been posed at the very outset. There
is no modern problem that the Gothic did not see and bring into form, no
Hellenistic problem that did not of necessity come up for the old Orphic
temple-teachings.
It is of no importance whether the subtilizing turn of mind expresses
itself here in oral tradition and there in books, whether such books are
personal creations of an “I” as they are amongst ourselves or anonymous
fluid masses of texts as in India, and whether the result is a set of
comprehensible systems or, as in Egypt, glimpses of the last secrets are
veiled in expressions of art and ritual. Whatever the variations, the
general course of philosophies as organisms is the same. At the
beginning of every springtime period, philosophy, intimately related to
great architecture and religion, is the intellectual echo of a mighty
metaphysical living, and its task is to establish critically the sacred
causality in the world-image seen with the eye of faith.[453] The basic
distinctions, not only of science but also of philosophy, are dependent
on, not divorced from, the elements of the corresponding religion. In
this springtime, thinkers are, not merely in spirit but actually in
status, _priests_. Such were the Schoolmen and the Mystics of the Gothic
and the Vedic as of the Homeric[454] and the Early-Arabian[455]
centuries. With the setting-in of the Late period, and not earlier,
philosophy becomes urban and worldly, frees itself from subservience to
religion and even dares to make that religion itself the object of
epistemological criticism. The great theme of Brahman, Ionic and Baroque
philosophies is the problem of knowing. The urban spirit turns to look
at itself, in order to establish the proposition that there is no higher
judgment-seat of knowing beyond itself, and with that thought draws
nearer to higher mathematics and instead of priests we have men of the
world, statesmen and merchants and discoverers, tested in high places
and by high tasks, whose ideas about thought rest upon deep experience
of life. Of such are the series of great thinkers from Thales to
Protagoras and from Bacon to Hume, and the series of pre-Confucian and
pre-Buddha thinkers of whom we hardly know more than the fact that they
existed.
At the end of such series stand Kant and Aristotle,[456] and after them
there set in the Civilization-philosophies. In every Culture, thought
mounts to a climax, setting the questions at the outset and answering
them with ever-increasing force of intellectual expression—and, as we
have said before, ornamental significance—until exhausted; and then it
passes into a decline in which the problems of knowing are in every
respect stale repetitions of no significance. There is a metaphysical
period, originally of a religious and finally of a rationalistic cast—in
which thought and life still contain something of chaos, an unexploited
fund that enables them effectively to create—and an ethical period in
which life itself, now become megalopolitan, appears to call for inquiry
and has to turn the still available remainder of philosophical creative-
power on to its own conduct and maintenance. In the one period life
_reveals_ itself, the other has life as its _object_. The one is
“theoretical” (contemplative) in the grand sense, the other perforce
practical. Even the Kantian system is in its deepest characters
_contemplated_ in the first instance and _only afterwards_ logically and
systematically formulated and ordered.
We see this evidenced in Kant’s attitude to mathematics. No one is a
genuine metaphysician who has not penetrated into the form-world of
numbers, who has not lived them into himself as a symbolism. And in fact
it was the great thinkers of the Baroque who created the analytical
mathematic, and the same is true, _mutatis mutandis_, of the great pre-
Socratics and Plato. Descartes and Leibniz stand beside Newton and
Gauss, Pythagoras and Plato by Archytas and Archimedes, at the summits
of mathematical development. But already in Kant the philosopher has
become, as mathematician, negligible. Kant no more penetrated to the
last subtleties of the Calculus as it stood in his own day than he
absorbed the axiomatic of Leibniz. The same may be said of Aristotle.
And thenceforward there is no philosopher who is counted as a
mathematician. Fichte, Hegel and the Romantics were entirely
unmathematical, and so were Zeno[457] and Epicurus. Schopenhauer in this
field is weak to the point of crudity, and of Nietzsche the less said
the better. When the form-world of numbers passed out of its ken,
philosophy lost a great convention, and since then it has lacked not
only structural strength but also what may be called the _grand style_
of thinking. Schopenhauer himself admitted that he was a hand-to-mouth
thinker (_Gelegenheitsdenker_).
With the decline of metaphysics, ethics has outgrown its status as a
subordinate element in abstract theory. Henceforth it _is_ philosophy,
the other divisions being absorbed into it and practical living becoming
the centre of consideration. The passion of pure thought sinks down.
Metaphysics, mistress yesterday, is handmaid now; all it is required to
do is to provide a foundation for practical views. And the foundation
becomes more and more superfluous. It becomes the custom to despise and
mock at the metaphysical, the unpractical, the philosophy of “stone for
bread.” In Schopenhauer it is for the sake of the fourth book that the
first three exist at all. Kant merely _thought_ that it was the same
with him; in reality, pure and not applied reason is still his centre of
creation. There is exactly the same difference in Classical philosophy
before and after Aristotle—on the one hand, a grandly conceived Cosmos
to which a _formal_ ethic adds almost nothing, and, on the other, ethics
as such, as programme, as necessity with a desultory _ad hoc_ metaphysic
for basis. And the entire absence of logical scruple with which
Nietzsche, for instance, dashes off such theories makes no difference
whatever to our appreciation of his philosophy proper.
It is well known[458] that Schopenhauer did not proceed to Pessimism
from his metaphysic but, on the contrary, was led to develop his system
by the pessimism that fell upon him in his seventeenth year. Shaw, a
most significant witness, observes in his “Quintessence of Ibsenism”
that one may quite well accept Schopenhauer’s philosophy and reject his
metaphysics—therein quite accurately discriminating between that which
makes him the first thinker of the new age and that which is included
because an obsolete tradition held it to be indispensable in a complete
philosophy. No one would undertake to divide Kant thus, and the attempt
would not succeed if it were made. But with Nietzsche one has no
difficulty in perceiving that his “philosophy” was through-and-through
an inner and very early experience, while he covered his metaphysical
requirements rapidly and often imperfectly by the aid of a few books,
and never managed to state even his ethical theory with any exactitude.
Just the same overlay of living seasonable ethical thought on a stratum
of metaphysics required by convention (but in fact superfluous) is to be
found in Epicurus and the Stoics. We need have no doubt after this as to
what is the essence of a Civilization-philosophy.
Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities. The world-city has
definitely overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory
proper to itself, directed of necessity outward, soulless. Henceforward,
we might with some justice replace the word “soul” by the word “brain.”
And, since in the Western “brain” the will to power, the tyrannical set
towards the Future and purpose to organize everybody and everything,
demands practical expression, ethics, as it loses touch more and more
with its metaphysical past, steadily assumes a _social-ethical_ and
_social-economic_ character. The philosophy of the present that starts
from Hegel and Schopenhauer is, so far as it represents the spirit of
the age (which, e.g., Lotze and Herbart do not), a _critique of
society_.
The attention that the Stoic gave to his own body, the Westerner devotes
to the body social. It is not chance that Hegelian philosophy has given
rise to Socialism (Marx, Engels), to Anarchism (Stirner) and to the
problem-posing social drama (Hebbel). Socialism is political economy
converted into the ethical and, moreover, the _imperative_ mood. So long
as a metaphysic existed (that is, till Kant) political economy remained
a science. But as soon as “philosophy” became synonymous with practical
ethics, _it replaced mathematics as the basis of thought about the
world_—hence the importance of Cousin, Bentham, Comte, Mill and Spencer.
To choose his material at will is not given to the philosopher, neither
is the material of philosophy always and everywhere the same. There are
no eternal questions, but only questions arising out of the feelings of
a particular being and posed by it. _Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein
Gleichnis_ applies also to every genuine philosophy as the intellectual
expression of this being, as the actualization of spiritual
possibilities in a form-world of concepts, judgments and thought-
structures comprised in the living phenomenon of its author. Any and
every such philosophy is, from the first word to the last, from its most
abstract proposition to its most telltale trait of personality, a thing-
become, mirrored over from soul into world, from the realm of freedom
into that of necessity, from the immediate-living into the dimensional-
logical; and on that very account it is mortal, and its life has
prescribed rhythm and duration. _The choice of them, therefore, is
subject to strict necessity._ Each epoch has its own, important for
itself and for no other epoch. It is the mark of the born philosopher
that he sees his epoch and his theme with a sure eye. Apart from this,
there is nothing of any importance in philosophical production—merely
technical knowledge and the industry requisite for the building up of
systematic and conceptual subtleties.
Consequently, the distinctive philosophy of the 19th Century is _only_
Ethics and social critique in the productive sense—nothing more. And
consequently, again, its most important representatives (apart from
actual practitioners) are the _dramatists_. They are the real
philosophers of Faustian activism, and compared with them not one of the
lecture-room philosophers and systematics counts at all. All that these
unimportant pedants have done for us is, so to write and rewrite the
history of philosophy (and what history!—collections of dates and
“results”) that no one to-day knows what the history of philosophy is or
what it might be.
Thanks to this, the deep organic unity in the thought of this epoch has
never yet been perceived. The essence of it, from the philosophical
point of view, can be precised by asking the question: In how far is
Shaw the pupil and fulfiller of Nietzsche? The question is put in no
ironic spirit. Shaw is the one thinker of eminence who has consistently
advanced in the same direction as that of the true Nietzsche—namely,
productive criticism of the Western morale—while following out as poet
the last implications of Ibsen and devoting the balance of the artistic
creativeness that is in him to practical discussions.
Save in so far as the belated Romanticist in him has determined the
style, sound and attitude of his philosophy, Nietzsche is in every
respect a disciple of the materialistic decades. That which drew him
with such passion to Schopenhauer was (not that he himself or anyone
else was conscious of it) that element of Schopenhauer’s doctrine by
which he destroyed the great metaphysic and (without meaning to do so)
parodied his master Kant; that is to say, the modification of all deep
ideas of the Baroque age into tangible and mechanistic notions. Kant
speaks in inadequate words, which hide a mighty and scarcely
apprehensible intuition, an intuition of the world as appearance or
phenomenon. In Schopenhauer this becomes the world as brain-phenomenon
(Gehirnphänomen). The change-over from tragic philosophy to
philosophical plebeianism is complete. It will be enough to cite one
passage. In “The World as Will and Idea” Schopenhauer says: “The will,
as thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner, true and indestructible
essence of the man; in itself, however, it is without consciousness. For
the consciousness is conditioned by the intellect and this is a mere
accident of our being, since it is a function of the brain, and that
again (with its dependent nerves and spinal cord) is a mere fruit, a
product, nay, even a parasite of the rest of the organism, inasmuch as
it does not intervene directly in the latter’s activities but only
serves a purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with
the outer world.” Here we have exactly the fundamental position of the
flattest materialism. It was not for nothing that Schopenhauer, like
Rousseau before him, studied the English sensualists. From them he
learned to misread Kant in the spirit of megalopolitan utilitarian
modernity. The intellect as instrument of the will-to-life,[459] as
weapon in the struggle for existence, the ideas brought to grotesque
expression by Shaw in “Man and Superman”—it was because this was his
view of the world that Schopenhauer became the fashionable philosopher
when Darwin’s main work was published in 1859. In contrast to Schelling,
Hegel and Fichte, he was a philosopher, and the only philosopher, whose
metaphysical propositions could be absorbed with ease by intellectual
mediocrity. The clarity of which he was so proud threatened at every
moment to reveal itself as triviality. While retaining enough of formula
to produce an atmosphere of profundity and exclusiveness, he presented
the civilized view of the world complete and assimilable. His system is
_anticipated Darwinism_, and the speech of Kant and the concepts of the
Indians are simply clothing. In his book “Ueber den Willen in der Natur”
(1835) we find already the struggle for self-preservation in Nature, the
human intellect as master-weapon in that struggle and sexual love as
unconscious selection according to biological interest.[460]
It is the view that Darwin (via Malthus) brought to bear with
irresistible success in the field of zoology. The economic origin of
Darwinism is shown by the fact that the system deduced from the
similarities between men and the higher animals ceases to fit even at
the level of the plant-world and becomes positively absurd as soon as it
is seriously attempted to apply it with its will-tendency (natural
selection, mimicry) to primitive organic forms.[461] Proof, to the
Darwinian, means to the ordering and pictorial presentation of a
selection of facts so that they conform to his historico-dynamic basic
feeling of “Evolution.” Darwinism—that is to say, that totality of very
varied and discrepant ideas, in which the common factor is merely the
application of the causality principle to living things, which therefore
is a _method and not a result_—was known in all details to the 18th
Century. Rousseau was championing the ape-man theory as early as 1754.
What Darwin originated is only the “Manchester School” system, and it is
this _latent political element in it that accounts for its popularity_.
The spiritual unity of the century is manifest enough here. From
Schopenhauer to Shaw, everyone has been, without being aware of it,
bringing the same principle into form. Everyone (including even those
who, like Hebbel, knew nothing of Darwin) is a derivative of the
evolution-idea—and of the shallow civilized and not the deep Goethian
form of it at that—whether he issues it with a biological or an economic
imprint. There is evolution, too, in the evolution-idea itself, which is
Faustian through and through, which displays (in sharpest contrast to
Aristotle’s timeless entelechy-idea) all our passionate urgency towards
infinite future, our _will_ and sense of _aim_ which is so immanent in,
so specific to, the Faustian spirit as to be the _a priori_ form rather
than the discovered principle of our Nature-picture. And in the
evolution of evolution we find the same change taking place as
elsewhere, the turn of the Culture to the Civilization. In Goethe
evolution is upright, in Darwin it is flat; in Goethe organic, in Darwin
mechanical; in Goethe an experience and emblem, in Darwin a matter of
cognition and law. To Goethe evolution meant inward fulfilment, to
Darwin it meant “Progress.” Darwin’s struggle for existence, which he
read _into_ Nature and not out of it, is only the plebeian form of that
primary feeling which in Shakespeare’s tragedies moves the great
realities against one another; but what Shakespeare inwardly saw, felt
and actualized in his figures as destiny, Darwinism comprehends as
causal connexion and formulates as a superficial system of utilities.
And it is this system and not this primary feeling that is the basis of
the utterances of “Zarathustra,” the tragedy of “Ghosts,” the problems
of the “Ring of the Nibelungs.” Only, it was with terror that
Schopenhauer, the first of his line, perceived what his own knowledge
meant—that is the root of his pessimism, and the “Tristan” music of his
adherent Wagner is its highest expression—whereas the late men, and
foremost among them Nietzsche, face it with enthusiasm, though it is
true, the enthusiasm is sometimes rather forced.
Nietzsche’s breach with Wagner—that last product of the German spirit
over which greatness broods—marks his silent change of school-
allegiance, his unconscious step from Schopenhauer to Darwin, from the
metaphysical to the physiological formulation of the same world-feeling,
from the denial to the affirmation of the aspect that in fact is common
to _both_, the one seeing as will-to-life what the other regards as
struggle for existence. In his “Schopenhauer als Erzieher” he still
means by evolution an inner ripening, but the Superman is the product of
evolution as machinery. And “Zarathustra” is _ethically_ the outcome of
an unconscious protest against “Parsifal”—which _artistically_ entirely
governs it—of the rivalry of one evangelist for another.
But Nietzsche was also a Socialist without knowing it. Not his
catchwords, but his instincts, were Socialistic, practical, directed to
that welfare of mankind that Goethe and Kant never spent a thought upon.
Materialism, Socialism and Darwinism are only artificially and on the
surface separable. It was this that made it possible for Shaw in the
third act of “Man and Superman” (one of the most important and
significant of the works that issued from the transition) to obtain, by
giving just a small and indeed perfectly logical turn to the tendencies
of “master-morale” and the production of the Superman, the specific
maxims of _his own_ Socialism. Here Shaw was only expressing with
remorseless clarity and full consciousness of the commonplace, what the
uncompleted portion of the Zarathustra would have said with Wagnerian
theatricality and woolly romanticism. All that we are concerned to
discover in Nietzsche’s reasoning is its _practical_ bases and
consequences, which proceed of necessity from the structure of modern
public life. He moves amongst vague ideas like “new values,” “Superman,”
“Sinn der Erde,” and declines or fears to shape them more precisely.
Shaw does it. Nietzsche observes that the Darwinian idea of the Superman
evokes the notion of breeding, and stops there, leaves it at a sounding
phrase. Shaw pursues the question—for there is no object in talking
about it if nothing is going to be _done_ about it—asks how it is to be
achieved, and from that comes to demand the transformation of mankind
into a stud-farm. But this is merely the conclusion implicit in the
Zarathustra, which Nietzsche was not bold enough, or was too fastidious,
to draw. If we _do_ talk of systematic breeding—a completely
materialistic and utilitarian notion—we must be prepared to answer the
questions, who shall breed what, where and how? But Nietzsche, too
romantic to face the very prosaic social consequences and to expose
poetic ideas to the test of facts, omits to say that his whole doctrine,
as a derivative of Darwinism, presupposes Socialism and, moreover,
socialistic _compulsion_ as the _means_; that any systematic breeding of
a class of higher men requires as condition precedent a strictly
socialistic ordering of society; and that this “Dionysiac” idea, as it
involves a _common_ action and is not simply the private affair of
detached thinkers, is democratic, turn it how you may. It is the climax
of the ethical force of “Thou shalt”; to impose upon the world the form
of his will, Faustian man sacrifices even himself.
The breeding of the Superman follows from the notion of “selection.”
Nietzsche was an unconscious pupil of Darwin from the time that he wrote
aphorisms, but Darwin himself had remoulded the evolution-ideas of the
18th Century according to the Malthusian tendencies of political
economy, which he projected on the higher animal-world. Malthus had
studied the cotton industry in Lancashire, and already in 1857 we have
the whole system, only applied to men instead of to beasts, in Buckle’s
History of English Civilization.
In other words, the “master-morale” of this last of the Romantics is
derived—strangely perhaps but very significantly—from that source of all
intellectual modernity, the atmosphere of the English factory. The
Machiavellism that commended itself to Nietzsche as a Renaissance
phenomenon is something closely (one would have supposed, obviously)
akin to Darwin’s notion of “mimicry.” It is in fact that of which Marx
(that other famous disciple of Malthus) treats in his _Das Kapital_, the
bible of political (not ethical) Socialism.[462] That is the genealogy
of “Herrenmoral.” The Will-to-Power, transferred to the realistic,
political and economic domain, finds its expression in Shaw’s “Major
Barbara.” No doubt Nietzsche, as a personality, stands at the
culmination of this series of ethical philosophers, but here Shaw the
party politician reaches up to his level as a thinker. The will-to-power
is to-day represented by the two poles of public life—the worker-class
and the big money-and-brain men—far more effectually than it ever was by
a Borgia. The millionaire Undershaft of Shaw’s best comedy is a
Superman, though Nietzsche the Romanticist would not have recognized his
ideal in such a figure. Nietzsche is for ever speaking of
transvaluations of all values, of a philosophy of the “Future” (which,
incidentally, is merely the Western, and not the Chinese or the African
future), but when the mists of his thought do come in from the Dionysiac
distance and condense into any tangible form, the will-to-power appears
to him in the guise of dagger-and-poison and never in that of strike and
“deal.” And yet he says that the idea first came to him when he saw the
Prussian regiments marching to battle in 1870.
The drama, in this epoch, is no longer poetry in the old sense of the
Culture days, but a form of agitation, debate and demonstration. The
stage has become a moralizing institution. Nietzsche himself often
thought of putting his ideas in the dramatic form. Wagner’s Nibelung
poetry, more especially the first draft of it (1850), expresses his
social-revolutionary ideas, and even when, after a circuitous course
under influences artistic and non-artistic, he has completed the “Ring,”
his Siegfried is still a symbol of the Fourth Estate, his Brünhilde
still the “free woman.” The sexual selection of which the “Origin of
Species” enunciated the theory in 1859, was finding its musical
expression at the very same time in the third act of “Siegfried” and in
“Tristan.” It is no accident that Wagner, Hebbel and Ibsen, all
practically simultaneously, set to work to dramatize the Nibelung
material. Hebbel, making the acquaintance in Paris of Engels’s writings,
expresses (in a letter of April 2, 1844) his surprise at finding that
his own conceptions of the social principle of his age, which he was
then intending to exemplify in a drama _Zu irgend einer Zeit_, coincided
precisely with those of the future “Communist Manifesto.” And, upon
first making the acquaintance of Schopenhauer (letter of March 19,
1857), he is equally surprised by the affinity that he finds between the
_Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_ and tendencies upon which he had based
his Holofernes and his _Herodes und Mariamne_. Hebbel’s diaries, of
which the most important portion belongs to the years 1835-1845, were
(though he did not know it) one of the deepest philosophical efforts of
the century. It would be no surprise to find whole sentences of it in
Nietzsche, who never knew him and did not always come up to his level.
The _actual and effective_ philosophy of the 19th Century, then, has as
its one genuine theme the Will-to-Power. It considers this Will-to-Power
in civilized-intellectual, ethical, or social forms and presents it as
will-to-life, as life-force, as practical-dynamical principle, as idea,
and as dramatic figure. (The period that is _closed_ by Shaw corresponds
to the period 350-250 in the Classical.) The rest of the 19th-Century
philosophy is, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase, “professors’ philosophy by
philosophy-professors.” The real landmarks are these:
1819. Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_. The will to
life is for the first time put as the only reality (original force,
Urkraft); but, older idealist influences still being potent, it is put
there to be negatived (zur Verneinung empfohlen).
1836. Schopenhauer, _Ueber den Willen in der Natur_. Anticipation of
Darwinism, but in metaphysical disguise.
1840. Proud’hon, _Qu’est-ce que la Propriété_, basis of Anarchism.
Comte, _Cours de philosophic positive_; the formula “order and
progress.”
1841. Hebbel, “Judith,” first dramatic conception of the “New Woman”
and the “Superman.” Feuerbach, _Das Wesen des Christenthums_.
1844. Engels, _Umriss einer Kritik des Nationalökonomie_, foundation
of the materialistic conception of history. Hebbel, _Maria Magdalena_,
the first social drama.
1847. Marx, _Misère de la Philosophie_ (synthesis of Hegel and
Malthus). These are the _epochal years_ in which economics begins to
dominate social ethic and biology.
1848. Wagner’s “Death of Siegfried”; Siegfried as social-ethical
revolutionary, the Fafnir hoard as symbol of Capitalism.
1850. Wagner’s _Kunst und Klima_; the sexual problem.
1850-1858. Wagner’s, Hebbel’s and Ibsen’s Nibelung poetry.
1859 (year of symbolic coincidences). Darwin, “Origin of Species”
(application of economics to biology). Wagner’s “Tristan.” Marx, _Zur
Kritik der politischen Ökonomie_.
1863. J. S. Mill, “Utilitarianism.”
1865. Dühring, _Wert des Lebens_—a work which is rarely heard of, but
which exercised the greatest influence upon the succeeding generation.
1867. Ibsen, “Brand.” Marx, _Das Kapital_.
1878. Wagner “Parsifal.” First dissolution of materialism into
mysticism.
1879. Ibsen “Nora.”
1881. Nietzsche, _Morgenröthe_; transition from Schopenhauer to
Darwin, morale as biological phenomenon.
1883. Nietzsche, _Also sprach Zarathustra_; the Will-to-Power, but in
Romantic disguise.
1886. Ibsen, “Rosmersholm.” Nietzsche, _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_.
1887-8. Strindberg, “Fadren” and “Fröken Julie.”
From 1890 the conclusion of the epoch approaches. The religious works
of Strindberg and the symbolical of Ibsen.
1896. Ibsen, “John Gabriel Borkman.” Nietzsche, _Uebermensch_. 1898.
Strindberg, “Till Damascus.”
From 1900 the last phenomena.
1903. Weininger, _Geschlecht und Charakter_; the only serious attempt
to revive Kant within this epoch, by referring him to Wagner and
Ibsen.
1903. Shaw, “Man and Superman”; final synthesis of Darwin and
Nietzsche.
1905. Shaw, “Major Barbara”; the type of the Superman referred back to
its economic origins.
With this, the ethical period exhausts itself as the metaphysical had
done. Ethical Socialism, prepared by Fichte, Hegel, and Humboldt, was at
its zenith of passionate greatness about the middle of the 19th Century,
and at the end thereof it had reached the stage of repetitions. The 20th
Century, while keeping the _word_ Socialism, has replaced an ethical
philosophy that only Epigoni suppose to be capable of further
development, by a praxis of economic everyday questions. The ethical
disposition of the West will remain “socialistic” but its theory has
ceased to be a problem. And there remains the possibility of a third and
last stage of Western philosophy, that of a physiognomic scepticism. The
secret of the world appears successively as a knowledge problem, a
valuation problem and a form problem. Kant saw Ethics as an object of
knowledge, the 19th Century saw it as an object of valuation. The
Sceptic would deal with _both_ simply as the historical expression of a
Culture.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XI
FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN
NATURE-KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER XI
FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-KNOWLEDGE
I
Helmholtz observed, in a lecture of 1869 that has become famous, that
“the final aim of Natural Science is to discover the motions underlying
all alteration, and the motive forces thereof; that is, to resolve
itself into Mechanics.” What this resolution into mechanics means is the
reference of all qualitative impressions to fixed quantitative base-
values, that is, to the _extended_ and to _change of place_ therein. It
means, further—if we bear in mind the opposition of becoming and become,
form and law, image and notion—the referring of the seen Nature-picture
to the imagined picture of a single numerically and structurally
measurable Order. The specific tendency of all Western mechanics is
towards an intellectual _conquest by measurement_, and it is therefore
obliged to look for the essence of the phenomenon in a system of
constant elements that are susceptible of full and inclusive
appreciation by measurement, of which Helmholtz distinguishes _motion_
(using the word in its everyday sense) as the most important.
To the physicist this definition appears unambiguous and exhaustive, but
to the sceptic who has followed out the history of this scientific
conviction, it is very far from being either. To the physicist, present-
day mechanics is a logical system of clear, uniquely-significant
concepts and of simple, necessary relations; while to the other it is a
_picture_ distinctive of the structure of the West-European spirit,
though he admits that the picture is consistent in the highest degree
and most impressively convincing. It is self-evident that no _practical_
results and discoveries can prove anything as to the “truth” of the
_theory_, the _picture_.[463] For most people, indeed, “mechanics”
appears as the self-evident synthesis of Nature-impressions. But it
merely appears to be so. For what is motion? Is not the postulate that
everything qualitative is reducible to the motion of unalterably-alike
mass-points, essentially Faustian and not common to humanity?
Archimedes, for example, did not feel himself obliged to transpose the
mechanics that he saw into a mental picture of motions. Is motion
generally a purely mechanical quantity? Is it a word for a visual
experience or is it a notion derived from that experience? Is it the
number that is found by measurement of experimentally-produced facts, or
the picture that is subjected to that number, that is signified by it?
And if one day physics should really succeed in reaching its supposed
aim, in devising a system of law-governed “motions” and of efficient
forces behind them into which everything whatsoever appreciable by the
senses could be fitted—would it thereby have achieved “knowledge” of
that which occurs, or even made one step towards this achievement? Yet
is the form-language of mechanics one whit the less dogmatic on that
account? Is it not, on the contrary, a vessel of the myth like the root-
words, not proceeding from experience but shaping it and, in this case,
shaping it with all possible rigour? What is force? What is a cause?
What is a process? Nay, even on the basis of its own definitions, has
physics a specific problem at all? Has it an object that counts as such
for all the centuries? Has it even one unimpeachable imagination-unit,
with reference to which it may express its results?
The answer may be anticipated. Modern physics, as a science, is an
immense system of _indices_ in the form of names and numbers whereby we
are enabled to work with Nature as with a machine.[464] As such, it may
have an exactly-definable end. But as a piece of _history_, all made up
of destinies and incidents in the lives of the men who have worked in it
and in the course of research itself, physics is, in point of object,
methods and results alike an expression and actualization of a Culture,
an organic and evolving element in the essence of that Culture, and
every one of its results is a symbol. That which physics—which exists
only in the waking-consciousness of the Culture-man—thinks it finds in
its methods and in its results was already there, underlying and
implicit in, the choice and manner of its search. Its discoveries, in
virtue of their imagined content (as distinguished from their printable
formulæ), have been of a purely mythic nature, even in minds so prudent
as those of J. B. Mayer, Faraday and Hertz. In every Nature-law,
physically exact as it may be, we are called upon to distinguish between
the nameless number and the naming of it, between the plain fixation of
limits[465] and their theoretical interpretation. The formulæ represent
general logical values, pure numbers—that is to say, objective space—and
boundary-elements. But formulæ are dumb. The expression _s_ = ½_gt_²
means nothing at all unless one is able mentally to connect the letters
with particular words and their symbolism. But the moment we clothe the
dead signs in such words, give them flesh, body and life, and, in sum, a
perceptible significance in the world, we have overstepped the limits of
a mere _order_. θεωρία means image, vision, and it is this that makes a
Nature-law out of a figure-and-letter formula. Everything exact is in
itself _meaningless_, and every physical observation is so constituted
that it _proves the basis of a certain number of imaged
presuppositions_; and the effect of its successful issue is to make
these presuppositions more convincing than ever. Apart from these, the
result consists merely of empty figures. But in fact we do not and
cannot get apart from them. Even if an investigator puts on one side
every hypothesis that he knows as such, as soon as he sets his _thought_
to work on the supposedly clear task, he is not controlling but being
controlled by the unconscious form of it, for in living activity he is
always a man of his Culture, of his age, of his school and of his
tradition. Faith and “knowledge” are only two species of inner
certitude, but of the two faith is the older and it dominates all the
conditions of knowing, be they never so exact. And thus it is theories
and not pure numbers that are the support of all natural science. The
unconscious longing for that genuine science which (be it repeated) is
peculiar to the spirit of Culture-man sets itself to apprehend, to
penetrate, and to comprise within its grasp the world-image of Nature.
Mere industrious measuring for measuring’s sake is not and never has
been more than a delight for little minds. Numbers may only be the key
of the secret, no more. No significant man would ever have spent himself
on them for their own sake.
Kant, it is true, says in a well-known passage: “I maintain that in each
and every discipline of natural philosophy it is only possible to find
as much of true science as is to be found of mathematics therein.” What
Kant has in mind here is pure delimitation in the field of the become,
so far as law and formula, number and system can (at any particular
stage) be seen in that field. But a law without words, a law, consisting
merely of a series of figures read off an instrument, cannot even as an
intellectual operation be completely effective in this pure state. Every
savant’s experiment, be it what it may, is at the same time an instance
of the _kind_ of symbolism that rules in the savant’s ideation. All Laws
formulated in words are Orders that have been activated and vitalized,
filled with the very essence of the one—and only the one—Culture. As to
the “necessity” which is a postulate in all exact research, here too we
have to consider two kinds of necessity, viz., a necessity within the
spiritual and living (for it is Destiny that the history of every
individual research-act takes its course when, where and how it does)
and a necessity within the known (for which the current Western name is
Causality). If the pure numbers of a physical formula represent a causal
necessity, the existence, the birth and the life-duration of a theory
are a Destiny.
Every fact, even the simplest, contains _ab initio_ a theory. A fact is
a uniquely-occurring impression upon a waking being, and everything
depends on whether that being, the being for whom it occurs or did
occur, is or was Classical or Western, Gothic or Baroque. Compare the
effect produced by a flash of lightning on a sparrow and on an alert
physical investigator, and think how much more is contained in the
observer’s “fact” than in the sparrow’s. The modern physicist is too
ready to forget that even words like quantity, position, process, change
of state and body represent specifically Western images. These words
excite and these images mirror a feeling of significances, too subtle
for verbal description, incommunicable to Classical or to Magian or to
other mankind as like subtleties of their thought and feeling are
incommunicable to us. And the character of scientific facts as such—that
is, the mode of their becoming known—is completely governed by this
feeling; and if so, then also _a fortiori_ such intricate intellectual
notions as work, tension, quantity of energy, quantity of heat,
probability,[466] every one of which contains a veritable scientific
myth of its own. We think of such conceptual images as ensuing from
quite unprejudiced research and, subject to certain conditions,
definitively valid. But a first-rate scientist of the time of Archimedes
would have declared himself, after a thorough study of our modern
theoretical physics, quite unable to comprehend how anyone could assert
such arbitrary, grotesque and involved notions to be Science, still less
how they could be claimed as necessary consequences from actual facts.
“The scientifically-justified conclusions,” he would have said, “are
really so-and-so”; and thereupon he would have evolved, on the basis of
the same elements made “facts” by _his_ eyes and _his_ mind, theories
that our physicists would listen to with amazed ridicule.
For what, after all, are the basic notions that have been evolved with
inward certainty of logic in the field of our physics? Polarized light-
rays, errant ions, flying and colliding gas-particles, magnetic fields,
electric currents and waves—are they not one and all Faustian visions,
closely akin to Romanesque ornamentation, the upthrust of Gothic
architecture, the Viking’s voyaging into unknown seas, the longings of
Columbus and Copernicus? Did not this world of forms and pictures grow
up in perfect tune with the contemporary arts of perspective oil-
painting and instrumental music? Are they not, in short, our passionate
directedness, our passion of the third dimension, coming to symbolic
expression in the imagined Nature-picture as in the soul-image?
II
It follows then that all “knowing” of Nature, even the exactest, is
based on a religious faith. The pure mechanics that the physicist has
set before himself as the end-form to which it is his task (and the
purpose of all this imagination-machinery) to reduce Nature, presupposes
a _dogma_—namely, the religious world-picture of the Gothic centuries.
For it is from this world-picture that the physics peculiar to the
Western intellect is derived. There is no science that is without
unconscious presuppositions of this kind, over which the researcher has
no control and which can be traced back to the earliest days of the
awakening Culture. _There is no Natural science without a precedent
Religion._ In this point there is no distinction between the Catholic
and the Materialistic views of the world—both say the same thing in
different words. Even atheistic science has religion; modern mechanics
exactly reproduces the contemplativeness of Faith.
When the Ionic reaches its height in Thales or the Baroque in Bacon, and
man has come to the urban stage of his career, his self-assurance begins
to look upon critical science, in contrast to the more primitive
religion of the countryside, as the superior attitude towards things,
and, holding as he thinks the only key to real knowledge, to explain
religion itself empirically and psychologically—in other words, to
“conquer” it with the rest. Now, the history of the higher Cultures
shows that “science” is a transitory spectacle,[467] belonging only to
the autumn and winter of their life-course, and that in the cases of the
Classical, the Indian, the Chinese and the Arabian thought alike a few
centuries suffice for the complete exhaustion of its possibilities.
Classical science faded out between the battle of Cannæ and that of
Actium and made way for the world-outlook of the “second
religiousness.”[468] And from this it is possible to foresee a date at
which our Western scientific thought shall have reached the limit of its
evolution.
There is no justification for assigning to this intellectual form-world
the primacy over others. Every critical science, like every myth and
every religious belief, rests upon an inner certitude. Various as the
creatures of this certitude may be, both in structure and in sound, they
are not different in basic principle. Any reproach, therefore, levelled
by Natural science at Religion is a boomerang. We are presumptuous and
no less in supposing that we can ever set up “The Truth” in the place of
“anthropomorphic” conceptions, for no other conceptions but these exist
at all. Every idea that is possible at all is a mirror of the being of
its author. The statement that “man created God in his own image,” valid
for every historical religion, is not less valid for every physical
theory, however firm its reputed basis of fact. Classical scientists
conceived of light as consisting in corporeal particles proceeding from
the source of light to the eye of the beholder. For the Arabian thought,
even at the stage of the Jewish-Persian academies of Edessa, Resaïna and
Pombaditha (and for Porphyry too), the colours and forms of things were
evidenced without the intervention of a medium, being brought in a magic
and “spiritual” way to the seeing-power which was conceived as
substantial and resident in the eyeball. This was the doctrine[469]
taught by Ibn-al-Haitan, by Avicenna and by the “Brothers of
Sincerity.”[470] And the idea of light as a force, an _impetus_, was
current even from about 1300 amongst the Paris Occamists who centred on
Albert of Saxony, Buridan and Oresme the discoverer of co-ordinate
geometry. Each Culture has made its own set of images of processes,
which are true only for itself and only alive while it is itself alive
and actualizing its possibilities. When a Culture is at its end and the
creative element—the imaginative power, the symbolism—is extinct, there
are left “empty” formulæ, skeletons of dead systems, which men of
another Culture read literally, feel to be without meaning or value and
either mechanically store up or else despise and forget. Numbers,
formulæ, laws _mean_ nothing and _are_ nothing. They must have a body,
and only a _living_ mankind—projecting its livingness into them and
through them, expressing itself by them, inwardly making them its own—
can endow them with that. And thus there is no absolute science of
physics, but only individual sciences that come, flourish and go within
the individual Cultures.
The “Nature” of Classical man found its highest artistic emblem in the
nude statue, and out of it logically there grew up a _static of bodies,
a physics of the near_. The Arabian Culture owned the arabesque and the
cavern-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this world-feeling there
issued _Alchemy_ with its ideas of mysterious efficient substantialities
like the “philosophical mercury,” which is neither a material nor a
property but some thing that underlies the coloured existence of metals
and can transmute one metal into another.[471] And the outcome of
Faustian man’s Nature idea was _a dynamic of unlimited span, a physics
of the distant_. To the Classical therefore belong the conceptions of
_matter and form_, to the Arabian (quite Spinozistically) the idea of
_substances_ with visible or secret _attributes_,[472] and to the
Faustian the idea of _force and mass_. Apollinian theory is a quiet
meditation, Magian a silent knowledge of Alchemy the means of Grace
(even here the religious source of mechanics is to be discerned), and
the Faustian is from the very outset a _working hypothesis_.[473] The
Greek asked, what is the essence of visible being? We ask, what
possibility is there of mastering the invisible motive-forces of
becoming? For them, contented absorption in the visible; for us,
masterful questioning of Nature and methodical experiment.
As with the formulation of problems and the methods of dealing with
them, so also with the basic concepts. They are symbols in each case of
the one and only the one Culture. The Classical root-words ἄπειρον,
ἀρχή, μορφή, ὕλη, are not translatable into our speech. To render ἀρχή
by “prime-stuff” is to eliminate its Apollinian connotation, to make the
hollow shell of the word sound an alien note. That which Classical man
saw before him as “motion” in space, he understood as ἀλλοίωσις, change
of position of bodies; we, from the way in which we experience motion,
have deduced the concept of a _process_, a “going forward,” thereby
expressing and emphasizing that element of directional energy which our
thought necessarily predicates in the courses of Nature. The Classical
critic of Nature took the visible juxtaposition of states as the
original diversity, and specified the famous four elements of
Empedocles—namely, earth as the rigid-corporeal, water as the non-rigid-
corporeal and air as the incorporeal, together with fire, which is so
much the strongest of all optical impressions that the Classical spirit
could have no doubt of its bodiliness. The Arabian “elements,” on the
contrary, are ideal and implicit in the secret constitutions and
constellations which define the phenomenon of things for the eye. If we
try to get a little nearer to this feeling, we shall find that the
opposition of rigid and fluid means something quite different for the
Syrian from what it means for the Aristotelian Greek, the latter seeing
in it different degrees of bodiliness and the former different magic
attributes. With the former therefore arises the image of the _chemical_
element as a sort of magic substance that a secret causality makes to
appear out of things (and to vanish into them again) and which is
subject even to the influence of the stars. In Alchemy there is deep
scientific doubt as to the plastic actuality of things—of the “somata”
of Greek mathematicians, physicists and poets—and it dissolves and
destroys the soma in the hope of finding its essence. It is an
iconoclastic movement just as truly as those of Islam and the Byzantine
Bogomils were so. It reveals a deep disbelief in the tangible figure of
phenomenal Nature, the figure of her that to the Greek was sacrosanct.
The conflict concerning the person of Christ which manifested itself in
all the early Councils and led to the Nestorian and Monophysite
secessions is an _alchemistic_ problem.[474] It would never have
occurred to a Classical physicist to investigate things while at the
same time denying or annihilating their perceivable form. And for that
very reason there was no Classical chemistry, any more than there was
any theorizing on the substance as against the manifestations of Apollo.
The rise of a chemical method of the Arabian style betokens a new world-
consciousness. The discovery of it, which at one blow made an end of
Apollinian natural science, of mechanical statics, is linked with the
enigmatic name of Hermes Trismegistus,[475] who is supposed to have
lived in Alexandria _at the same time as Plotinus and Diophantus_.
Similarly it was just at the time of the definite emancipation of the
Western mathematic by Newton and Leibniz that the Western chemistry[476]
was freed from Arabic form by Stahl (1660-1734) and his Phlogiston
theory. Chemistry and mathematic alike became pure analysis. Already
Paracelsus (1493-1541) had transformed the Magian effort to make gold
into a pharmaceutical science—a transformation in which one cannot but
surmise an altered world-feeling. Then Robert Boyle (1626-1691) devised
the analytical method and _with it the Western conception of the
Element_. But the ensuing changes must not be misinterpreted. That which
is called the founding of modern chemistry and has Stahl and Lavoisier
at its turning-points is anything but a building-up of “chemical” ideas,
in so far as chemistry implies the alchemistic outlook on Nature. It is
in fact the _end_ of genuine chemistry, its dissolution into the
comprehensive system of pure dynamic, its assimilation into the
mechanical outlook which the Baroque age had established through Galileo
and Newton. The elements of Empedocles designate states of bodiliness
(bezeichnen ein körperliches Sichverhalten) but the elements of
Lavoisier, whose combustion-theory followed promptly upon the isolation
of oxygen in 1771, designate energy-systems accessible to human will,
“rigid” and “fluid” becoming mere terms to describe tension-relations
between molecules. By our analysis and synthesis, Nature is not merely
asked or persuaded but forced. The modern chemistry is a chapter of the
modern physics of Deed.
What we call Statics, Chemistry and Dynamics—words that as used in
modern science are merely traditional distinctions without deeper
meaning—are really the _respective physical systems of the Apollinian,
Magian and Faustian souls_, each of which grew up in its own Culture and
was limited as to validity to the same. Corresponding to these sciences,
each to each, we have the mathematics of Euclidean geometry, Algebra and
Higher Analysis, and the arts of statue, arabesque and fugue. We may
differentiate these three kinds of physics (bearing in mind of course
that other Cultures may and in fact do give rise to other kinds) by
their standpoints towards the problem of motion, and call them
mechanical orderings of states, secret forces and processes
respectively.
III
Now, the tendency of human thought (which is always causally disposed)
to reduce the image of Nature to the simplest possible quantitative
form-units that can be got by causal reasoning, measuring and counting—
in a word, by mechanical differentiation—leads necessarily in Classical,
Western and every other possible physics, to an atomic theory. Of Indian
and Chinese science we know hardly more than the fact they once existed,
and the Arabian is so complicated that even now it seems to defy
presentation. But we do know our own and the Apollinian sciences well
enough to observe, here too, a deeply symbolical opposition.
The Classical atoms are _miniature forms_, the Western _minimal quanta_,
and quanta, too, of energy. On the one hand perceptibility, sensuous
nearness, and on the other, abstractness are the basic conditions of the
idea. The atomistic notions of modern physics—which include not only the
Daltonian or “chemical” atom but also the electrons[477] and the quanta
of thermodynamics—make more and more demands upon that truly Faustian
power of _inner vision_ which many branches of higher mathematics (such
as the Non-Euclidean geometries and the Theory of Groups) postulate, and
which is not at the disposal of laymen. A quantum of action is an
extension-element conceived without regard to sensible quality of any
kind, which eludes all relation with sight and touch, for which the
expression “shape” has no meaning whatever—something therefore which
would be utterly inconceivable to a Classical researcher. Such, already,
were Leibniz’s “Monads”[478] and such, superlatively, are the
constituents of Rutherford’s picture of the atom as positively-charged
nucleus with planetary negative electrons, and of the picture that Niels
Bohr has imagined by working these in with the “quanta” of Planck.[479]
The atoms of Leucippus and Democritus were different in form and
magnitude, that is to say, they were purely plastic units,
“indivisible,” as their name asserts, but only plastically indivisible.
The atoms of Western physics, for which “indivisibility” has quite
another meaning, resemble the figures and themes of music; their being
or essence consisting in vibration and radiation, and their relation to
the processes of Nature being that of the “motive” to the
“movement.”[480] Classical physics examines the aspect, Western the
working, of these ultimate elements in the picture of the Become; in the
one, the basic notions are notions of stuff and form, in the other they
are notions of capacity and intensity.
