Decline of the West

Volume 1

&

Volume 2

Oswald Spengler

A well-formatted version based on the Alfred A. Knopf, 1926 (vol 1) & 1928 (vol 2) editions, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson.

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2016

I have attempted to remain faithful to the original text in all the essentials, with the following exceptions: Spelling has been modernized in obvious cases; footnotes have been changed to endnotes (and footnotes containing physical page references have been deleted, and many of the hyphenations have been deleted. I understand that Atkinson was attempting to show the literal translation with hyphenated words, but this made for awkward reading (even without the hyphens, the translation is often tedious). I have also, in this electronic edition, eliminated footnotes referencing explicit page numbers in volumes 1 and 2.

No doubt errors remain despite several proofs, but hopefully none that will detract from the material.

David G. Payne

2014, Petoskey

Decline of the West

Volume 1

FORM AND ACTUALITY

Oswald Spengler

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 super-normal 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 sequelae, 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 role 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 coordinates 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 rigor 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. 15 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 cataloging the errors that are still to be found in Spengler’s vast ordered multitude of facts, Eduard Meyer honorably 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 “bleibendes 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 reader will notice that translator’s footnotes 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 Encyclopaedia 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.

January, 1926 C.F.A.

SPENGLER'S 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 today.

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 (Ewigiestrigen) and greet every idea that is intended for the pathfinder of tomorrow 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.

SPENGLER'S 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 1911, 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 premises 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

Volume 1 Contents

Volume 2 Contents

Translator’s Note

Author’s Preface to the Revised Edition

Author’s Preface to the First Edition

I. Introduction

II. The Meaning of Numbers

III. The Problem of World History: 1: Physiognomic and Systematic

IV. The Problem of World History: 2: The Destiny Idea and the Causality Principle

V. Makrokosmos: 1: The Symbolism of the World Picture and the Problem of Space

VI. Makrokosmos: 2: Apollinian, Faustian, and Magian Soul

VII. Music and Plastic: 1: The Arts of Form

VIII. Music and Plastic: 2: Act and Portrait

IX. Soul Image and Life Feeling: 1: On the Form of the Soul

X. Soul Image and Life Feeling: 2: Buddhism, Stoicism, and Socialism

XI. Faustian and Apollinian Nature Knowledge

Volume 1 End Notes

Tables Illustrating the Comparative Morphology of History

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

I

In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untraveled 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 fulfillment — 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 premises 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 craftworks, 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 Caesar and Alexander — analogies of which, as we shall see, the first is morphologically quite unacceptable 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 Caesar’s time with the Yankee. Petrarch, the first passionate archaeologist (and is not archaeology 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 Caesars, 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 Thermopylae 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 (today 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, insofar 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 practiced 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 Caesar 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 labeled 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 rigor 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, insofar 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 connections 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, today, 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.

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 Caesar 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 coloring. 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 (εἰσαγγελἰα). 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 chose 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 (ον´ 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 centers 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 Caesar’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 Caesar’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 chiseled 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. Today, 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 today 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.

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 Mycenaean age the elevation into a ritual of this particular funerary method amongst all those practiced in turn by stone age peoples, was essentially alien; indeed its Royal tombs suggest that earth burial was regarded as peculiarly honorable. 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 Parsifal, 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 dust heap (whence we are now extracting them), and we do not hear that anyone in Hellas ever troubled himself about the ruins of Mycenae 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 Aeschylus 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 coloring, 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 marshaling 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.

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 today, 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 layout 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 skepticism which from Galileo onward has regulated and deepened our inborn ideas of nature.

Thanks to the subdivision of history into “Ancient,” “Medieval” 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 European¹⁰ 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 wholeheartedly 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 center 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 skepticism 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 neighborhood 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, Caesar 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 footnotes, 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 center 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.

VII

The scheme “ancient-medieval-modern” in its first form was a creation of the Magian world sense. It first appeared in the Persian and Jewish religions after Cyrus, 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.¹¹

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 theater 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.¹²

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.¹³ It was at least implied if not stated in so many words, that here, beyond the ancient and the medieval, something definitive was beginning, a Third Kingdom in which, somewhere, there was to be fulfillment 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),¹⁴ 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 “afterworld”¹⁵ (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 program.

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 cavemen) 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.16 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 dry as dust 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 colors, 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 aging “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 marvelous 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-medieval-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,”¹⁷ invented in 1667 by Professor Horn of Leyden, has today 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 naively 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 premises that every historian finds necessary for his purpose and every historical work shows in its layout. 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.

VIII

Today 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 premises 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 aesthetics 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 Russian¹⁸ 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 center 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-medieval-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, medieval 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 Tolstoy — 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 Parsifal 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 worldwide 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 Northwest European city with the horizon that is implied by a house rent of £100 to £300 a year and a Protestant upbringing, we substitute Caesar’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 today. His conflicts, which start from spiritual premises 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.

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 today more than ever, used to express subjective valuations and entirely personal preferences in sociology, ethics and aesthetics — 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 Aeschylus, Plato, Apollo and Dionysus, the Athenian state and Caesarism (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 Greco-Roman Culture have always swung between two extremes, and our standpoints have invariably been defined for us by the “ancient-medieval-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 “today.” The one group looks upon Greece as a “not yet,” the other upon modernity as a “nevermore.” Both labor 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 Aeschylus’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.¹⁹ 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.

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 formulas 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,²⁰ economic megalopolitan²¹ 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 today regard very skeptically: 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 Paestum 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 today 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 today 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 bookkeeping 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.

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, fulfillment 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 — the two basic ideas of every civilization — bring up a wholly new form problem of History, the very problem that we are living through today 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 today the Scandinavian North²² — 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 Sikyon²³ — and those of the Reformation in the German free cities and the Huguenot wars. But just as these cities overcame the countryside (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 today — 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 Prague, have become provincial towns and fight inwardly a lost battle against the world cities. The world city means cosmopolitanism in place of “home,”²⁴ 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;²⁵ 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,²⁶ 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 carcasses 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 Maecenas’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 globetrotter 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 learned 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 hallmark of a politic of Civilization today, 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.²⁷ 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 centers 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 formulas 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 palaestra and the Roman circus.²⁸ 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 coloring. 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. Chaeronea 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 labor as continued to exist side by side with gang labor. 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 Caesarism — foreshadowed by C. Flaminius, shaped first by Marius, handled by strong minded, large scale men of fact — did the Classical World learn the preeminence of money. Without this fact neither Caesar, nor “Rome” generally, is understandable. In every Greek is a Don Quixote, in every Roman a Sancho Panza factor, and these factors are dominants.

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; 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.29 Their classic wars were those against the Samnites, Pyrrhus and Carthage. Their grand hour was Cannae. 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 demonic and immense, which grips, forces into service, and uses up the late mankind of the world city stage, willy nilly, aware or unaware.³⁰ Life is the process of effecting possibilities, and for the brain man there are only extensive possibilities.³¹ Hard as the half developed Socialism of today 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 230,³² the Chinese group of states was tending towards imperialism, it was entirely futile to combat the principle of Imperialism (Lien-heng), practiced in particular by the “Roman” state of Tsin³³ and theoretically represented by the philosopher Dschang Yi, by ideas of a League of Nations (Hoh-tsung) largely derived from Wang Hü, a profound skeptic 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.

Rhodes is to be regarded as the first precursor of a Western type of Caesars, 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 Caesar. 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 Caesarism; 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. Caesar, 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 connection — e.g., Charlemagne and Haroun-al-Raschid, Alexander and Caesar, 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.

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 hallmark 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 farreaching 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 molding 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 Caesar’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 tomorrow — 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, here 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 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 cooperated 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 mold to the “philosophers” of today, 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 reveled 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 today and tomorrow 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, today, at least not indispensable.

To me, the depths and refinement of mathematical and physical theories are a joy; by comparison, the aesthete 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 today 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 Caesars — 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 Graeculus 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 today many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice 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 Praetor 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 today 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 center 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 Skepticism, 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 skepticism 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 Skeptic 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. Skepticism 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.

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 endeavor was to comprehend it from an examination of the spirit of the preceding centuries — not years. In the course of this originally small task,³⁴ 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 connections — 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, long range 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 color, 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 countryside, 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 skepticism 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 favor 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.³⁵ 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 tables³⁶ 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

I

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 connection 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 center of gravity and the center 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 term¹ ) 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.²

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.³

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.

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 dividing⁴ — 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 differentia, 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 connection 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,⁵ 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.

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 modem 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 differentia 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 learned), 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 arts⁶ 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 insofar 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 I 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 color, 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.⁷ “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 aesthetics 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 colors 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 coordinate 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 today, 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 center 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 Aramaeans, 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 today 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 freestanding 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 mold for a sculpture that has this ideal. The worked stone is only a something insofar 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 inter-spaces between them, which for us are filled with the impressive symbol of the Universe of Space, are for them the nonent (τό μή ὄν).

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 άρχὴ 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.”⁸

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 countryside 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,⁹ and refuse to venture out of the Mediterranean along sea paths long before dared by the Phoenicians 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 “Timaeus” 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 x -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 fulfillment 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 είΧ which we constantly use, or even the fractional index (e.g., 5½) 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 (πλενραί ) 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 masterwork 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. 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.¹⁰ Rediscovered by Copernicus, it was to shake the metaphysical passions of the West to their foundations — witness Giordano Bruno¹¹ — to become the fulfillment 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 stars¹² 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 sand¹³ 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) aether, 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 coordinates, 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,¹⁴ 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 today? 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 hallmark of causal necessity and so is linked with death as chronological number is with becoming, with life, with the necessity of destiny. This connection 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

Forever and forever sweeping round.”¹⁵

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 preexistent 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 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,”¹⁶ 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 colors 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 Aegean 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 — Mandaeanism, Manichaeism, 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 καλοκἀγαθία 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.),¹⁷ who was the first Western who used coordinates so to say elastically¹⁸ 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 countryside, not megalopolitans like Euclid and D’Alembert.¹⁹ 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 caliber of Plato and Gauss.

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 coordinates — 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.²⁰

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 facade 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.

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,²¹ 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 preexistent 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 connection 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 .

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.²²

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 today even amongst mathematicians, for is it not the base of all our written notation?

But it is not the separate signs (e.g., x, 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 3x + 4x = 5x and xn + yn = zn (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 connection 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 problem²³) 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 connection 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 ( 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., ) could be conceived in a sort of negative fashion by Classical minds; they had, in fact, enough idea of it to ban it as ἄῥῥητος 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 skepticism witnessed the emergence of one seemingly impossible truth after another.²⁴ 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 — reveled 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 fulfillment 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 today — 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 role 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 favorable, 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 defense 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.²⁵

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,” 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 Aeschylus, a Plotinus, a Dante; and in the world embracing spatial energy of modern technics.

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,” insofar 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 center 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 measurable. 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 (σῶματα καὶ πράγματα: persona 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 άρχὴ, 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, Gaea, is akin to Mother Earth. There is a deep relation between the honor 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 today 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.²⁶ 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,²⁷ 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 x 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 non-mathematical 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.²⁸

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 role of proportion in ordering the parts of the individual statue, the typically Classical art forms 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 today. 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 centers 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.²⁹ 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 skillfully 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.³⁰

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 coordinate 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 coordinate system should not be changed. But these coordinates 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 figure, but symbolically by an equation. “Geometry” altered its meaning; the coordinate 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 Michelangelo and Vignola. Visually pure lines became, in palace and church facades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In place of the clear coordinates 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 facades, 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 Zwinger³¹ is a sinfonia. Along with 18th Century mathematics, 18th Century architecture develops into a form world of musical characters.

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 an, 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 coordinate 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.³² 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.

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 today 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 today 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.

Classical

Western

1. Conception of a new number

About 540 B.C.

Number as magnitude

(Pythagoreans)

(About 470, sculpture prevails over fresco painting)

About 1630 A.D.

Number as relation (Descartes, Pascal, Fermat). (Newton, Leibniz, 1670)

(About 1670, music prevails over oil painting)

2. Zenith of systematic development

450-350

Plato, Archytas, Eudoxus

(Phidias, Praxiteles)

1750-1800

Euler, Lagrange, Laplace

(Gluck, Haydn, Mozart)

3. Inward completion and conclusion of the

figure world

300-250

Euclid, Apollonius, Archimedes

(Lysippus, Leochares)

After 1800

Gauss, Cauchy, Riemann

(Beethoven)

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,” naively 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 coordinates, 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 today, 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 redefined “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 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 insofar as it assigns things-becoming their place as things-become, and History insofar 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 is history. (Erlebtes ist Geschehenes, ist Geschichte.)

Every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated. It carries the hallmark 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 causality. 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 color. 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 formulas, 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 unClassical 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 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,¹ 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.

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,² 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 x 8 = 96, and 18 October, 1813.³ 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. 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 today from their religious customs and myths — that entirely organic world of pure willfulness, of hostile demons and kindly powers — was through and through a living and swaying whole, un-understandable, 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 naive 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 naive, 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 “Feme” (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 connections, 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.⁴

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 reenact 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 (“abstract”) 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.

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 center of time.⁵ (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 connection, 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 eternitatis 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 connection with a purely Classical man, who is always complete and never becoming.

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 willful 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 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 morphology⁶ 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 fulfillment 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 archaeologist, the philologist, the aesthetic 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 10th Century to solve — to explore carefully the inner structure of the organic units through and in which World history fulfills 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; upstream, 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; downstream, 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 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 fulfillment, 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 Civilisation, 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.

This — the inward and outward fulfillment, 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 today — the decline of the West.⁷ 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.⁸ 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 demonic 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 Saxony⁹ and southern France, the early Christian catacombs, the Dipylon¹⁰ 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 Pisistratidae, in the age of Justinian, in that of the Counter Reformation, and we find every individual trait of expression deliberate, strict, measured, marvelous in its ease and self-confidence. And we find, too, that everywhere, at moments, the coming fulfillment 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 gray 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” 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.

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 style¹¹ 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 layout and street plan, in the language of its public and private architecture, in the type of its squares, alleys, courts, facades, in its color, 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 hallmarks 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. 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 preordained life durations as the starting point for a new enunciation of its problem. 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 connections, 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?¹² 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,¹³ 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 daydreams 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 Minnesanger reappears. When Goethe blocked out the Urfaust,¹⁴ 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 who could understand Byron. 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’ Bacchae anticipates the life outlook, and much of Plato’s Timaus the religious syncretism of the Imperial age; and Goethe’s Fausf 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;¹⁵ 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.¹⁶ 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, Caesar and Wallenstein, parceled Germany and parceled 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 fruit fullness 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 bookkeeping; the first Tyrannis and the Fronde; Augustus and Shih-huang-ti;¹⁷ 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, fulfill 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 connections, in much the same way as modern palaeontology 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.

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 center 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 connections 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 modeled in reason forms. Destiny itself (passed over in silence by Kant and every other builder of rational world systems because with their armory 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 today, 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 connections 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.¹ 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,² 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 fulfillment 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 Luther³ 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.

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.

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 defense against the incomprehensible. What is named, comprehended, measured is ipso facto overpowered, made inert and taboo.” 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.⁴ 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 , t2, -t, from which the assumption of a time of zero magnitude or of negative times is, to say the least, not excluded.⁵ 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 analysis⁶ 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.”⁷

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 connection 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 today 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.⁸ 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 cyclometric⁹ 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 Fluxions¹⁰ 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.

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. 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 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.¹¹ 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 today, 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.¹²

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 Mycenaean 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 color, 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 aesthetics 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.

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 color 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 aesthetics. 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 history¹³ alone.

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 Oedipus, his “empirical ego,” nay, his σῶμα that is hunted and thrown by Destiny. Oedipus complains that Creon has misused his “body”¹⁴ and that the oracle applied to his “body.”¹⁵ Aeschylus, again, speaks of Agamemnon as the “royal body, leader of fleets.”¹⁶ 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 Glouster’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 connection 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 imperiled 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 Oedipus 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 offerings¹⁷ and note how — from Demetrius of Alopeke (about 400)¹⁸ — 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.”19 Fundamentally all Greek statues were standard masks, like the actors in the theater 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.

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 — 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. Insofar 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,²⁰ 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.²¹ 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, archaeology 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 durable²² material was deliberately chosen. The Dorian Greek ignored the Mycenaean stone technique and built in wood or clay, though Mycenaean 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 Heraeum 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 past²³ as well, and is conscious of the course both of personal and of super-personal becoming. That organ was not present in the makeup 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; and the great families of Rome had traditions that were pure romance — witness Caesar’s slayer, Brutus, with his firm belief in his reputed tyrannicide ancestor. Caesar’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 Caesar 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 center 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.²⁴ 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 Chôu period with its highly developed sense of eras and epochs — 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.²⁵ Such crises, too, a deep feeling man of the West can experience within himself, as a true Greek could never do. Over our countryside, day and night from thousands of belfries, ring the bells²⁶ 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.²⁷ Without exact time measurement, without a chronology of becoming to correspond with his imperative need of archaeology (the preservation, excavation and collection of things-become), Western man is unthinkable. The  aroque age intensified the Gothic symbol of the belfry to the point of grotesqueness, and produced the pocket watch that constantly accompanies the individual.²⁸

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 Caesar, 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.²⁹ 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 Mycenae, Tiryns, Orchomenos and other places. And when in Imperial times the sarcophagus or “flesh consumer”³⁰ began to supersede the vase of ashes, it was again, as in the time when the Homeric urn superseded the shaft grave of Mycenae, 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 death days 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 doubt³¹ 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 Μονσεῖον³² how deep a significance lies in the change of sense!

VI

It is the primitive feeling of Care³³ 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 center 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 worshipers of Parwati.34 In the one case as in the other, man feels himself as nature, as a plant, as a will-less and care-less element of becoming (dem Sinn des Werdens willenlos und sorglos hingegeben). The domestic religion of Rome centered 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.³⁵ 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.³⁶ 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” 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.³⁷

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.

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 Chôu dynasty (1169-256 B.C.), of the organization of which the Chôu 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.³⁸ 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 marketplaces 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 Caesar, 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 livestock 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;³⁹ 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 supposed⁴⁰ 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 Caesar 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 connections 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.”⁴¹

On the surface of history it is the unforeseen that reigns. Every individual event, decision and personality is stamped with its hallmark. 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. 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 descendant⁴²), 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”⁴³ 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 Fulfillment 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?

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, supernatural 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,⁴⁴ 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.

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 today 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 connection 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 naiveté 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 Oedipus — 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 today! Think of the Dey smacking the Consul with his fly flap⁴⁵ 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)⁴⁶ 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;⁴⁷ 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 fulfills 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.⁴⁸ 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 colored 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 connections. 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, demonic, 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 εἰμαρμέη⁴⁹ in contrast to the Shakesperian logic of incident. Consider Oedipus 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 Caesar was one of mythical incidentalness, 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 expedition⁵⁰ — 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,⁵¹ 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.

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 today 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 fulfillment 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 fulfills 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.⁵²

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.⁵³ 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.⁵⁴ 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 farreaching, 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 incident⁵⁵ 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,⁵⁶ 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 remold, 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 Caesar, 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 Chaeronea, Gaugamela (Arbela), Alexander’s Indian expedition and the Roman victory of Sentinum.⁵⁷ And we begin to understand that in wars and political catastrophes — the chief material of our historical writings — victory is not the essence of the fight nor peace the aim of a revolution.

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 favor 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 today and tomorrow.

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 Caesar 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,⁵⁸ 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, forms⁵⁹) 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:

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 stated to be kept up “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 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 re-transformed 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 skepticism that is inherent in our handling of physical hypotheses.⁶⁰ For the attitude of the physicist to his atoms, electrons, currents, and fields of force, to aether and mass, is very far removed from the naive 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.”⁶¹ 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 vertebras. 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 color⁶² 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 demonic 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 Caesar 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

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 formulas 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 naiveté 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 hallmark 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 traveler, 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 facades of the Renaissance in which they provide the upward striving clement. 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, 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 newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance,” said Tolstoy 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 reenacted 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, and its form language tells at once of hostility and of reverence.

Every thing-become is mortal. Not only peoples, languages, races and Culture 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 colored 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.¹ 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 premise 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 naiveté 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 preexistent 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,² 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.³

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 commonplace 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  hese 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.⁴ 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 connection 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,⁵ 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 hallmark of Time in our instinctive tendency to feel the depth that is in the world unidirectionally 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.⁶

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 connection 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 colored 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 insofar as it is an original possession of the soul of that Culture which is expressed by our life as a whole, and acquired insofar that every individual soul reenacts 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.⁷ 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, color, 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 word⁸ 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.⁹ 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, τὀ μή 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 color 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 centers of the sides in a carefully toned-off ratio, and so the whole corpus is given a something that swings mysterious about a center. 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 hovers. 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, colors 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.

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, 1/3, 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.¹⁰

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 today, 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, ὔλη, μορφή 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 colorblind 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 fundamental 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 color 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

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 Oedipus 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 Manichaean 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 inter-space 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 center 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,¹ 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. Strzygowski2 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 overripe 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. 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 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.³ 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),⁴ 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,⁵ and often again it proved impossible to complete the projected scheme. The passionate language of this architecture is that of the poems too.⁶ 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 Irae together with the Völuspà,⁷ 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 Wiber — 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,” like “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 color 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, Parzefal, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust are the loneliest heroes in all the Cultures. Read the wondrous awakening of the inner life in Wolfram’s Parzefal. 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.

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, supported though it was by the whole weight of Church authority, and even the Devil — the great adversary in the Gothic world drama — has disappeared unnoticed from among the possibilities of the Faustian world feeling. Luther could still throw the ink pot 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 lightless, 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 colors. 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.

II

That which is expressed by the soul of the West in its extraordinary wealth of media — words, tones, colors, pictorial perspectives, philosophical systems, legends, the spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals and the formulas 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 graveside 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 music⁸) 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 traveler 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,⁹ and similarly the Sun temples of the Fifth Dynasty are not “buildings” but a path enclosed by mighty masonry.¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 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. 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.”¹² The temple is not a self-contained building but a layout, 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.¹³ 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.”¹⁴ 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.

III

All art is expression language. 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.¹⁵

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 in Lebenstakte); 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.¹⁶

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.¹⁷ 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 Egypt¹⁸ 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 practiced as a craft (and dealt not merely with sentence and meter but also with gesture and the choice of imagery¹⁹), 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’ prose²⁰ 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. 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.²¹ 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 recollection²² 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. The peasant’s cottage 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 them²³ — the life of a nation and its social ordering in the plan (not the elevation or silhouette) of the city. 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 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.

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 today — 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. 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, 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.

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 Mycenaean age have survived.²⁴ 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”²⁵ and others of the early Chôu 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 pillar-wise 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.”²⁶ 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.²⁷ 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. 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 rigor 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-Mycenaean period has bequeathed nothing to our archaeologists. 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 ὄν, 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.²⁸

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 surface²⁹ 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.”³⁰ When windows were in practice indispensable, they were for the sake of artistic impression concealed by galleries as in the Eastern basilica.³¹ 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 facades 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 color is effective as material, here we have colors 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-colored 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 inter-penetration 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 Rock³² 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, fairytale light which for Northerners is always so seductive in Moorish art.

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 align 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 Egypt³³ 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.”³⁴ 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 today 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,³⁵ 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 number³⁶ and which sit on the roof plane.³⁷ 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.³⁸ 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 facades (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 center 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 Aegean, 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 rigor 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 marvelous 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 ἀταραξία, 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.³⁹ 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. 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.”⁴⁰ 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 Mycenaean 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 Didymaeum 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 fulfillment 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-Medieval-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 Paestum 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 countryside, 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 Aeschylus.

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 colors 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 super fine art of Egypt under Sesostris III (c. 1850 B.C.) and the brief moments of satiated happiness that produced the varied splendor 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 today 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.⁴¹

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 Graeco-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. Riegl⁴² and Strzygowski⁴³ 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.⁴⁴ All these religions, the Christian, the Jewish, the Persian, the Manichaean, the Syncretic, 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 Mithraeum,⁴⁵ 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;⁴⁶ 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 center 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,” the Pauline Christianity that conquered in the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, Western Judaism and the cults of Syncretism. The architectural type of the Pseudomorphosis, both for Jew and Gentile, is the Basilica.⁴⁷ 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,⁴⁸ which later becomes a standing element of the mosque and is probably of South Arabian origin.⁴⁹ 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.⁵⁰

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.⁵¹ 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.⁵²

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 Manichaeans 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 Manichaean 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-Aramaean-Persian than in its West-Aramaean-Syrian mode.⁵³ 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 inter-penetration 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 Maxentius⁵⁴ 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 brillant 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 fulfill 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 fulfillment 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 facades 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 legend⁵⁵ — 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 Manichaeans, 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.⁵⁶ 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 fulfillment 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 colors. 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.⁵⁷ 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 connection 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 Aramaean 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 facade of the Castle of Mashetta in Moab built by the Ghassanids.⁵⁸ 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 practiced by Oriental craftsmen or imported as patterns for our own weavers, metalworkers and armorers.⁵⁹ Ravenna, Lucca, Venice, Granada, Palermo were the efficient centers 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 Museum⁶⁰ 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.⁶¹ 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.

CHAPTER VII

MUSIC AND PLASTIC

I

THE ARTS OF FORM

I

The dearest 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,¹ 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 wordless² 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 overestimate 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 colors, 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 colors 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 brush stroke — and those of Vermeer or Goya — music, created on colored 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.³ 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 facade 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 — what 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,” “medieval” 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-medieval-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 today 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 battlefield) 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.⁴ 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 Paestum 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 Mithrasa 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 nonexistent in the temple. The Faustian building has a visage and not merely a facade (whereas the front of a peripteros is, after all, only one of four sides and the center-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 facade, 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.⁵

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 today 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 favor of space. The  gyptian 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 are⁶) 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 frontalness⁷ 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,⁸ 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.⁹ 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.¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 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 Aegina 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 barbaric¹² — 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 colors of the instruments, and the contrasts of strings and wind, human voices and instrumental voices, as means wherewith to faint. 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:¹³ 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 color 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.¹⁴ 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 storied facades, 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 insofar as they have penetrated to the churches of the far West as antiphons, responsorial psalmody and Ambrosian chants.¹⁵ But it is self-evident that not only the religious west of Edessa (the syncretic cults, especially Syrian sun worship, the Gnostic and the Mandaean) but also those to the east (Mazdaists, Manichaeans, Mithraists, the synagogues of Iraq 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); 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 imitative¹⁶ and the ornamental sides of music, and although owing to the fleeting nature of all tone creations¹⁷ 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.¹⁸ 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 coordinates.¹⁹ This is the genuine “rinascita” and “reformatio” as Joachim of Floris saw it at the end of the 12th Century — 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 traveled 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.²⁰ 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. 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. 1511) brought the formal polyphony of human voices to the height of fulfillment.

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 newborn “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. 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 movement²¹ 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,²² 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’s²³ (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 “color” 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 color tones or tone colors? 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, 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 1420.²⁴ In the first the issue was one of life and death for a newborn 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 hallmarked 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.²⁵ 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 undercurrents 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,²⁶ 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 facade 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 Irae,” 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 practiced 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, carefree and unquestioning South. It produced no new building idea, and the extent of its architectural achievement might almost be reduced to facades and courtyards.

Now, this focusing 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 Paestum, 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 Paris²⁷ — 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 today 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.²⁸ 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.²⁹ This art was a mask, a mode of the taste of an elite, 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 elite, 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 Caesar, 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 Delia Querela. 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 colors 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 vapor 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 musk 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 highlighted 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 preserved³⁰ 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,³¹ 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 expression³² 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 mountaintops 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, cozy, well-rounded — with these parks in which all the waterworks, 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.33 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 color — in some cases, indeed, we can only regret that the artist did not stop at the cartoon. In the statue-like sketch, color 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 color tones interpret space.³⁴ 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 Aegina 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 color-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 colorblindness 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 colors that were technically available. There are authentic blue horses in archaic Acropolis work and Etruscan tomb painting; and a bright blue coloring 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 colors 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 colors. 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 color 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 gray 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 color, 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 colors. They are missing in the strict Attic fresco and therefore dominant in oil painting. Yellow and red, the Classical colors, are the colors of the material, the near, the full-blooded. Red is the characteristic color of sexuality — hence it is the only color 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 colors has established itself in every great school as a deep felt necessity. Violet, a red succumbing to blue, is the color of women no longer fruitful and of priests living in celibacy.

Yellow and red are the popular colors, the colors 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 colors. For red and yellow, the Apollinian, Euclidean-polytheistic colors, belong to the foreground even in respect of social life; they are meet for the noisy hearty market days and holidays, the naive immediateness of a life subject to the blind chances of the Classical Fatum, the point existence. But blue and green — the Faustian, monotheistic colors — 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 connection between ideas of space and the meaning of color in Goethe’s studies of “entoptic colors” 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 color of destiny is Grünewald’s. The indescribable power of space in his nights is equaled only by Rembrandt’s. And the thought suggests itself here, is it possible to say that his bluish green, the color in which the interior of a great cathedral is so often clothed, is the specifically Catholic color? — it being understood that we mean by “Catholic” strictly the Faustian Christianity (with the Eucharist as its center) that was founded in the Lateran Council of 1215 and fulfilled in the Council of Trent. This color 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” colors of the painted Hellenic temples and statues. It is to be noted that the effect of this color, 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 freestanding 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 colors of Watteau would have been destitute of all essence, things of almost inexpressible emptiness and untruth. By these colors 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 center 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 colors. Gold is not a color. As compared with simple yellow, it produces a complicated sense impression, through the metallic, diffuse refulgence that is generated by its glowing surface. Colors — whether colored 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.³⁵ 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. Nazzam 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. 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, color, and the mastering of aerial space in the art of the Franciscans³⁶ 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 Nicaea, 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 color 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 color 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 colors 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 color. 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 outline-less 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 colored 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 color — 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 connection. 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 color has something Protestant in it. It anticipates the hyperbolic³⁷ Northern pantheism of the 18th Century with the Archangels voice in the Prologue of Goethe’s “Faust.”³⁸ 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 colors, by means of these unlimited brown shadings and the contrast effect of immediately juxtaposed color strokes. Thereafter both the arts spread through their worlds of tones and colors — color tones and tone colors — 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 colors 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 color that there is. It is the one major color 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 Civilisation — it is a different will that seeks expression; and the very brown that he had learned 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, Leibl39 — 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 color. 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 color 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 color 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 color 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 strings⁴⁰ and to the orchestration that even as late as Bruckner so often fills space with a browny golden expanse of tone. All other colors 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 color. (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 color. 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 colors 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.⁴¹ 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. Today 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?⁴²

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 color 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?⁴³ 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.⁴⁴ Nothing was further from the Classical mind than this reverence for the weatherbeaten 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 favor 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.⁴⁵ 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.⁴⁶ 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

ACT¹ 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 favor 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, insofar as he belongs to the fabric of actuality, insofar 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 center 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 permitted²) it was not, as Nietzsche thought, an orgiastic joy of untrammeled 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,³ 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 structure⁴ 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 today 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 — 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 role 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 connection 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.⁵

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 facade 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 riddle6 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 remold 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 centers 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 center for which everything else is world around, exactly as the grammatical subject “I” becomes the center 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 super-sensuous 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 Paeonius’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 stelae of Attic cemeteries.⁷ 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 center of the World-as-Nature which as phenomenon receives shape and significance from his being, but, above all, as a center 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 1160, 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 portrait 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 Slaves⁸ than there is in the whole head of Praxiteles’s Hermes.⁹ Myron’s Discobolus¹⁰ 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”¹¹ or King Phiops (Pepi), or again with Donatello’s “David,”¹² 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 favored part of the body! That is why these heads are so small, so unsignificant in their pose, so unthoroughly modeled. 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, Centuries¹³ 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 color 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 Leibl¹⁴ — 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 equaled (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 color 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 favor, 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. 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 center of its world picture. About 1150, in the great epic of statuary of Reims Cathedral, the principal place in the center 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 hetaerae like Aphrodite. In the root feeling which produced the Classical type of womanhood, fruitfulness has a vegetal character — in this connection 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,¹⁵ 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 Clytemnestra are Amazons. How strangely even Aeschylus passes over in silence the mother-tragic in Clytemnestra! 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,¹⁶ arrives at secularizing¹⁷ 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,¹⁸ 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 behavior 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 Sophocles¹⁹ was sculptured about 340 — or of a living man like the Pericles of Cresilas.²⁰ 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,²¹ 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 Aeschines 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.

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)²² 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.²³ Take two German masters like Lucas Cranach and Tilmann Riemenschneider who were untouched by any theory and (in contrast to Dürer, whose inclination to aesthetic subtlety made him pliant before alien tendencies) worked in unqualified naiveté. 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 pediment²⁴ with his horses’ heads in the Battle of the Amazons,²⁵ 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 color 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.”²⁶) and in contrast with the high ethical significance of the Classical Act have almost no symbolic force.²⁷ 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.²⁸

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 Grande²⁹ 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)³⁰ 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 Caesar 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 modeled, 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 Donatello³¹ — 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 connection 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” facade 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 supposed³² — 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 favorite 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 color — 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 chiseled 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 demonic nature is always striving to overpower, whether he is cutting statues or piling great buildings out of it.³³ He is the one sculptor of his age who dealt only with marble. Bronze, as cast, allows the modeler 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 aeternitatis 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 facade 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 color 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 favor 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 weapon³⁴) 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 color the sharply 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 fulfillment 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,³⁵ to Perugino’s “Christ Giving the Keys,”³⁶ 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, coordinate 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.³⁷ 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,³⁸ he did not go beyond the brown under-painting, 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 color (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 mined 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 color world subserving space instead of things.

For this reason, too, Leonardo (after innumerable attempts) decided to leave Christ’s 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 firearms — 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.³⁹ 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, centers upon the naked statue. The Faustian group forms itself round the ideal of pure spatial infinity and its center of gravity is instrumental music. From this center, 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 modeling 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 fulfillment, 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 color 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 practiced 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 color 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 modeling 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 align 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 rigor 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, Paeonius, Alcamenes, Scopas, Praxiteles, Lysippus. Behind Bach and Händel come Gluck, Stamitz, the younger Bachs, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven — in their hands an armory 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. Today 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 facades 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 role.

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 colors 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 color, 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 color, every scarcely 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 colored 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 riverbanks 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, demonic, 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 color. 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 color 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 color and the transcendent brown of Rembrandt as the color of the Protestant world feeling. On the other hand, Plein-air and its new color scale stand for irreligion.⁴⁰ 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” fulfills 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 colors 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 white-washer’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 overdeveloped nerves, but scientific to the last degree, energetic in everything that relates to the conquest of technical obstacles, acutely assertive of program. 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 gray 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 practiced 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 connection 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 program 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 labored 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 Géricault 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,⁴¹ 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 leveled 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 today. 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 Gauls⁴² 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. Today, 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 color, and this was just what Wagner achieved with three bars. A whole world of soul could crowd into these three bars. Colors 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 colors. 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 practiced as art today — 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 theaters, 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 today 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 practiced 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 today 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 today 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 clamor 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, weightlifters with cardboard dumbbells — 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 today as “art”? A faked music, filled with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a raked painting, full of idiotic, exotic and show card 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.45 Instead of its symbolism being honored 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 Graeco-Asiatic, now Graeco-Egyptian, now (after Praxiteles) neo-Attic. The relief of the XlXth 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 armor, 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 today in Indian, Chinese, and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions — all is patternwork.46 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.

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 skeptical 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 today 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 connections 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 forever 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. 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 to space, so the “soul” is a counter-world 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 labors 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 electrodynamics. Will functions and thought functions are spoken of in just the same way as the function of a system of forces. To analyze 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 coordinates 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 naivest 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 connection 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;¹ 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 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 practice 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. 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 nonexistent, the Nonent. Where in this field is “Will”? or the idea of functional connections? 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 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,² 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 centers 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, επιθυμητικόν, 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 σωφποσύνη 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 hallmark 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 Manichaeans, 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.7 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.³ 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 Kabbala⁴ and the part played by Jewish philosophers in the so-called medieval 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.⁵ 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 colors 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 center 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 geometrico⁶ method was to be looked for — it is common to the Talmud, the Zend Avesta and the Arabian Kalaam; 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 discrepancy 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 favor 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.⁷ 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 labor 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” — fulfillment of an “I,” ethical work upon an “I,” justification of an “I” by faith and works; respect of the neighbor “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 vainglory. The Russian soul, will-less, having the limitless plane as its prime symbol, 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 neighbor, 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. Tolstoy’s hero Nechludov looks after his moral “I” as he does after his fingernails; this is just what betrays Tolstoy as belonging to the pseudomorphosis of Petrinism. But Raskolnikov is only something in a “we.” His fault is the fault of all, 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) also⁸ 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.”⁹ 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.¹⁰ 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.¹¹

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 center 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 center of gravity and center 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 connection 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, Yahweh 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 center 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.¹² 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. Aeschylus says so outright in a powerful passage of the “Prometheus,”¹³ 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.¹⁴ 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 σωφποσύνη and ἀταραξία. More than one of the philosophers betrays the connection 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 facade 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 connection between the achievement of Vignola and Giacomo Delia Porta and the creation by Ignatius Loyola of the Order that stands for the pure and abstract will of the Church,¹⁵ 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, today, 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.¹⁶

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 connection 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 role 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 απρόσωτος — 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 role of king or general to a man was expressed by Romans in the words persona regis, imperatoris.¹⁷ 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 role. However labeled — 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 connection. The significance of Aristotle’s phrase ξῶον 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 neighbor 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 center 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.