_There is a Stoicism and there is a Socialism of the atom_, the words
describing the static-plastic and the dynamic-contrapuntal ideas of it
respectively. The relations of these ideas to the images of the
corresponding ethics is such that every law and every definition takes
these into account. On the one hand—Democritus’s multitude of confused
atoms, put there, patient, knocked about by the blind chance that he as
well as Sophocles called ἀνάγκη, hunted like Œdipus. On the other hand—
systems of abstract force-points working in unison, aggressive,
energetically dominating space (as “field”), overcoming resistances like
Macbeth. The opposition of basic feelings makes that of the mechanical
Nature-pictures. According to Leucippus the atoms fly about in the void
“of themselves”; Democritus merely regards shock and countershock as a
form of change of place. Aristotle explains individual movements as
accidental, Empedocles speaks of love and hate, Anaxagoras of meetings
and partings. All these are elements also of Classical tragedy; the
figures on the Attic stage are related to one another just so. Further,
and logically, they are the elements of Classical politics. There we
have minute cities, political atoms ranged along coasts and on islands,
each jealously standing for itself, yet ever needing support, shut-in
and shy to the point of absurdity, buffeted hither and thither by the
planless orderless happenings of Classical history, rising to-day and
ruined to-morrow. And in contrast—the dynastic states of our 17th and
18th Centuries, political fields of force, with cabinets and great
diplomats as effective centres of purposeful direction and comprehensive
vision. The spirit of Classical history and the spirit of Western
history can only be really understood by considering the two souls as an
opposition. And we can say the same of the atom-idea, regarded as the
basis of the respective physics. Galileo who created the concept of
force and the Milesians who created that of ἀρχή, Democritus and
Leibniz, Archimedes and Helmholtz, are “contemporaries,” members of the
same intellectual phases of quite different Cultures.
But the inner relationship between atom-theory and ethic goes further.
It has been shown how the Faustian soul—whose being consists in the
overcoming of presence, whose feeling is loneliness and whose yearning
is infinity—puts its need of solitude, distance and abstraction into all
its actualities, into its public life, its spiritual and its artistic
form-worlds alike. This pathos of distance (to use Nietzsche’s
expression) is peculiarly alien to the Classical, in which everything
human demanded nearness, support and community. It is this that
distinguishes the spirit of the Baroque from that of the Ionic, the
culture of the Ancien Régime from that of Periclean Athens. And this
pathos, which distinguishes the heroic doer from the heroic sufferer,
appears also in the picture of Western physics as _tension_. It is
tension that is missing in the science of Democritus; for in the
principle of shock and countershock it is denied by implication that
there is a force commanding space and identical with space. And,
correspondingly, the element of Will is absent from the Classical soul-
image. Between Classical men, or states, or views of the world, there
was—for all the quarrelling and envy and hatred—no inner tension, no
deep and urging need of distance, solitude, ascendancy; and consequently
there was none between the atoms of the Cosmos either. The principle of
tension (developed in the potential theory), which is wholly
untranslatable into Classical tongues and incommunicable to Classical
minds, has become for Western physics fundamental. Its content follows
from the notion of energy, _the Will-to-Power in Nature_, and therefore
it is for us just as necessary as for the Classical thought it is
impossible.
IV
_Every atomic theory, therefore, is a myth and not an experience._ In it
the Culture, through the contemplative-creative power of its great
physicists, reveals its inmost essence and very self. It is only a
preconceived idea of criticism that extension exists in itself and
independently of the form-feeling and world-feeling of the knower. The
thinker, in imagining that he can cut out the factor of Life, forgets
that knowing is related to the known as direction is to extension and
that it is only through the living quality of direction that what is
felt extends into distance and depth and becomes space. The cognized
structure of the extended is a projection of the cognizing being.
We have already[481] shown the decisive importance of the _depth-
experience_, which is identical with the awakening of a soul and
therefore with the creation of the outer world belonging to that soul.
The mere sense-impression contains only length and breadth, and it is
the living and necessary act of interpretation—which, like everything
else living, possesses direction, motion and irreversibility (the
qualities that our consciousness synthesizes in the word Time)—that
_adds_ depth and thereby fashions actuality and world. Life itself
enters into the experiences as third dimension. The double meaning of
the word “far,” which refers both to future and to horizon, betrays the
deeper meaning of this dimension, through which extension as such is
evoked. The Becoming stiffens and passes and is at once the Become; Life
stiffens and passes and is at once the three-dimensional Space of the
known. It is common ground for Descartes and Parmenides that thinking
and being, i.e., imagined and extended, are identical. “Cogito, ergo
sum” is simply the formulation of the depth-experience—I cognize, and
therefore I am in space. But in the style of this cognizing, and
therefore of the cognition-product, the prime-symbol of the particular
Culture comes into play. The perfected extension of the Classical
consciousness is one of sensuous and bodily presence. The Western
consciousness achieves extension, after its own fashion, as
transcendental space, and as it thinks its space more and more
transcendentally it develops by degrees the abstract polarity of
Capacity and Intensity that so completely contrasts with the Classical
visual polarity of Matter and Form.
But it follows from this that in the known there can be no reappearance
of living time. For this has already passed into the known, into
constant “existence,” as Depth, and hence duration (i.e., timelessness)
and extension are identical. Only the knowing possesses the mark of
direction. The application of the word “time” to the imaginary and
measurable time-dimension of physics is a mistake. The only question is
whether it is possible or not to avoid the mistake. If one substitutes
the word “Destiny” for “time” in any physical enunciation, one feels at
once that pure Nature does not contain Time. The form-world of physics
extends just as far as the cognate form-world of number and notion
extend, and we have seen that (notwithstanding Kant) there is not and
cannot be the slightest relation of any sort between mathematical number
and Time. And yet this is controverted _by the fact of motion_ in the
picture of the world-around. It is the unsolved and unsolvable problem
of the Eleatics—being (or thinking) and motion are incompatible; motion
“is” not (is only “apparent”).
And here, for the second time, Natural science becomes dogmatic and
mythological. The words Time and Destiny, for anyone who uses them
instinctively, touch Life itself in its deepest depths—life as a whole,
which is not to be separated from lived-experience. Physics, on the
other hand—i.e., the observing Reason—_must_ separate them. The
livingly-experienced “in-itself,” mentally emancipated from the act of
the observer and become object, dead, inorganic, rigid, is now “Nature,”
something open to exhaustive mathematical treatment. In this sense the
knowledge of Nature is an activity of _measurement_. All the same, we
live even when we are observing and therefore the thing we are observing
_lives with us_. The element in the Nature-picture in virtue of which it
not merely from moment to moment _is_, but in a continuous flow with and
around us _becomes_, is the copula of the waking-consciousness and its
world. This element is _called_ movement, and it contradicts Nature as a
picture, but it represents the _history_ of this picture. And therefore,
as precisely as Understanding is abstracted (by means of words) from
feeling and mathematical space from light-resistances (“things”[482]),
so also physical “time” is abstracted from the impression of motion.
Physics investigates Nature, and consequently it knows time only as a
length. But the physicist _lives_ in the midst of the _history_ of this
Nature, and therefore he is forced to conceive motion as a
mathematically determinable magnitude, as a concretion of the pure
numbers obtained in the experiment and written down in formulæ.
“Physics,” says Kirchhoff, “is the complete and simple description of
motions.” That indeed has always been its object. But the question is
one not of motions _in_ the picture but of motions _of_ the picture.
Motion, in the Nature of physics, is nothing else but that
_metaphysical_ something which gives rise to the consciousness of a
succession. The known is timeless and alien to motion; its state of
becomeness implies this. It is the _organic sequence_ of knowns that
gives the impression of a motion. The physicist receives the word as an
impression not upon “reason” but upon the whole man, and the function of
that man is not “Nature” only but the whole world. And that is the
world-as-history. “Nature,” then, is an expression of the Culture in
each instance.[483] All physics is treatment of the motion-problem—in
which the life-problem itself is implicit—not as though it could one day
be solved, _but in spite of, nay because of, the fact that it is
insoluble_. The secret of motion awakens in man the apprehension of
death.[484]
If, then, Nature-knowledge is a subtle kind of self-knowledge—Nature
understood as picture, as mirror of man—the attempt to solve the motion-
problem is an attempt of knowledge to get on the track of its own
secret, its own Destiny.
V
Only physiognomic tact can, if creative, succeed in this, and in fact it
has done so from time immemorial in the arts, particularly tragic
poetry. It is the thinking man who is perplexed by movement; for the
contemplative it is self-evident. And however completely the former can
reduce his perplexities to system, the result is systematic and not
physiognomic, pure extension logically and numerically ordered, nothing
living but something become and dead.
It is this that led Goethe, who was a poet and not a computer, to
observe that “Nature has no system. It has Life, it is Life and
succession from an unknown centre to an unknowable bourne.” For one who
does not live it but knows it, Nature has a system. But it is only a
system and nothing more, and motion is a contradiction in it. The
contradiction may be covered up by adroit formulation, _but it lives on
in the fundamental concepts_. The shock and countershock of Democritus,
the entelechy of Aristotle, the notions of force from the “impetus” of
14th-Century Occamists to the quantum-theory of radiation, all contain
it. Let the reader conceive of the motion _within_ a physical system as
the _ageing_ of that system (as in fact it is, as lived-experience of
the observer), and he will feel at once and distinctly the fatefulness
immanent in, the unconquerably organic content of, the word “motion” and
all its derivative ideas. But Mechanics, having nothing to do with
ageing, should have nothing to do with motion either, and consequently,
since no scientific system is conceivable without a motion-problem in
it, a complete and self-contained mechanics is an impossibility.
Somewhere or other there is always an organic starting-point in the
system where immediate Life enters it—an umbilical cord that connects
the mind-child with the life-mother, the thought with the thinker.
This puts the fundamentals of Faustian and Apollinian Nature-science in
quite another light. No “Nature” is pure—there is always something of
history in it. If the man is ahistorical, like the Greek, so that the
totality of his impressions of the world is absorbed in a pure point-
formed present, his Nature-image is static, self-contained (that is,
walled against past and future) in every individual moment. Time as
magnitude figures in Greek physics as little as it does in Aristotle’s
entelechy-idea. If, on the other hand, the Man is historically
constituted, the image formed is dynamic. Number, the definitive
evaluation of the become, is in the case of ahistoric man Measure, and
in that of the historical man Function. One measures only what is
present and one follows up only what has a past and a future, a course.
And the effect of this difference is that the inner inconsistencies of
the motion-problem are covered up in Classical theories and forced into
the foreground in Western.
History is eternal becoming and therefore eternal future; Nature is
become and therefore eternally past.[485] And here a strange inversion
seems to have taken place—the Becoming has lost its priority over the
Become. When the intellect looks back from _its_ sphere, the Become, the
aspect of life is reversed, the idea of Destiny which carries aim and
future in it having turned into the mechanical principle of cause-and-
effect of which the centre of gravity lies in the past. The spatially-
experienced is promoted to rank above the temporal living, and time is
replaced by a length in a spatial world-system. And, since in the
creative experience extension follows from direction, the spatial from
life, the human understanding imports life _as a process_ into the
inorganic space of its imagination. While life looks on space as
something functionally belonging to itself, intellect looks upon life as
something _in_ space. Destiny asks: “Whither?”, Causality asks:
“Whence?” To establish scientifically means, starting from the become
and actualized, to search for “causes” by going back along a
mechanically-conceived course, that is to say, by treating becoming as a
length. But it is not possible to live backwards, only to think
backwards. Not Time and Destiny are reversible, but only that which the
physicist calls “time” and admits into his formulæ as divisible, and
preferably as negative or imaginary quantities.
The perplexity is always there, though it has rarely been seen to be
originally and necessarily inherent. In the Classical science the
Eleatics, declining to admit the necessity of thinking of Nature as in
motion, set up against it the logical view that thinking is a being,
with the corollary that known and extended are identical and knowledge
and becoming therefore irreconcilable. Their criticisms have not been,
and cannot be, refuted. But they did not hinder the evolution of
Classical physics, which was a necessary expression of the Apollinian
soul and as such superior to logical difficulties. In the “classical”
mechanics so-called of the Baroque, founded by Galileo and Newton, an
irreproachable solution of the motion-problem on dynamic lines has been
sought again and again. The history of the concept of force, which has
been stated and restated with all the tireless passion of a thought that
feels its own self endangered by a difficulty, is nothing but the
history of endeavours to find a form that is unimpeachable,
mathematically and conceptually, for motion. The last serious attempt—
which failed like the rest, and of necessity—was Hertz’s.
Without discovering the true source of all perplexities (no physicist as
yet has done that), Hertz tried to eliminate the notion of force
entirely—rightly feeling that error in all mechanical systems has to be
looked for in one or another of the basic concepts—and to build up the
whole picture of physics on the quantities of time, space and mass. But
he did not observe that it is Time itself (which as direction-factor is
present in the force-concept) that is the organic element without which
a dynamic theory cannot be expressed and with which a clean solution
cannot be got. Moreover, quite apart from this, the concepts force, mass
and motion constitute a dogmatic unit. They so condition one another
that the application of one of them tacitly involves both the others
from the outset. The whole Apollinian conception of the motion-problem
is implicit in the root-word ἀρχή, the whole Western conception of it in
the force-idea. The notion of mass is only the complement of that of
force. Newton, a deeply religious nature, was only bringing the Faustian
world-feeling to expression when, to elucidate the words “force” and
“motion,” he said that masses are points of attack for force and
carriers for motion. So the 13th-Century Mystics had conceived of God
and his relation to world. Newton no doubt rejected the metaphysical
element in his famous saying “hypotheses non fingo,” but all the same he
was metaphysical through and through in the founding of his mechanics.
_Force is the mechanical Nature-picture of western man; what Will is to
his soul-picture and infinite Godhead in his world-picture._ The primary
ideas of this physics stood firm long before the first physicist was
born, for they lay in the earliest religious world-consciousness of our
Culture.
VI
With this it becomes manifest that the physical notion of Necessity,
too, has a religious origin. It must not be forgotten that the
mechanical necessity that rules in what our intellects comprehend as
Nature is founded upon another necessity which is organic and fateful in
Life itself. The latter creates, the former restricts. One follows from
inward certitude, the other from demonstration; that is the distinction
between tragic and technical, historical and physical logic.
There are, further, differences within the necessity postulated and
assumed by science (that of cause-and-effect) which have so far eluded
the keenest sight. We are confronted here with a question at once of
very great difficulty and of superlative importance. A Nature-knowledge
is (however philosophy may express the relation) a function of knowing,
which is in each case knowing in a particular style. A scientific
necessity therefore has the style of _the appropriate intellect_, and
this brings morphological differences into the field at once. It is
possible to see a strict necessity in Nature even where it may be
impossible to express it in natural laws. In fact natural laws, which
for us are self-evidently the proper expression-form in science, are not
by any means so for the men of other Cultures. They presuppose a quite
special form, the distinctively Faustian form, of understanding and
therefore of Nature-knowing. There is nothing inherently absurd in the
conception of a mechanical necessity wherein each individual case is
morphologically self-contained and never exactly reproduced, in which
therefore the acquisitions of knowledge cannot be put into consistently-
valid formulæ. In such a case Nature would appear (to put it
metaphorically) as an unending decimal that was also non-recurring,
destitute of periodicity. And so, undoubtedly, it was conceived by
Classical minds—the feeling of it manifestly underlies their primary
physical concepts. For example, the proper motion of Democritus’s atoms
is such as to exclude any possibility of calculating motions in advance.
Nature-laws are forms of the known in which an aggregate of individual
cases are brought together as a unit of higher degree. Living Time is
ignored—that is, it does not matter whether, when or how often the case
arises, for the question is not of chronological sequence but of
mathematical consequence.[486] But in the consciousness that no power in
the world can shake this calculation lies our will to command over
Nature. That is Faustian. It is only from this standpoint that miracles
appear as breaches of the laws of Nature. Magian man saw in them merely
the exercise of a power that was not common to all, not in any way a
contradiction of the laws of Nature. And Classical man, according to
Protagoras, was only the measure and not the creator of things—a view
that unconsciously forgoes all conquest of Nature through the discovery
and application of laws.
We see, then, that the causality-principle, in the form in which it is
self-evidently necessary for us—the agreed basis of truth for our
mathematics, physics and philosophy—is a Western and, more strictly
speaking, a Baroque phenomenon. It cannot be proved, for every proof set
forth in a Western language and every experiment conducted by a Western
mind presupposes itself. In every problem, the enunciation contains the
proof in germ. The method of a science is the science itself. Beyond
question, the notion of laws of Nature and the conception of physics as
“scientia experimentalis,”[487] which has held ever since Roger Bacon,
contains _a priori_ this specific kind of necessity. The Classical mode
of regarding Nature—the alter ego of the Classical mode of being—on the
contrary, does _not_ contain it, and yet it does not appear that the
scientific position is weakened in logic thereby. If we work carefully
through the utterances of Democritus, Anaxagoras, and Aristotle (in whom
is contained the whole sum of Classical Nature-speculation), and, above
all, if we examine the connotations of key-terms like ἀλλοίωσις, ἀνάγκη,
ἐντελέχεια, we look with astonishment into a world-image totally unlike
our own. This world-image is self-sufficing and therefore, for this
definite sort of mankind, unconditionally true. And causality in our
sense plays no part therein.
The alchemist or philosopher of the Arabian Culture, too, assumes a
necessity within his world-cavern that is utterly and completely
different from the necessity of dynamics. There is no causal nexus of
law-form but only _one_ cause, God, immediately underlying _every_
effect. To believe in Nature-laws would, from this standpoint, be to
doubt the almightiness of God. If a rule seems to emerge, it is because
it pleases God so; but to suppose that this rule was a necessity would
be to yield to a temptation of the Devil. This was the attitude also of
Carneades, Plotinus and the Neo-Pythagoreans.[488] _This_ necessity
underlies the Gospels as it does the Talmud and the Avesta, and upon it
rests the technique of alchemy.
The conception of number as function is related to the dynamic principle
of cause-and-effect. Both are creations of the same intellect,
expression-forms of the same spirituality, formative principles of the
same objectivized and “become” Nature. In fact the physics of Democritus
differs from the physics of Newton in that the chosen starting-point of
the one is the optically-given while that of the other is abstract
relations that have been deduced from it. The “facts” of Apollinian
Nature-knowledge are things, and they lie on the surface of the known,
but the facts of Faustian science are relations, which in general are
invisible to lay eyes, which have to be mastered intellectually, which
require for their communication a code-language that only the expert
researcher can fully understand. The Classical, static, necessity is
immediately evident in the changing phenomena, while the dynamic
causation-principle prevails beyond things and its tendency is to
weaken, or to abolish even, their sensible actuality. Consider, for
example, the world of significance that is connected, under present-day
hypotheses, with the expression “a magnet.”
The principle of the Conservation of Energy, which since its
enunciation by J. R. Mayer has been regarded in all seriousness as a
plain conceptual necessity, is in fact a redescription of the
_dynamic_ principle of causality by means of the physical concept of
force. The appeal to “experience,” and the controversy as to whether
judgment is necessary or empirical—i.e., in the language of Kant (who
greatly deceived himself about the highly-fluid boundaries between the
two), whether it is _a priori_ or _a posteriori_ certain—are
characteristically Western. Nothing seems to us more self-evident and
unambiguous than “experience” as the source of exact science. The
Faustian experiment, based on working hypotheses and employing the
methods of measurement, is nothing but the systematic and exhaustive
exploitation of this “experience.” But no one has noticed that a whole
world-view is implicit in such a concept of “experience” with its
aggressive dynamic connotation, and that there is not and cannot be
“experience” in this pregnant sense for men of other Cultures. When we
decline to recognize the scientific results of Anaxagoras or
Democritus as experiential results, it does not mean that these
Classical thinkers were incapable of interpreting and merely threw off
fancies, but that we miss in their generalizations that causal element
which for us _constitutes_ experience in our sense of the word.
Manifestly, we have never yet given adequate thought to the
_singularity_ of this, the pure Faustian, conception of experience.
The contrast between it and faith is obvious—and entirely superficial.
For indeed exact sensuous-intellectual experience is in point of
structure completely congruent with that heart-experience (as we may
well call it), that illumination which deep religious natures of the
West (Pascal, for instance, whom one and the same necessity made
mathematician and Jansenist) have known in the significant moments of
their being. Experience means to us an _activity_ of the intellect,
which does not resignedly confine itself to receiving, acknowledging
and arranging momentary and purely present impressions, but seeks them
out and calls them up in order to overcome them in their sensuous
presence and to bring them into an unbounded unity in which their
sensuous discreteness is dissolved. Experience in our sense possesses
the tendency _from particular to infinite_. And for that very reason
it is in contradiction with the feeling of Classical science. What for
us is the way to acquire experience is for the Greek the way to lose
it. And therefore he kept away from the drastic method of experiment;
therefore his physics, instead of being a mighty system of worked-out
laws and formulæ that strong-handedly override the sense-present
(“only knowledge is power”), is an aggregate of impressions—well
ordered, intensified by sensuous imagery, clean-edged—which leaves
Nature intact in its self-completeness. Our exact Natural science is
imperative, the Classical is θεωρία in the literal sense, the result
of passive contemplativeness.
VII
We can now say without any hesitation that the form-world of a Natural
science corresponds to those of the appropriate mathematic, the
appropriate religion, the appropriate art. A deep mathematician—by which
is meant not a master-computer but a man, any man, who feels the spirit
of numbers living within him—realizes that through it he “knows God.”
Pythagoras and Plato knew this as well as Pascal and Leibniz did so.
Terentius Varro, in his examination of the old Roman religion (dedicated
to Julius Cæsar), distinguished with Roman seriousness between the
_theologia civilis_, the sum of officially-recognized belief, the
_theologia mythica_, the imagination-world of poets and artists, and the
_theologia physica_ of philosophical speculation. Applying this to the
Faustian Culture, that which Thomas Aquinas and Luther, Calvin and
Loyola taught belongs to the first category, Dante and Goethe belong to
the second; and to the third belongs scientific physics, inasmuch as
behind its formulæ there are images.
Not only primitive man and the child, but also the higher animals
spontaneously evolve from the small everyday experiences an image of
Nature which contains the sum of technical indications observed as
recurrent. The eagle “knows” the moment at which to swoop down on the
prey; the singing-bird sitting on the eggs “knows” the approach of the
marten; the deer “finds” the place where there is food. In man, this
experience of all the senses has narrowed and deepened itself into
experience of the eye. But, as the habit of verbal speech has now been
superadded, understanding comes to be abstracted from seeing, and
thenceforward develops independently as reasoning; to the instantly-
comprehending _technique_ is added the reflective _theory_. Technique
applies itself to visible near things and plain needs, theory to the
distance and the terrors of the invisible. By the side of the petty
knowledge of everyday life it sets up belief. And still they evolve,
there is a new knowledge and a new and higher technique, and to the myth
there is added the cult. The one teaches how to know the “numina,” the
other how to conquer them. For theory in the eminent sense is religious
through and through. It is only in quite late states that scientific
theory evolves out of religious, _through men having become aware of
methods_. Apart from this there is little alteration. The image-world of
physics remains mythic, its procedure remains a cult of conjuring the
powers in things, and the images that it forms and the methods that it
uses remain generically dependent upon those of the appropriate
religion.[489]
From the later days of the Renaissance onward, the notion of God has
steadily approximated, in the spirit of every man of high significance,
to the idea of pure endless Space. The God of Ignatius Loyola’s
_exercitia spiritualis_ is the God also of Luther’s “ein’ feste Burg,”
of the Improperia of Palestrina and the Cantatas of Bach. He is no
longer the Father of St. Francis of Assisi and the high-vaulted
cathedrals, the personally-present, caring and mild God felt by Gothic
painters like Giotto and Stephen Lochner, but an impersonal principle;
unimaginable, intangible, working mysteriously in the Infinite. Every
relic of personality dissolves into insensible abstraction, such a
divinity as only instrumental music of the grand style is capable of
representing, a divinity before which painting breaks down and drops
into the background. This God-feeling it was that formed the scientific
world-image of the West, its “Nature,” its “experience” and therefore
its theories and its methods, in direct contradiction to those of the
Classical. The force which moves the mass—that is what Michelangelo
painted in the Sistine Chapel; that is what we feel growing more and
more intense from the archetype of Il Gesù to the climax in the
cathedral façades of Della Porta and Maderna, and from Heinrich Schütz
to the transcendent tone-worlds of 18th-Century church music; that is
what in Shakespearian tragedy fills with world-becoming scenes widened
to infinity. And that is what Galileo and Newton captured in formulæ and
concepts.
The word “God” rings otherwise under the vaulting of Gothic cathedrals
or in the cloisters of Maulbronn and St. Gallen than in the basilicas of
Syria and the temples of Republican Rome. The character of the Faustian
cathedral is that of the _forest_. The mighty elevation of the nave
above the flanking aisles, in contrast to the flat roof of the basilica;
the transformation of the columns, which with base and capital had been
set as self-contained individuals in space, into pillars and clustered-
pillars that grow up out of the earth and spread on high into an
infinite subdivision and interlacing of lines and branches; the giant
windows by which the wall is dissolved and the interior filled with
mysterious light—these are the architectural actualizing of a world-
feeling that had found the first of all its symbols in the high forest
of the Northern plains, the deciduous forest with its mysterious
tracery, its whispering of ever-mobile foliage over men’s heads, its
branches straining through the trunks to be free of earth. Think of
Romanesque ornamentation and its deep affinity to the sense of the
woods. The endless, lonely, twilight wood became and remained the secret
wistfulness in all Western building-forms, so that when the form-energy
of the style died down—in late Gothic as in closing Baroque—the
controlled abstract line-language resolved itself immediately into
naturalistic branches, shoots, twigs and leaves.
Cypresses and pines, with their corporeal and Euclidean effect, could
never have become symbols of unending space. But the oaks, beeches and
lindens with the fitful light-flecks playing in their shadow-filled
volume are felt as bodiless, boundless, spiritual. The stem of the
cypress finds conclusive fulfilment of its vertical tendency in the
defined columniation of its cone-masses, but that of an oak seems, ever
restless and unsatisfied, to strain beyond its summit. In the ash, the
victory of the upstriving branches over the unity of the crown seems
actually to be won. Its aspect is of something dissolving, something
expanding into space, and it was for this probably that the World-Ash
Yggdrasil became a symbol in the Northern mythology. The rustle of the
woods, a charm that no Classical poet ever felt—for it lies beyond the
possibilities of Apollinian Nature-feeling—stands with its secret
questions “whence? whither?” its merging of presence into eternity, in a
deep relation with Destiny, with the feeling of History and Duration,
with the quality of Direction that impels the anxious, caring, Faustian
soul towards infinitely-distant Future. And for that reason the organ,
that roars deep and high through our churches in tones which, compared
with the plain solid notes of aulos and cithara, seem to know neither
limit nor restraint, is the instrument of instruments in Western
devotions. Cathedral and organ form a symbolic unity like temple and
statue. The history of organ-building, one of the most profound and
moving chapters of our musical history, is a history of a longing for
the forest, a longing to speak in the language of that true temple of
Western God-fearing. From the verse of Wolfram von Eschenbach to the
music of “Tristan” this longing has borne fruit unceasingly. Orchestra-
tone strove tirelessly in the 18th Century towards a nearer kinship with
the organ-tone. The word “schwebend”—meaningless as applied to Classical
things—is important alike in the theory of music, in oil-painting, in
architecture and in the dynamic physics of the Baroque. Stand in a high
wood of mighty stems while the storm is tearing above, and you will
comprehend instantly the full meaning of the concept of a force which
moves mass.
Out of such a primary feeling in the existence that has become
thoughtful there arises, then, an idea of the Divine immanent in the
world-around, and this idea becomes steadily more definite. The
thoughtful percipient takes in the impression of motion in outer Nature.
He feels about him an almost indescribable _alien life_ of unknown
powers, and traces the origin of these effects to “numina,” to The
Other, inasmuch as this Other also possesses Life. Astonishment at
_alien motion_ is the source of religion and of physics both;
respectively, they are the elucidations of Nature (world-around) by the
soul and by the reason. The “powers” are the first object both of
fearful or loving reverence and of critical investigation. There is a
religious experience _and_ a scientific experience.
Now it is important to observe how the consciousness of the Culture
intellectually concretes its primary “numina.” It imposes significant
words—_names_—on them and there conjures (seizes or bounds) them. By
virtue of the Name they are subject to the intellectual power of the man
who possesses the Name, and (as has been shown already) the whole of
philosophy, the whole of science, and everything that is related in any
way to “knowing” is at the very bottom nothing but an infinitely-refined
mode of _applying the name-magic of the primitive to the “alien.”_ The
pronouncement of the right name (in physics, the right concept) is an
incantation. Deities and basic notions of science alike come into being
first as vocable names, with which is linked an idea that tends to
become more and more sensuously definite. The outcome of a _Numen_ is a
_Deus_, the outcome of a notion is an idea. In the mere naming of
“thing-in-itself,” “atom,” “energy,” “gravitation,” “cause,” “evolution”
and the like is for most learned men the same sense of deliverance as
there was for the peasant of Latium in the words “Ceres,” “Consus,”
“Janus,” “Vesta.”[490]
For the Classical world-feeling, conformably to the Apollinian depth-
experience and its symbolism, the individual body was “Being.” Logically
therefore the form of this body, as it presented itself in the light,
was felt as its essence, as the true purport of the word “being.” What
has not shape, what is not a shape, is not at all. On the basis of this
feeling (which was of an intensity that we can hardly imagine) the
Classical spirit created as counter-concept[491] to the form of “The
Other” _Non-Form_ viz., stuff, ἀρχή, ὕλη, that which in itself possesses
no being and is merely complement to the actual “Ent,” representing a
secondary and corollary necessity. In these conditions, it is easy to
see how the Classical pantheon inevitably shaped itself, as a higher
mankind side by side with the common mankind, as a set of perfectly-
formed bodies, of high possibilities incarnate and present, but in the
unessential of stuff not distinguished and therefore subject to the same
cosmic and tragic necessity.
It is otherwise that the Faustian world-feeling experiences depth. Here
the sum of true Being appears as pure efficient Space, which _is_ being.
And therefore what is sensuously felt, what is very significantly
designated the plenum (das Raumerfüllende), is felt as a fact of the
second order, as something questionable or specious, as a resistance
that must be overcome by philosopher or physicist before the true
content of Being can be discovered. Western scepticism has never been
directed against Space, always against tangible things only. Space is
the _higher_ idea—force is only a less abstract expression for it—and it
is only as a counter-concept to space that mass arises. For mass is what
is _in_ space and is logically and physically dependent upon space. From
the assumption of a wave-motion of light, which underlies the conception
of light as a form of energy, the assumption of a corresponding mass,
the “luminiferous æther” necessarily followed. A definition of mass and
ascription of properties to mass follows from the definition of force
(and not vice versa) with all the necessity of a symbol. All Classical
notions of substantiality, however they differed amongst themselves as
realist or idealist, distinguish a “to-be-formed,” that is, a Nonent,
which only receives closer definition from the basic concept of form,
whatever this form may be in the particular philosophical system. All
Western notions of substantiality distinguish a “to-be-moved,” which
also is a negative, no doubt, but one polar to a different positive.
_Form and non-form, force and non-force_—these words render as clearly
as may be the polarities that in the two Cultures underlie the world-
impression and contain all its modes. That which comparative philosophy
has hitherto rendered inaccurately and misleadingly by the one word
“matter” signifies in the one case the substratum of shape, in the other
the substratum of force. No two notions could differ more completely.
For here it is the feeling of God, a _sense of values_, that is
speaking. The Classical deity is superlative shape, the Faustian
superlative force. The “Other” is the Ungodly to which the spirit will
not accord the dignity of Being; to the Apollinian world-feeling this
ungodly “other” is substance without shape, to the Faustian it is
substance without force.
VIII
Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of
primitive man, and that as spiritual culture “advances,” this myth-
forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, and had not
the morphology of history remained to this day an almost unexplored
field, the supposedly universal mythopoetic power would long ago have
been found to be limited to particular periods. It would have been
realized that this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes,
traits and symbols—like and consistent amongst themselves—belongs most
decidedly not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the
springtimes of _great_ Cultures.[492] Every myth of the great style
stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first
formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found.
There—it _must_ be.
I make the assumption that that which a primitive folk—like the
Egyptians of Thinite times, the Jews and Persians before Cyrus,[493] the
heroes of the Mycenæan burghs and the Germans of the Migrations—
possesses in the way of religious ideas is not yet myth in the higher
sense. It may well be a sum of scattered and irregular traits, of cults
adhering to names, fragmentary saga-pictures, but it is not yet a divine
order, a mythic organism, and I no more regard this as myth than I
regard the ornament of that stage as art. And, be it said, the greatest
caution is necessary in dealing with the symbols and sagas current to-
day, or even those current centuries ago, amongst ostensibly primitive
peoples, for in those thousands of years every country in the world has
been more or less affected by some high Culture alien to it.
There are, therefore, as many form-worlds of great myth as there are
Cultures and early architectures. The antecedents—that chaos of
undeveloped imagery in which modern folk-lore research, for want of a
guiding principle, loses itself—do not, on this hypothesis, concern us;
but we _are_ concerned, on the other hand, with certain cultural
manifestations that have never yet been thought of as belonging to this
category. It was in the Homeric age (1100-800 B.C.) and in the
corresponding knightly age of Teutonism (900-1200 A.D.), that is, the
_epic_ ages, and neither before nor after them, that the great world-
image of a new religion came into being. The corresponding ages in India
and Egypt are the Vedic and the Pyramid periods; one day it will be
discovered that Egyptian mythology did in fact ripen into _depth_ during
the Third and Fourth Dynasties.
Only in this way can we understand the immense wealth of religious-
intuitive creations that fills the three centuries of the Imperial Age
in Germany. What came into existence then was _the Faustian mythology_.
Hitherto, owing to religious and learned preconceptions, either the
Catholic element has been treated to the exclusion of the Northern-
Heathen or vice versa, and consequently we have been blind to the
breadth and the unity of this form-world. In reality there is no such
difference. The deep change of meaning in the Christian circle of ideas
is identical, as a creative act, with the consolidation of the old
heathen cults of the Migrations. It was in this age that the folk-lore
of Western Europe became an entirety; if the bulk of its material was
far older, and if, far later again, it came to be linked with new outer
experiences and enriched by more conscious treatment, yet it was then
and neither earlier nor later that it was vitalized with its symbolic
meaning. To this lore belong the great God-legends of the Edda and many
motives in the gospel-poetry of learned monks; the German hero-tales of
Siegfried and Gudrun, Dietrich and Wayland; the vast wealth of chivalry-
tales, derived from ancient Celtic fables, that was simultaneously
coming to harvest on French soil, concerning King Arthur and the Round
Table, the Holy Grail, Tristan, Percival and Roland. And with these are
to be counted—beside the spiritual transvaluation, unremarked but all
the deeper for that, of the Passion-Story—the Catholic hagiology of
which the richest floraison was in the 10th and 11th Centuries and which
produced the Lives of the Virgin and the histories of SS. Roch, Sebald,
Severin, Francis, Bernard, Odilia. The _Legenda Aurea_ was composed
about 1250—this was the blossoming-time of courtly epic and Icelandic
skald-poetry alike. The great Valhalla Gods of the North and the mythic
group of the “Fourteen Helpers” in South Germany are contemporary, and
by the side of Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, in the Völuspa we
have a Christian form in the South German Muspilli. This great myth
develops, like heroic poetry, at the _climax_ of the early Culture. They
both belong to the two primary estates, priesthood and nobility; they
are at home in the cathedral and the castle and not in the village
below, where amongst the people the simple saga-world lives on for
centuries, called “fairy-tale,” “popular beliefs” or “superstition” and
yet inseparable from the world of high centemplation.[494]
Nowhere is the final meaning of these religious creations more clearly
indicated than in the history of Valhalla. It was not an original German
idea, and even the tribes of the Migrations were totally without it. It
took shape just at _this_ time, instantly and as an inward necessity, in
the consciousness of the peoples newly-arisen on the soil of the West.
Thus it is “contemporary” with Olympus, which we know from the Homeric
epos and which is as little Mycenæan as Valhalla is German in origin.
Moreover, it is only for the two higher estates that Valhalla emerges
from the notion of Hel; in the beliefs of the people Hel remained the
realm of the dead.[495]
The deep inward unity of this Faustian world of myth and saga and the
complete congruence of its expression-symbolism has never hitherto been
realized, and yet Siegfried, Baldur, Roland, Christ the King in the
“Heliand,” are different names for one and the same figure. Valhalla and
Avalon, the Round Table and the communion of the Grail-templars, Mary,
Frigga and Frau Holle mean the same. On the other hand, the external
provenance of the material motives and elements, on which mythological
research has wasted an excessive zeal, is a matter of which the
importance does not go deeper than the surface. As to the meaning of a
myth, its provenance proves _nothing_. The “numen” itself, the primary
form of the world-feeling, is a pure, necessary and unconscious
creation, and it is not transferable. What one people takes over from
another—in “conversion” or in admiring imitation—is a name, dress and
mask for its own feeling, never the feeling of that other. The old
Celtic and old Germanic myth-motives have to be treated, like the
repertory of Classical forms possessed by the learned monk, and like the
entire body of Christian-Eastern faith taken over by the Western Church,
simply as the material out of which the Faustian soul in these centuries
created a mythic architecture of its own. It mattered little whether the
persons through whose minds and mouths the myth came to life were
individual skalds, missionaries, priests or “the people,” nor did the
circumstance that the Christian ideas dictated its forms affect the
inward independence of that which had come to life.
In the Classical, Arabian and Western Cultures, the myth of the
springtime is in each case that which we should expect; in the first
static, in the second Magian, in the third dynamic. Examine every detail
of form, and see how in the Classical it is an attitude and in the West
a deed, there a being and here a will that underlies them; how in the
Classical the bodily and tangible, the sensuously-saturated, prevails
and how therefore in the mode of worshipping the centre of gravity lies
in the sense-impressive _cult_, whereas in the North it is space, force
and therefore a religiousness that is predominantly dogmatic in
colouring that rule. These very earliest creations of the young soul
tell us that there is relationship between the Olympian figures, the
statue and the corporeal Doric temple; between the domical basilica, the
“Spirit” of God and the arabesque; between Valhalla and the Mary myth,
the soaring nave and instrumental music.
The Arabian soul built up its myth in the centuries between Cæsar and
Constantine—that fantastic mass of cults, visions and legends that to-
day we can hardly even survey,[496] syncretic cults like that of the
Syrian Baal and of Isis and Mithras not only transported to but
transformed in Syrian soil; Gospels, Acts of Apostles and Apocalypses in
astonishing profusion; Christian, Persian, Jewish, Neoplatonist and
Manichæan legends, and the heavenly hierarchy of angels and spirits of
the Fathers and the Gnostics. In the suffering-story of the Gospels,
_the very epic of the Christian nation_, set between the story of
Jesus’s childhood and the Acts of the Apostles, and in the Zoroaster-
legend that is contemporary with it, we are looking upon the hero-
figures of Early Arabian epic as we see Achilles in the Classical and
Siegfried and Percival in the Faustian. The scenes of Gethsemane and
Golgotha stand beside the noblest pictures of Greek and Germanic saga.
These Magian visions, almost without exception, grew up under the
pressure of the dying Classical which, in the nature of things unable to
communicate its spirit, the more insistently lent its forms. It is
almost impossible now to estimate the extent to which given Apollinian
elements had to be accepted and transvalued before the old Christian
myth assumed the firmness that it possessed in the time of Augustine.
IX
The Classical polytheism, consequently, has a style of its own which
puts it in a different category from the conceptions of any other world-
feelings, whatever the superficial affinities may be. This mode of
possessing gods without godhead has only existed once, and it was in the
one Culture that made the statue of naked Man the whole sum of its art.
Nature, as Classical man felt and knew it about him, viz., a sum of
well-formed bodily things, could not be deified in any other form but
this. The Roman felt that the claim of Yahweh to be recognized as sole
God had something atheistic in it. One God, for him, was no God, and to
this may be ascribed the strong dislike of popular feeling, both Greek
and Roman, for the philosophers in so far as they were pantheists and
godless. Gods are bodies, σώματα of the perfectest kind, and plurality
was an attribute of bodies alike for mathematicians, lawyers and poets.
The concept of ζῷον πολιτικόν was valid for gods as well as for men;
nothing was more alien to them than oneness, solitariness and self-
adequacy; and no existence therefore was possible to them save under the
aspect of eternal propinquity. It is a deeply significant fact that in
Hellas of all countries star-gods, the numina of the Far, are wanting.
Helios was worshipped only in half-Oriental Rhodes and Selene had no
cult at all. Both are merely artistic modes of expression (it is as such
only that they figure in the courtly epos of Homer), elements that Varro
would class in the _genus mythicum_ and not in the _genus civile_. The
old Roman religion, in which the Classical world-feeling was expressed
with special purity, knew neither sun nor moon, neither storm nor cloud
as deities. The forest stirrings and the forest solitude, the tempest
and the surf, which completely dominated the Nature of Faustian man
(even that of pre-Faustian Celts and Teutons) and imparted to their
mythology its peculiar character, left Classical man unmoved. Only
concretes—hearth and door, the coppice and the plot-field, this
particular river and that particular hill—condensed into Being for him.
We observe that everything that has farness, everything that contains a
suggestion of unbounded and unbodied in it and might thereby bring space
as Ent and divine into the felt Nature, is excluded and remains excluded
from Classical myth; how should it surprise, then, if clouds and
horizons, that are the very meaning and soul of Baroque landscapes, are
totally wanting in the Classical backgroundless frescoes? The unlimited
multitude of antique gods—every tree, every spring, every house, nay
every part of a house is a god—means that every tangible thing is an
_independent_ existence, and therefore that none is functionally
subordinate to any other.
The bases of the Apollinian and the Faustian Nature-images respectively
are in all contexts the two opposite symbols of _individual thing_ and
_unitary space_. Olympus and Hades are perfectly sense-definite places,
while the kingdom of the dwarfs, elves and goblins, and Valhalla and
Niflheim are all somewhere or other in the universe of space. In the old
Roman religion “Tellus Mater” is not the all-mother but the visible
ploughable field itself. Faunus _is_ the wood and Vulturnus _is_ the
river, the name of the seed _is_ Ceres and that of the harvest _is_
Consus. Horace is a true Roman when he speaks of “sub Jove frigido,”
under the cold sky. In these cases there is not even the attempt to
reproduce the God in any sort of image at the places of worship, for
that would be tantamount to duplicating him. Even in very late times the
instinct not only of the Romans but of the Greeks also is opposed to
idols, as is shown by the fact that plastic art, as it became more and
more profane, came into conflict more and more with popular beliefs and
the devout philosophy.[497] In the house, Janus is the door as god,
Vesta the hearth as goddess, the two functions of the house are
objectivized and deified at once. A Hellenic river-god (like Acheloüs,
who appears as a bull,) is definitely understood as being the river and
not as, so to say, dwelling in the river. The Pans[498] and Satyrs are
the fields and meadows as noon defines them, well bounded and, as having
figure, having also existence. Dryads and Hamadrayads _are_ trees; in
many places, indeed, individual trees of great stature were honoured
with garlands and votive offerings without even the formality of a name.
On the contrary, not a trace of this localized materiality clings to the
elves, dwarfs, witches, Valkyries and their kindred the armies of
departed souls that sweep round o’nights. Whereas Naiads _are_ sources,
nixies and hags, and tree-spirits and brownies are souls that are only
bound to sources, trees and houses, from which they long to be released
into the freedom of roaming. This is the very opposite of the plastic
Nature-feeling, for here things are experienced merely as spaces of
another kind. A nymph—a spring, that is—assumes human form when she
would visit a handsome shepherd, but a nixy is an enchanted princess
with nenuphars in her hair who comes up at midnight from the depths of
the pool wherein she dwells. Kaiser Barbarossa sits in the Kyffhäuser
cavern and Frau Venus in the Hörselberg. It is as though the Faustian
universe abhorred anything material and impenetrable. In things, we
suspect other worlds. Their hardness and thickness is merely appearance,
and—a trait that would be impossible in Classical myth, because fatal to
it—some favoured mortals are accorded the power to see through cliffs
and crags into the depths. But is not just this the secret intent of our
physical theories, of each new hypothesis? No other Culture knows so
many fables of treasures lying in mountains and pools, of secret
subterranean realms, palaces, gardens wherein other beings dwell. The
whole substantiality of the visible world is denied by the Faustian
Nature-feeling, for which in the end nothing is of earth and the only
actual is Space. The fairy-tale dissolves the matter of Nature as the
Gothic style dissolves the stone-mass of our cathedrals, into a ghostly
wealth of forms and lines that have shed all weight and acknowledge no
bounds.
The ever-increasing emphasis with which Classical polytheism somatically
individualized its deities is peculiarly evident in its attitude to
“strange gods.” For Classical man the gods of the Egyptians, the
Phœnicians and the Germans, in so far as they could be imagined as
figures, were as real as his own gods. Within his world-feeling the
statement that such other gods “do not exist” would have no meaning.
When he came into contact with the countries of these deities he did
them reverence. The gods were, like a statue or a polis, Euclidean
bodies having locality. They were beings of the near and not the general
space. If a man were sojourning in Babylon, for instance, and Zeus and
Apollo were far away, all the more reason for _particularly_ honouring
the local gods. This is the meaning of the altars dedicated “to the
unknown gods,” such as that which Paul so significantly misunderstood in
a Magian monotheistic sense at Athens.[499] These were gods not known by
name to the Greek but worshipped by the foreigners of the great seaports
(Piræus, Corinth or other) and therefore entitled to their due of
respect from him. Rome expressed this with Classical clearness in her
religious law and in carefully-preserved formulæ like, for example, the
_generalis invocatio_.[500] As the universe is the sum of things, and as
gods are things, recognition had to be accorded even to those gods with
whom the Roman had not yet practically and historically come into
relations. He did not know them, or he knew them as the gods of his
enemies, but they _were_ gods, for it was impossible for him to conceive
the opposite. This is the meaning of the sacral phrase in Livy, VIII, 9,
6: “di quibus est potestas nostrorum hostiumque.” The Roman people
admits that the circle of its own gods is only momentarily bounded, and
after reciting these by name it ends the prayer thus so as not to
infringe the rights of others. According to its sacral law, the
annexation of foreign territory involves the transfer to Urbs Roma of
all the religious obligations pertaining to this territory and its gods—
which of course logically follows from the _additive_ god-feeling of the
Classical. Recognition of a deity was very far from being the same as
acceptance of the forms of its cult; thus in the Second Punic War the
Great Mother of Pessinus[501] was received in Rome as the Sibyl
commanded, but the priests who had come in with her cult, which was of a
highly un-Classical complexion, practised under strict police
supervision, and not only Roman citizens but even their slaves were
forbidden under penalty to enter this priesthood. The reception of the
goddess gave satisfaction to the Classical world-feeling, but the
personal performance of her despised ritual would have infringed it. The
attitude of the Senate in such cases is unmistakable, though the people,
with its ever-increasing admixture of Eastern elements, had a liking for
these cults and in Imperial times the army became in virtue of its
composition a vehicle (and even the chief vehicle) of the Magian world-
feeling.
This makes it the easier to understand how the cult of deified men could
become a _necessary_ element in this religious form-world. But here it
is necessary to distinguish sharply between Classical phenomena and
Oriental phenomena that have a superficial similarity thereto. Roman
emperor-worship—i.e., the reverence of the “genius” of the living
Princes and that of the dead predecessors as “Divi”—has hitherto been
confused with the ceremonial reverence of the Ruler which was customary
in Asia Minor (and, above all, in Persia,)[502] and also with the later
and quite differently meant Caliph-deification which is seen in full
process of formation in Diocletian and Constantine. Actually, these are
all very unlike things. However intimately these symbolic forms were
interfused in the East of the Empire, in Rome itself the Classical type
was actualized unequivocally and without adulteration. Long before this
certain Greeks (e.g., Sophocles, Lysander and, above all, Alexander) had
been not merely hailed as gods by their flatterers but felt as gods in a
perfectly definite sense by the people. It is only a step, after all,
from the deification of a thing—such as a copse or a well or, in the
limit, a statue which represented a god—to the deification of an
outstanding man who became first hero and then god. In this case as in
the rest, what was reverenced was the perfect shape in which the world-
stuff, the un-divine, had actualized itself. In Rome the consul on the
day of his triumph wore the armour of Jupiter Capitolinus, and in early
days his face and arms were even painted red, in order to enhance his
similarity to the terra-cotta statue of the God whose “numen” he for the
time being incorporated.
X
In the first generations of the Imperial age, the antique polytheism
gradually dissolved, often without any alteration of outward ritual and
mythic form, into the Magian monotheism.[503] A new soul had come up,
and it lived the old forms in a new mode. The names continued, but they
covered other numina.
In all Late-Classical cults, those of Isis and Cybele, of Mithras and
Sol and Serapis, the divinity is no longer felt as a localized and
formable being. In old times, Hermes Propylæus had been worshipped at
the entrance of the Acropolis of Athens, while a few yards away, at the
point where later the Erechtheum was built, was the cult-site of Hermes
as the husband of Aglaure. At the South extremity of the Roman Capitol,
close to the sanctuary of Juppiter Feretrius (which contained, not a
statue of the god, but a holy stone, _silex_[504]) was that of Juppiter
Optimus Maximus, and when Augustus was laying down the huge temple of
the latter he was careful to avoid the ground to which the numen of the
former adhered.[505] But in Early Christian times Juppiter Dolichenus or
Sol Invictus[506] could be worshipped “wheresoever two or three were
gathered together in his name.” All these deities more and more came to
be felt as a single numen, though the adherents of a particular cult
would believe that they in particular knew the numen in its true shape.
Hence it is that Isis could be spoken of as the “million-named.”
Hitherto, names had been the designations of so many gods different in
body and locality, now they are _titles_ of the One whom every man has
in mind.
This Magian monotheism reveals itself in all the religious creations
that flooded the Empire from the East—the Alexandrian Isis, the Sun-god
favoured by Aurelian (the Baal of Palmyra), the Mithras protected by
Diocletian (whose Persian form had been completely recast in Syria), the
Baalath of Carthage (Tanit, Dea Cælestis[507]) honoured by Septimius
Severus. The importation of these figures no longer increases as in
Classical times the number of concrete gods. On the contrary, they
absorb the old gods into themselves, and do so in such a way as to
deprive them more and more of picturable shape. Alchemy is replacing
statics. Correspondingly, instead of the image we more and more find
symbols—e.g., the Bull, the Lamb, the Fish, the Triangle, the Cross—
coming to the front. In Constantine’s “in hoc signo vinces” scarcely an
echo of the Classical remains. Already there is setting in that aversion
to human representation that ended in the Islamic and Byzantine
prohibitions of images.
Right down to Trajan—long after the last trait of Apollinian world-
feeling had departed from the soil of Greece—the Roman state-worship had
strength enough to hold to the Euclidean tendency and to _augment_ its
world of deities. The gods of the subject lands and peoples were
accorded recognized places of worship, with priesthood and ritual, in
Rome, and were themselves associated as perfectly definite individuals
with the older gods. But from that point the Magian spirit began to gain
ground even here, in spite of an honourable resistance which centred in
a few of the very oldest patrician families.[508] The god-figures as
such, as bodies, vanished from the consciousness of men, to make way for
a transcendental god-feeling which no longer depended on sense-
evidences; and the usages, festivals and legends melted into one
another. When in 217 Caracalla put an end to all sacral-legal
distinctions between Roman and foreign deities and Isis, absorbing all
older female numina, became actually the first goddess of Rome[509] (and
thereby the most dangerous opponent of Christianity and the most
obnoxious target for the hatred of the Fathers), then Rome became a
piece of the East, a religious diocese of Syria. Then the Baals of
Doliche, Petra, Palmyra and Edessa began to melt into the monotheism of
Sol, who became and remained (till his representative Licinius fell
before Constantine) God of the Empire. By now, the question was not
between Classical and Magian—Christianity was in so little danger from
the old gods that it could offer them a sort of sympathy—but it was,
which of the Magian religions should dictate religious form to the world
of the Classical Empire? The decline of the old plastic feeling is very
clearly discernible in the stages through which Emperor-worship passed—
first, the dead emperor taken into the circle of State gods by
resolution of the Senate (Divus Julius, 42 B.C.), a priesthood provided
for him and his image removed from amongst the ancestor-images that were
carried in purely domestic celebrations; then, from Marcus Aurelius, no
further consecrations of priests (and, presently, no further building of
temples) for the service of deified emperors, for the reason that
religious sentiment was now satisfied by a general “templum divorum”;
finally, the epithet Divus used simply as a _title_ of members of the
Imperial family. This end to the evolution marks the victory of the
Magian feeling. It will be found that multiple names in the inscriptions
(such as Isis-Magna Mater-Juno-Astarte-Bellona, or Mithras-Sol Invictus-
Helios) come to signify titles of one sole existent Godhead.[510]
XI
Atheism is a subject that the psychologist and the student of religion
have hitherto regarded as scarcely worth careful investigation. Much has
been written and argued about it, and very roundly, by the free-thought
martyr on the one hand and the religious zealot on the other. But no one
has had anything to say about the _species_ of atheism; or has treated
it analytically as an _individual and definite_ phenomenon, positive and
necessary and intensely symbolic; or has realized how it is limited in
time.
Is “Atheism” the _a priori_ constitution of a certain world-
consciousness or is it a voluntary self-expression? Is one born with it
or converted to it? Does the unconscious feeling that the cosmos has
become godless bring in its train the consciousness that it is so, the
realization that "Great Pan is dead"? Are there early atheists, for
example in the Doric or the Gothic ages? Has this thinker or that been
denounced as atheist with injustice as well as with passion? And can
there be civilized men who are _not_ wholly or at any rate partially
atheist?
It is not in dispute (the word itself shows it in all languages) that
atheism is essentially a negation, that it signifies the foregoing of a
spiritual idea and therefore the precedence of such an idea, and that it
is not the creative act of an unimpaired formative power. But what is it
that it denies? In what way? And who is the denier?
Atheism, rightly understood, is the necessary expression of a
spirituality that has accomplished itself and exhausted its religious
possibilities, and is declining into the inorganic. It is entirely
compatible with a living wistful desire for real religiousness[511]—
therein resembling Romanticism, which likewise would recall that which
has irrevocably gone, namely, the Culture—and it may quite well be in a
man as a creation of his feeling without his being aware of it, without
its ever interfering with the habits of his thought or challenging his
convictions. We can understand this if we can see what it was that made
the devout Haydn call Beethoven an atheist after he had heard some of
his music. Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture but with
the dawn of the Civilization. It belongs to the great city, to the
“educated man” of the great city who acquires mechanistically what his
forefathers the creators of the Culture had lived organically. In
respect of the Classical feeling of God, Aristotle is an atheist
unawares. The Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism is atheistic like the Socialism
of Western and the Buddhism of Indian modernity, reverently though they
may and do use the word “God.”
But, if this late form of world-feeling and world-image which preludes
our “second religiousness” is universally a negation of the religious in
us, the structure of it is different in each of the Civilizations. There
is no religiousness that is without an atheistic opposition belonging
uniquely to itself and directed uniquely against itself. Men continue to
experience the outer world that extends around them as a cosmos of well-
ordered bodies or a world-cavern or efficient space, as the case may be,
but they no longer livingly experience the sacred causality in it. They
only learn to know it in a profane causality that is, or is desired to
be, inclusively mechanical.[512] There are atheisms of Classical,
Arabian and Western kinds and these differ from one another in meaning
and in matter. Nietzsche formulated the dynamic atheism on the basis
that “God is dead,” and a Classical philosopher would have expressed the
static and Euclidean by saying that the “gods who dwell in the holy
places are dead,” the one indicating that boundless space has, the other
that countless bodies have, become godless. But _dead_ space and _dead_
things are the “facts” of physics. The atheist is unable to experience
any difference between the Nature-picture of physics and that of
religion. Language, with a fine feeling, distinguishes wisdom and
intelligence—the early and the late, the rural and the megalopolitan
conditions of the soul. Intelligence even sounds atheistic. No one would
describe Heraclitus or Meister Eckart as an intelligence, but Socrates
and Rousseau were intelligent and not “wise” men. There is something
root-less in the word. It is only from the standpoint of the Stoic and
of the Socialist, of the typical irreligious man, that want of
intelligence is a matter for contempt.
The spiritual in every living Culture is religious, has religion,
whether it be conscious of it or not. That it exists, becomes, develops,
fulfils itself, _is_ its religion. It is not open to a spirituality to
be irreligious; at most it can play with the idea of irreligion as
Medicean Florentines did. But the megalopolitan _is_ irreligious; this
is part of his being, a mark of his historical position. Bitterly as he
may feel the inner emptiness and poverty, earnestly as he may long to be
religious, it is out of his power to be so. All religiousness in the
Megalopolis rests upon self-deception. The degree of piety of which a
period is capable is revealed in its attitude towards toleration. One
tolerates, either because the form-language appears to be expressing
something of that which in one’s own lived experience is felt as divine,
or else because that experience no longer contains _anything_ so felt.
What we moderns have called “Toleration” in the Classical world[513] is
an expression of the _contrary_ of atheism. Plurality of numina and
cults is inherent in the conception of Classical religion, and it was
not toleration but the self-evident expression of antique piety that
allowed validity to them all. Conversely, anyone who demanded exceptions
showed himself _ipso facto_ as godless. Christians and Jews counted, and
necessarily counted, as atheists in the eyes of anyone whose world-
picture was an aggregate of individual bodies; and when in Imperial
times they ceased to be regarded in this light, the old Classical god-
feeling had itself come to an end. On the other hand, respect for the
form of the local cult whatever this might be, for images of the gods,
for sacrifices and festivals was always expected, and anyone who mocked
or profaned them very soon learned the limits of Classical toleration—
witness the scandal of the Mutilation of the Hermae at Athens and trials
for the desecration of the Eleusinian mysteries, that is, impious
travestying of the sensuous element. But to the Faustian soul (again we
see opposition of space and body, of conquest and acceptance of
presence) _dogma_ and not visible ritual constitutes the essence. What
is regarded as godless is opposition to doctrine. Here begins the
spatial-spiritual conception of heresy. A Faustian religion by its very
nature cannot allow any freedom of conscience; it would be in
contradiction with its space-invasive dynamic. Even free thinking itself
is no exception to the rule. After the stake, the guillotine; after the
burning of the books, their suppression; after the power of the pulpit,
the power of the Press. Amongst us there is no faith without leanings to
an Inquisition of some sort. Expressed in _appropriate_ electrodynamic
imagery, the field of force of a conviction adjusts all the minds within
it according to its own intensity. Failure to do so means absence of
conviction—in ecclesiastical language, ungodliness. For the Apollinian
soul, on the contrary, it was contempt of the cult—ἀσέβεια in the
literal sense—that was ungodly, and here its religion admitted no
freedom of _attitude_. In both cases there was a line drawn between the
toleration demanded by the god-feeling and that forbidden by it.
Now, here the Late-Classical philosophy of Sophist-Stoic speculation (as
distinct from the general Stoic disposition) was in opposition to
religious feeling. And accordingly we find the people of Athens—that
Athens which could build altars to “unknown gods”—persecuting as
pitilessly as the Spanish Inquisition. We have only to review the list
of Classical thinkers and historical personages who were sacrificed to
the integrity of the cult. Socrates and Diagoras were executed for
ἀσέβεια; Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Aristotle, Alcibiades only saved
themselves by flight. The number of executions for cult-impiety, in
Athens alone and during the few decades of the Peloponnesian War, ran
into hundreds. After the condemnation of Protagoras, a house-to-house
search was made for the destruction of his writings. In Rome, acts of
this sort began (so far as history enables us to trace them) in 181 B.C.
when the Senate ordered the public burning of the Pythagorean “Books of
Numa.”[514] This was followed by an uninterrupted series of expulsions,
both of individual philosophers and of whole schools, and later by
executions and by public burnings of books regarded as subversive of
religion. For instance, in the time of Cæsar alone, the places of
worship of Isis were five times destroyed by order of the Consuls, and
Tiberius had her image thrown into the Tiber. The refusal to perform
sacrifice before the image of the Emperor was made a penal offence. All
these were measures against “atheism,” in the _Classical_ sense of the
word, manifested in theoretical or practical contempt of the visible
cult. Unless we can put our Western feeling of these matters out of
action we shall never penetrate into the essence of the world-image that
underlay the Classical attitude to them. Poets and philosophers might
spin myths and transform god-figures as much as they pleased. The
dogmatic interpretation of the sensuous data was everyone’s liberty. The
_histories_ of the gods could be made fun of in Satyric drama and
comedy—even that did not impugn their Euclidean existence. But the
statue of the god, the cult, the plastic embodiment of piety—it was not
permitted to any man to touch these. It was not out of hypocrisy that
the fine minds of the earlier Empire, who had ceased to take a myth of
any kind seriously, punctiliously conformed to the public cults and,
above all, to the cult—deeply real for all classes—of the Emperor. And,
on the other hand, the poets and thinkers of the mature Faustian Culture
were at liberty “not to go to Church,” to avoid Confession, to stay at
home on procession-days and (in Protestant surroundings) to live without
any relations with the church whatever. But they were not free to touch
points of dogma, for that would have been dangerous within any
confession and any sect, including, once more and expressly, free-
thought. The Roman Stoic, who without faith in the mythology piously
observed the ritual forms, has his counterpart in those men of the Age
of Enlightenment, like Lessing and Goethe, who disregarded the rites of
the Church but never doubted the “fundamental truths of faith.”
XII
If we turn back from Nature-feeling become form to Nature-knowledge
become system, we know God or the gods as the origin of the images by
which the intellect seeks to make the world-around comprehensible to
itself. Goethe once remarked (to Riemer): “The Reason is as old as the
World; even the child has reason. But it is not applied in all times in
the same way or to the same objects. The earlier centuries had their
ideas in intuitions of the fancy, but ours bring them into notions. _The
great views of Life were brought into shapes, into Gods; to-day they are
brought into notions._ Then the productive force was greater, now the
destructive force or art of separation.” The strong religiousness of
Newton’s mechanics[515] and the almost complete atheism of the
formulations of modern dynamics are of like colour, positive and
negative of the same primary feeling. A physical system of necessity has
all the characters of the soul to whose world-form it belongs. The Deism
of the Baroque belongs with its dynamics and its analytical geometry;
its three basic principles, God, Freedom and Immortality, are in the
language of mechanics the principles of inertia (Galileo), least action
(D’Alembert) and the conservation of energy (J. R. Mayer).
That which nowadays we call quite generally physics is in reality an
artifact of the Baroque. At this stage the reader will not feel it as
paradoxical to associate the mode of representation which rests on the
assumption of distant forces and the (wholly un-Classical and anything
but naïve) idea of action-at-a-distance, attraction and repulsion of
masses, specially with the Jesuit style of architecture founded by
Vignola, and to call it accordingly the Jesuit style of physics; and I
would likewise call the Infinitesimal Calculus, which of necessity came
into being just when and where it did, the Jesuit style of mathematic.
Within this style, a working hypothesis that deepens the technique of
experimentation is “correct”; for Loyola’s concern, like Newton’s, was
not description of Nature but _method_.
Western physics is by its inward form dogmatic and not ritualistic
(kultisch). Its content is the _dogma of Force_ as identical with space
and distance, the theory of the mechanical Act (as against the
mechanical Posture) in space. Consequently its tendency is persistently
to overcome the apparent. Beginning with a still quite Apollinian-
sensuous classification of physics into the physics of the eye (optics),
of the ear (acoustics) and of the skin-sense (heat), it by degrees
eliminated all sense-impressions and replaced them by abstract systems
of relations; thus, under the influence of ideas concerning dynamical
motion in an æther, radiant heat is nowadays dealt with under the
heading of “optics,” a word which has ceased to have anything to do with
the eye.
“Force” is a mythical quantity, which does not arise out of scientific
experimentation but, on the contrary, defines the structure thereof _a
priori_. It is only the Faustian conception of Nature that instead of a
magnet thinks of a magnetism whose field of force includes a piece of
iron, and instead of luminous bodies thinks of radiant energy, and that
imagines personifications like “electricity,” “temperature” and
“radioactivity.”[516]
That this “force” or “energy” is really a numen stiffened into a concept
(and in nowise the result of scientific experience) is shown by the
often overlooked fact that the basic principle known as the First Law of
Thermodynamics[517] says nothing whatever about the nature of energy,
and it is properly speaking an incorrect (though psychologically most
significant) assumption that the idea of the “Conservation of Energy” is
fixed in it. Experimental measurement can in the nature of things only
establish a _number_, which number we have (significantly, again) named
_work_. But the dynamical cast of our thought demanded that this should
be conceived as a _difference_ of energy, although the absolute value of
energy is only a figment and can never be rendered by a definite number.
There always remains, therefore, an undefined additive constant, as we
call it; in other words, we always strive to maintain the image of an
energy that our inner eye has formed, although actual scientific
practice is not concerned with it.
This being the provenance of the force-concept, it follows that we can
no more define it than we can define those other un-Classical words Will
and Space. There remains always a felt and intuitively-perceived
remainder which makes every personal definition an almost religious
_creed_ of its author. Every Baroque scientist in this matter has his
personal inner experience which he is trying to clothe in words. Goethe,
for instance, could never have defined his idea of a world-force, but to
himself it was a certainty. Kant called force the phenomenon of an ent-
in-itself: “we know substance in space, the body, only through forces.”
Laplace called it an unknown of which the workings are all that we know,
and Newton imagined immaterial forces at a distance. Leibniz spoke of
_Vis viva_ as a quantum which together with matter formed the unit that
he called the monad, and Descartes, with certain thinkers of the 18th
Century, was equally unwilling to draw fundamental distinctions between
motion and the moved. Beside _potentia_, _virtus_, _impetus_ we find
even in Gothic times peri-phrases such as _conatus_ and _nisus_, in
which the force and the releasing cause are obviously not separated. We
can, indeed, quite well differentiate between Catholic, Protestant and
Atheistic notions of force. But Spinoza, a Jew and therefore,
spiritually, a member of the Magian Culture, could not absorb the
Faustian force-concept at all, and it has no place in his system.[518]
And it is an astounding proof of the secret power of root-ideas that
Heinrich Hertz, the only Jew amongst the great physicists of the recent
past, was also the only one of them who tried to resolve the dilemma of
mechanics by _eliminating_ the idea of force.
The force-dogma is the one and only theme of Faustian physics. That
branch of science which under the name of Statics has been passed from
system to system and century to century is a fiction. “Modern Statics”
is in the same position as “arithmetic” and “geometry,” which, if the
literal and original senses of the words be kept to, are void of meaning
in modern analysis, empty names bequeathed by Classical science and only
preserved because our reverence for all things Classical has hitherto
debarred us from getting rid of them or even recognizing their
hollowness. There _is_ no Western statics—that is, no interpretation of
mechanical facts that is natural to the Western spirit bases itself on
the ideas of form and substance, or even, for that matter, on the ideas
of space and mass otherwise than in connexion with those of time and
force.[519] The reader can test this in any department that he pleases.
Even “temperature,” which of all our physical magnitudes has the most
plausible look of being static, Classical and passive, only falls into
its place in our system when it is brought into a force-picture, viz.,
the picture of a quantity of heat made up of ultra-swift subtle
irregular motions of the atoms of a body, with temperature as the _mean
vis viva_ of these atoms.
The Late Renaissance imagined that it had revived the Archimedean
physics just as it believed that it was continuing the Classical
sculpture. But in the one case as in the other it was merely preparing
for the forms of the Baroque, and doing so out of the spirit of the
Gothic. To this Statics belongs the picture-subject as it is in
Mantegna’s work and also in that of Signorelli, whose line and attitude
later generations regarded as stiff and cold. With Leonardo, dynamics
begins and in Rubens the movement of swelling bodies is already at a
maximum.
As late as 1629 the spirit of Renaissance physics appears in the theory
of magnetism formulated by the Jesuit Nicolaus Cabeo. Conceived in the
mould of an Aristotelian idea of the world, it was (like Palladio’s work
on architecture) foredoomed to lead to nothing—not because it was
“wrong” in itself but because it was in contradiction with the Faustian
Nature-feeling which, freed from Magian leading-strings by the thinkers
and researchers of the 14th Century, now required forms of its very own
for the expression of its world-knowledge. Cabeo avoided the notions of
force and mass and confined himself to the Classical concepts of form
and substance—in other words, he went back from the architecture of
Michelangelo’s last phase and of Vignola to that of Michelozzo and
Raphael—and the system which he formed was complete and self-contained
but without importance for the future. A magnetism conceived as a state
of individual bodies and not as a force in unbounded space was incapable
of symbolically satisfying the inner eye of Faustian man. What we need
is a theory of the Far, not one of the Near. Newton’s mathematical-
mechanical principles required to be made explicit as a dynamics pure
and entire, and this another Jesuit, Boscovich,[520] was the first to
achieve in 1758.
Even Galileo was still under the influence of the Renaissance feeling,
to which the opposition of force and mass, that was to produce, in
architecture and painting and music alike the element of grand movement,
was something strange and uncomfortable. He therefore limited the idea
of force to contact-force (impact) and his formulation did not go beyond
conservation of momentum (quantity of motion). He held fast to mere
moved-ness and fought shy of any passion of space, and it was left to
Leibniz to develop—first in the course of controversy and then
positively by the application of his mathematical discoveries—the idea
of genuine _free and directional forces_ (living force, activum thema).
The notion of conservation of momentum then gave way to that of
conservation of living forces, as quantitative number gave way to
functional number.
The concept of mass, too, did not become definite until somewhat later.
In Galileo and Kepler its place is occupied by volume, and it was Newton
who distinctly conceived it as _functional_—the world as function of
God. That mass (defined nowadays as the constant relation between force
and acceleration in respect of a system of material points) should have
no proportionate relation whatever to volume was, in spite of the
evidence of the planets, a conclusion inacceptable to Renaissance
feeling.
But, even so, Galileo was forced to inquire into the _causes_ of motion.
In a genuine Statics, working only with the notions of material and
form, this question would have had no meaning. For Archimedes
displacement was a matter of insignificance compared with form, which
was the essence of all corporeal existence; for, if space be Nonent,
what efficient can there be external to the body concerned? Things are
not functions of motion, but they move themselves. Newton it was who
first got completely away from Renaissance feeling and formed the notion
of distant forces, the attraction and repulsion of bodies across space
itself. Distance is already in itself a force. The very idea of it is so
free from all sense-perceptible content that Newton himself felt
uncomfortable with it—in fact it mastered him and not he it. It was the
spirit of Baroque itself, with its bent towards infinite space, that had
evoked this _contrapuntal and utterly un-plastic_ notion. And in it
withal there was a contradiction. To this day no one has produced an
adequate definition of these forces-at-a-distance. No one has ever yet
understood what centrifugal force really is. Is the force of the earth
rotating on its axis the cause of this motion or vice versa? Or are the
two identical? Is such a cause, considered _per se_, a force or another
motion? What is the difference between force and motion? Suppose the
alterations in the planetary system to be workings of a centrifugal
force; that being so, the bodies ought to be slung out of their path
[tangentially], and as in fact they are not so, we must assume a
centrifugal force as well. What do all these words mean? It is just the
impossibility of arriving at order and clarity here that led Hertz to do
away with the force-notion altogether and (by highly artificial
assumptions of rigid couplings between positions and velocities) to
reduce his system of mechanics to the principle of contact (impact). But
this merely conceals and does not remove the perplexities, which are of
intrinsically Faustian character and rooted in the very essence of
dynamics. “Can we speak of forces which owe their origin to motion?”
Certainly not; but can we get rid of _primary_ notions that are _inborn_
in the Western spirit though indefinable? Hertz himself made no attempt
to apply his system practically.
This _symbolic_ difficulty of modern mechanics is in no way removed by
the potential theory that was founded by Faraday when the centre of
gravity of physical thought had passed from the dynamics of matter to
the electrodynamics of the æther. The famous experimenter, who was a
visionary through and through—alone amongst the modern masters of
physics he was not a mathematician—observed in 1846: “I assume nothing
to be true in any part of space (whether this be empty as is commonly
said, or filled with matter) except forces and the lines in which they
are exercised.” Here, plain enough, is the directional tendency with its
intimately organic and historic content, the tendency in the knower to
live the process of his knowing. Here Faraday is metaphysically at one
with Newton, whose forces-at-a-distance point to a mythic background
that the devout physicist declined to examine. The possible alternative
way of reaching an unequivocal definition of force—viz., that which
starts from World and not God, from the object and not the subject of
natural motion-state—was leading at the very same time to the
formulation of the concept of Energy. Now, this concept represents, as
distinct from that of force, a quantum of directedness and not a
direction, and is in so far akin to Leibniz’s conception of “living
force” unalterable in quantity. It will not escape notice that essential
features of the mass-concept have been taken over here; indeed, even the
bizarre notion of an atomic structure of energy has been seriously
discussed.
This rearrangement of the basic words has not, however, altered the
feeling that a world-force with its substratum does exist. The motion-
problem is as insoluble as ever. All that has happened on the way from
Newton to Faraday—or from Berkeley to Mill—is that the religious deed-
idea has been replaced by the irreligious work-idea.[521] In the Nature-
picture of Bruno, Newton and Goethe something divine is working itself
out in acts, in that of modern physics _Nature is doing work_; for every
“process” within the meaning of the First Law of Thermodynamics is or
should be measurable by the expenditure of energy to which a quantity of
work corresponds in the form of “bound energy.”
Naturally, therefore, we find the decisive discovery of J. R. Mayer
coinciding in time with the birth of the Socialist theory. Even economic
systems wield the same concepts; the value-problem has been in relation
with quantity of work[522]] ever since Adam Smith, who _vis-à-vis_
Quesney and Turgot marks the change from an organic to a mechanical
structure of the economic field. The “work” which is the foundation of
modern economic theory has purely dynamic meaning, and phrases could be
found in the language of economists which correspond exactly to the
physical propositions of conservation of energy, entropy and least
action.
If, then, we review the successive stages through which the central idea
of force has passed since its birth in the Baroque, and its intimate
relations with the form-worlds of the great arts and of mathematics, we
find that (1) in the 17th Century (Galileo, Newton, Leibniz) it is
pictorially formed and in unison with the great art of oil-painting that
died out about 1630; (2) in the 18th Century (the “classical” mechanics
of Laplace and Lagrange) it acquires the abstract character of the
fugue-style and is in unison with Bach; and (3) with the Culture at its
end and the civilized intelligence victorious over the spiritual, it
appears in the domain of pure analysis, and in particular in the theory
of functions of several complex variables, without which it is, in its
most modern form, scarcely understandable.
XIII
But with this, it cannot be denied, the Western physics is drawing near
to the limit of its possibilities. At bottom, its mission as a
historical phenomenon has been to transform the Faustian Nature-feeling
into an intellectual knowledge, the faith-forms of springtime into the
machine-forms of exact science. And, though for the time being it will
continue to quarry more and more practical and even “purely theoretical”
results, results as such, whatever their kind, belong to the superficial
history of a science. To its deeps belong only the history of its
symbolism and its style, and it is almost too evident to be worth the
saying that in those deeps the essence and nucleus of our science is in
rapid disintegration. Up to the end of the 19th Century every step was
in the direction of an inward fulfilment, an increasing purity, rigour
and fullness of the dynamic Nature-picture—and then, that which has
brought it to an optimum of theoretical clarity, suddenly becomes a
_solvent_. This is not happening intentionally—the high intelligences of
modern physics are, in fact, unconscious that it is happening at all—but
from an inherent historic necessity. Just so, at the same relative
stage, the Classical science inwardly fulfilled itself about 200 B.C.
Analysis reached its goal with Gauss, Cauchy and Riemann, and to-day it
is only filling up the gaps in its structure.
This is the origin of the sudden and annihilating doubt that has arisen
about things that even yesterday were the unchallenged foundation of
physical theory, about the meaning of the energy-principle, the concepts
of mass, space, absolute time, and causality-laws generally. This doubt
is no longer the fruitful doubt of the Baroque, which brought the knower
and the object of his knowledge together; it is a doubt affecting the
very possibility of a Nature-science. To take one instance alone, what a
depth of unconscious Skepsis there is in the rapidly-increasing use of
enumerative and statistical methods, which aim only at _probability_ of
results and forgo in advance the absolute scientific exactitude that was
a creed to the hopeful earlier generations.
The moment is at hand now, when the possibility of a self-contained and
self-consistent mechanics will be given up for good. Every physics, as I
have shown, must break down over the motion-problem, in which the living
person of the knower methodically intrudes into the inorganic form-world
of the known. But to-day, not only is this dilemma still inherent in all
the newest theories but three centuries of intellectual work have
brought it so sharply to focus that there is no possibility more of
ignoring it. The theory of gravitation, which since Newton has been an
impregnable truth, has now been recognized as a temporally limited and
shaky hypothesis. The principle of the Conservation of Energy has no
meaning if energy is supposed to be infinite in an infinite space. The
acceptance of the principle is incompatible with any three-dimensional
structure of space, whether infinite or Euclidean or (as the Non-
Euclidean geometries present it) spherical and of “finite, yet
unbounded” volume. Its validity therefore is restricted to “a system of
bodies self-contained and not externally influenced” and such a
limitation does not and cannot exist in actuality. But symbolic infinity
was just what the Faustian world-feeling had meant to express in this
basic idea, which was simply _the mechanical and extensional re-ideation
of the idea of immortality and world-soul_. In fact it was a feeling out
of which knowledge could never succeed in forming a pure system. The
luminiferous æther, again, was an ideal postulate of modern dynamics
whereby every motion required a something-to-be-moved, but every
conceivable hypothesis concerning the constitution of this æther has
broken down under inner contradictions; more, Lord Kelvin has proved
mathematically that there _can_ be no structure of this light-
transmitter that is not open to objections. As, according to the
interpretation of Fresnel’s experiments, the light-waves are
transversal, the æther would have to be a rigid body (with truly quaint
properties), but then the laws of elasticity would have to apply to it
and in that case the waves would be longitudinal. The Maxwell-Hertz
equations of the Electro-magnetic Theory of Light, which in fact are
pure nameless numbers of indubitable validity, exclude the explanation
of the æther by any mechanics whatsoever. Therefore, and having regard
also to the consequences of the Relativity theory, physicists now regard
the æther as pure vacuum. But that, after all, is not very different
from demolishing the dynamic picture itself.
Since Newton, the assumption of constant mass—the counterpart of
constant force—has had uncontested validity. But the Quantum theory of
Planck, and the conclusions of Niels Bohr therefrom as to the fine
structure of atoms, which experimental experience had rendered
necessary, have destroyed this assumption. Every self-contained system
possesses, besides kinetic energy, an energy of radiant heat which is
inseparable from it and therefore cannot be represented purely by the
concept of mass. For if mass is defined by living energy it is _ipso
facto_ no longer constant with reference to thermodynamic state.
Nevertheless, it is impossible to fit the theory of quanta into the
group of hypotheses constituting the “classical” mechanics of the
Baroque; moreover, along with the principle of causal continuity, the
basis of the Infinitesimal Calculus founded by Newton and Leibniz is
threatened.[523] But, if these are serious enough doubts, the ruthlessly
cynical hypothesis of the Relativity theory strikes to the very heart of
dynamics. Supported by the experiments of A. A. Michelson, which showed
that the velocity of light remains unaffected by the motion of the
medium, and prepared mathematically by Lorentz and Minkowski, its
specific tendency is to _destroy the notion of absolute time_.
Astronomical discoveries (and here present-day scientists are seriously
deceiving themselves) can neither establish nor refute it. “Correct” and
“incorrect” are not the criteria whereby such assumptions are to be
tested; the question is whether, in the chaos of involved and artificial
ideas that has been produced by the innumerable hypotheses of
Radioactivity and Thermodynamics, it can hold its own as a _useable_
hypothesis or not. But however this may be, _it has abolished the
constancy of those physical quantities into the definition of which time
has entered_, and unlike the antique statics, the Western dynamics knows
_only_ such quantities. Absolute measures of length and rigid bodies are
no more. And with this the possibility of absolute quantitative
delimitations and therefore the “classical” concept of mass as the
constant ratio between force and acceleration fall to the ground—just
after the quantum of action, a product of energy and time, had been set
up as a new constant.
If we make it clear to ourselves that the atomic ideas of Rutherford and
Bohr[524] signify nothing but this, that the numerical results of
observations have suddenly been provided with a picture of a planetary
world within the atom, instead of that of atom-swarms hitherto favoured;
if we observe how rapidly card-houses of hypothesis are run up nowadays,
every contradiction being immediately covered up by a new hurried
hypothesis; if we reflect on how little heed is paid to the fact that
these images contradict one another and the “classical” Baroque
mechanics alike, we cannot but realize that the _great style of ideation
is at an end_ and that, as in architecture and the arts of form, a sort
of craft-art of hypothesis-building has taken its place. Only our
extreme maestria in experimental technique—true child of its century—
hides the collapse of the symbolism.
XIV
Amongst these symbols of decline, the most conspicuous is the notion of
Entropy, which forms the subject of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The first law, that of the conservation of energy, is the plain
formulation of the essence of dynamics—not to say of the constitution of
the West-European soul, to which Nature is necessarily visible only in
the form of a contrapuntal-dynamic causality (as against the static-
plastic causality of Aristotle). The basic element of the Faustian
world-picture is not the Attitude but the Deed and, mechanically
considered, the Process, and this law merely puts the mathematical
character of these processes into form as variables and constants. But
the Second Law goes deeper, and shows a _bias_ in Nature-happenings
which is in no wise imposed _a priori_ by the conceptual fundamentals of
dynamics.
Mathematically, Entropy is represented by a quantity which is fixed by
the momentary state of a self-contained system of bodies and under all
physical and chemical alterations can only increase, never diminish; in
the most favourable conditions it remains unchanged. Entropy, like Force
and Will, is something which (to anyone for whom this form-world is
accessible at all) is inwardly clear and meaningful, but is formulated
differently by every different authority and never satisfactorily by
any. Here again, the intellect breaks down where the world-feeling
demands expression.
Nature-processes in general have been classified as irreversible and
reversible, according as entropy is increased or not. In any process of
the first kind, free energy is converted into bound energy, and if this
dead energy is to be turned once more into living, this can only occur
through the simultaneous binding of a further quantum of living energy
in some second process; the best-known example is the combustion of
coal—that is, the conversion of the living energy stored up in it into
heat bound by the gas form of the carbon dioxide, if the latent energy
of water is to be translated into steam-pressure and thereafter into
motion.[525] It follows that in the world as a whole entropy continually
increases; that is, the dynamic system is manifestly approaching to some
final state, whatever this may be. Examples of the irreversible
processes are conduction of heat, diffusion, friction, emission of light
and chemical reactions; of reversible, gravitation, electric
oscillations, electromagnetic waves and sound-waves.
What has never hitherto been fully felt, and what leads me to regard the
Entropy theory (1850) as the beginning of the destruction of that
masterpiece of Western intelligence, the old dynamic physics, is the
deep opposition of theory and actuality which is here for the first time
introduced into theory itself. The First Law had drawn the strict
picture of a causal Nature-happening, but the Second Law by introducing
irreversibility has for the first time brought into the mechanical-
logical domain a tendency belonging to immediate life and thus in
fundamental contradiction with the very essence of that domain.
If the Entropy theory is followed out to its conclusion, it results,
_firstly_, that in theory all processes must be reversible—which is one
of the basic postulates of dynamics and is reasserted with all rigour in
the law of the Conservation of Energy—but, _secondly_, that in actuality
processes of Nature in their entirety are irreversible. Not even under
the artificial conditions of laboratory experiment can the simplest
process be exactly reversed, that is, a state once passed cannot be re-
established. Nothing is more significant of the present condition of
systematics than the introduction of the hypotheses of “elementary
disorder” for the purpose of smoothing-out the contradiction between
intellectual postulate and actual experience. The “smallest particles”
of a body (an image, no more) throughout perform reversible processes,
but in actual things the smallest particles are in disorder and mutually
interfere; and so the irreversible process that alone is experienced by
the observer is linked with increase of entropy by taking the mean
probabilities of occurrences. And thus theory becomes a chapter of the
Calculus of Probabilities, and in lieu of exact we have statistical
methods.
Evidently, the significance of this has passed unnoticed. Statistics
belong, like chronology, to the domain of the organic, to fluctuating
Life, to Destiny and Incident and not to the world of laws and timeless
causality. As everyone knows, statistics serve above all to characterize
political and economic, that is, historical, developments. In the
“classical” mechanics of Galileo and Newton there would have been no
room for them. And if, now, suddenly the contents of that field are
supposed to be understood and understandable only statistically and
under the aspect of Probability—instead of under that of the _a priori_
exactitude which the Baroque thinkers unanimously demanded—what does it
mean? It means that the object of understanding is ourselves. The Nature
“known” in this wise is the Nature that we know by way of living
experience, that we live in ourselves. What _theory_ asserts (and, being
itself, must assert)—to wit, this ideal irreversibility that never
happens in actuality—represents a relic of the old severe intellectual
form, the great Baroque tradition that had contrapuntal music for twin
sister. But the resort to statistics shows that the force that that
tradition regulated and made effective is exhausted. Becoming and
Become, Destiny and Causality, historical and natural-science elements
are beginning to be confused. Formulæ of life, growth, age, direction
and death are crowding up.
That is what, from this point of view, irreversibility in world-
processes has to mean. It is the expression, no longer of the physical
“t” but of genuine _historical_, inwardly-experienced Time, which is
identical with Destiny.
Baroque physics was, root and branch, a _strict systematic_ and remained
so for as long as its structure was not racked by theories like these,
as long as its field was absolutely free from anything that expressed
accident and mere probability. But directly these theories come up, it
becomes _physiognomic_. “The course of the world” is followed out. The
idea of the end of the world appears, under the veil of formulæ that are
no longer in their essence formulæ at all. Something Goethian has
entered into physics—and if we understand the deeper significance of
Goethe’s passionate polemic against Newton in the “Farbenlehre”[526] we
shall realize the full weight of what this means. For therein intuitive
vision was arguing against reason, life against death, creative image
against normative law. The critical form-world of Nature-_knowledge_
came out of Nature-_feeling_, God-feeling, as the evoked contrary. Here,
at the end of the Late period, it has reached the maximal distance and
is turning to come home.
So, once more, the imaging-power that is the efficient in dynamics
conjures up the old great symbol of Faustian man’s historical passion,
Care—the outlook into the farthest far of past and future, the back-
looking study of history, the foreseeing state, the confessions and
introspections, the bells that sounded over all our country-sides and
measured the passing of Life. The ethos of the word Time, as we alone
feel it, as instrumental music alone and no statue-plastic can carry it,
is directed upon an _aim_. This aim has been figured in every life-image
that the West has conceived—as the Third Kingdom, as the New Age, as the
task of mankind, as the issue of evolution. And it is figured, as the
destined end-state of all Faustian “Nature,” in Entropy.
Directional feeling, a relation of past and future, is implicit already
in the mythic concept of force on which the whole of this dogmatic form-
world rests, and in the description of natural processes it emerges
distinct. It would not be too much, therefore, to say that entropy, as
the intellectual form in which the infinite sum of nature-events is
assembled as a _historical and physiognomic_ unit, tacitly underlay all
physical concept-formation from the outset, so that when it came out (as
one day it was bound to come out) it was as a “discovery” of scientific
_induction_ claiming “support” from all the other theoretical elements
of the system. The more dynamics exhausts its inner possibilities as it
nears the goal, the more decidedly the historical characters in the
picture come to the front and the more insistently the organic necessity
of Destiny asserts itself side by side with the inorganic necessity of
Causality, and Direction makes itself felt along with capacity and
intensity, the factors of pure extension. The course of this process is
marked by the appearance of whole series of daring hypotheses, all of
like sort, which are only apparently demanded by experimental results
and which in fact world-feeling and mythology imagined as long ago as
the Gothic age.
Above all, this is manifested in the bizarre hypotheses of atomic
disintegration which elucidate the phenomena of radioactivity, and
according to which uranium atoms that have kept their essence unaltered,
in spite of all external influences, for millions of years and then
suddenly without assignable cause explode, scattering their smallest
particles over space with velocities of thousands of kilometres per
second. Only a few individuals in an aggregate of radioactive atoms are
struck by Destiny thus, the neighbours being entirely unaffected. Here
too, then, is a picture of history and not “Nature,” and although
statistical methods here also prove to be necessary, one might almost
say that in them mathematical number has been replaced by
chronological.[527]
With ideas like these, the mythopoetic force of the Faustian soul is
returning to its origins. It was at the outset of the Gothic, just at
the time when the first mechanical clocks were being built, that the
myth of the world’s end, Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, arose. It
may be that, like all the reputedly old-German myths Ragnarök (whether
in the Völuspa form or as the Christian Muspilli) was modelled more or
less on Classical and particularly Christian-Apocalyptic motives.
Nevertheless, it is the expression and symbol of the Faustian and of no
other soul. The Olympian college is historyless, it knows no becoming,
no epochal moments, no aim. But the passionate thrust into distance is
Faustian. Force, Will, has an aim, and where there is an aim there is
for the inquiring eye an end. That which the perspective of oil-painting
expressed by means of the vanishing point, the Baroque park by its
_point de vue_, and analysis by the _n_th term of an infinite series—the
conclusion, that is, of a willed directedness—assumes here the form of
the concept. The Faust of the Second Part is dying, for he has reached
his goal. What the myth of Götterdämmerung signified of old, the
irreligious form of it, the theory of Entropy, signifies to-day—_world’s
end as completion of an inwardly necessary evolution_.