Starting, significantly enough, from Seneca and not from Aeschylus and Sophocles¹⁸ (just as the contemporary architecture linked itself with Imperial Rome and not with Paestum), the Baroque drama with ever increasing emphasis makes character instead of occurrence its center of gravity, the origin of a system of spiritual coordinates (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 μίμησις οὐκ ἀνθρώπῶν ἀλλά πρξεως καί βίον. 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 “role,” “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 milieu. 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 roles 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 theater, for even the strolling player — even the portrait statue — 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.¹⁹ What relation, for instance, has the entire inward past of Oedipus or Orestes to the shattering event that suddenly meets him on his way? 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 thread²⁰ 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 aging 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 connection 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 Oedipus’s σῶμα is subjected to the Oracle. 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.²¹ 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 Aeschylus (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 Aeschylus went further and made the sacral vestments of the Eleusinian priesthood the regular costume of the Attic stage, and was accused on that account.²² For the δράμα 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 there became associated another, a boorish — the burlesque (whether phallic or dithyrambic) scenes of the spring festivals of Demeter and Dionysus. The beast dances²³ 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, naenia). 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 Aeschylus’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 center of gravity of the whole, as we see more particularly in the “Prometheus,” the “Agamemnon” and the “Oedipus Rex.” But presently — at the very time when in Polycletus the pure plastic was triumphing over the fresco — 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 Aeschylus 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.²⁴ The Classical soul is pure “present,” pure σῶμα, unmoved and point-formed being. To see this imperiled 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 καθάρσις. 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 aesthetic 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 dead weight 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 today 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.²⁵ Presentation is entirely that of grandly imagined gestures, the meager 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 Polls 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 theater 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 marveled 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 neighborhood of Oratorios and Passions, without ever hearing of the Greek theater! 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 today (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 “Trachinias,” 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.²⁶ 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 candlelit 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 hallmarks 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 naive 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 schoolbook 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 naive 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 facade with the Propylaea, 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 “clamor of the Boeotians.” It is only today 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,²⁷ 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 artwork 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 neighbor, 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 centers 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 color 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 over-runnings 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 reestablished, the infinity that is expanded in all directions by the picture is ruled by the Western perspective; 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.

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 today 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 it²⁸ — 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 today we “know” that the sum of all the solar systems, about 35,000,000, constitutes a closed (and demonstrably finite²⁹) 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 Xllth Dynasty. This aspect — an image, I repeat, and not a matter of experimental knowledge — is for the Faustian a high and noble³⁰ 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 astronomy³¹ 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 gray dawn the art of sailing the seas which emancipated them.³² The Egyptians knew the sail, but only profited by it as a labor 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 Culture³³ 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 Phoenicians, 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, 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,³⁴ 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 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-patriae, 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 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 honored 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,”³⁵ Manichaeans, Nestorians and Mohammedans, it means nothing that has any connection 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 today 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.”³⁶ 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 giant-like 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 today; 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

I

We are now at last in a position to approach the phenomenon of Morale,¹ 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 rejected² (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 action³ 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 ὁδός 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 neighbor. 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 center 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 — was recast as a morale of imperative command.⁴

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”⁵ 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, 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 hallmark 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 behavior 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 today 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 Free-thinking 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 skeptic and prophet, moral critic and moral gospeler. 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 skeptic 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 formulas 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, 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 fulfill 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 center 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 formulas 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 — 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 ἀπάθεια. 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 Hoenstaufen 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, Caesar 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 Odysseus’s and Ajax’s — 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 Conquistadors, 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?⁶ Only in pious and honored 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,⁷ 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 compassion that was practiced 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 today 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,”⁸ 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 today 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 center 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 remolds all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practices 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 masterwork, 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 fall. 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. 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 altered⁹ — 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.¹⁰ 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 — skeptical, practical, artificial — alone represents Civilization today. 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 — 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, farseeing, 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 Caesar’s.

V

So long as the man of a Culture that is approaching its fulfillment 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 Aeschylus, 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 Aeschylus, 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 outmaneuvering of destiny. What Aeschylus 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, smooths 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 Aeschylus’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 Apolliniaa world, and, quite generally, not a religion like the religions of the Vedas or the religion of the Apostle Paul,¹¹ 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.¹² 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 today, who reduce the inward man to a bundle of sensations and an aggregation of electrochemical energies. The teacher Nagasena tells King Milinda¹³ 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.¹⁴ 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 neighbor. 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,¹⁵ 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 insofar 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 flavor, the Stoic abnegation of the same a Buddhistic flavor. 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 irreligious¹⁶ down to the last detail, down to the look of the streets, the dry intelligence of the faces.¹⁷ 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 Free-thinker 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 forever, 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.

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 peasant like even when it lived in towns. They are the marketplace 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;¹⁸ the man of the theaters and places of amusement, of sport and “bestsellers.” 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.¹⁹ 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 marketplaces of the megalopolis. As the whole of Hellenistic philosophy is rhetorical, so the social ethical 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. 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 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 marketplaces of the great cities and the megalopolitan form of propaganda. The word “pagan” (man of the heath or countryside) 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 arid 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 newborn 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 Skeptics 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;²⁰ 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 genetically 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 practice 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 insofar 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 civilized 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 insofar 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 “aere 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-medieval-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. 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 Homeric²¹ and the Early Arabian 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,²² 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 Zeno23 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 center 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 center 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 program, 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-known²⁴ 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, to write and rewrite the history of philosophy (and what history! — collections of dates and “results”) so that no one today 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 insofar 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 changeover 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,²⁵ 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.²⁶

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. Proof, to the Darwinian, means 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 fulfillment, 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 connection 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 remolded 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.²⁷ 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 today 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 forever 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 29, 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 philosophie 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 skepticism. 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 Skeptic would deal with both simply as the historical expression of a Culture.

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 skeptic 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.¹ 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 rigor? 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. 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 formulas), 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 and their theoretical interpretation. The formulas represent general logical values, pure numbers — that is to say, objective space — and boundary elements. But formulas are dumb. The expression s = ½gt2 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,² 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, 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 Cannae and that of Actium and made way for the world outlook of the “second religiousness.” 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, Resaina and Pombaditha (and for Porphyry too), the colors 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 doctrine³ taught by Ibn-al-Haitan, by Avicenna and by the “Brothers of Sincerity.”4 And the idea of light as a force, an impetus, was current even from about 1300 amongst the Paris Occamists who centered on Albert of Saxony, Buridan and Oresme the discoverer of coordinate 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” formulas, 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, formulas, 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 colored existence of metals and can transmute one metal into another.⁵ 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,⁶ 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. 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, ἀρχἠ, μορφή, ὕλη, are not translatable into our speech. To render ἀρχἠ 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. 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,⁷ who is supposed to have lived in Alexandria at the same time as Flotinus and Diophantus. Similarly it was just at the time of the definite emancipation of the Western mathematic by Newton and Leibniz that the Western chemistry⁸ 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, insofar 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 electrons⁹ 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”¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 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.” 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 Oedipus. 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 counter-shock 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 today and ruined tomorrow. And in contrast — the dynastic states of our 17th and 18th Centuries, political fields of force, with cabinets and great diplomats as effective centers 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 counter-shock 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 quarreling 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 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”), 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 formulas. “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. 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.

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 center 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 counter-shock 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 aging 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 aging, 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. 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 center 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 formulas 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 endeavors 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 formulas. 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. 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,” 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.¹² 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 formulas 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 Caesar), 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 formulas 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 super-added, 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.

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 facades of Delia 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 formulas 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 fulfillment 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.”¹³

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 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 skepticism 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 aether” 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 mytho-poetic 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. 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, the heroes of the Mycenaean 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 today, 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 folklore 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 folklore 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 “fairytale,” “popular beliefs” or “superstition” and yet inseparable from the world of high contemplation.

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 Mycenaean 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.¹⁴

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 worshiping the center 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 coloring 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 Caesar and Constantine — that fantastic mass of cults, visions and legends that today we can hardly even survey, 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 Manichaean 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 insofar as they were pantheists and godless. Gods are bodies, σώηατα 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 worshiped 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 fatness, 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. 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 Achelous, who appears as a bull, is definitely understood as being the river and not as, so to say, dwelling in the river. The Pans¹⁵ 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 honored 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 favored 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 fairytale 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 Phoenicians and the Germans, insofar 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 honoring 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.¹⁶ These were gods not known by name to the Greek but worshiped by the foreigners of the great seaports (Piraeus, 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 formulas like, for example, the generalis invocatio.17 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 Pessinus¹⁸ 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, practiced 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,)¹⁹ 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 armor of Jupiter Capitolinus, and in early days his face and arms were even painted red, in order to enhance his similarity to the terracotta 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. 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 Propylaeus had been worshiped 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 Jupiter Feretrius (which contained, not a statue of the god, but a holy stone, silex²⁰) was that of Jupiter 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.²¹ But in early Christian times Jupiter Dolichenus or Sol Invictus²² could be worshiped “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  lexandrian Isis, the Sun god favored 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 Caelestis²³) honored 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 honorable resistance which centered in a few of the very oldest patrician families.²⁴ 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 Rome²⁵ (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.²⁶

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? Are there cases of men insisting on describing themselves as atheists who are in fact not atheists at all? And, on the other hand, 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 religiousness²⁷ — 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. 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 rootless 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, fulfills 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 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.”²⁸ 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 Caesar 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; today 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 mechanics²⁹ and the almost complete atheism of the formulations of modern dynamics are of like color, 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 (Q.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 naive) 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 aether, 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.”³⁰

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 Thermodynamics³¹ 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 periphrases 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. 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 connection with those of time and force.³² 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 mold 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,³³ 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 movedness 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 unacceptable 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 centripetal 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 center of gravity of physical thought had passed from the dynamics of matter to the electrodynamics of the aether. 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 insofar 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. 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 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 fulfillment, an increasing purity, rigor 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 today 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 today, 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 aether, 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 aether 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 aether 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 Electromagnetic Theory of Light, which in fact are pure nameless numbers of indubitable validity, exclude the explanation of the aether by any mechanics whatsoever. Therefore, and having regard also to the consequences of the Relativity theory, physicists now regard the aether 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.³⁴ 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 usable 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 Bohr³⁵ 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 favored; 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 favorable 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.³⁶ 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 rigor 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 reestablished. 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. Formula: 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 formulas that are no longer in their essence formulas 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”³⁷ 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 countrysides 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, quite suddenly without assignable cause explode, scattering their smallest particles over space with velocities of thousands of kilometers per second. Only a few individuals in an aggregate of radioactive atoms are struck by Destiny thus, the neighbors 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.³⁸

With ideas like these, the mytho-poetic 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 modeled 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 nth 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 today — 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 today, 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 role 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 scientificness 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 caliber 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 Caesarism 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 today 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 retreatment 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 today 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 formulas, 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 today they cannot be handled separately — witness spectrum analysis, radioactivity, radiation of heat. While fifty years ago the essence of chemistry could still be described almost without mathematics, today 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 aether, 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 desensualized.

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.³⁹ 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 skepticism 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, hardworking, 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.

Notes - Volume 1

Chapter 1

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.” [Return]

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. [Return]

³ In the original, these fundamental antitheses are expressed simply by means werden and sein. Exact renderings are therefore impossible in English. — Tr. [Return]

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 naiveté. 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. Greich 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. [Return]

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 Mycenaean 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. [Return]

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 Mycenaean — 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. [Return]

⁷ From Homer to the tragedies of Seneca, a full thousand years, the same handful of myth figures (Thyestes, Clytemnestra, 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. [Return]

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. [Return]

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. [Return]

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, chat 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. Id 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 Tolstoy, Aksakov or Dostoevsky. “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 today certainly does not. [Return]

¹¹ Windelband, Gesch. d. Phil. (1903), pp. 275 ff. [Return]

¹² 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. [Return]

¹³ As we can see from the expression, at once desperate and ridiculous, “newest time” (neueste Zeit). [Return]

¹⁴ 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 Encyclopaedia Britannica, XI ed., Tr.) [Return]

¹⁵ The expression “antique” — meant of course in the dualistic sense — is found as early as the Isagoge of Porphyry (c. 300 A.D.). [Return]

¹⁶ “Mankind? It is an abstraction. There are, always have been, and always will be, men and only men.” (Goethe to Luden.) [Return]

¹⁷ “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 Sabaea into Abyssinia, was entirely excluded from this “World history.” [Return]

¹⁸ See Chapter IX, footnote #51. To the true Russian the basic proposition of Darwinism is as devoid of meaning as that of Copernicus is to a true Arab. [Return]

¹⁹ 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 hallmark “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, Holderlin, 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.] [Return]

²⁰ As will be seen later, the words zivilisierte and Zivilisation possess in this work a special meaning. — Tr. [Return]

²¹ 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. [Return]

²² 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. [Return]

²³ 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.). [Return]

²⁴ 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.” [Return]

²⁵ Hence it was that the first to succumb to Christianity were the Romans who could not afford to be Stoics. [Return]

²⁶ 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 insula, (Pöhlmann, Aus Altertum und Gegenwart, 1911, pp. 199 ff.) [Return]

²⁷ See Vol. II, 326. [Return]

²⁸ 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. [Return]

²⁹ The conquest of Gaul by Caesar 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. [Return]

³⁰ 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. [Return]

³¹ This is probably the meaning of Napoleon’s significant words to Goethe: “What have we today to do with destiny? Policy is destiny.” [Return]

³² Corresponding to the 300-50 B.C. phase of the Classical world. [Return]

³³ Which in the end gave its name to the Empire (Tsin = China). [Return]

³⁴ The work referred to is embodied in Vol. II. [Return]

³⁵ The philosophy of this book I owe to the philosophy of Goethe, which is practically unknown today, 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. [Return]

³⁶ At the end of the volume. [Return]

Chapter 2

¹ Weltanschauung im wörtlichen Sinne; Anschauung der Welt. [Return]

² The case of mankind in the historyless state is discussed in Vol. II. [Return] 

³ With, moreover, a “biological horizon.” [Return]

⁴ Also “thinking in money.” [Return]

⁵ 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. [Return]

⁶ As also those of law and of money. [Return]

⁷ Poincaré, in his Science et Méthode (Ch. Ill), searchingly analyses the “becoming” of one of his own mathematical discoveries. Each decisive stage in it bears “les mȇmes 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. [Return]

⁸ 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 aether — 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 ἅλογον (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. [Return]

⁹ Horace’s words (Odes I xi): “Tu ne quassieris, scire nefas, quem mihi quem tibi finem di dederint, Leuconoë, nec Babylonios temptaris numeros . . . carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁰ 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. [Return]

¹¹ 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. [Return]

¹² F. Strunz, Gesch. d. Naturwiss. im Mittelalter (1910), p. 90. [Return]

¹³ 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. [Return]

¹⁴ 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). [Return]

¹⁵ Dr. Anster’s translation. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁶ See Vol. II, Chapter III. [Return]

¹⁷ Oresme was, equally, prelate, church reformer, scholar, scientist and economist — the very type of the philosopher leader. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁸ 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. [Return]

¹⁹ 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 harbored a primitive population of quite different spiritual constitution. [Return]

²⁰ Born 1601, died 1665. See Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article Fermat, and references therein. — Tr. [Return]

²¹ Similarly, coinage and double entry bookkeeping play analogous parts in the money thinking of the Classical and the Western Cultures respectively. [Return]

²² The same may be said in the matter of Roman Law and of coinage. [Return]

²³ 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. [Return]

²⁴ 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. [Return]

²⁵ From the savage conjurer with his naming magic to the modern scientist who subjects things, by attaching technical labels to them, the form has in no wise changed. [Return]

²⁶ A beginning is now being made with the application of non-EucIidcan 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. [Return]

²⁷ That only one parallel to a given straight line is possible through a given point — a proposition that is incapable of proof. [Return]

²⁸ It is impossible to say, with certainty, how much of the Indian mathematics that we possess is old, i.e., before Buddha. [Return]

²⁹ 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 a1, a2, a3… 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   018601small   or functions such as 018602small where x is infinite or indefinite. — Tr. [Return]

³⁰ “Function, rightly understood, is existence considered as an activity” (Goethe). [Return]

³¹ Built for August II, in 1711, as barbican or fore building for a projected palace. — Tr. [Return]

³² 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.” [Return]

Chapter 3

¹ “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. [Return]

² “There are prime phenomena which in their godlike simplicity we must not disturb or infringe.” [Return]

³ The date of Napoleon’s defeat, and the liberation of Germany, on the field of Leipzig. — Tr. [Return]

⁴ “All we see before us passing / Sign and symbol is alone.” From the final stanza of Faust II (Anster’s translation). — Tr. [Return]

⁵ This phrase, derived by analogy from the center of gravity of mechanics, is offered as a translation of “mithin in einem Zeitpunkte gar nicht zusammengefasst werden können,” — Tr. [Return]

⁶ Not the dissecting morphology of the Darwinian’s pragmatic zoology with its hunt for causal connections, but the seeing and overseeing morphology of Goethe. [Return]

⁷ 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. 31 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). [Return]

⁸ St. Bernward was Bishop of Hildesheim from 993 to1022, and himself architect and metalworker. 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. [Return]

⁹ 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. [Return]

¹⁰ 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. [Return]

¹¹ 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. [Return]

¹² 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. 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. [Return]

¹³ 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. [Return]

¹⁴ The first draft of Faust I, discovered only comparatively recently. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁵ See Ency. Brit., Xlth Ed., articles Owen, Sir Richard; Morphology and Zoology (p. 1029). — Tr. [Return]

¹⁶ 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. [Return]

¹⁷ 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. [Return]

Chapter 4

1 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. 231 et seq.) [Return]

2 The expression “space of time” (Zeitraum) which is common to many languages, is evidence of our inability to represent direction otherwise than by extension. [Return]

3 I.e., the translated Bible. — Tr. [Return]

4 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. [Return]

5 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. [Return]

6 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.] [Return]

7 Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicari velim, nescio. (Conf. XI, 14.) [Return]

8 Save in elementary mathematics. (It may be remarked that most philosophers since Schopenhauer have approached these question with the prepossessions of elementary mathematics.) [Return]

9 The “inverse circular functions” of English textbooks. — Tr. [Return]

10 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. [Return]

11 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. [Return]

12 At this point the German text repeats the paragraph which in this edition begins at “But inquiry” (p. 92) and ends at the close of section I. — Tr. [Return]

13 Here the author presumably means history in the ordinary acceptation of the word. — Tr. [Return]

14 Oed. Rex., 642. κακῶς ἐίληφα τὀυμόν σῶμα συν τέχνη κακῆ. (Cf. Rudolf Hirsch, Die Person (1914), p. 9.) [Return]

15 Oed. Col., 355. μαντεῖα ... ἄ τοῦδ᾿ ἐχρήσθη σώματος. [Return]

16 Choëphorae, 710. ἐπί ναυάρχψ σώματι ... τψ βασιλείψ. [Return]

17 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. [Return]

18 Who was criticized as “no god maker but a man maker” and as one who spoiled 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. [Return]

19 The writers immediately succeeding Aristophanes. — Tr. [Return]

20 Diels, Antike Technik (1920), p. 159. [Return]

21 About 400 B.C. savants began to construct crude sun dials in Africa and Ionia, and from Plato’s time still more primitive clepsydrae 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 connection with the Greek life feeling. See Diels, op. cit., pp. 160 et seq. [Return]

22 Horace’s monumentum are 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. [Return]

23 Ordered, for us, by the Christian chronology and the ancient-medieval-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. [Return]

24 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. [Return]

25 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 τοσόυτον μεν ἤ Μυτιλήνη ἤλθε κινδύνου), a phrase which recalls forcibly what has just been said regarding the “situation drama.” — Tr. [Return]

26 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. [Return]

27 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 Mayan Antiquities. — Tr.) [Return]

28 Let the reader try to imagine what a Greek would feel when suddenly made acquainted with this custom of ours. [Return]

29 The Chinese ancestor worship honored genealogical order with strict ceremonies. And whereas here ancestor worship by degrees came to be the center 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.) [Return]

30 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. [Return]

31 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. [Return]

32 Originally a philosophical and scientific lecture temple founded in honor of Aristotle, and later the great University of Alexandria, bore the title Μονσεῖον. 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. [Return]

33 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. [Return]

34 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 Parwati is one. Vaishnavism — the Vishnu branch of Indian religion — also contains an erotic clement 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. 340 et seq., and Ency. Brit., XI Edition, article Hinduism. — Tr. [Return]

35 British Museum. — Tr. [Return]

36 Dresden. — Tr. [Return]

37 In connection 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. [Return]

38 See, further, the last two sections of Vol. II (Der Staat and Wirtschaftsleben). — Tr. [Return]

39 Sesenheim is the home of Friederike, and a student’s holiday took him thither: Weimar, of course, is the center from which all the activity of his long life was to radiate. — Tr. [Return]

40 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 center of any planetary orbit. — Tr. [Return]

41 Sprüche im Reimen. [Return]

42 The path from Calvin to Darwin is easily seen in English philosophy. [Return]

43 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 aesthetic took its examples from both Cultures, it was bound to go wrong in the very enunciation of its problem. [Return]

44 “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. [Return]

45 The incident which is said to have precipitated the French war on Algiers (1827). — Tr. [Return]

46 Act. II, Scene VII. — Tr. [Return]

47 In the general upheaval of 1848 a German national parliament was assembled at Frankfurt, of a strongly democratic color, and it chose Frederick William IV of Prussia as hereditary emperor. Frederick William, however, refused to “pick up a crown put 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. [Return]

48 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. [Return]

49 Derived from μείρομαι, to receive as one’s portion, to have allotted to one, or, colloquially, to “come in for” or “step into.” — Tr. [Return]

50 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. [Return]

51 Helios is only a poetical figure; he had neither temples nor cult. Even less was Selene a moon goddess. [Return]

52 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. [Return]

53 The words of Canning at the beginning of the XlXth century may be recalled. “South America free! and if possible English!” The expansion idea has never been expressed in greater purity than this. [Return]

54 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. [Return]

55 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. [Return]

56 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. [Return]

57 Where in 295 B.C. the Romans decisively defeated the last great Samnite effort to resist their hegemony over Italy. — Tr. [Return]

58 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. [Return]

59 That is, not merely conclusions of peaces or death days 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. [Return]

60 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 neighborhood of the electromagnetic 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. [Return]

61 There is no difference essentially between these representations and the switchboard wiring diagram. [Return]

62 Goethe’s theory of color 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 electromagnetic theory, which has substituted a merely mathematical existence for the Newtonian physical existence of color 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 colorless that becomes colored 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 color rays, but a surge of irregular wave trains which are only regularized into color vibrations through being acted upon by analyzers of one sort and another, from prisms to particulate matter. This necessity of a counter-agent for the production of color 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. [Return]

Chapter 5

¹ 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. [Return]

² The want of perspective in children’s drawings is emphatically not perceptible to the children themselves. [Return]

³ 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 naive 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. [Return]

⁴ 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. [Return]

⁵ So much so that Gauss said nothing about his discovery until almost the end of his life for fear of “the clamor of the Boeotians.” [Return]

⁶ The distinction of right and left 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. [Return]

⁷ It may not be out of place here to refer to the enormous importance attached in savage society to initiation rites at adolescence. — Tr. [Return]

⁸ Either in Greek or in Latin τόπος (= locus) means spot, locality, and also social position; χὠρα (= spatium) means space between, distance, rank, and also ground and soil (e.g., τὰ ἐκ τῆς χώρας, produce); τὸ κἐνον (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 ὸρατὸς 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. [Return]

⁹ 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 center 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 center 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. [Return]

¹⁰ 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. [Return]

Chapter 6

¹ 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.) [Return]

² Strzygowski’s Ursprung der Christlichen Kirchenkunst (1920), p. 80. [Return]

³ 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 “Pomoerium”) in later times shows. A “templum,” too, was the Roman camp whose rectangular outline is visible today 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 (“aedes”) were not “templa” at all. On the other hand, the early Greek τέμενος of Homeric times must have had a similar significance. [Return]

⁴ The student may consult the articles “Church History,” “Monasticism,” “Eucharist” and other articles therein referred to in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, XI Edition. — Tr. [Return]

⁵ 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 medieval England must have been more populous than modern England is. — Tr. [Return]

⁶ Cf. my introduction to Ernst Droem’s Gesdäge, p. ix. [Return]

⁷ The oldest and most mystical of the poems of the “Elder Edda.” — Tr. [Return]

⁸ 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. [Return]

⁹ Hölscher, Grabdenkmal des Königs Chephren; Borchardt, Grabdenkmal des Sahurd; Curtius, Die Antike Kunst, p. 45. [Return]

¹⁰ See Vol. II, p. 196.; Borchardt, Re-Heiligtum des Newoserri; Ed. Mayer, Geschichte des Altertums, I, 251. [Return]

¹¹ “Relief en creux”; compare H, Schäfer, Von Aegyptischer Kunst (1919), I, p. 41. [Return]

¹² 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 Chôu and Vedic times. [Return]

¹³ C. Glaser, Die Kunsf Ostastiens (1920), p. 181. [Return]

¹⁴ Glaser, op. cit., p. 43. [Return]

¹⁵ 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. 115) which gives rise to that tendentious 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. [Return]

¹⁶ See Vol. II, pp. 81 et seq., and Worringer, Abstraktion und Einführung, pp. 66 et seq. [Return]

¹⁷ 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 colors of the instruments. The essential is irrevocably gone, and every “reproduction” is in reality something new and different. [Return]

¹⁸ For the workshop of Thothmes at Tell-el-Amarna, see Mitteilungen der Deutschen-Orient-Gesellschaft. No. 52, pp. 28 et seq. [Return]

¹⁹ K. Burdach, Deutsche Renaissance, p. 11. The pictorial art of the Gothic period also has its strict typism and symbolism. [Return]

²⁰ E. Norden, Antike Kunst-prosa, pp. 8 et seq. [Return]

²¹ 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.” [Return]

²² Hence the ornamental character of script. [Return]

²³ E.g., the Slavonic round villages and Teutonic street villages cast 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. [Return]

²⁴ The same applies to the architecture of Thinite Egypt and to the Seleucid-Persian sun and fire temples of the pre-Christian area. [Return]

²⁵ The combination of scrolls and “Greek keys” with the Dragon or other emblem of storm power. — Tr. [Return]

²⁶ Dvorák, Idealismus und Naturalismus in der got. Skulptur u. Malerei (Hist. Zeitschrift, 1918, pp. 44 et seq.). [Return]

²⁷ 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. 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. [Return]

²⁸ Certainly the Greeks at the time when they advanced from the Antae: 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. [Return]

²⁹ The surface of the space volume itself, not that of the stone. Dvorák, Hist. Ztschr., 1918, pp. 17 et seq. [Return]

³⁰ Dehio, Gesch. der deutschen Kunst, I, p. 16. [Return]

³¹ For descriptions and illustrations of types of Doming and Vaulting, see the article Vault in Ency. Brit., XI Ed. — Tr. [Return]

³² “Mosque of Omar.” — Tr. [Return]

³³ H. Schäfer, Von Aegyptischtr Kunst, I, pp. 15 et seq.

(The bulls are shown in Fig. 18 in the article Egypt in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, XI Edition, Vol. IX, pp. 65-66. — Tr.) [Return]

³⁴ Frankl, Baukunst des Mittelalters (1918), pp. 16 et seq. [Return]

³⁵ The lack of any vertical tendency in the Russian life feeling is perceptible also in the saga figure of Ilya Murometz. 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 fulfillment 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. [Return]

³⁶ The cemetery church of Kishi has 22. [Return]

³⁷ J. Grabar, “History of Russian Art” (Russian, 1911), I-III. Eliasberg, Russ. Baukunst (1922.), Introduction. [Return]

³⁸ The disposition of Egyptian and that of Western history are so clear as to admit of comparison being earned 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. [Return]

³⁹ That which differentiates the Japanese harakiri from this suicide is its intensely purposeful and (so to put it) active and demonstrative character. — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁰ Koldewey-Puchstein, Die griech. Tempel in Unter-Italien und Sizilien, I, p. 228. [Return]

⁴¹ See Vol. II, Chapter III. [Return]

⁴² Stilfragen, Grundlage zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (1893). Spatrömische Kunstindustrie (1901). [Return]

⁴³ Amida (1910). Die bildende Kunst des Ostens (1916), Altai-Iran (1917). Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa (1918). [Return]

⁴⁴ 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. [Return]

⁴⁵ For a brief description of the components of a Mithrasum, the student may be referred to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, XI Edition, art. Mithras (Section II). — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁶ The oldest Christian designs in the Empire of Axum undoubtedly agree with the pagan work of the Sabaeans. [Return]

⁴⁷ Kohl & Watzinger, Antike Synagogen in Galiläa (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. [Return]

⁴⁸ Frauberger, Die Akropolis von Baalbek, plate 22. (See Ency. Brit., XI Edition, art. “Baalbek,” for plan, etc. — Tr.) [Return]

⁴⁹ Diez, Die Kunst der islamischen Völker, pp. 8 et seq. In old Sabaean temples the altar court (mahdar) is in front of the oracle chapel (makanat). [Return]

⁵⁰ Wulff, Altechristliche und byzantinische Kunst, p. 227. [Return]

⁵¹ 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 transverse 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. [Return]

⁵² Neither technically nor in point of space feeling has this piece of purely interior architecture any connection 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. [Return]

⁵³ 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. 209), 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 Judaeo-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. [Return]

⁵⁴ Generally called the “Basilica of Constantine.” — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁵ 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. [Return]

⁵⁶ 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. [Return]

⁵⁷ A. Riegl, Stilfragen (1893), pp. 248 et seq., 272 et seq. [Return]

⁵⁸ The Ghassanid Kingdom flourished in the extreme Northwest 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. [Return]

⁵⁹ Dehio, Gesch. der deutschen Kunst, I, pp. 16 et seq. [Return]

⁶⁰ Wulff, Altchristl.-byzant. Kunst, pp. 153 et seq. [Return]

⁶¹ See Geffcken, Der Ausgang des griech-röm. Heidentums (1920), p. 113. [Return]

Chapter 7

¹ 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. [Return]

² 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 connection with words : it is a pure architecture of human voices in which several texts, Latin and vernacular, sacred and secular, were sung together. [Return]

³ Our pedantic method has given us an art history that excludes music history; and while the one has become a normal clement 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. [Return]

⁴ This sentence is not in the original. It has been inserted, and the following sentence modified, for the sake of clarity. — Tr. [Return]

⁵ The aspect of the streets of Old Egypt may have been very similar to this, if we can draw conclusions from tesserae: discovered in Cnossus (see H. Bossert, Alt Kreta (1921), T. 14). And the Pylon is an undoubted and genuine facade. (Such tesserae:, bearing pictures of windowed houses, are illustrated in Art. “Aegean Civilization,” Ency. Brit., XI Edition, Vol. I, p. 251, plate IV, fig. I. — Tr.). [Return]

⁶ Ghiberti has not outgrown the Gothic, nor has even Donatello; and already in Michelangelo the feeling is Baroque, i.e., musical. [Return]

⁷ The struggle to fix the problem is visible in the series of “Apollo figures.” See Déonna, Les Apollons archaïques (1909). [Return]

⁸ 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. [Return]

⁹ Miletus was in a particular relation with Egypt through Naucratis. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁰ 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. [Return]

¹¹ V. Salis, Kunst der Griechen (1919), pp. 47, 98 et seq. [Return]

¹² The decisive preference of the white stone is itself significant of the opposition of Renaissance to Classical feeling. [Return]

¹³ 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 coordinates (i.e., substantially, the key of the harmony) may alter, so that henceforth the note, from A flat, has become G sharp. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁴ 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. [Return]

¹⁵ See articles under these headings in Grove’s “Dictionary of Music.” — Tr. [Return]

¹⁶ In Baroque music the word “imitation” means something quite different from this, viz., the exact repetition of a motive in a new coloring (starting from a different note of the scale). [Return]

¹⁷ 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. [Return]

¹⁸ See articles Fauxbourdon, Discant and Gimel in Grove’s “Dictionary of Music.” — Tr. [Return]

¹⁹ 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. [Return]

²⁰ 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. [Return]

²¹ 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. [Return]

²² Einstein, Gesch. der Musik, p. 67. [Return]

²³ Coysevox lived 1640-1720. Much of the embellishment and statuary of Versailles is his work. [Return]

²⁴ See Vol. II, pp. 204 et seq., 208 et seq. [Return]

²⁵ 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 center 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. [Return]

²⁶ 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. [Return]

²⁷ Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien. (An English translation was published in 1878. — Tr.) [Return]

²⁸ 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. [Return]

²⁹ A. Schmarsow, Gotik in der Renaissance (1921); B. Haendke, Der niederl. Einfluss auf die Malerei Toskana-Umbriens (Monatshefte für Kunstwissensch. 1912). [Return]

³⁰ The colossal statue of Bartolommeo Colleone at Venice. — Tr. [Return]

³¹ Svoboda, Römische und Romanische Paläste (1919); Rostowzew, Pompeianische Landschaften und Römische Villen (Röm. mitt., 1904). [Return]

³² 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. [Return]

³³ That is, the expression for the sum of a convergent series beyond any specified term. — Tr. [Return]

³⁴ 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 modeling 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 color tones and affected by atmosphere. [Return]

³⁵ 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. [Return]

³⁶ The life and teaching of St. Francis were, morally and aesthetically alike, the centers of inspiration for Cimabue, Giotto and the Italian Gothic generally. — Tr. [Return]

³⁷ Der nordische im Grenzenlose schweifende Pantheismus. [Return]

³⁸ There follows a translation of this chorus. — Tr. 

Raphael. The Sun out sings the brother spheres Michael. And storms arise and swell and ebb

in olden rivalry of song, o’er sea and mountain, lake and field,

and thunder girt pursues the years in wild contention weave a web

the preordainèd path along. of forces purposed though concealed.

Tis from his face the angels gain The lightning is thy flaming sword,

their strength; but scan it no one may. the thunder veils thee on thy way,

Thought is outranged and Works remain yet ever spare thy envoys. Lord,

sublime as on Creation Day. the gentle changing of thy day.

Gabriel. And, swift beyond description, flies The Three. Tis from thy face the angels gain

the circling scene of land and sea, their strength, but scan it no one may.

in alternance of Paradise Beyond all thought thy Works remain

with dark and awful Mystery. sublime as on Creation Day.

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. [Return]

³⁹ 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. [Return]

⁴⁰ The strings in the Orchestra represent, as a class, the colors 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 colors of nearness, the popular colors, 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, insignificant 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 colors are those of the distance. — Tr.) [Return]

⁴¹ 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. [Return]

⁴² 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. [Return]

⁴³ Pausanias, it should be observed, was neither by date nor by origin a Greek. — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁴ “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. [Return]

⁴⁵ 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. [Return]

⁴⁶ 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. [Return]

Chapter 8

¹ The word Akt means “pose” and, in art language, “nude.” In this work it must be understood in a widened connotation — viz., as expressing the instantaneous-become as against the historically-becoming, the presentation in the perfect as against the imperfect sense, the act as against the action. It has therefore been retained, “nude” however being substituted in certain cases. [Return]

² One need only contrast the Greek artist with Rubens and Rabelais. [Return]

³ 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. [Return]

⁴ 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. [Return]

⁵ 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 nude 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. [Return]

⁶ Kluge, Deutsche Sprachgesch. (1920), pp. 202 et seq. [Return]

⁷ A. Conze, Die Attischen Grabreliefs (1893 etc.). [Return]

⁸ Louvre. Replicas of the pair in the Vict, and Alb. Museum, London. — Tr. [Return]

⁹ 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. [Return]

¹⁰ 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 Fürtwangler’s (shown in Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article Greek Art, fig. 68). — Tr. [Return]

¹¹ A cast of this is in the British Museum (illustrated in the Museum Guide to Egypt. Antiq., pl. XXI). — Tr. [Return]

¹² In the Bargello, Florence. Replica in Vict, and Alb. Museum, London. — Tr. [Return]

¹³ 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. [Return]

¹⁴ In his portrait of Frau Gedon, already alluded to, p. 252. [Return]

¹⁵ The so-called “Three Fates” in the British Museum. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁶ The Orphic springtime contemplates the Gods and does not see them.  [Return]

¹⁷ 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 Handel 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.) [Return]

¹⁸ Harmodius and Aristogiton. At Naples. Illustrated in Ency. Brit. XI ed., article Greek Art, fig. 50. Cast in British Museum. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁹ The famous statue now in the Lateran Museum, Rome. — Tr. [Return]

²⁰ An antique copy is in the British Museum. — Tr. [Return]

²¹ In the Vatican Museum. — Tr. [Return]

²² 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. [Return]

²³ It could be said of Hellenistic portrait art that it followed exactly the opposite course. [Return]

²⁴ British Museum. — Tr. [Return]

²⁵ Pinakothek, Munich. — Tr. [Return]

²⁶ Art Gallery, Vienna. — Tr. [Return]

²⁷ Nothing more clearly displays the decadence of Western art since the middle of the 19th century than its absurd mass wise rendering of nudes; the deeper meaning of study of the nude and the importance of the motive have been entirely forgotten. [Return]

²⁸ 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. [Return]

²⁹ Tombs of the Scaligers, Verona. — Tr. [Return]

³⁰ National Gallery, London. — Tr. [Return]

³¹ Museo Nazionale, Florence. — Tr. [Return]

³² 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, Gemrode, 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, insofar 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. [Return]

³³ 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 favorite 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.) [Return]

³⁴ Although gunpowder is much older than the Baroque, its application in real earnest to long ranging firearms was only accomplished during the 16th Century. It cannot be said that there was any technical reason why 200 years should have elapsed between the first use of powder in European warfare and the first effective soldier’s firearm. 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. [Return]

³⁵ Uffizi, Florence. — Tr. [Return]

³⁶ Sistine Chapel, Rome. — Tr. [Return]

³⁷ “Doctor Marianus.” — Tr. [Return]

³⁸ Vatican. — Tr. [Return]

³⁹ In Renaissance work the finished product is often quite depressingly complete. The absence of “infinity” is palpable. No secrets, no discoveries. [Return]

⁴⁰ Hence the impossibility of achieving a genuinely religious painting on plein-air principles. The world feeling that underlies it is so throughly 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. [Return]

⁴¹ State Museum, Berlin. — Tr. [Return]

⁴² I.e., the “giants” of the great frieze, who were in fact Galatians playing the part. This Gigantomachia, a program work like the Ring, represented a situation, as the Ring represented characters, under mythological labels. — Tr. [Return]

Chapter 9

¹ 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. [Return]

² That is, discussion of the doctrines of the Eleatic school regarding unity and plurality, the Ent and Nonent, focused 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. [Return]

³ De Boer, Gesch. d. Philos. im Islam (1901), pp. 93, 108. [Return]

⁴ A detailed summary will be found in Ency. Brit., XI ed., article Kabbalah, by Dr. Ginsburg and Dr. Cook. — Tr. [Return]

⁵ See Windelband, Gesch. d. neueren Philosophie (1919), I, 208; also Hinnebert, Kultur der Gegenwart, I, V (1913), p. 484. [Return]

⁶ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article Cartesianism (V, 421). — Tr. [Return]

⁷ 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. [Return]

⁸ In the German, “Vor allem aber sein eignes Ich,” (But in Luther’s Bible, characteristically, “Auch dazu sein eigen Leben.”) — Tr. [Return]

⁹ Barnasha. The underlying idea is not the filial relation, but an impersonal coming up in the field of mankind. [Return]

¹⁰ ἐθἐλω and βόυλομαι, to have the intention, or wish, or inclination (βόυλομαι means counsel, council, plan, and ἐθἐλω 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. Caesar is net 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. [Return]

¹¹ 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, 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. [Return]

¹² 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. [Return]

¹³ Lines 525-534. [Return]

ΧΟ. τούτων ἅπα Ζεύς ἐστιν άσθενέστεροσ;

ΠΡ. οὔκουν ἄνεκφύγοι γε τήν πεπρωμένην, etc. — Tr.

¹⁴ Iliad, XXII, 208-215. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁵ 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.) [Return]

¹⁶ Luther placed practical activity (the day’s demands, as Goethe said) at the very center 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. [Return]

¹⁷ 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 theater 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. [Return]

¹⁸ W. Creizenach, Gesch, d. neueren Dramas (1918), II, 346 et seq. [Return]

¹⁹ 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. [Return]

²⁰ 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. [Return]

²¹ The evolution of meaning in the Classical words pathos and passio 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. [Return]

²² 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. [Return]

23 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. [Return]

²⁴ As the student of cultural history today 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] (καθάρσις) 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 worshipers of Dionysus as obtaining a καθάρσις, a healthful relief, by the “lyric utterance of their sacred frenzy.” — Tr. [Return]

²⁵ The evolution of ideals of stage presentation in the minds of Aechylus, Sophocles and Euripides successively is perhaps comparable with that of sculptural style which we see in the pediments of Aegina, of Olympia and of the Parthenon. [Return]

²⁶ It must be repeated that the Hellenistic shadow painting of Zeuxis and Apollodorus is a modeling 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.) [Return]

²⁷ The great mass of Socialists would cease to be Socialists if they could understand the Socialism of the nine or ten men who today grasp it with the full historical consequences that it involves. [Return]

²⁸ Sec Vol. II, Chapter IX, note #52. [Return]

²⁹ 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. [Return]

³⁰ The thrill of big figures is a feeling peculiar to Western mankind. In the Civilization of today 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 x 109, one relating to ordinary experience as 3.45 (i.e., 3.45 X 100) and one in electromagnetic theory, not as 0.00000345 but as 3 .45 x 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 kilometers brought into an order of thought that deals with millimeters] by simply changing the ten-power. — Tr.) [Return]

³¹ In stellar calculations even the mean radius of the earth’s orbit (1.493 x 1013 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. [Return]

³² 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 center 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 Aegean 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 Phoenician; but they may well have been similar to those that Caesar 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. [Return]

³³ 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 gun power — 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. [Return]

³⁴ 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. [Return]

³⁵ I.e., adherents of the various syncretic cults. [Return]

³⁶ This applies even more forcibly to the other “long range” episode, that of the Ten Thousand (Xenophon, Anabasis I). — Tr. [Return]

Chapter 10

¹ 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, ἤθος, 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 honor, loyalty, bravery, the feeling that attributes nobility and vulgarity. [Return]

² The original is here expanded a little for the sake of clarity. — Tr. [Return]

³ 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. [Return]

⁴ “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 far fetched 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. [Return]

⁵ 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. [Return]

⁶ 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. [Return]

⁷ 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 nth 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. [Return]

⁸ A paraphrase of the opening of “John Tanner’s Revolutionist’s Handbook,” Ch. V. — Tr. [Return]

⁹ Rousseau’s Contrat Social is paralleled by exactly equivalent productions of Aristotle’s time. [Return]

¹⁰ The first on the atheistical system of Sankhya, the second (through Socrates) on the Sophists, the third on English sensualism. [Return]

¹¹ 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. [Return]

¹² The articles Buddha and Buddhism in the Ency. Brit., XI ed., by T.W. Rhys Davids, may be studied in this connection. — Tr. [Return]

¹³ See “The Questions of King Milinda,” ed. Rhys Davids. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁴ Of course, each Culture naturally has its own kind of materialism, conditioned in every detail by its general world feeling. [Return]

¹⁵ 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 today between Socialism and early Christianity. [Return]

¹⁶ The term must not be confused with anti-religious. [Return]

¹⁷ 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. [Return]

¹⁸ 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. [Return]

¹⁹ See P. Wendland, Die hellenist-röm. Kultur (1912), pp. 75 et seq. [Return]

²⁰ Compare my Preussentum und Sozialismus, pp. 22 et seq. [Return]

²¹ 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. [Return]

²² 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. [Return]

²³ Zeno the Stoic, not to be confused with Zeno of Elea, whose mathematical fineness has already been alluded to. — Tr. [Return]

²⁴ Neue Paralipomena, §656. [Return]

²⁵ 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). [Return]

²⁶ In the chapter “Zur Metaphysik der Geschlechtsliebe” (II, 44) the idea of natural selection for the preservation of the genus is anticipated in full. [Return]

²⁷ 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. [Return]

Chapter 11

¹ See, for example, Leonard, Relativitäts-Prinzip, Aether, Gravitation (1920), pp. 20 et seq. [Return]

² 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. [Return]

³ E. Wiedermann, Die Naturwissensch. bei den Arabern (1890). F. Struntz, Gesch. d. Nafurwissensch. im Mittelalter (1910), p. 58. [Return]

⁴ An order of encyclopaedists and philosophers; sec Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. II, p. 278a. — Tr. [Return]

⁵ 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 I’ 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. [Return]

⁶ For the metals, “mercury” is the principle of substantial character (luster, tensility, fusibility), “sulfur” 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 sulfur. 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 sulfur (or the sulfur 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.) [Return]

⁷ See the article under this heading, and also that under Alchemy, Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁸ 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. [Return]

⁹ For even Helmholtz had sought to account for the phenomena of electrolysis by the assumption of an atomic structure of electricity. [Return]

¹⁰ Which in their physical aspect are individual centers of force, without parts or extension or figure. (For their metaphysical aspect, see Ency. Brit., XI edition, Article Leibniz, especially pp. 387-8. — Tr.) [Return]

11 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 is still somewhat provisional. The article Matter by Rutherford in the Ency. Brit., Xllth 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. [Return]

¹² J. Goldziher, Die islam, und jüd. Philosophie (“Kultur der Gegenwart,” I, V, 1913), pp. 306 et seq. [Return]

¹³ 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. [Return]

¹⁴ E. Mogk, Germ. Mythol., Grundr. d. Germ. Philos., III (1900), p. 340. [Return]

¹⁵ The pantheistic idea of Pan, familiar in European poetry, is a conception of later Classical ages, acquired in principle from Egypt. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁶ 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 guidebook (I, 24) says: “here there are... altars of the gods styled Unknowns, of heroes, etc.” (βωμοί δε θεῶν τε όνομαχομένων ‘Αγνώστων 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. [Return]

¹⁷ Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer (1912), p. 38. [Return]

¹⁸ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article Great Mother of the Gods. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁹ 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. [Return]

²⁰ Significantly enough, the formula of the oath sworn by this stone was not “per Jovis lapidem” but “per Jovem lapidem.” — Tr. [Return]

²¹ The Erechtheum, similarly, was a group of cult sites, each refraining from interference with the others. — Tr. [Return]

²² Jupiter 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 Jupiter Dolichenus, over the Empire. — Tr. [Return]

²³ To whom the inhabitants of “Roman” Carthage managed to attach even Dido. — Tr. [Return]

²⁴ Wissowa, Kult. und Relig. d. Römer (1912), pp. 98 et seq. [Return]

²⁵ Wissowa, Relig. u. Kult. der Römer (1912), p. 355. [Return]

²⁶ 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, “Caesar” 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 honor which could be conferred and canceled. 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. [Return]

²⁷ 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. [Return]

²⁸ Livy XL, 29. — Tr. [Return]

²⁹ 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. [Return]

³⁰ 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. [Return]

³¹ The law of the equivalence of heat and work. — Tr. [Return]

³² 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.” [Return]

³³ See footnote #23, Chapter IX. — Tr. [Return]

³⁴ See M. Planck, Entstehung und bisherige Entwicklung der Quantentheorie (1920), pp. 17-25. [Return]

³⁵ Which in many cases have led to the supposition that the “actual existence” of atoms has now at last been proved — a singular throwback to the materialism of the preceding generation. [Return]

³⁶ 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. [Return]

³⁷ See footnote #76, Chapter IV. [Return]

³⁸ 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.]. [Return]

³⁹ 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 Group in the Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

APPENDIX: TABLES I-III

Decline of the West

Volume 2

PERSPECTIVES ON WORLD HISTORY

Oswald Spengler

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

In the annotations to the volume I have followed the same course as in the first — namely, that of giving primary references to the Encyclopedia Britannica as being the most considerable work of the kind that is really widely distributed in both the English-speaking fields, though occasionally special encyclopedias or other works are referred to. Owing to the more definitely historical character of this volume, as compared with its predecessor, and particularly its stressing of a history that scarcely figures as yet in a regular education — the “Magian” — such references are necessarily more numerous. Even so, more might perhaps have been inserted with advantage. The Translator’s notes have no pretension to be critical in themselves, though here and there an argument is pointed with an additional example, or an obvious criticism anticipated. In each domain they will no doubt be resented by an expert, but the same expert will, it is hoped, find them useful for domains not his own.

London, July 1928 C.F.A

Volume 2 Contents

Volume 1 Contents

Translator’s Note

I. Origin and Landscape: (A) The Cosmic and the Microcosm

II. Origin and Landscape: (B) The Group of the Higher Cultures

III. Origin and Landscape: (C) The Relations Between the Cultures

IV. Cities and Peoples: (A) The Soul of the City

V. Cities and Peoples: (B) Peoples, Races, Tongues

VI. Cities and Peoples: (C) Primitives, Culture Peoples, Fellaheen

VII. Problems of the Arabian Culture: (A) Historic Pseudo-morphoses

VIII. Problems of the Arabian Culture: (B) The Magian Soul

IX. Problems of the Arabian Culture: (C) Pythagoras, Mohammed, Cromwell

X. The State: (A) The Problem of the Estates: Nobility and Priesthood

XI. The State: (B) State and History

XII. The State: (C) Philosophy of Politics

XIII. The Form World of Economic Life: (A) Money

XIV. The Form World of Economic Life: (B) The Machine

End Notes

CHAPTER I

ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(A) THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM

I

Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you — a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earthbound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadows, this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free — he dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he will.

A plant is nothing on its own account. It forms a part of the landscape in which a chance made it take root. The twilight, the chill, the closing of every flower — these are not cause and effect, not danger and willed answer to danger. They are a single process of nature, which is accomplishing itself near, with, and in the plant. The individual is not free to look out for itself, will for itself, or choose for itself.

An animal, on the contrary, can choose. It is emancipated from the servitude of all the rest of the world. This midget swarm that dances on and on, that solitary bird still flying through the evening, the fox approaching furtively the nest — these are little worlds of their own within another great world. An animalcule in a drop of water, too tiny to be perceived by the human eye, though it lasts but a second and has but a corner of this drop as its field — nevertheless is free and independent in the face of the universe. The giant oak, upon one of whose leaves the droplet hangs, is not.¹

Servitude and freedom — this is in last and deepest analysis the differentia by which we distinguish vegetable and animal existence. Yet only the plant is wholly and entirely what it is; in the being of the animal there is something dual. A vegetable is only a vegetable; an animal is a vegetable and something more besides. A herd that huddles together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a way into his God — all these are seeking to return out of the life of freedom into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated into individuality and loneliness.

The seeds of a flowering plant show, under the microscope, two sheath-leaves which form and protect the young plant that is presently to turn towards the light, with its organs of the life cycle and of reproduction, and in addition a third, which contains the future root and tells us that the plant is destined irrevocably to become once again part of a landscape. In the higher animals, on the contrary, we observe that the fertilized egg forms, in the first hours of its individualized existence, an outer sheath by which the inner containers of the cyclic and reproductive components — i.e., the plant element in the animal body — are enclosed and shut off from the mother body and all the rest of the world. This outer sheath symbolizes the essential character of animal existence and distinguishes the two kinds in which the Living has appeared on this earth.

There are noble names for them, found and bequeathed by the Classical world. The plant is something cosmic, and the animal is additionally a microcosm in relation to a macrocosm. When, and not until, the unit has thus separated itself from the All and can define its position with respect to the All, it becomes thereby a microcosm. Even the planets in their great cycles are in servitude, and it is only these tiny worlds that move freely relative to a great one which appears in their consciousness as their world-around (environment). Only through this individualism of the microcosm does that which the light offers to its eyes — our eyes — acquire meaning as “body,” and even to planets we are from some inner motive reluctant to concede the property of bodiliness.

All that is cosmic bears the hallmark of periodicity; it has “beat” (rhythm, tact). All that is microcosmic possesses polarity; it possesses “tension.”

We speak of tense alertness and tense thought, but all wakeful states are in their essence tensions. Sense and object, I and thou, cause and effect, thing and property — each of these is a tension between discretes, and when the state pregnantly called “detente” appears, then at once fatigue, and presently sleep, set in for the microcosmic side of life. A human being asleep, discharged of all tensions, is leading only a plantlike existence.

Cosmic beat, on the other hand, is everything that can be paraphrased in terms like direction, time, rhythm, destiny, longing — from the hoof beats of a team of thoroughbreds and the deep tread of proud marching soldiers to the silent fellowship of two lovers, the sensed tact that makes the dignity of a social assembly, and that keen quick judgment of a “judge of men” which I have already, earlier in this work, called physiognomic tact.

This beat of cosmic cycles goes on notwithstanding the freedom of microcosmic movement in space, and from time to time breaks down the tension of the waking individual’s being into the one grand felt harmony. If we have ever fol lowed the flight of a bird in the high air — how, always in the same way, it rises, turns, glides, loses itself in the distance — we must have felt the plantlike certainty of the “it” and the “we” in this ensemble of motion, which needs no bridge of reason to unite your sense of it with mine. This is the meaning of war dances and love dances amongst men and beasts. In this wise a regiment mounting to the assault under fire is forged into a unity, in this wise does the crowd collect at some exciting occasion and become a body, capable of thinking and acting pitifully, blindly, and strangely for a moment ere it falls apart again. In such cases the microcosmic wall is obliterated. It jostles and threatens, it pushes and pulls, it flees, swerves, and sways. Limbs intertwine, feet rush, one cry comes from every mouth, one destiny overlies all. Out of a sum of little single worlds comes suddenly a complete whole.

The perception of cosmic beat we call “feel” (Fühlen) that of microcosmic tensions “feeling” (Empfinden). The ambiguity of the word “Sinnlichkeit” has obscured this clear difference between the general and plantlike side and the specifically animal side of life. If we say for the one race or sex life, and for the other sense life, a deep connection reveals itself between them. The former ever bears the mark of periodicity, beat, even to the extent of harmony with the great cycles of the stars, of relation between female nature and the moon, of this life generally to night, spring, warmth. The latter consists in tensions, polarities of light and object illuminated, of cognition and that which is cognized, of wound and the weapon that has caused it. Each of these sides of life has, in the more highly developed genera, taken shape in special organs, and the higher the development, the clearer the emphasis on each side. We possess two cyclic organs of the cosmic existence, the blood system and the sex organ, and two differentiating organs of microcosmic mobility, senses and nerves. We have to assume that in its origin the whole body has been both a cyclic and a tactual organ.

The blood is for us the symbol of the living. Its course proceeds without pause, from generation to death, from the mother body in and out of the body of the child, in the waking state and in sleep, never ending. The blood of the ancestors flows through the chain of the generations and binds them in a great linkage of destiny, beat, and time. Originally this was accomplished only by a process of division, redivision, and ever new division of the cycles, until finally a specific organ of sexual generation appeared and made one moment into a symbol of duration. And how thereafter creatures begat and conceived, how the plantlike in them drove them to reproduce themselves for the maintenance beyond themselves of the eternal cycle, how the one great pulse beat operates through all the detached souls, filling, driving, checking, and often destroying — that is the deepest of all life’s secrets, the secret that all religious mysteries and all great poems seek to penetrate, the secret whose tragedy stirred Goethe in his “Selige Sehnsucht” and “Wahlverwandtschaften” where the child has to die because, brought into existence out of discordant cycles of the blood, it is the fruit of a cosmic sin.

To these cosmic organs the microcosm as such adds (in the degree to which it possesses freedom of movement vis-à-vis the macrocosm) the organ “sense,” which is originally touch sense and nothing else. Even now, at our own high level of development, we use the word “touch” quite generally of contacts by eye, by ear, and even by the understanding, for it is the simplest expression of the mobility of a living creature that needs constantly to be establishing its relation to its world-around. But to “establish” here means to fix place, and thus all senses, however sophisticated and remote from the primitive they may seem, are essentially positive senses; there are no others. Sensation of all kinds distinguishes proper and alien. And for the positional definition of the alien with respect to the proper the scent of the hound serves just as much as the hearing of the stag and the eye of the eagle. Color, brightness, tones, odors, all conceivable modes of sensation, imply detachment, distance, extension.

Like the cosmic cycle of the blood, the differentiating activity of sense is originally a unity. The active sense is always an understanding sense also. In these simple relations seeking and finding are one — that which we most appositely call “touch.” It is only later, in a stage wherein considerable demands are made upon developed senses, that sensation and understanding of sensation cease to be identical and the latter begins to detach itself more and more clearly from the former. In the outer sheath the critical organ separates itself from the sense organ (as the sex organ does from that of blood circulation). But our use of words like “keen,” “sensitive,” “insight,” “poking our nose,” and “flair,” not to mention the terminology of logic, all taken from the visual world, shows well enough that we regard all understanding as derived from sensation, and that even in the case of man the two still work hand in hand.

We see a dog lying indifferent and then in a moment tense, listening, and scenting — what he merely senses he is seeking to understand as well. He is able, too, to reflect — that is a state in which the understanding is almost alone at work and playing upon mat sensations. The older languages very clearly expressed this graduation, sharply distinguishing each degree as an activity of a specific kind by means of a specific label — e.g., hear, listen, listen for (lauschen); smell, scent, sniff; see, spy, observe. In such series as these the reason content becomes more and more important relative to the sensation content.

Finally, however, a supreme sense develops among the rest. A something in the All, which forever remains inaccessible to our will-to-understand, evokes for itself a bodily organ. The eye comes into existence — and in and with the eye, as its opposite pole, light. Abstract thinking about light may lead (and has led) to an ideal light representable by an ensemble picture of waves and rays, but the significance of this development in actuality was that thenceforward life was embraced and taken in through the light world of the eye. This is the supreme marvel that makes everything human what it is. Only with this light world of the eye do distances come into being as colors and brightnesses; only in this world are night and day and things and motions visible in the extension of illumined space, and the universe of infinitely remote stars circling above the earth, and that light horizon of the individual life which stretches so far beyond the environs of the body.

In the world of this light — not the light which science has deduced indirectly by the aid of mental concepts, themselves derived from visions (“theory” in the Greek sense) — it comes to pass that seeing, human herds wander upon the face of this little earth star, and that circumstances of light — the full southern flood over Egypt and Mexico, the greyness of the north — contribute to the determination of their entire life. It is for his eye that man develops the magic of his architecture, wherein the constructional elements given by touch are restated in relations generated by light. Religion, art, thought, have all arisen for light’s sake, and all differentiations reduce to the one point of whether it is the bodily eye or the mind’s eye that is addressed.

And with this there emerges in all clarity yet another distinction, which is normally obscured by the use of the ambiguous word “consciousness” (Bewusstsein). I distinguish being or “being there” (Dasein) from waking being or waking consciousness (Wachsein). Being possesses beat and direction, while waking consciousness is tension and extension. In being a destiny rules, while waking consciousness distinguishes causes and effects. The prime question is for the one “when and wherefore?” for the other “where and how?”

A plant leads an existence that is without waking consciousness. In sleep all creatures become plants, the tension of polarity to the world-around is extinguished,, and the beat of life goes on. A plant knows only a relation to the when and the wherefore. The upthrust of the first green shoots out of the wintry earth, the swelling of the buds, the whole mighty process of blooming, scent, color glory, and ripening — all this is desire to fulfill a destiny, constant yearning towards a “when?”

“Where?” on the other hand can have no meaning for a plant existence. It is the question with which awakening man daily orients himself afresh with respect to the world. For it is only the pulse beat of Being that endures throughout the generations, whereas waking consciousness begins anew for each microcosm. And herein lies the distinction between procreation and birth, the first being a pledge of duration, the second a beginning. A plant, therefore, is bred, but it is not born. It “is there,” but no awakening, no birthday, expands a sense world around it.

II

With this we are brought face to face with man. In man’s waking consciousness nothing disturbs the now pure lordship of the eye. The sounds of the night, the wind, the panting of beasts, the odor of flowers, all stimulate in him a “whither” and a “whence” in the world of light. Of the world of scent, in which even our closest comrade the dog still coordinates his visual impressions, we have no conception whatever. We know nothing of the world of the butterfly, whose crystalline eye projects no synthetic picture, or of those animals which, while certainly not destitute of senses, are blind. The only space that remains to us is visual space, and in it places have been found for the relics of other sense worlds (such as sounds, scents, heat and cold) as properties and effects of light things — it is a seen fire that warmth comes from, it is a seen rose in illumined space that gives off the scent and we speak of a certain tone as violin tone. As to the stars, our conscious relations with them are limited to seeing them — over our heads they shine, describing their visible path.² But of these sense worlds there is no doubt that animals and even primitive men still have sensations that are wholly different from ours; some of these sensations we are able to figure to ourselves indirectly by the aid of scientific hypotheses, but the rest now escape us altogether.

This impoverishment of the sensual implies, however, an immeasurable deepening. Human waking consciousness is no longer a mere tension between body and environment. It is now life in a self-contained light world. The body moves in the space that is seen. The depth experience is a mighty out-thrust into the visible distance from a light center³ — the point which we call “I.” “I” is a light concept. From this point onward the life of an “I” becomes essentially a life in the sun, and night is akin to death. And out of it, too, there arises a new feeling of fear which absorbs all others within itself — fear before the invisible, fear of that which one hears or feels, suspects, or observes in its effects without seeing. Animals indeed experience fear in other forms, but man finds these forms puzzling, and even uneasiness in the presence of stillness to which primitive men and children are subject (and which they seek to dispel by noise and loud talking) is disappearing in the higher types of mankind. It is fear of the invisible that is the essence and hallmark of human religiousness. Gods are surmised, imagined, envisaged light actualities, and the idea of an “invisible” god is the highest expression of human transcendence. Where the bounds of the light world are, there lies the beyond, and salvation is emancipation from the spell of the light world and its facts.

In precisely this resides the ineffable charm and the very real power of emancipation that music possesses for us men. For music is the only art whose means lie outside the light world that has so long become coextensive with our total world, and music alone, therefore, can take us right out of this world, break up the steely tyranny of light, and let us fondly imagine that we are on the verge of reaching the soul’s final secret — an illusion due to the fact that our waking consciousness is now so dominated by one sense only, so thoroughly adapted to the eye world, that it is incapable of forming, out of the impressions it receives, a world of the ear.⁴

Man’s thought, then, is visual thought, our concepts are derived from vision, and the whole fabric of our logic is a light world in the imagination.

This narrowing and consequent deepening, which has led to all our sense impressions being adapted to and ordered with those of sight, has led also to the replacement of the innumerable methods of thought communication known to animals by the one single medium of language, which is a bridge in the light world between two persons present to one another’s bodily or imaginative eyes. The other modes of speaking of which vestiges remain at all have long been absorbed into language in the form of mimicry, gesture, or emphasis. The difference between purely human speech and general animal utterance is that words and word linkages constitute a domain of inward light ideas, which has been built up under the sovereignty of the eyes. Every word meaning has a light value, even in the case of words like “melody,” “taste,” “cold,” or of perfectly abstract designations.

Even among the higher animals, the habit of reciprocal understanding by means of a sense link has brought about a marked difference between mere sensation and understanding sensation. If we distinguish in this wise sense impressions and sense judgments (e.g., scent judgment, taste judgment, or aural judgment), we find that very often, even in ants and bees, let alone birds of prey, horses, and dogs, the center of gravity has palpably shifted towards the judgment side of waking being. But it is only under the influence of language that there is set up within the waking consciousness a definite opposition between sensation and understanding, a tension that in animals is quite unthinkable and even in man can hardly have been at first anything more than a rarely actualized possibility. The development of language, then, brought along with it a determination of fundamental significance — the emancipation of understanding from sensation.

More and more often there appears, in lieu of the simple comprehension of the gross intake, a comprehension of the significances of the component sense impressions, which have hardly been noticed as such before.⁵ Finally these impressions themselves are discarded and replaced by the felt connotations of familiar word sounds. The word, originally the name of a visual thing, changes imperceptibly into the label of a mental thing, the “concept.” We are far from being able to fix exact meanings to such names — that we can do only with wholly new names. We never use a word twice with identical connotation, and no one ever understands exactly as another does. But mutual comprehension is possible, in spite of this, because of the common world outlook that has been induced in both, with and by the use of a common language; in an ambiance common to the lives and activities of both, mere word sounds suffice to evoke cognate ideas. It is this mode of comprehending by means of sounds at once derived and detached (abstract) from actual seeing which, however rarely we can find it definitely evidenced at the primitive level, does in fact sharply separate the generic animal kind of waking consciousness from the purely humankind which supervenes. Just so, at an earlier stage, the appearance of waking consciousness as such fixed a frontier between the general plantlike and the specifically animal existence.

Understanding detached from sensation is called thought. Thought has introduced a permanent disunity into the human waking consciousness. From early times it has rated understanding and sensibility as “higher” and “lower” soul power. It has created the fateful opposition between the light world of the eye, described as a figment and an illusion, and the world imagined (“vorgestellte,” “set before” oneself), in which the concepts, with their faint but ineffaceable tinge of light coloration, live and do business. And henceforth for man, so long as he “thinks,” this is the true world, the world-in-itself. At the outset the ego was waking being as such (insofar, that is, as, having sight, it felt itself as the center of a light world); now it becomes “spirit” — namely, pure understanding, which “cognizes” itself as such and very soon comes to regard not only the world around itself, but even the remaining component of life, its own body, as qualitatively below itself. This is evidenced not only in the upright carriage of man, but in the thoroughly intellectualized formation of his head, in which the eyes, the brow, and the temples become more and more the vehicles of expression.⁶

Clearly, then, thought, when it became independent, discovered a new mode of activity for itself. To the practical thought which is directed upon the constitution of the light things in the world-around, with reference to this or that practical end, there is added the theoretical, penetrating, subtilizing thought which sets itself to establish the constitution of these things “in themselves,” the natura rerum. From that which is seen, the light is abstracted, the depth experience of the eye intensifies itself in a grand and unmistakable course of development into a depth experience within the tinted realm of word connotations. Man begins to believe that it is not impossible for his inner eye to see right through into the things that actually are. Concept follows upon concept, and at last there is a mighty thought architecture made up of buildings that stand out with full clarity under the inner light.

The development of theoretical thought within the human waking consciousness gives rise to a kind of activity that makes inevitable a fresh conflict — that between Being (existence) and Waking Being (waking consciousness). The animal microcosm, in which existence and consciousness are joined in a self-evident unity of living, knows of consciousness only as the servant of existence. The animal “lives” simply and does not reflect upon life. Owing, however, to the unconditional monarchy of the eye, life is presented as the life of a visible entity in the light; understanding, then, when it becomes interlocked with speech, promptly forms a concept of thought and with it acounter-concept of life, and in the end it distinguishes life as it is from that which might be. Instead of straight, uncomplicated living, we have the antithesis represented in the phrase “thought and action.” That which is not possible at all in the beasts becomes in every man not merely a possibility, but a fact and in the end an alternative. The entire history of mature humanity with all its phenomena has been formed by it, and the higher the form that a Culture takes, the more fully this opposition dominates the significant moments of its conscious being.

The plantlike cosmic, Being heavy with Destiny, blood, sex, possess an immemorial mastery and keep it. They are life. The other only serves life. But this other wills, not to serve, but to rule; moreover, it believes that it does rule, for one of the most determined claims put forward by the human spirit is its claim to possess power over the body, over “nature.” But the question is: Is not this very belief a service to life? Why does our thought think just so? Perhaps because the cosmic, the “it,” wills that it shall? Thought shows off its power when it calls the body a notion, when it establishes the pitifulness of the body and commands the voices of the blood to be silent. But in truth the blood rules, in that silently it commands the activity of thought to begin and to cease. There, too, is a distinction between speech and life — Being can do without consciousness and the life of understanding, but not vice versa. Thought rules, after all, in spite of all, only in the “realm of thought.”

III

It only amounts to a verbal difference whether we say that thought is a creation of man, or higher mankind a creation of thought. But thought itself persistently credits itself with much too high a rank in the ensemble of life, and through its ignorance of, or indifference to, the fact that there are other modes of ascertainment besides itself, forfeits its opportunity of surveying the whole without prejudice. In truth, all professors of thought — and in every Culture they have been almost the only authorized spokesmen — have taken it as self-evident that cold abstract thought is the way of approach to “last things.” Moreover, they have assumed, also as self-evident, that the “truth” which they reach on this line of advance is the same as the truth which they have set before themselves as an aim, and not, as it really is, a sort of imaginary picture which takes the place of the unknowable secrets.

For, although man is a thinking being, it is very far from the fact that his being consists in thinking. This is a difference that the born subtilizer fails to grasp. The aim of thought is called “truth,” and truths are “established” — i.e., brought out of the living impalpability of the light world into the form of concepts and assigned permanently to places in a system, which means a kind of intellectual space. Truths are absolute and eternal — i.e., they have nothing more to do with life.

But for an animal, not truths, but only facts exist. Here is the difference between practical and theoretical understanding. Facts and truths differ as time and space, destiny and causality. A fact addresses itself to the whole waking consciousness, for the service of being, and not to that side of the waking consciousness which imagines it can detach itself from being. Actual life, history, knows only facts; life experience and knowledge of men deal only in facts. The active man who does and wills and fights, daily measuring himself against the power of facts, looks down upon mere truths as unimportant. The real statesman knows only political facts, not political truths. Pilate’s famous question is that of every man of fact.

It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science with the problem of the value of truth and knowledge — cheap and even blasphemous though this seems to the born thinker and savant, who regards his whole raison d’être as impugned by it. Descartes meant to doubt everything, but certainly not the value of his doubting.

It is one thing, however, to pose problems and quite another to believe in solutions of them. The plant lives and knows not that it lives. The animal lives and knows that it lives. Man is astounded by his life and asks questions about it. But even man cannot give an answer to his own questions, he can only believe in the correctness of his answer, and in that respect there is no difference between Aristotle and the meanest savage.

Whence comes it, then, that secrets must be unraveled and questions answered? Is it not from that fear which looks out of even a child’s eyes, that terrible dowry of human waking consciousness which compels the understanding, free now from sensation and brooding on images, to probe into every deep for solutions that mean release? Can a desperate faith in knowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions?

“Shuddering awe is mankind’s noblest part.” He to whom that gift has been denied by fate must seek to discover secrets, to attack, dissect, and destroy the awe inspiring, and to extract a booty of knowledge therefrom. The will-to-system is a will to kill something living, to “establish,” stabilize, stiffen it, to bind it in the train of logic. The intellect has conquered when it has completed the business of making rigid.

This distinction that is usually drawn between “reason” (Vernunft) and “understanding” (Verstand) is really that between the divination and flair belonging to our plant side, which merely makes use of the language of eye and word, and the understanding proper, belonging to our animal side, which is deduced from language. “Reason” in this sense is that which calls ideas into life, “understanding” that which finds truths. Truths are lifeless and can be imparted (mitgeteilt); ideas belong to the living self of the author and can only be sympathetically evoked (mitgefühlt). Understanding is essentially critical, “reason” essentially creative.⁷ The latter begets the object of its activity, the former starts from it. In fact, understanding criticism is first practiced and developed in association with ordinary sensations — it is in sensation judgments that the child learns to comprehend and to differentiate. Then, abstracted from this connection and henceforward busied with itself, criticism needs a substitute for the sensation activity that had previously served as its object. And this cannot be given it but by an already existing mode of thought, and it is upon this that criticism now works. This, only this, and not something building freely on nothingness, is Thought.

For quite early, before he has begun to think abstractly, primitive man forms for himself a religious world picture, and this is the object upon which the understanding begins to operate critically. Always science has grown up on a religion and under all the spiritual prepossessions of that religion, and always it signifies nothing more or less than an abstract melioration of these doctrines, considered as false because less abstract. Always it carries along the kernel of a religion in its ensemble of principles, problem enunciations, and methods. Every new truth that the understanding finds is nothing but a critical judgment upon some other that was already there. The polarity between old and new knowledge involves the consequence that in the world of the understanding there is only the relatively correct — namely, judgments of greater convincingness than other judgments. Critical knowledge rests upon the belief that the understanding of today is better than that of yesterday. And that which forces us to this belief, is again, life.

Can criticism then, as criticism, solve the great questions, or can it merely pose them? At the beginning of knowledge we believe the former. But the more we know, the more certain we become of the latter. So long as we hope, we call the secret a problem.

Thus, for mankind aware, there is a double problem, that of Waking Being and that of Being; or of Space and of Time; or of the world-as-nature and the world-as-history; or of pulse and tension. The waking consciousness seeks to understand not only itself, but in addition something that is akin to itself. Though an inner voice may tell one that here all possibilities of knowledge are left behind, yet, in spite of it, fear over-persuades — everyone — and one goes on with the search, preferring even the pretense of a solution to the alternative of looking into nothingness.

IV

Waking consciousness consists of sensation and understanding, and their common essence is a continuous self-adjustment in relation to the macrocosm. To that extent waking consciousness is identical with ascertainment (Feststellen), whether we consider the touch of an infusorian, or human thinking of the highest order. Feeling, now, for touch with itself in this wise, the waking consciousness first encounters the epistemological problem. What do we mean by cognition, or by the knowledge of cognition? And what is the relation between the original meanings of these terms and their later formulations in words? Waking and sleep alternate, like day and night, according to the course of the stars, and so, too, cognition alternates with dreams. How do these two differ?

Waking consciousness, however — whether it be that of sensation or that of understanding — is synonymous with the existence of oppositions, such as that between cognition and the object cognized, or thing and property, or object and event. Wherein consists the essence of these oppositions? And so arises the second problem, that of causality. When we give the names “cause” and “effect” to a pair of sensuous elements, or “premise” and “consequence” to a pair of intellectual elements, we are fixing between them a relation of power and rank — when one is there, the other must be there also. In these relations, observe, time does not figure at all. We are concerned not with facts of destiny, but with causal truths, not with a “When?” but with a law-fixed dependence. Beyond doubt this is the understanding’s most promising line of activity. Mankind perhaps owes to discoveries of this order his happiest moments; and thus he proceeds, from these oppositions in the near and present things of everyday life that strike him immediately, forward in an endless series of conclusions to the first and final causes in the structure of nature that he calls God and the meaning of the world. He assembles, orders, and reviews his system, his dogma of law-governed connections, and he finds in it a refuge from the unforeseen. He who can demonstrate, fears no longer. But wherein consists the essence of causality? Does it lie in knowing, in the known, or in a unity of both?