XV
It remains now to sketch the last stage of Western science. From our
standpoint of to-day, the gently-sloping route of decline is clearly
visible.
This too, the power of looking ahead to inevitable Destiny, is part of
the historical capacity that is the peculiar endowment of the Faustian.
The Classical died, as we shall die, but it died unknowing. It believed
in an eternal Being and to the last it lived its days with frank
satisfaction, each day spent as a gift of the gods. But we know our
history. Before us there stands a last spiritual crisis that will
involve all Europe and America. What its course will be, Late Hellenism
tells us. The tyranny of the Reason—of which we are not conscious, for
we are ourselves its apex—is in every Culture an epoch between man and
old-man, and no more. Its most distinct expression is the cult of exact
sciences, of dialectic, of demonstration, of causality. Of old the
Ionic, and in our case the Baroque were its rising limb, and now the
question is what form will the down-curve assume?
In this very century, I prophesy, the century of scientific-critical
Alexandrianism, of the great harvests, of the final formulations, a new
element of inwardness will arise to overthrow the will-to-victory of
science. Exact science must presently fall upon its own keen sword.
First, in the 18th Century, its methods were tried out, then, in the
19th, its powers, and now its historical rôle is critically reviewed.
But from Skepsis there is a path to “second religiousness,” which is the
sequel and not the preface of the Culture. Men dispense with proof,
desire only to believe and not to dissect.
The individual renounces by laying aside books. The Culture renounces by
ceasing to manifest itself in high scientific intellects. But science
exists only in the living thought of great savant-generations, and books
are nothing if they are not living and effective in men worthy of them.
Scientific results are merely items of an intellectual tradition. It
constitutes the death of a science that no one any longer regards it as
an event, and an orgy of two centuries of exact scientific-ness brings
satiety. Not the individual, the soul of the Culture itself has had
enough, and it expresses this by putting into the field of the day ever
smaller, narrower and more unfruitful investigators. The great century
of the Classical science was the third, after the death of Aristotle;
when Archimedes died and the Romans came, it was already almost at its
end. Our great century has been the 19th. Savants of the calibre of
Gauss and Humboldt and Helmholtz were already no more by 1900. In
physics as in chemistry, in biology as in mathematics, the great masters
are dead, and we are now experiencing the _decrescendo_ of brilliant
gleaners who arrange, collect and finish-off like the Alexandrian
scholars of the Roman age. Everything that does not belong to the
matter-of-fact side of life—to politics, technics or economics—exhibits
the common symptom. After Lysippus no great sculptor, no artist as man-
of-destiny, appears, and after the Impressionists no painter, and after
Wagner no musician. The age of Cæsarism needed neither art nor
philosophy. To Eratosthenes and Archimedes, true creators, succeed
Posidonius and Pliny, collectors of taste, and finally Ptolemy and
Galen, mere copyists. And, just as oil-painting and instrumental music
ran through their possibilities in a few centuries, so also dynamics,
which began to bud about 1600, is to-day in the grip of decay.
But before the curtain falls, there is one more task for the historical
Faustian spirit, a task not yet specified, hitherto not even imagined as
possible. There has still to be written a _morphology of the exact
sciences_, which shall discover how all laws, concepts and theories
inwardly hang together as forms and what they have meant as such in the
life-course of the Faustian Culture. The re-treatment of theoretical
physics, of chemistry, of mathematics as a sum of symbols—this will be
the definitive conquest of the mechanical world-aspect by an intuitive,
once more religious, world-outlook, a last master-effort of physiognomic
to break down even systematic and to absorb it, as expression and
symbol, into its own domain. One day we shall no longer ask, as the 19th
Century asked, what are the valid laws underlying chemical affinity or
diamagnetism—rather, we shall be amazed indeed that minds of the first
order could ever have been completely preoccupied by questions such as
these. We shall inquire whence came these forms that were prescribed for
the Faustian spirit, why they had to come to our kind of humanity
particularly and exclusively, and what deep meaning there is in the fact
that the numbers that we have won became phenomenal in just this
picture-like disguise. And, be it said, we have to-day hardly yet an
inkling of how much in our reputedly objective values and experiences is
only disguise, only image and expression.
The separate sciences—epistemology, physics, chemistry, mathematics,
astronomy—are approaching one another with acceleration, converging
towards a complete identity of results. The issue will be a fusion of
the form-worlds, which will present on the one hand a system of numbers,
functional in nature and reduced to a few ground-formulæ, and on the
other a small group of theories, denominators to those numerators, which
in the end will be seen to be myths of the springtime under modern
veils, reducible therefore—and at once of necessity reduced—to
picturable and physiognomically significant characters that are the
fundamentals. This convergence has not yet been observed, for the reason
that since Kant—indeed, since Leibniz—there has been no philosopher who
commanded the problems of _all_ the exact sciences.
Even a century ago, physics and chemistry were foreign to one another,
but to-day they cannot be handled separately—witness spectrum analysis,
radioactivity, radiation of heat. Fifty years ago the essence of
chemistry could still be described almost without mathematics, and to-
day the chemical elements are in course of volatilizing themselves into
the mathematical constants of variable relation-complexes, and with the
sense-comprehensibility of the elements goes the last trace of magnitude
as the term is Classically and plastically understood. Physiology is
becoming a chapter of organic chemistry and is making use of the methods
of the Infinitesimal Calculus. The branch of the older physics—
distinguished, according to the bodily senses concerned in each, as
acoustics, optics and heat—have melted into a dynamic of matter and a
dynamic of the æther, and these again can no longer keep their frontiers
mathematically clear. The last discussions of epistemology are now
uniting with those of higher analysis and theoretical physics to occupy
an almost inaccessible domain, the domain to which, for example, the
theory of Relativity belongs or ought to belong. The sign-language in
which the emanation-theory of radioactivity expresses itself is
completely de-sensualized.
Chemistry, once concerned with defining as sharply as possible the
qualities of elements, such as valency, weight, affinity and reactivity,
is setting to work to get rid of these sensible traits. The elements are
held to differ in character according to their derivation from this or
that compound. They are represented to be complexes of different units
which indeed behave (“actually”) as units of a higher order and are not
practically separable but show deep differences in point of
radioactivity. Through the emanation of radiant energy degradation is
always going on, so that we can speak of the _lifetime_ of an element,
in formal contradiction with the original concept of the element and the
spirit of modern chemistry as created by Lavoisier. All these tendencies
are bringing the ideas of chemistry very close to the theory of Entropy,
with its suggestive opposition of causality and destiny, Nature and
History. And they indicate the paths that our science is pursuing—on the
one hand, towards the discovery that its logical and numerical results
are identical with the structure of the reason itself, and, on the
other, towards the revelation that the whole theory which clothes these
numbers merely represents the symbolic expression of Faustian life.
And here, as our study draws to its conclusion, we must mention the
truly Faustian theory of “aggregates,” one of the weightiest in all this
form-world of our science. In sharpest antithesis to the older
mathematic, it deals, not with singular quantities but with the
aggregates constituted by all quantities [or objects] having this or
that specified morphological similarity—for instance all square numbers
or all differential equations of a given type. Such an aggregate it
conceives as a new unit, a new _number of higher order_, and subjecting
it to criteria of new and hitherto quite unsuspected kinds such as
“potency,” “order,” “equivalence,” “countableness,” and devising laws
and operative methods for it in respect of these criteria. Thus is being
actualized a last extension of the function-theory.[528] Little by
little this absorbed the whole of our mathematic, and now it is dealing
with variables by the principles of the Theory of Groups in respect of
the character of the function and by those of the Theory of Aggregates
in respect of the values of the variables. Mathematical philosophy is
well aware that these ultimate meditations on the nature of number are
fusing with those upon pure logic, and an algebra of logic is talked of.
The study of geometrical axioms has become a chapter of epistemology.
The aim to which all this is striving, and which in particular every
Nature-researcher feels in himself as an impulse, is the achievement of
a pure numerical transcendence, the complete and inclusive conquest of
the visibly apparent and its replacement by a language of imagery
unintelligible to the layman and impossible of sensuous realization—but
a language that the great Faustian symbol of Infinite space endows with
the dignity of inward necessity. The deep scepticism of these final
judgments links the soul anew to the forms of early Gothic
religiousness. The inorganic, known and dissected world-around, the
World as Nature and System, has deepened itself until it is a pure
sphere of functional numbers. But, as we have seen, number is one of the
most primary symbols in every Culture; and consequently the way to pure
number is the return of the waking consciousness to its own secret, the
revelation of its own formal necessity. The goal reached, the vast and
ever more meaningless and threadbare fabric woven around natural science
falls apart. It was, after all, nothing but the inner structure of the
“Reason,” the grammar by which it believed it could overcome the Visible
and extract therefrom the True. But what appears under the fabric is
once again the earliest and deepest, the Myth, the immediate Becoming,
Life itself. The less anthropomorphic science believes itself to be, the
more anthropomorphic it is. One by one it gets rid of the _separate_
human traits in the Nature-picture, only to find at the end that the
supposed pure Nature which it holds in its hand is—humanity itself, pure
and complete. Out of the Gothic soul grew up, till it overshadowed the
religious world-picture, the spirit of the City, the alter ego of
irreligious Nature-science. But now, in the sunset of the scientific
epoch and the rise of victorious Skepsis, the clouds dissolve and the
quiet landscape of the morning reappears in all distinctness.
The final issue to which the Faustian wisdom tends—though it is only in
the highest moments that it has seen it—is the dissolution of all
knowledge into a vast system of morphological relationships. Dynamics
and Analysis are in respect of meaning, form-language and substance,
identical with Romanesque ornament, Gothic cathedrals, Christian-German
dogma and the dynastic state. One and the same world-feeling speaks in
all of them. They were born with, and they aged with, the Faustian
Culture, and they present that Culture in the world of day and space as
a historical drama. The uniting of the several scientific aspects into
one will bear all the marks of the great art of counterpoint. _An
infinitesimal music of the boundless world-space_—that is the deep
unresting longing of this soul, as the orderly statuesque and Euclidean
Cosmos was the satisfaction of the Classical. That—formulated by a
logical necessity of Faustian reason as a dynamic-imperative causality,
then developed into a dictatorial, hard-working, world-transforming
science—is the grand legacy of the Faustian soul to the souls of
Cultures yet to be, a bequest of immensely transcendent forms that the
heirs will possibly ignore. And then, weary after its striving, the
Western science returns to its spiritual home.
-----
Footnote 369:
See pp. 55 et seq.
Footnote 370:
See p. 126.
Footnote 371:
Primitive languages afford no foundations for abstract ordered
thought. But at the beginning of every Culture an inner change takes
place in the language that makes it adequate for carrying the highest
symbolic tasks of the ensuing cultural development. Thus it was
_simultaneously with the Romanesque style_ that English and German
arose out of the Teutonic languages of the Frankish period, and
French, Italian and Spanish out of the “lingua rustica” of the old
Roman provinces—languages of _identical_ metaphysical content though
so dissimilar in origin.
Footnote 372:
See p. 262.
Footnote 373:
See p. 172.
Footnote 374:
That is, discussion of the doctrines of the Eleatic school regarding
unity and plurality, the Ent and Nonent, focussed themselves, in Zeno,
down to the famous paradoxes concerning the nature of motion (such as
“Achilles and the Tortoise”) which within the Greek discipline were
unanswerable. Their general effect was to show that motion depended
upon the existence of an indefinitely great plurality, that is, of
infinitely small subdivisions as well as infinitely great quantities,
and, the denial of this plurality being the essential feature of the
Eleatic philosophy, its application to motion was bound to produce
“paradoxes.”
The enunciations, with a brief but close critique, will be found in
the Ency. Brit., XI ed., Article _Zeno of Elea_. Here it suffices to
draw attention to the difficulties that are caused by the absence (or
unwelcome presence) of time and direction elements, not only in the
treatment of plurality itself (which is conceived of indifferently as
an augmentation or as a subdivision of the finite magnitude) but
especially in the conclusion of the “arrow” paradox and in the very
obscure enunciation of Paradox 8.—_Tr._
Footnote 375:
See Vol. II, pp. 296 et seq.
Footnote 376:
De Boer, _Gesch. d. Philos. im Islam_ (1901), pp. 93, 108.
Footnote 377:
A detailed summary will be found in Ency. Brit., XI ed., article
_Kabbalah_, by Dr. Ginsburg and Dr. Cook.—_Tr._
Footnote 378:
See Windelband, _Gesch. d. neueren Philosophie_ (1919), I, 208; also
Hinnebert, _Kultur der Gegenwart_, I, V (1913), p. 484.
Footnote 379:
See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article _Cartesianism_ (V, 421).—_Tr._
Footnote 380:
See Vol. II, p. 296.
Footnote 381:
When, therefore, in the present work also, precedence is consistently
given to Time, Direction and Destiny over Space and Causality, this
must not be supposed to be the result of reasoned proofs. It is the
outcome of (quite unconscious) tendencies of life-feeling—the only
mode of origin of philosophic ideas.
Footnote 382:
See p. 201.
Footnote 383:
See Vol. II, p. 363.
Footnote 384:
In the German, “Vor allem aber sein eignes Ich.” (But in Luther’s
Bible, characteristically, “Auch dazu sein eigen Leben.”)—_Tr._
Footnote 385:
_Barnasha._ The underlying idea is not the filial relation, but an
impersonal coming-up in the field of mankind.
Footnote 386:
ἐθέλω and βούλομαι imply, to have the intention, or wish, or
inclination (βουλή means counsel, council, plan, and ἐθέλω has no
equivalent noun). _Voluntas_ is not a psychological concept but, like
_potestas_ and _virtus_, a thoroughly Roman and matter-of-fact
designation for a practical, visible and outward asset—substantially,
the _mass_ of an individual’s being. In like case, we use the word
energy. The “will” of Napoleon is something very different from the
energy of Napoleon, being, as it were, lift in contrast to weight. We
must not confuse the outward-directed intelligence, which
distinguishes the Romans as civilized men from the Greeks as cultured
men, with “will” as understood here. Cæsar is _not_ a man of will in
the Napoleonic sense. The idioms of Roman law, which represent the
root-feeling of the Roman soul far better than those of poetry, are
significant in this regard. Intention in the legal sense is _animus_
(_animus occidendi_); the wish, directed to some criminal end, is
_dolus_ as distinct from the unintended wrongdoing (_culpa_).
_Voluntas_ is nowhere used as a technical term.
Footnote 387:
The Chinese soul “wanders” in its world. This is the meaning of the
East-Asiatic perspective, which places the vanishing point in the
_middle_ of the picture instead of in the depth as we do. The function
of perspective is to subject things to the “I,” which in ordering
comprehends them; and it is a further indication that “will”—the claim
to command the world—is absent from the Classical make-up that its
painting denies the perspective background. In Chinese perspective as
in Chinese technique (see Vol. II, p. 627), _directional_ energy is
wanting, and it would not be illegitimate to call East-Asiatic
perspective, in contrast with the powerful thrust into depth of _our_
landscape-painting, a perspective of “Tao”; for the world-feeling
indicated by that word is unmistakably the operative element in the
picture.
Footnote 388:
Obviously, atheism is no exception to this. When a Materialist or
Darwinian speaks of a “Nature” that orders everything, that effects
selections, that produces and destroys anything, he differs only to
the extent of one word from the 18th-Century Deist. The _world-
feeling_ has undergone no change.
Footnote 389:
Lines 525-534:
ΧΟ. τούτων ἄρα Ζεύς ἐστιν ἀσθενέστερος;
ΠΡ. οὔκουν ἂν ἐκφύγοι γε τὴν πεπρωμένην, etc.—_Tr._
Footnote 390:
Iliad, XXII, 208-215.—_Tr._
Footnote 391:
The great part played by learned Jesuits in the development of
theoretical physics must not be overlooked. Father Boscovich, with his
system of atomic forces (1759), made the first serious advance beyond
Newton. The idea of the equivalence of God and pure space is even more
evident in Jesuit work than it is in that of the Jansenists of Port
Royal with whom Descartes and Pascal were associated.
(Boscovich’s atomic theory is discussed by James Clerk Maxwell in
Ency. Brit., XI ed., XVIII, 655—a reference that, for more general
reasons, no student of the Faustian-as-scientist should fail to follow
up.—_Tr._)
Footnote 392:
Luther placed practical activity (the day’s demands, as Goethe said)
at the very centre of morale, and that is one of the main reasons why
it was to the deeper natures that Protestantism appealed most
cogently. Works of piety devoid of directional energy (in the sense
that we give the words here) fell at once from the high esteem in
which they had been sustained (as the Renaissance was sustained) by a
relic of _Southern_ feeling. On ethical grounds monasticism
thenceforth falls into ever-increasing disrepute. In the Gothic Age
entry into the cloister, the renunciation of care, deed and will, had
been an act of the loftiest ethical character—the highest sacrifice
that it was possible to imagine, that of _life_. But in the Baroque
even Roman Catholics no longer felt thus about it. And the
institutions, no longer of renunciation but merely of inactive
comfort, went down before the spirit of the Enlightenment.
Footnote 393:
προσῶπον meant in the older Greek “visage,” and later, in Athens,
“mask.” As late as Aristotle the word is not yet in use for person.
“Persona,” originally also a theatre-mask, came to have a juristic
application, and in Roman Imperial times the pregnant Roman sense of
this word affected the Greek προσῶπον also. See R. Hirzel, _Die
Person_ (1914), pp. 40 et seq.
Footnote 394:
See pp. 127 et seq.
Footnote 395:
W. Creizenach, _Gesch. d. neueren Dramas_ (1918), II, 346 et seq.
Footnote 396:
See p. 265.
Footnote 397:
We too have our anecdote, but it is of our own type and diametrically
opposed to the Classical. It is the “short story” (_Novelle_)—the
story of Cervantes, Kleist, Hoffmann and Storm—and we admire it in
proportion as we are made to feel that its motive is _possible only
this once, at this time and with these people_, whereas the mythic
type of anecdote, the Fable, is judged by precisely opposite criteria.
Footnote 398:
See pp. 143 et seq.
Footnote 399:
The Fates of the Greeks are represented as spinning, measuring out and
cutting the thread of a man’s destiny, but not as weaving it _into the
web_ of his life. It is a mere dimension.—_Tr._
Footnote 400:
See p. 129.
Footnote 401:
The evolution of meaning in the Classical words _pathos_ and _passico_
corresponds with this. The second was formed from the first only in
the Imperial period, and carried its original sense in the “Passion”
of Christ. It was in the early Gothic times, and particularly in the
language of the Franciscan “Zealots” and the disciples of Joachim of
Floris, that its meaning underwent the decisive reversal. Expressing
thenceforward a condition of profound excitement which strained to
discharge itself, it became finally a generic name for all spiritual
dynamic; in this sense of strong will and directional energy it was
brought into German as _Leidenschaft_ by Zesen in 1647.
Footnote 402:
The Eleusinian mysteries contained no secrets at all. Everyone knew
what went on. But upon the believers they exercised a strange and
overpowering effect, and the “betrayal” consisted in profaning them by
imitating their holy forms outside the temple-precinct. See, further,
A. Dieterich, _Kleine Schriften_ (1911), pp. 414 et seq.
Footnote 403:
See Vol. II, pp. 345 et seq.
Footnote 404:
The dancers were goats, Silenus as leader of the dance wore a
horsetail, but Aristophanes’s “Birds,” “Frogs” and “Wasps” suggest
that there were still other animal disguises.
Footnote 405:
See pp. 283 et seq.
Footnote 406:
As the student of cultural history to-day is not necessarily familiar
with technical Greek, it may be helpful to reproduce from Cornish’s
edition of Smith’s “Greek and Roman Antiquities,” s.v. “Tragoedia,”
the following paragraph, as clear as it is succinct:
“Tragedy is described by Aristotle (_Poet._, VI, 2) as effecting by
means of pity and terror that purgation [of the soul] (κάθαρσις) which
belongs to [is proper for] such feelings.”... Tragedy excites pity and
terror by presenting to the mind things which are truly pitiable and
terrible. When pity and terror are moved, as tragedy moves them, by a
worthy cause, then the mind experiences that sense of relief which
comes from finding an outlet for a natural energy. And thus the
impressions made by Tragedy leave behind them in the spectator a
temperate and harmonious state of the soul. Similarly Aristotle speaks
of the enthusiastic worshippers of Dionysus as obtaining a κάθαρσις, a
healthful relief, by the “lyric utterance of their sacred frenzy.”—
_Tr._
Footnote 407:
The evolution of ideals of stage-presentation in the minds of
Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides successively is perhaps comparable
with that of sculptural style which we see in the pediments of Ægina,
of Olympia and of the Parthenon.
Footnote 408:
It must be repeated that the Hellenistic shadow-painting of Zeuxis and
Apollodorus is a modelling of the individual body for the purpose of
producing the plastic effect on the eye. There was no idea of
rendering space by means of light and shade. The body is “shaded” but
it _casts no shadow_.
(Contrast with this Dante’s exact and careful specification of the
time-of-day in every episode of the _Purgatorio_ and the _Paradiso_,
sublimely imaginative as these poems are.—_Tr._)
Footnote 409:
The great mass of Socialists would cease to be Socialists if they
could understand the Socialism of the nine or ten men who to-day grasp
it with the full historical consequences that it involves.
Footnote 410:
See p. 239 et seq.
Footnote 411:
See p. 68.
Footnote 412:
See Vol. II, p. 363, note.
Footnote 413:
As we increase the powers of the telescope we find that the number of
newly appearing stars falls off rapidly towards the edges of the
field.
Footnote 414:
The thrill of big figures is a feeling peculiar to Western mankind. In
the Civilization of to-day this significant passion for gigantic sums,
for indefinitely big and indefinitely minute measurements, for
“records” and statistics, is playing a conspicuous part.
(Our very notation of number is ceasing to rest on sense-standards.
Science has carried number, as ordinarily written, so high and so low
that it now uses a _movable base_ for its numerical statements. For
example, a number in astronomy is written, not as 3,450,000,000 but as
3.45 × 10^9, one relating to ordinary experience as 3.45 (i.e., 3.45 ×
10^0) and one in electromagnetic theory, not as 0.00000345 but as 3.45
× 10^{-6}. Under this system the conceptual unit may be as large or as
small, compared with the unit of daily experience, as the region of
thought in which the calculation is taking place requires. And
different conceptual worlds can be connected as to number [say, a
number of kilometres brought into an order of thought that deals with
millimetres] by simply changing the ten-power.—_Tr._)
Footnote 415:
In stellar calculations even the mean radius of the earth’s orbit
(1.493 × 10^{13} cm.) hardly suffices as unit, as the distance of a
star of one second parallax is already 206,265 such units away from
us; star-distances are reckoned therefore either in light-years or in
terms of the unit distance of a star of this standard parallax.—_Tr._
Footnote 416:
As early as the second millennium before Christ they worked from
Iceland and the North Sea past Finisterre to the Canaries and West
Africa. An echo of these voyagings lingers in the Atlantis-saga of the
Greeks. The realm of Tartessus (at the mouth of the Guadalquivir)
appears to have been a centre of these movements (see Leo Frobenius,
_Das unbekannte Afrika_, p. 139). Some sort of relation, too, there
must have been between them and the movements of the “sea peoples,”
Viking swarms which after long land-wanderings from North to South
built themselves ships again on the Black Sea or the Ægean and burst
out against Egypt from the time of Rameses II (1292-1225). The
Egyptian reliefs show their ship-types to have been quite different
from the native and the Phœnician; but they may well have been similar
to those that Cæsar found afterwards among the Veneti of Brittany. A
later example of such outbursts is afforded by the Varyags or
Varangians in Russia and at Constantinople. No doubt more light will
shortly be thrown on the courses of these movement-streams.
Footnote 417:
Here there is no need to postulate firearms (as distinct from
gunpowder used in fireworks) in the Chinese Culture. The archery of
the Chinese and Japanese was such as only the British 14th-century
archery could match in the Western and nothing in the Classical.
It should be noted also that it was in our 14th Century that—quite
independently of gunpowder—archery and the construction of siege-
engines reached their zenith in the West. The “English” bow had long
been used by the Welsh, but it was left to Edward I and Edward III to
make it the tactical weapon par excellence.—_Tr._
Footnote 418:
See Vol. II, pp. 626 et seq.
Footnote 419:
Half as long again as Nelson’s _Victory_ and about the same length as
the last wooden steam three-deckers (e.g., _Duke of Wellington_) of
the mid-19th Century.—_Tr._
Footnote 420:
See Vol. II, pp. 207 et seq., and Chapter IV B.
Footnote 421:
See Vol. II, p. 80.
Footnote 422:
I.e., adherents of the various syncretic cults. Sec Vol. II, pp. 212
et seq.
Footnote 423:
This applies even more forcibly to the other “long-range” episode,
that of the Ten Thousand (Xenophon, _Anabasis_ I).—_Tr._
Footnote 424:
In this place it is exclusively with the conscious, religio-
philosophical morale—the morale which can be known and taught and
followed—that we are concerned, and not with the racial rhythm of
Life, the habit, Sitte, ἦθος, that is unconsciously present. The
morale with which we are dealing turns upon _intellectual_ concepts of
Virtue and Vice, good and bad; the other, upon ideals in the _blood_
such as honour, loyalty, bravery, the feeling that attributes nobility
and vulgarity. See Vol. II, 421 et seq.
Footnote 425:
The original is here expanded a little for the sake of clarity.—_Tr._
Footnote 426:
After what has been said above regarding the absence of pregnant words
for “will” and “space” in the Classical tongues, the reader will not
be surprised to hear that neither Greek nor Latin affords exact
equivalents for these words action and activity.
Footnote 427:
See Vol. II, pp. 293 et seq.
Footnote 428:
“He who hath ears to hear, let him hear”—there is no claim to power in
these words. But the Western Church never conceived its mission thus.
The “Glad Tidings” of Jesus, like those of Zoroaster, of Mani, of
Mahomet, of the Neo-Platonists and of all the cognate Magian religions
were mystic benefits _displayed_ but in nowise imposed. Youthful
Christianity, when it had flowed into the Western world, merely
imitated the missionarism of the later Stoa, itself by that time
thoroughly Magian. Paul may be thought of as urgent; the itinerant
preachers of the Stoa were certainly so, as we know from our
authorities. But _commanding_ they were not. To illustrate by a
somewhat farfetched parallel—in direct contrast to the physicians of
the Magian stamp who merely proclaimed the virtues of their mysterious
arcana, the medical men of the West seek to obtain for their knowledge
the _force of civil law_, as for instance in the matter of vaccination
or the inspection of pork for trichina.
Footnote 429:
For the Buddhist Four Truths see Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. IV, p. 742.
English translation of Kant’s _Kritik der praktischen Vernunft_ by T.
K. Abbott.—_Tr._
Footnote 430:
See p. 201.
Footnote 431:
See p. 205 and 222 et seq.
Footnote 432:
See Vol. II, p. 334.
Footnote 433:
The philosophy and dogma of charity and almsgiving—a subject that
English research seems generally to have ignored—is dealt with at
length in Dr. C. S. Loch’s article _Charity and Charities_, Ency.
Brit., XI ed.—_Tr._
Footnote 434:
Not only as local sovereigns enforcing order, like the good Bishop
Wazo of Liége who fought down his castled robber-barons one by one in
the middle of the 11th Century, but even as high commanders for the
Emperor in distant Italy. The battle of Tusculum in 1167 was won by
the Archbishops of Köln and Mainz. English history, too, contains the
figures of warlike prelates—not only leaders of national movements
like Stephen Langton but strong-handed administrators and fighters.
The great Scots invasion of 1346 was met and defeated by the
Archbishop of York. The Bishops of Durham were for centuries
“palatines”; we find one of them serving _on pay_ in the King’s army
in France, 1348. The line of these warlike Bishops in our history
extends from Odo the brother of William the Conqueror to Scrope,
archbishop and rebel in Henry IV’s time.—_Tr._
Footnote 435:
A paraphrase of the opening of “John Tanner’s Revolutionist’s
Handbook,” Ch. V.—_Tr._
Footnote 436:
See Vol. II, pp. 116 et seq.
Footnote 437:
Rousseau’s _Contrat Social_ is paralleled by exactly equivalent
productions of Aristotle’s time.
Footnote 438:
The first on the atheistical system of Sankhya, the second (through
Socrates) on the Sophists, the third on English sensualism.
Footnote 439:
See Vol. II, pp. 441 et seq.
Footnote 440:
It was many centuries later that the Buddhist ethic of life gave rise
to a religion for simple peasantry, and it was only enabled to do so
by reaching back to the long-stiffened theology of Brahmanism and,
further back still, to very ancient popular cults. See Vol. II, pp.
378, 285.
Footnote 441:
The articles _Buddha_ and _Buddhism_ in the Ency. Brit., XI ed., by T.
W. Rhys Davids, may be studied in this connexion.—_Tr._
Footnote 442:
See “The Questions of King Milinda,” ed. Rhys Davids.—_Tr._
Footnote 443:
Of course, each Culture naturally has its own kind of materialism,
conditioned in every detail by its general world-feeling.
Footnote 444:
To begin with, it would be necessary to specify _what_ Christianity
was being compared with it—that of the Fathers or that of the
Crusades. For these are two different religions in the same clothing
of dogma and cult. The same want of psychological _flair_ is evident
in the parallel that is so fashionable to-day between Socialism and
early Christianity.
Footnote 445:
The term must not be confused with _anti_-religious.
Footnote 446:
Note the striking similarity of many Roman portrait-busts to the
matter-of-fact modern heads of the American style, and also (though
this is not so distinct) to many of the portrait-heads of the Egyptian
New Empire.
Footnote 447:
See Vol. II, pp. 122 et seq.
Footnote 448:
The original is here very obscure; it reads: “... es ist der
‘Gebildete,’ jener Anhänger eines Kultus des geistigen Mittelmasses
und der Offentlichkeit als Kultstätte.”—_Tr._
Footnote 449:
See P. Wendland, _Die hellenist.-röm. Kultur_ (1912), pp. 75 et seq.
Footnote 450:
See Vol. II, pp. 318 et seq.
Footnote 451:
See Vol. II, pp. 269 et seq.
Footnote 452:
Compare my _Preussentum und Sozialismus_, pp. 22 et seq.
Footnote 453:
See Vol. II, pp. 324 et seq., 368 et seq.
Footnote 454:
See Vol. II, p. 345. It is possible that the peculiar style of
Heraclitus, who came of a priestly family of the temple of Ephesus, is
an example of the form in which the old Orphic wisdom was orally
transmitted.
Footnote 455:
See Vol. II, p. 307.
Footnote 456:
Here we are considering only the scholastic side. The mystic side,
from which Pythagoras and Leibniz were not very far, reached its
culminations in Plato and Goethe, and in our own case it has been
extended beyond Goethe by the Romantics, Hegel and Nietzsche, whereas
Scholasticism exhausted itself with Kant—and Aristotle—and degenerated
thereafter into a routine-profession.
Footnote 457:
Zeno the Stoic, not to be confused with Zeno of Elea, whose
mathematical fineness has already been alluded to.—_Tr._
Footnote 458:
_Neue Paralipomena_, § 656.
Footnote 459:
Even the modern idea that unconscious and impulsive acts of life are
completely efficient, while intellect can only bungle, is to be found
in Schopenhauer (Vol. II, cap. 30).
Footnote 460:
In the chapter “Zur Metaphysik der Geschlechtsliebe” (II, 44) the idea
of natural selection for the preservation of the genus is anticipated
in full.
Footnote 461:
See Vol. II, pp. 36 et seq.
Footnote 462:
This began to appear in 1867. But the preliminary work _Zur Kritik der
politischen Ökonomie_ came out in the same year as Darwin’s
masterpiece.
Footnote 463:
Vol. II, p. 625. See, for example, Leonard, _Relativitäts-Prinzip,
Aether, Gravitation_ (1920), pp. 20 et seq.
Footnote 464:
See Vol. II, pp. 369 et seq., 624 et seq.
Footnote 465:
See p. 57.
Footnote 466:
E.g., in Boltzmann’s formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics:
“the logarithm of the probability of a state is proportional to the
entropy of that state.” Every word in this contains an entire
scientific concept, capable only of being sensed and not described.
Footnote 467:
See Vol. II, p. 369.
Footnote 468:
See Vol. II, pp. 382 et seq.
Footnote 469:
E. Wiedermann, _Die Naturwissensch. bei den Arabern_ (1890). F.
Struntz, _Gesch. d. Naturwissensch. im Mittelalter_ (1910), p. 58.
Footnote 470:
An order of encyclopædists and philosophers; see Ency. Brit., XI ed.,
Vol. II, p. 278a.—_Tr._
Footnote 471:
M. P. E. Berthelot, _Die Chemie im Altertum u. Mittelalter_ (1909),
pp. 64 et seq. (The reference is evidently to a German version;
Berthelot published several works on the subject, viz., _Les origines
de l’Alchémie_ [1885]; _Introduction à l’étude de la chimie des
anciens et du moyen âge_ [1889]; _Collection des anciens alchimistes
grecs_ [1887, translations of texts]; _La chimie au moyen âge_
[1893].—_Tr._
Footnote 472:
For the metals, “mercury” is the principle of substantial character
(lustre, tensility, fusibility), “sulphur” that of the attributive
generation (e.g., combustion, transmutation). See Struntz, _Gesch. d.
Naturwissensch. im Mittelalter_ (1910), pp. 73 et seq.
(It seems desirable to supplement this a little for the non-technical
reader, by stating, however roughly and generally, the principle and
process of transmutation as the alchemist saw them. All metals consist
of mercury and sulphur. Remove “materiality” from common mercury (or
from the mercury-content of the metal under treatment) by depriving it
(or the metal) of “earthness,” “liquidness” and “airiness” (i.e.,
volatility) and we have a prime, substantial (though not material) and
stable thing. Similarly, remove materiality from sulphur (or the
sulphur-content of the metal treated) and it becomes an elixir,
efficient for generating attributes. Then, the prime matter and the
elixir react upon one another so that the product on reassuming
materiality is a different metal, or rather a “metallicity” endowed
with different characters and attributes. The production of one metal
from another thus depends merely on the modalities of working
processes.—_Tr._)
Footnote 473:
See Vol. II, pp. 370, 627.
Footnote 474:
See Vol. II, pp. 314 et seq.
Footnote 475:
See the article under this heading, and also that under _Alchemy_,
Ency. Brit., XI ed.—_Tr._
Footnote 476:
During the Gothic age, in spite of the Spanish Dominican Arnold of
Villanova (d. 1311), chemistry had had no sort of creative importance
in comparison with the mathematical-physical research of that age.
Footnote 477:
For even Helmholtz had sought to account for the phenomena of
electrolysis by the assumption of an atomic structure of electricity.
Footnote 478:
Which in their physical aspect are individual centres of force,
without parts or extension or figure. (For their metaphysical aspect,
see Ency. Brit., XI edition. Article _Leibniz_, especially pp. 387-8.—
_Tr._)
Footnote 479:
M. Born, _Aufbau der Materie_ (1920), p. 27.
(So many books and papers—strict, semi-popular and frankly popular—
have been published in the last few years that references may seem
superfluous, the more so as the formulation of this central theory of
present-day physics. The article _Matter_ by Rutherford in the Ency.
Brit., XIIth edition (1922), and Bertrand Russell, _The A.B.C. of
Atoms_, are perhaps the clearest elementary accounts that are
possible, having regard to the scientist’s necessary reservations of
judgment.—_Tr._
Footnote 480:
See p. 231.
Footnote 481:
See p. 172.
Footnote 482:
See p. 121 and Vol. II, pp. 11 et seq.
Footnote 483:
See p. 169.
Footnote 484:
See p. 166 and Vol. II, p. 18.
Footnote 485:
See p. 152.
Footnote 486:
See p. 116 et seq., pp. 151 et seq.
Footnote 487:
See Vol. II, pp. 369 et seq.
Footnote 488:
J. Goldziher, _Die islam. und jüd. Philosophie_ (“Kultur der
Gegenwart,” I, V, 1913), pp. 306 et seq.
Footnote 489:
See Vol. II, pp. 27 et seq., 427 et seq.
Footnote 490:
And it may be asserted that the downright faith that Haeckel, for
example, pins to the names atom, matter, energy, is not essentially
different from the fetishism of Neanderthal Man.
Footnote 491:
See p. 126.
Footnote 492:
Compare Vol. II, pp. 38 et seq.
Footnote 493:
See Vol. II, p. 305.
Footnote 494:
See Vol. II, pp. 343 et seq., and p. 346.
Footnote 495:
E. Mogk, _Germ. Mythol._, Grundr. d. Germ. Philos., III (1900), p.
340.
Footnote 496:
See Vol. II, p. 241 et seq., 306 et seq.
Footnote 497:
See p. 268.
Footnote 498:
The pantheistic idea of Pan, familiar in European poetry, is a
conception of later Classical ages, acquired in principle from Egypt.—
_Tr._
Footnote 499:
Few passages in the Acts of the Apostles have obtained a stronger hold
on _our_ imagination than Paul’s meeting with the altar of “the
Unknown God” at Phalerum (Acts XVII, 23). And yet we have perfectly
definite evidence, later than Paul’s time, of the plurality of the
gods to whom this altar was dedicated. Pausanias in his guide-book (I,
24) says: “here there are ... altars of the gods styled Unknowns, of
heroes, etc.” (βωμοί δε θεῶν τε ὀνομαζομένων Ἀγνώστων καὶ ἡρῴων ...
κ.τ.λ.). Such, however, is the force of our fixed idea that even Sir
J. G. Frazer, in his “Pausanias and Other Studies,” speaks of “The
Altar to the Unknown God which St. Paul, and Pausanias after him,
saw.” More, he follows this up with a description of a dialogue
“attributed to Lucian” (2nd Cent. A.D.) in which the Unknown God of
Athens figures in a Christian discussion; but this dialogue (the
Philopatris) is almost universally regarded as a much later work,
dating at earliest from Julian’s time (mid-4th Cent.) and probably
from that of Nicephorus Phocas (10th Cent.).—_Tr._
Footnote 500:
Wissowa, _Religion und Kultus der Römer_ (1912), p. 38.
Footnote 501:
See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article _Great Mother of the Gods_.—_Tr._
Footnote 502:
In Egypt Ptolemy Philadelphus was the first to introduce a ruler-cult.
The reverence that had been paid to the Pharaohs was of quite other
significance.
Footnote 503:
See Vol. II, pp. 241 et seq.
Footnote 504:
Significantly enough, the formula of the oath sworn by this stone was
not “per Jovis lapidem” but “per Jovem lapidem.”—_Tr._
Footnote 505:
The Erechtheum, similarly, was a group of cult-sites, each refraining
from interference with the others.—_Tr._
Footnote 506:
Juppiter Dolichenus was a local deity of Doliche in Commagene, whose
worship was spread over all parts of the Empire by soldiers recruited
from that region; the tablet dedicated to him which is in the British
Museum was found, for example, near Frankfurt-on-Main.
Sol Invictus is the Roman official form of Mithras. Troop-movements
and trade spread his worship, like that of Juppiter Dolichenus, over
the Empire.—_Tr._
Footnote 507:
To whom the inhabitants of “Roman” Carthage managed to attach even
Dido.—_Tr._
Footnote 508:
Wissowa, _Kult. und. Relig. d. Römer_ (1912), pp. 98 et seq.
Footnote 509:
Wissowa, _Relig. u. Kult. der Römer_ (1912), p. 355.
Footnote 510:
The symbolic importance of the Title, and its relation to the concept
and idea of the Person, cannot here be dealt with. It must suffice to
draw attention to the fact that the Classical is the only Culture in
which the Title is unknown. It would have been in contradiction with
the strictly somatic character of their names. Apart from personal and
family names, only the technical names of offices actually exercised
were in use. “Augustus” became at once a personal name, “Cæsar” very
soon a designation of office. The advance of the Magian feeling can be
seen in the way in which courtesy-expressions of the Late-Roman
bureaucracy, like “Vir clarissimus,” became permanent titles of honour
which could be conferred and cancelled. In just the same way, the
names of old and foreign deities became titles of the recognized
Godhead; e.g., Saviour and Healer (Asklepios) and Good Shepherd
(Orpheus) are titles of Christ. In the Classical, on the contrary, we
find the secondary names of Roman deities evolving into independent
and separate gods.
Footnote 511:
Diagoras, who was condemned to death by the Athenians for his
“godless” writings, left behind him deeply pious dithyrambs. Read,
too, Hebbel’s diaries and his letters to Elise. He “did not believe in
God,” but he prayed.
Footnote 512:
See Vol. II, p. 376.
Footnote 513:
See Vol. II, p. 244.
Footnote 514:
Livy XL, 29.—_Tr._
Footnote 515:
In the famous conclusion of his “Optics” (1706) which made a powerful
impression and became the starting-point of quite new enunciations of
theological problems, Newton limits the domain of mechanical causes as
against the Divine First Cause, whose perception-organ is necessarily
infinite space itself.
Footnote 516:
As has been shown already, the dynamic structure of our thought was
manifested first of all when Western languages changed “feci” to “ego
habeo factum,” and thereafter we have increasingly emphasized the
dynamic in the phrases with which we fix our phenomena. We say, for
instance, that industry “finds outlets for itself” and that
Rationalism “has come into power.” No Classical language allows of
such expressions. No Greek would have spoken of Stoicism, but only of
the Stoics. There is an essential difference, too, between the imagery
of Classical and that of Western poetry in this respect.
Footnote 517:
The law of the equivalence of heat and work.—_Tr._
Footnote 518:
See p. 307.
Footnote 519:
Original: “Keine dem abendländischen Geist natürliche Art der Deutung
mechanischer Tatsachen, welche die Begriffe Gestalt und Substanz
(allenfalls Raum und Masse) statt Raum, Zeit, Masse, und Kraft
zugrunde liegt.”
Footnote 520:
See foot-note, p. 314.—_Tr._
Footnote 521:
See p. 355.
Footnote 522:
See Vol. II, p. 618.
Footnote 523:
See M. Planck, _Entstehung und bisherige Entwicklung der
Quantentheorie_ (1920), pp. 17-25.
Footnote 524:
Which in many cases have led to the supposition that the “actual
existence” of atoms has now at last been proved—a singular throw-back
to the materialism of the preceding generation.
Footnote 525:
This sentence follows the original word for word and phrase for
phrase. Its significance depends wholly on the precise meaning to be
attached to such words as “dead,” “free,” “latent,” and to attempt any
sharper formulation of the processes in English would require not only
the definition of these (or other) basic terms but also extended
description of what they imply.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is something which is _absorbed by_,
rather than specified for, the student. Elsewhere in this English
edition, indications have been frequently given to enable the ordinary
student to follow up matters referred to more allusively in the text.
But in this difficult domain such minor aids would be worthless. All
that is possible is to recommend such students to make a very careful
study of some plain statement of the subject like Professor Soddy’s
“Matter and Energy” (especially chapters 4 and 5) and to follow this
up—to the extent that his mathematical knowledge permits—in the
articles _Energy_, _Energetics_ and _Thermodynamics_ in the Ency.
Brit., XI ed.—_Tr._
Footnote 526:
See foot-note, p. 157.
Footnote 527:
The application of the idea of “lifetime” to elements has in fact
produced the conception of “half-transformation times” [such as 3.85
days for Radium Emanation.—_Tr._].
Footnote 528:
The text of this paragraph has been slightly condensed, as in such a
field as this of philosophical mathematics partial indications would
serve no useful purpose. The mathematical reader may refer to the
articles _Function_, _Number_, and _Groups_ in the Ency. Brit., XI
ed.—_Tr._
INDEX
Prepared by DAVID Μ. MATTESON
Aachen Minster, and style, 200
Abaca, Evaristo F. dall’, sonatas, 283
Abel, Niels H., mathematic problem, 85
Absolutism, contemporary periods, table iii
Abydos, 58_n._;
contemporaries, table ii
Abyssinia, cult-buildings, 209
Academy, contemporaries, table i
Acanthus motive, history, 215
Acheloüs, as god, 403
Achilles, archetype, 203, 402
Acre, battle, 150
Acropolis, contemporaries, table ii. _See also_ Parthenon
Act, and portrait, 262, 266, 270
Action, in Western morale, 342
Actium, battle, 381
Activity, as Western trait, 315, 320;
as quality of Socialism, 362-364
Actuality, as test of philosophy, 41;
significance, 164
Adam de la Hale. _See_ La Hale
Addison, Joseph, type, 254
Adolescence, initiation-rites as symbol, 174_n._
Adrastos, cult, 33_n._
Ægina temple, sculpture, 226, 244
Æschines, portrait statue, 270
Æschylus, tragic form and method, 129, 320, 321;
and architecture, 206;
and motherhood, 268;
and deity, 313;
morale, 355
Æsthetics, and genius in art, 128
Æther, contradictory theories, 418
Agamemnon, contemporaries, table iii
Aggregates, theory, 426
Aglaure, cult, 406
Ahmes, arithmetic, 58
Ahriman, Persian Devil, 312
Aim, and direction, 361;
nebulousness, 363
Aksakov, Sergei, and Europe, 16_n._
Albani, Francesco, linear perspective, 240;
colour, 246
Albani villa, garden, 240
Albert of Saxony, Occamist, 381
Alberti, Leone B., gardening, 240
Alcamenes, contemporary mathematic, 78;
period, 284
Alchemy, as symbol, 248;
as Arabian physics, 382, 383;
process of transmutation, 382_n._;
and substance, 383;
and mechanical necessity, 393
Alcibiades, and Napoleon, 4;
and Classical morale, 351;
condemnation, 411
Alcman, music, 223
Alembert, Jean B. le R. d’, mathematic, 66, 78;
and time, 126;
mechanics and deism, 412
Alexander the Great, analogies, 4;
and Dionysus legend, 8;
romantic, 38;
and economic organization, 138;
expedition as episode, 147;
himself as epoch, 149;
as conqueror, 336;
morale, 349;
as paradox, 363;
deification, 405;
contemporaries, table iii
Alexander I of Russia, and Napoleon, 150
Alexandria, as a cultural left-over, 33, 73_n._, 79;
contemporaries, 112;
collections of University, 136_n._;
as irreligious, 358
Alfarabi, and extension, 178;
and dualism, 306;
contemporaries, table i
Algebra, defined, significance of letter-notation, 71;
Diophantus and Arabian Culture, 71-73;
Western liberation, 86;
contemporaries, table i.
_See also_ Mathematics
Algiers, origin of French war, 144_n._
Alhambra, courtyard, 235
Alien, and “proper”, 53
Alkabi, and extension, 178
Alkarchi, contemporaries, table i
Al-Khwarizmi, mathematic, 72;
contemporaries, table i
Alkindi, and dualism, 307;
contemporaries, table i
Allegory, motive and word, 219_n._
Almighty, philosophical attitude toward, 123. _See also_ Religion
Alphabet, and historical consciousness, 12_n._ _See also_ Language
Alsidzshi, mathematic, 72
Altar of the Unknown God, Paul’s error, 404
Amarna art, contemporaries, table ii
Ambrosian chants, and Jewish psalmody, 228
Amenemhet III, pyramid, 13;
portrait, 108, 262
Amida, and Arabian art, 209
Analogies, superficial and real historical, 4, 6, 27, 38, 39;
necessity of technique, 5
Analysis, and Classical mathematic, 69;
in Western mathematic, 74, 75;
inadequacy as term, 81;
and earlier mathematics, 84;
contemporaries, table i.
_See also_ Mathematics
Anamnesis, and comprehension of depth, 174
Ananke, and Tyche, 146
Anarchism, basis, 367, 373
Anatomy, in Classical and Western art, 264;
Michelangelo and Leonardo, 277
Anaxagoras, and ego, 311;
on atoms, 386;
and mechanical necessity, 392, 394;
condemnation, 411
Anaximander, and chaos, 64;
popularity, 327
Ancestral worship, cultural basis, 134, 135_n._
Ancient History, as term, 16
Anecdote, and Classical tragedy, 318;
Western, 318_n._
Angelico, Fra, and the antique, 275
Anthesteria, 135_n._
Antigone, and Kriemhild, 268
Antiphons, and Jewish psalmody, 228
Antisthenes, character of Nihilism, 357;
and diet, 361
Antonello da Messina, Dutch influence, 236
Apelles, contemporaries, table ii
Aphrodisias Temple in Caria, as pseudomorphic, 210
Aphrodite, as goddess, 268;
in Classical art, 268
Apocalypses, and world-history, 18_n._;
contemporaries, table i
Apollinian soul, explained, 183. _See also_ Classical Culture
Apollo Didymæus Temple, form-type, 204
Apollo of Tenea, contemporaries, table ii
Apollodorus of Athens, unpopularity, 35;
painting, 283, 325_n._
Apollodorus of Damascus, Roman architecture, 211
Apollonius Pergæus, and infinity, 69;
mathematic, 90
Appius Claudius, contemporaries, table iii
Arabesque, algebraic analogy, 72;
period, 108;
spun surface, 196;
character, 203, 212;
as symbol, 215, 248;
end-art, 223;
contemporaries, table ii
Arabian Culture, and polar idea of history, 18;
mathematic, significance of algebra, 63, 71-73;
expressions, 72;
and Late-Classical, 73, 209, 212, 214;
and Marycult, 137;
prime symbol, cavern, 174, 209, 215;
soul and dualism, 183, 305-307, 363;
“inside” architectural expression, 184, 199, 200, 224;
religious expression, 187, 188, 312, 401;
and Russian art, 201;
autumn of style, 207;
art as single phenomenon, 207-209;
art research, 209;
dome space-symbolism, 210-212;
ornamentation, 212;
fetters, 212;
emancipation, hurry, 213;
and mosaic, 214;
arch-column, 214;
Acanthus motive, 215;
and portraiture, 223, 262;
architecture in Italy, 235;
music, 228;
and Renaissance, 235;
gold as symbol, 247;
political concept, 335;
will-lessness, 309, 311;
art and spectator, 329;
and world-history, 363;
nature idea, chemistry, 382-384, 393;
religion in Late-Classical, 407;
spiritual epochs, table i;
art epochs, table ii
Arabian Nights, as symbol, 248
Arbela, battle, 151
Arcadians, provided history, 11
Arch, and column, 214, 236
Archæology, and historical repetition, 4;
cultural attitude, 14, 132, 254;
significance, 134.
Archery, Eastern and Western, 333_n._
Archimedes, style, 59;
and infinity, 69;
mathematical limitation, 84, 90;
contemporaries, 112, 386;
and metaphysics, 366;
and motion, 377;
as creator, 425
Architecture, ahistoric symbolism of Classical, 9, 12_n._;
symbolism of Egyptian, 69, 189, 202;
transition to and from Arabian, 72, 73;
Rococo as music, 87, 231, 285;
as early art of a Culture, mother-art, 128, 224;
undurable basis of Classical, 132, 198;
column, and arch, 166, 184, 204, 214, 236, 260_n._, 345;
dimension and direction, cultural relation, 169_n._, 177, 184, 205,
224;
symbolism in Chinese, 190, 196;
imitation and ornament, becoming and become, 194-198, 202;
history of techniques and ideas, 195;
of Civilization period, 197;
stage of Russian, 201;
Classical, feeble development of style, 204;
pseudomorphic Late-Classical, basilica, 209, 212, 214;
Arabian, dome type, 208, 210-212;
Western façade and visage, 224;
cathedral and infinite space, forest character, 198-200, 224, 396;
Arabian in Italy, 235;
place of Renaissance, 235;
Michelangelo and Baroque, 277;
and cultural morale, 345;
contemporary cultural epochs, table ii.
_See also_ Art; Baroque; Egyptian Culture; Doric; Gothic; Romanesque
Archytas, irrational numbers and fate, 65_n._;
and higher powers, 66;
contemporaries, 78, 90, 112, table i;
and metaphysics, 366
Arezzo, school of art, 268
Aristarchus of Samos, and Eastern thought, 9;
and heliocentric system, 68, 69, 139
Aristogiton, statue, 269_n._
Aristophanes, and burlesque, 30, 320_n._
Aristotle, ahistoric consciousness, 9;
entelechy, 15;
contemporaries, 17, table i;
and philosophy of being, 49_n._;
mechanistic world-conception, 99, 392;
and deity, 124, 313;
tabulation of categories, 125;
as collector, 136_n._;
as Plato’s opposite, 159;
on tragedy, 203, 318, 320, 321, 351;
on body and soul, 259;
on Zeuxis, 284;
and inward life, 317;
and philanthropy, 351;
and Civilization, 352;
and diet, 361;
culmination of Classical philosophy, 365, 366;
and mathematics, 366;
on atoms, 386;
as atheist, 409;
condemnation, 411
Arithmetic, Kant’s error, 6_n._;
and time, 125, 126.
_See also_ Mathematics
Army, Roman notion, 335
Arnold of Villanova, and chemistry, 384_n._
Art and arts, irrational polar idea, 20;
as sport, 35;
and future of Western Culture, 40;
as mathematical expression, 57, 58, 61, 62, 70;
Arabian, relation to algebra, 72;
and vision, 96;
causal and destiny sides, 127, 128;
Western, and “memory,” 132_n._;
mortality, 167;
religious character of early periods, 185;
lack of early Chinese survivals, 190_n._;
as expression-language, 191;
and witnesses, 191;
imitation and ornament, 191-194;
their opposition, becoming and become, 194-196;
typism, 193;
so-called, of Civilization, copyists, 197, 293-295;
meaning of style, 200, 201;
forms and cultural spirituality, 214-216;
as symbolic expression of Culture, 219, 259;
expression-methods of wordless, 219_n._;
sense-impression and classification, 220, 221;
historical boundaries, organism, 221;
species within a Culture, no rebirths, 222-224;
early period architecture as mother, 224;
Western philosophical association, 229;
secularization of Western, 230;
dominance of Western music, 231;
outward forms and cultural meaning, 238;
and popularity, 242;
space and philosophy, 243;
cultural basis of composition, 243;
symptom of decline, striving, 291, 292;
trained instinct and minor artists, 292, 293;
cultural association with morale, 344;
contemporary cultural epochs, table ii.
_See also_ Imitation; Ornament; Science; Style; arts by name
Aryan hero-tales, contemporaries, table i
Asklepios, as Christian title, 408_n._
Astrology, cultural attitude, 132, 147
Astronomy, Classical Culture and, 9;
heliocentric system, 68, 139;
dimensional figures, 83;
cultural significance, 330-332
Ataraxia, Stoic ideal, 343, 347, 352, 361
Atheism, and “God”, 312_n._;
as definite phenomenon, position, 408, 409;
cultural basis of structure, 409;
and toleration, 410, 411
Athene, as goddess, 268
Athens, and Paris, 27;
culture city, 32;
as religious, 358
Athtar, temples, 210
Atlantis, and voyages of Northmen, 332_n._
Atmosphere, in painting, 287
Atomic theories, Boscovich’s, 314_n._;
cultural basis, 384-387, 419;
disintegration hypotheses, 423
Augustan Age, Atticism, 28_n._
Augustine, Saint, and time, 124, 140;
and Jesus, 347;
contemporaries, table i
Augustus, as epoch, 140;
statue, 295
Aurelian, favourite god, 406;
contemporaries, table iii
Avalon, and Valhalla, 401
Avesta. _See_ Zend Avesta
Aviation, Leonardo’s interest, 279
Avicenna, on light, 381;
contemporaries, table i
Axum, empire, and world-history, 16, 208, 209_n._, 223
Baader, Franz X. von, and dualism, 307
Baal, shrines as basilicas, 209_n._;
cults, 406, 407;
contemporaries, table i
Baalbek, basilica, 209_n._;
Sun Temple as pseudomorphic, 210
Babylon, and time, 9, 15;
geographical science, 10;
place in history, 17;
autumnal city, 79
Baccio della Porta. _See_ Bartolommeo
Bach, John Sebastian, contemporaries, 27, 112, 417, table ii;
as analysist, 62;
contemporary mathematic, 78;
fugue, 230;
and dominance of music, 231;
and popularity, 243;
pure music, 283;
ease, 292;
ethical passion, 355;
God-feeling, 394
Bachofen, Johann J., Classical ideology, 28;
on stone, 188
Backgrounds, in Renaissance art, 237;
in Western painting, 239;
in Western gardening, 240.
_See also_ Depth-experience
Bacon, Francis, Shakespeare controversy, 135_n._
Bacon, Roger, world-conception, 99;
and mechanical necessity, 392;
contemporaries, table i
Bähr, Georg, architecture, 285
Baghdad, autumnal city, 79;
contemporary cities, 112;
philosophy of school, 248, 306, 307;
contemporaries of school, table i
Ballade, origin, 229
Bamberg Cathedral, sculpture, 235
Barbarossa, symbolism, 403
Baroque, mathematic, 58, 77;
musical association, 87, 228_n._, 230;
as stage of style, 202;
sculpture as allegory, 219_n._;
origin, 236;
depth-experience in painting, 239;
in gardening, 240;
portraits, 265;
Michelangelo’s relation, 277;
philosophy, reason and will, 308;
soul, 313, 314;
contemporaries, table ii.
_See also_ Art
Bartolommeo, Fra (Baccio della Porta), and line, 280;
dynamic God-feeling, 394
Basilica, as pseudomorphic type, 209, 210;
and Western cathedral, 211, 224;
contemporaries, table ii
Basilica of Maxentius (Constantine), Arabian influences, 212
Basra School, philosophy, 248, 306;
contemporaries, table i
_Basso continuo._ _See_ Thoroughbass.
Baths of Caracalla, Syrian workmen, 211, 212
Battista of Urbino, portrait, 279
Baudelaire, Pierre Charles, sensuousness, 35;
autumnal accent, 241;
and the decadent, 292
Bayle, Pierre, and imperialism, 150
Bayreuth. _See_ Wagner
Beauty, transience, cultural basis, 194;
as Classical rôle, 317
Become, Civilization as, 31, 46;
philosophers, 49_n._;
explained, relationships, 53;
and learning, 56;
and extension, 56;
and mathematical number, 70, 95;
relation to nature and history, 94-98, 102, 103;
and symbolism, 101;
and causality and destiny, 119;
and problem of time, 122;
and mortality, 167;
in art, 194.
_See also_ Becoming; Causality; Nature; Space
Becoming, and history, 25, 94-98, 102, 103;
philosophers, 49_n._;
explained, relationships, 53;
intuition, 56;
and direction, 56;
and chronological number, 70;
relation to nature and destiny and causality, 119, 138, 139;
and mathematics, 125, 126;
in art, 194.
_See also_ Become; Destiny; History; Time
Beech, as symbol, 396
Beethoven, Ludwig van, contemporary mathematic, 78, 90;
and pure reason, 120;
and imagination, 220;
orchestration, 231;
inwardness, “brown” music, 251, 252, 252_n._;
music as confession, 264;
period, 284;
straining, 291;
contemporaries, table ii
Bell, as Western symbol, 134_n._
Bellini, Giovanni, and portrait, 272, 273
Benares, autumnal city, 99
Benedetto da Maiano, and ornament, 238;
and portrait, 272
Bentham, Jeremy, and imperialism, 150;
and economic ascendency, 367;
contemporaries, table i
Berengar of Tours, controversy, 185
Berkeley, George, on mathematics and faith, 78_n._
Berlin, megalopolitanism, 33;
as irreligious, 79, 358
Berlioz, Hector, contemporaries, table ii
Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, contemporaries, 400, table i
Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo, architecture, 87, 231, 244, 245;
contemporaries, table ii
Bernward, Saint, as architect, 107_n._, 206
Berry, Duke of, Books of Hours, 239
Beyle, Henri. _See_ Stendhal
Bible, and periodic history, 18;
as Arabian symbol, 248.
_See also_ Christianity
Biedermeyer, contemporaries, table ii
Binchois, Égide, music, 230
Binomial theorem, discovery, 75
Biography, and portraiture, 12;
Cultures and, 13, 14;
and character, 316;
and Western tragedy, 318.
_See also_ Portraiture
Biology, and preordained life-duration, 108;
in politics, 156;
as weakest science, 157;
and Civilization, 360
Bismarck, Fürst von, wars and cultural rhythm, 110_n._;
and destiny, 145;
morale, 349
Bizet, Georges, “brown” music, 252
Blood, Leonardo’s discovery of circulation, 278
Blue, symbolism, 245, 246
Boccaccio, Giovanni, and Homer, 268_n._
Body, as symbol of Classical Culture, 174;
and geometrical systems, 176_n._;
in Arabian philosophy, 248;
and soul, Classical expression, 259-261.
_See also_ Sculpture; Spirit
Böcklin, Arnold, act and portrait, 271_n._;
painting, 289, 290
Boehme, Jakob, contemporaries, table i
Bogomils, iconoclasts, 383
Bohr, Niels, and mass, 385, 419
Boltzmann, Ludwig, on probability, 380_n._
Boniface, Saint, as missionary, 360
Book, and cult-building, 197_n._
Books of Hours, Berry’s, 239
Books of Numa, burning, 411
Boomerang, and mathematical instinct, 58
Borgias, Hellenic sorriness, 273
Boscovich, Ruggiero Giuseppe, and physics, 314_n._, 415
Botticelli, Sandro, Dutch influence, 236;
goldsmith, 237;
and portrait, 271, 272
Boucher, François, and body, 271
Boulle, André C., Chippendale’s ascendency, 150_n._
Bourbons, analogy, 39
Boyle, Robert, and element, 384
Brahmanism, transvaluation, 352;
Buddhist interpretation of Karma, 357;
contemporaries of Brahmanas, table i.
_See also_ Indian Culture
Brain, and soul, 367
Bramante, Donato d’Angnolo, plan of St. Peter’s, 184
Brancacci Chapel, 237, 279
Brass musical instruments, colour expression, 252_n._
Bronze, and Classical expression, 253;
patina, 253;
Michelangelo and, 276
Brothers of Sincerity, on light, 381;
contemporaries, table i
Brown, symbolism of studio, 250, 288;
Leonardo and, 280
Bruckner, Anton, end-art, 223;
“brown” music, 252
Bruges, loss of prestige, 33;
as religious, 358
Brunelleschi, Filippo, linear perspective, 240;
and antique, 275_n._;
architecture, 313
Bruno, Giordano, world, 56;
martyrdom, 68;
and vision, 96;
esoteric, 326;
astronomy, 331;
contemporaries, table i
Brutus, M. Junius, character, 5
Buckle, Henry T., and evolution, 371
Buddhism, and Civilization, end-phenomenon, materialism, 32, 352, 356,
357, 359, 409;
and state, 138;
Nirvana, 178, 357, 361;
morale, 341, 347;
scientific basis of ideas, 353;
moral philosophy, 355;
as peasant religion, 356_n._;
and Christianity, 357;
and contemporaries, 357, 358, 361, table i;
and diet, 361.
_See also_ Religion
Burckhardt, Jacob, Classical ideology, 28;
on Renaissance, 234
Buridan, Jean, Occamist, 381
Burlesque, Classical, 30, 320
Busts, Classical, as portraits, 269, 272
Buxtehude, Dietrich, organ works, 220
Byron, George, Lord, and Civilization, 110
Byzantinism, as Civilization, 106;
and portraiture, 130_n._;
style, 206;
Acanthus motive, 215;
allegorical painting, 219_n._;
contemporaries, tables ii, iii.
_See also_ Arabian Culture
Byzantium, tenement houses, 34_n._
Cabeo, Nicolaus, theory of magnetism, 414
Caccias, character, 229
Cæsar, C. Julius, analogies, 4, 38;
and newspaper, 5;
and democracy, 5;
conquest of Gaul, 36_n._;
practicality, 38;
and calendar and duration, 133;
and economic organization, 138;
and destiny, 139;
bust, 272;
morale, 349;
Divus Julius, 407;
contemporaries, table iii
Cæsarism, and money, 36;
contemporary periods, table iii
Calchas, cult, 185
Calculus, and Classical astronomy, 69;
limit-idea, 86;
Newtonian and Leibnizian, 126_n._;
and religion, 170;
as Jesuit style, 412;
basis threatened, 419.
_See also_ Mathematics
Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, plays as confession, 264
Calendar, Cæsar’s, 133
Caliphate, Diocletian’s government, 72, 212;
deification of caliph, 405
Callicles, ethic, 351
Calvin, John, predestination and evolution, 140_n._, 141;
and Western morale, 348;
variety of religion, 394;
contemporaries, table i
Can Grande, statue, 272
Cannæ, as climax, 36
Canning, George, and imperialism, 149_n._
Cantata, and orchestra, 230
Canzoni, character, 229
Caracalla, and citizenship and army, 335, 407
Carcassonne, restoration, 254_n._
Cardano, Girolamo, and numbers, 75
Care, and distance, 12;
cultural attitude, relation to state, 136, 137;
and maternity, 267
Carissimi, Giacomo, music, pictorial character, 230, 283
Carneades, and mechanical necessity, 393
Carstens, Armus J., naturalism, 212
Carthage. _See_ Punic Wars
Carthaginians, and geography, 10_n._, 333
Castle, and cathedral, 195, 229
Catacombs, art, 137_n._, 224
Categories, tabulation, 125
Catharine of Siena, Saint, and Gothic, 235
Cathedral, as ornament, 195;
and castle, 229;
forest-character, 396;
contemporaries, table ii.
_See also_ Gothic; Romanesque
Cato, M. Porcius, Stoicism and income, 33
Cauchy, Augustin Louis, notation, 77;
mathematic problem, 85;
and infinitesimal calculus, 86;
mathematical position, 90;
goal of analysis, 418;
contemporaries, table i
Causality, history and Kantian, 7;
and historiography, 28;
and number, 56;
and pure phenomenon, 111_n._;
and destiny and history, limited domain, 117-121, 151, 156-159;
and space and time, 119, 120, 142;
and principle, 121;
and grace, 141;
and reason, 308;
and Civilization, 360;
and destiny in natural science, 379;
and mechanical necessity, 392-394.
_See also_ Become; Destiny; Nature; Space
Cavern, as symbol, 200, 209, 215, 224
Celtic art, as Arabian, 215
Centre of time, and history, 103
Ceres, materiality, 403
Cervantes, Miguel de, tragic method, 319
Ceylon, Mahavansa, 12
Cézanne, Paul, landscapes, 289;
striving, 292
Chæronea, issue at battle, 35
Chalcedon, Council of, and Godhead, 209, 249
Chaldeans, astronomy, Classical reaction, 147
Chamber-music, as summit of Western art, 231
Chan-Kwo period, contemporaries, table iii
Character, and person, 259;
and will, Western ego, 314, 335;
Cultures and study, 316;
gesture as Classical substitute, 316;
in Western tragedy, Classical contrast, 317-326.
_See also_ Morale; Soul
Chardin, Jean B. S., and French tradition, 289
Chares, Helios and gigantomachia, 291
Charity. _See_ Compassion
Charlemagne, analogies, 4, 38;
contemporaries, table iii
Charles XII of Sweden, analogy, 4
Chartres Cathedral, sculpture, 235, 261
Chemistry, thoughtless hypotheses, 156_n._;
no Classical, 383;
Western so-called, 384;
as Arabian system, 384, 393;
new essence, entropy, 426.
_See also_ Natural science
Cheops, dynasty, 58_n._
Chephren, dynasty, 58_n._;
tomb-pyramid, 196, 203
Chian, contemporaries, table iii
Children, Western portraiture, 266-268. _See also_ Motherland.
Chinese Culture, historic feeling, 14;
imperialism, 37;
philosophers, 42, 45;
time-measurement, 134_n._;
ancestral worship, 135_n._;
and care, 136;
attitude toward state, 137;
economic organization, 138;
destiny-idea, landscape as prime symbol, 190, 196, 203;
lack of early art survivals, 190_n._;
and tutelage, 213;
music, 228;
gardening, 240;
bronzes, patina, 253_n._;
portraiture, 260, 262;
Civilization, 295;
soul, perspective as expression, 310_n._;
passive morale, 315, 341, 347;
and discovery, 333, 336;
political epochs, table iii.
_See also_ Cultures
Chippendale, Thomas, position, 150_n._
Chivalry, southern type, 233_n._
Chorus, in art-history, 191;
in Classical tragedy, 324
Chosroes-Nushirvan, art of period, 203
Chóu Li, on Chóu dynasty, 137
Chóu Period, and care, 137;
contemporaries, table iii
Christianity, comparisons, 4;
Eastern, and historical-periods, 22_n._;
and poor Stoics, 33_n._;
as Arabian, 72, 402;
Mary-cult, Madonna in art, 136, 267, 268;
destiny in Western, 140;
architectural expression of early, 208-211;
colour and gold as symbols, 247-250;
in Western art, spiritual space, 279;
dualism in early, 306;
“passion”, 320_n._;
Eastern, and home, 335;
Western transformation of morale, 344, 347, 348;
and Buddhism, 357;
of Fathers and Crusades, 357_n._;
missionarism, 360;
God-man problem as alchemistic, 383;
and mechanical necessity, miracles, 392, 393;
elements of Western, 399-401;
foreign gods as titles, 408_n._
_See also_ Religion
Chronology, relation of Classical Culture, 9, 10;
as number, 97, 153_n._;
and the when, 126;
and archæology, 134.
_See also_ History
Chrysippus, and Stoicism, 33, 358;
and corporeality, 177
Chuang-tsü, practical philosophy, 45
Chun-Chiu Period, contemporaries, table iii
Cicero, M. Tullius, analogy, 4
Cimabue, Giovanni, and nature, 192;
and Byzantine art, 238;
and Francis of Assisi, 249_n._;
and portraiture, 273
Cimarosa, Domenico, ease, 292
Cistercians, soul, 360
Citizenship, Classical concept, 334. _See also_ Politics
Civilization, defined, as destiny of a Culture, 31-34, 106, 252, 353,
354;
and the “become”, 31, 46;
and megalopolitanism, 32, 35;
money as symbol, 34-36;
and economic motives, 35;
imperialism, 36;
destiny of Western, 37, 38;
and scepticism, 46, 409;
Alexander-idea, 150;
English basis of Western, 151, 371;
Western, effect on history, 151;
so-called art, 197, 293-295;
style histories, 207;
Western painting, _plein-air_, 251, 288, 289;
and gigantomachia, 291;
Manet and Wagner, 293;
transvaluation of values, striving, 351, 353;
Nihilism and inward finishedness, 352;
manifestations, 353, 354;
problematic and plebeian morale, 354, 355;
and irreligion, 358;
diatribe as phenomenon, 359;
and biological philosophies, philosophical essence, 361, 367;
natural science, 417;
contemporary spiritual epochs, table i;
contemporary art epochs, table ii;
contemporary political epochs, table iii.
_See also_ Cultures
Clarke, Samuel, and imperialism, 150
Classical Culture, philosophy, culmination, 3, 45;
ahistoric basis, 8-10, 12_n._, 97, 103, 131-135, 254, 255, 264, 363;
and chronology, 9, 10_n._;
and geography, 10_n._;
religious expression, bodied pantheon, later monotheistic tendencies,
10, 11, 13, 187, 312, 397, 398, 402-408;
and mortality, funeral customs, 13, 134;
portraiture, 13, 130, 264, 265, 269, 272;
and archæology, 14;
and measurement of time, 15;
mathematic, 15, 63-65, 69, 77, 83, 84, 90;
contemporary Western periods, 26;
Western views, ideology, 27-31, 76, 81, 237, 238, 243, 254, 270, 323;
“Classical” and “antike”, 28_n._;
civilization, Rome, Stoicism, 32-34, 36, 44, 294, 352;
cosmology, astronomy, 63, 68, 69, 147, 330;
cultural significance of mathematic, 65-67, 70;
and algebra, 71;
surviving forms under Arabian Culture, 72, 73, 208;
opposition to Western soul, 78;
and space, 81-84, 88, 175_n._;
“smallness”, 83;
relation to proportion and function, 84, 85;
popularity, 85, 254, 326-328;
and destiny-idea, dramatic illustration, 129, 130, 143, 146, 147,
317-326, 424;
care and sex attitude, family and home, 136, 266-268, 334-337;
attitude toward state, 137, 147;
and economic organization, 138;
actualization of the corporeal only, sculpture, 176-178, 225, 259-
261;
soul, attributes, 183, 304, 305;
architectural expression, 184, 198, 224;
weak style, 203;
art-work and sense-organ, 220;
and music, 223, 227;
and form and content, 242;
and composition, 243;
colour, 245-247;
nature idea, statics, 263, 382-384, 392;
and discovery, 278;
painting, 287;
will-less-ness, 309, 310;
lack of character, gesture as substitute, 316;
art and time of day, 325;
morale, ethic of attitude, 341, 342, 347, 351;
and “action”, 342_n._;
cult and dogma, 401, 410;
and strange gods, 404;
scientific periods, 424;
spiritual epochs, table i;
art epochs, table ii;
political epochs, table iii.
_See also_ Art; Cultures; Renaissance; Science
Classicism, and dying Culture, 108;
defined, 197;
period in style, 207
Claude Lorrain, landscape as space, 184;
“singing” picture, 219;
and ruins, 254;
colour, 246, 288;
period, 283;
landscape as portrait, 287
Cleanliness, cultural attitude, 260
Cleisthenes, contemporaries, table iii
Cleomenes III, contemporaries, table iii
Cleon, and economic organization, 138
Clepsydra, Plato’s, 15
Clock, and historic consciousness, 14;
religious aspect, 15_n._;
cultural attitude, 131, 134
Clouds, in paintings, 239
Cluniac reform, and architecture, 185
Clytæmnestra, and Helen, 268
Cnidian Aphrodite, 108, 268
Cnossos art, 224_n._, 293;
contemporaries, table ii
Cobbett, William, population theory, 185_n._
Cognition, and nature, 94, 102, 103
Colleoni, Bartolommeo, statue, 238, 272
Colosseum, and real Rome, 44;
form type, 204;
contemporaries, table ii
Colossus of Rhodes, and gigantomachia, 291
Colour, Goethe’s theory, 157_n._, 158_n._;
and depth-experience, 242;
Classical and Western use, symbolism, 245-247;
Western blue and green, 245;
Arabian Culture and gold, 247-249;
brushwork and motion-quality, 249;
studio-brown, as symbol, 250, 288;
Leonardo’s sense, 280;
_plein-air_, 288.
_See also_ Painting
Columbus, Christopher, and Spanish ascendency, 148;
and Leonardo, 278;
and space and will, 310, 337;
spiritual result, 334
Column, as symbol, 166, 184, 214, 260_n._, 345;
Classical orders, 204;
and arch, 214, 236
Compass, symbolism, 333
Compassion, times and meaning, 347-351;
and Socialism, 362
Composition in art, cultural basis, 243
Comprehension, qualities, 99
Comte, Auguste, provincialism, 24;
and economic ascendency, 367, 373;
contemporaries, table i
Confession, as Western symbol, 131, 140, 261, 264;
absence in Renaissance art, 273
Confucius, and actuality, 42;
and analogies, 357
Conic sections, contemporaries, table i
Conquest, as Western concept, 336
Consciousness, phases, 154
Consecutives in church music, 188
Conservation of energy, and causality, 393;
and first law of thermodynamics, 413;
and concept of infinity, 418;
and entropy, 420-424
Constable, John, significance of colour, 251;
and impressionism, 288
Constantine the Great, and artistic impotence, 294;
as caliph, 405;
religion, 407
Constantinople. _See_ Byzantium; Haggia Sophia
Consus, materiality, 403
Contemplation, defined, 95
Contemporaneity, intercultural, 26, 112, 177, 202_n._, 220;
number paradigm, 90;
Classical sculpture and Western music, 226, 283, 284, 291;
in physical theories, 386;
spiritual epochs, table i;
culture epochs, table ii;
political epochs, table iii
Contending States, period in China, homology, 111
Content, and form, 242, 270
Contrition, sacrament as Western symbol, 261, 263
Conversion, impossibility, 345
Copernicus, Classical anticipation of system, 68, 139;
and destiny, 94;
discovery and Western soul, 310, 330, 331
Corelli, Arcangelo, sonatas, 226, 283;
and dominance of music, 231;
colour expression, 252_n._;
Catholicism, 268_n._
Corinth, and unknown gods, 404
Corinthian column, contemporaries, table ii. _See also_ Column
Corneille, Pierre, and unities, 323
Corot, Jean B. C., colour, 246, 289;
and nude, 271;
impressionism, 286;
landscape as portrait, 287;
ease, 292
Cosmogonies, contemporaries, table i
Cosmology, cultural attitude, 63, 68, 69, 147, 330-332.
_See also_ Astronomy
Counterpoint, and Gothic, 229;
and fugue, 230.
_See also_ Music
Counter-Reformation, Michelangelo and spirit, 275
Couperin, François, pastoral music, 240;
colour expression, 252_n._
Courbet, Gustave, landscapes, 288-290
Courtyards, Renaissance, 235
Cousin, Victor, and economic ascendency, 367
Coysevox, Antoine, sculpture, 232;
decoration, 245
Cranach, Lucas, and portraiture, 270
Crassus Dives, M. Licinius, and city of Rome, 34
Cremation, as cultural symbol, 134
Cresilas, and portraiture, 130_n._, 269
Crete, inscriptions, 12_n._;
Minoan art, 198
Cromwell, Oliver, and imperialism, 149;
contemporaries, table iii
Crusades, symbolism, 15_n._, 198;
and Trojan War, 27;
Christianity, 357_n._;
contemporaries, table iii
Ctesiphon, school, 63
Cult and dogma, cultural attitudes, 401, 410, 411;
in natural science, 412
Cultures, Spengler’s morphological theory, xi;
obligatory stages, symbols, 3, 4, 6, 38, 39;
superficial and real analogies, 4, 6, 27, 38;
theory of distinct cycles, 21, 22, 31, 78;
divergent viewpoints, 23, 46, 131;
as organisms, mortality, 26, 104, 109, 167;
contemporary periods, 26, 112, 177, 202_n._, 220;
Civilization as destiny, 31-34, 106, 252, 353, 354;
symmetry, 47;
and notion of the world, language, 55;
physiognomic meaning as essence of history, 55, 101, 104, 105;
mathematical aspects, separation, 57-63, 67, 70;
and universal validity, 60, 146, 178-180, 202, 287;
number-thought and world-idea, 70;
stages, 106, 107;
application of term “habit” or “style”, 108, 205;
recapitulation in life of individuals, 110;
homologous forms, 111;
separate destiny-ideas, 129, 145;
comparative study, 145_n._;
as interpretation of soul, 159, 180, 302-304, 307, 313, 314;
cultural and intercultural macrocosm, 165;
particular, and nature, 169;
kind of extension as symbol, 173-175;
actualization of depth-experience, 175;
plurality of prime symbols, 179, 180;
tutelage, 213;
art forms and spiritualities, 214-216;
arts of form as symbolic expression, 219;
significance of species of art, 222-224;
as bases of morale, 315, 345-347;
and times of day, 325;
and nature-law, 377-380, 382, 387;
scientific period, 381;
religious springtimes, 399-402;
renunciation, second religiousness, 424;
characteristics of seasons, table i;
contemporary art epochs, table ii;
contemporary political epochs, table iii.
_See also_ Arabian; Art; Chinese; Classical; Egyptian; History;
Indian; Macrocosm; Morphology; Nature; Spirit; Western
Cupid, as art motive, 266
Cupola. _See_ Dome
Curtius Rufus, Quintus, biography of Alexander, 4
Cusanus, Nikolaus. _See_ Nicholas of Cusa
Cuyp, Albert, landscape as portrait, 287
Cyaxares, and Henry the Fowler, 4
Cybele, cult, 406
Cynics, practicality, 45;
morale, 203, 342;
and digestion, 361;
contemporaries, table i
Cypress, as symbol, 396
Cyrenaics, practicality, 45;
contemporaries, table i
Dante Alighieri, historical consciousness, 14, 56, 142, 159;
influence of Joachim of Floris, 20;
and vision, 96;
homology, 111;
and popularity, 243;
and confession, 273;
and psychology, 319;
and time of day, 325_n._;
esoteric, 328;
morale, 355;
variety of religion, 394;
contemporaries, table i
Danton, Georges, adventurer, 149
Darwinism and evolution, and Socialism, 35, 370-372;
and practical philosophy, 45;
morphology and vision, 104_n._, 105;
Goethe and, 111_n._;
and teleology, 120;
and destiny, 140;
and cultural art-theory, 141_n._;
and usefulness, 155;
and biological politics, 156;
nature and God, 312;
anticipation, Darwin’s political-economic application, 369-373;
contemporaries, table i
Daumier, Honoré, act and portrait, 271_n._;
and grand style, 290
David, Pierre Jean, naturalism, 212
Dea Cælestis, 406
Death, and historical consciousness, 13;
and become, 54, 167;
Cultures and funeral customs, 134, 135, 185;
and space, 166;
and world-fear and symbolism, 166;
stone as emblem, 188;
and ornament, 195
Decoration, architectural, 196;
Gothic, and bodilessness, 199;
Arabian, 208, 212;
mosaic, 214;
Acanthus motive, 215.
_See also_ #Ornament#
Dedekind, Richard, notation, 77, 95
Definitions, and destiny, xiv;
fundamental, 53-56
Deism, cause, 187, 412;
concept, 312_n._;
Baroque, and mechanics, 412.
_See also_ Religion
Deities, cultural basis, 312. _See also_ Religion
Delacroix, Ferdinand V. E., and impressionism, 288;
contemporaries, table ii
Delphi, Polygnotus’s frescos, 243
Demeter cult, 83;
spring festivals, 320;
contemporaries, table i
Demeter of Knidos, statue, 136
Demetrius of Alopeke, and portraiture, 130, 269
Democracy, decay by formalism, 35;
contemporary periods, table iii.
_See also_ Politics
Democritus, and corporeality, 177;
and ego, 311;
cosmology, 331;
atoms, 385;
Leibniz as contemporary, 386;
and motion, 389;
and mechanical necessity, 392-394;
contemporaries, table i
Demosthenes, statue, 270
Depth-experience, significance, 168, 169, 172-174;
and number, 171;
and time, 172, 173;
realization as cultural symbol, 173-175;
in Western painting, 239, 246;
in Western gardening, 240;
and destiny, 241;
and philosophy in art, 243;
in portrait, 263, 266;
and impressionism, 285-287;
and will, 311;
in Socialism, 361;
and natural science, 380, 386, 394;
Western God-feeling, 395;
cathedral and organ, 396.
_See also_ Destiny; Space
Desargues, Girard, mathematic, 75
Descartes, René, civic world-outlook, 33;
and actuality, 42;
style, 61;
mathematics and religion, 66;
relation to Classical mathematic, 69;
and new number-idea, 74, 75, 81, 88, 90, 126, 188;
contemporaries, 112, table i;
and Jansenists, 314_n._;
as thinker, 366;
thinking and being, 387;
on force, 413
Des Près, Josquin, music, 230
Destiny, and pessimism, xiv;
historical, 3, 4, 6, 38-41;
as logic of time, 7;
acceptance, 40, 44;
in World War, 47;
fulfilment of Western mathematic, 90;
of a Culture, 106, 145;
and causality, 117-121;
soul and predestination, 117;
organic logic, 117;
and time and space, 119, 120;
and idea, 121;
in art, revolts, 127, 128, 233;
separate cultural ideas, illustrations, 129-131, 145-149, 189, 190,
424;
in Western Christianity, 140, 141;
and incident, 138-141, 144;
and nature, 142;
Classical “fate”, body and personality, 143, 147;
youth, 152;
and Western depth-experience, 241;
patina as symbol, 253;
and motherhood, 267;
Western, and painting, 276_n._;
ethic and soul’s view, 302, 346, 355;
and will, 308;
and Civilization, 360;
and causality in natural science, 379;
and decay of exact science, 422-424.
_See also_ Becoming; Causality; Civilization; History; Time
Devil, disappearance, 187;
and Arabian dualism, 312, 363
Diadochi, period as episode, 149, 151
Diagoras, character of atheism, 408_n._;
condemnation, 411
Diatribe, as phenomenon of Civilization, 359
Dido, cult, 406_n._
Diet, and Civilization, 361
Diez, Feodor, significance of colour, 252
Differential calculus, as symbol, 15. _See also_ Calculus
Dimension, abstract notion, 89;
significance of depth, 168;
singularity, 169_n._
Dinzenhofer, Kilian I., architecture, 285
Diocletian, as caliph, 72, 212, 405;
as epoch, 149;
and Mithras 406
Diogenes, morale, 203;
and deity, 313;
Indian kinship, 347, 357
Dionysiac movement, Alexander and legend, 8;
contemporaries, homology, 27, 110, table i;
as revolt, 233, 356;
spring festival, 320, 321, 324
Dionysius I, contemporaries, table iii
Diophantus, algebra, and Arabian Culture, 63, 71-73, 383
Dipylon vases, 73, 107, 196
Direction, and time and becoming, 54, 56;
and extension, 99, 172;
and dimension, 169_n._;
and will, 308;
and aim, 361.
_See also_ Time
Discant, music, 229
Discobolus, Myron’s, 263, 265
Discovery, as Western trait, 278, 279, 332;
and space and will, 310, 337;
spiritual results, 334
Divinities. _See_ Religion
Dogma and cult, cultural attitude, 401, 410, 411;
in natural science, 412
Doliche, Baal, 407
Dome, as Arabian art expression, 210
Dome of the Rock, characteristics, 200
Dominicans, influence of Joachim of Floris, 20
Domitian, contemporaries, table iii
Donatello, and Gothic, 225_n._;
“David”, 265;
and portrait, 272
Doric, column as symbol, 9, 195;
and Gothic, 27;
timber style, 132;
and Ionic, 205;
and Egyptian, 213;
Western exclusion, 345;
contemporaries, table ii, iii.
_See also_ Architecture; Column
Dostoyevski, Feodor M., and Europe, 16_n._;
Raskolnikov’s philosophy, 309;
and compassion, 350
Drama, cultural basis, Classical and Western, 128-131, 141_n._, 143,
147, 148, 203, 255, 317-322, 347;
German, 290;
development of Classical, 320, 321;
cultural basis of form, unities, 322, 323;
undeveloped Western, 323;
Classical elimination of individuality, 323;
chorus, 324;
and time of day, 324;
attitude toward scene, 325;
and cultural basis of morale, 347;
and philosophy of Western activism, 368, 372;
Classical, and atomic theory, 386
Dresden, architecture, 207, 285;
chamber music, 232
Droem, autumnal accent, 241
Dryads, passivity, 336;
materiality, 403
Dschang Yi, and imperialism, 37
Dualism, in Arabian Culture, 305-307, 363;
and will and reason, 309;
in religion, 312
Dühring, Eugen Karl, position in Western ethics, 373
Dürer, Albrecht, historical heads, 103;
colour, 245, 250;
and act and portrait, 270
Dufay, Guillaume, music, in Italy, 230, 236
Duns Scotus, historical place, 72;
contemporaries, table i
Dunstaple, John, music, 230
Duration. _See_ Life
Durham, palatinate, 349_n._
Dyck, Anthony van. _See_ Van Dyck
Dynamics, as Western system, 384, 393. _See also_ Natural science
Eckhardt, Meister, on imitation, 191;
mysticism, 213;
egoism, 335;
wisdom and intellect, 409;
contemporaries, table i
Economic motives. _See_ Money
Economic organization, cultural attitude toward care, 138
Economics, and Western practical ethics, 367-369.
_See also_ Politics; Socialism
Eddas, space-expression, 185, 187;
and Western religion, 400, 423;
contemporaries, table i
Edessa, school, 63, 381;
and Arabian art, 209;
Baal, 407
Edfu, temple, 294
Edward I of England, and archery, 333_n._
Edward III of England, and archery, 333_n._
Egoism, in Western Culture, 262, 302, 309, 335
Egyptian Culture, historic aspect, 12;
and immortality, 13;
and pure number, 69;
historical basis, funeral custom, 135;
and care, 136;
and Mary-cult, 137;
attitude toward state, 137;
economic organization, 138;
stone as symbol, 188;
destiny-idea, path as prime symbol, 188, 189;
architectural expression, 189, 202;
brave style, 201-203;
and tutelage, 213;
streets, 224;
art composition, 243;
sculpture, 248_n._, 266;
and portrait, 262;
Civilization, 294, 295;
view of soul, 305;
morale, 315;
and discovery, 332;
and Socialism, 347;
and man-deification, 405_n._;
art epochs, table ii;
political epochs, table iii.