The world of tensions is necessarily in itself stiff and dead — namely, “eternal truth,” something beyond all time, something that is a state. The actual world of waking consciousness, however, is full of changes. This does not astonish an animal in the least, but it leaves the thought of the thinker powerless, for rest and movement, duration and change, become and becoming, are oppositions denoting something that in its very nature “passeth all understanding” and must therefore (from the point of view of the understanding) contain an absurdity. For is that a fact at all which proves to be incapable of distillation from the sense world in the form of a truth? On the other hand, though the world is cognized as timeless, a time element nevertheless adheres to it — tensions appear as beat, and direction associates itself with extension. And so all that is problematical for the understanding consciousness somehow gathers itself together in one last and gravest problem, the problem of motion. And on that problem free and abstract thought breaks down, and we begin to discern that the microcosmic is after all as dependent as ever upon the cosmic, just as the individualness of a being from its first moment is constituted not by a body, but by the sheath of a body. Life can exist without thought, but thought is only one mode of life. High as may be the objectives that thought sets before itself, in actuality life makes use of thought for its ends and gives it a living objective quite apart from the solution of abstract problems. For thought the solutions of problems are correct or erroneous — for life they are valuable or valueless, and if the will-to-know breaks down on the motion problem, it may well be because life’s purpose has at that point been achieved. In spite of this, and indeed because of this, the motion problem remains the center of gravity of all higher thought. All mythology and all natural science has arisen out of man’s wonder in the presence of the mystery of motion.

The problem of motion touches, at once and immediately, the secrets of existence, which are alien to the waking consciousness and yet inexorably press upon it. In posing motion as a problem we affirm our will to comprehend the incomprehensible, the when and wherefore, Destiny, blood, all that our intuitive processes touch in our depths. Born to see, we strive to set it before our eyes in the light, so that we may in the literal sense grasp it, assure ourselves of it as of something tangible.

For this is the decisive fact, of which the observer is unconscious — his whole effort of seeking is aimed not at life, but at the seeing of life, and not at death, but at the seeing of death. We try to grasp the cosmic as it appears in the macrocosm to the microcosm, as the life of a body in the light world between birth and death, generation and dissolution, and with that differentiation of body and soul that follows of deepest necessity from our ability to experience⁸ the inward proper as a sensuous alien.

That we do not merely live but know about “living” is a consequence of our bodily existence in the light. But the beast knows only life, not death. Were we pure plantlike beings, we should die unconscious of dying, for to feel death and to die would be identical. But animals, even though they hear the death cry, see the dead body, and scent putrefaction, behold death without comprehending it. Only when understanding has become, through language, detached from visual awareness and pure, does death appear to man as the great enigma of the light world about him.

Then, and only then, life becomes the short span of time between birth and death, and it is in relation to death that that other great mystery of generation arises also. Only then does the diffuse animal fear of everything become the definite human fear of death. It is this that makes the love of man and woman, the love of mother and child, the tree of the generations, the family, the people, and so at last world history itself the infinitely deep facts and problems of destiny that they are. To death, as the common lot of every human being born into the light, adhere the ideas of guilt and punishment, of existence as a penance, of a new life beyond the world of this light, and of a salvation that makes an end of the death fear. In the knowledge of death is originated that world outlook which we possess as being men and not beasts.

V

There are born destiny men and causality men. A whole world separates the purely living man — peasant and warrior, statesman and general, man of the world and man of business, everyone who wills to prosper, to rule, to fight, and to dare, the organizer or entrepreneur, the adventurer or bravo or gambler — from the man who is destined either by the power of his mind or the defect of his blood to be an “intellectual” — the saint, priest, savant, idealist, or ideologue. Being and waking being, pulse and tension, motives and ideas, cyclic organs and touch organs — there has rarely been a man of any significance in whom the one side or the other has not markedly predominated. All that motives and urges, the eye for men and situations, the belief in his star which every born man of action possesses and which is something wholly different from belief in the correctness of a standpoint, the voices of the blood that speak in moments of decision, and the immovably quiet conviction that justifies any aim and any means — all these are denied to the critical, meditative man. Even the footfall of the fact-man sounds different from, sounds more planted than, that of the thinker, in whom the pure microcosmic can acquire no firm relation with earth.

Destiny has made the man so or so — subtle and fact shy, or active and contemptuous of thought. But the man of the active category is a whole man, whereas in the contemplative a single organ can operate without (and even against) the body. All the worse, then, when this organ tries to master actuality as well as its own world, for then we get all those ethico-politico-social reform projects which demonstrate, unanswerably, how things ought to be and how to set about making them so — theories that without exception rest upon the hypothesis that all men are as rich in ideas and as poor in motives as the author is (or thinks he is). Such theories, even when they have taken the field armed with the full authority of a religion or the prestige of a famous name, have not in one single instance effected the slightest alteration in life. They have merely caused us to think otherwise than before about life. And this, precisely, is the doom of the “late” ages of a Culture, the ages of much writing and much reading — that they should perpetually confuse the opposition of life and thought with the opposition between thought about life and thought about thought. All world improvers, priests, and philosophers are unanimous in holding that life is a fit object for the nicest meditation, but the life of the world goes its own way and cares not in the least what is said about it. And even when a community succeeds in living “according to rule,” all that it achieves is, at best, a note on itself in some future history of the world — if there is space left after the proper and only important subject matter has been dealt with.

For, in the last resort, only the active man, the man of destiny, lives in the actual world, the world of political, military, and economic decisions, in which concepts and systems do not figure or count. Here a shrewd blow is more than a shrewd conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which statesmen and soldiers of all times have regarded the “ink slinger” and the “bookworm” who think that world history exists for the sake of the intellect or science or even art. Let us say it frankly and without ambiguity: the understanding divorced from sensation is only one, and not the decisive, side of life. A history of Western thought may not contain the name of Napoleon, but in the history of actuality Archimedes, for all his scientific discoveries, was possibly less effective than that soldier who killed him at the storming of Syracuse.

Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is at the head and not in the train of great events. They misunderstand completely the role played, for example, by the political Sophists in Athens or by Voltaire and Rousseau in France. Often enough a statesman does not “know” what he is doing, but that does not prevent him from following with confidence just the one path that leads to success; the political doctrinaire, on the contrary, always knows what should be done, and yet his activity, once it ceases to be limited to paper, is the least successful and therefore the least valuable in history. These intrusions happen only too frequently in times of uncertainty, like that of the Attic enlightenment, or the French or the German revolutions, when the ideologue of word or pen is eager to be busy with the actual history of the people instead of with systems. He mistakes his place. He belongs with his principles and programs to no history but the history of a literature. Real history passes judgment on him not by controverting the theorist, but by leaving him and all his thoughts to himself. A Plato or a Rousseau — not to mention the smaller intellects — could build up abstract political structures, but for Alexander, Scipio, Caesar, and Napoleon, with their schemes and battles and settlements, they were entirely without importance. The thinker could discuss destiny if he liked; it was enough for these men to be destiny.

Under all the plurality of microcosmic beings, we are perpetually meeting with the formation of inspired mass units, beings of a higher order, which, whether they develop slowly or come into existence in a moment, contain all the feelings and passions of the individual, enigmatic in their inward character and inaccessible to reasoning — though the connoisseur can see into and reckon upon their reactions well enough. Here too we distinguish the generic animal unities which are sensed, the unities profoundly dependent upon Being and Destiny — like the way of an eagle in the air or the way of the stormers on the breach — from the purely human associations which depend upon the understanding and cohere on the basis of like opinions, like purposes, or like knowledge. Unity of cosmic pulse one has without willing to have it; unity of common ground is acquired at will. One can join or resign from an intellectual association as one pleases, for only one’s waking consciousness is involved. But to a cosmic unity one is committed, and committed with one’s entire being. Crowds of this order of unity are seized by storms of enthusiasm or, as readily, of panic. They are noisy and ecstatic at Eleusis or Lourdes, or heroically firm like the Spartans of Thermopylae and the last Goths in the battle of Vesuvius.⁹ They form themselves to the music of chorales, marches, and dances, and are sensitive like human and animal thoroughbreds to the effects of bright colors, decoration, costume, and uniform.

These inspired aggregates are born and die. Intellectual associations are mere sums in the mathematical sense, varying by addition and subtraction, unless and until (as sometimes happens) a mere coincidence of opinion strikes so impressively as to reach the blood and so, suddenly, to create out of the sum a Being. In any political turning point words may become fates and opinions passions. A chance crowd is herded together in the street and has one consciousness, one sensation, one language — until the short-lived soul flickers out and everyone goes his way again. This happened every day in the Paris of 1789, whenever the cry of “A la lanterne!” fell upon the ear.

These souls have their special psychology,¹⁰ and the knowledge of this psychology is for the public man an essential. A single soul is the mark of every genuine order or class, be it the chivalry and military orders of the Crusades, the Roman Senate or the Jacobin club, polite society under Louis XIV or the Prussian country “Adel” peasantry or guilds, the masses of the big city or the folk of the secluded valley, the peoples and tribes of the migrations or the adherents of Mohammed and, generally, of any new founded religion or sect, the French of the Revolution or the Germans of the Wars of Liberation The mightiest beings of this kind that we know are the higher Cultures, which are born in great spiritual upheavals, and in a thousand years of existence weld all aggregates of lower degree — nations, classes, towns, generations — into one unit.

All grand events of history are carried by beings of the cosmic order, by peoples, parties, armies, and classes, while the history of the intellect runs its course in loose associations and circles, schools, levels of education, “tendencies” and “isms.” And here again it is a question of destiny whether such aggregates at the decisive moments of highest effectiveness find a leader or are driven blindly on, whether the chance headmen are men of the first order or men of no real significance tossed up, like Robespierre or Pompey, by the surge of events. It is the hallmark of the statesman that he has a sure and penetrating eye for these mass souls that form and dissolve on the tide of the times, their strength and their duration, their direction and purpose. And even so, it is a question of Incident whether he is one who can master them or one who is swept away by them.

CHAPTER II

ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(B) THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES

I

Now, man — no matter whether it is for life or for thought that he is born into the world — so long as he is acting or is thinking, is awake and therefore in focus — i.e., adjusted to the one significance that for the moment his light world holds for him. Everyone knows that it is almost sharply painful to switch off suddenly in the middle of, say, an experiment in physics, in order to think about some event of the day. I have said earlier that the innumerable settings that take turns in man’s waking consciousness fall into two distinct groups — the worlds of destiny and pulsation, and the worlds of causes and tensions. The two pictures I have called world-as-history and world-as-nature. In the first, life makes use of critical understanding. It has the eye under command, the felt pulsation becomes the inwardly imagined wave train, and the shattering spiritual experience becomes pictured as the epochal peak. In the second, thought itself rules, and its causal criticism turns life into a rigorous process, the living content of a fact into an abstract truth, and tension into formula.

How is this possible? Each is an eye picture, but in the one the seer is giving himself up to the never to be repeated facts, and in the other he is striving to catch truths for an ever valid system. In the history picture, that in which knowledge is simply an auxiliary, the cosmic makes use of the microcosmic. In the picture which we call memory and recollection, things are present to us as bathed in an inner light and swept by the pulsation of our existence. But the chronological element¹ tells us that history, as soon as it becomes thoughthistory, is no longer immune from the basic conditions of all waking consciousness. In the nature (or science) picture it is the ever present subjective that is alien and illusive, but in the history picture it is the equally ineliminable objective, Number, that leads into error.

When we are working in the domain of Nature (science), our settings and self-adjustments should be and can be up to a certain point impersonal— one “forgets oneself” — but every man, class, nation, or family sees the picture of history in relation to itself. The mark of Nature is an extension that is inclusive of everything, but History is that which comes up out of the darkness of the past, presents itself to the seer, and from him sweeps onward into the future. He, as the present, is always its middle point, and it is quite impossible for him to order the facts with any meaning if he ignores their direction — which is an element proper to life and not to thought. Every time, every land, every living aggregate has its own historical horizon, and it is the mark of the genuine historical thinker that he actualizes the picture of history that his time demands.

Thus Nature and History are distinguishable like pure and impure criticism — meaning by “criticism” the opposite of lived experience. Natural science is criticism and nothing else. But in History, criticism can do no more than scientifically prepare the field over which the historian’s eye is to sweep. History is that ranging glance itself, whatever the direction in which it ranges. He who possesses such an eye can understand every fact and every situation “historically.” Nature is a system, and systems can be learned.

The process of historical self-adjustment begins for everyone with the earliest impressions of childhood. Children’s eyes are keen, and the facts of the nearest environment, the life of the family and the house and the street, are sensed and felt right down to the core, long before the city and its population come into their visual field, and while the words “people,” “country,” “state,” are still quite destitute of tangible meaning to them. Just so, and so thoroughly, primitive man knows all that is presented to his narrow field of view as history, as living — and above all Life itself, the drama of birth and death, sickness and eld; the history of passionate war and passionate love, as experienced in himself or observed in others; the fate of relatives, of the clan, of the village, their actions and their motives; tales of long enmity, of fights, victory, and revenge. The life horizon widens, and shows not lives, but Life coming and going. The pageant is not now of villages and clans, but of remote races and countries; not of years, but of centuries. The history that is actually lived with and participated in never reaches over more than a grandfather’s span — neither for ancient Germans and present day Negroes, nor for Pericles and Wallenstein. Here the horizon of living ends, and a new plane begins wherein the picture is based upon hearsay and historical tradition, a plane in which direct sympathies are adapted to a mind picture that is both distinct and, from long use, stable. The picture so developed shows very different amplitudes for the men of the different Cultures. For us Westerners it is with this secondary picture that genuine history begins, for we live under the aspect of eternity, whereas for the Greeks and Romans it is just then that history ceases. For Thucydides² the events of the Persian Wars, for Caesar those of the Punic Wars, were already devoid of living import.

And beyond this plane again, other historic unit pictures rise to the view — pictures of the destinies of the plant world and the animal world, the landscape, the stars — which at the last fuse with the last pictures of natural science into mythic images of the creation and the end of the world.

The nature (science) picture of the child and the primitive develops out of the petty technique of every day, which perpetually forces both of them to turn away from the fearful contemplation of wide nature to the critique of the facts and situations of their near environment. Like the young animal, the child discovers its first truths through play. Examining the toy, cutting open the doll, turning the mirror round to see what is behind it, the feeling of triumph in having established something as correct for good and all — no nature research whatsoever has got beyond this. Primitive man applies this critical experience, as he acquires it, to his arms and tools, to the materials for his clothing, food, and housing — i.e., to things insofar as they are dead. He applies it to animals as well when suddenly they cease to have meaning for him as living beings whose movements he watches and divines as pursuer or pursued, and are apprehended mechanically instead of vitally, as aggregates of flesh and bone for which he has a definite use — exactly as he is conscious of an event, now as the act of a daemon and a moment afterwards as a sequence of cause and effect. The mature man of the Culture transposes in exactly the same way, every day and every hour. Here, too, is a “nature” horizon, and beyond it lies the secondary plane formed of our impressions of rain, lightning, and tempest, summer and winter, moon phases and star courses. But at that plane religiousness, trembling with fear and awe, forces upon man criteria of a far higher kind. Just as in the history picture he sounds the ultimate facts of life, so here he seeks to establish the ultimate truths of nature. What lies beyond any attainable frontier of knowledge he calls God, and all that lies within that frontier he strives to comprehend — as action, creation, and manifestation of God — causally.

Every group of scientifically established elements, therefore, has a dual tendency, inherent and unchanged since primitive ages. The one tendency urges forwards the completest possible system of technical knowledge, for the service of practical, economical, and warlike ends, which many kinds of animals have developed to a high degree of perfection, and which from them leads, through primitive man and his acquaintance with fire and metals, directly to the machine technics of our Faustian Culture. The other tendency took shape only with the separation of strictly human thought from physical vision by means of language, and the aim of its effort has been an equally complete theoretical knowledge, which we call in the earlier phases of the Culture religious, and in the later scientific. Fire is for the warrior a weapon, for the craftsman part of his equipment, for the priest a sign from God, and for the scientist a problem. But in all these aspects alike it is proper to the “natural,” the scientific, mode of waking consciousness. In the world-as-history we do not find fire as such, but the conflagration of Carthage and the flames of the fagots heaped around John Hus and Giordano Bruno.

II

I repeat, every being livingly experiences every other being and its destiny only in relation to itself. A flock of pigeons is regarded by the farmer on whose fields it settles quite otherwise than by the nature lover in the street or the hawk in the air. The peasant sees in his son the future and the heritage, but what the neighbor sees in him is a peasant, what the officer sees is a soldier, what the visitor sees is a native. Napoleon experienced men and things very differently as Emperor and as lieutenant. Put a man in a new situation, make the revolutionary a minister, the soldier a general, and at once history and the key men of history become for him something other than what they were. Talleyrand saw through the men of his time because he belonged with them, but had he been suddenly plumped down in the company of Crassus, Caesar, Catiline, and Cicero, his understanding of their measures and views would have been either null or erroneous. There is no history-in-itself. The history of a family is taken differently by each member of it, that of a country differently by each party, that of the age by each nation. The German looks upon the World War otherwise than the Englishman, the workman upon economic history otherwise than the employer, and the historian of the West has a quite other world history before his eyes than that of the great Arabian and Chinese historians. The history of an era could be handled objectively only if it were very distant in time, and the historian were radically disinterested; and we find that our best historians cannot judge of or describe even the Peloponnesian Wars and Actium without being in some measure influenced by present interests.

It is not incompatible with, rather it is essential to, a profound knowledge of men that the appraiser should see through glasses of his own color. This knowledge, indeed, is exactly the component that we discern to be wanting in those generalizations that distort or altogether ignore that all important fact, the uniqueness of the constituent event in history³ — the worst example of this being the “materialistic” conception of history, about which we have said almost all there is to say when we have described it as physiognomic barrenness. But both in spite of this and on account of this⁴ there is for every man, because he belongs to a class and a time and a nation and a Culture, a typical picture of history as it ought to appear in relation to himself, and equally there are typical pictures specific to the time or class or Culture, qua time or class or Culture. The supreme generalization possible to each Culture as a major being is a primary and, for it, symbolical image of its own world-as-history, and all self-attunements of the individual — or of the group livingly effective as individual — are with reference to that image. Whenever we describe another person’s ideas as profound or superficial, original or trivial, mistaken or obsolete, we are unwittingly judging them with reference to a picture which springs up to answer for the value at the moment of a continuous function of our time and our personality.⁵

Obviously, then, every man of the Faustian Culture possesses his own picture of history and, besides, innumerable other pictures from his youth upwards, which fluctuate and alter ceaselessly in response to the experiences of the day and the year. And how different, again, are the typical history images of men and different eras and classes, the world of Otto the Great and that of Gregory VII, that of a Doge of Venice and that of a poor pilgrim! In what different worlds lived Lorenzo de’ Medici, Wallenstein, Cromwell, Marat, and Bismarck, a serf of the Gothic age, a savant of the Baroque, the army officer of the Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War, and the Wars of Liberation respectively! Or, to consider our own times alone, a Frisian peasant whose life of actuality is limited to his own countryside and its folk, a high merchant of Hamburg, and a professor of physics! And yet to all of these, irrespective of individual age, status, and period, there is a common basis that differentiates the ensemble of these figures, their prime image, from that of every other Culture.

But, over and above this, there is a distinction of another kind which separates the Classical and the Indian history pictures from those of the Chinese, the Arabian, and, most of all, the Western Cultures — the narrow horizon of the two first named. Whatever the Greeks may (and indeed must) have known of ancient Egyptian history, they never allowed it to penetrate into their peculiar history picture, which for the majority was limited to the field of events that could be related by the oldest surviving participant, and which even for the finer minds stopped at the Trojan War, a frontier beyond which they would not concede that there had been historical life at all.⁶

The Arabian Culture,⁷ on the other hand, very early dared the astounding gesture — we see it in the historical thought alike of the Jews and of the Persians from Cyrus’s time — of connecting the legend of creation to the present by means of a genuine chronology; the Persians indeed comprised the future as well in the sweep of the gesture, and predated the last judgment and the coming of the Messiah. This exact and very narrow definition of human history — the Persian reckoning allows twelve millennia from first to last, the Jewish counts less than six up to the present — is a necessary expression of the Magian world feeling and fundamentally distinguishes the Judaeo-Persian creation sagas from those of the Babylonian Culture, from which so many of their external traits are derived.

Different, again, are the primary feelings which give historical thought in the Chinese and the Egyptian Cultures its characteristically wide and unbounded horizons, represented by chronologically stated sequences of dynasties which stretch over millennia and finally dissolve into a gray remoteness.

The Faustian picture of world history, again, prepared in advance by the existence of a Christian chronology,⁸ came into being suddenly, with an immense extension and deepening of the Magian picture which the Western Church had taken over, an extension and deepening that was to give Joachim of Floris in the high Gothic the basis of his wonderful interpretation of all world destinies as a sequence of three eons under the aspects of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Parallel with this there was an immense widening of the geographical horizon, which even in Gothic times (thanks to Vikings and Crusaders) came to extend from Iceland to the remotest ends of Asia;⁹ and from 1500 onwards, the developed man of the Baroque is able to do what none of his peers in the other Cultures could do and — for the first time in human history — to regard the whole surface of the planet as its field. Thanks to compass and telescope, the savant of that mature age could for the first time not merely posit the sphericity of the earth as a matter of theory, but actually feel that he was living upon a sphere in space. The land horizon is no more. So, too, time horizons melt in the double endlessness of the calendar before and after Christ. And today, under the influence of this picture, which comprises the whole planet and will eventually embrace all the high Cultures, the old Gothic division of history into “ancient,” “medieval,” and modern, long become trite and empty, is visibly dissolving.

In all other Cultures the aspects of world history and of man history coincide. The beginning of the world is the beginning of man, and the end of man is the end of the world. But the Faustian infinity craving for the first time separated the two notions during the Baroque, and now it has made human history, for all its immense and still unknown span, a mere episode in world history, while the Earth — of which other Cultures had seen not even the whole, but only superficial fractions as “the world” — has become a little star amongst millions of solar systems.

The extension of the historical world picture makes it even more necessary in this Culture than in any other to distinguish between the everyday self-attunements of ordinary people and that extreme self-attunement of which only the highest minds are capable, and which even in them holds only for moments. The difference between the historical view field of Themistocles and that of an Attic husbandman is probably very small, but this difference is already immense as between Henry VI and a hind of his day,¹⁰ and as the Faustian Culture mounts up and up, the power of self-focusing attains to such heights and depths that the circle of adepts grows ever smaller and smaller. In fact, there is formed a sort of pyramid of possibilities, in which individuals are graded according to their endowments; every individual, according to his constitution, stands at the level which he is capable at his best focus of holding. But it follows from this that between Western men there are limitations to the possibilities of reciprocal understanding of historical life problems, limitations that do not apply to other Cultures, at any rate in such fateful rigor as they do to ours. Can a workman today really understand a peasant? Or a diplomat a craftsman? The historico-geographical horizon that determines for each of them the questions worth asking and the form in which these are asked is so different from the horizons of the others that what they can exchange is not a communication, but passing remarks. It is, of course, the mark of the real appraiser of man that he understands how “the other man” is adjusted and regulates his intercourse with him accordingly (as we all do in talking to children), but the art of appraising in this sense some man of the past (say Henry the Lion or Dante), of living oneself into his history picture so thoroughly that his thoughts, feelings, and decisions take on a character of self-evidence, is, owing to the vast difference between the one’s and the other’s waking consciousness, so rare that up to the eighteenth century it was not even seen that the historian ought to attempt it. Only since 1800 has it become a desideratum for the writing of history, and it is one very seldom satisfied at that.

The typically Faustian separation of human history, as such, from the far wider history of the world has had the result that since the end of the Baroque our world picture has contained several horizons disposed one behind the other in as many planes. For the exploration of these, individual sciences, more or less overtly historical in character, have taken shape. Astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, one after the other follow up the destinies of the star world, the earth’s crust, life, and man, and only then do we come to the “world” history — as it is still called even today — of the higher Cultures, to which, again, are attached the histories of the several cultural elements, family history, and lastly (that highly developed specialty of the West) biography.

Each of these planes demands a particular self-focusing, and the moment the special focus becomes sharp the narrower and the broader planes cease to be live Being and become mere given facts. If we are investigating the battle of the Teutoburger Wald, the growing up of this forest in the plant world of the North German plain is presupposed. If, on the other hand, we are examining into the history of the German tree world, the geological stratification of the earth is the presupposition, though it is just a fact whose particular destiny need not be further followed out in this connection. If, again, our question is the origin of the Cretaceous, the existence of the Earth itself as a planet in the solar system is a datum, not a problem. Or, to express it otherwise, that there is an Earth in the star world, that the phenomenon “life” occurs in the Earth, that within this “life” there is the form “man,” that within the history of man there exists the organic form of the Culture, is in each case an incident in the picture of the next higher plane.

In Goethe, from his Strassburg period to his first Weimar residence, the inclination to attune himself to “world” history was very strong — as evidenced in his Caesar, Mohammed, Socrates, Wandering Jew, and Egmont sketches. And after that painful renunciation of the prospect of high political achievement¹¹ — the pain which calls to us in Tasso even through the sober resignedness of its final form — this precisely was the attunement that he chose to cut out of his life; and thereafter he limits himself, almost fiercely, to the picture planes of plant history, animal history, and earth history (his “living nature”) on the one hand and to biography on the other.

All these “pictures,” developed in the same man, have the same structure. Even the history of plants and animals, even that of the earth’s crust or that of the stars, is a fable convenue and mirrors in outward actuality the inward tendency of the ego’s being. The student of the animal world or of stratification is a man, living in a period and having a nationality and a social status, and it is no more possible to eliminate his subjective standpoint from his treatment of these things than it would be to obtain a perfectly abstract account of the French Revolution or the World War. The celebrated theories of Kant, Laplace, Cuvier, Lyell, Darwin, have also a politico-economic tinting, and their very power and impressiveness for the lay public show that the mode of outlook upon all these historical planes proceeds from a single source. And what is accomplishing itself today is the final achievement of which Faustian history thinking is capable — the organic linking and disposition of these historical planes in a single vast world history of uniform physiognomic that shall enable our glance to range from the life of the individual man without a break to the first and last destinies of the universe. The nineteenth century — in mechanistic (i.e., unhistorical) form — enunciated the problem. It is one of the preordained tasks of the twentieth to solve it.

III

The picture that we possess of the history of the Earth’s crust and of life is at present still dominated by the ideas which civilized¹² English thought has developed, since the Age of Enlightenment, out of the English habit of life — Lyell’s “phlegmatic” theory of the formation of the geological strata, and Darwin’s of the origin of species, are actually but derivatives of the development of England herself. In place of the incalculable catastrophes and metamorphoses such as von Buch and Cuvier¹³ admitted, they put a methodical evolution over very long periods of time and recognize as causes only scientifically calculable and indeed mechanical utility-causes.

This “English” type of causality is not only shallow, but also far too narrow. It limits possible causal connections, in the first place, to those which work out their entire course on the earth’s surface; but this immediately excludes all great cosmic relations between earthly life phenomena and the events of the solar system and the stellar universe, and assumes the impossible postulate that the exterior face of the earth ball is a completely insulated region of natural phenomena. And, secondly, it assumes that connections which are not comprehensible by the means at present available to the human consciousness — namely, sensation refined by instruments and thought precised by theory — do not even exist.

It will be the characteristic task of the twentieth century, as compared with the nineteenth, to get rid of this system of superficial causality, whose roots reach back into the rationalism of the Baroque period, and to put in its place a pure physiognomic. We are skeptics in regard to any and every mode of thought which “explains” causally. We let things speak for themselves, and confine ourselves to sensing the Destiny immanent in them and contemplating the form manifestations that we shall never penetrate. The extreme to which we can attain is the discovery of causeless, purposeless, purely existent forms underlying the changeful picture of nature. For the nineteenth century the word “evolution” meant progress in the sense of increasing fitness of life to purposes. For Leibniz — whose Protogaea(1691), a work full of significant thought, outlines, on the basis of studies made in the Harz silver mines, a picture of the world’s infancy that is Goethian through and through — and for Goethe himself it meant fulfillment in the sense of increasing connotation of the form. The two concepts, Goethe’s form fulfillment and Darwin’s evolution, are in as complete opposition as destiny to causality, and (be it added) as German to English thought, and German to English history.

There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by palaeontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely “transitional” types, no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in ever increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings which exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types, in the grouping of today. We see how, amongst fish, the Selachians, with their simple form, appear first in the foreground of history and then slowly fade out again, while the Teleostians slowly bring a more perfected fish type to predominance. The same applies to the plant world of the ferns and horsetails, of which only the last species now linger in the fully developed kingdom of the flowering plants. But the assumption of utility-causes or other visible causes for these phenomena has no support of actuality.¹⁴ It is a Destiny that evoked into the world life as life, the ever sharper opposition between plant and animal, each single type, each genus, and each species. And along with this existence there is given also a definite energy of the form — by virtue of which in the course of its self-fulfillment it keeps itself pure or, on the contrary, becomes dull and unclear or evasively splits into numerous varieties — and finally a life duration of this form, which (unless, again, incident intervenes to shorten it) leads naturally to a senility of the species and finally to its disappearance.

As for mankind, discoveries of the Diluvial age indicate more and more pointedly that the man-forms existing then correspond to those living now; there is not the slightest trace of evolution towards a race of greater utilitarian “fitness.” And the continued failure to find man in the Tertiary discoveries indicates more and more clearly that the human life form, like every other, originates in a sudden mutation (Wandlung) of which the “whence,” “how,” and “why” remain an impenetrable secret. If, indeed, there were evolution in the English sense of the word, there could be neither defined earth strata nor specific animal classes, but only a single geological mass and a chaos of living singular forms which we may suppose to have been left over from the struggle for existence. But all that we see about us impels us to the conviction that again and again profound and very sudden changes take place in the being of plants and animals, changes which are of a cosmic kind and nowise restricted to the earth’s surface, which are beyond the ken of human sense and understanding in respect of causes, if not indeed in all respects.¹⁵ So, too, we observe that swift and deep changes assert themselves in the history of the great Cultures, without as signable causes, influences, or purposes of any kind. The Gothic and the Pyramid styles come into full being as suddenly as do the Chinese imperialism of Shi-hwang-ti and the Roman of Augustus, as Hellenism and Buddhism and Islam. It is exactly the same with the events in the individual life of every person who counts at all, and he who is ignorant of this knows nothing of men and still less of children. Every being, active or contemplative, strides on to its fulfillment by epochs and we have to assume just such epochs in the history of solar systems and the world of the fixed stars. The origins of the earth, of life, of the free moving animal are such epochs, and, therefore, mysteries that we can do no more than accept.¹⁶

IV

That which we know of man divides clearly into two great ages of his being. The first is, as far as our view is concerned, limited on the one side by that profound fugue of planetary Destiny which we call the beginning of the Ice Age — and about which we can (within the picture of world history) say no more than that a cosmic change took place — and on the other by the beginnings of high cultures on Nile and Euphrates, with which the whole meaning of human existence became suddenly different. We discover everywhere the sharp frontier of Tertiary and Diluvial, and on the hither side of it we see man as a completely formed type, familiar with custom, myth, wit, ornament, and technique and endowed with a bodily structure that has not materially altered up to the present day.

We will consider the first age as that of the primitive Culture. The only field in which this Culture endured throughout the second age (though certainly in a very “late” form) and is found alive and fairly intact today is northwest Africa. It is the great merit of Leo Frobenius¹⁷ that he recognized this quite clearly, beginning with the assumption that in this field a whole world of primitive life (and not merely a greater or less number of primitive tribes) remained remote from the influences of the high Cultures. The ethnologist-psychologist, on the contrary, delights in collecting, from all over the five continents, fragments of peoples who really have nothing in common but the negative fact of living a subordinate existence in the middle of one or another of the high Cultures, without participation in its inner life. The result is a congeries of tribes, some stationary, some inferior, and some decadent, whose respective modes of expression, moreover, are indiscriminately lumped together.

But the primitive Culture is not fragmentary, but something strong and integral, something highly vital and effectual. Only, this Culture is so different from everything that we men of a higher Culture possess in the way of spiritual potentialities that we may question whether even those people which have carried the first age very deep into the second are good evidence, in their present modes of being and waking being, for the condition of the old time.

For some thousands of years now the waking consciousness of man has had the impression of constant mutual touch between the tribes and peoples as an obvious everyday fact. But in dealing with the first age we must not forget that in it man, cohering in a very few small groups, is completely lost in the immensity of the landscape, the ruling element therein being the mighty masses of the great animal herds. The rarity of our finds sufficiently proves this. At the time of Aurignacian Man there were perhaps a dozen hordes, each a few hundred strong, wandering in the whole area of France, and such hordes must have regarded it as a deeply impressive and puzzling event when (if ever) they became aware that fellow men existed. Can we imagine even in the least degree what it was to live in a world almost empty of men — we for whom all nature has long since become a background for the human multitude? How man’s world consciousness must have changed when, besides the forests and the herds of beasts, other men “just like himself” began to be met with, more and more frequently, in the countryside. The increase of man’s numbers — this, too, doubtless took place very suddenly — made experience of “fellow men” habitual, and replaced the impression of astonishment by the feelings of pleasure or hostility, and these again evoked a whole new world of experiences and of involuntary and inevitable relations. It was for the history of the human soul perhaps the deepest and most pregnant of all events. It was in relation to alien life forms that man first became conscious of his own, and now the interior organization of the clan was enriched by a wealth of inter-tribal forms of relation, which thereafter completely dominated primitive life and thought. For it was then that, out of very simple modes of sensuous understanding, the rudiments of verbal language (and, therefore, of abstract thought) came into being, amongst them the particularly fortunate few, which — though we can form no idea of their structure — we may assume as the origins of the later Indo-germanic and Semitic language groups.

Then, out of this general primitive Culture of a humanity linked by inter-tribal relations, there shot up suddenly (about 3000 B.C.¹⁸) the Culture of Egypt and Babylonia. Probably for a millennium before that date both these fields had been nursing something that differed radically from every primitive Culture in kind and in intent, something having an inward unity common to all its forms of expression and directional in all its life. To me it seems highly probable that, if not indeed all over the earth’s surface, at any rate in man’s essence a change was accomplished at that time; and if so, then any primitive Culture worthy of the name that is still found living later, ever dwindling, in the midst of higher Cultures, should itself be something different from the Culture of the first Age. But, with reference to primitive Culture of any sort, that which I call the pre-Culture (and which can be shown to occur as a uniform process in the beginning of every high Culture) is something different in kind, something entirely new.

In all primitive existence the “it,” the Cosmic, is at work with such immediacy of force that all microcosmic utterances, whether in myth, custom, technique, or ornament, obey only the pressures of the very instant. For us, there are no ascertainable rules for the duration, tempo, and course of development of these utterances. We observe, say, an ornamental form language — not to be called a style — ruling over the population of a wide area, spreading, changing, and at last dying out. Alongside this, and perhaps with quite different fields of extension, we may find modes of fashioning and using weapons, tribal organizations, religious practices, each developing in a special way of its own, with epochal points of its own, beginnings and ends of its own, completely influenced by other form domains. When in some prehistoric stratum we have identified an accurately known type of pottery, we cannot safely argue from it to the customs and religion of the population to which it belonged. And if by chance the same area does hold for a particular form of marriage and, say, a certain type of tattooing, this never signifies a common basic idea such as is indicated, for example, by the discovery of gunpowder and that of perspective in painting. No necessary connections come to light between ornament and organization by age classes, or between the cult of a god and the kind of agriculture practiced. Development in these cases means always some development of one or another individual aspect or trait of the primitive Culture, never of that Culture itself. This, as I have said before, is essentially chaotic; the primitive Culture is neither an organism nor a sum of organisms.

But with the type of the higher Culture this “it” gives way to a strong and undiffused tendency. Within the primitive Culture tribes and clans are the only quickened beings — other than the individual men of course. Here, however, the Culture itself is such a being. Everything primitive is a sum — a sum of the expression forms of primitive groupings. The high Culture, on the contrary, is the waking being of a single huge organism which makes not only custom, myths, technique, and art, but the very peoples and classes incorporated in itself the vessels of one single form language and one single history. The oldest speech that we know of belongs to the primitive Culture, and has lawless destinies of its own which cannot be deduced from those of, say, Ornament or Marriage. But the history of script belongs integrally with the expression history of the several higher Cultures. That the Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, and Mexican each formed a special script in its pre-Cultural age — that the Indian and the Classical on the other hand did not do so, but took over (and very late) the highly developed writing of a neighboring Civilization — that in the Arabian, again, every new religion and sect immediately formed its particular script — all these are facts that stand in a deeply intimate relation to the generic form history of these Cultures and its inner significance.

To these two ages our knowledge of man is restricted, and they certainly do not suffice to justify conclusions of any sort about possible or certain new eras or about their “when” and “how” — quite apart from the fact that in any case the cosmic connections that govern the history of man as a genus are entirely inaccessible to our measures.

My kind of thought and observation is limited to the physiognomy of the actual. At the point when the experience of the “judge of men” vis-à-vis his environment, and that of the “man of action” vis-à-vis his facts, become ineffective, there also this insight finds its limit. The existence of these two ages is a fact of historical experience; more, our experiencing of the primitive Culture consists not only in surveying, in its relics, a self-contained and closed off thing, but also in reacting to its deeper meaning by virtue of an inward relation to it which persists in us. But the second age opens to us another and quite different kind of experience. It was an incident, the sense of which cannot now be scrutinized, that the type of the higher Culture appeared suddenly in the field of human history. Quite possibly, indeed, it was some sudden event in the domain of earth history that brought forth a new and different form into phenomenal existence. But the fact that we have before us eight such Cultures, all of the same build, the same development, and the same duration, justifies us inlooking at them comparatively, and therefore justifies our treating them as comparable, studying them comparatively, and obtaining from our study a knowledge which we can extend backwards over lost periods and forwards over the future — provided always that a Destiny of a different order does not replace this form world, suddenly and basically, by another. Our license to proceed thus comes from general experience of organic being. As in the history of the Raptores or the Conifers we cannot prophesy whether and when a new species will arise, so in that of Cultural history we cannot say whether and when a new Culture shall be. But from the moment when a new being is conceived in the womb, or a seed sinks into the earth, we do know the inner form of this new life course; and we know that the quiet course of its development and fulfillment may be disturbed by the pressure of external powers, but never altered.

This experience teaches, further, that the Civilization which at this present time has gripped the earth’s whole surface is not a third age, but a stage — a necessary stage — of the Western Culture, distinguished from its analogues only by the forcefulness of its extension tendency. Here experience ends, and all speculation on what new forms will govern the life of future mankind (or, for that matter, whether there will be any such new forms) all building of majestic card houses on the foundation of “it should be, it shall be” is mere trifling — far too futile, it seems to me, to justify one single life of any value being expended on it.

The group of the high Cultures is not, as a group, an organic unit. That they have happened in just this number, at just these places and times, is, for the human eye, an incident without deeper intelligibility. The ordering of the individual Cultures, on the contrary, has stood out so distinctly that the historical technique of the Chinese, the Magian, and the Western worlds — often, indeed, the mere common consent of the educated in these Cultures — has been able to fashion a set of names upon which it would be impossible to improve.¹⁹

Historical thought, therefore, has the double task of dealing comparatively with the individual life courses of the Cultures, and of examining the incidental and irregular relations of the Cultures amongst themselves in respect of their meaning. The necessity of the first of these tasks, obvious enough, has yet been overlooked hitherto. The second has been handled, but only by the lazy and shallow method of imposing causality over the whole tangle and laying it out tidily along the “course” of a hypothetical “world” history, thereby making it impossible to discover either the psychology of these difficult, but richly suggestive, relations or to discover that of the inner life of any particular Culture. In truth, the condition for solving the first problem is that the second has been solved already. The relations are very different, even under the simple aspect of time and space. The Crusades brought a Springtime face to face with an old and ripe Civilization; in the Cretan-Mycenaean world seed time and golden autumn are seen together. A Civilization may stream over from immense remoteness, as the Indian streamed into the Arabian from the East, or lie senile and stifling over an infancy, as the Classical lay upon its other side. But there are differences, too, of kind and strength; the Western Culture seeks out relations, the Egyptian tries to avoid them; the former is beaten by them again and again in tragic crises, while the Classical gets all it can out of them, without suffering. But all these tendencies have their roots in the spirituality of the Culture itself — and sometimes they tell us more of this Culture than does its own language, which often hides more than it communicates.

V

A glance over the group of the Cultures discloses task after task. The nineteenth century, in which historical research was guided by natural science, and historical thought by the ideas of the Baroque, has simply brought us to a pinnacle whence we see the new world at our feet. Shall we ever take possession of that new world?

Even today uniform treatment of these grand life courses is immensely difficult, because the more remote fields have not been seriously worked up at all. Once more, it is the lordly outlook of the West European — he will only notice that which approaches him from one or another antiquity by the proper and respectful route of a Middle Age, and that which goes its own ways will get but little of his attention. Thus, of the things of the Chinese and the Indian worlds, certain kinds are now beginning to be tackled — art, religion, philosophy — but the political history is dealt with, if at all, “chattily.” It does not occur to anyone to treat the great constitutional problems of Chinese history — the Hohenstaufen destiny of the Li Wang (842), the first Congress of Princes (659), the struggle of principle between the imperialism (Lien-heng) of the “Roman” state of Tsin and the League of Nations idea (Ho-tsung) between 500 and 300, the rise of the Chinese Augustus, Hwang-ti (221) — with anything of the thoroughness that Mommsen devoted to the principate of Augustus. India, again; however completely the Indians themselves have forgotten their state history, we have after all more available material for Buddha’s time than we have for history of the Classical ninth and eighth centuries, and yet even today we act as though “the” Indian had lived entirely in his philosophy, just as the Athenians (so our classicists would have us believe) spent their lives in beauty-philosophizing on the banks of the Ilissus. But even Egyptian politics receive little reflective attention. The later Egyptian historian concealed under the name “Hyksos period” the same crisis which the Chinese treat of under the name “Period of the Contending States” — here, too, is something never yet investigated. And interest in the Arabian world has reached to the frontier of the Classical tongues and no further. With what endless assiduity we have described the constitution of Diocletian, and assembled material for the entirely unimportant administrative history of the provinces of Asia Minor — because it is written in Greek. But the Sassanid state, the precedent and in every respect the model of Diocletian’s, comes into the picture only occasionally, and then as Rome’s opponent in war. What about its own administrative and juristic history? What is the poor sum total of material that we have assembled for the law and economics of Egypt, India, and China²⁰ in comparison with the work that has been done on Greek and Roman law.

About 3000²¹ after a long “Merovingian” period, which is still distinctly perceptible in Egypt, the two oldest Cultures began, in exceedingly limited areas on the lower Nile and the lower Euphrates. In these cases the distinctions between early and late periods have long ago been labeled as Old and Middle Kingdom, Sumer and Akkad. The outcome of the Egyptian feudal period marked by the establishment of a hereditary nobility and the decline (from Dynasty VI) of the older Kingship, presents so astounding a similarity with the course of events in the Chinese springtime from I-Wang (934-909) and that in the Western from the Emperor Henry IV (1056-1106) that a unified comparative study of all three might well be risked. At the beginning of the Babylonian “Baroque” we see the figure of the great Sargon (2500), who pushed out to the Mediterranean coast, conquered Cyprus, and styled himself, like Justinian I and Charles V, “lord of the four parts of the earth.” And in due course, about 1800 on the Nile and rather earlier in Sumer-Akkad, we perceive the beginnings of the first Civilizations. Of these the Asiatic displayed immense expansive power. The “achievements of the Babylonian Civilization” (as the books say), many things and notions connected with measuring, numbering, and accounting, traveled probably as far as the North and the Yellow Seas. Many a Babylonian trademark upon a tool may have come to be honored, out there in the Germanic wild, as a magic symbol, and so may have originated some “Early German” ornament. But meantime the Babylonian realm itself passed from hand to hand. Kassites, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Medes, Persians, Macedonians — all of these small²² warrior hosts under energetic leaders — successively replaced one another in the capital city without any serious resistance on the part of its people.

It is a first example — soon paralleled in Egypt — of the “Roman Empire” style. Under the Kassites rulers were set up and displaced by praetorians; the Assyrians, like the later soldier emperors of Rome (after Commodus), maintained the old constitutional forms; the Persian Cyrus and the Ostrogoth Theodoric regarded themselves as managers of the Empire, and the warrior bands, Mede and Lombard, as master peoples in alien surroundings. But these are constitutional rather than factual distinctions; in intent and purpose the legions of Septimius Severus, the African, did not differ from the Visigoths of Alaric, and by the battle of Adrianople²³ “Romans” and “barbarians” have become almost indistinguishable.

After 1500 three new Cultures begin — first, the Indian, in the upper Punjab; then, a hundred years later, the Chinese on the middle Hwang-Ho; and then, about 1100, the Classical, on the Aegean Sea. The Chinese historians speak of the three great dynasties of Hsia, Shang, and Chôu in much the same way as Napoleon regarded himself as a fourth dynasty following the Merovingians, the Carolingians, and the Capetians — in reality, the third coexisted with the Culture right through its course in each case. When in 441 B.C. the titular Emperor of the Chôu dynasty became a state pensioner of the “Eastern Duke” and when in A.D. 1793 “Louis Capet” was executed, the Culture in each case passed into the Civilization. There are some bronzes of very great antiquity preserved from late Chang times, which stand towards the later art in exactly the same relation as Mycenaean to Early Classical pottery and Carolingian to Romanesque art. In the Vedic, Homeric, and Chinese springtimes, with their “Pfalzen” and “Burgen,” their knighthood and feudal rulership, can be seen the whole image of our Gothic, and the “period of the Great Protectors” (Ming-Chu, 685-691) corresponds precisely to the time of Cromwell, Wallenstein, and Richelieu and to the First Tyrannis of the Greek world.

The period 480-230 is called by the Chinese historians the “Period of the Contending States”; it culminated in a century of unbroken warfare between mass armies with frightful social upheavals, and out of it came the “Roman” state of Tsin as founder of a Chinese Imperium. This phase Egypt experienced between 1780 and 1580, of which the last century was the “Hyksos” time. The Classical experienced it from Chasronea (338), and, at the high pitch of horror, from the Gracchi (133) to Actium (31 B.C.). And it is the destiny of the West European-American world for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

During this period the center of gravity changes — as from Attica to Latium, so from the Hwang-ho (at Ho-nan-fu) to the Yang-tse (modern province of Hu-pei). The Si-Kiang was as vague for the Chinese savants of those days as the Elbe for the Alexandrian geographer, and of the existence of India they had as yet no notion.

As on the other side of the globe there arose the principes of the Julian-Claudian house, so here in China there arose the mighty figure of Wang-Cheng, who led Tsin through the decisive struggle to sole supremacy and in 221 assumed the title of Shi (literally equivalent to “Augustus”) and the Caesar name Hwang-ti. He founded the “Pax Serica,” as we may call it, carried out a grand social reform in the exhausted Empire, and — as promptly as Rome²⁴ — began to build his “Limes” the famous Great Wall, for which in 214 he annexed a part of Mongolia. He was the first, too, to subdue the barbarians south of the Yang-tse, in a series of large scale campaigns followed and confirmed by military roads, castles, and colonies. But “Roman,” too, was his family history — a Tacitean drama with Lui-Shi (Chancellor and stepfather of the Emperor) and Li-Szu, the great statesman (the Agrippa of his day, and unifier of the Chinese script), playing parts, and one that quickly closed in Neronic horrors. Followed then the two Han dynasties (Western, 206 B.C. A.D. 23; Eastern, A.D. 25-220), under which the frontiers extended more and more, while in the capital eunuch ministers, generals, and soldiery made and unmade the rulers at their pleasure. At certain rare moments, as under Wu-ti (140-86) and Ming-ti (58-76), the Chinese-Confucian, the Indian-Buddhist, and the Classical-Stoic world forces approached one another so closely in the region of the Caspian that they might easily have come into actual touch.²⁵

Chance decreed that the heavy attacks of the Huns should break themselves in vain upon the Chinese “Limes,” which at each crisis found a strong emperor to defend it. The decisive repulse of the Huns took place in 124-119 under the Chinese Trajan, Wu-ti; and it was he, too, who finally incorporated Southern China in the Empire, with the object of obtaining a route into India, and built a grand embattled road to the Tarim. And so the Huns turned westward, and in due course they appear, impelling a swarm of Germanic tribes, in face of the Limes of the Roman world. This time they succeeded. The Roman Imperium collapsed, and thus two only of the three empires continued, and still continue, as desirable spoil for a succession of different powers. Today it is the “red haired barbarian” of the West who is playing before the highly civilized eyes of Brahman and Mandarin the role once played by Mogul and Manchu, playing it neither better nor worse than they, and certain like them to be superseded in due course by other actors. But in the colonization field of foundering Rome, on the other hand, the future Western Culture was ripening underground in the northwest, while in the east the Arabian Culture had flowered already. The Arabian Culture²⁶ is a discovery. Its unity was suspected by late Arabians, but it has so entirely escaped Western historical research that not even a satisfactory name can be found for it. Conformably to the dominant languages, the seed time and the spring might be called the Aramaic and the later time the Arabian, but there is no really effectual name. In this field the Cultures were close to one another, and the extension of the corresponding Civilizations led to much overlaying. The pre-Cultural period of the Arabian, which we can follow out in Persian and Jewish history, lay completely within the area of the old Babylonian world, but the springtime was under the mighty spell of the Classical Civilization, which invaded from the West with all the power of a just attained maturity, and the Egyptian and Indian Civilizations also made themselves distinctly felt. And then in turn the Arabian spirit — under Late Classical disguises for the most part — cast its spell over the nascent Culture of the West. The Arabian Civilization stratified over a still surviving Classical in the popular soul of south Spain, Provence, and Sicily, and became the model upon which the Gothic soul educated itself. The proper landscape of this Culture is remarkably extended and singularly fragmented. Let one put oneself at Palmyra or Ctesiphon, and, musing, look outwards all round. In the north is Osrhoene; Edessa became the Florence of the Arabian spring. To the west are Syria and Palestine — the home of the New Testament and of the Jewish Mishna, with Alexandria as a standing outpost. To the east Mazdaism experienced a mighty regeneration, which corresponded to the birth of Jesus in Jewry and about which the fragmentary state of Avesta literature enables us to say only that it happened.²⁷ Here, too, were born the Talmud and the religion of Mani. Deep in the south, the future home of Islam, an age of chivalry was able to develop as fully as in the realm of the Sassanids; even today there survive, unexplored, the ruins of castles and strongholds whence the decisive wars were waged between the Christian state of Axum and the Jewish state of the Himyarites on the two shores of the Red Sea, with Roman and Persian diplomacy poking the fire. In the extreme north was Byzantium, that strange mixture of sere, civilized, Classical, with vernal and chevaleresque which is manifested above all in the bewildering history of the Byzantine army system. Into this world Islam at last — and far too late — brought a consciousness of unity, and this accounts for the self-evident character of its victorious progress and the almost unresisting adhesion of Christians, Jews, and Persians alike. Out of Islam in due course arose the Arabian Civilization which was at the peak of its intellectual completeness when the barbarians from the West broke in for a moment, marching on Jerusalem. How, we may ask ourselves, did this inroad appear in the eyes of cultivated Arabians of the time? Somewhat like Bolshevism, perhaps? For the statecraft of the Arabian World the political relations of “Frankistan” were something on a lower plane. Even in our Thirty Years’ War — from that point of view a drama of the “Far West” — when an English envoy²⁸ strove to stir up the Porte against the house of Habsburg, the statesman who handled policy over a field stretching from Morocco to India, evidently judged that the little predatory states on the horizon were of no real interest. And even when Napoleon landed in Egypt, there were still many without an inkling of the future.

Meantime yet another new Culture developed in Mexico. This lay so remote from the rest that no word even passed between them. All the more astonishing, therefore, is the similarity of its development to that of the Classical. No doubt the archaeologist standing before a teocalli would be horrified to think of his Doric temple in such a connection; yet it was a thoroughly Classical trait — feebleness of the will-to-power in the matter of technics — that kept the Aztecs ill-armed and so made possible their catastrophe.

For, as it happens, this is the one example of a Culture ended by violent death. It was not starved, suppressed, or thwarted, but murdered in the full glory of its unfolding, destroyed like a sunflower whose head is struck off by one passing. All these states — including a world power and more than one federation — with an extent and resources far superior to those of the Greek and Roman states of Hannibal’s day; with a comprehensive policy, a carefully ordered financial system, and a highly developed legislation; with administrative ideas and economic tradition such as the ministers of Charles V could never have imagined; with a wealth of literature in several languages, an intellectually brilliant and polite society in great cities to which the West could not show one single parallel — all this was not broken down in some desperate war, but washed out by a handful of bandits in a few years, and so entirely that the relics of the population retained not even a memory of it all. Of the giant city Tenochtitlan²⁹ not a stone remains aboveground. The cluster of great Mayan cities in the virgin forests of Yucatan succumbed swiftly to the attack of vegetation, and we do not know the old name of any one of them. Of the literature three books survive, but no one can read them.

The most appalling feature of the tragedy was that it was not in the least a necessity of the Western Culture that it should happen. It was a private affair of adventurers, and at the time no one in Germany, France, or England had any idea of what was taking place. This instance shows, as no other shows, that the history of humanity has no meaning whatever and that deep significances reside only in the life courses of the separate Cultures. Their interrelations are unimportant and accidental. In this case the accident was so cruelly banal, so supremely absurd, that it would not be tolerated in the wildest farce. A few cannon and handguns began and ended the drama.³⁰

A sure knowledge of even the most general history of this world is now forever impossible. Events as important as our Crusades and Reformation have vanished without leaving a trace. Only in recent years has research managed to settle the outline, at any rate, of the later course of development, and with the help of these data comparative morphology may attempt to widen and deepen the picture by means of those of other Cultures.³¹ On this basis the epochal points of this Culture lie about two hundred years later than those of the Arabian and seven hundred years before those of our own. There was a pre-Cultural period which, as in China and Egypt, developed script and calendar, but of this we now know nothing. The time reckoning began with an initial date which lies far behind the birth of Christ, but it is impossible now to fix it with certainty relative to that event.³² In any case, it shows an extraordinarily strongly developed history sense in Mexican mankind.

The springtime of the “Hellenic” Maya states is evidenced by the dated relief pillars of the old cities of Copan (in the south), Tikal, and somewhat later Chichen Itza (in the north), Naranjo, and Seibal³³ — about 160-450. At the end of this period Chichen Itza was a model of architecture that was followed for centuries. The full glory of Palenque and Piedras Negras (in the west) may correspond to our Late Gothic and Renaissance (450-600 = European 1250-1400?). In the Baroque or Late period Champutun appears as the center of style formation, and now the “Italic” Nahua peoples of the high plateau of Anahuac began to come under the cultural influence. Artistically and spiritually these peoples were mere recipients, but in their political instincts they were far superior to the Maya (about 600-960, = Classical 750-400 = Western 1400-1750?). And now Maya entered on the “Hellenistic” phase. About 960 Uxmal was founded, soon to be a cosmopolis of the first rank, an Alexandria or Baghdad, founded like these on the threshold of the Civilization. With it we find a series of brilliant cities like Labna, Mayapan, Chacmultun, and a revived Chichen Itza. These places mark the culminating point of a grandiose architecture, which thereafter produced no new style, but applies the old motives with taste and discrimination to mighty masses. Politically this is the age of the celebrated League of Mayapan, an alliance of three leading states, which appears to have maintained the position successfully — if somewhat artificially and arbitrarily — in spite of great wars and repeated revolutions (960-1165 = Classical 350-150 = Western 1800-2000).

The end of this period was marked by a great revolution, and with it the definitive intervention of the (“Roman”) Nahua powers in the Maya affair. With their aid Hunac Ceel brought about a general overthrow and destroyed Mayapan (about 1190 = Classical 150). The sequel was typical of the history of the over-ripened Civilization in which different peoples contend for military lordship. The great Maya cities sink into the same bland contentment as Roman Athens and Alexandria, but out on the horizon of the Nahua lands was developing the last of these peoples, the Aztecs — young, vigorous, barbaric, and filled with an insatiable will-to-power. In 1325 (= the Age of Augustus) they founded Tenochtitlan, which soon became the paramount and capital city of the whole Mexican world. About 1400 military expansion began on the grand scale. Conquered regions were secured by military colonies and a network of military roads, and a superior diplomacy kept the dependent states in check and separated. Imperial Tenochtitlan grew enormous and housed a cosmopolitan population speaking every tongue of this world empire.³⁴ The Nahua provinces were politically and militarily secure, the southward thrust was developing rapidly, and a hand was about to be laid on the Maya states; there is no telling what the course of the next centuries would have been. And suddenly — the end.

At that date the West was at a level which the Maya had already overpassed by 700; nothing short of the age of Frederick the Great would have been ripe enough to comprehend the politics of the Mayapan League, and what the Aztecs of A.D. 1500 were organizing lies for us well in the future. But that which distinguished Faustian man, even then, from the man of any other Culture was his irrepressible urge into distance. It was this, in the last resort, that killed and even annihilated the Mexican and Peruvian Culture — the unparalleled drive that was ready for service in any and every domain. Certainly the Ionic style was imitated in Carthage and in Persepolis, and Hellenistic taste in the Gandara art of India found admirers. Future investigation will probably find some Chinese in the primitive German wood architecture. The Mosque style ruled from Farther India to North Russia, to West Africa, and to Spain. But all that amounts to nothing as compared with the expansion power of the Western Soul. The true style history of that soul, it need hardly be said, accomplished itself only on the mother soil, but its resultant effects knew no bounds. On the spot where Tenochtitlan had stood, the Spaniards erected a Baroque cathedral adorned with masterpieces of Spanish painting and plastic. Already at that date the Portuguese had got to work in Hither India and Late Baroque architects from Spain and Italy in the heart of Poland and Russia. The English Rococo, and especially Empire, made for themselves a broad province in the Plantation States of North America, whose wonderful rooms and furniture are far less well known in Germany than they ought to be. Classicism was at work already in Canada and at the Cape, and presently there were no limits at all. It was just the same in every other domain of form; the relation between this forceful young Civilization and the still remaining old ones — is that it covers them, all alike, with ever thickening layers of West European-American life forms under which, slowly, the ancient native form disappears.

VI

In the presence of this picture of the world of man — which is destined to displace the older one of “Ancient-Medieval-Modern” that is still firmly established even in the best minds — it will become possible, too, to give a new answer (and for our Civilization, I think, a final answer) to the old question: What is History?

Ranke, in the preface of his World History says: “History only begins when the monuments become intelligible, and trustworthy written evidences are available.” This is the answer of a collector and arranger of data; obviously, it confuses that which has happened with that which happened within the field of view open at the particular time to the particular student. Mardonius was defeated at Plataea — has this ceased to be history if two thousand years later it has somehow dropped out of the ken of the historians? For a fact to be a fact, must it be mentioned in books?

The weightiest historian since Ranke, Eduard Meyer,³⁵ says: “Historic is that which is, or has been, effective... Only through historical treatment does the individual process, lifted by history from among the infinite mass of contemporary processes, become the historical event.” The remark is thoroughly in the manner and spirit of Hegel. Firstly, its starting point is the fact and not any accidental knowledge or ignorance of the fact, and if there is any mode of picturing history which necessarily imposes such a starting point, it is that presented in these pages, since it compels us to assume the existence of facts of the first order in majestic sequences, even when we do not (and never will) know them in the scientific sense. We have to learn to handle the unknown in the most comprehensive way. Secondly, truths exist for the mind, facts only in relation to life. Historical treatment — in my terminology, physiognomic fact — is decided by the blood, the gift of judging men broadened out into past and future, the innate flair for persons and situations, for the event, for that which had to be, must have been. It does not consist in bare scientific criticism and knowing of data. The scientific mode of experience is, for every true historian, something additional or subordinate. It addresses to the waking consciousness, by the way of understanding and imparting, laborious and repetitive proof of that which one moment of illumination has already, and instantly, demonstrated to Being.

Just because the force of our Faustian being has by now worked up about us a circumcircle of inner experiences such as no other men and no other time could acquire — just because for us the remotest events become increasingly significant and disclose relationships that no one else, not even the closest contemporaries of these events, could perceive — much has now become history (i.e., life in tune with our life) that centuries ago was not history. Tacitus probably “knew” the data concerning Tiberius Gracchus’s revolution, but for him it no longer meant anything effectively, whereas for us it is full of meaning. The history of the Monophysites and their relation to Mohammed’s milieu signify nothing whatever to the Islamic believer, but for us it is recognizably the story of English Puritanism in another setting. For the world view of a Civilization which has made the whole earth its stage, nothing is in the last resort quite unhistorical. The scheme of ancient-medieval-modern history, as understood by the nineteenth century, contained only a selection of the more obvious relations. But the influence that old Chinese and Mexican history are beginning to exercise on us today is of a subtler and more intellectual kind. There we are sounding the last necessities of life itself. We are learning out of another life course to know ourselves what we are, what we must be, what we shall be. It is the great school of our future. We who have history still, are making history still, find here on the extreme frontiers of historical humanity what history is.

A battle between two Negro tribes in the Sudan, or between the Cherusci and Chatti of Caesar’s time, or — what is substantially the same — between ant communities, is merely a drama of “living Nature.” But when the Cherusci beat the Romans, as in the year 9,³⁶ or the Aztecs the Tlascalans, it is history. Here the “when” is of importance and each decade, or even year, matters, for here one is dealing with the march of a grand life course, in which every decision takes rank as an epoch. Here there is an object towards which every happening impels, a being that strives to fulfill its predestination, a tempo, an organic duration — and not the disorderly ups and downs of Scythians, Gauls, or Caribs, of which the particular detail is as unimportant as that of doings in a colony of beavers or a steppe herd of gazelles. These are zoological happenings and have their place in an altogether different orientation of our outlook, that in which we are concerned not with the destiny of individual peoples or herds, but with that of “man,” or “the” gazelle, or “the” ants, as species. Primitive man has history only in the biological sense, and all prehistoric study boils down to the investigation of this sense. The increasing familiarity of men with fire, stone tools, and the mechanical laws which make weapons effective, characterizes only the development of the type and of its latent possibilities. The objects for which one tribe employed these weapons against another tribe are of no importance in this plane of history. Stone Age and Baroque are age grades in the existence of respectively a genus and a Culture — i.e., two organisms belonging to two fundamentally different settings. And here I would protest against two assumptions that have so far vitiated all historical thought: the assertion of an ultimate aim of mankind as a whole and the denial of there being ultimate aims at all. The life has an aim. It is the fulfillment of that which was ordained at its conception. But the individual belongs by birth to the particular high Culture on the one hand and to the type Man on the other — there is no third unit of being for him. His destiny must lie either in the zoological or in the world historical field. “Historical” man, as I understand the word and as all great historians have meant it to be taken, is the man of a Culture that is in full march towards self-fulfillment. Before this, after this, outside this, man is historyless; and the destinies of the people to which he belongs matter as little as the Earth’s destiny matters when the plane of attention is the astronomical and not the geological.

From this there follows a fact of the most decisive importance, and one that has never before been established: that man is not only historyless before the birth of the Culture, but again becomes so as soon as a Civilization has worked itself out fully to the definitive form which betokens the end of the living development of the Culture and the exhaustion of the last potentialities of its significant existence. That which we see in the Egyptian Civilization after Seti I (1300) and in the Chinese, the Indian, the Arabian to this day is — notwithstanding all the cleverness of the religious, philosophical and, especially, political forms in which it is wrapped — just the old zoological up and down of the primitive age again. Whether the lords sitting in Babylon were wild war hordes like the Kassites or refined inheritors like the Persians, when, for how long, and with what success they kept their seats, signified nothing from the standpoint of Babylon. The comfort of the population was affected by such things, naturally, but they made no difference either way to the fact that the soul of this world was extinct and its events, therefore, void of any deep meaning. A new dynasty, native or foreign, in Egypt, a revolution or a conquest in China, a new Germanic people in the Roman Empire, were elements in the history of the landscape like a change in the fauna or the migration of a flock of birds.

In the history, the genuine history, of higher men the stake fought for and the basis of the animal struggle to prevail is ever — even when driver and driven are completely unconscious of the symbolic force of their doings, purposes, and fortunes — the actualization of something that is essentially spiritual, the translation of an idea into a living historical form. This applies equally to the struggle of big style tendencies in art (Gothic and Renaissance), of philosophy (Stoics and Epicureans), of political ideals (Oligarchy and Tyrannis), and of economic forms (Capitalism and Socialism). But the post history is void of all this. All that remains is the struggle for mere power, for animal advantage per se. Whereas previously power, even when to all appearance destitute of any inspiration, was always serving the Idea somehow or other, in the late Civilization even the most convincing illusion of an idea is only the mask for purely zoological strivings.

The distinction between Indian philosophy before and after Buddha is that the former is a grand movement towards attaining the aim of Indian thought by and in the Indian soul, and the latter the perpetual turning up of new facets of a now crystallized and undevelopable thought stock. The solutions are there, for good, though the fashions of expressing them change. The same is true of Chinese painting before and after the Han dynasties — whether we know it or not — and of Egyptian architecture before and after the beginning of the New Empire. So also with technics. The West’s discoveries of the steam engine and of electricity are accepted by the Chinese today in just the same way — and with just the same religious awe — as bronze and the plow were accepted four thousand years ago, and fire in a still remoter age. Both, spiritually, differ in toto from the discoveries which the Chinese made for themselves in the Chôu period and which in each instance signified an epoch in their inner history.³⁷ Before and after that time, centuries play a vastly less important role than decades and even years within the Culture, for the spans of time are gradually returning to the biological order. This it is that confers upon these very Late conditions — which to the people living in them seem almost self-evident — that character of changeless pageantry which the genuine Culture-man — e.g., Herodotus in Egypt and the Western successors of Marco Polo in China — has found so astonishing in comparison with his own vigorous pulse of development. It is the changelessness of non-history.

Is not Classical history at an end with Actium and the Pax Romana? There are no more of those great decisions which concentrate the inner meaning of a whole Culture. Unreason, biology, is beginning to dominate, and it is becoming a matter of indifference for the world — though not for the actions of the private individual — whether an event turns out thus or thus. All great political questions are solved, as they are solved sooner or later in every Civilization, inasmuch as questions are no longer felt as questions and are not asked. Yet a little while, and man will cease to understand what problems were really involved in the earlier catastrophes; what is not livingly experienced of one self cannot be livingly experienced of another. When the later Egyptians speak of the Hyksos time, or the later Chinese of the corresponding period of the “Contending States,” they are judging the outward picture according to the criteria of their own ways of life, in which there are no more riddles. They see in these things merely struggles for power, and they do not see that those desperate wars, external and internal, wars in which men stirred up the alien against their own kin, were fought for an idea. Today we understand what was taking place, in fearful alternations of tension and discharge, round the murder of Tiberius Gracchus and that of Clodius. In 1700 we could not have done so, and in 2200 we shall again be unable to do so. It is just the same with that of Chian, a Napoleonic figure, in whom later Egyptian historians could discover nothing more characterized than a “Hyksos king.” Had it not been for the coming of the Germans, Roman historians a thousand years later might have put the Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, and Cicero together as a dynasty which was overthrown by Caesar.

Compare the death of Tiberius Gracchus with the death of Nero, when Rome received the news of Galba’s rising, or the victory of Sulla over the Marian party with that of Septimius Severus over Pescennius Niger. If in these later cases the event had gone otherwise, would the course of the Imperial Age have been altered in any way? The distinction so carefully drawn by Mommsen and Eduard Meyer³⁸ between the “principate” of Pompey and Augustus and the “monarchy” of Caesar misses the mark completely. At that stage, the point is merely a constitutional one, though fifty years before it would still have signified an opposition between ideas. When Vindex and Galba in 68 set out to restore “the Republic,” they were gambling on a notion in days when notions having genuine symbolic force had ceased to be, and the only question was who should have the plain material power. The struggle for the Caesar title became steadily more and more negroid, and might have gone on century after century in increasingly primitive and, therefore, “eternal” forms.

These populations no longer possessed a soul. Consequently they could no longer have a history proper to themselves. At best they might acquire some significance as an object in the history of an alien Culture, and whatever deeper meaning this relation possessed would be derived entirely from the will of the alien Life. Any effective historical happening that does take place on the soil of an old Civilization acquires its consistency as a course of events from elsewhere and never from any part played in it by the man of that soil. And so once again we find ourselves regarding the phenomenon of “world history” under the two aspects — life courses of the great Cultures and relations between them.

CHAPTER III

ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(C) THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES

I

Although consideration of the Cultures themselves should logically precede that of the relations between them, modern historical thought generally reverses the order. The less it really knows of the life courses which together make up a seeming unity of world happenings, the more zealously it searches for life in the web of relations, and the less it understands even of these. What a wealth of psychology there is in the probings, rejections, choices, transvaluations, errors, penetrations, and welcomings! — and not only between Cultures which immediately touch one another, wonder at one another, fight one another, but also as between a living Culture and the form world of a dead one whose remains still stand visible in the landscape. And how narrow and poor, on the other hand, are the conceptions which the historians label “influence,” “continuity,” and “permanent effects”!

This is pure nineteenth century. What is sought is just a chain of causes and effects. Everything follows and nothing is prime. Since every young Culture superficially shows form elements of older Cultures, these elements are supposed to have had continuing effect (fortgewirkt), and when a set of such effects has been strung together, the historian regards it with satisfaction as a sound piece of work.

At bottom, this mode of treatment rests upon that idea which inspired the great Gothics long ago, the idea of a significant singleness in the history of all mankind. They saw how, on earth, men and peoples changed, but ideas stayed, and the powerful impressiveness of the picture has not worn itself out even today. Originally it was seen as a plan that God was working out by means of the human instrument. And it could still be regarded as such at a far later stage, in fact so long as the spell of the “ancient-medieval-modern” scheme lasted and its parade of permanence prevented us from noting that actuality was ever changing. But meantime our outlook also has altered and become cooler and wider. Our knowledge has long overpassed the limits of this chart, and those who are still trying to sail by it are beating about in vain. It is not products that “influence,” but creators that absorb. Being has been confused with waking being, life with the means by which it expresses itself. The critical thought, or even simple waking consciousness, sees everywhere theoretical units subjected to motion. That is truly dynamic and Faustian, for in no other Culture have men imagined history thus. The Greek, with his thoroughly corporeal understanding of the world, would never have traced “effects” of pure expression units like “Attic drama” or “Egyptian art.”

Originally what happens is that a name is given to a system of expression forms conjuring up in our minds a particular complex of relations. But this does not last long, and soon one is suppositing under the name a being, and under the relation an effect. When we speak today of Greek philosophy, or Buddhism, or Scholasticism, we mean something that is somehow living, a power unit that has grown and grown until it is mighty enough to take possession of men, to subject their waking consciousness and even their being, and in the end to force them into an active conformity, which prolongs the direction followed by its own “life.” It is a whole mythology, and, significantly, it is only men of the Western Culture — the only mankind that lives with and in this picture is the Western — whose myth contains plenty of daemons of this sort — “electricity” and “positional energy,” for example.

In reality these systems only exist in the human waking consciousness, and they exist as modes of activity. Religion, science, art, are activities of waking consciousness that are based on a being. Faith, meditation, creation, and whatever of visible activity is required as outcome of these invisibles — as sacrifice, prayer, the physical experiment, the carving of a statue, the statement of an experience in communicable words — are activities of the waking consciousness and nothing else. Other men see only the visible and hear only words. In so doing they experience something in themselves, but they cannot give any account of the relation between this experience and that which the creator lived in himself. We see a form, but we do not know what in the other’s soul begat that form; we can only have some belief about the matter, and we believe by putting in our own soul. However definitely and distinctly a religion may express itself in words, they are words, and the hearer puts his own sense into them. However impressive the artist’s notes or colors, the beholder sees and hears in them only himself, and if he cannot do so, the work is for him meaningless. (The extremely rare and highly modern gift, possessed by a few intensely historical men, of “putting oneself in the other’s place” need not be considered in this connection.) The German whom Boniface converted did not transfer himself into the missionary’s soul. It was a spring tide quiver that passed in those days through the whole young world of the North, and what it meant was that each man found suddenly in conversion a language wherein to express his own religiousness. Just so the eyes of a child light up when we tell it the name of the object in its hand.

It is not, then, microcosmic units that move, but cosmic entities that pick amongst them and appropriate them. Were it otherwise — were these systems very beings that could exercise an activity (for “influence” is an organic activity) — the picture of history would be quite other than what it is. Consider how every maturing man and every living Culture is continuously bathed in innumerable potential influences. Out of all these, only some few are admitted as such — the great majority are not. Is choice concerned with the works, or with the men?

The historian who is intent upon establishing causal series counts only the influences that are present, and the other side of the reckoning — those that are not — does not appear. With the psychology of the “positive” influences is associated that of the “negative.” This is a domain into which no one has yet ventured, but here, if anywhere, there are fruits to be reaped, and it must be tackled unless the answer to the whole question is to be left indeterminate; for if we try to evade it, we are driven into illusory visions of world historical happening as a continuous process in which everything is properly accounted for. Two Cultures may touch between man and man, or the man of one Culture may be confronted by the dead form world of another as presented in its communicable relics. In both cases the agent is the man himself. The closed off act of A can be vivified by B only out of his own being, and eo ipso it becomes B’s, his inward property, his work, and part of himself. There was no movement of “Buddhism” from India to China, but an acceptance of part of the Indian Buddhists’ store of images by Chinese of a certain spiritual tendency, who fashioned out a new mode of religious expression having meaning for Chinese, and only Chinese, Buddhists. What matters in all such cases is not the original meanings of the forms, but the forms themselves, as disclosing to the active sensibility and understanding of the observer potential modes of his own creativeness. Connotations are not transferable. Men of two different kinds are parted, each in his own spiritual loneliness, by an impassable gulf. Even though Indians and Chinese in those days both felt as Buddhists, they were spiritually as far apart as ever. The same words, the same rites, the same symbol — but two different souls, each going its own way.