_See also_ Cultures; arts by name, especially Architecture
Egyptianism, contemporary periods, table iii
Eichendorff, Joseph von, poetry, 289
Eleatic philosophy, and motion, 305_n._, 388, 390
Elements, cultural concepts of physical, 383, 384. _See also_ Atomic
theories; Natural science
Eleusinian mysteries, dramatic imitation, 320
Elis, treaty, 10_n._
Emigration, cultural attitude, 336
Empedocles, elements, 327, 383, 384;
on atoms, 386
Emperor-worship, 405, 407, 411
Empire style, as Classicism, 207;
contemporaries, table ii
Encyclopedists, contemporaries, table i
Energy, and _voluntas_, 310_n._
Engels, Friedrich, and Hegelianism, 367;
position in Western ethics, 373
England, Manchester system and Western Civilization, 29, 151, 371;
imperialism and Napoleonic epoch, 149-151
Enlightenment, Age of, and movement, 155;
effect on monasticism, 316_n._;
and tolerance, 343;
and cult and dogma, 411
Entelechy, ahistoric aspect, 15
Entropy, theory, formulations, 420;
effect, 421-424
Epaminondas, and invented history, 11
Ephesus, Council of, and Godhead, 209
Epic, and religion, 399-402
Epictetus, and Jesus, 347
Epicureanism, practicality, 45;
morale, 315;
and will, 341, 342;
contemporaries, table i
Epicurus, Indian kinship, 347;
character of Nihilism, 357;
and Socialism, 358;
and mathematics, 366;
and ethics, 367;
contemporaries, table i
Epigoni, and Socialism, 374
Epistemology, and history, 119, 355
Epochs, personal and impersonal, 148. _See also_ Incident; Destiny
Epos, contemporaries of popular, table i
Erastosthenes, as creator, 425
Erechtheum, in style history, 108, 207
Eroticism. _See_ Sex
Esoterics, in Western Culture, 326-329.
_See also_ Popularity
Etching, Leonardo’s relation, 281;
as Western art, 290
Ethics, relation to Culture, 354;
period in philosophy, 365-367;
socio-economic character of Western, 367-369;
dramatical presentation of Western, 368, 372;
evolution theory, aspects, 369-372;
landmarks of Western, 373, 374;
exhaustion of period, 374.
_See also_ Metaphysics; Morale; Philosophy
Etruscan, round-buildings, 211_n._;
contemporaries of discipline, table i
Eucharist, cultural significance, 185, 186;
as centre of Western Christianity, 247
Euclid, mathematical style, 59, 64, 65;
limitation of geometry, 67, 88;
mathematical position, 90;
parallel axiom, 176_n._
_See also_ Geometry
Eudoxus, and higher powers, 66;
and infinity, 69, 69_n._;
and mathematic, 78, 90
Euler, Leonhard, mathematic, 78, 90;
and differentials, 86;
and time, 126;
contemporaries, 231, table i
Euripides, unpopularity, 35;
foreshadowing by, 111;
end-art, 223;
tragic method, 319
Europe, as historical term, 16_n._
Evolution. _See_ Darwinism
Exhaustion-method of Archimedes, 69
Experience, and historical sense, 10;
lived and learned, 55;
in Western concept of nature, 393;
and faith, 394;
and theory, 395
Experiment, and experience, 393
Exploration. _See_ Discovery
Expressionism, farce, 294
Extension, and direction, 99, 172;
and reason, 308.
_See also_ Space
Eyck, Jan van, portraits, 272, 309;
contemporaries, table ii
Eye, in sculpture, 329
Façades, cultural significance, 224;
Renaissance, 235
Fact, and theory, 378
Fairies, cultural attitude, 336, 403
Faith, and Western mathematic, 78.
_See also_ Religion
Family, Western portraits, 266;
Civilization and race-suicide, 359.
_See also_ Motherhood
Faraday, Michael, and theory, 100, 378, 416
Farnese Bull, theatrical note, 291
Fate, cultural attitude, 129.
_See also_ Destiny
Faunus, materiality, 403
Faustian soul, explained, 183. _See also_ Western Culture
Fauxbourdon, music, 229
Fayum, 58_n._
Fear, and Classical and Western tragedy, 321
Federigo of Urbino, portrait, 279
Feeling, and “proper,” 53
Fermat, Pierre de, relation to Classical mathematic, 69;
mathematic style, 74, 75, 90;
problem, 76, 77;
contemporaries, table i
Feudalism, contemporary periods, table iii
Feuerbach, Anselm von, act and portrait, 271_n._
Feuerbach, Ludwig A., provincialism, 24;
position in Western ethics, 373;
contemporaries, table i
Fichte, Johann G., basis of Socialism, 362, 374;
esoteric, 369;
and mathematics, 374;
contemporaries, table i
Fifty-year period, cultural rhythm, 110
Fischer von Erlach, Johann B., architecture, 285
Flaminius, C., and economic motive, 36;
and imperialism, 37
Fleury, Andre, Cardinal de, policy, 4, 349
Florence, culture city, loss of prestige 29, 33;
cathedral, 184, 238;
and Arabian Culture, 211;
and Renaissance, 233-238;
and Northern art, 236;
character as state, 273.
_See also_ Renaissance; Savonarola
Fluxions, significance of Newton’s designation, 15_n._
Fontainebleau, park, 240
Force, as undefinable Western concept, numen, 390, 391, 398, 402, 412-
417;
stages of concept, 417;
contradictions, 418.
_See also_ Natural science
Forest, and Western cathedrals, 396
Form, and law, 97;
and music, 219;
and content, 242, 270
Forum of Nerva, craft-art, 198, 215
Forum of Trajan, ornament, 215
Fouquet, Nicolas, and gardening, 241
Four-part movement, 231
Fourteen Helpers, 400
Fourth dimension, and Classical mathematic, 66;
and time and space, 124
Fox, Charles James, contemporaries, table iii
Fragonard, Jean H., and music, 232
France, and maturity of Western Culture, 148, 150;
_plein-air_ painting, 288, 289
Francesca, Piero della, and static space, 237;
perspective, 240;
and artistic change, 279, 287
Francis of Assisi, art influence, 249_n._;
morale, 348;
God-feeling, 395;
contemporaries, table i
Francis I of France, and imperial crown, 148
Franciscans, influence of Joachim of Floris, 20
François Vase, composition, 244
Frau Holle, and Mary-cult, 267
Frau Venus, symbolism, 403
Frazer, Sir J. G., error on “Unknown God”, 404_n._
Frederick the Great, and analogy, 4;
on chance, 142_n._;
contemporaries, table iii
Frederick William I of Prussia, and Socialism, 138;
Egyptian kinship, 347
Frederick William IV of Prussia, and German unity, 145
Free will, and destiny, 140, 141. _See also_ Will
Freedom, and historical destiny, 39
Freiburg Minster, Viking Gothic, 213
French Revolution, incident and destiny in, 148, 149
Frescobaldi, Girolamo, music, 230
Frescos, Classical, and time of day, 225, 283, 325;
Renaissance, 237, 275;
displacement by oil, 279.
_See also_ Painting
Fresnel, Augustin J., light theory, 418
Friedrich, Kaspar D., and grand style, 289
Frigga, and Mary-cult, 267
Fronde, contemporaries, table iii
Front, cultural basis of architectural, 224
Fugue, style and theme, 230, 231
Function, as symbol of Western Culture, 74-78;
and proportion, 84;
contrast with Classical construction, 85;
basis of Western number, thought, 86, 87;
Goethe’s definition, 86_n._;
expansion in groups, aggregates, 89, 90, 426.
_See also_ Mathematics
Funeral customs, as cultural symbol, 134, 135, 158
Future, youth as, 152;
cultural relation, 363
Gabrieli, Andrea, music, 252
Gabrieli, Giovanni, music, 226
Galen, as copyist, 425
Galileo, and natural philosophy, 7;
on nature and mathematics, 57;
and static idea, 236, 412;
dynamic world-picture, 311;
deeds of science, 355;
concept of force, 386, 415, 417;
and motion-problem, 390;
God-feeling, 396;
contemporaries, table i
Gama, Vasco da, spiritual result, 334
Gardening, as Chinese religious art, 190;
Western, perspective, 240, 241;
Renaissance, 241;
English, and ruins, 254
Gaugamela, battle, 151
Gaul, Cæsar’s conquest, 36_n._
Gauss, Karl F., style, 59;
artist-nature, 61;
mathematical position, 78, 85, 90, 176_n._;
and nonperceptual geometry, 88;
contemporaries, 112, table i;
and dimension, 170, 172;
and popularity, 327;
and metaphysics, 366;
goal of analysis, 418
Gaza, temple, 211
Gedon, Frau, Leibl’s portrait, 252_n._, 266_n._
Generations, spiritual relation, 110_n._
Geography, Classical Culture and, 10_n._;
influence on historical terms, 16_n._
_See also_ Discovery
Geology, and mineralogy, 96
Geometry, Kant’s error, 6_n._, 170, 171;
art expression, 61;
limitation of Classical, 67, 83, 88;
Descartes and infinite, 74;
Western mathematic and term, 81;
Western liberation, 86, 170_n._;
and arithmetic, 125, 126;
systems and corporeality, 176_n._;
and popularity, cultural basis, 327.
_See also_ Mathematics
George, Henry, autumnal accent, 241
Gerbert. _See_ Sylvester II
Géricault, Jean L. A. T., and grand style, 290
Germany, union as destiny, 144;
and music and architecture, 285;
diversion from music to painting, 289
Germigny des Près, church as mosque, 201
Gernrode Cathedral, simplicity, 196;
and antique, 275_n._
Gesture, as Classical symbol, 316;
in Classical tragedy, 317
Gesu, Il, church at Rome, façade, 313;
God-feeling, 395
Ghassanid Kingdom, 215
Ghiberti, Lorenzo, and Gothic, 225_n._, 235, 238
Ghirlandaio, Il, Dutch influence, 236
Giacomo della Porta, architecture, 314;
God-feeling, 395
Gigantomachia, and decline of art, 291
Giorgione, Il, and impressionism, 239;
clouds, 240;
colour, 251, 252;
and body, 271
Giotto, childlike feeling, 212;
technique, 221;
and fresco-art, 237;
and Francis of Assisi, 249_n._;
Gothic, 235, 274;
God-feeling, 395;
contemporaries, table ii
Giovanni Pisano, sculpture, 212, 235, 238, 263
Glass painting, Gothic and Venetian, 252;
contemporaries, table ii
Gluck, Christopher W., contemporary mathematics, 78, 90;
character of arias, 219_n._;
music, 260;
period, 284
Gnostics, music, 228;
dualism, 248, 306;
contemporaries, table i
Gobelins, and music, 232
God, Western, and will, 312. _See also_ Religion
Görres, Jakob J. von, and dualism, 307
Goes, Hugo van der, in Italy, 236
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, and living nature and vision, vii, 95, 96,
105, 111_n._, 113, 140, 154, 389;
influence on Spengler, xiv;
historic consciousness, 14, 142, 159;
on life, 20;
on mankind, 21;
and world-as-history, 25, 99, 104;
as Classicist, 30;
and Darwinism, 35, 111_n._, 370;
and actuality, 42, 43;
as philosopher, 49_n._, 365_n._;
on becoming and become, 49_n._, 53;
and intuition, 56;
on vision and observation, 61;
and mathematics, 61, 65, 75;
and Plato’s Ideas, 70;
on function, 86_n._;
on form and law, 97;
on symbols, 102_n._;
on historiography, 103;
and morphology, 104_n._, 111;
on blossoming of art, 107;
display of individuality, 110;
foreshadowing by, 111;
and causal effort, nature-studies, 118, 155-157, 422;
on reasonable order, 123;
and the Almighty, 124;
dramatic form, 129, 318;
destiny in life, 139, 145, 146, 281;
and imperialism, 149;
theory of colour, 157_n._, 158_n._, 246;
as Kant’s opposite, 159;
and style as organism, 205;
and imagination, 220;
Northern pantheism, 250, 251_n._;
on soul and body, 259;
lyrics, 286;
and confession, 300;
as biographer, 316;
and time of day, 324;
Faust as symbol of Civilization, 354;
ethical passion, 355;
variety of religion, 394;
and cult and dogma, 411;
on application of reason, 412;
and world-force, 413, 417;
contemporaries, table i
Götterdämmerung, Christian form, 400
Gold, and Arabian Culture, 247;
contrasting Classical use, 253_n._
Golden Age, cultural basis of concept, 363
Golden Legend, contemporaries, 400
Gorgias, autumnal accent, 207
Gospels, contemporaries, table i
Gothic, and Doric, 27;
architecture, and depth-experience, 177, 184, 185, 187, 198-200;
cathedrals as ornament, 195;
sculpture, nude, cathedral groups, 196, 197, 227, 231, 261, 266, 272;
as stage of style, 202;
and Arabian, borrowings, 211, 213;
musical association, 229, 230;
aliveness, 233;
in Italy, and Renaissance, 234-238;
esoteric, 243;
Italian, and Francis of Assisi, 249_n._;
and later Western expression, 252;
and nature, 264;
philosophy, will and reason, 308;
God-feeling, 395;
forest, cathedral, and organ, 396;
contemporaries, tables ii, iii.
_See also_ Art; Western Culture
Goujon, Jean, sculpture, 244
Government. _See_ Politics
Goya y Lucientes, Francisco, technique, 221;
act and portrait, 271_n._, 264;
ease, 292;
contemporaries, table ii
Goyen, Jan van, landscape as portrait, 287
Gracchi, and economic organization, 138;
as incident, 139
Grace, and destiny, 140, 141
Granada, and Arabian Culture, 216
Grassmann, Hermann G., religion and mathematic, 70
Gravitation, shaky hypothesis, 418
Great Mother of Pessinus, Rome and cult, 405
Greco, El, clouds, 240
Greece, and Europe, 16_n._ _See also_ Classical Culture
Green, symbolism, 245, 246
Gregory VII, pope, morale, 349
Grote, George, narrow Classicalism, 29
Groups, as culmination of Western mathematic, 89, 90, 427
Grünewald, Matthias, clouds, 240;
colour, 246, 250, 288;
and Renaissance, 274
Guardi, Francesco, painting, 207, 220
Guercino, Giovanni F. B., colour, 246;
and musical expression, 250
Guido d’ Arezzo, music, 228
Guido da Siena, and Madonna, 267
Guilhem of Poitiers, professionalism, 229_n._
Gundisapora, school, 63
Gunpowder, relation to Baroque, 278_n._, 333
Gymnastics, and sport, 35
Habit, applied to a Culture, 108
Hadrian, analogy, 4;
Pantheon as Arabian, 211
Hadrian’s Villa, type, 211_n._
Haeckel, Ernst H., and Civilization, 252;
faith in names, 397_n._
Hageladas, contemporaries, table ii
Hagia Sophia, period, 108;
miracle, 130_n._;
character, 184, 200;
mosque as resumption, 211;
acanthus motive, 215
Halo, history, 130_n._
Hals, Frans, musical expression, 250;
period, 283
Hamadryads, materiality, 403
Han Dynasty, importance, 94;
contemporaries, table iii
Handel, George F., and dominance of music, 231;
colour expression, 252_n._;
Catholicism, 268_n._;
oratorios, 283
Hannibal, contemporaries, 112, table iii;
historical position, 144;
ethical exception, 349
Happiness, and Classical ethic, 351
Harakiri, and Greek suicide, 204_n._
Hardenberg, Karl A. von, reorganization of Prussia, 150_n._
Harmodius, statue, 269_n._
Haroun-al-Raschid, analogies, 38;
contemporaries, table ii
Hauran, basilica type, 210, 210_n._
Haydn, Joseph, contemporary mathematic, 78, 90;
orchestration, 231;
colour expression, 252_n._;
and Praxiteles, 284;
period, 284;
ease, 291;
as religious, 358
Hebbel, Friedrich, provincialism, 24;
and practical philosophy, 45;
on research and vision, 102;
and cultural contrasts, 128;
as dramatist, 143, 290;
causal effort, 156;
and Civilization, 352;
nebulous aim, 363;
and Hegelianism, 367;
and economic ethics, 370, 371, 373;
character of atheism, 408_n._
Hegel, Georg W. F., and history, 19, 22;
and mystic philosophy, 365_n._;
and mathematics, 366;
and critique of society, 367, 374;
esoteric, 369;
contemporaries, table i
Heimarmene, in Classical tragedy, 320
Hei, and Valhalla, 400
Helen, and Kriemhild, 268
Helios, as god, 147_n._, 402
Hellenism, contemporaries, tables i, ii
Hellenistic art period, contemporaries, table ii
Helmholtz, Hermann L. F. von, time and mathematic, 64;
on natural science and mechanics, 377;
on electrolysis, 385_n._;
Archimedes as contemporary, 386
Henry the Fowler, and Cyaxares, 4
Henry the Lion, morale, 349
Hera, Samian temple, 225_n._
Heracles, Vatican torso, 255
Heracles legends, contemporaries, table i
Heraclitus, morale, 268_n._, 315, 343;
popularity, 327;
and Stoicism, 356;
wisdom and intellect, 409
Heræa, treaty, 10_n._
Heræum of Olympia, timber construction, 132
Herbart, Johann F., ethics, 367
Herder, Johann G. von, and history, 19
Hermes, cults, 406
Hermes Trismegistus, and chemistry, 383
Herodotus, ahistoric consciousness, 9, 146
Hersfeld, and antique, 275_n._
Hertz, Heinrich, and theory, 378;
and motion-problem, 391, 414, 416
Hesiod, contemporaries, table i
Hilda, Saint, passing-bell, 134_n._
Hildesheim Cathedral, simplicity, 196;
and antique, 275_n._
Hipparchus, as scientist, 9, 330
Hippasus, irrational numbers and fate, 65_n._
History, Spengler and morphology, xi;
and destiny and causality, experiencing and thinking, 3, 118, 121,
151;
repetitions of expression-forms, 4, 27;
needed technique of analogies, 5;
consciousness, 8;
historic and ahistoric Cultures, 8-12, 97, 103, 132-136, 254, 255,
264, 363;
consciousness and attitude toward mortality, 13;
concept of morphology, 5-8, 26, 39, 100, 101;
form and form feeling, 15, 16;
irrational culminative division scheme, 16-18, 22;
origin of the scheme, 18;
Western development of it, 19, 20, 94;
theory of distinct Cultures, 21, 22;
provincialism of Western thinkers, 22-25;
world-as-history, thing-becoming, 25, 95;
single riddle, 48;
time essence, 49;
and intuition, 56;
definite sense and nature, 55, 57, 94;
and Culture, 55;
detached view, 93;
research and vision, 96, 102, 105, 142;
anti-historical and ahistorical, 97_n._;
chronology, 97;
as original world-form, 98;
“scientific, possibility, 98, 153, 154;
and mechanistic world-conception, 99;
and direction and extension, 99, 100;
portraiture of Cultures, 101, 104, 105;
memory-picture, 103;
elements of form-world, 103, 104;
phenomena, 105, 106;
future task, organic culture-history, 105, 159;
stages of a Culture, 106-108;
preordained durations, 109;
homology, 111;
cultural contemporaneousness, 112;
enlarged possibilities, restoration and prediction, 112, 113;
teleology and materialistic conception, 121;
cultural basis of viewpoint, 131;
cultural symbols, clock;
bell, funeral customs, museums, 131, 134-136;
cultural feeling of care, 136-138;
judgment and life, 139;
incident and destiny, Western examples, 143, 148;
grandiose demand of Western, 145;
incidental character of Classical, 146, 147;
as actualizing of a soul, 147;
impersonal and personal epochs, 148;
effect of Civilization-period, 152;
and happening, 153;
causal harmonies, 153, 154, 158;
confusion in causal method, 155-157;
physiognomic investigation, 157;
symbolism, 163;
of styles, 205;
and cultural art expression, 249, 253;
and portrait, 264;
and will, 308;
and action, 343;
cultural opposition, 386;
in natural science, 389.
_See also_ Becoming; Destiny; Nature; Politics; Spirit; Time
Hittites, inscriptions, 12_n._
Hobbema, Meyndert, colour, 246
Hobbes, Thomas, and actuality, 42
Hölderlin, Johann C. F., narrow Classicalism, 28_n._;
autumnal accent, 241;
and confession, 264;
lyrics, 286;
and fatherland, 335
Hoffmann, Ernst T. A., “Johannes Kreisler”, 276_n._, 285
Hogarth, William, position, 150_n._, 283
Holbein, Hans, colour, 250;
contemporaries, table ii
Holy Grail legend, cultural significance, 186, 198;
elements, 213
Holy Roman Empire, contemporaries, table iii
Home, Henry, on ruins, 254_n._
Home, significance of term, 33_n._;
cultural basis of conception, 83, 334-337.
_See also_ Politics
Homer, contemporaries, 27, table i;
soul, 203, 305;
religion, 268_n._;
gods, 312, 313;
popularity, 328;
and Classical ethics, 349
Homology, historical application, 111, 112
Horace, and duration, 65_n._, 132
Horizon, and mathematics, 171;
in Western landscape painting, 239, 242
Horn, Georg, and term Middle Age, 22
Horoscopes, cultural attitude, 147
Houdon, Jean A., sculpture as painting, 245
Hucbald, music, 228
Hugo van der Goes. _See_ Goes
Huguenot wars, character, 33
Humboldt, Alexander von, Ethical Socialism, 374
Hus, John, contemporaries, table i
Hwang-Ti, contemporaries, table iii
Hygiene, as phenomenon of Civilization, 361
Hyksos Period, contemporaries, 111, tables ii, iii;
feebleness, 149
Hyksos Sphinx, 108, 262
Hypsicles, as Arabian thinker, 63
Iamblichus, on statues of gods, 216;
contemporaries, table i
Ibn-al-Haitan, on light, 381
Ibn Kurra, contemporaries, table i
Ibsen, Henrik, world-conception, 20;
provincialism, 24, 33_n._;
sex problem, 35;
unpopularity, 35;
and practical philosophy, 45;
causal effort, 156;
tragic method, 318;
and morale, 346;
and Civilization, 352;
character of Nihilism, 357;
journalism, 360;
nebulous aim, 363, 364;
and socio-economic ethics, 372-374
Iconoclasts, Arabian principle, 262;
contemporaries, table i
Idea, and destiny, 121
Idolatry, Arabian iconoclasm, 262;
Classical attitude, 403
Iliad, spatial aspect, 198
Ilya Murometz, Russian saga, 201_n._
Image, cultural basis of idea, 216
Imagination, music as channel, 220
Imitation, qualities and aim, 191-194;
opposition to ornament, 194-196;
period in architecture, 197;
in music, 228.
_See also_ Ornament
Imperialism, negative character of Roman, 36;
and Civilization, 36;
Western destiny, 37, 38;
origin of Western, Napoleon’s relation, 148;
cultural attitude, 336;
cultural contemporaries, table iii
Impressionism, as space, 184;
beginning, 239;
Leonardo’s relation, 277;
full meaning, 285-287;
later _plein-air_, 288;
in Wagner’s music, 292
Improvisation, as manifestation, 195
Incident, world, 142;
and destiny, 138-144;
and cause, 142;
and style of existence, 142-147;
as basis of Western tragedy, 143;
historical use, 143.
_See also_ Destiny
India, Napoleon and, 150
Indian Culture, ahistorical basis, 11, 12, 133;
anonymous philosophy, 12;
mathematic, 84, 178;
sex attitude, 136;
attitude toward state, 137;
morale, passive, 315, 341, 347;
Buddhism and Civilization, 352;
spiritual epochs, table i.
_See also_ Buddhism; Cultures
Indo-Iranian art period, contemporaries, table ii
Infinity, and Classical mathematic, 69;
in Western Culture, 74-76, 81-84;
and new notation, 76-78;
limit as a relation, 86;
and Western science, 418, 427.
_See also_ Depth-experience; Space
Innocent III, pope, and Western morale, 348
Inquisition, and Western faith, 410
Integral calculus. _See_ Calculus
Intellect, and nature, 157. _See also_ Will
Intelligence, and atheism, 409
Interregnum, Germanic, period as episode, 149
Intuition, and learning, 55, 56
Ionic, and Doric, 205;
contemporaries, tables ii, iii.
_See also_ Architecture; Column
Irak, synagogue music, 228
Irrationalism, cultural attitude, 64-66, 68, 83
Isis, motherhood, 137;
cult, 406, 407
Islam, analogy to Mohammed, 39;
Mohammed as epoch, 149;
architectural expression, 208, 209, 211;
iconoclasm, 262;
and home, 335;
Mohammed’s unimposed mystic benefits, 344_n._;
Puritanism, 356;
Mohammed’s contemporaries, table i;
fatalism period, table i.
_See also_ Arabian Culture; Religion
Issus, battle, mosaic, 214
Italy, liberation as episode, 151;
and music, 230
I-Wang, contemporaries, table iii
Jacobins, and reason and will, 308
Jacopo della Quercia, and ornament, 238
Jahn, Friedrich L., and gymnastics, 35_n._
James, Henry, on ruins, 254_n._
Jansenism, and theoretical science, 66, 314_n._;
Puritanism, 356;
contemporaries, table i
Janus, materiality, 403
Japan, harakiri, 204_n._;
art and the nude, 262_n._
Jason of Pheræ, contemporaries, table iii
Jesuitism, and Baroque architecture, 313;
style in science, 412.
_See also_ Loyola
Jesus, as Son of Man, 309;
and Arabian morale, 344, 347;
unimposed glad tidings, 344_n._
_See also_ Christianity
Joachim of Floris, world-conception, 19, 229, 261;
and “passion”, 320_n._;
contemporaries, table i
John, Saint, and world-history, 18_n._;
dualism in Gospel, 306
Journalism, as phenomenon of Civilization, 360
Judaism, architectural expression, 209, 211_n._;
psalmody, 228;
Kabbala, dualism, 248, 307, 312;
and home 335.
_See also_ Arabian Culture
Judgment, and necessity, 393
Julius II, pope, Raphael’s portrait, 272
Juppiter Dolichenus, cult, 406_n._
Juppiter Feretrius, temple and oath, 406
Juppiter Optimus Maximus, cult, 406
Jurisprudence, esoteric Western, 328
Justinian, period of fulfilment, 107;
and Hagia Sophia, 130_n._
Justus van Gent, in Italy, 236
Kabbala, dualism, 248, 307
Kalaam, determinism, 307
Kant, Emmanuel, and space and time, 6_n._, 7, 64, 122, 124-126, 143,
169, 170, 173-175;
and history, 19;
provincialism, 23;
contemporaries, 27, table i;
final Western systematic philosophy, 45, 365-367;
as philosopher of Being, 49_n._;
and nature and mathematics, 57, 64, 68, 78, 366, 379;
_a priori_ error, 59;
mechanistic world-conception, 99;
and causality and destiny, 118-120, 151;
and the Almighty, 124;
and incident, 143;
as Goethe’s opposite, 159;
on knowledge of thought, 299;
egoism, 310, 335;
esoteric, 327;
and compassion, 350, 362;
and ethics, 354, 355;
and materialism, 368;
on judgment, 393;
on force, 413
Karlstadt, Andreas R., contemporaries, table i
Karma, Buddhist interpretation, 357
Karnak, contemporaries, table ii
Katharsis, Classical, 322, 347.
_See also_ Drama
Kelvin, Lord, and æther, 418
Kepler, Johan, mathematic and religion, 71, 330;
horoscope for Wallenstein, 147;
deeds of science, 355;
and mass, 415
Kirchhoff, Gustav R., on physics and motions, 388
Kishi, church architecture, 201_n._
Kismet, 129, 307.
_See also_ Destiny
Klein, Felix, and groups, 90
Kleist, Heinrich B. W. von, as dramatist, 290
Kleisthenes of Sikyon, tyranny, 33
Knowledge, comparative forms, 59, 60;
virtue and power, 362;
and feeling, 365;
as naming of numina, 397
Kriemhild, and Helen, 268
Krishna worship, and sex, 136_n._
Kwan-tsi, and actuality, 42
Lagrange, Comte, mathematic, 66, 78, 90;
on mechanics, 124;
and force, 417;
contemporaries, table i
La Hale, Adam de, operetta, 229
Landscape, as Chinese prime symbol, 174, 190, 196, 203;
horizon in painting, 239;
Western gardening, 240;
Baroque, as portrait 270_n._, 287;
_plein-air_, 288, 289;
and dramatic scene, 326
Lanfranc, controversy, 185
Langton, Stephen, as warrior, 349_n._
Language, of Culture, 55;
word and number, 57;
beginning of word-sense, 57;
paired root-words, 127;
personality-idea in Western, 262, 302, 309, 310, 413_n._;
as cultural function, 302_n._
_See also_ Names; Writing
Laocoön group, theatrical note, 291;
and Pre-Socratic philosophy, 305
Lao-tse, and imperialism, 37;
and actuality, 42.
Laplace, Marquis Pierre de, mathematic, 78, 90;
contemporaries, 112, table i;
and force, 413, 417
Lasso, Orlando, style, 230
Lateran Council, and Western Christianity, 247
Latin, as Stoic creation, 361
Lavoisier, Antoine L., chemistry, 384, 426
Law, and form, 97
League of Nations, Chinese ideas, 37
Learning, and intuition, 55, 56
Legends, contemporary, table i
Legnano, battle, a symbol, 349
Leibl, Wilhelm, significance of colour, 252;
portraiture, 266;
and body, 271;
and grand style, 289-291;
etching, 290;
striving, 292
Leibniz, Baron von, and actuality, 42;
mathematics, metaphysics, and religion, 56, 66, 70, 126, 366, 394;
relation to Classical mathematic, 69;
calculus, 75, 78, 82, 84, 90;
and vision, 105;
and Nicholas of Cusa, 236;
esoteric, 327;
and mystic philosophy, 365_n._;
monads as quanta of action, 385;
Democritus as contemporary, 386;
and force, 413, 415-417;
contemporaries, table i
Leipzig, battle, issue, 35
Lenbach, Franz von, copyist, 295
Le Nôtre, André, gardening, 240_n._, 241
Leo III, pope, and iconoclasm, 262
Leochares, contemporary mathematic, 90
Leonardo da Vinci, astronomical theory, 69;
spirituality, 128;
Dutch influence, 236;
and background, 237;
and impressionism, 239, 287;
and sculpture, 244;
colour, 246;
and body, 271;
and portrait, 272;
as dissatisfied thinker, 274;
discovery as basis of art, 277-279;
and circulation of the blood, 278;
and aviation, 279;
Western soul and technical limitation, 279-281;
and dynamics, 414
Lessing, Gotthold E., world-conception, 20;
and cultural contrasts, 128;
and Aristotle’s philanthropy, 351;
and cult and dogma, 411
Lessing, Karl F., colour, 252
Leucippus, atoms, 135, 385, 386
Li, contemporaries, table iii
Licinian Laws, myth, 11
Life, and soul and world, 54;
duration, specific time-value, 108;
duration applied to Culture, 109;
Classical Culture and duration, 132;
and willing, 315.
_See also_ Death
Light and shadow, cultural art attitude, 242_n._, 283, 325_n._
Light theories, electro-magnetic, 156_n._;
Newton’s, and Goethe’s theory of colour, 157_n._, 158_n._;
cultural basis, 381;
contradictory, 418
Limit, as a relation, 86
Linden, as symbol, 396
Lingam. _See_ Phallus
Lingayats, sect, 136_n._
Ling-yan-si, Saints, 260
Linois, Comte de, and India, 150_n._
Lippi, Filippino, Dutch influence, 236
Liszt, Franz, Catholicism, 268_n._;
contemporaries, table ii
Literature. _See_ Art; Drama; History; Poetry; writers by name,
especially Dante; Goethe; Ibsen
Livy, on strange gods, 405
Lochner, Stephen, God-feeling, 395
Locke, John, and imperialism, 150;
contemporaries, table i
Loggia dei Lanzi, artistic sentiment, 272
Logarithms, liberation, 88
Logic, organic and inorganic, 3, 117;
of time and space, 7;
and mathematics, convergence, 57, 427;
and morale, 354.
_See also_ Causality
Logicians, contemporaries, table i
Lokoyata, contemporaries, table i
London, culture city, 33
Loredano, doge, portrait, 272
Lorentz, Hendrik A., and Relativity, 419
Lorenzo de’ Medici, and music, 230
Lotze, Rudolf H., ethics, 367
Louis XIV, uncleanliness, 260;
contemporaries, table iii
Louisiana, Napoleon’s project, 150
Loyola, Ignatius, and style of the Church, 148;
architectural parallel, 314;
and Western morale, 348;
God-feeling, 394, 395;
and method, 412
Lucca, and Arabian Culture, 216
Lucian, and Philopatris dialogue, 404_n._
Lucullus, L., army, 36
Ludovisi Villa, garden, 240
Lully, Raymond, music, 283
Luther, Martin, and “know”, 123;
and destiny, 141;
as epoch, 149;
and works, 316_n._;
and Western morale, 348, 349, 355;
God-feeling, 394, 395;
contemporaries, table i
Luxor, contemporaries, table ii
Lycurgus, myth, 11
Lysander, deification, 405
Lysias, portrait, 270
Lysicrates, Monument of, acanthus motive, 215
Lysippus, contemporary mathematic, 90;
sculpture, 226, 260_n._;
period, 284;
canon, 287;
straining, 291;
irreligion, 358;
contemporaries, table ii
Lysistratus, and portraiture, 269
Machault, Guillaume de, and counterpoint, 229_n._
Machiavellism, and mimicry, 371
Macpherson, James, autumnal accent, 241
Macrocosm, idea, 163-165;
cultural and intercultural, 165;
expression, 180;
and style-problem, 214-216.
_See also_ History; Morphology; Nature; Symbolism; World-conceptions
Maderna, Stefano, sculpture, 244;
God-feeling, 395
Madonna, in Western art, 136, 267, 280.
_See also_ Marycult; Motherhood
Madrid, culture city, 32, 109
Madrigals, character, 229
Mæcenas, park, 34
Magdeburg Cathedral, Viking Gothic, 213
Magian soul, explained, 183. _See also_ Arabian Culture
Magnetism, Cabeo’s theory, 414
Magnitude, emancipation of Western mathematic, 74-78;
and relations, 84, 86
Mahavansa, as historical work, 12
Mainz Cathedral, and styles, 205
Makart, Hans, copyist, 295
Malatestas, Hellenic sorriness, 273
Malthus, Thomas R., and Darwinism, 350, 369, 371
Manchester system, and Western Civilization, 151, 371;
and Darwinism, 369
Mandæans, as Arabian, 72;
music, 228;
contemporaries, table i
Manet, Édouard, unpopularity, 35;
and body, 271;
landscapes, 288;
_plein-air_ painting, 288-290;
weak style, 291;
striving, 292;
and Wagner, 292;
irreligion, 358
Mani, and mystic benefits, 344_n._;
and Jesus, 347;
contemporaries, table i
Manichæanism, as Arabian, 72;
architectural expression, 209, 211;
music, 228;
dualism, 306;
and home, 335
Mankind, as abstraction, 21, 46
Mantegna, Andrea, technique, 221, 239;
and colour, 242;
and portrait, 271;
and statics, 414
Marble, and later Western sculpture, 232, 276_n._;
Greek use, 248_n._, 253;
Michelangelo’s attitude, 276.
_See also_ Stone
Marcellus II, pope, and Church music, 268_n._
Marcion, and Jesus, 347;
contemporaries, table i
Marcus Aurelius, and monotheistic tendency, 407
Marées, Hans, significance of colour, 252;
portraiture, 266, 271, 271_n._, 309;
and grand style, 289, 290;
striving, 292
Marenzio, Luca, music, 251
Marius, C., and economic motive, 36;
contemporaries, table iii
Mars Ultor, temple, ornament, 215
Marseillaise, morale, 355
Marsyas, Myron’s, lack of depth, 226
Marwitz, Friedrich A. L. von der, and Hardenberg, 150_n._
Marx, Karl, and practical philosophy, 45;
and earlier and final Socialism, 138;
and superficially incidental, 144;
character of Nihilism, 352, 357;
and Hegelianism, 367;
socio-economic ethics, 372, 373;
contemporaries, table i
Mary-cult, as symbol, 136;
Madonna in Western art, 267, 280
Masaccio, and artistic change, 237, 279, 287
Mashetta, castle, façade, 215
Mask, and Classical drama, 316, 317_n._, 318, 323
ass, Western functional concept, 415;
effect of quantum theory, 419
Materialism, and Goethe’s living nature, 111_n._;
Buddhism as, 356;
in Western ethics, 368;
and Socialism, 370
Mathematics, spatial concept, 6_n._, 7;
plurality, cultural basis, 15, 59-63, 67, 70, 101, 314;
position, 56;
and extension, 56;
and nature, 57;
wider-culture vision and analogy, 57, 58;
beginning of number-sense, 59;
as art, 61, 62, 70;
vision, 61;
of Classical Culture, positive, measurable numbers, 63-65, 69, 77;
and time and becoming, 64, 125, 126;
symbolism in Classical, 65-67, 70;
religious analogy, 66, 70, 394;
and empirical observation, 67;
character of Arabian, 71-73;
primitive levels, 73;
Western, and infinite functions, 74-76;
Western need of new notation, 76;
as expression of world-fear, 79-81;
and Western meaning of space, 81-84, 88;
and proportion and function, 84;
construction _versus_ function, 85;
virtuosity, 85;
and physiognomic morphology, 85;
Western, and limit as a relation, 86;
Western abstraction, 86, 87;
Western conflict with perception limitations, 87, 170, 171;
culmination of Western, groups, 89, 90, 426;
paradigm of Classical and Western, 90;
and the how, what, and when, 126;
cultural relation to art, 129, 130;
Classical sculpture and Western music as, 284;
impressionism, 286;
vector and Baroque art, 311;
esoteric Western, 328;
and philosophy, 366;
replacement by economics, 367;
theory of aggregates, and logic, 426;
cultural contemporary epochs, table i.
_See also_ Nature; Number; branches by name
Matter. _See_ Body; Natural science
Matthew Passion. _See_ Schütz, Heinrich
Maxwell-Hertz equations, 418
Maya Culture. _See_ Mexican
Mayer, Julius Robert, and theory, 378;
and conservation of energy, 393, 412, 417
Mazarin, Jules, Cardinal, morale, 349
Mazdaism, as Arabian, 209;
architectural expression, 211;
and pneuma, 216;
music, 228;
contemporaries, table i
Mazdak, contemporaries, table i
Meander, motive, 316, 345
Mechanics, and fourth dimension, 124.
_See also_ Motion; Natural science
Mediæval History, as term, 16, 22
Medicis, Hellenic sorriness, 273
Megalopolitanism, and Civilization of a Culture, 32-35, 38;
and systematism, 102.
_See also_ Civilization
Melody, Classical and Western, 227
Memlinc, Hans, in Italy, 236;
and Renaissance, 274
Memory, conception, 103;
as organ of history, 132;
as term, 132
Mencius, practical philosophy, 45
Mendicant Orders, as exception, 348
Menes, contemporaries, table iii
Menzel, Adolf F. E., and body, 271;
impressionism, 286;
and grand style, 290, 291
Merovingian-Carolingian Era, contemporary art epochs, table ii
Mesopotamia, synagogues, 210
Messenians, provided history, 11
Metaphysics, and scientific research, 154;
and symbolism, 163;
Western and pairs of concepts, 311;
basis of Classical, 311;
period in philosophy, 365-367.
_See also_ Ethics; Philosophy.
Mexican (Maya) Culture, and historical scheme, 16, 18;
and time measurement, 134_n._;
ornament, 196;
and tutelage, 213
Meyer, Eduard, on Spengler, x;
on Classical Culture and geography, 10_n._
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, Rossini on Huguenots, 293
Michelangelo, liberation of architecture, beginning of Baroque, 87,
206, 225_n._, 313;
materiality, obsession by the architectural, 128;
St. Peter’s, 206, 238;
and passing of sculpture, 223, 244;
anticipations, 263;
and physiognomy of muscles, 264;
nude, and portrait, 272;
sonnets, 273;
as dissatisfied thinker, 274;
unsuccessful quest of the Classical, 275-277, 281;
and marble, 276;
architecture as final expression, 277;
and popularity, 327;
God-feeling, 395;
contemporaries, table ii
Michelozzo, Bartolommeo di, and Classical, 415
Michelson, Albert A., experiments, 419
Middle Kingdom, contemporaries, tables i-iii
Milesians, physical theory, 386
Miletus, form-type of Didymæum, 204;
and Egypt, 225
Milinda, King, and Nagasena, 356
Military art, Western, 333_n._
Mill, John Stuart, and economic ascendency, 367, 373
Millennianism, as Western phenomenon, 363, 423
Mineralogy, and geology, 96
Minerva Medica, Syrian workmen, 211
Ming-Chu, contemporaries, table iii
Ming-ti, contemporaries, table iii
Minkowski, Hermann, imaginary time, 124_n._;
and Relativity, 419
Minnesänger, rules, 193;
imitative music, 229
Mino da Fiesole, and portrait, 272
Minoan art, character, 198;
contemporaries, 241
Minstrels, imitative music, 229
Mirabeau, Comte de, and imperialism, 149;
contemporaries, table iii
Miracles, cultural attitude toward, 392, 393
Missionarism, Stoic, 344_n._;
and diatribe, 360
Mithraists, and pneuma, 216;
form-language of mithræa, 224;
music, 228;
cult in Rome, 406, 406_n._
Mitylene, episode and Classical time-sense, 133_n._
Moab, Castle of Mashetta, 215
Modern History, as irrational term, 16-18
Mörike, Eduard, poetry, 289
Mohammed. _See_ Islam
Moissac, church ornamentation, 199
Molière, tragic method, 318
Mommsen, Theodor, on Classical historians, 11;
narrow Classicalism, 28
Monasticism, and Western morale, 316_n._;
order-movement, 343;
mendicant orders, 348
Money, Roman conception, 33;
as hall-mark of Civilization, 34-36
Monophysites, Islam as heir, 211;
as alchemistic problem, 383;
contemporaries, table i
Monteverde, Claudio, music, 226, 230, 249, 283
Morale, plurality, cultural basis, no conversions, 315, 345-347;
Western, and activity, 315;
and analysis, 341;
Western moral imperative, 341, 342;
intellectual and unconscious concepts, 341_n._;
Western purposeful motion, ethic of deed, 342-344, 347;
Western Christian, 344, 348;
and art, 344;
morphology, 346;
compassion, cultural types of manly virtue, 347-351;
real and presumed, phrases and meanings, 348;
Classical, and happiness, 351;
instinctive and problematic, tragic and plebeian, 354, 355;
end phenomena, cultural basis, 356-359;
Civilization and diatribe, 359, 360;
and diet, 361;
qualities and aim of Socialism, 361-364;
and cultural atomic theories, 386.
_See also_ Ethics; Spirit
Moravians, as exception, 348
Morphology, Spengler and historical, xi;
concept of historical, 5-8, 26, 39;
historical, and symbolism, 46;
historical, ignored, 47;
symmetry, 47;
historical and natural, 48;
historical, Western study of comparative, 50, 159;
comparative, knowledge forms, 60;
of mathematical operations, 85;
systematic and physiognomic, 100, 101, 121;
of world-history explained, 101;
of Cultures, 104;
historical homology, 111, 112;
element of causal and destiny, 121;
of morales, 346;
of history of philosophy, 364-374;
of exact sciences, 425
Mortality. _See_ Death
Mosaic, as cultural expression, 214;
and Arabian gold background, 247;
eyes, 329;
contemporaries, table ii
Mosque, architectural characteristics, 200, 210;
contemporaries, table ii
Motherhood, cultural attitude, meaning, 136, 137;
and destiny, portraiture, 267
Mo-ti, practical philosophy, 45
Motion, and fourth dimension, 124;
Eleatic difficulty, 305_n._;
and natural science, 377, 387-391.
_See also_ Natural science
Motion pictures, and Western character, 322
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, contemporary mathematic, 78, 90;
period, 108, 284;
orchestration, 231;
colour expression, 252_n._;
ease, 292;
contemporaries, table ii
Mummies, as symbol, 12, 13, 135
Murillo, Bartolomé, period, 283
Murtada, and will, 311
Museums, as historical symbols, 135;
change in meaning of word, 136
Music, thoroughbass and geometry, 61;
mathematical relation, 62, 63;
of Baroque period, 78;
and proportion and function, 84;
bodilessness of Western, development, 97, 177, 230, 231, 283;
history of instruments, 195;
Western church, as architectural ornament, 196, 199;
as art of form, 219, 221_n._;
and allegory, 219_n._;
as channel for imagination, 220;
Classical, 223, 227, 252_n._;
form-ideal of Western, 225;
technical contrast of Classical and Western, 227_n._;
word and organism, cultural basis, 227, 228;
Arabian, 228;
Chinese, 228;
imitation and ornament, 228;
ornamental and imitative Western, 229;
secularization, thoroughbass, 230;
of Renaissance, 234;
Flemish influence in Italy, 236;
and horizon in painting, 239;
pastoral, and gardening, 240;
esoteric Western, 243;
as Western prime phenomenon, 244, 281-284;
and Western painting, 250, 251;
instruments and colour expression, 252;
instrumental as historical expression, 255;
and uncleanliness, 260_n._;
and portrait, 262, 266;
Catholic, 268_n._;
Michelangelo’s tendency, 277;
Western, and Classical free sculpture, 283, 284;
climacteric instruments, 284;
and Rococo architecture, 285;
impressionism, 285, 286;
and later German school of painting, 289;
Wagner and death of Western, 291, 293;
his impressionism, 292;
and Western soul, 305;
and Western concept of God, 312;
and character, 314;
place of organ, 396;
Western contemporary natural science, 417;
contemporary cultural epochs, table ii.