Searching through all Cultures, then, one will always find that the continuation of earlier creations into a later Culture is only apparent, and that in fact the younger being has set up a few (very few) relations to the older being, always without regard to the original meanings of that which it makes its own. What becomes, then, of the “permanent conquests” of philosophy and science? We are told again and again how much of Greek philosophy still lives on today, but this is only a figure of speech without real content, for first Magian and then Faustian humanity, each with the deep wisdom of its unimpaired instincts, rejected that philosophy, or passed unregarding by it, or retained its formulas under radically new interpretations. The naive credulity of erudite enthusiasm deceives itself here — Greek philosophic notions would make a long catalog, and the further it is taken, the more vanishingly small becomes the proportion of the alleged survivals. Our custom is simply to overlook as incidental “errors” such conceptions as Democritus’s theory of atomic images,¹ the very corporeal world of Plato’s “ideas,” and the fifty-two hollow spheres of Aristotle’s universe, as though we could presume to know what the dead meant better than they knew themselves! These things are truths and essential — only, not for us. The sum total of the Greek philosophy that we possess, actually and not merely superficially, is practically nil. Let us be honest and take the old philosophers at their word; not one proposition of Heraclitus or Democritus or Plato is true for us unless and until we have accommodated it to ourselves. And how much, after all, have we taken over of the methods, the concepts, the intentions, and the means of Greek science, let alone its basically incomprehensible terms? The Renaissance, men say, was completely under the “influence” of Classical art. But what about the form of the Doric temple, the Ionic column, the relation of column to architrave, the choice of color, the treatment of background and perspective in painting, the principles of figure grouping, vase painting, mosaic, encaustic, the structural element in statuary, the proportions of Lysippus? Why did all this exercise no “influence?”

Because that which one (here, the Renaissance artist) wills to express is in him a priori. Of the stock of dead forms that he had in front of him, he really saw only the few that he wanted to see, and saw them as he wanted them — namely, in line with his own intention and not with the intention of the original creator, for no living art ever seriously considers that. Try to follow, element by element, the “influence” of Egyptian plastic upon early Greek, and you will find in the end that there is none at all, but that the Greek will-to-form took out of the older art stock some few characteristics that it would in any case have discovered in some shape for itself. All round the Classical landscape there were working, or had worked, Egyptians, Cretans, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, and Phoenicians, and the works of these peoples — their buildings, ornaments, art works, cults, state forms, scripts, and sciences — were known to the Greeks in profusion. But how much out of all this mass did the Classical soul extract as its own means of expression? I repeat, it is only the relations that are accepted that we observe. But what of those that were not accepted? Why, for example, do we fail to find in the former category the pyramid, pylon, and obelisk of Egypt, or hieroglyphic, or cuneiform? What of the stock of Byzantium and of the Moorish East was not accepted by Gothic art and thought in Spain and Sicily? It is impossible to over-praise the wisdom (quite unconscious) that governed the choice and the unhesitating transvaluation of what was chosen. Every relation that was accepted was not only an exception, but also a misunderstanding, and the inner force of a Being is never so clearly evidenced as it is in this art of deliberate misunderstanding. The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in truth we have denatured it. Only consider the praises addressed by the West to Plato! From Bernard of Chartres and Marsilius Ficinus to Goethe and Schelling! And the more humble our acceptance of an alien religion, the more certain it is that that religion has already assumed the form of the new soul. Truly, someone ought to have written the history of the “three Aristotles” — Greek, Arabian, and Gothic — who had not one concept or thought in common. Or the history of the transformation of Magian Christianity into Faustian! We are told in sermon and book that this religion extended from the old Church into and over the Western field without change of essence. Actually, Magian man evolved out of the deepest depths of his dualistic world consciousness a language of his own religious awareness that we call “the” Christian religion. So much of this experience as was communicable — words, formulas, rites — was accepted by the man of the Late Classical Civilization as a means of expression for his religious need; then it passed from man to man, even to the Germans of the Western pre-Culture, in words always the same and in sense always altering. Men would never have dared to improve upon the original meanings of the holy words — it was simply that they did not know these meanings. If this be doubted, let the doubter study “the” idea of Grace, as it appears under the dualistic interpretation of Augustine affecting a substance in man, and under the dynamic interpretation of Calvin, affecting a will in man. Or that Magian idea, which we can hardly grasp at all, of the consensus (Arabic ijma)² wherein, as a consequence of the presence in each man of a pneuma emanating from the divine pneuma, the unanimous opinion of the elect is held to be immediate divine Truth. It was this that gave the decisions of the early Church Councils their authoritative character, and it underlies the scientific methods that rule in the world of Islam to this day. And it was because Western men did not understand this that the Church Councils of later Gothic times amounted, for him, to nothing more than a kind of parliament for limiting the spiritual mobility of the Papacy. This idea of what a Council meant prevailed even in the fifteenth century — think of Constance and Basel, Savonarola and Luther — and in the end it disappeared, as futile and meaningless, before the conception of Papal Infallibility. Or, again, the idea, universal in the Early Arabian world, of the resurrection of the flesh, which again presupposed that of divine and human pneuma. Classical man assumed that the soul, as the form and meaning of the body, was somehow co-created herewith, and Greek thought scarcely mentions it. Silence on a matter of such gravity may be due to one or the other of two reasons — the idea’s not being there at all, or being so self-evident as not to emerge into consciousness as a problem. With Arabian man it was the latter. But just as self-evident for him was the notion that his pneuma was an emanation from God that had taken up residence in his body. Necessarily, therefore, there had to be something from which the human soul should rise again on the Day of Judgment, and hence resurrection was thought of as he ἔκ νεκρῶν, “out of the corpses.” This, in its deeper meaning, is utterly incomprehensible for the West. The words of Holy Scripture were not indeed doubted, but unconsciously another meaning was substituted by the finer minds amongst Catholics, this other meaning, unmistakable already in Luther and today quite general, is the conception of immortality as the continued existence to all eternity of the soul as a center of force. Were Paul or Augustine to become acquainted with our ideas of Christianity, they would reject all our dogmas, all our books, and all our concepts as utterly erroneous and heretical.

As the strongest example of a system that to all appearance has traveled unaltered through two millennia, and yet actually has passed through three whole courses of evolution in three Cultures, with completely different meanings in each, we may take Roman law.

II

Law, in the Classical world, is law made by citizens for citizens and presupposes that the state form is that of the Polis. It was this basic form of public life that led — and self-evidently — to the notion of the person as identical with the man who, added to others like him, made up the body (σῶμα)³ of the State. From this formal fact of Classical world feeling grew up the whole structure of Classical law.

“Persona” then is a specifically Classical notion, possessing meaning and valency only in the Classical Culture. The individual person is a body which belongs to the stock of the Polis. It is with reference to him that the law of the Polis is ordered, downwards into the law of Things — with, as a marginal case, the slave who was body, but not person — and upward into the law of Gods — with, as a marginal case, the hero who from being person had attained godhead and the legal right to a cult, like Lysander and Alexander in the Greek cities and Divus Julius and his successors in Rome. This tendency, becoming more and more definite in the development of Classical jurisprudence, explains also the notion of capitis deminutio media, which is so alien to our Western ideas; for we can imagine a person (in our sense of the word) as deprived of certain rights and even of all rights, but the Classical man under this punishment ceased to be a person although living on as a body. And the specifically Classical idea of the thing, res, is only intelligible in contrast to and as the object of persona.

As Classical religion was State religion through and through, there is no distinction made as to the fount of law; real law and divine law were made, like personal law, by the citizen, and the relations of things and of gods to persons were precise and definite. Now, it was a fact of decisive significance for the Classical jurisprudence that it was always the product of immediate public experience — and, moreover, not the professional experience of the jurists, but the practical everyday experience of men who counted in political and economic life generally. The man who followed the public career in Rome had necessarily to be jurist, general, administrator, and financial manager. When he gave judgment as praetor, he had behind him a wide experience of many fields other than law. A judicialclass, professionally (let alone theoretically) specialized in law as its sole activity, was entirely unknown to the Classical. The whole outlook of the later jurisprudence was determined by this fact. The Romans were here neither systematists nor historians nor theorists, but just splendidly practical. Their jurisprudence is an empirical science of individual cases, a refined technique, and not in the least a structure of abstractions.⁴

It would give an incorrect idea to oppose Greek and Roman law to one another as quantities of the same order. Roman law in its whole development is an individual city law, one amongst hundreds of such, and Greek law as a unity never existed at all. Although Greek speaking cities very often had similar laws, this did not alter the fact that the law of each was its own and no other’s. Never did the idea of a general Doric, still less a general Hellenic, legislation arise. Such notions were wholly alien to Classical thought. The jus civile applied only to Quirites — foreigners, slaves and the whole world outside the city⁵ simply did not count in the eyes of the law, whereas even the Sachsen spiegel⁶ evidences already our own deep felt idea that there can only really be one law. Until far into Imperial times the strict distinction was maintained between the jus civile of citizens and the jus gentium for “other people” who came within the cognizance of Rome’s jurisdiction as sojourners.⁷ (It need hardly be added that this “law of nations” has no sort of resemblance to that which we call by the same name.) It was only because Rome as a unit city attained — as under other conditions Alexandria might have attained — to “Imperium” over the Classical world that Roman law became preeminent, not because of its intrinsic superiority, but firstly through Rome’s political success and afterwards because of Rome’s monopoly of practical experience on the large scale. The formation of a general Classical jurisprudence of Hellenistic cast — if we are entitled to call by that name an affinity of spirit in a large number of separate legal systems — falls in a period when Rome was still politically a third rate power. And when Roman law began to assume bigger forms, this was only one aspect of the fact that Roman intellect had subjugated Hellenism. The work of forming later Classical law passed from Hellenism to Rome — i.e., from a sum of city-states, which one and all had been impressively made aware of their individual impotence, to one single city whose whole activity was in the end devoted to the upholding and exploitation of an effective primacy. Thus it came about that Hellenism never formed a jurisprudence in the Greek tongue. When the Classical world entered upon a stage in which it was ripe for this science (the latest of all), there was but one lawgiving city that counted in the matter.

In reality, insufficient regard has been paid to the fact that Greek and Roman law are not parallel in time but successive. Roman law is the younger and presupposes the long experience of the elder;⁸ it was built up, in fact, late and, with this exemplar before it, very swiftly. It is not without significance that the flowering time of the Stoic philosophy, which deeply affected juridical ideas, followed that of Greek, but preceded that of Roman, law.

III

This jurisprudence, however, was built up by the mind of an intensely ahistorical species of man. Classical law, consequently, is law of the day and even the moment; it was in its very idea occasional legislation for particular cases, and when the case was settled, it ceased to be law. To extend its validity over subsequent cases would have been in contradiction to the Classical sense of the present.

The Roman praetor, at the beginning of his year of office, issued an edict in which he set forth the rules that he intended to follow, but his successor next year was in nowise bound to them. And even this limitation of a year on the validity of the rules did not mean that this was actually the duration of the rules. On the contrary (particularly after the Lex Aebutia) the praetor formulated in each individual case the concrete rule of law for the judges⁹ to whom he remitted the matter for judgment, which had to be according to this rule and no other. That is, the praetor produced, and indeed generated, a present law without duration.¹⁰

Similar in appearance, but so profoundly different in meaning as to leave no doubt as to the great gap which is set between Classical and Western Law, is that inspired and truly Germanic notion of English jurisprudence, the creative power of the judge who “declares” the law. His business is to apply a law which in principle possesses eternal validity. Even the application of the existing body of laws he can regulate, according to the situations disclosed in the course of the case, by means of his “rules” (which have nothing in common with the praetor’s). And if he should conclude in the presence of a particular set of facts that current law is defective in respect of these, he can fill the gap at once, and thus in the very middle of a trial create new law, which (if concurred in by the judicial body in the due forms)becomes thereafter part and parcel of the permanent stock of law. This is what makes it so completely un-Classical. In the old jurisprudence, the gradual formation of a stock of rules was due purely to the fact that public life followed a substantially homogeneous course throughout a particular period, and produced again and again the same situations to be dealt with — rules not deliberately invested with validity for the future, but more or less recreated again and again as empirical rulings ad hoc. The sum of these rulings — not a system, but a collection — came to constitute “the law” as we find it in the later legislation by praetor’s edict, each successive praetor having found it practically convenient to take over substantial portions of his predecessor’s work.

Experience, then, means for the ancient lawgiver something different from what it means to us. It means, not the comprehensive outlook over a consistent mass of law that contains implicitly every possible case, associated with practical skill in applying it, but the experimental knowledge that certain jural situations are forever recurring, so that one can save oneself the trouble of forming new law on every occasion.

The genuine Classical form for the slow accretion of legal material is an almost automatic summation of individual νομοί leges, edicta, as we find it in the heyday of the Roman praetor. All the so called legislations of Solon, Charondas, and the Twelve Tables are nothing but occasional collections of such edicts as had been found to be useful. The Law of Gortyn,¹¹ which is more or less contemporary with the Twelve, is a supplement to some older collection. A newly founded city would promptly provide itself with such a collection, and in the process a certain amount of dilettantism would slip in (cf. the lawmakers satirized by Aristophanes in The Birds). But there is never system in them, still less any intention of establishing enduring law thereby.

In the West it is conspicuously the other way about. The tendency is from the first to bring the entire living body of law into a general code, ordered forever and exhaustively complete, containing in advance the decision of every conceivable future problem.¹² All Western law bears the stamp of the future, all Classical the stamp of the moment.

IV

But this, it may be said, is contradicted by the fact that there actually were Classical law works compiled by professional jurists for permanent use. Undoubtedly so. But we must remember that we are completely ignorant of Early Classical law (1100-700) and it is pretty certain that the customary law of the countryside and the nascent town was never noted down as that of the Gothic age was set forth in theSachsenspiegel or that of the Early Arabian in the Syrian Law book.¹³ The earliest stratification that we can now detect consists of the collections (from 700 B.C.) ascribed to mythical or semi-mythical personages like Lycurgus, Zaleucus, Charondas, and Dracon,¹⁴ and certain Roman kings.¹⁵ That these existed the form of the saga shows, but of their real authors, the actual process of their codification, and their original contents even the Greeks of the Persian War period were ignorant.

A second stratification, corresponding to Justinian’s code and to the “Reception” of Roman Law in Germany, is connected with the names of Solon (600), Pittacus (550), and others. Here the laws have already attained to a structure and are inspired by the city; they are described as “politeiai,” “nomoi,” in contrast to old “thesmai” and “rhetrai.”¹⁶ In reality, therefore, we only know the history of lateClassical law. Now, why these sudden codifications? A mere look at these names shows that at bottom they were not processes of putting down the results of pure experience, but decisions of political power problems.

It is a grave error to suppose that a law that surveys all things evenly and without being influenced by political and economic interests can exist at all. Such a state of things can be pictured, and is always being pictured, by those who suppose that the imagining of political possibilities is a political activity. But nothing alters the fact that such a law, born of abstractions, does not exist in real history. Always the law contains in abstract form the world picture of its author, and every historical world picture contains a political economic tendencydependent, not upon what this man or that thinks, but upon what is practically intended by the class which in fact commands the power and, with it, the legislation. Every law is established by a class in the name of the generality. Anatole France once said that “our law in majestic equality forbids the rich no less than the poor to steal bread and to beg in the street.”¹⁷ A one-sided justice no doubt. But equally the other side will always try to win sole authority for laws derived from its outlook upon life. These legislative codes are one and all political acts, and party political acts at that — in the case of Solon a democratic constitution (πολιτεία) combined with private laws (νομοί) of the same stamp, in that of Dracon and the Decemvirs¹⁸ an oligarchic constitution fortified by private law. It was left to Western historians, accustomed to their own durable law, to undervalue the importance of this connection; Classical man was under no misapprehension as to what really happened in these cases. The product of the Decemvirs was in Rome the last code of purely patrician character. Tacitus calls it the end of right law (“finis aqui juris” Annals, III, 27). For, just as the fall of the Decemvirs was followed very significantly by the rise of another Ten, the Tribunes, so immediately the jus of the Twelve Tables and the constitution on which it was founded began to be attacked by the undermining process of the lex rogata (people’s law), which set itself with Roman constancy to do what Solon had achieved in one act in the case of Dracon’s work, the πατρίος πολιτεία which was the law ideal of the Attic oligarchy. Thenceforward Dracon and Solon were the “slogans” in the long battle between Oligarchy and Demos, which in Rome meant Senate and Tribunate. The Spartan constitution associated with the name “Lycurgus” not only stood for the ideal of Dracon and the Twelve Tables, but concreted it. We can see, parallel with the closely related course of events in Rome, the tendency of the two Spartan kings to evolve from the condition of Tarquinian tyrants to that of tribunes of the Gracchan kind; the fall of the last Tarquins or the institution of the Decemvirs — a coup d’état of one kind or another against the tribunician tendency¹⁹ — corresponds more or less to the fall of Cleomenes (488) and of Pausanias (470); and the revolution of Agis III and Cleomenes III (about 240) aligns itself with the political activity of C. Flaminius, which began only a few years later. But never in Sparta were the kings able to achieve any thoroughgoing success over the senatorial element represented by the Ephors.

In the period of these struggles, Rome had become a megalopolis of the late Classical type. The rustic instincts were more and more pushed back by the intelligence of the city.²⁰ Consequently from about 350 we find side by side with the lex rogata of the people the lex data, the administrative law, of the praetor. With this the Twelve Tables idea drops out of the contest and it is the praetor’s edict that becomes the football of the party battle.

It did not take long for the praetor to become the center of both legislation and judicial practice. And presently, corresponding to the political extension of the city’s power, the jurisdiction of the praetor and the field of his jus civile — the law of the citizens — begin to diminish in significance and the peregrin praetor with his jus gentium — the law of the alien — steps into the foreground. And when finally the whole population of the Classical world, save the small part possessing Roman citizenship, was comprised in the field of this alien law, the jus peregrinum of the city of Rome became practically an imperial law. All other cities — and even Alpine tribes and migrant Bedouin clans were civitates from the administrative point of view — retained their local laws only as supplements, not alternatives, to the peregrin law of Rome.

It marked the close of Classical law-making, therefore, when Hadrian (about A.D. 130) introduced the Edictum perpetuum, which gave final form to the well established corpus of the annual pronouncements of the praetors and forbade further modifications thereof. It was still, as before, the praetor’s duty to publish the “law of his year,” but, even though this law had no greater degree of validity than corresponded to his administrative powers and was not the law of the Empire, he was obliged thenceforth to stick to the established text.²¹ It is the very symbol of the petrified “Late” Civilization.²²

With the Hellenistic age began jurisprudence, the science of law, the systematic comprehension of the law which men actually apply. Since legal thought presupposes a substance of political and economic relations, in the same way as mathematical thought presupposes physical and technical elements of knowledge,²³ Rome very soon became the home of Classical jurisprudence. Similarly in the Mexican world it was the conquering Aztecs whose academies (e.g., Tezcuco) made law the chief subject of study. Classical jurisprudence was the Roman’s science, and his only one. At the very moment when the creative mathematic closes off with Archimedes, juristic literature begins with Aelius’s Tripertita, a commentary on the Twelve (198 B.C.).²⁴ The first systematic private law was written by M. Scaevola about 100. The genuine maturity of Classical law is in the two centuries 200-0 — although we today, with quaint perversity, apply the time to a period which was really that of Early Arabian law. And from the relics of these two literatures we can measure the greatness of the gap that separates the thought of two Cultures. The Romans treat only of cases and their classification; they never analyze a basic idea such as, for instance, judicial error. They distinguish carefully the sorts of contracts, but they have no conception of Contract as an idea, or of any theories as to invalidity or unsoundness. “Taking everything into account,” says Lenel,²⁵ “it is clear that the Romans cannot possibly be regarded as exemplars of scientific method.”

The last phase is that of the schools of the Sabiniani and Proculiani (Augustus to about 160 A.D.). They are scientific schools like the philosophical schools in Athens, and in them, possibly, the expiring stages of the conflict between the senatorial and the tribunician (Caesarian) conceptions of law were fought, for amongst the best of the Sabiniani were two descendants of Caesar’s slayers and one of the Proculiani was picked upon by Trajan as his potential successor. While the method was to all intents and purposes settled and concluded, the practical fusion of the citizen’s statute law (jus civile) and the praetor’s edict (jus honorarium) was carried out here.

The last landmark of Classical jurisprudence, so far as we know, was the Institutes of Gaius (about 161).

Classical law is a law of bodies. In the general stock composing the world it distinguishes bodily Persons and bodily Things and, like a sort of Euclidean mathematic of public life, establishes ratios between them, The affinity between mathematical and legal thought is very close. The intention, in both, is to take the prima facie data, to separate out the sensuous incidental, and to find the intellectually basic principle — the pure form of the object, the pure type of the situation, the pure connexity of cause and effect. Life, in the Classical, presents itself to the critical waking consciousness of the Classical man in a form penetrated with Euclidean character, and the image that is generated in the legal mind is one of bodies, of positional relations between bodies, and of reciprocal effects of bodies by contact and reaction — just as with Democritus’s atoms. It is juristic statics.²⁶

V

The first creation of “Arabian” law was the concept of the incorporeal person. Here is an element entirely absent in Classical law,²⁷ and appearing quite suddenly in the “Classical” jurists (who were all Aramaeans), which cannot be estimated at its full value, or in its symbolic importance as an index of the new world feeling, unless we realize the full extent of the field that this “Arabian” law covered.

The new landscape embraces Syria and northern Mesopotamia, southern Arabia and Byzantium. In all these regions a new law was coming into being, an oral or written customary law of the same “early” type as that met with in the Sachsenpiegel. Wonderfully, the law of individual cities which is so self-evident on Classical ground is here silently transmuted into a law of creed communities. It is Magian, magic, through and through. Always one Pneuma, one like spirit, one identical knowledge and comprehension of whole and sole truth, welds the believers of the same religion into a unit of will and action, into one juristic person. A juristic person is thus a collective entity which has intentions, resolutions, and responsibilities as an entity. In Christianity we see the idea already actual and effective in the primitive community at Jerusalem,²⁸ and presently it soars to the conception of a triune Godhead of three Persons.²⁹

Before Constantine, even, the Late Classical law of imperial decrees (constitutiones, placita) though the Roman form of city law was strictly kept, was genuinely a law for the believers of the “Syncretic Church,”³⁰ that mass of cults perfused by one single religiousness. In Rome itself, it is true, law was conceived of by a large part of the population as city-state law, but this feeling became weaker and weaker with every step towards the East. The fusion of the faithful into a single jural community was effected in express form by the Emperor cult, which was religious law through and through. In relation to this law Jews and Christians³¹ were infidels who ensconced themselves with their own laws in another field of law. When in 212 the Aramaean Caracalla, by the Constitutio Antoniana, gave Roman citizenship to all inhabitants except dediticii peregrins,³² the form of his act was purely Classical, and no doubt there were plenty of people who understood it in the Classical spirit — i.e., as literally an incorporation of the citizens of every other city in the city of Rome. But the Emperor himself conceived it quite otherwise. It made everyone subject to the “Ruler of the Faithful,” the head of the cult religion venerated as Divus. With Constantine came the great change; he turned Imperial Caliph law on to the creed community of Christianity in lieu of that of Syncretism, and thereby constituted the Christian Nation. The labels “devout” and “unbeliever” changed places. From Constantine onwards the quiet transformation of “Roman” law into orthodox Christian law proceeded more and more decisively, and it was as such that converted Asiatics and Germans received and adopted it. Thus a perfectly new law came into being in old forms. According to the old marriage law it was impossible for a Roman burgher to marry the daughter of, say, a Capuan burgher if legal community, connubium, was not in force between the two cities.³³ But now the question was whether a Christian or a Jew — irrespective of whether he was Roman, Syrian, or Moor — could legally marry an infidel. For in the Magian law world there was no connubiumbetween those of different faiths. There was not the slightest difficulty about an Irishman in Constantinople marrying a Negress if both were Christians, but how could a Monophysite Christian marry a Nestorian maiden who was his neighbor in their Syrian village? Racially they were probably indistinguishable, but they belonged to legally different nations.

This Arabian concept of nationality is a new and wholly decisive fact. The frontiers between “home” and “abroad” lay in the Apollinian world between every two towns, and in the Magian between every two creed communities. What the “enemy,” the peregrin, was to the Roman, the Pagan was to the Christian, the Amhaarez to the Jew. What the acquisition of Roman citizenship meant for the Gaul or the Greek in Caesar’s time, Christian baptism meant for him now — entry into the leading nation of the leading Culture.³⁴ The Persians of the Sassanid period no longer conceived of themselves, as their predecessors of Achasmenid times had done, as a unit by virtue of origin and speech, but as a unit of Mazdaist believers, vis-à-vis unbelievers, irrespective of the fact that the latter might be of pure Persian origin (as indeed the bulk of the Nestorians were). So also with the Jews, and later the Mandaeans and Manichaeans, and later again the Monophysite and the Nestorian Christians — each body felt itself a nation, a legal community, a juristic person in a new sense.

Thus there arises a group of Early Arabian laws, differentiated according to religions as decisively as Classical laws are differentiated according to cities. In the realm of the Sassanids schools arose for teaching the Zoroastrian law proper to them; the Jews, who formed an exceedingly large portion of the population from Armenia to Sahara, created their proper law in the Talmud, which was completed and closed some few years before the Corpus Juris. Each one of these Churches had its peculiar jurisdiction, independent of the geographical frontiers of the moment — as in the East today — and the judge representing the ground lord judged only cases between parties of different faiths. The self-jurisdiction of the Jews within the Empire had never been contested by anyone, but the Nestorians and the Monophysites also began, very soon after their separation, to create and to apply laws of their own, and thus by a negative process — i.e., by the gradual withdrawal of all heterodox communities — Roman imperial law came to be the law of the Christians who confessed the same creed as the Emperor. Hence the importance of the Roman-Syrian law book, which has been preserved in several languages. It was probably³⁵ pre-Constantinian and written in the chancery of the Patriarch of Antioch; it is quite unmistakably Early Arabian law in Late Classical form, and, as its many translations indicate, it owed its currency to the opposition to the orthodox Imperial Church. It was without doubt the basis of Monophysite law, and it reigned till the coming of Islam over a field far larger than that of the Corpus Juris.

The question arises, what in such a tapestry of laws could have been the real practical value of the part of them which was written in Latin? The law historians, with all the one-sidedness of the expert, have hitherto looked at this part alone and therefore have not yet realized that there is a problem here at all. Their texts were “Law” unqualified, the law that descended from Rome to us, and they were concerned only to investigate the history of these texts and not their real significance in the lives of the Eastern peoples. What in reality we have here is the highly civilized law of an aged Culture forced upon the springtime of a young one.³⁶ It came over as learned literature, and in the train of political developments which were quite other than they would have been had Alexander or Caesar lived longer or had Antony won at Actium. We must look at Early Arabian law from the standpoint of Ctesiphon and not from that of Rome. The law of the distant West had long before reached inward fulfillment — could it be here more than a mere literature? What part did it play, if any, in the active law study, law making, and law practice of this landscape? And, indeed we must further ask how much of Roman — or for that matter of Classical generally — is contained in this literature itself.³⁷

The history of this Latin-written law belongs after 160 to the Arabian East, and it says a great deal that it can be traced in exactly parallel courses into the history of Jewish, Christian, and Persian literature.³⁸ The “Classical” jurists (160-220), Papinian, Ulpian, and Paul, were Aramaeans, and Ulpian described himself with pride as a Phoenician from Tyre. They came, therefore, from the same population as the Tannaim who perfected the Mishnah shortly after 200, and most of the Christian Apologists (Tertullian 160-223). Contemporary with them is the fixation of canon and text for the New Testament by Christian, for the Hebrew Old Testament by Jewish,³⁹ and for the Avesta by Persian, scholars. It is the high Scholasticism of the Arabian Springtime. The digests and commentaries of these jurists stand towards the petrified legal store of the Classical in exactly the same relation as the Mishnah to the Torah of Moses (and as, much later, the Hadith to the Koran) — they are “Halak-hoth”⁴⁰ — a new customary law grasped in the forms of an authoritative and traditional law material. The casuistic method is everywhere the same. The Babylonian Jews possessed a well developed civil law which was taught in the academies of Sura and Pumbeditha. Everywhere a class of law-men formed itself — the prudentes of the Christians, the rabbis of the Jews, later the ulemas (in Perian, mollahs) of the Islamic nation — who enunciated opinions, responsa (Arabic, Fetwa). If the Ulema was acknowledged by the State, he was called “Mufti” (Byzantine, ex auctoritate principii). Everywhere the forms are exactly the same.

About 200 the Apologists pass into the Fathers proper, the Tannaim into the Amoraim, the great casuists of juridical law (jus) into the exegetes and codifiers of constitutional law (lex). The constitutions of the Emperors, from 200 the sole source of new “Roman” law, are again a new “Halakhah” laid down over that in the jurists’ writings, and therefore correspond exactly to the Gemara, which rapidly evolved as an outlier of the Mishnah. The new tendencies reached fulfillment simultaneously in the Corpus Juris and the Talmud.

The opposition between jus and lex in Arabian-Latin usage comes to expression very clearly in the work of Justinian. Institutes and Digests are jus; they have essentially the significance of canonical texts. Constitutions and Novels are leges, new law in the form of elucidations. The canonical books of the New Testament and the traditions of the Fathers are related to one another in the same way.

As to the Oriental character of the thousands of constitutions, no one now has any doubts. It is pure customary law of the Arabian world that the living pressure of evolution forced under the texts of the learned.⁴¹ The innumerable decrees of the Christian rulers of Byzantium, of the Persian of Ctesiphon, of the Jewish (the Resh-Galuta⁴²) in Babylonia, and finally of the Caliphs of Islam have all exactly the same significance.

But what significance had the other part of pseudo-Classical, the old jurists’, law? Here it is not enough to explain texts, and we must know what was the relation between texts, jurisprudence, and court decisions. It can happen that one and the same law book is, in the waking consciousness of two groups of peoples, equivalent to two fundamentally different works.

It was not long before it became the habit, not to apply the old laws of the city of Rome to the fact material of the given case, but to quote the jurists’ texts like the Bible.⁴³ What does this signify? For our Romanists it is a sign of decadence, but looked at from the viewpoint of the Arabian world, it is just the reverse — a proof that Arabian man did eventually succeed in making an alien and imposed literature inwardly his own, in the form admissible for his own world feeling. With this the completeness of the opposition between the Classical and the Arabian world feeling becomes manifest.

VI

Whereas the Classical law was made by burghers on the basis of practical experience, the Arabian came from God, who manifested it through the intellect of chosen and enlightened men. The Roman distinction between jus and fas (such as it was, for the content even of fas had proceeded from human reflection) became meaningless. The law, of whatever kind, spiritual or secular, came into being, as stated in the first words of Justinian’s Digests, Deo auctore. The authoritativeness of Classical laws rests upon their success, that of the Arabian on the majesty of the name that they bear.⁴⁴ But it matters very considerably indeed in a man’s feelings whether he regards law as an expression of some fellow man’s will or as an element of the divine dispensation. In the one case he either sees for himself that the law is right or else yields to force, but in the other he devoutly acknowledges (“Islam” = to commit, devote). The Oriental does not ask to see either the practical object of the law that is applied to him or the logical grounds of its judgments. The relation of the cadi to the people, therefore, has nothing in common with that of the praetor to the citizens. The latter bases his decisions upon an insight trained and tested in high positions, the former upon a spirit that is effective and immanent in him and speaks through his mouth. But it follows from this that their respective relations to written law — the praetor’s to his edict, the cadi’s to the jurists’ texts — must be entirely different. It is a quintessence of concentrated experience that the praetor makes his own, but the texts are a sort of oracle that the cadi esoterically questions. It does not matter in the least to the cadi what a passage originally meant or why it was framed. He consults the words — even the letters — and he does so not at all for their everyday meanings, but for the magic relations in which they must stand towards the case before him. We know this relation of the “spirit” to the “letter” from the Gnosis, from the early Christian, Jewish, and Persian apocalyptic and mystical literature, from the Neo-pythagorean philosophy, from the Kabbalah; and there is not the slightest doubt that the Latin codices were used in exactly the same way in the minor judicial practice of the Aramaean world. The conviction that the letters contain secret meanings, penetrated with the Spirit of God, finds imaginative expression in the fact (mentioned above) that all religions of the Arabian world formed scripts of their own, in which the holy books had to be written and which maintained themselves with astounding tenacity as badges of the respective “nations” even after changes of language.⁴⁵

But even in law the basis of determining the truth by a majority of texts is the fact of the consensus of the spiritual elect, the ijma.⁴⁶ This theory Islamic science worked out to its logical conclusions. We seek to find the truth, each for himself, by personal pondering, but the Arabian savant feels for and ascertains the general conviction of his associates, which cannot err because the mind of God and the mind of the community are the same. If consensus is found, truth is established. “Ijma” is the key of all Early Christian, Jewish, and Persian Councils, but it is the key, too, of the famous Law of Citations of Valentinian III (426), which the law men have universally ridiculed without in the least understanding its spiritual foundations. The law limits the number of great jurists whose texts were allowed to be cited to five, and thus set up a canon — in the same sense as the Old and New Testaments, both of which also were summations of texts which might be cited as canonical. If opinions differed, the law of Valentinian laid it down that a majority should prevail, or if the texts were equally divided, the authority of Papinian.⁴⁷ The interpolation method, used on a large scale by Tribonian for the Digest of Justinian, is a product of this same outlook. A canonical text is in its very idea true and incapable of improvement. But the actual needs of the spirit alter, and so there grew up a technique of secret modifications which outwardly kept up the fiction of inalterability and which is employed very freely indeed in all religious writings of the Arabian world, the Bible included.

After Mark Antony, Justinian is the most fateful personality of the Arabian world. Like his “contemporary” Charles V he ruined everything for which he was invoked. Just as in the West the Faustian dream of a resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire runs through all the political romanticism that darkened the sense of fact during and beyond the age of Napoleon — and even that of the princely fools of 1848 — so also Justinian was possessed with a Quixotic urgency to recover the entire Imperium. It was always upon distant Rome instead of upon his proper world, the Eastern, that his eyes were fixed. Even before he ascended the throne, he was already in negotiation with the Pope of Rome, who was still subordinate to the great Patriarch of Christendom and not yet generally recognized even as primus inter pares. It was at the Pope’s instance that the dual nature symbol was introduced at Chalcedon,⁴⁸ a step which lost the Monophysite countries wholly and forever. The consequence of Actium was that Christianity in its first two decisive and formative centuries was pulled over into the West, into Classical territories, where the higher intellectual stratum held aloof. Then the Early Christian spirit rose afresh with the Monophysites and Nestorians. But Justinian thrust this revival back upon itself, and the result was that in the realms of Eastern Christianity the reformist movement, when in due course it appeared, was not a Puritanism but the new religion of Islam. And in the same way, at the very moment when the Eastern customary law had become ripe for codification, he framed a Latin codex which, for language reasons in the East and for political reasons in the West, was condemned from the first to remain a literary product.

The work itself, like the corresponding codes of Dracon and Solon, came into being at the threshold of a “Late” period, and with political intentions. In the West, where the fiction of a continuing Imperium Romanum produced the utterly meaningless campaigns of Belisarius and Narses, Latin codes had been put together (about A.D. 500) by Visigoths, Burgundians and Ostrogoths for subjugated Romans, and so Byzantium must needs get out a genuine Roman code in opposition. In the East the Jewish nation has already settled its code, the Talmud, while, for the immense numbers of people who were subject to the Emperor’s law, a code proper for the Emperor’s own nation, the Christian, had become a necessity.

For the Corpus Juris with its topsy-turviness and its technical faults is, in spite of everything, an Arabic — in other words, a religious— creation, as evidenced in the Christian tendency of many interpolations;⁴⁹ in the fact that the constitutions relative to ecclesiastical law, which had been put at the end even in the Theodosian codex, were now placed at the beginning; and very markedly in the preambles of many of the Novels. Yet the book is not a beginning, but an end. Latin, which had long become valueless, now disappears completely from legal life (even the Novels are mostly in Greek), and with it the work so misguidedly written in that language. But the history of the law pursues the way that the Syrian-Roman law book had indicated to it, and in the eighth century arrives at works in the mode of our eighteenth, such as the Ecloga of the Emperor Leo⁵⁰ and the Corpus of the great Persian jurist Archbishop Jesubocht.⁵¹ In that time, too, came the greatest figure of Islamic jurisprudence, Abu Hanifah.

VII

The law history of the West begins in total independence of Justinian’s creation. At that time it was in complete oblivion, so thoroughly unimportant, in fact, that of its main element, the Pandects (Digest), there was but one manuscript, which by accident (an unfortunate one) was discovered about 1050.

The pre-Cultural phase, from about A.D. 500, had thrown up a series of Germanic tribal codes — the Visigothic, Ostrogothic, Burgundian, Frankish, and Lombard — which correspond to those of the Arabian pre-Culture that survives for us only in the Jewish⁵² Deuteronomy (c. 621, more or less our Deuteronomy xii-xxvi) and Priestly History (c. 450, now represented by the second, third, and fourth books of the Pentateuch). Both are concerned with the values of basic significance for a primitive existence — family and chattels — and both make use, crudely, yet shrewdly, of an old and civilized law — the Jews (and no doubt the Persians and others) working upon the late Babylonian,⁵³ and the Germans upon some few relics of Urbs Roma.