_See also_ Art
Muspilli, and Northern myths, 400, 423
Mutazilites, contemporaries, table i
Mycenæ, funeral customs, 135;
contemporaries, tables, ii, iii
Mycerinus, dynasty, 58_n._
Myron, sculpture as planar art, 225, 226, 283;
Discobolus, 263, 264
Mysteries, Classical, 320. _See also_ Religion
Mysticism, art association, 229;
and dualism, 307;
cultural culmination, 365_n._;
and concept of force, 391;
contemporaries, table i
Myth, natural science as, 378, 387
Mythology, significance in Classical Culture, 10, 11, 13;
origin, 57.
_See also_ Religion
Nagasena, materialism, 356
Names, as overcoming fear, 123;
concretion of numina, 397
Napoleon I, analogies, 4, 5;
romantic, 38;
imperialism, 42, 149-151;
as destiny and epoch, 142, 144, 149;
egoism, 336;
morale, 349;
and toil for future, 363;
contemporaries, table iii
Napoleonic Wars, and cultural rhythm, 110_n._
Nardini, Pietro, orchestration, 231
Natural science, mechanics and motion, cultural basis of postulate,
377, 378;
fact and theory, cultural images, 378-380;
Western, and depth-experience, tension, 380, 386, 387;
and religion, cultural basis, 380-382, 391, 411, 412, 416;
scientific period of a Culture, 381;
cultural relativity, 382;
cultural nature ideas and elements, 382-384;
statics, chemistry, dynamics, cultural systems, 384;
cultural atomic theories, 384-387;
thinking-motion problem, system and life, 387-389;
mechanical and organic necessity, 391;
cultural attitude on mechanical necessity, 392-394;
things and relations, 393;
conservation of energy and Western concept of experience, 393;
theory and religion, Western God-feeling, 395;
naming of notions, 397;
and atheism, 409;
Western dogma of undefinable force, provenance, stages, 412-417;
as to Western statics, 414, 415;
mass concept of Civilization, work-idea, 416, 417;
disintegration of exact, contradictions, 417-420;
physiognomic effect of irreversibility theory, 420-424;
effect of radioactivity, 423;
decay, 424;
morphology, convergence of separate sciences, 425-427;
anthropomorphic return, 427.
_See also_ Nature
Natural selection, and Western ethics, Superman, 371. _See also_
Darwinism
Naturalism, antiquity, 33, 207, 288;
in art, 192
Nature, contrast of historical morphology, 5, 7, 8;
definite sense, and history, 55, 57, 94-98, 102, 103;
and learning, 56;
mathematics as expression, 57;
as late world-form, 98;
mechanistic world-conception, 99, 100;
systematic morphology, 100;
and causality and destiny, 119, 121, 142;
cultural viewpoints, 131, 263;
timelessness, 142, 158;
historical overlapping, living harmonies, 153, 154, 158;
and intellect, 157;
personal connotations, 169;
soul as counter-world, 301;
and reason, 308.
_See also_ Causality; History; Mathematics; Natural science; Space;
Spirit
Naucratis, and Miletus, 225_n._
Naumann, Johann C., architecture, 285
Nazzâm, on body, 248;
contemporaries, table i
Necessity, mechanical and organic, 391
Nemesis, character of Classical, 129, 320. _See also_ Destiny
Neo-Platonists, as Arabian, 72;
and pneuma, 216;
and body, 248;
dualism, 306;
unimposed mystic benefits, 344_n._
Neo-Pythagoreans, and body, 248;
and mechanical necessity, 393
Nerva, forum, 198, 215
Nestorianism, and art, 209, 211;
music, 228;
and home, 334;
as alchemistic problem, 383;
contemporaries, table i
Neumann, Karl J., on Roman myths, 11
New York City, and megalopolitanism, 33
Newton, Sir Isaac, and “fluxions”, 15_n._;
artist-nature, 61;
mathematic and religion, 70, 396, 412;
mathematical discoveries, 75, 78, 90;
and time and space, 124, 126;
light theory, and Goethe’s theory, 157_n._, 158_n._, 422;
dynamic world-picture, 311;
deeds of science, 355;
and motion-problem, 390, 391;
and metaphysics, 366;
and force and mass, 415, 417;
contemporaries, table i
Nibelungenlied, and Homer, 27;
esoteric, 328;
and Western Christianity, 400-402
Nicæa, Council of, and Godhead, 249
Nicephorus Phocas, and Philopatris dialogue, 404_n._
Nicholas of Cusa, astronomical theory, 69;
religion and mathematic, 70;
musical association, 236;
contemporaries, table i
Nicholas of Oresme, and beginning of Western mathematic, 73, 74, 279;
art association, 229;
Occamist, 381
Niese, Benedictus, on Roman myths, 11
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, influence on Spengler, xiv, 49_n._;
provincialism, 24;
Classical ideology, 28, 28_n._;
on city life, 30;
unpopularity, 35;
practical philosophy, 45;
and historical unity, 48;
and detachment, 93;
and Wagner, 111, 291, 370;
on history and definition, 158;
on art witnesses, 191;
autumnal accent, 241;
on Greeks and colour, 245;
on “brown” music, 252;
on Greeks and body, 260;
will and reason, 308;
and morale, 315, 342, 346;
and home, 335;
actuality of “Mann”, 347, 350;
and Civilization, 352;
character of Nihilism, 357;
and diet, 361;
nebulous aim, 363, 364;
and mystic philosophy, 365_n._;
and mathematics, 366;
ethics and metaphysics, 367;
materialism, 368;
and evolution and Socialism, 370-372;
position in Western ethics, 373, 374;
on pathos of distance, 386;
dynamic atheism, 409;
contemporaries, table i
Niflheim, lack of materiality, 403
Nihilism, and finale of a Culture, 352;
cultural manifestations, 357
Nirvana, ahistoric expression, 11, 133;
and zero, 178;
conception, 347, 357, 361.
_See also_ Buddhism
Nisibis, and Arabian art, 209
Northmen, discoveries, 330
Norwich Cathedral, simplicity, 196
Notre-Dame, Madonna of the St. Anne, 263
Nude, in Classical art, necessity, 130, 260-262, 317;
cultural basis of feeling, 216, 270, 272;
as element of Classical Culture only, 225
Nürnberg, loss of prestige, 33;
church statuary, 103;
church and styles, 205;
as religious, 358
Numa, cult, 185;
contemporaries, table i
Number, chronological and mathematical, 6, 7, 70, 97;
defined, 67;
numbers and mortality, 70;
Arabian indeterminate, 72;
Western Culture and functional, 74, 75, 90;
Western attitude and notation, 76, 332_n._;
symbolism, 82, 165;
astronomical, 83, 332_n._;
cultural attitudes, 88;
and the become, 95;
and numbering, 125;
Indian conception, 178;
functional, and causality, 393.
_See also_ Mathematics
Numina, naming, 397. _See also_ Religion
Nyaya, contemporaries, table i
Oak, as symbol, 396
Occamists, physical theory, 381, 389
Odo, Bishop, as warrior, 349_n._
Odysseus, as enduring, 203
Okeghem, Joannes, music, 130;
and popularity, 243
Oken, Lorenz, and dualism, 307
Old Kingdom, and care, 137;
contemporaries, tables ii, iii
Old Nordic art, as Arabian, 215
Oldach, Julius, act and portrait, 271_n._
Omar, Mosque of, characteristics, 200_n._
Ommayad period, homology, 111
Opera, and orchestra, 230
Oracle, Classical, 147
Oratorio, and orchestra, 230
Orchomenos, funeral customs, 135
Oreads, passivity, 336
Oresme. _See_ Nicholas of Oresme
Organ, and Western devotions, 396
Origen, and dualism, 306;
morale, 348;
contemporaries, table i
Ormuzd, Persian God, 312
Ornament, qualities and aim, 191-194;
opposition to imitation, 194-196;
building and its symbolic decoration, 196;
pictorial period, 197;
and Civilization, 197, 294;
in music, 228, 230, 231;
Renaissance, 233_n._, 238.
_See also_ Decoration; Imitation
Orpheus, cult, 185;
as Christian title, 408_n._;
contemporaries of discipline and movement, table i
Otto the Great, egoism, 336
Owen, Sir Richard, and morphology, 111
Pachelbel, Johann, organ works, 220
Pacher, Michael, colour, 250
Paderborn Cathedral, simplicity, 196
Pæonius, Nike, 263;
period, 284
Pæstum, temple, 224, 235
Paewati worshippers, sect, 136_n._
Painting, perspective and geometry, 61;
allegorical, 219_n._;
and form-ideal of Classical sculpture and Western music, 226, 232;
word and organism, 227;
Flemish influence in Italy, 236;
Renaissance fresco to Venetian oil, line to space, 237, 279-281;
development of background in Western, 239;
form and content, outline and colour, 242;
cultural expression and popularity, 243;
oil, as Western prime phenomenon, period, 244, 281-283;
Classical and Western colours, 245-247;
outdoor and indoor, 247;
symbolism in brushwork, 249;
of Western Civilization, 251;
Baroque portraits, 265;
and destiny of Western art, 276_n._;
Leonardo and discovery, spiritual space, 277-280;
Western studio-brown, pictorial chromatics, 250, 288;
Classical limitation, 283, 287;
full meaning of Impressionism, 285-287;
19th Century episode, _plein-air_, 288;
German school and grand style, 289;
Baroque and concept of vector, 311;
and time of day, 325;
Western, and spectator, 329;
Western, and contemporary natural science, 417;
contemporary cultural epochs, table ii.
_See also_ Art; Portraiture
Palazzo Farnese, style, 205;
Michelangelo’s cornice, 275
Palazzo Strozzi, style, 234;
and artistic sentiment, 272
Palermo, and Arabian Culture, 211, 216
Palestrina, Giovanni da, style, 220, 230, 323;
and popularity, 243;
Michelangelo’s heir, 274, 277;
God-feeling, 395
Palladio, Andrea, style, 30, 414
Palma, Jacopo, colour, 252
Palmyra, basilica, 209_n._;
Baal, 407
Pan, idea, 403
Panama Canal, Goethe’s prophecy, 42
“Panem et circenses”, as symbol, 362
Pantheon, as mosque, 72, 211
Paolo Veronese, clouds, 240;
colour, 252
Papacy, contemporaries, table iii
Paracelsus, Philippus, and chemistry, 384
Parallel axiom, 83, 88, 176_n._
Paris, and Athens, 27;
culture city, 33;
autumnal city, 79;
Flemish influence, 236_n._;
as irreligious, 358
Paris, Peace of (1763), and imperialism, 150
Park. _See_ Gardening
Parmenides, civic world-outlook, 33;
thinking and being, 387
Parthenon, Three Fates as type, 268;
horse’s head, Rubens contrast, 271;
popularity, 327
Pascal, Blaise, and actuality, 42;
faith and experience, 66, 394;
mathematic, and Archimedes, 69, 75, 90, 126;
and predestination, 141;
and Jansenists, 314_n._;
and Western morale, 348;
contemporaries, table i
Passion, in Christian cult, 320_n._
Passivity, as Classical trait, 315, 320;
and pathos, 320_n._
Past, and passing, 166
Pastels, and music, 232
Paterculus, C. Velleius, view of art, 205
Path. _See_ Way
Pathos, and passion, 320_n._
Patina, symbolism, 253
Patriotism, cultural concept, 334-337
Patristic literature, contemporaries, table i
Paul, Saint, and world-history, 18_n._;
and dualism, 306;
and will, 344;
and diatribe, 360;
error on “Unknown God”, 404
Paulicians, and art, 209, 211;
iconoclasm, 262;
contemporaries, table i
Paulinzella Monastery, simplicity, 196;
and antique, 275_n._
Pausanias, culture, 254_n._;
on altars to unknown gods, 404_n._
Pazzi, chapel, 313
Peace, Classical and Western conception, 275_n._
Peasant, as Culture relic, 354
Peloponnesian War, as epoch, 149
Pepi. _See_ Phiops
Perception, and “alien”, 53;
Western transcendency, 87-89;
space and time as forms, 169-171, 173
Percival, archetype, 402
Pergamene art, modernity, 111;
composition, 244, 260;
gigantomachia, 291, 352;
actuality, 364;
contemporaries, table ii
Pericles, homology, 111;
portrait, 130_n._, 269;
and economic organization, 138;
morale, 349
Peripatos, contemporaries, table i
Persians, architectural expression, 209;
and home, 335;
contemporary art periods, table ii.
_See also_ Arabian Culture
Perspective, Classical attitude, 109;
Western painting and gardening, 240-242;
as soul-expression, 310_n._;
Western, and astronomy, 330
Perugino, technique, 249;
and portraiture, 272;
and artistic change, 279;
simplicity, 280
Pessimism, and Spengler’s theories, xiv, 40
Peter the Great, and Europe, 16_n._
Peterborough Cathedral, simplicity, 196
Petra, Baal, 407
Petrarch, Francesco, analogy, 4;
historic consciousness, 14;
narrow Classicalism, 29, 275
Petrinism, Tolstoi’s connection, 309
Phallus, as symbol, cult, 136, 267, 320
Phidias, contemporary mathematic, 78, 90;
and portraiture, 130_n._;
and soulless body, 225, 267;
popularity, 243;
and self-criticism, 264;
and marble, 276;
and Handel, 284;
period, 284;
as religious, 358;
contemporaries, table ii
Philanthropy, Aristotle’s, 351
Philippe de Vitry, and counterpoint, 229_n._
Philo, and body, 248;
and Jesus, 347
Philopatris dialogue, source, 404_n._
Philosopher’s Stone, as symbol, 248, 307
Philosophy, truth and individual attitude, xv;
natural and historical, 7, 8;
anonymous Indian, 12;
provincialism, 22, 23;
epochal limitations, cultural boundaries, 41, 46, 364, 367;
test of value, actuality, 41-43;
present-day Western, and cultural destiny, 43-45;
development of Western practical, 45;
scepticism as final Western, 45, 374;
of becoming and become, 49_n._;
and mathematics, 56, 64, 366;
Kant’s postulates, 59;
comparative forms of knowledge, 60;
and names, 123;
scientific, of time, 124;
tabulation of categories, 125;
and death, 166;
Western art association, 229;
of Culture and Civilization, 354, 355;
cultural questions, early posing, 364;
course within each Culture, 364;
metaphysical and ethical periods, 365-367.
_See also_ Ethics; Metaphysics; Spirit
Phiops, Western contemporary, 202_n._;
statue, 265
Phlogiston theory, Stahl’s, 384
Phœnicians, and discovery, 65, 333
Phrynichus, fine, 321
Physics, cautious hypotheses, 156;
Jesuits and theoretical, 314_n._;
and popularity, cultural basis, 327, 328.
_See also_ Natural science
Physiognomy. _See_ Destiny; Portraiture
Picturesqueness, and historical expression, 255
Piero della Francesca. _See_ Francesca
Pigalle, Jean B., sculpture, 244
Pindar, as religious, 358
Pine, as symbol, 396
Piombo, Sebastiano del. _See_ Sebastiano
Piræus, and unknown gods, 404
Pisano, Giovanni. _See_ Giovanni
Pisistratidæ, as period of fulfilment, 107
Planck, Max, atomic theory, 385, 419
Plane, significance in Egyptian architecture, 189
Plastic. _See_ Sculpture
Plato, ahistoric consciousness, 9, 14;
and clepsydra, 15;
provincialism, 22;
and actuality, 42;
philosopher of the becoming, 49_n._;
metaphysics and mathematics, 56, 67, 69, 71, 84, 90, 366;
and the irrational, 66;
and Goethe’s “mothers”, 70;
and mechanistic world-conception, 99;
foreshadowing by, 111;
and the Almighty, 124;
Kant on, 125;
as Aristotle’s opposite, 159;
anamnesis, 174;
and idolatry 268_n._;
on soul, 304, 305;
and ego, 311;
and ethics, 354;
and mystic philosophy, 365_n._;
and science and religion, 394;
contemporaries, table i
_Plein-air_, as Civilization painting, 252;
characterized, 288
Pliny, on Mesopotamian temples, 210_n._;
on Lysistratus, 269;
on Lysippus, 287;
as collector, 425
Plotinus, world, 56;
and philosophical transition, 72;
and vision, 96;
homology, 111;
and body, 248;
and dualism, 306;
and Jesus, 347;
and Arabian Culture, 383;
and mechanical necessity, 393;
contemporaries, table i
Plutarch, as biographer, 14, 316;
and dualism, 306
Pneuma, as Arabian principle, 216, 329;
and eyes in Arabian art, 329.
_See also_ Dualism
Pöppelmann, Daniel, architecture, 285
Poetry, infinite space in Western, 185;
Western, as confession, 264, 273;
Western and Classical lyric, 286, 324.
_See also_ Drama; Literature
Poincaré, Henri, on mathematical vision, 61_n._
Point, and Western geometry, 74, 82, 89
_Point de vue_, in Rococo parks, 240
Polar discovery, as symbol, 335
_Polis_, as Classical symbol, 83, 147, 334
Polish, as symbol in art, 248_n._
Politics, inadequate basis for historical deductions, 46;
under Classical Culture, 83, 147, 334;
meaning of the state, 137;
spatial aspect of Western, 198;
origin of Arabian state, 212;
Renaissance attitude, 273;
cultural conception, 334-337;
and atomic theories, 386;
contemporary cultural epochs, table iii.
_See also_ Imperialism; Philosophy; Socialism
Pollaiuolo, Antonio, Dutch influence, 236;
goldsmith, 237
Polybius, ahistoric consciousness, 10
Polycletus, contemporary Western music, 27,112, 177, 284;
contemporary mathematic, 78;
sculpture, canon, 177, 225, 226, 231, 260_n._, 283, 284;
present-day appeal, 255;
and self-criticism, 264;
and statue of Augustus, 295;
and fresco, 321
Polycrates, contemporaries, table iii
Polygnotus, contemporaries, 112, table ii;
frescoes, background, colour, 147, 183, 221, 243, 245, 283, 330
Pombaditha, academy, 381
Pompeii, wall-paintings, 287
Pompey the Great, army, 36
Pope, Alexander, type, 254
Popularity, cultural basis, 85, 243, 326-328, 362;
in colour, 246
Porcelain, and Western music, 231
Porphyry, and “antique”, 20_n._;
academy, 281
Port Royal, contemporaries, table i.
_See also_ Jansenism
Porta, Baccio della. _See_ Bartolommeo
Porta, Giacomo della. _See_ Giacomo
Portinari altar, 236
Portraiture, and biography, 12;
character of Classical, nude sculpture, 13, 260, 261, 264, 265, 269,
272;
cultural basis and expression, character and attitude, 101, 104, 216,
260, 317;
portrait as Western expression, 130, 261-266;
and Arabian Culture, 223;
and Gothic, 261, 266;
and confession, 264;
contrast of act and portrait, 262, 266, 270, 271;
depth-experience, impressionism, 266, 287;
child and group portraits, motherhood, 266-268;
Renaissance, 271-273;
Leonardo’s relation, 281;
landscape as, 270_n._, 287;
Roman statues, 295;
and will, 309;
American, as irreligious, 358_n._
_See also_ Soul
Portuguese, and discovery, 333
Poseidon, temple of, as model, 224
Posidonius, and dualism, 306;
as collector, 425
Potsdam, architecture, 207
Poussin, Nicolas, musical analogy, 220;
colour, 246;
period, 283
Prag, loss of prestige, 33
Praxiteles, contemporary mathematic, 90;
sculpture, 226, 270;
Hermes, 264;
and womanhood, 268;
and Haydn, 284;
period, 284;
ease, 291
Predestination. _See_ Destiny
Present, and becoming, 54;
significance in Classical Culture, 63, 65-67
Pre-Socratics, philosophy, 41, 175, 305;
and mathematics, 366;
contemporaries, table i
Prime phenomena, Goethe’s living nature, vii, 95, 96, 105, 111_n._,
113, 140, 154, 389;
in history, 105;
and destiny, 121;
of Western Culture, 244.
_See also_ Symbols
Principle, and causality, 121
Proclus, and Jesus, 347
Procopius, courtier, 207
Progress, as phenomenon of Civilization, 352, 361
Prohibition, and Civilization, 361
Proper, and alien, 53
Proportion, and function, 84
Propylæa, popularity, 327
Protagoras, conception of man, 311, 392;
popularity, 327;
and Classical morale, 351;
and Stoicism, 356;
problem, 365;
condemnation, 411
Protestantism, colour symbolism, 250;
of etching, 290;
and works, 316_n._;
as symbol, 343.
_See also_ Reformation.
Proud’hon, Pierre Joseph, position in Western ethics, 373
Providence, and destiny, 141
Provinces, defined, 33
Provincialism, philosophical and historical, 22-25
Prussia, great periods, 36;
English basis of reorganization, 150_n._
Psalmody, Jewish, 228
Pseudomorphosis, Late-Classical style, 209-212, 214;
and image, 216;
music, 228
Psychologists, period, contemporaries, table i
Psychology, “scientific”, and soul, 299-303, 313;
as counter-physics, 301;
and will and _soma_, 319
Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and ruler-cult, 405
Ptolemy, L. Claudius, relation of Copernicus, 139_n._;
as copyist, 425
Puget, Pierre, sculpture, 244
Punic Wars, as classic, 36;
and cultural rhythm, 110_n._;
homology, 111;
intensity, 333
Purcell, Henry, pictorial music, 283
Pure reason, and destiny, 120
Puritanism, as common cultural feature, 112;
and destiny, 141;
and imperialism, 148;
cultural contemporary epochs, table i
Putto, as art motive, 266
Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, and religious painting, 288_n._
Pygmalion and Galatea, and marble, 276
Pyramids, period, 58_n._, 203
Pyrrho, contemporaries, table i
Pyrrhus, Roman war, 36
Pythagoras and Pythagoreans, analogy, 39;
and actuality, 42;
mathematical vision, 57, 58;
and Classical mathematic, 61, 62, 64;
new number, and fate, 65_n._, 82, 90;
mathematic and religion, 70, 394;
contemporaries, 112, table i;
and Copernicus, 330;
and mystic philosophy, 365_n._;
and metaphysics, 366
Quadratures, and Archimedes’ method, 69
Quantum theory, effect, 419
Quattrocento, and Gothic, 221.
_See also_ Renaissance
Quercia, Jacopo della. _See_ Jacopo
Quesnay, François, economic theory, 417
Race-suicide, as phenomenon of Civilization, 359
Radioactivity, effect on natural science, 423
Ragnarök, Muspilli as contemporary, 400;
and world’s end, 400
Rameses II, analogy, 39;
and artistic impotence, 44, 294;
contemporaries, table iii
Ranke, Leopold von, and analogy, 4, 5;
and historical tact, 22;
on historical vision, 96
Raphael Sanzio, Madonnas, 136, 268, 280;
technique, 221, 278;
and Titian, 227;
and background, 237;
popularity, 243;
colour, 245;
and confession, 264;
and portrait, 272;
as dissatisfied thinker, 274;
and fresco and oil, line and space, 279, 280
Raskolnikov. _See_ Dostoevsky
Rationalism, and chance, 142_n._;
contemporaries of English, table i
Ravenna, and Arabian Culture, 206, 211, 216, 235;
mosaics, 221, 247, 329
Rayski, Louis F. von, art and portrait, 271_n._
Reason, and will, 308
Red, symbolism, 246
Reformation, conflicts in Germany, 33;
and Dionysiac movement, 111;
as common cultural epoch, 112;
class-opposition to Renaissance, 229;
contemporaries, table i
Reims Cathedral, 224;
statuary, 267
Relations, and magnitudes, 84, 86
Relativity theory, and time, 124_n._;
effect on natural science, 419;
domain, 426
Relief, Egyptian, 189, 202;
and Classical round sculpture, 225.
_See also_ Sculpture
Religion, reality of Classical, 10, 11, 13;
relation of clock and bell, 15_n._, 134_n._;
and number, 56;
mathematical cultural analogy, 66, 70;
stage in a Culture, 108, 399-402;
second period, sequel to Civilization, 108, 424-428;
Western, and “memory”, 132_n._;
and death, 166;
birth of Western soul, 167;
and early art periods, 185;
cultural expression, 185-188, 399, 401;
Egyptian, 188;
Chinese, 190;
and imitation, 191;
architecture as ornament, 195;
Russian, 201_n._;
Arabian architecture, 208;
Classical, and art, 268;
and _plein-air_ painting, 288_n._;
revelation and dualism, 307;
cultural soul-elements, and deities, 312;
and Classical drama, 320;
and astronomy, 330;
relation to Civilization, 358;
and hygiene, 361;
and philosophy, 365;
and natural science, 380-382, 391, 411, 416;
Western experience and faith, 394;
varieties, 394;
and theory, 395;
God-feelings, 395;
depth-experience in Western, cathedral, organ, 395-397;
naming of numina, 397;
Classical bodied pantheon, 398, 402;
Western deity as force, unitary-space symbol, 398, 403, 413;
of primitive folk, 399;
elements of Western, 399-401;
Classical, and strange gods, 404;
late Classical, dislocation and monotheism, Arabian ascendency, 406-
408;
cult of deified men, 405, 407, 411;
atheism as phenomenon, 408-411;
cult and dogma, cultural attitude, 410, 411;
contemporary cultural epochs, table i.
_See also_ Death; Soul; Spirit; creeds and sects by name
Rembrandt, portraiture, and confession, 101, 103, 130, 140, 264, 266,
269, 281, 300;
contemporaries, 112, table ii;
inwardness, colour, 183, 251-253;
etchings, nights, 187, 246, 290;
musical counterpart, 220;
and horizon, 239;
esoteric, 243;
depth, 244;
and body, 271;
period, 283;
impressionism, 287, 288;
and psychology, 319
Renaissance, contemporaries, 27, table ii;
mathematic, 71;
relation to Classical, as revolt, illusion, 28_n._, 132_n._, 232-234,
237, 238, 252, 266, 272-274, 279, 323;
homology, 111;
and beautiful, 194;
and Western style, 202, 205, 206, 221, 223, 225, 244;
and Arabian and Gothic, 212, 234-238;
and polychrome sculpture, 226;
class-opposition to Reformation, 229;
ornament, 233_n._, 238;
façades and courtyards, 235;
arch and column, 236;
park, 241;
and popularity, 243, 328;
and patina, 253;
and child-figures, 266;
and portrait, 271-273;
and spiritual development, 273;
leaders as dissatisfied thinkers, 274, 281;
Michelangelo, 275-277, 281;
Raphael, 279, 280;
Leonardo, 277-281;
and background, 237;
and statics, 414
Renoir, Pierre A., striving, 292
Resaïna, academy, 381
Research, and vision, 95, 96, 102, 105, 142;
historical and scientific data, 154;
metaphysical, 163
Restorations, Western attitude toward, 254
Resurrection, change in meaning, 135_n._
Rhine River, as historic, 254_n._
Rhodes, Cecil, analogy, 4;
and imperialism, 37, 38;
morale, 349, 351
Rhodes, as “Venice of Antiquity”, 49;
and Helios, 402
Richelieu, Cardinal, morale, 349;
contemporaries, table iii
Riegl, Alois, on Arabian art, 208, 215
Riemann, Georg F. B., artist-nature, 61;
relation to Archimedes, 69;
religion and mathematic, 70;
notation, 77;
and boundlessness, 88;
mathematical position, 90;
goal of analysis, 418;
contemporaries, table i
Riemenschneider, Tilmann, and portraiture, 270
Robespierre, Maximilien, adventurer, 149;
contemporaries, table iii
Rococo, as stage of style, 202;
architecture and music, 231, 232, 285;
parks, 240;
contemporaries, table ii.
_See also_ Baroque
Rodin, Auguste, sculpture as painting, 244, 245
Rogier van der Weyden, in Italy, 236
Roman Catholicism, colour symbolism, 247-249;
and music, 268_n._;
monasticism, 316_n._, 343, 348;
esoteric dogma, 328;
prelates and manly virtue, 349.
_See also_ Christianity; Jesuitism
Roman law, and cultural-language, 310_n._
Romanesque, simplicity, 196;
as stage of style, 201, 202;
and Classical, 275_n._
Romanticism, defined, 197;
and mysticism, 365_n._;
and mathematics, 366
Rome, city, megalopolitanism, 32, 34
Rome, empire, and Classical Culture, 8;
imperialism, 36-38, 336;
and Arabian Culture, 72, 207, 208;
army and citizenship, 325;
emperor-worship, 405, 407, 411;
and toleration, 411.
_See also_ Classical Culture
Rondanini Madonna, as music, 277
Rondeau, origin, 229
Roof, as Arabian expression, 210
Rore, Cyprian de, in Italy, 236;
music, 251, 252
Rossellino, Antonio, and portrait, 272
Rossini, Gioachino, Catholicism, 268_n._;
on Meyerbeer, 293
Rottmann, Karl, and grand style, 289
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, and naturalism, 33, 207, 288;
and superficially incidental, 144;
and imperialism, 149, 150;
autumnal accent, 207;
and Civilization, 352;
contemporaries, 353_n._, table i;
and compassion, 362;
and Darwinism, 369;
intellect and wisdom, 409
Rubens, Peter Paul, colour, 253;
and body, 270, 271_n._, 278;
and dynamics, 414
Ruins, as Western expression, 254
Ruler-cult, 405, 411
Runge, Otto P., and grand style, 289
Russia, and the West, 16_n._;
stage of art, 201;
architecture, 211;
ignored art, 223;
will-less soul, 309;
culture and charity, 350
Rutherford, Sir Ernest, atoms as quanta of action, 385, 419
Ruysdael, Jakob, colour, 246;
period, 283
Sabæans, and early Christian designs, 22_n._, 209_n._;
temple-form, 210_n._;
art, 223;
art contemporaries, table ii
Sahu-rê, pyramid, 203
St. Denis, royal tombs, 261, 264
St. Lorenz Church, Nürnberg, and styles, 205
St. Mark, Venice, origins, 211
St. Patroclus, Soest, arcade-porch, 205
St. Paul without the Walls, as Pseudomorphic, 210, 210_n._
St. Peter’s, Rome, as Baroque, 206, 238
St Pierre et St Paul, Moissac, ornamentation, 199
St. Priscilla, catacombs, paintings, 137
St. Vitale, Ravenna, characteristics, 200
Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, boundlessness, 199
Saints, contemporary legends, 400, table i
Saivas, Lingayats, 136_n._
Saktas, 136_n._
Salamanca, loss of prestige, 33
Salvation Army, as exception, 348
Samarra, contemporaries, table ii
Samnites, Roman war as classic, 36, 151_n._
Samos, Hera of Cheramues, 225_n._
Sangallo, Antonio da, Palazzo Farnese façade, 275
Sankhya, and Buddhism, 353_n._, 356;
contemporaries, table i
Sant’ Andrea, Pistora, Pisano’s Sibyls, 263
Santa Maria Novella, Florence, style, 234;
Flemish paintings, 236
Sassanids, and Arabian state, 212;
art 223;
music, 228
Satyrs, materiality, 403
Savonarola, Girolamo, and art tendencies, 233;
and Renaissance, 328;
and Western morale, 348;
contemporaries, table i
Scarlatti, Alessandro, character of arias, 219_n._
Scene, dramatic, cultural basis, 325
Scepticism, as last stage of Western philosophy, 45, 374
Scharnhorst, Gerhard von, army reforms, 150_n._
Schelling, Friedrich von, and dualism, 307;
esoteric, 369;
contemporaries, table i
Schiller, Johann C. F., tragic form, 147;
banality, 155
Schirazi, and dualism, 307
Schlüter, Andreas, architecture, 244, 245, 285
Schöngauer, Martin, colour, 250
Scholasticism, art association, 229;
will and reason, 305;
and dualism, 307;
cultural culmination, 365_n._;
contemporaries, table i
Schopenhauer, Arthur, and history, 7, 29, 97_n._;
provincialism, 23, 24;
practical philosophy, 45, 368;
and mathematics, 67, 125, 366;
will, and reason, 308, 342;
and Civilization, 352;
and ethics, 354, 373;
pessimism and system, 366, 370;
and critique of society, 367;
and Darwinism, 369, 372, 373;
contemporaries, table i
Schroeter, Manfred, on criticism of Spengler, x
Schütz, Heinrich, Matthew Passion, 199, 244;
and imagination, 220;
pictorial music, 283;
God-feeling, 395
Science, of history, 153, 154;
esoteric Western, 328.
_See also_ Art; Mathematics; Natural science; Nature
Scipio, P. Cornelius, and economic organization, 138;
contemporaries, table iii
Scopas, and self-criticism, 264;
and body, 270;
period, 284
Scott, Sir Walter, as historian, 96
Scrope, Richard, as warrior, 349_n._
Sculpture, and proportion and function, 84;
Classical, as become, 97;
cultural basis, 216, 225;
form-ideal of Classical, picture-origin, 225;
polychrome, 226;
music-origin of Rococo, 231;
Gothic, 231, 261;
use of marble, 232, 249_n._, 253, 276;
Renaissance, 235, 237, 238, 253;
position in Western Culture, 244;
Egyptian, polish, 248_n._, 266;
bronze, 253, 276;
Classical expression of body as soul, 260, 261, 305;
Michelangelo’s attitude, 275-277, 281;
free Classical, and Western music, 283, 284;
Classical, and time of day, 325;
Classical, and spectator, 329;
contemporary cultural periods, table ii.
_See also_ Art; Portraiture
Sebastiano del Piombo, and Raphael, 272
Second religiousness, period in a Culture, xi, 108, 424-428;
of Rome, 306
Selene, as goddess, 147_n._, 402
Seleucus, astronomical theory, 68
Seljuk art, contemporaries, table ii
Semper, Gottfried, on style, 221
Seneca, L. Annæus, Stoicism and income, 33;
and Baroque drama, 317
Sentinum, battle, 151
Septimius Severus, favourite god, 406
Serapis, cult, 406
Serenus, as Arabian thinker, 63
Servius Tullius, myth, 11
Sesostris, court, 81;
as name, 206;
autumn of Culture, 207
Sethos I, contemporaries, table iii
Sèvres ware, and Wedgwood, 150_n._
Sex, naturalism, 24, 33, 207, 288;
problem of Civilization, 35;
cultural attitude, 136;
historical aspects, 137
Sforzas, Hellenic sorriness, 273
Shaftesbury, Earl of, and imperialism, 150
Shakespeare, William, tragic form and method, vision, 129, 130,
141_n._, 142, 143, 220, 319;
Bacon controversy, 135_n._;
and motive, 156;
as dramatist of the incidental, 142, 146;
and historical material, 255;
and Classical drama, 323;
and time of day, 324;
scenes, 325;
God-feeling, 330, 395;
ethical passion, 347, 355;
and evolution, 370
Shang Period, contemporaries, table iii
Shaw, George Bernard, sex problem, 35;
and history, 255_n._;
and morale, 346, 368, 369, 373, 374;
superman, 350;
and diet, 361;
on Schopenhauer, 367;
and Socialism and Darwinism, 371, 372
Shih-huang-ti, career, 112_n._
Shiva, cult, 136_n._
Short story, Western, 318_n._
Siegfried, archtype, 402;
contemporaries, table i
Siena, and counter-Renaissance, 234;
school, 268
Signorelli, Luca de’, and Classicism, 221;
and body and colour, 239, 242, 278;
act and portrait, 270, 271;
and statics, 414
Sikyon, Adrastos cult, 33_n._
Silesian wars, and cultural rhythm, 110_n._
Simone Martini, and Gothic, 235
Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s frescos, 263, 275, 395
Sistine Madonna, 268, 280
Six Classical Systems, contemporaries, table i
Skyscraper, and gigantomachia, 291
Sluter, Klaus, sculpture, 263
Smith, Adam, economic theory, 417
Soaring, as Western term, 397
Socialism, and Civilization, 32;
and Darwinism, 35, 370-372;
and economic motives, 36, 355;
and imperialism, 37;
Frederick William I’s practice, 138;
ethical, defined, esoteric, 328_n._, 342, 347, 351, 355, 374;
scientific basis of ideas, 353;
as end-phenomenon, 356, 357;
and contemporaries, immaturity, 357, 358, 361;
irreligion, 359, 409;
necessity, 361;
dynamic qualities, and compassion, 361;
and work, 362;
and future, 363;
tragedy of nebulous aim, 363;
and lie of life, 364;
and political economy, 367;
contemporaries, table i
Sociology, biological, 155;
and Western ethics, 367, 368
Socrates, ahistoric consciousness, 14;
ethic, 347;
and Civilization, 352;
and Stoicism, 353_n._;
intellect and wisdom 409;
condemnation, 410;
contemporaries, table i
Soest, church, 205
Sol Invictus, cult, 406, 406_n._, 407
Sonata, movement, 231
Sophists, scientific basis, 353_n._, 356;
and diet, 361;
contemporaries, table i
Sophocles, ahistoric consciousness, 9;
tragic form and method, 129, 130, 141_n._, 143, 146, 318, 321, 330,
386;
statue, 269;
deification, 405
Soul, and world and life, 54;
mathematic expression, 101;
of Cultures, inner image, 106, 303;
and predestination, 117;
individual, and macrocosm, 165, 259;
cultural designations and attributes, 183;
man as phenomenon, cultural expression, 259;
Classical “body” expression, 259-261;
Western expression in portrait, 261-266;
knowledge and faith, 299, 300;
as image of counter-world, 300;
and “exact” science, 301, 302, 313;
culture-language, 302;
cultural basis of systematic psychology, 303, 304, 307, 313, 314;
Classical static and Western dynamic, 304, 305;
Arabian dualism, 305;
will and reason, outer world parallels, 308;
Western will-culture, egoism, 308-312, 314;
and cultural religious concepts, 312, 358;
cultural basis of morale, 315;
dynamic, and biography, 315, 316;
Classical gesture, beauty, 316;
and cultural forms of tragedy, 317-326;
popularity, cultural basis, 326-329;
cultural relation to universe, 330-332;
and to discovery, 332-337;
and brain, 367.
_See also_ Morale; Portraiture; Spirit
Space, and natural morphology, 6, 7;
and the become, 56;
relation to Classical and Western Cultures, 64, 81-84, 88;
world-fear and creative expression, 79-81;
multi-dimensional, symbolism, 88, 89, 165;
direction and extension, 99, 172;
and causality and destiny, 119, 120;
awareness, 122;
and scientific time, 124, 125;
time as counter-concept, 126, 170, 172;
and death, 166;
world-experience and depth, 168, 169, 172;
perception or comprehension, 169-172;
cultural symbolism in depth-experience, 173-175;
cultural prime symbols, 174-178, 337;
Classical use of term, 175_n._;
cultural basis of concepts, 179, 310;
and architectural and religious expression of Culture, 183-188, 198-
200;
Egyptian and Chinese experiencing, 189-191, 201-203;
Western arts and prime phenomenon, 281, 282;
extension and reason, 308.
_See also_ Become; Causality; Depth-experience; Nature; Time
Spain, period of ascendency, incident and destiny, 148, 150
Spaniards, and discovery, 333
Spanish-Sicilian art, contemporaries, table ii
Spanish Succession War, and cultural rhythm, 110_n._;
as epoch, 149
Sparta, myth, 11;
and music, 223
Spencer, Herbert, and economic ascendency, 367;
contemporaries, table i
Spengler, Oswald, reception of book, ix;
basis of philosophy, xiii-xv, 49_n._
Speyer Cathedral, 185, 224
Spinoza, Baruch, and dualism, 307;
and force, 413
Spirit, and soul in Arabian dualism, 306.
_See also_ Body; History; Morale; Nature; Philosophy; Religion; Soul
Spirit land, cultural conception, 333
Spirit-wall, 203
Spitzweg, Karl, significance of colour, 252
Sport, and Civilization, 35
Stahl, Georg Ernst, chemical theory, 384
Stained glass. _See_ Glass painting
Stamitz, Johann K., Classical contemporary, 177;
and four-part movement, 231;
period, 284
State. _See_ Politics
Statics, as Classical system, 384, 393;
no Western concept, 414.
_See also_ Natural science
Statistics, and probability, 421
Steamship, Classical anticipation, 334
Stendhal, and psychology, 319
Stipel, and zero, 178_n._
Stirner, Max, and morale, 346;
and Hegelianism, 367;
contemporaries, table i
Stoicism, and Civilization, 32, 352;
and money, 33, 36;
practicality, 45;
homology, 111;
and state, 138;
and corporeality, 177;
weak soul, 203;
ethic, 315, 347, 355, 367;
and will, 344_n._, 347;
scientific basis of ideas, 353;
as end-phenomenon, 356, 357;
and contemporaries, 357, 358, 361, table i;
irreligion, 359, 409;
and diet, 361
Stone, as symbol, 188, 195, 206;
polish, 248_n._
_See also_ Architecture; Marble; Sculpture
Strassburg Minister, Arabian influence, 213
Streets, cultural attitude, 109;
Western aspect and depth-experience, 224, 241;
Egyptian aspect, 224_n._
Strindberg, August, provincialism, 24, 33_n._;
sex problem, 35;
and morale, 346, 374;
and Civilization, 352
String music, in Western Culture, 231, 252_n._
Strzygowski, Josef, on Arabian art, 184, 209
Style, as cultural emanation, 108, 200, 202;
brave Egyptian, 201-203;
Chinese, 203;
weak Classical, 203-205;
history as organism, cultural basis, 205;
stages of each style, 206;
history of Arabian, 207-214;
and technical form of arts, 220;
in natural science, 387, 391
Suez Canal, Goethe’s prophecy, 42
Sufism, contemporaries, table i
Suhrawardi, on body, 248
Suicide, cultural attitude, 204
Sulla, incident, 139;
contemporaries, table iii
Sunda, islands of, Roman knowledge, 334
Superman, in Nietzsche and Shaw, 350, 369, 370;
natural selection, 371
Sutras, contemporaries, table i
Sylvester II, pope, and clock, 15_n._
Symbolism, in living thought, xiii;
symbols of a culture, 4, 13, 31;
in historical morphology, 7, 46;
clock and bell, 14, 131, 134_n._;
money and Civilization, 34;
in the become, 101;
actuality, 101, 168;
symbols (names) and fear, 123, 193, 397;
of funeral customs, 134, 135;
of museums, 135;
of world-history, 163;
symbols defined, 163;
spatiality, 165;
and knowledge of death, 166;
kind of extension as cultural symbol, 173-175;
cultural prime symbols, plurality, 174, 179, 180, 189, 190, 196, 203,
337;
writing as cultural symbol, 197_n._;
window, 199, 210, 224;
in colour and gold, 245-249;
as replacing images, 407
Synagogues, patterns, 211_n._
Syncretism, architectural expression, 209;
cults, 228;
contemporaries, table i
Syracuse, culture city, 32;
and Plato, 42
Syria, music of sun-worship, 228;
contemporaries of art, table ii.
_See also_ Arabian Culture
Taboo, idea, 80;
effect of naming, 123;
side of art, 127.