The political life of the Gothic springtime, with its peasant, feudal, and simple burgher laws, leads very soon to particular development in three great branches of law which have remained distinct to this day — and there has been no unifying comparative history of law in the West to probe the deep meaning of this development.

The most important by far, owing to the political destinies in which it was involved, was the Norman law, which was borrowed from the Frankish. After the Conquest of England in 1066, this drove out the native Saxon, and since that day in England “the law of the great men has become the law of the whole people.” Its purely German spirit has developed it, without a catastrophe, from a feudal regime of unparalleled stringency into the institutions of the present day which have become law in Canada, India, Australia, South Africa, and the United States. Even apart from the extent of its power, it is the most instructive in West Europe. Its development, unlike that of the rest, did not lie in the hands of theoretical jurists. The study of Roman law at Oxford was not allowed to touch practice; and at Merton in 1236 the higher nobility expressly rejected it. The Bench itself continued to develop the old law material by means of creative precedents, and it was these practical decisions (“Reports”) that formed the basis of law books such as that of Bracton.⁵⁴ Since then, and to this day, a statute law, kept living and progressive by the court decisions, and a common law, which always vividly underlies the legislation, exist side by side, without its ever becoming necessary for the representatives of the people to make single large efforts at codification.

In the South, the law of the German-Roman codices above mentioned prevailed — in southern France the Visigothic (called the droitécrit in contrast to the Frankish droit coutumier of the north), and in Italy the Lombard (which was the most important of them, was almost purely Germanic, and held its own till well into the Renaissance). Pavia became a study center for German law and produced about 1070 the “Expositio,” by far the greatest achievement of juridical science in the age, and immediately after it a code, the “Lombarda.”⁵⁵ The legal evolution of the entire South was broken off by Napoleon’s Code Civil, which took its place. But this in turn has become in all Latin lands and far beyond them the basis for further creative work — and hence, after the English, it is the most important.

In Germany, the movement that set in so powerfully with the Gothic tribal laws (Sachsenspiegel, 1230; Schwabenspiegel, 1274) frittered itself away to nullity. A host of petty civic and territorial rights went on springing up until indignation with the facts induced an unreal political romanticism in dreamers and enthusiasts, the Emperor Maximilian among them, and law came under attack with the rest. The Diet of Worms in 1495 framed its “Kammergerichtsordnung”⁵⁶ after an Italian model. Now there was not only the “Holy Roman Empire” on German ground, but “Roman law” as German common law. The old German procedures were exchanged for Italian. The judges had to study their law beyond the Alps, and obtained their experience not from the ambient life, but from a logic chopping philology. In this country alone are to be found, later, the ideologues for whom the Corpus Juris is an ark to be defended against the profanation of realities.

What, in fact, was it that under the high sounding name passed into the intellectual keeping of a handful of Gothic men? About 1100, at the University of Bologna, a German, Irnerius, had made that unique manuscript of the Pandects the object of a veritable Scholasticism. He transferred the Lombard method to the new text, “the truth of which, as a ratio scripta, was believed in as implicitly as the Bible and Aristotle.”⁵⁷ Truth! — but the Gothic understanding, tied to the Gothic life content, was incapable even of distantly guessing at the spirit of these texts, for the principles fixed in them were the principles of a civilized and megalopolitan life. This school of the glossators, like Scholasticism in general, stood under the spell of concept realism; as they held the genuine real, the substance of the world, to be not in things, but in universal concepts, so they maintained that the law was to be found not in custom and usage as displayed in the despised⁵⁸ Lombarda, but in the manipulation of abstract notions. Their interest in the book was purely dialectical⁵⁹ — never was it in their minds to apply their work to life. It was only after 1300, and then slowly, that their anti-Lombard glosses and summas made their way into the cities of the Renaissance. The jurists of the Late Gothic, above all Bartolus, had fused canon and Germanic law into one whole with a definitely practical intention, and into it they brought ideas of actuality — here, as in Dracon’s code and the Imperial Edicts from Theodosius to Justinian, the actuality of a Culture that is on the threshold of its “Late” stage. It was the creation of Bartolus that became effective in Spain and Germany as “Roman law”; only in France did the jurists of the Baroque, after Cujacius and Donellus, get back from the Scholastic to the Byzantine text.

But Bologna witnessed, besides Irnerius’s achievement in abstraction, an event of quite other and decisive import — the famous Decretum of Gratian, written about 1140.⁶⁰ This created the Western science of spiritual law. For by bringing the old Catholic, Magian, church law,⁶¹ founded in the Early Arabian sacrament of baptism,⁶² into a system, it provided the very form that the new Catholic, Faustian Christianity needed for the jural expression of its own being, which reached back to the prime sacrament of an altar and a consecrated priesthood. With the Liber extra of 1234 the main body of the Corpus Juris Canonici is complete. What the Empire had failed to accomplish — the creation, out of the immense undeveloped profusion of tribal laws, of a general Western “Corpus Juris Germanici” — the Papacy achieved. There came into existence a complete private law, with sanctions and processes, produced with German method out of the ecclesiastical and secular law material of the Gothic. This is the law called “Roman” which presently, after Bartolus, was infused into all study of the texts of Justinian themselves. And it shows us, in the domain of jurisprudence as elsewhere, that great dissidence, inherent in the Faustian, which produced the gigantic conflict between the Papacy and the Empire. The destruction between fas and jus, impossible in the Arabian world, was inevitable in the Western. They are two expressions of a will-to-power over the infinite, but the will behind “temporal” legislation is rooted in custom and lays hands on the generations of the future, while that of “spiritual” originates in mystical certainty and pronounces a timeless and eternal law.⁶³ This battle between equally matched opponents has never yet been ended, and it is visible even today in our law of marriage, with its opposition of the ecclesiastical and the civil wedding.

With the dawn of the Baroque, life, having by that time assumed urban and money-economic forms, begins to demand a law like that of the Classical city-states after Solon. The purpose of the prevailing law was now perfectly clear. But it was a fateful legacy from the Gothic that the creation of “the law inborn in us” was looked upon as the privilege of a learned class, and this privilege no one succeeded in shaking.

Urban rationalism turned, as in the case of the Sophists and the Stoics, to busy itself with the “law of nature,” from its foundation by Oldendorp and Bodinus to its destruction by Hegel. In England the great Coke successfully defended Germanic self-developing practical law against the last attempts of the Tudors to introduce Pandect law. But on the Continent the systems of the learned evolved in Romanforms right down to the state codes of Germany and the schemes of the Ancien Régime in France on which the Code Napoleon was based. And therefore Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) is the one purely Germanic Code, and it appeared when the Faustian Culture had already reached the threshold of its Civilization.

VIII

With this I reach the objective and look around me. I see three law histories, connected merely by the elements of verbal and syntactical form, taken over by one from another, voluntarily or perforce, but never revealing to the new user the nature of the alien being which underlay them. Two of these histories are complete. The third is that in which we ourselves are standing — standing, too, at a decisive point where we embark in our turn upon the big constructive task that Rome and Islam, each for itself and in its season, have accomplished before us.

What has “Roman” law been for us hitherto? What has it spoiled? What can it be for us in the future?

All through our legal history runs, as basic motive, the conflict between book and life. The Western book is not an oracle or magician’s text with Magian under-sense, but a piece of preserved history. It is compressed Past that wants to become Future, through us who read it and in whom its content lives anew. Faustian man does not aim, like Classical man, at bringing his life to a self-contained perfection, but at carrying on a life that emerged long before him and will draw to its end long after him. For Gothic man — so far as he reflected about himself at all — the question was not whether he should look for linkages of his being and history, but in what direction to look for them. He required a past in order to find meaning and depth in the present. On the spiritual side the past which presented itself to him was ancient Israel; on the mundane it was ancient Rome, whose relics he saw all about him. What was revered was revered not because it was great, but because it was old and distant. If these men had known Egypt, they would hardly have noticed Rome, and the language of our Culture would have developed differently.

As it was a Culture of books and readers, Classical texts were “received” in any and every field as Roman law was “received” in Germany, and their further development assumed the form of a slow and unwilling self-emancipation. “Reception” of Aristotle, of Euclid, of the Corpus Juris, means in this Culture (in the Magian East it was different) discovering a ready made vessel for our own thought a great deal too soon, with the result of making a historically built kind of man into a slave of concepts. The alien life feeling, of course, did not and could not enter into his thought, but it was a hindrance to his own life feeling’s development of an unconstrained speech of its own.

Now, legal thought is forced to attach itself to something tangible — there must be something before it can abstract its concepts; it must have something from which to abstract. And it was the misfortune of Western jurisprudence that, instead of quarrying in strong, firm custom of social and economic life, it abstracted prematurely and in a hurry from Latin writings. The Western jurist became a philologist, and practical experience of life was replaced by scholarly experience in the purely logical separation and disposition of legal concepts on self-contained foundations.

Owing to this, we have been completely cut off from touch with the fact that private law is meant to represent the social and economic existence of its period. Neither the Code Napoleon nor the Prussian Landrecht, neither Grotius nor Mommsen, was definitely conscious of this fact. Neither in the training of the legal profession nor in its literature do we detect the slightest inkling of this — the genuine — “source” of valid law.

And consequently we possess a private law that rests on the shadowy, foundations of the Late Classical economy. The intense embitterment which, in these beginnings of our Civilization’s economy, opposes the name of Capitalism to the name of Socialism comes very largely from the fact that scholarly jurisprudence, and under its influence educated thought generally, have tied up such all important notions as person, thing, and property to the conditions and the dispositions of Classical life. The book puts itself between the facts and the perception of them. The learned — meaning thereby the book-learned — weigh up everything to this day in scales that are essentially Classical. The man who is merely active and not trained to judgment feels himself misunderstood. He sees the contradiction between the life of the times and the law’s outlook upon it, and calls for the heads of those who — to gain their private ends, as he thinks — have promoted this opposition.

Again the question is: By whom and for whom is Western law made? The Roman praetor was a landowner, a military officer, a man experienced in administrative and financial questions; and it was just this experience that was held to qualify him for the inseparable functions of expounder and maker of the law. The peregrin praetor developed his aliens’ law as a law of commercial intercourse adapted to the Late Classical megalopolis — without plan, without tendency, out of the cases that came before him and nothing else.

But the Faustian will-to-duration demands a book, something valid “forevermore,”⁶⁴ a system that is intended to provide in advance for every possible case, and this book, a work of learning, necessarily called for a scholarly class of jurists and judges — the doctors of the faculties, the old German legal families, and the French “noblesse de robe” The English judges, who number hardly over a hundred,⁶⁵ are drawn indeed from an upper class of advocates (the “barristers”), but they actually rank above many members of the Government.

A scholar class is alien to the world, and despises experience that does not originate in thought. Inevitably conflict arises between the “state of knowledge” as the scholar will accept it and the flowing custom of practical life. That manuscript of the Pandect of Irnerius became, and for centuries remained, the “world” in which learned jurists lived. Even in England, where there are no law faculties (in the European sense), it was exclusively the legal profession that controlled further growth, so that even here the development of legal ideas diverged from the development of general life.

Thus what we have hitherto called juristic science is in fact either the philology of law language, or the scholarship of law ideas. It is now the only science that still continues to deduce the meaning of life from “eternally valid” principles. “The German jurisprudence of today,” says Sohm,⁶⁶ “represents very largely indeed an inheritance from medieval Scholasticism. We have not yet begun to consider in deep earnest the bearing of the basic values of the actual life about us upon legal theory. We do not even yet know what these values are.”

Here, then, is the task that German thought of the future has to perform. From the practical life of the present it has to develop the deepest principles of that life and elevate them into basic law ideas. If our great arts lie behind us, our great jurisprudence is yet to come.

For the work of the nineteenth century — however creative that century believed itself to be — was merely preparatory. It freed us from the book of Justinian, but not from the concepts. The ideologues of Roman law among scholars no longer count, but scholarship of the old cast remains. It is another kind of jurisprudence that is needed now to free us from the schematism of these concepts. Philological expertness must give place to social and economic.

A glance at German civil and penal law will make the position clear. They are systems ringed with a chaplet of minor laws — it was impossible to embody the material of these in the main law. Conceptually, and therefore syntactically, that which could not be understood in terms of the Classical scheme separates itself from that which can be so understood.

How was it that in 1900 the theft of electric power — after grotesque discussions as to whether the matter in dispute was a corporeal thing⁶⁷ — had to be dealt with under an ad hoc statute? Why was it impossible to work the substance of patent law into the ensemble of the law about things? Why was copyright law unable conceptually to differentiate the intellectual creation, its communicable form the manuscript, and the objective product in print? Why, in contradiction with the law of things, had the artistic and the material property in a picture to be distinguished by separating acquisition of the original from acquisition of the right to reproduce it? Why is the misappropriation of a business idea or a scheme of organization unpunishable, and theft of the piece of paper on which it is set forth punishable? Because even today we are dominated by the Classical idea of the material thing.⁶⁸ We live otherwise. Our instinctive experience is subject to functional concepts, such as working power, inventiveness, enterprise, such as intellectual and bodily, artistic and organizing, energies and capacities and talents. In our physics (of which the theory, advanced though it is, is but a copy of our present mode of life) the old idea of a body has in principle ceased to exist — as in this very instance of electrical power. Why is our law conceptually helpless in the presence of the great facts of modern economics? Because persons, too, are known to it only as bodies.⁶⁹

If the Western jurisprudence took over ancient words, yet only the most superficial elements of the ancient meanings still adhered to them. The consistency of the text disclosed only the logical use of the words, not the life that underlay them. No practice can reawaken the silent metaphysic of old jural ideas. No laws in the world make this last and deepest element explicit, because — just because — it is self-evident. In all of them the essential is tacitly presupposed; in application it is not only the formula but also, and primarily, the inexpressible element beneath it that the people inwardly understands and can practice. Every law is, to the extent that it would be impossible to exaggerate, customary law. Let the statute define the words; it is life that explains them.

If, however, a scholars’ law language of alien origin and alien scheme tries to bind the native and proper law, the ideas remain void and the life remains dumb. Law becomes, not a tool, but a burden, and actuality marches on, not with, but apart from legal history.

And thus it is that the law material that our Civilization needs fits only in externals, or even not at all, with the Classical scheme of the law books, and for the purposes of our proper jurisprudence and our educated thought generally is still formless and therefore unavailable.

Are persons and things, in the sense of present day legislation, law concepts at all? No! They merely serve to draw the ordinary distinction, the zoological distinction, so to say, between man and the rest. But of old the whole metaphysic of Classical being adhered to the notion of “persona.” The distinction between man and deity, the essence of the Polis, of the hero, of the slave, the Cosmos of stuff and form, the life ideal of Ataraxia, were the self-evident premises, and these premises have for us completely perished. In our thought the word “property” is tied up with the Classical static definition, and consequently, in every application to the dynamism of our way of living it falsifies. We leave such definitions to the world-shy abstract professors of ethics, jurists, and philosophers and to the unintelligent debate of political doctrinaires — and this although the whole understanding of the economic history of this day rests upon the metaphysic of this one notion.

It must be emphasized then — and with all rigor — that Classical law was a law of bodies, while ours is a law of functions. The Romans created a juristic statics; our task is juristic dynamics. For us persons are not bodies, but units of force and will; and things are not bodies, but aims, means, and creations of these units. The Classical relation between bodies was positional, but the relation between forces is called action. For a Roman the slave was a thing which produced new things. A writer like Cicero could never have conceived of “intellectual property,” let alone property in a practical notion or in the potentialities of talent; for us, on the contrary, the organizer or inventor or promoter is a generative force which works upon other, executive, forces, by giving direction, aim, and means to their action.⁷⁰ Both belong to economic life, not as possessors of things, but as carriers of energies.

The future will be called upon to transpose our entire legal thought into alignment with our higher physics and mathematics. Our whole social, economic, and technical life is waiting to be understood, at long last, in this wise. We shall need a century and more of keenest and deepest thought to arrive at the goal. And the prerequisite is a wholly new kind of preparatory training in the jurist. It demands:

An immediate, extended, and practical experience in the economic life of the present.

An exact knowledge of the legal history of the West, with constant comparison of German, English, and “Roman” development.

Knowledge of Classical jurisprudence, not as a model for principles of present day validity, but as a brilliant example of how a law can develop strong and pure out of the practical life of its time.

Roman law has ceased to be our source for principles of eternal validity. But the relation between Roman existence and Roman law ideas gives it a renewed value for us. We can learn from it how we have to build up our law out of our experiences.

CHAPTER IV

CITIES AND PEOPLES

(A) THE SOUL OF THE CITY

I

About the middle of the second millennium before Christ, two worlds lay over against one another on the Aegean Sea. The one, darkly groping, big with hopes, drowsy with the intoxication of deeds and sufferings, ripening quietly towards its future, was the Mycenaean. The other, gay and satisfied, snugly ensconced in the treasures of an ancient Culture, elegant, light, with all its great problems far behind it, was the Minoan of Crete.

We shall never really comprehend this phenomenon, which in these days is becoming the center of research interest, unless we appreciate the abyss of opposition that separates the two souls. The man of those days must have felt it deeply, but hardly “cognized” it. I see it before me: the humility of the inhabitant of Tiryns and Mycenae before the unattainable esprit of life in Cnossus, the contempt of the well bred of Cnossus for the petty chiefs and their followers, and withal a secret feeling of superiority in the healthy barbarians, like that of the German soldier in the presence of the elderly Roman dignitary.

How are we in a position to know this? There are several such moments in which the men of two Cultures have looked into one another’s eyes. We know more than one “Inter-Culture” in which some of the most significant tendencies of the human soul have disclosed themselves.

As it was (we may confidently say) between Cnossus and Mycenae, so it was between the Byzantine court and the German chieftains who, like Otto II, married into it — undisguised wonder on the part of the knights and counts, answered by the contemptuous astonishment of a refined, somewhat pale and tired Civilization at that bearish morning vigor of the German lands which Scheffel has described in Ekkehard.¹

In Charlemagne the mixture of a primitive human spirituality, on the threshold of its awakening, with a superposed Late intellectuality, becomes manifest. Certain characteristics of his rulership would lead us to name him the Caliph of Frankistan, but on his other side he is but the chief of a Germanic tribe; and it is the mingling of the two that makes him symbolic, in the same way as the form of the Aachen palace chapel — no longer mosque, not yet cathedral. The Germanic Western pre-Culture meanwhile is moving on, but slowly and underground, for that sudden illumination which we most ineptly call the Carolingian Renaissance is a ray from Baghdad. It must not be overlooked that the period of Charles the Great is an episode of the surface, ending, as accidentals do end, without issue. After 900, after a new deep depression, there begins something really new, something having the telling force of a Destiny and the depth that promises duration. But in 800 it was the sun of the Arabian Civilization passing on from the world cities of the East to the countryside of the West. Even so the sunshine of Hellenism had spread to the distant Indus.²

That which stands on the hills of Tiryns and Mycenae is Pfalz and Burg of root Germanic type. The palaces of Crete — which are not kings’ castles, but huge cult buildings for a crowd of priests and priestesses — are equipped with megalopolitan — nay, Late Roman — luxury. At the foot of those hills were crowded the huts of yeoman and vassals, but in Crete (Gournia, Hagia Triada) the excavation of towns and villas has shown that the requirements were those of high civilization, and the building technique that of a long experience, accustomed to catering for the most pampered taste in furniture and wall decoration, and familiar with lighting, water circulation, staircases, and suchlike problems.³ In the one, the plan of the house is a strict life symbol; in the other, the expression of a refined utilitarianism. Compare the Kamares vases and the frescoes of smooth stucco with everything that is genuinely Mycenaean — they are, through and through, the product of an industrial art, clever and empty, and not of any grand and deep art of heavy, clumsy, but forceful symbolism like that which in Mycenae was ripening towards the geometric style. It is, in a word, not a style but a taste.⁴ In Mycenae was housed a primitive race which chose its sites according to soil value and facilities for defense, whereas the Minoan population settled in business foci, as may be observed very clearly in the case of Philakopi on Melos which was established for the export trade in obsidian. A Mycenaean palace is a promise, a Minoan something that is ending. But it was just the same in the West about 800 — the Frankish and Visigothic farms and manor houses stretched from the Loire to the Ebro, while south of them lay the Moorish castles, villas, and mosques of Cordova and Granada.

It is surely no accident that the peak of this Minoan luxury coincides with the period of the great Egyptian revolution, and particularly the Hyksos time (1780-1580 B.C.).⁵ The Egyptian craftsmen may well have fled in those days to the peaceful islands and even as far as the strongholds of the mainland, as in a later instance the Byzantine scholars fled to Italy. For it is axiomatic that the Minoan Culture is a part of the Egyptian, and we should be able to realize this more fully were it not that the part of Egypt’s art store which would have been decisive in this connection — viz.: what was produced in the Western Delta — has perished from damp. We only know the Egyptian Culture insofar as it flourished on the dry soil of the south, but it has long been admitted as certain that the center of gravity of its evolution lay elsewhere.

It is not possible to draw a strict frontier between the late Minoan and the young Mycenaean art. Throughout the Egyptian-Cretan world we can observe a highly modern fad for these alien and primitive things, and vice versa the war-band kings of the mainland strongholds stole or bought Cretan objets d’art wherever and however they could come by them, admiring and imitating — even as the style of the Migrations, once supposed to be, and prized as, proto-German, borrows the whole of its form language from the East.⁶ They had their palaces and tombs built and decorated by captive or invited craftsmen. The “Treasure house” (Tomb) of Atreus in Mycenae, therefore, is exactly analogous to the tomb of Theoderich at Ravenna.

In this regard Byzantium itself is a marvel. Here layer after layer has to be carefully separated. In 316 Constantine, rebuilding on the ruins of the great city destroyed by Septimus Severus, created a Late Classical cosmopolis of the first rank, into which presently streamed hoary Apollinism from the West and youthful Magism from the East. And long afterwards again, in 1096, it is a Late Magian cosmopolis, confronted in its last autumn days with spring in the shape of Godfrey of Bouillon’s crusaders, whom that clever royal lady Anna Comnena⁷ portrays with contempt. As the easternmost of the Classical West, this city bewitched the Goths; then, a millennium later, as the northernmost of the Arabian world, it enchanted the Russians. And the amazing Vasili Blazheny in Moscow (1554), the herald of the Russian pre-Culture, stands “between styles,” just as, two thousand years before, Solomon’s Temple had stood between Babylon the Cosmopolis and early Christianity.

II

Primeval man is a ranging animal, a being whose waking consciousness restlessly feels its way through life, all microcosm, under no servitude of place or home, keen and anxious in its senses, ever alert to drive off some element of hostile Nature. A deep transformation sets in first with agriculture — for that is something artificial, with which hunter and shepherd have no touch. He who digs and plows is seeking not to plunder, but to alter Nature. To plant implies, not to take something, but to produce something. But with this, man himself becomes plant — namely, as peasant. He roots in the earth that he tends, the soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, and a new earth boundness of being, a new feeling, pronounces itself. Hostile Nature becomes the friend; earth becomes Mother Earth. Between sowing and begetting, harvest and death, the child and the grain, a profound affinity is set up. A new devoutness addresses itself in chthonian cults to the fruitful earth that grows up along with man. And as completed expression of this life feeling, we find everywhere the symbolic shape of the farmhouse, which in the disposition of the rooms and in every line of external form tells us about the blood of its inhabitants. The peasant’s dwelling is the great symbol of settledness. It is itself plant, thrusts its roots deep into its “own” soil.⁸ It isproperty in the most sacred sense of the word. The kindly spirits of hearth and door, floor and chamber — Vesta, Janus, Lares and Penates — are as firmly fixed in it as the man himself.

This is the condition precedent of every Culture, which itself in turn grows up out of a mother landscape and renews and intensifies the intimacy of man and soil. What his cottage is to the peasant, that the town is to the Culture man. As each individual house has its kindly spirits, so each town has its tutelary god or saint. The town, too, is a plantlike being, as far removed as a peasantry is from nomadism and the purely microcosmic. Hence the development of a high form language is linked always to a landscape. Neither an art nor a religion can alter the site of its growth; only in the Civilization with its giant cities do we come again to despise and disengage ourselves from these roots. Man as civilized, as intellectual nomad, is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free intellectually as hunter and herdsman were free sensually. “Ubi bene, ibi patria” is valid before as well as after a Culture. In the not yet spring of the Migrations it was a Germanic yearning — virginal, yet already maternal — that searched the South for a home in which to nest its future Culture. Today, at the end of this Culture, the rootless intellect ranges over all landscapes and all possibilities of thought. But between these limits lies the time in which a man held a bit of soil to be something worth dying for.

It is a conclusive fact — yet one hitherto never appreciated — that all great Cultures are town Cultures. Higher man of the Second Age is a town-tied animal. Here is the real criterion of “world history” that differentiates it with utter sharpness from man’s history — world history is the history of civic man. Peoples, states, politics, religion, all arts, and all sciences rest upon one prime phenomenon of human being, the town. As all thinkers of all Cultures themselves live in the town (even though they may reside bodily in the country), they are perfectly unaware of what a bizarre thing a town is. To feel this we have to put ourselves unreservedly in the place of the wonderstruck primitive who for the first time sees this mass of stone and wood set in the landscape, with its stone enclosed streets and its stone paved squares — a domicile, truly, of strange form and strangely teeming with men!

But the real miracle is the birth of the soul of a town. A mass soul of a wholly new kind — whose last foundations will remain hidden from us forever — suddenly buds off from the general spirituality of its Culture. As soon as it is awake, it forms for itself a visible body. Out of the rustic group of farms and cottages, each of which has its own history, arises a totality. And the whole lives, breathes, grows, and acquires a face and an inner form and history. Thenceforward, in addition to the individual house, the temple, the cathedral, and the palace, the town figure itself becomes a unit objectively expressing the form language and style history that accompanies the Culture throughout its life course.

It goes without saying that what distinguishes a town from a village is not size, but the presence of a soul. Not only in primitive conditions, such as those of central Africa, but in Late conditions too — China, India, and industrialized Europe and America — we find very large settlements that are nevertheless not to be called cities. They are centers of landscape; they do not inwardly form worlds in themselves. They have no soul. Every primitive population lives wholly as peasant and son of the soil — the being “City” does not exist for it. That which in externals develops from the village is not the city, but the market, a mere meeting point of rural life interests. Here there can be no question of a separate existence. The inhabitant of a market may be a craftsman or a tradesman, but he lives and thinks as a peasant. We have to go back and sense accurately what it means when out of a primitive Egyptian or Chinese or Germanic village — a little spot in a wide land — a city comes into being. It is quite possibly not differentiated in any outward feature, but spiritually it is aplace from which the countryside is henceforth regarded, felt, and experienced as “environs” as something different and subordinate. From now on there are two lives, that of the inside and that of the outside, and the peasant understands this just as clearly as the townsman. The village smith and the smith in the city, the village headman and the burgomaster, live in two different worlds. The man of the land and the man of the city are different essences. First of all they feel the difference, then they are dominated by it, and at last they cease to understand each other at all. Today a Brandenburg peasant is closer to a Sicilian peasant than he is to a Berliner. From the moment of this specific attunement, the City comes into being, and it is this attunement which underlies, as something that goes without saying, the entire waking consciousness of every Culture.

Every springtime of a Culture is ipso facto the springtime of a new city type and civism. The men of the pre-Culture are filled with a deep uneasiness in the presence of these types, with which they cannot get into any inward relation. On the Rhine and the Danube the Germans frequently, as at Strassburg, settled down at the gates of Roman cities that remained uninhabited.⁹ In Crete the conquerors built, on the ruins of the burnt out cities like Gournia and Cnossus — villages. The Orders of the Western pre-Culture, the Benedictines, and particularly the Cluniacs and Premonstratensians, settled like the knights on free land; it was the Franciscans and Dominicans who began to build in the Early Gothic city. There the new soul had just awakened. But even there a tender melancholy still adheres to the architecture, as to Franciscan art as a whole — an almost mystical fear of the individual in presence of the new and bright and conscious, which as yet was only dully accepted by the generality. Man hardly yet dared to cease to be peasant; the first to live with the ripe and considered alertness of genuine megalopolitans are the Jesuits. It is a sign that the countryside is still unconditionally supreme, and does not yet recognize the city, when the ruler shifts his court every spring from palace to palace. In the Egyptian Old Kingdom the thickly populated center of the administration was at the “White Wall” (Memphis), but the residences of the Pharaohs changed incessantly as in Sumerian Babylon and the Carolingian Empire.¹⁰ The Early Chinese rulers of the Chôu dynasty had their court as a rule at Lo Yang (the present Ho-nan-fu) from about 1160, but it was not until 770 — corresponding to our sixteenth century — that the locality was promoted to be the permanent royal residence.¹¹

Never has the feeling of earthboundness, of the plantwise cosmic, expressed itself so powerfully as it did in the architecture of the petty early towns, which consisted of hardly more than a few streets about a marketplace or a castle or a place of worship. Here, if anywhere, it is manifest that every grand style is itself plantlike. The Doric column, the Egyptian pyramid, the Gothic cathedral, grow out of the ground, earnest, big with destiny, Being without waking consciousness. The Ionic column, the buildings of the Middle Kingdom and those of the Baroque, calmly aware and conscious of themselves, free and sure, stand on the ground. There, separated from the power of the land — cut off from it, even, by the pavement underfoot — Being becomes more and more languid, sensation and reason more and more powerful. Man becomes intellect, “free” like the nomads, whom he comes to resemble, but narrower and colder than they. “Intellect,” “Geist,” “esprit,” is the specific urban form of the understanding waking consciousness. All art, all religion and science, become slowly intellectualized, alien to the land, incomprehensible to the peasant of the soil. With the Civilization sets in the climacteric. The immemorially old roots of Being are dried up in the stone masses of its cities. And the free intellect — fateful word! — appears like a flame, mounts splendid into the air, and pitiably dies.

III

The new Soul of the City speaks a new language, which soon comes to be tantamount to the language of the Culture itself. The open land with its village-mankind is wounded; it no longer understands that language, it is nonplussed and dumb. All genuine style history is played out in the cities. It is exclusively the city’s destiny and the life experience of urban men that speaks to the eye in the logic of visible forms. The very earliest Gothic was still a growth of the soil and laid hold of the farmhouse with its inhabitants and its contents. But the Renaissance style flourished only in the Renaissance city, the Baroque only in the Baroque city — not to mention the wholly megalopolitan Corinthian column or Rococo. There was perhaps some quiet infiltration from these into the landscape; but the land itself was no longer capable of the smallest creative effort — only of dumb aversion. The peasant and his dwelling remained in all essentials Gothic, and Gothic it is to this day. The Hellenic countryside preserved the geometric style, the Egyptian village the cast of the Old Kingdom.

It is, above all, the expression of the city’s “visage” that has a history. The play of this facial expression, indeed, is almost the spiritual history of the Culture itself. First we have the little proto-cities of the Gothic and other Early Cultures, which almost efface themselves in the landscape, which are still genuine peasant houses crowded under the shadow of a stronghold or a sanctuary, and without inward change become townhouses merely in the sense that they have neighbor houses instead of fields and meadows around them. The peoples of the Early Culture gradually became town peoples, and accordingly there are not only specifically Chinese, Indian, Apollinian, and Faustian town forms, but, moreover, Armenian and Syrian, Ionian and Etruscan, German and French and English town physiognomies. There is a city of Phidias, a city of Rembrandt, a city of Luther. These designations, and the mere names of Granada, Venice, and Nürnberg conjure up at once quite definite images, for all that the Culture produces in religion, art, and knowledge has been produced in such cities. While it was still the spirit of knights’ castles and rural monasteries that evoked the Crusades, the Reformation is urban and belongs to narrow streets and steep-gabled houses. The great Epic, which speaks and sings of the blood, belongs to Pfalz and Burg, but the Drama, in which awakened life tests itself, is city poetry, and the great Novel, the survey of all things human by the emancipatedintellect, presupposes the world city. Apart from really genuine folksong, the only lyrism is of the city. Apart from the “eternal” peasant art, there is only urban painting and architecture, with a swift and soon ended history.

And these stone visages that have incorporated in their light world the humanness of the citizen himself and, like him, are all eye and intellect — how distinct the language of form that they talk, how different from the rustic drawl of the landscape! The silhouette of the great city, its roofs and chimneys, the towers and domes on the horizon! What a language is imparted to us through one look at Nürnberg or Florence, Damascus or Moscow, Peking or Benares. What do we know of the Classical cities, seeing that we do not know the lines that they presented under the Southern noon, under clouds in the morning, in the starry night? The courses of the streets, straight or crooked, broad or narrow; the houses, low or tall, bright or dark, that in all Western cities turn their facades, their faces, and in all Eastern cities turn their backs, blank wall and railing, towards the street; the spirit of squares and corners, impasses and prospects, fountains and monuments, churches or temples or mosques, amphitheaters and railway stations, bazaars and town halls! The suburbs, too, of neat garden villas or of jumbled blocks of flats, rubbish heaps and allotments; the fashionable quarter and the slum area, the Subura of Classical Rome and the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Paris, ancient Baiae and modern Nice, the little town picture like Bruges and Rothenburg and the sea of houses like Babylon, Tenochtitlan, Rome, and London! All this has history and is history. One major political event — and the visage of the town falls into different folds. Napoleon gave to Bourbon Paris, Bismarck gave to worthy little Berlin, a new mien. But the Country stands by, uninfluenced, suspicious and irritated.

In the earliest time the landscape figure alone dominates man’s eyes. It gives form to his soul and vibrates in tune therewith. Feelings and woodland rustlings beat together; the meadows and the copses adapt themselves to its shape, to its course, even to its dress. The village, with its quiet hillocky roofs, its evening smoke, its wells, its hedges, and its beasts, lies completely fused and embedded in the landscape. The country town confirms the country, is an intensification of the picture of the country. It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city as world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture. The town that once upon a time humbly accommodated itself to that picture now insists that it shall be the same as itself. Extra muros, chaussées and woods and pastures become a park, mountains become tourists’ viewpoints; and intra muros arises an imitation Nature, fountains in lieu of springs, flowerbeds, formal pools, and clipped hedges in lieu of meadows and ponds and bushes. In a village the thatched roof is still hill like and the street is of the same nature as the baulk of earth between fields. But here the picture is of deep, long gorges between high, stony houses filled with colored dust and strange uproar, and men dwell in these houses, the like of which no nature being has ever conceived. Costumes, even faces, are adjusted to a background of stone. By day there is a street traffic of strange colors and tones, and by night a new light that outshines the moon. And the yokel stands helpless on the pavement, understanding nothing and understood by nobody, tolerated as a useful type in farce and provider of this world’s daily bread.

It follows, however — and this is the most essential point of any — that we cannot comprehend political and economic history at all unless we realize that the city, with its gradual detachment from and final bankrupting of the country, is the determinative form to which the course and sense of higher history generally conforms. World history is city history.

An obvious case in point is, of course, the Classical world, in which the Euclidean feeling of existence connected the city idea with its need of minimizing extension and thus, with ever-increasing emphasis, identified the State with the stone body of the individual Polis. But, quite apart from this instance, we find in every Culture (and very soon) the type of the capital city. This, as its name pointedly indicates, is that city whose spirit, with its methods, aims, and decisions of policy and economics, dominates the land. The land with its people is for this controlling spirit a tool and an object. The land does not understand what is going on, and is not even asked. In all countries of all Late Cultures, the great parties, the revolutions, the Caesarisms, the democracies, the parliaments, are the form in which the spirit of the capital tells the country what it is expected to desire and, if called upon, to die for. The Classical forum, the Western press, are, essentially, intellectual engines of the ruling City. Any country dweller who really understands the meaning of politics in such periods, and feels himself on their level, moves into the City, not perhaps in the body, but certainly in the spirit.¹² The sentiment and public opinion of the peasant’s countryside — so far as it can be said to exist — is prescribed and guided by the print and speech of the city. Egypt is Thebes, the orbis terrarum is Rome, Islam is Baghdad, France is Paris. The history of every springtime phase is played out in the many small centers of many separate districts. The Egyptian nomes, the Greek peoples of Homer, the Gothic counties and free cities, were the makers of history of old. But gradually Policy gathers itself up into a very few capitals, and everything else retains but a shadow of political existence. Even in the Classical world, the atomizing tendency towards city-states did not hold out against the major movement. As early as the Peloponnesian War it was only Athens and Sparta that were really handling policy, the remaining cities of the Aegean being merely elements within the hegemony of the one or the other; of policies of their own there is no longer any question. Finally it is the Forum of the City of Rome alone that is the scene of Classical history. Caesar might campaign in Gaul, his slayers in Macedonia, Antony in Egypt, but, whatever happened in these fields, it was from their relation to Rome that events acquired meaning.

IV

All effectual history begins with the primary classes, nobility and priesthood, forming themselves and elevating themselves above the peasantry as such. The opposition of greater and lesser nobility, between king and vassal, between worldly and spiritual power, is the basic form of all primitive politics, Homeric, Chinese, or Gothic, until with the coming of the City, the burgher, the Tiers État history changes its style. But it is exclusively in these classes as such, in their class consciousness, that the whole meaning of history inheres. The peasant is historyless. The village stands outside world history, and all evolution from the “Trojan” to the Mithridatic War, from the Saxon emperors to the World War of 1914, passes by these little points on the landscape, occasionally destroying them and wasting their blood, but never in the least touching their inwardness.