_See also_ Religion
Tacitus, Cornelius, ahistoric consciousness, 10, 11;
limited background, 132, 133
Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles de, on life before 1789, 207
Talmud, dualism, 306;
determinism, 307;
and nature, 393;
contemporaries, table i
Tanis, Hyksos Sphinx, 108, 262
Tanit, as deity, 406
Tao, principle, 14, 190, 203, 228;
perspective, 311_n._
Tarquins, myth, 11;
contemporaries, table iii
Tartessus, realm, 332_n._
Tartini, Giuseppe, orchestration, 231;
violin story, 276_n._
Tasso, Torquato, and fixed scene, 325
Taygetus, Mount, Lycurgus as local god, 11
Technics, and future of Western Culture, 41, 44
Technique, and theory, 395
Teleology, as caricature, 120
Telephus Frieze. _See_ Pergamene
Telescope, as Western symbol, 331
Tell-el-Amarna, art, 193_n._, 293
Tellez, Gabriel. _See_ Tirso de Molina
Tellus Mater, materiality, 403
Temperature, and dynamics, 414
Templum, as cult-plan, 185
Tension, as Western principle, 386
Ten Thousand, expedition, as episode, 147, 336_n._
Terpander, music, 223
Thales, and problem of knowing, 365, 381
Thalestas, music, 223
Thebes, autumnal city, 99
Themistocles, ahistoric consciousness, 9;
morale, 349
Theocritus, irreligion, 358
Theory, and fact, 378;
and religion, 395
Theosophy, conversion, 346
Theotokos, and Mary-cult, 137_n._, 267, 268
Theresa, Saint, and Western morale, 348
Thermodynamics, first law and energy, 413;
second law, entropy, 420
Theseus legends, contemporaries, table i
Thing-become. _See_ Become
Thing-becoming. _See_ Becoming
Thinite Period, contemporaries, tables ii, iii
Thinker, defined, xiii
Third Kingdom, as Western conception, 363;
and lie of life, 364
Thirty Years’ War, as epoch, 149
Thoma, Hans, painting, 289
Thomas Aquinas, influence of Joachim of Floris, 20;
and destiny, 141;
ethic, 309;
religion, 394;
contemporaries, table i
Thoroughbass, and geometry, 61;
rise, 230
Thorwaldsen, Albert, sculpture, 245
Thothmes, workshop, 193_n._
Thucydides, ahistoric consciousness, 9;
limited background, 10, 132, 133_n._
Thunder-pattern, 196
Thuthmosis III, maturity of culture, 94;
contemporaries, table iii
Tiberius, as episode, 140;
contemporaries, table iii
Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, painting, 283;
ease, 292
Time, and historical morphology, 6;
and history, problems, 49, 95, 103, 158;
and direction, 54, 56;
and mathematics, 64, 125, 126;
enigma, as word, effect of naming, 79, 121-123;
direction and extension, 99, 172;
and destiny and causality, 119, 120;
unawareness, 122;
mechanical conception, 122;
“space of time”, 122_n._;
and Relativity, 124_n._, 419;
and space, scientific explanation, counter-concept, 124-126, 170;
ahistoric and historic drama, cultural basis, 130;
cultural symbolism of clock, 131, 134;
and cause and incident, 142;
as feeling, 154;
and nature, 158, 387-391;
past and transience, 166;
direction and dimension, 169_n._;
and depth, 172, 173;
and imitation and ornament, 193-195, 197;
direction and will, 308;
direction and aim, 361.
_See also_ Becoming; Destiny; History; Space
Time of day, cultural attitude, 324, 325
Tintoretto, background, 239
Tiresias, cult, 185
Tirso de Molina, and unities, 323
Tiryns, funeral customs, 135
Titian, period, 108;
technique, brushwork, 221, 249;
and Raphael, 227;
and colour, 242, 252;
and popularity, 243;
portraits as biography, 264;
and body, 271;
Baroque, 274;
impressionism, 286;
contemporaries, table ii
Title, symbolic importance, 408_n._
Toleration, cultural attitude, 343, 404, 410, 411
Tolstoi, Leo, and Europe, 16_n._;
provincialism, 24;
on notion of death, 166;
philosophy, 309
Totem, side of art, 128. _See also_ Religion; Taboo
Tragedy. _See_ Drama
Trajan, analogy, 39;
and Arabian art, 211;
forum, 215;
contemporaries, table iii
Transcendentalism, Western, 311
Transience, notion, 166
Trecento, so-called Renaissance, 233_n._
Trent, Council of, Jesuit domination, 148;
and Western Christianity, 247;
and church music, 268_n._;
and Western morale, 348
Trigonometry, contemporaries, table i. _See also_ Mathematics
Trinity, as physical problem, 383
Trojan War, and Crusades, 10_n._, 27
Troubadours, imitative music, 229
Truth, relativity, cultural basis, xiii, 41, 46, 60, 146, 178-180, 304,
313, 345
Tscharvaka, contemporaries, table i
Tsin, contemporaries, 37, table iii
Turfan, Indian dramas, 295
Turgot, Anne R. J., economic theory, 417
Tuscany. _See_ Florence; Renaissance
Tusculum, battle, 349_n._
Twelfth Night, 325
Twilight of the Gods, Christian form, 400
Tyche, as deity, 146
Tzigane music, improvisation, 195
Uhde, Fritz K. H. von, and religious painting, 288_n._
Ulm Minster, as model, 224
Unities, dramatic, Classical and Western attitude, 323
Universe, cultural attitude, 330-332
Upanishads, contemporaries, table i
Usefulness, cult, 155, 156
Uzzano bust, Donatello’s, 272
Vaishnavism, 136_n._
Valcashika, contemporaries, table i
Valhalla, conception, 186, 187;
history, 400;
and unitary space, 403
Valkyries, and unitary space, 403
Valmy, battle, Goethe and significance, 149
Van Dyck, Anthony, musical expression, 250
Varangians, movement-stream, 333_n._
Varro, M. Terentius, classification of gods, 11;
on religions, 394
Varyags, movement-stream, 333_n._
Vasari, Giorgio, on imitation, 192
Vase-painting, Classical, and time of day, 226, 325;
Renaissance, 237
Vatican, Raphael’s frescoes, 237, 279;
Michelangelo’s, 263, 275, 395
Vaux-le-Vicomte, park, 241
Vector, concept and Baroque art, 311;
and motion, 314
Vedanta doctrine, 352, 355;
contemporaries, table i
Vedas, homology, 111;
contemporaries, table i
Vegetarianism, and Civilization, 361
Velasquez, Diego, musical expression, 250;
and body, 271;
period, 283;
as religious, 358
Venice, and Arabian Culture, 211, 216, 235;
art ascendency, 224;
school of painting, 227, 281;
music, 230, 236, 282;
and Renaissance, 273.
_See also_ Titian
Venus and Rome, temple, 211
Verlaine, Paul, autumnal accent, 241
Vermeer, Jan, technique, 221;
colour, 251, 253;
period, 283
Veronese, Paolo. _See_ Paolo
Verrocchio, Andrea, sculpture, Colleone statue, 235, 238, 272;
goldsmith, 237;
and portrait, 271;
anti-Gothic, 275_n._
Versailles, park, 241
Vesta, materiality, 403
Viadana, Lodovico, music, 230
Vienna, master-builders, 207;
chamber music, 232
Vieta, François, significance of algebraic notation, 71
Vignola, Giacomo, architecture, liberation, 87, 313, 412
Village Sheikh, statue, 265
Violin, as Western symbol, 231, 252_n._
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene E., and restorations, 254_n._
Virtue, cultural concepts of manly, 348. _See also_ Truth
Vishnu, and Krishna, 136_n._
Vision, and history and art, 95, 96, 102, 142
Vitruvius, and arch and column, 204
Völuspá, unitary space, 185. _See also_ Eddas
Voltaire, contemporary mathematics, 66;
and imperialism, 150;
contemporaries, table i
_Voluntas_, meaning, 310_n._
Vulturnus, materiality, 403
Wagner, Richard, sensuousness, 35;
and popularity, 35, 327;
foreshadowing by, 111;
modernity, 111;
and imagination, 220;
end-art, 223, 425;
impressionism, and endless space, 282, 286, 292;
and form and size, 291, 352;
striving, 292;
and psychology, 319;
and Civilization, 352;
character of Nihilism, 357;
irreligion, 358;
nebulous aim, 363, 364;
and lie of life, 364;
and Nietzsche, 370;
and socio-economic ethics, 370, 372, 373;
forest-longing, 397
Wallenstein, Albrecht von, horoscope, 147;
contemporaries, table iii
Walther von der Vogelweide, lyrics, 324
Wang-Cheng, contemporaries, table iii
Wang Hü, imperialism, 37
Washington, George, contemporaries, table iii
Washington, D. C., contemporaries, 112
Wasmann, Rudolf F., act and portrait, 271_n._;
and grand style, 289
Watteau, Jean A., period, 108;
“singing” picture, 219, 232, 283;
colour, 246, 247, 253;
contemporaries, table ii
Way, as Egyptian prime symbol, 174, 189, 201
Wazo of Liége, Bishop, as warrior, 349_n._
Wedgwood ware, and Sèvres, 150_n._
Weierstrass, Karl T. W., on poetry in mathematics, 62;
and time, 126
Weimar, culture city, 29, 139
Weininger, Otto, position in Western ethics, 374
Western Culture, clock and bell as symbols, 14, 15_n._, 131, 134;
mathematic, function, 15, 62, 68, 74-78, 87-90;
irrational idea of historical culmination in, 16-20, 39;
provincialism, 22-25, 39;
Classical contemporary of present period, 26;
destiny, acceptance, 32, 37-41, 44, 336;
philosophy of decline, 45, 46;
World War as type of change, 46-48;
infinite space as prime symbol, art expression, 81, 86, 87, 89, 174-
178, 184-187, 198-201, 224, 229-232, 239-242, 281-285, 337;
and popularity, 85, 243, 326-328, 362;
historic basis, destiny-idea, 97, 129, 130, 133-135, 143, 145, 363;
morphological aspect, 100;
dramatic form, 129;
expression of soul, portrait, 130, 260-266, 304;
and care and sex, 136;
attitude toward state, 137;
economic organization, 138;
religious expression, 140, 185-188, 312, 398-401;
Franco-Spanish period of maturity, 148, 150_n._;
English basis of Civilization, 151, 371;
final test of foreseeing destiny, 159;
birth of soul, attributes, 167, 183;
literary expression, 185-188;
art-work and sense-organ, imagination, 220;
secularization of arts, 230;
form and content, 242;
position of sculpture, 244;
colour symbol, 245-247, 250;
brushwork as symbol, 249;
unity, 252;
and motherhood, 266-268;
languages, 302_n._;
as will-culture, 308-312;
and time of day, 324;
significance of astronomy, 330-332;
and discovery, 332-337;
aspects of ethics, 367-369;
culture and dogma, 410;
spiritual epochs, table i;
art epochs, table ii;
political epochs, table iii.
_See also_ Art; Civilization; Cultures; History; Nature; Politics;
Spirit
Weyden, Rogier van der. _See_ Rogier
Wilhelm, Meister, painting, 263
Will, free will and destiny, 140, 141;
unexplainable, 299;
as Western concept, 302, 304, 308-313;
and reason, 308;
and Western concept of God, 312;
and character, 314;
and life, 315;
and Western morale, 341-345, 373
Willaert, Adrian, music, in Italy, 236, 252
Winckelmann, Johann J., narrow Classicalism, 28_n._
Wind instruments, colour expression, 252_n._
Window, cultural significance, 199, 210, 224
Woermann, Karl, on catacomb Madonna, 137_n._
Wolfram von Eschenbach, world-outlook, 142;
forest-longing, 186, 397;
and Grail, 213_n._;
and popularity, 243;
tragic method, 319, 324
Woodwind instruments, colour expression, 252_n._
Word, relation to number, 57.
_See also_ Language; Names
Work, Protestant works, 316_n._;
and deed, 355;
and Socialism, 362;
Western concept, 413
World, and soul and life, 54
World-Ash Yggdrasil, as symbol, 396
World conceptions, historical and natural, overlapping, 98-100, 102,
103, 119, 153, 154, 158;
(diagram), 154;
symbolic, 163-165;
happening and history, 153.
_See also_ History; Macrocosm; Nature
World-end, as symbol of Western soul, 363, 423
World-fear, creative expression, 79-81
World-longing, development, and world-fear, 78-81
World War, and Spengler’s theories, ix, xv;
as type of historical change of phase, 46-48, 110_n._;
contemporaries, table iii
Writing, alphabet and historical consciousness, 12_n._;
as ornament, 194_n._, 197_n._
_See also_ Language
Würzburg, Marienkirche and style, 200;
master-builders, 207
Wu-ti, contemporaries, table iii
Yahweh, dualism, 312, 402
Yang-chu, practical philosophy, 45
Yellow, symbolism, 246
Yggdrasil, as symbol, 396
Yoga doctrine, 355;
contemporaries, table i
Youth, and future, 152
Zama, as marking a period, 36
Zarathustra. _See_ Zoroaster
Zarlino, Giuseppe, music, 230, 282
Zend Avesta, dualism, 306, 307;
and nature, 393;
contemporaries, table i
Zeno, of Elea. _See_ Eleatic philosophy
Zeno, the Stoic, ethic, 347, 354;
character of Nihilism, 357;
and mathematics, 366;
contemporaries, table i
Zenodorus, as Arabian thinker, 63
Zero, Classical mathematic and, 66-68;
and theory of the limit, 86;
cultural conception, 178
Zeuxis, painting, light and shadow, 207, 242_n._, 283, 325_n._
Zola, Emile, journalism, 360
Zoroaster, Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra”, 30, 342, 363, 370, 371;
unimposed mystic benefits, 344_n._;
Arabian epic, 402.
_See also_ Zend Avesta
Zwinger, of Dresden, in style history, 108, 207, 285
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TABLES
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
TABLE I. “CONTEMPORARY” SPIRITUAL EPOCHS
═════════════════╤════════════════╤════════════════╤════════════════╤═══════════════════════
│ _INDIAN_ │ _CLASSICAL_ │ _ARABIAN_ │ _WESTERN_
│ (from 1500) │ (from 1100) │ (from 0.) │ (from 900)
─────────────────┼────────────────┴────────────────┴────────────────┴───────────────────────
=SPRING.= │ I. BIRTH OF A MYTH OF THE GRAND STYLE, EXPRESSING A NEW GOD-FEELING.
│ WORLD-FEAR. WORLD-LONGING
│ │ │ │
_(Rural-intuit- │1500-1200 │1100-800 │0-300 │900-1200
ive. Great crea- │Vedic religion │Hellenic-Ital- │ Primitive │German Catholicism
tions of the │ │ ian “Demeter” │ Christianity │Edda (Baldr)
newly-awakened │ │ religion of │ (Mandaeans, │Bernard of Clairvaux,
dream-heavy Soul.│ │ the people │ Gnosis, Sync- │ Joachim of Floris,
Super-personal │ │ │ retism Marcion,│ Francis of Assisi
unity and ful- │ │ │(Mithras, Baal) │Popular Epos
ness)_ │Aryan hero- │Homer │Gospels. Apoca- │ (Siegfried)
│ tales │ │ lypses │Western legends of the
│ │Heracles and │Christian, Maz- │ Saints
│ │ Theseus │ daist and │
│ │ legends │ pagan legends │
│ II. EARLIEST MYSTICAL-METAPHYSICAL SHAPING OF THE NEW WORLD-OUTLOOK
│ ZENITH OF SCHOLASTICISM
│ │ │ │
│Preserved in │Oldest (oral) │Origen (d. 254),│Thomas Aquinas (d.
│oldest parts of │Orphic, Etruscan│Plotinus (d. │1274), Duns Scotus (d.
│the Vedas │discipline │269), Mani (d. │1308), Dante (d. 1321)
│ │ │276), Iamblichus│and Eckhardt (d. 1329)
│ │ │(d. 330) │
│ │After-effect; │Avesta, Talmud. │Mysticism.
│ │Hesiod, │Patristic │Scholasticism
│ │Cosmogonies │literature │
─────────────────┼────────────────┴────────────────┴────────────────┴───────────────────────
=SUMMER.= │ III. REFORMATION: INTERNAL POPULAR OPPOSITION TO THE GREAT SPRINGTIME
│ FORMS
=(Ripening │Brahmanas. │Orphic movement.│Augustine (d. │Nicolaus Cusanus (d.
consciousness. │Oldest parts of │Dionysiac │430) │1464)
Earliest urban │Upanishads (10th│religion. “Numa”│Nestorians │John Hus (d. 1308)
and critical │and 9th │religion(7th │(about 430) │Savonarola, Karlstadt,
stirrings)= │Centuries) │Century) │Monophysites │Luther, Calvin (d.
│ │ │(about 450) │1564)
│ │ │Mazdak (about │
│ │ │500) │
│ │ │ │
│ IV. BEGINNING OF A PURELY PHILOSOPHICAL FORM OF THE WORLD-FEELING.
│ OPPOSITION OF IDEALISTIC AND REALISTIC SYSTEMS
│ │ │ │
│Preserved in │The great Pre- │Byzantine, │Galileo, Bacon,
│Upanishads │Socratics (6th │Jewish, Syrian, │Descartes, Bruno,
│ │and 5th │Coptic and │Boehme, Leibniz. 16th
│ │Centuries) │Persian │and 17th Centuries
│ │ │literature of │
│ │ │6th and 7th │
│ │ │Centuries │
│ │ │ │
V. FORMATION OF A NEW MATHEMATIC CONCEPTION OF NUMBER AS COPY
AND CONTENT OF WORLD-FORM
│ │ │ │
│(lost) │Number as │The indefinite │Number as Function
│ │magnitude │number (Algebra)│(analysis)
│ │(proportion) │ │
│ │Geometry. │ │
│ │Arithmetic │ │
│ │Pythagoreans │(development not│Descartes, Pascal,
│ │(from 540) │yet │Fermat (_ca._ 1630)
│ │ │investigated) │
│ │ │ │Newton and Leibniz
│ │ │ │(_ca._ 1670)
│ │ │ │
VI. PURITANISM. RATIONALISTIC-MYSTIC IMPOVERISHMENT OF RELIGION
│ │ │ │
│(lost) │Pythagorean │Mohammed (622) │English Puritans
│ │ society │ Paulicians and │ (from 1620)
│ │ (from 540) │ Iconoclasts │French Jansenists
│ │ │ (from 650) │ from 1640)
│ │ │ │ Port Royal
│ │ │ │
─────────────────┼────────────────┴────────────────┴────────────────┴───────────────────────
=AUTUMN.= │VII. “ENLIGHTENMENT.” BELIEF IN ALMIGHTINESS OF REASON. CULT OF “NATURE.”
│ “RATIONAL” RELIGION
│ │ │ │
=(Intelligence │Sutras; Sankhya;│Sophists of │Mutazilites │English Ration-
of the City. Zen-│ Buddha; later │ the 5th Cen- │ │ alists (Locke)
ith of strict │ Upanishads │ tury │Sufism │French Encyc-
intellectual cre-│ │Socrates (d. │ │ lopaedists
ativeness)= │ │ 399) │Nazzam, │ (Voltaire)
│ │Democritus (d. │ Alkindi │ Rousseau
│ │ _ca._ 360) │ (about 830) │
│ │ │ │
│ VIII. ZENITH OF MATHEMATICAL THOUGHT. ELUCIDATION OF THE FORM-WORLD OF
│ NUMBERS
│ │ │ │
│(lost) │Archytas (d. │(not invest- │Euler (d. 1763),
│ │ 365) │ igated) │ Lagrange (d. 1813),
│ │Plato (d. 346) │(Theory of │ Laplace (d. 1827)
│(Zero as │(Conic Sections)│ number. │(The Infinitesimal
│ number) │ │Spherical │ problem)
│ │ │ Trigonometry) │
│ │ │ │
│ IX. THE GREAT CONCLUSIVE SYSTEMS
│ │ │ │
│_Idealism_ }│ │ │ { Schelling
│ Yoga, Vedanta }│Plato (d. │Alfarabi (d. │Goethe {
│_Epistemology_ }│ 346) │ 950) │ { Hegel
│ Valcashika }│Aristotle (d. │Avicenna (d. │Kant {
│_Logic_ Nyaya }│ 322) │ _ca._1000) │ { Fichte
│ │ │ │
─────────────────┼────────────────┴────────────────┴────────────────┴───────────────────────
=WINTER.= │ X. MATERIALISTIC WORLD-OUTLOOK. CULT OF SCIENCE, UTILITY AND PROSPERITY
│ │ │ │
=(Dawn of Mega- │Sankhya, │Cynics, Cyr- │Communistic, │Bentham, Comte,
lopolitan Civ- │Tscharvaka │ enaics │ atheistic, │ Darwin
ilization. Ex- │(Lokoyata) │Last Soph- │ Epicurean sects│Spencer, Stirner,
tinction of │ │ ists (Pyr- │ of Abbassid │ Marx
spiritual cre- │ │rhon) │ times. “Breth- │Feuerbach
ative force. │ │ │ ren of Sincer- │
Life itself be- │ │ │ ity” │
comes problem- │ XI. ETHICAL-SOCIAL IDEALS OF LIFE. EPOCH OF “UNMATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY.”
atical. Ethical- │ SKEPSIS
practical tend- │ │ │ │
encies of an │Tendencies │Hellenism │Movements │Schopenhauer,
irreligious and │in Buddha’s │ │ in Islam │ Nietzsche
unmetaphysical │time │ │ │Socialism,
cosmopolitan- │ │ │ │ Anarchism
ism)= │ │ │ │Hebbel, Wag-
│ │ │ │ ner, Ibsen
│ │ │ │
│ XII. INNER COMPLETION OF THE MATHEMATICAL FORM-WORLD. THE CONCLUDING
│ THOUGHT
│ │ │ │
│(lost) │Euclid, │Alchwarizmi │Gauss (d. 1855)
│ │Apollonius │(800) │
│ │(about 300) │ │
│ │ │Ibn Kurra (850) │Cauchy (d. 1857)
│ │Archimedes │Alkarchi, │Riemann (d. 1866)
│ │(about 250) │Albiruni (10th │
│ │ │Century) │
│ │ │ │
│ XIII. DEGRADATION OF ABSTRACT THINKING INTO PROFESSIONAL LECTURE-ROOM
│ PHILOSOPHY. COMPENDIUM LITERATURE
│ │ │ │
│The “Six Class- │Academy, Peri-, │Schools of │Kantians.
│ ical Systems” │ patos, Sto- │ Baghdad and │“Logicians”
│ │ ics, Epicur- │ Basra │ and “Psycho-
│ │ eans │ │ logists”
│ │ │ │
│ XIV. SPREAD OF A FINAL WORLD-SENTIMENT
│ │ │ │
│Indian Buddhism │Hellenistic- │Practical │Ethical Socialism from
│ │Roman Stoicism │fatalism in │1900
│ │from 200 │Islam after 1000│
------------------------------------------------------------------------
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
TABLE II. “CONTEMPORARY” CULTURE EPOCHS
═════════════════╤════════════════╤═════════════════╤═══════════════╤═══════════════
│_EGYPTIAN_ │_CLASSICAL_ │_ARABIAN_ │_WESTERN_
─────────────────┴────────────────┴─────────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────
=PRE-CULTURAL PERIOD.= CHAOS OF PRIMITIVE EXPRESSION FORMS. MYSTICAL SYMBOLISM AND
NAÏVE IMITATION
│ │ │ │
│Thinite Period │Mycenean Age │Persian- │Merovingian-
│ │ │ Seleucid │ Carolingian
│ │ │ Period │ Era
│(3400-3000) │(1600-1700) │(500-0) │(500-900)
│ │Late-Egyptian │Late-Classical │
│ │ (Minoan) │ (Hellenistic)│
│ │Late-Babylonian │Late-Indian │
│ │ (Asia Minor) │ (Indo- │
│ │ │ Iranian) │
│ │ │ │
=EXCITATION= │ │ │
──────────────────────────────────┴─────────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────
=CULTURE.= LIFE-HISTORY OF A STYLE FORMATIVE OF THE ENTIRE INNER-BEING. FORM-
LANGUAGE OF DEEPEST SYMBOLIC NECESSITY
=I. EARLY PERIOD=│OLD KINGDOM │DORIC │EARLY-ARABIAN │GOTHIC
│ │ │ FORM-WORLD. │
=(Ornament and │(2900-2400) │(1100-500) │(Sassanid, │(900-1500)
architecture as │ │ │ Byzantine, │
elementary │ │ │ Armenian, │
expression of the│ │ │ Syrian, │
young world- │ │ │ Sabæan, │
feeling.) (The │ │ │ “Late- │
“Primitives”)= │ │ │ Classical” │
│ │ │ and “Early │
│ │ │ Christian” │
│ │ │ (0-500) │
│ _1. Birth and Rise. Forms sprung from the Land, unconsciously
│ shaped_
│Dynasties IV-V. │11th to 9th │1st to 3rd │11th to 13th
│ │ Centuries │ Centuries │ Centuries
│(2930-2625) │ │Cult interiors │
│ │ │Basilica, │Romanesque and
│ │ │ Cupola │ Early-Gothic
│ │ │ (Pantheon as │ vaulted
│ │ │ Mosque) │ cathedrals
│Geometrical │Timber building │ │
│ Temple style │ │ │
│Pyramid temples │Doric column │Column-and-arch│Flying buttress
│Ranked plant- │Architrave │Stem-tracery │Glass-painting,
│ columns │ │ filling │ Cathedral
│ │ │ blanks │
│Rows of flat- │Geometric │Sarcophagus │sculpture
│ relief │ (Dipylon) style│ │
│Tomb statues │Burial urns │ │
│ │ │ │
_2. Completion of the early form-language. Exhaustion of possibilities.
Contradiction_
│VI Dynasty │8th and 7th │4-5th Centuries│14-15th
│ (2625-2574) │ Centuries │ │ Centuries
│Extinction of │End of archaic │End of Syrian, │Late Gothic and
│ pyramid-style │ Doric-Etruscan │ Persian, and │ Renaissance
│ and epic- │ style │ Coptic │
│ idyllic relief│ │ pictorial art│
│ style │ │ │
│Floraison of │Proto-Corinthian-│Rise of mosaic-│Floraison and
│ archaic │ Early-Attic │ picturing and│ waning of
│ portrait- │ (mythological) │ of arabesque │ fresco and
│ plastic │ vase │ │ statue. From
│ painting │ │ │ Giotto
│ │ │ │ (Gothic) to
│ │ │ │ Michelangelo
│ │ │ │ (Baroque).
│ │ │ │ Siena,
│ │ │ │ Nürnberg. The
│ │ │ │ Gothic
│ │ │ │ picture from
│ │ │ │ Van Eyck to
│ │ │ │ Holbein.
│ │ │ │ Counterpoint
│ │ │ │ and oil-
│ │ │ │ painting
─────────────────┼────────────────┼─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
=II. LATE PERIOD │MIDDLE KINGDOM │IONIC │LATE-ARABIAN │BAROQUE
(Formation of │(2150-1800) │(650-350) │ FORM-WORLD │(1500-1800)
a group of arts │ │ │ (Persian-Nest-│
urban and con- │ │ │ orian, Byz- │
scious, in the │ │ │ antine-Arm- │
hands of individ-│ │ │ enian, Islam- │
uals) (“Great │ │ │ ic Moorish) │
Masters”)= │ │ │ (500-800) │
│ │ │ │
_3. Formation of a mature artistry_
│XIth Dynasty. │Completion of │Completion of │The pictorial
│ Delicate and │ the temple- │ of the mosque-│ style in
│ telling art │ body (Peri- │ interior (Cen-│ architecture
│(Almost no │ pteros,stone) │ tral dome of │ from Michel-
│ traces left) │The Ionic col- │ Hagia Sophia) │ angelo to Ber-
│ │ umn │ │ nini (d. 1680)
│ │Reign of fresco- │Zenith of mos- │Reign of oil-
│ │ painting till │ aic painting │ painting from
│ │ Polygnotus │ │ Titian to Rem-
│ │ (460) │ │ brandt (d.
│ │Rise of free │Completion of │ 1664)
│ │ plastic “in │ the carpet- │Rise of music
│ │ the round” │ like arabesque│ from Orlando
│ │ (“Apollo of │ style (Machat-│ Lasso to H.
│ │ Tenea” to │ ta) │ Schütz (d.
│ │ Hageladas) │ │ 1671)
│ │ │ │
_4. Perfection of an intellectualized form-language_
│ │ │ │
│XIIth Dynasty │Maturity of │Ommayads │Rococo
│ (2000-1788) │ Athens (480- │ │
│ │ 350) │ │
│Pylon-temple, │The Acropolis │(7th-8th │Musical
│ Labyrinth │ │ Century) │ architecture
│ │ │ │ (“Rococo”)
│ │ │ │
│Character- │Reign of │Complete │Reign of
│ statuary and │ Classical │ victory of │ classical
│ historical │ plastic from │ featureless │ music from
│ reliefs │ Myron to │ arabesque │ Bach to
│ │ Phidias │ over │ Mozart
│ │ │ architecture │
│ │ │ also │
│ │End of strict │ │End of
│ │ fresco and │ │ classical
│ │ ceramic │ │ oil-painting
│ │ painting │ │ (Watteau to
│ │ (Zeuxis) │ │ Goya)
│ │ │ │
_5. Exhaustion of strict creativeness. Dissolution of grand form. End of the Style.
“Classicism” and “Romanticism”_
│Confusion after │The age of │“Haroun-al- │Empire and
│ about 1750 │ Alexander │ Raschid” │ Biedermeyer
│ │ │ (about 800) │
│(No remains) │The Corinthian │“Moorish Art” │Classicist
│ │ column │ │ taste in
│ │ │ │ architecture
│ │Lysippus and │ │Beethoven,
│ │ Apelles │ │ Delacroix
─────────────────┼────────────────┴─────────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────
=CIVILIZATION.= │EXISTENCE WITHOUT INNER FORM. MEGALOPOLITAN ART AS A COMMONPLACE:
│ LUXURY, SPORT, NERVE-EXCITEMENT: RAPIDLY-CHANGING FASHIONS IN
│ ART (REVIVALS, ARBITRARY DISCOVERIES, BORROWINGS)
│ │ │ │
_1. “Modern Art.” “Art problems.” Attempts to portray or to excite the megalopolitan
consciousness. Transformation of Music, architecture and painting into mere craft-
arts_
│Hyksos Period │Hellenism │Sultan │19th and 20th
│ │ │ dynasties of │ Centuries
│ │ │ 9th-10th │
│ │ │ Century │
│(Preserved only │Pergamene Art │ │Liszt, Berlioz,
│ in Crete; │ (theatricality)│ │ Wagner
│ Minoan art) │ │ │
│ │Hellenistic │Prime of │Impressionism
│ │ painting modes │ Spanish- │ from
│ │ (veristic, │ Sicilian art │ Constable to
│ │ bizarre, │ │ Leibl and
│ │ subjective) │ │ Manet
│ │Architectural │Samarra │American
│ │ display in the │ │ architecture
│ │ cities of the │ │
│ │ Diadochi │ │
│ │ │ │
_2. End of form-development. Meaningless, empty, artificial, pretentious
architecture and ornament. Imitation of archaic and exotic motives_
│ │ │ │
│XVIII Dynasty │Roman Period │Seljuks (from │From 2000
│ (1580-1350) │ (100-0-100) │ 1050) │
│ Rock temple of│ Indiscriminate │ “Oriental │
│ Dehr-el-Bahri.│ piling of all │ Art” of the │
│ Memnon- │ three orders. │ Crusade │
│ Colossi. Art │ Fora, theatres │ period │
│ of Cnossos and│ (Colosseum). │ │
│ Amarna │ Triumphal │ │
│ │ arches │ │
│ │ │ │
_3. Finale. Formation of a fixed stock of forms. Imperial display by means of
material and mass. Provincial craft-art_
│ │ │ │
│XIX Dynasty │Trajan to │Mongol Period │From 2000
│ (1350-1205) │ Aurelian │ (from 1250) │
│Gigantic │Gigantic fora, │Gigantic │
│ buildings of │ thermæ, │ buildings │
│ Luxor, Karnak │ colonnades, │ (e.g. in │
│ and Abydos. │ triumphal │ India) │
│ │ arches │ │
│Small-art (beast│Roman provincial │Oriental craft-│
│ plastic, │ art (ceramic, │ art │
│ textiles, │ statuary, arms)│ (rugs,arms, │
│ arms) │ │ implements) │
------------------------------------------------------------------------
═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
TABLE III. “CONTEMPORARY” POLITICAL EPOCHS
═══════════════════╤═════════════════╤════════════════╤═════════════════╤════════════════
│_EGYPTIAN_ │_CLASSICAL_ │_CHINESE_ │_WESTERN_
───────────────────┴─────────────────┴────────────────┴─────────────────┴────────────────
=PRE-CULTURAL PERIOD.= PRIMITIVE FOLK. TRIBES AND THEIR CHIEFS. AS YET NO
“POLITICS” AND NO “STATE”
│ │ │ │
│Thinite Period │Mycenean Age │Shang Period │Frankish Period
│(Menes) │(“Agamemnon”) │ │(Charlemagne)
│3400-3000 │1600-1100 │(1700-1300) │(500-900)
───────────────────┴─────────────────┴────────────────┴─────────────────┴────────────────
=CULTURE.= NATIONAL GROUPS OF DEFINITE STYLE AND PARTICULAR WORLD-FEELING. “NATIONS.”
WORKING OF AN IMMANENT STATE-IDEA
I. EARLY PERIOD. _Organic articulation of political existence. The two prime classes
(noble and priest)._
_Feudal economics; purely agrarian values_
│ │ │ │
=1. Feudalism. │OLD KINGDOM │DORIC PERIOD │EARLY CHOU │GOTHIC PERIOD
Spirit of country- │ (2900-2400) │ (1100-650) │ PERIOD │ (900-1500)
side and country- │Feudal conditions│The Homeric │ (1300-800) │ Roman-German
man. The “City” │ of IV Dynasty │ king │The central │ Imperial per-
only a market or │Increasing power │ │ (Wang) │ iod
stronghold. Chiv- │ of feudatories │Rise of the │ pressed │Crusading nob-
alric-religious │ and priest- │ nobility │ hard by the │ ility
ideals. Struggles │ hoods │(Ithaca. Et- │ feudal nob- │Empire and
of ideals. Strug- │The Pharaoh as │ruria, Sparta) │ ility │ Papacy
gles of vassals │ incarnation of │ │ │
amongst them- │ Ra │ │ │
selves and a- │ │ │ │
gainst overlord= │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
=2. Crisis and │VI Dynasty. │Aristocratic │934-904. I-Wang │Territorial
dissolution of │ Break-up of the│ synoecism │ and the vassals│ princes
patriarchal forms │ Kingdom into │ Dissolution of│ │ Renaissance
From feudalism to │ heritable │ kinship into │ 842. │ towns.
aristocratic State=│ principalities.│ annual offices│ Interregnum │ Lancaster and
│ VII and VIII │ Oligarchy │ │ York
│ Dynasties, │ │ │ 1254
│ interregnum │ │ │ Interregnum
│ │ │ │
II. LATE PERIOD. _Actualizing of the matured State-idea. Town versus countryside. Rise of
Third Estate (Bourgeoisie)._
_Victory of money over landed property_
│ │ │ │
=3. Fashioning of a│MIDDLE KINGDOM │IONIC PERIOD │LATE CHOU PERIOD │BAROQUE PERIOD
world of States of │ (2150-1800) │ (650-300) │ (800-500) │ (1500-1800)
strict form. │ XIth Dynasty. │ 6th Century. │ Period of the │ Dynastic
Frondes= │ Overthrow of │ First │ “Protectors” │ family power,
│ the baronage by│ Tyrannis. │ (Ming-Chu 685- │ Fronde
│ the rulers of │ (Cleisthenes, │ 591) and the │ (Richelieu,
│ Thebes. │ Periander, │ rulers of │ Wallenstein,
│ Centralized │ Polycrates, │ Thebes. │ Cromwell)
│ bureaucracy- │ the Tarquins.)│ congresses of │ about 1630.
│ state │ The City- │ princes (-460) │
│ │ State. │ │
│ │ │ │
=4. Climax of │XIIth Dynasty │The pure Polis │Chun-Chiu per- │Ancien Régime.
the State-form │ (2000-1788) │ (absolutism of │ iod (“Spring” │ Rococo.
(“Absolutism”) │Strictest cent- │ the Demos). │ and “Autumn”), │Court nobility
Unity of town and │ ralization of │ Agora politics │ 590-480 │ of Versailles.
“Society.” The │ power │Rise of the │Seven powers │ Cabinet poli-
“three estates”)= │Court and fin- │ tribunate │Perfection of │ tics
│ ance nobility │Themistocles, │ social forms │Habsburg and
│ │ Pericles │ (Li) │ Bourbon.
│ │ │ │Louis XIV.
│ │ │ │ Frederick the
│ │ │ │ Great
│ │ │ │
=5. Break-up of │1788-1680. Rev- │4th Century. │480. Beginning │End of XVIII
the State-form │ olution and │ Social revol- │ of the Chan- │ Century. Rev-
(Revolution and │ military govern-│ ution and Sec- │ Kwo period │ olution in Ame-
Napoleonism). │ ment. Decay of │ ond Tyrannis │ │ ica and France
Victory of the │ the realm. Small│ (Dionysius I, │ │ (Washington,
city over the │ potentates, in │ Jason of Phe- │441. Fall of │ Fox, Mira-
countryside (of │ some cases │ rae, Appius │ the Chou dyn- │ beau, Robes-
the “people” │ sprung from the │ Claudius the │ asty │ pierre)
over the priv- │ people │ Censor) │Revolutions and │
ileged, of the │ │ │ annihilation- │_Napoleon_
intelligentsia │ │_Alexander_ │ wars │
over tradition, │ │ │ │
of money over │ │ │ │
policy)= │ │ │ │
───────────────────┴─────────────────┴────────────────┴─────────────────┴────────────────
=CIVILIZATION.= THE BODY OF THE PEOPLE, NOW ESSENTIALLY URBAN IN CONSTITUTION,
DISSOLVES INTO FORMLESS MASS. MEGALOPOLIS AND PROVINCES. THE FOURTH
ESTATE (“MASSES”), INORGANIC, COSMOPOLITAN
│ │ │ │
=1. Domination of │1680 (1788) │300-100. Politi-│480-230. Period │1800-2000. XIXth
Money (“Democracy”)│ -1580. Hyksos │ cal Hellenism. │ of the “Contend-│ Century. From
Economic powers │ period. Deepest │ From Alexander │ ing States” │ Napoleon to the
permeating the pol-│ decline.Dicta- │ to Hannibal and│288. The Imperial│ World-War.
itical forms and │ tures of alien │ Scipio royal │ title │ “System of the
authorities= │ generals (Chian)│ all-power; from│The imperialist │ Great Powers,”
│After 1600 │ Cleomenes III │ statesmen of │ standing arm-
│ definitive │ and C. Flamin- │ Tsin │ ies, constit-
│ victory of the │ ius (220) to │From 289 incorp- │ utions. XXth-
│ rulers of │ C. Marius, rad-│ oration of the │ Century trans-
│ Thebes │ ical demagogues│ last states in │ ition from
│ │ │ the Empire │ constitutional
│ │ │ │ to informal
│ │ │ │ sway of indivi-
│ │ │ │ duals. Annihi-
│ │ │ │ lation
│ │ │ │ wars.Imperialism
│ │ │ │ Imperialism
│ │ │ │
=2. Formation of │1580-1350. │100-0-100. Sulla│ │
Cæsarism. Victory │XVIIIth Dynasty │to Domitian │250-0-26. House }│
of force-politics │ │ │of Wang-Cheng }│
over money. In- │ │ │and Western Han }│1000-1200
creasing primitive-│ │ │ Dynasty }│
ness of political │Thuthmosis III │Cæsar, Tiberius │221. Augustus }│
forms. Inward de- │ │ │ -title (Shi) }│
cline of the nat- │ │ │of Emperor }│
ions into a form- │ │ │ Hwang-Ti }│
less population, │ │ │140-80. Wu-ti }│
and constitution │ │ │ │
thereof as an Imp- │ │ │ │
erium of gradually-│ │ │ │
increasing crudity │ │ │ │
of despotism= │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
=3. Maturing of the│1350-1205. XIXth │100-300. Trajan │25-220 A.D. }│
final form. Private│Dynasty │ to Aurelian │ Eastern Han }│after 1200
and family policies│ │ │ Dynasty }│
of individual │Sethos I │Trajan, Septi- │58-71. Ming-ti }│
leaders. The world │ │ mius Severus │ │
as spoil. Egyptic- │ │ │ │
ism, Mandarinism, │Rameses II │ │ │
Byzantinism. His- │ │ │ │
tory less stiffen- │ │ │ │
ing and enfeeble- │ │ │ │
ment even of the │ │ │ │
imperial machin- │ │ │ │
ery, against young │ │ │ │
peoples eager for │ │ │ │
spoil, or alien │ │ │ │
conquerors. Primi- │ │ │ │
tive human condi- │ │ │ │
tions slowly │ │ │ │
thrust up into the │ │ │ │
highly-civilized │ │ │ │
mode of living= │ │ │ │
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Note
The use of an extra ‘S’ in the name of ‘Hagia S Sophia’ on p. 200 is
questionable. If it is an abbreviation of ‘Saint’ as it is a line early,
it is redundant here given the word ‘Hagia’, meaning the same thing.
On p. 407, footnotes 508 and 509 refer to the same work, _Religion und
Kultus der Römer_. However the citation of the first note is garbled, as
_Kult. und. Relig. d. Römer_.
In the Index, a reference to the effect on natural science of the
Relativity Theory was corrupted as ‘19;4’. The proper page is p. 419,
and the reference is corrected.
The page reference to a note on Goethe and Materialism should have been
to p. 111, not p. 211.
The page references in footnote 486 most likely refer to Volume II,
since the two pages mentioned contain no pertinent material.
There are a number of index entries which refer to footnotes on a given
page while the topics appear in the main text. This would seem to
indicate that the preparation of the Index was not reviewed after the
final version of the text was complete. These references have been
amended to direct the reader to the correct page:
Intercultural Contemporaneity (multiple times) (p. 112), Frescos (p.
225), Tasso (p. 325),
The reference to Saint John and world-history as a note on p. 18 seems
incorrect. Footnote 13 on that page refers to the Apostle Paul. The
reference is left unlinked.
On p. vi of the Index, a cross-referenced ‘Motherland’ topic is missing.
Minor punctuation lapses in the Index have been corrected without
further notice.
Other errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected,
and are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the
original.
xvii.18 Geometry and arith[e]metic Removed.
8.4 lead to a naturalistic[,] Chronology Removed.
8.27 there is certain[t]ly no world-history Removed.
12.29 unparallel[l]ed in art-history Removed.
25.19 all these arbit[r]ary> and narrow schemes Inserted.
26.39 occurring f[u/o]r us Replaced.
37.20 and theor[i/e]tically Replaced.
62.42 de [s]oudaineté et de certitude absolue Added.
82.30 The Greek m[e/a]thematicians Replaced.
126.35 approached these question[s] Added.
128.18 a glad materialization of the sp[i]ritual. Inserted.
129.39 κακῶς [ἐί/εἴ]ληφα τ[ὀυ/οὐ]μὸνσῶμα σ[υ/ὺ]ν Replaced.
τέχνῃ κακῇ.
129.41 μαντεῖα ... [ἅ/ἃ] τοῦδ’ Replaced.
133.43 (παρὰ τοσ[όu/oῦ]τον μ[ε/ὲ]ν [ἥ/ἡ] Μυτιλήνη Replaced.
ἦλθε κινδύνου)
134.36 “Handbook of Early Christian Antiquities)”[.] Added.
134.43 “Handbook of May on Antiquities.[”] Added.
150.41 was th[o]roughly English in spirit Inserted.
191.22 (mitschwingen i[n/m] Lebenstakte) Replaced.
200.16 Hagia [S ]Sophia in Constantinople Removed.
212.30 Here there was no brill[i]ant instant Inserted.
213.42 Ency. Brit., XI Ed.[)] Added.
227.28 to the harp[is/si]chord Transposed.
269.24 absorbed philos[o]pher Inserted.
269.38 impor[t]ant and significant Inserted.
270.34 comp[a]re his unbridled dynamism Inserted.
271.43 Oldach, Wasmann[,] Rayski and many another Inserted.
277.18 he shattere[e]d the canon Removed.
288.39 it is so th[o]roughly irreligious Inserted.
290.31 something of Rembrandt’s p[ro/or]traiture Transposed.
299.6 Every professed philos[o]pher Inserted.
302.27 the essen[s/c]e of the soul Replaced.
307.16 of _our_ Nature-picture[.] Added.
307.40 Ges[s/c]h. d. neueren Philosophie Replaced.
313.42 οὔκουν ἂν[ ]εκφύγοι γε τὴν πεπρωμένην Inserted.
318.6 ἀνθρώπ[ῶ/ω]ν ἀλλὰ πρ[[α/ά]ξεων καὶ βίου. Replaced.
330.25 that would not i[n/m]pugn the primacy Replaced.
333.43 quite independently of gunpow[d]er Inserted.
355.8 oppressive actualiti[t]es Removed.
360.18 sp[i]ritual prostitution Inserted.
363.31 what should be dest[r]oyed Inserted.
373.30 der politischen [O/Ö]konomie Replaced.
400.36 Mo[v/r]eover, it is only Replaced.
410.2 in its attitude to[r]wards toleration Removed.
a.iii.20 _See_ Bart[h]olommeo Removed.
a.v.41 Calculus, and Classical astro[mon/nom]y Transposed.
a.vi.17 ancest[o]ral worship Removed.
a.xii.33 Western math[e]matic and term Inserted.
a.xiii.47 wi[ds/sd]om and intellect Transposed.
a.xxv.45 intellect and wi[ds/sd]om Transposed.
a.xxviii.38 Tartini, G[ui/iu]seppe Transposed.
a.xxix.42 [‘/“]space of time” Replaced.
a.xxxi.11 Wey[ ]den, Rogier van der. Removed.
t3.20 dis[s]olution of Inserted.
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