The peasant is the eternal man, independent of every Culture that ensconces itself in the cities. He precedes it, he outlives it, a dumb creature propagating himself from generation to generation, limited to soil-bound callings and aptitudes, a mystical soul, a dry, shrewd understanding that sticks to practical matters, the origin and the ever-flowing source of the blood that makes world history in the cities.

Whatever the Culture up there in the city conceives in the way of state forms, economic customs, articles of faith, implements, knowledge, art, he receives mistrustfully and hesitatingly; though in the end he may accept these things, never is he altered in kind thereby. Thus the West European peasant outwardly took in all the dogmas of the Councils from the great Lateran to that of Trent, just as he took in the products of mechanical engineering and those of the French Revolution — but he remains what he was, what he already was in Charlemagne’s day. The present day piety of the peasant is older than Christianity; his gods are more ancient than those of any higher religion. Remove from him the pressure of the great cities and he will revert to the state of nature without feeling that he is losing anything. His real ethic, his real metaphysic, which no scholar of the city has yet thought it worthwhile to discover, lie outside all religious and spiritual history, have in fact no history at all.

The city is intellect. The Megalopolis is “free” intellect. It is in resistance to the “feudal” powers of blood and tradition that the burgherdom or bourgeoisie, the intellectual class, begins to be conscious of its own separate existence. It upsets thrones and limits old rights in the name of reason and above all in the name of “the People,” which henceforward means exclusively the people of the city. Democracy is the political form in which the townsman’s outlook upon the world is demanded of the peasantry also. The urban intellect reforms the great religion of the springtime and sets up by the side of the old religion of noble and priest, the new religion of the Tiers État, liberal science. The city assumes the lead and control of economic history in replacing the primitive values of the land, which are forever inseparable from the life and thought of the rustic, by the absolute idea of money as distinct from goods. The immemorial country word for exchange of goods is “barter”; even when one of the things exchanged is precious metal, the underlying idea of the process is not yet monetary — i.e., it does not involve the abstraction of value from things and its fixation in metallic or fictitious quantities intended to measure things qua “commodities.” Caravan expeditions and Viking voyages in the springtime are made between land settlements and imply barter or booty, whereas in the Late period they are made between cities and mean “money.” This is the distinction between the Normans before and the Hansa and Venetians after the Crusades,¹³ and between the seafarers of Mycenaean times and those of the later colonization period in Greece. The City means not only intellect, but also money.¹⁴

Presently there arrived an epoch when the development of the city had reached such a point of power that it had no longer to defend itself against country and chivalry, but on the contrary had become a despotism against which the land and its basic orders of society were fighting a hopeless defensive battle — in the spiritual domain against nationalism, in the political against democracy, in the economic against money. At this period the number of cities that really counted as historically dominant had already become very small. And with this there arose the profound distinction — which was above all a spiritual distinction — between the great city and the little city or town. The latter, very significantly called the country town, was a part of the no longer coefficient countryside. It was not that the difference between townsman and rustic had become lessened in such towns, but that this difference had become negligible as compared with the new difference between them and the great city. The sly shrewdness of the country and the intelligence of the megalopolis are two forms of waking consciousness between which reciprocal understanding is scarcely possible. Here again it is evident that what counts is not the number of inhabitants, but the spirit. It is evident, moreover, that in all great cities nooks remained in which relics of an almost rural mankind lived in their byways much as if they were on the land, and the people on the two sides of the street were almost in the relation of two villages. In fact, a pyramid of mounting civism, of decreasing number and increasing field of view, leads up from such quasi-rural elements, in ever narrowing layers, to the small number of genuine megalopolitans at the top, who are at home wherever their spiritual postulates are satisfied.

With this the notion of money attains to full abstractness. It no longer merely serves for the understanding of economic intercourse, butsubjects the exchange of goods to its own evolution. It values things, no longer as between each other, but with reference to itself. Its relation to the soil and to the man of the soil has so completely vanished, that in the economic thought of the leading cities — the “money markets” — it is ignored. Money has now become a power, and, moreover, a power that is wholly intellectual and merely figured in the metal it uses, a power the reality of which resides in the waking consciousness of the upper stratum of an economically active population, a power that makes those concerned with it just as dependent upon itself as the peasant was dependent upon the soil. There is monetary thought, just as there is mathematical or juristic.

But the earth is actual and natural, and money is abstract and artificial, a mere “category” — like “virtue” in the imagination of the Age of Enlightenment. And therefore every primary, pre-civic economy is dependent upon and held in bondage by the cosmic powers, the soil, the climate, the type of man, whereas money, as the pure form of economic intercourse within the waking consciousness, is no more limited in potential scope by actuality than are the quantities of the mathematical and the logical world. Just as no view of facts hinders us from constructing as many non-Euclidean geometries as we please, so in the developed megalopolitan economics there is no longer any inherent objection to increasing “money” or to thinking, so to say, in other money dimensions. This has nothing to do with the availability of gold or with any values in actuality at all. There is no standard and no sort of goods in which the value of the talent in the Persian Wars can be compared with its value in the Egyptian booty of Pompey. Money has become, for man as an economic animal, a form of the activity of waking consciousness, having no longer any roots in Being. This is the basis of its monstrous power over every beginning Civilization, which is always an unconditional dictatorship of money, though taking different forms in different Cultures. But this is the reason, too, for the want of solidity, which eventually leads to its losing its power and its meaning, so that at the last, as in Diocletian’s time, it disappears from the thought of the closing Civilization, and the primary values of the soil return anew to take its place.

Finally, there arises the monstrous symbol and vessel of the completely emancipated intellect, the world city, the center in which the course of a world history ends by winding itself up. A handful of gigantic places in each Civilization disfranchises and disvalues the entire motherland of its own Culture under the contemptuous name of “the provinces.” The “provinces” are now everything whatsoever — land, town, and city — except these two or three points. There are no longer noblesse and bourgeoisie, freemen and slaves, Hellenes and Barbarians, believers and unbelievers, but only cosmopolitans and provincials. All other contrasts pale before this one, which dominates all events, all habits of life, all views of the world.

The earliest of all world cities were Babylon and the Thebes of the New Empire — the Minoan world of Crete, for all its splendor, belonged to the Egyptian “provinces.” In the Classical the first example is Alexandria, which reduced old Greece at one stroke to the provincial level, and which even Rome, even the resettled Carthage, even Byzantium, could not suppress. In India the giant cities of Ujjaina, Kanauj, and above all Pataliputra were renowned even in China and Java, and everyone knows the fairytale reputation of Baghdad and Granada in the West. In the Mexican world, it seems, Uxmal (founded in 950) was the first world city of the Maya realms, which, however, with the rise of the Toltec world cities Tezcuco and Tenochtidan sank to the level of the provinces.

It should not be forgotten that the word “province” first appears as a constitutional designation given by the Romans to Sicily; the subjugation of Sicily, in fact, is the first example of a once preeminent Culture landscape sinking so far as to be purely and simply an object. Syracuse, the first real great city of the Classical world, had flourished when Rome was still an unimportant country town, but thenceforward, vis-à-vis Rome, it becomes a provincial city. In just the same way Habsburg Madrid and Papal Rome, leading cities in the Europe of the seventeenth century, were from the outset of the eighteenth depressed to the provincial level by the world cities of Paris and London. And the rise of New York to the position of world city during the Civil War of 1861-1865 may perhaps prove to have been the most pregnant event of the nineteenth century.

V

The stone Colossus “Cosmopolis” stands at the end of the life’s course of every great Culture. The Culture man whom the land has spiritually formed is seized and possessed by his own creation, the City, and is made into its creature, its executive organ, and finally its victim. This stony mass is the absolute city. Its image, as it appears with all its grandiose beauty in the light world of the human eye, contains the whole noble death symbolism of the definitive thing-become. The spirit pervaded stone of Gothic buildings, after a millennium of style evolution, has become the soulless material of this demonic stone desert.

These final cities are wholly intellect. Their houses are no longer, as those of the Ionic and the Baroque were, derivatives of the old peasant’s house, whence the Culture took its spring into history. They are, generally speaking, no longer houses in which Vesta and Janus, Lares and Penates, have any sort of footing, but mere premises which have been fashioned, not by blood but by requirements, not by feeling but by the spirit of commercial enterprise. So long as the hearth has a pious meaning as the actual and genuine center of a family, the old relation to the land is not wholly extinct. But when that, too, follows the rest into oblivion, and the mass of tenants and bed occupiers in the sea of houses leads a vagrant existence from shelter to shelter like the hunters and pastors of the “pre” time, then the intellectual nomad is completely developed. This city is a world, is the world. Only as a whole, as a human dwelling place, has it meaning, the houses being merely the stones of which it is assembled.

Now the old mature cities with their Gothic nucleus of cathedral, town halls, and high gabled streets, with their old walls, towers, and gates, ringed about by the Baroque growth of brighter and more elegant patricians’ houses, palaces, and hall churches, begin to overflow in all directions in formless masses, to eat into the decaying countryside with their multiplied barrack tenements and utility buildings, and to destroy the noble aspect of the old time by clearances and rebuildings. Looking down from one of the old towers upon the sea of houses, we perceive in this petrification of a historic being the exact epoch that marks the end of organic growth and the beginning of an inorganic and therefore unrestrained process of massing without limit. And now, too, appears that artificial, mathematical, utterly land-alien product of a pure intellectual satisfaction in the appropriate, the city of the city architect. In all Civilizations alike, these cities aim at the chessboard form, which is the symbol of soullessness. Regular rectangle blocks astounded Herodotus in Babylon and Cortez in Tenochtitlan. In the Classical world the series of “abstract” cities begins with Thurii, which was “planned” by Hippodamus of Miletus in 441. Priene, whose chessboard scheme entirely ignores the ups and downs of the site, Rhodes, and Alexandria follow, and become in turn models for innumerable provincial cities of the Imperial Age. The Islamic architects laid out Baghdad from 762, and the giant city of Samarra a century later, according to plan.¹⁵ In the West European and American world the layout of Washington in 1791 is the first big example.¹⁶ There can be no doubt that the world cities of the Han period in China and the Maurya dynasty in India possessed this same geometrical pattern. Even now the world cities of the Western Civilization are far from having reached the peak of their development. I see, long after A.D. 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of countryside, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of today’s and notions of traffic and communication that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness.¹⁷

Even in this final shape of his being, the Classical man’s form ideal remains the corporeal point. Whereas the giant cities of our present confess our irresistible tendency towards the infinite — our suburbs and garden cities, invading the wide countryside, our vast and comprehensive network of roads, and within the thickly built areas a controlled fast traffic on, below, and above straight, broad streets — the genuine Classical world city ever strove, not to expand, but to thicken — the streets narrow and cramped, impossible for fast traffic (although this was fully developed on the great Roman roads), entire unwillingness to live in suburbs or even to make suburbs possible.¹⁸ Even at that stage the city must needs be a body, thick and round, σῶμα in the strictest sense. The synoecism that in the early Classical had gradually drawn the land folk into the cities, and so created the type of the Polis, repeated itself at the last in absurd form; everyone wanted to live in the middle of the city, in its densest nucleus, for otherwise he could not feel himself to be the urban man that he was. All these cities are only cités, inner towns. The new synoecism formed, instead of suburban zones, the world of the upper floors. In the year 74 Rome, in spite of its immense population, had the ridiculously small perimeter of nineteen and a half kilometers [twelve miles].¹⁹ Consequently these city bodies extended in general not in breadth, but more and more upward. The block tenements of Rome such as the famous Insula Feliculse, rose, with a street breadth of only three to five meters [ten to seventeen feet]²⁰ to heights that have never been seen in Western Europe and are seen in only a few cities in America. Near the Capitol, the roofs already reached to the level of the hill saddle.²¹ But always the splendid mass cities harbor lamentable poverty and degraded habits, and the attics and mansards, the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw man — in Baghdad and in Babylon, just as in Tenochtitlan and today in London and Berlin. Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced to living in one of these wretched upper floor tenements of Rome.

But no wretchedness, no compulsion, not even a clear vision of the madness of this development, avails to neutralize the attractive force of these daemonic creations. The wheel of Destiny rolls on to its end; the birth of the City entails its death. Beginning and end, a peasant cottage and a tenement block are related to one another as soul and intellect, as blood and stone. But “Time” is no abstract phrase, but a name for the actuality of Irreversibility. Here there is only forward, never back. Long, long ago the country bore the country town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country. Once the full sinful beauty of this last marvel of all history has captured a victim, it never lets him go. Primitive folk can loose themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual nomad never. Homesickness for the great city is keener than any other nostalgia. Home is for him any one of these giant cities, but even the nearest village is alien territory. He would sooner die upon the pavement than go “back” to the land. Even disgust at this pretentiousness, weariness of the thousand-hued glitter, the taedium vitae that in the end overcomes many, does not set them free. They take the City with them into the mountains or on the sea. They have lost the country within themselves and will never regain it outside.

What makes the man of the world cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking consciousness become more and more dangerous. It must be remembered that in a microcosm the animal, waking side supervenes upon the vegetable side, that of being, and not vice versa. Beat and tension, blood and intellect, Destiny and Causality are to one another as the countryside in bloom is to the city of stone, as something existing per se to something existing dependently. Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness. But Civilization is nothing but tension. The head, in all the outstanding men of the Civilizations, is dominated exclusively by an expression of extreme tension. Intelligence is only the capacity for understanding at high tension, and in every Culture these heads are the types of its final men — one has only to compare them with the peasant heads, when such happen to emerge in the swirl of the great city’s street life. The advance, too, from peasant wisdom — “slimness,” mother wit, instinct, based as in other animals upon the sensed beat of life — through the city spirit to the cosmopolitan intelligence — the very word with its sharp ring betraying the disappearance of the old cosmic foundation — can be described as a steady diminution of the Destiny feeling and an unrestrained augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality. Intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by exercise in thought, masterly, but bloodless and jejune. The intelligent visage is similar in all races — what is recessive in them is, precisely, race. The weaker the feeling for the necessity and self-evidence of Being, the more the habit of “elucidation” grows, the more the fear in the waking consciousness comes to be stilled by causal methods. Hence the assimilation of knowledge with demonstrability, and the substitution of scientific theory, the causal myth, for the religious. Hence, too, money in the abstract as the pure causality of economic life, in contrast to rustic barter, which is pulsation and not a system of tensions.

Tension, when it has become intellectual, knows no form of recreation but that which is specific to the world city — namely, detente, relaxation, distraction. Genuine play, joie de vivre, pleasure, inebriation, are products of the cosmic beat and as such no longer comprehensible in their essence. But the relief of hard, intensive brain work by its opposite — conscious and practiced fooling — of intellectual tension by the bodily tension of sport, of bodily tension by the sensual straining after “pleasure” and the spiritual straining after the “excitements” of betting and competitions, of the pure logic of the day’s work by a consciously enjoyed mysticism — all this is common to the world cities of all the Civilizations. Cinema, Expressionism, Theosophy, boxing contests, nigger dances, poker, and racing — one can find it all in Rome. Indeed, the connoisseur might extend his researches to the Indian, Chinese, and Arabian world cities as well. To name but one example, if one reads the Kama-sutram one understands how it was that Buddhism also appealed to men’s tastes, and then the bullfighting scenes in the Palace of Cnossus will be looked at with quite different eyes. A cult, no doubt, underlay them, but there was a savor over it all, as over Rome’s fashionable Isis cult in the neighborhood of the Circus Maximus.

And then, when Being is sufficiently uprooted and Waking Being sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps forward to make an end of the drama — the sterility of civilized man. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of Causality (as modern science naturally enough has tried to grasp it); it is to be understood as an essentially metaphysical turn towards death. The last man of the world city no longer wants to live — he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood relation in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence. Let the reader try to merge himself in the soul of the peasant. He has sat on his glebe from primeval times,²² or has fastened his clutch in it, to adhere to it with his blood. He is rooted in it as the descendant of his forbears and as the forbear of future descendants. His house, his property, means, here, not the temporary connection of person and thing for a brief span of years, but an enduring and inward union of eternal land and eternal blood. It is only from this mystical conviction of settlement that the great epochs of the cycle — procreation, birth, and death — derive that metaphysical element of wonder which condenses in the symbolism of custom and religion that all landbound people possess. For the “last men” all this is past and gone. Intelligence and sterility are allied in old families, old peoples, and old Cultures, not merely because in each microcosm the over-strained and fettered animal element is eating up the plant element, but also because the waking consciousness assumes that being is normally regulated by causality. That which the man of intelligence, most significantly and characteristically, labels as “natural impulse” or “life force,” he not only knows, but also values, causally, giving it the place amongst his other needs that his judgment assigns to it. When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question of pro’s and con’s, the great turning point has come. For Nature knows nothing of pro and con. Everywhere, wherever life is actual, reigns an inward organic logic, an “it,” a drive, that is utterly independent of waking being, with its causal linkages, and indeed not even observed by it. The abundant proliferation of primitive peoples is a natural phenomenon, which is not even thought about, still less judged as to its utility or the reverse. When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of births. In the Classical world the practice was deplored by Polybius as the ruin of Greece, and yet even at his date it had long been established in the great cities; in subsequent Roman times it became appallingly general. At first explained by the economic misery of the times, very soon it ceased to explain itself at all. And at that point, too, in Buddhist India as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a man’s choice of the woman who is to be, not mother of his children as amongst peasants and primitives, but his own “companion for life,” becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the “higher spiritual affinity” in which both parties are “free” — free, that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say “that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself.”²³ The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul conflicts; marriage is a craft art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine’s who “belongs to herself” — they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful. The same fact, in conjunction with the same arguments, is to be found in the Alexandrian, in the Roman, and, as a matter of course, in every other civilized society — and conspicuously in that in which Buddha grew up. And in Hellenism and in the nineteenth century, as in the times of Lao Tzu and the Charvaka doctrine,²⁴ there is an ethic for childless intelligences, and a literature about the inner conflicts of Nora and Nana. The “quiverful,” which was still an honorable enough spectacle in the days of Werther, becomes something rather provincial. The father of many children is for the great city a subject for caricature; Ibsen did not fail to note it, and presented it in his Loves Comedy.

At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the Fellah type.

If anything has demonstrated the fact that Causality has nothing to do with history, it is the familiar “decline” of the Classical, which accomplished itself long before the irruption of Germanic migrants.²⁵ The Imperium enjoyed the completest peace; it was rich and highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius a series of rulers such as the Caesarism of no other Civilization can show; And yet the population dwindled, quickly and wholesale. The desperate marriage and children laws of Augustus — amongst them the Lex de maritandis ordinibus, which dismayed Roman society more than the destruction of Varus’s legions — the wholesale adoptions, the incessant plantation of soldiers of barbarian origin to fill the depleted countryside, the immense food charities of Nerva and Trajan for the children of poor parents — nothing availed to check the process. Italy, then North Africa and Gaul, and finally Spain, which under the early Caesars had been one of the most densely populated parts of the Empire, become empty and desolate. The famous saying of Pliny — so often and so significantly quoted today in connection with national economics — “Lati fundia prdidere Italiam, jam, vero et provincias”²⁶ inverts the order of the process; the large estates would never have got to this point if the peasantry had not already been sucked into the towns and, if not openly, at any rate inwardly, surrendered their soil. The terrible truth came out at last in the edict of Pertinax, A.D. 193, by which anyone in Italy or the provinces was permitted to take possession of untended land, and if he brought it under cultivation, to hold it as his legal property. The historical student has only to turn his attention seriously to other Civilizations to find the same phenomenon everywhere. Depopulation can be distinctly traced in the background of the Egyptian New Empire, especially from the XIX dynasty onwards. Street widths like those to Amenophis IV at Tell-el-Amarna — of fifty yards — would have been unthinkable with the denser population of the old days. The onset of the “Sea peoples,” too, was only barely repulsed — their chances of obtaining possession of the realm were certainly not less promising than those of the Germans of the fourth century vis-à-vis the Roman world. And finally the incessant infiltration of Libyans into the Delta culminated when one of their leaders seized the power, in 945 B.C. — precisely as Odoacer seized it in A.D. 476. But the same tendency can be felt in the history of political Buddhism after the Caesar Asoka.²⁷ If the Maya population literally vanished within a very short time after the Spanish conquest, and their great empty cities were reabsorbed by the jungle, this does not prove merely the brutality of the conqueror — which in this regard would have been helpless before the self-renewing power of a young and fruitful Culture mankind — but an extinction from within that no doubt had long been in progress. And if we turn to our own civilization, we find that the old families of the French noblesse were not, in the great majority of cases, eradicated in the Revolution, but have died out since 1815, and their sterility has spread to the bourgeoisie and, since 1870, to the peasantry which that very Revolution almost re-created. In England, and still more in the United States — particularly in the east, the very states where the stock is best and oldest — the process of “race suicide” denounced by Roosevelt set in long ago on the largest scale.

Consequently we find everywhere in these Civilizations that the provincial cities at an early stage, and the giant cities in turn at the end of the evolution, stand empty, harboring in their stone masses a small population of fellaheen who shelter in them as the men of the Stone Age sheltered in caves and pile dwellings.²⁸ Samarra was abandoned by the tenth century; Pataliputra, Asoka’s capital, was an immense and completely uninhabited waste of houses when the Chinese traveler Hsinan-tang visited it about A.D. 635, and many of the great Maya cities must have been in that condition even in Cortez’s time. In a long series of Classical writers from Polybius onward²⁹ we read of old, renowned cities in which the streets have become lines of empty, crumbling shells, where the cattle browse in forum and gymnasium, and the amphitheater is a sown field,³⁰ dotted with emergent statues and herms. Rome had in the fifth century of our era the population of a village, but its Imperial palaces were still habitable.

This, then, is the conclusion of the city’s history; growing from primitive barter center to Culture city and at last to world city, it sacrifices first the blood and soul of its creators to the needs of its majestic evolution, and then the last flower of that growth to the spirit of Civilization — and so, doomed, moves on to final self-destruction.

VI

If the Early period is characterized by the birth of the City out of the country, and the Late by the battle between city and country, the period of Civilization is that of the victory of city over country, whereby it frees itself from the grip of the ground, but to its own ultimate ruin. Rootless, dead to the cosmic, irrevocably committed to stone and to intellectualism, it develops a form language that reproduces every trait of its essence — not the language of a becoming and growth, but that of a becomeness and completion, capable of alteration certainly, but not of evolution. Not now Destiny, but Causality, not now living Direction, but Extension, rules. It follows from this that whereas every form language of a Culture, together with the history of its evolution, adheres to the original spot, civilized forms are at home anywhere and capable, therefore, of unlimited extension as soon as they appear. It is quite true that the Hanse Towns in their north Russian staples built Gothically, and the Spaniards in South America in the Baroque style, but that even the smallest chapter of Gothic style history should evolve outside the limits of West Europe was impossible, as impossible as that Attic or English drama, or the art of fugue, or the Lutheran or the Orphic religion should be propagated, or even inwardly assimilated, by men of alien Cultures. But the essence of Alexandrinism and of our Romanticism is something which belongs to all urban men without distinction. Romanticism marks the beginning of that which Goethe, with his wide vision, called world literature — the literature of the leading world city, against which a provincial literature, native to the soil but negligible, struggles everywhere with difficulty to maintain itself. The state of Venice, or that of Frederick the Great, or the English Parliament (as an effective reality), cannot be reproduced, but “modern constitutions” can be “introduced” into any African or Asiatic state as Classical Poleis could be set up amongst Numidians and ancient Britons. In Egypt the writing that came into common use was not the hieroglyphic, but the letter script, which was without doubt a technical discovery of the Civilization Age.³¹ And so in general — it is not true Culture languages like the Greek of Sophocles or the German of Luther, but world languages like the Greek Koine and Arabic and Babylonian and English, the outcome of daily practical usage in a world city, which are capable of being acquired by anybody and everybody. Consequently, in all Civilizations the “modern” cities assume a more and more uniform type. Go where we may, there are Berlin, London, and New York for us, just as the Roman traveler would find his columnar architecture, his fora with their statuary, and his temples in Palmyra or Trier or Timgad or the Hellenistic cities that extended out to the Indus and the Aral. But that which was thus disseminated was no longer a style, but a taste, not genuine custom but mannerism, not national costume but the fashion. This, of course, makes it possible for remote peoples not only to accept the “permanent” gains of a Civilization, but even to re-radiate them in an independent form. Such regions of “moonlight” civilization are south China and especially Japan (which were first Sinized at the close of the Han period, about A.D. 220); Java as a relay of the Brahman Civilization; and Carthage, which obtained its forms from Babylon.

All these are forms of a waking consciousness now acute to excess, mitigated or limited by no cosmic force, purely intellectual and extensive, but on that very account capable of so powerful an output that their last flickering rays reach out and superpose effects over almost the whole earth. Fragments of the forms of Chinese Civilization are probably to be found in Scandinavian wood architecture, Babylonian measures probably in the South Seas, Classical coins in South Africa, Egyptian and Indian influences probably in the land of the Incas.

But while this process of extension was overpassing all frontiers, the development of inner form of the Civilization was fulfilling itself with impressive consistency. Three stages are clearly to be distinguished — the release from the Culture, the production of the thoroughbred Civilization form, and the final hardening. For us this development has now set in, and, as I see it, it is Germany that is destined, as the last nation of the West, to crown the mighty edifice. In this stage all questions of the life — the Apollinian, Magian, or Faustian life — have been thought upon to the limit, and brought to a final clear condition of knowledge and not-knowledge. For or about ideas men fight no more. The last idea — that of the Civilization itself — is formulated in outline, and technics and economics are, as problems, enunciated and prepared for handling. But this is only the beginning of a vast task; the postulates have to be unfolded and these forms applied to the whole existence of the earth. Only when this has been accomplished and the Civilization has become definitely established not only in shape, but in mass, does the hardening of the form set in. Style, in the Cultures, has been the rhythm of the process of self-implementing. But the Civilized style (if we may use the word at all) arises as the expression of the state of completeness. It attains — in Egypt and China especially — to a splendid perfection, and imparts this perfection to all the utterances of a life that is now inwardly unalterable, to its ceremonial and mien as to the superfine and studied forms of its art practice. Of history, in the sense of an urge towards a form ideal, there can now be no question, but there is an unfailing and easy superficial adaptiveness which again and again manages to coax fresh little art problems and solutions out of the now basically stable language. Of this kind is the whole “history” of Chinese-Japanese painting (as we know it) and of Indian architecture. And just as the real history of the Gothic style differs from this pseudo-history, so the Knight of the Crusades differs from the Chinese Mandarin — the becoming state from the finished. The one is history; the other has long ago overcome history. “Long ago,” I say; for the history of these Civilizations is merely apparent, like their great cities, which constantly change in face, but never become other than what they are. In these cities there is no Soul. They are land in petrified form.

What is it that perishes here? And what that survives? It is a mere incident that German peoples, under pressure from the Huns, take possession of the Roman landscape and so prevent the Classical from prolonging itself in a “Chinese” end state. The movement of the “Sea peoples” (similar to the Germanic, even down to the details) which set in against the Egyptian Civilization from 1400 B.C. succeeded only as regards the Cretan island realm — their mighty expeditions against the Libyan and Phoenician coasts, with the accompaniment of Viking fleets, failed, as those of the Huns failed against China. And thus the Classical is our one example of a Civilization broken off in the moment of full splendor. Yet the Germans only destroyed the upper layer of the forms and replaced it by the life of their own pre-Culture. The “eternal” layer was never reached. It remains, hidden and completely shrouded by a new form language, in the underground of the whole following history, and to this day in southern France, southern Italy, and northern Spain tangible relics of it endure. In these countries the popular Catholicism is tinged from beneath with a Late Classical coloring, that sets it off quite distinctly from the Church Catholicism of the West European layer above it. South Italian Church festivals disclose Classical (and even pre-Classical) cults, and generally in this field there are to be found deities (saints) in whose worship the Classical constitution is visible behind the Catholic names.

Here, however, another element comes into the picture, an element with a significance of its own. We stand before the problem of Race.

CHAPTER V

CITIES AND PEOPLES

(B) PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES

I

Throughout the nineteenth century the scientific picture of history was vitiated by a notion that was either derived from, or at any rate brought to a point by, Romanticism — the idea of the “People” in the moral-enthusiastic sense of the word. If, here and there, in earlier time a new religion, a new ornamentation, a new architecture, or a new script appeared, the question that it raised presented itself to the investigator thus — What was the name of the people who produced the phenomenon? This enunciation of the problem is peculiar to the Western spirit and the present day cast of that spirit; but it is so false at every point that the picture that it evokes of the course of events must necessarily be erroneous. “The people” as the absolute basic form in which men are historically effective, the original home, the original settlement, the migrations of “the” peoples — all this is a reflection of the vibrant idea expressed in the “Nation” of 1789, of the “Volk” of 1813, both of which, in last analysis, are derived from the self-assuredness of England and Puritanism. But the very intensity of passion that the idea contains has protected it only too well from criticism. Even acute investigators have unwittingly made it cover a multitude of utterly dissimilar things, with the result that “peoples” have developed into definite and supposedly well understood unit quantities by which all history is made. For us, today, world history means — what it cannot be asserted to mean self-evidently, or to mean for, e.g., the Greeks and the Chinese — the history of Peoples. Everything else, Culture, speech, wit, religion, is created by the peoples. The State is the form of a people.

The purpose of this chapter is to demolish this romantic conception. What has inhabited the earth since the Ice Age is man, not “peoples.” In the first instance, their Destiny is determined by the fact that the bodily succession of parents and children, the bond of the blood, forms natural groups, which disclose a definite tendency to take root in a landscape. Even nomadic tribes confine their movements within a limited field. Thereby the cosmic plantlike side of life, of Being, is invested with a character of duration. This I call race. Tribes, septs, clans, families — all these are designations for the fact of a blood which circles, carried on by procreation, in a narrow or a wide landscape.

But these human beings possess also the microcosmic animal side of life, in waking consciousness and receptivity and reason. And the form in which the waking consciousness of one man gets into relation with that of another I call language, which begins by being a mere unconscious living expression that is received as a sensation, but gradually develops into a conscious technique of communication that depends upon a common sense of the meanings attaching to signs.

In the limit, every race is a single great body, and every language¹ the efficient form of one great waking consciousness that connects many individual beings. And we shall never reach the ultimate discoveries about either unless they are treated together and constantly brought into comparison with one another.

But, further, we shall never understand man’s higher history if we ignore the fact that man, as constituent of a race and as possessor of a language, as derivative of a blood unit and as member of an understanding unit, has different Destinies, that of his being and that of his waking being. That is, the origin, development, and duration of his race side and the origin, development, and duration of his language side are completely independent of one another. Race is something cosmic and psychic (Seelenhaft), periodic in some obscure way, and in its inner nature partly conditioned by major astronomical relations.

Languages, on the other hand, are causal forms, and operate through the polarity of their means. We speak of race instincts and of the spirit of a language. But they are two distinct worlds. To Race belong the deepest meanings of the words “time” and “yearning”; to language those of the words “space” and “fear.” But all this has been hidden from us, hitherto, by the overlying idea of “peoples.”

There are, then, currents of being and linkages of waking being. The former have physiognomy, the latter are based on system. Race, as seen in the picture of the world around, is the aggregate of all bodily characters so far as these exist for the sense perceptions of conscious creatures. Here we have to remember that a body develops and fulfills from childhood to old age the specific inner form that was assigned to it at the moment of its conception, while at the same time that which the body is (considered apart from its form) is perpetually being renewed. Consequently nothing of the body actually remains in the man except the living meaning of his existence, and of this all that we know is so much as presents itself in the world of waking consciousness. Man of the higher sort is limited, as to the impression of race that he can receive, almost wholly to what appears in the light world of his eye, so that for him race is essentially a sum of visible characters. But even for him there are not inconsiderable relics of the power to observe non-optical characters such as smell, the cries of animals, and, above all, the modalities of human speech. In the other higher animals, on the contrary, the capacity to receive the impression of race is decidedly not dominated by sight. Scent is stronger, and, besides, the animals have modes of sensation that entirely elude human understanding. It is, however, only men and animals that can receive the impression of race, and not the plants, and yet these too have race, as every nurseryman knows. It is, to me, a sight of deep pathos to see how the spring flowers, craving to fertilize and be fertilized, cannot for all their bright splendor attract one another, or even see one another, but must have recourse to animals, for whom alone these colors and these scents exist.

“Language” I call the entire free activity of the waking microcosm insofar as it brings something to expression for others. Plants have no waking being, no capacity of being moved, and therefore no language. The waking consciousness of animal existences, on the contrary, is through and through a speaking, whether individual acts are intended to tell or not, and even if the conscious or the unconscious purpose of the doing lies in a quite other direction. A peacock is indubitably speaking when he spreads his tail, but a kitten playing with a cotton reel also speaks to us, unconsciously, through the quaint charm of its movements. Everyone knows the difference there is in one’s movements according as one is conscious or unconscious of being observed; one suddenly begins to speak, consciously, in all one’s actions.

This, however, leads at once to the very significant distinction between two genera of language — the language which is only an expression for the world, an inward necessity springing from the longing inherent in all life to actualize itself before witnesses, to display its own presence to itself, and the language that is meant to be understood by definite beings. There are, therefore, expression languagesand communication languages. The former assume only a state of waking being, the latter a connection of waking beings. To understand means to respond to the stimulus of a signal with one’s own feeling of its significance. To understand one another, to hold “conversation,” to speak to a “thou,” supposes, therefore, a sense of meanings in the other that corresponds to that in oneself. Expression language before witnesses merely proves the presence of an “I,” but communication language postulates a “thou.” The “I” is that which speaks, and the “thou” that which is meant to understand the speech of the “I.” For primitives a tree, a stone, or a cloud can be a “thou.” Every deity is a “thou.” In fairy tales there is nothing that cannot hold converse with men, and we need only look at our own selves in moments of furious irritation or of poetic excitement to realize that anything can become a “thou” for us even today. And it is by some “thou” that we first came to the knowledge of an “I.” “I,” therefore, is a designation for the fact that a bridge exists to some other being.

It is impossible, however, to delimit an exact frontier between religious and artistic expression languages and pure communication languages. This is true also (and indeed specially) of the higher Cultures with the separate development of their form domains. For, on the one hand, no one can speak without putting into his mode of speech some significant trait of emphasis that has nothing to do with the needs of communication as such; and, on the other hand, we all know the drama in which the poet wants to “say” something that he could have said equally well or better in an exhortation, and the painting whose contents are meant to instruct, warn, or improve — the picture series in any Greek Orthodox church, which conforms to a strict canon and has the avowed purpose of making the truths of religion clear to a beholder to whom the book says nothing; or Hogarth’s substitute for sermons; or, for that matter, even prayer, the direct address to God, which also can be replaced by the performance before one’s eyes of cult ritual that speaks to one intelligibly. The theoretical controversy concerning the purpose of art rests upon the postulate that an artistic expression language should in no wise be a communication language, and the phenomenon of priesthood is based upon the persuasion that the priest alone knows the language in which man can communicate with God.

All currents of Being bear a historical, and all linkages of Waking being a religious, stamp. What we know to be inherent in every genuine religious or artistic form language, and particularly in the history of every script (for writing is verbal language for the eye), holds good without doubt for the origin of human articulate speech in general — indeed the prime words (of the structure of which we now know nothing whatever) must also certainly have had a cult coloring. But there is a corresponding linkage on the other side between Race and everything that we call life (as struggle for power), History (as Destiny), or, today, politics. It is perhaps too fantastic to argue something of political instinct in the search of a climbing plant for points of attachment that shall enable it to encircle, overpower, and choke the tree in order finally to rear itself high in the air above the treetop — or something of religious world feeling in the song of the mounting lark. But it is certain that from such things as these the utterances of being and of waking being, of pulse and tension, form an uninterrupted series up to the perfected political and religious forms of every modern Civilization.

And here at last is the key to those two strange words which were discovered by the ethnologists in two entirely different parts of the world in rather limited applications, but have since been quietly moving up into the foreground of research — “totem” and “taboo” The more enigmatic and indefinable these words became, the more it was felt that in them we were touching upon an ultimate life basis which was not that of merely primitive man. And now, as the result of the above inquiry, we have clear meanings for both before us. Totem and Taboo describe the ultimate meanings of Being and Waking being, Destiny and Causality, Race and Language, Time and Space, yearning and fear, pulse and tension, politics and religion. The Totem side of life is plantlike and inheres in all being, while the Taboo side is animal and presupposes the free movement of a being in a world. Our Totem organs are those of the blood circulation and of reproduction, our Taboo organs those of the senses and the nerves. All that is of Totem has physiognomy, all that is of Taboo has system. In the Totemistic resides the common feeling of beings that belong to the same stream of existence. It cannot be acquired and cannot be got rid of; it is a fact, the fact of all facts. That which is of Taboo, on the other hand, is the characteristic of linkages of waking consciousness, it is learnable and acquirable, and on that very account guarded as a secret by cult communities, philosophers’ schools, and artists’ guilds — each of which possesses a sort of cryptic language of its own.²

But Being can be thought of without waking consciousness, whereas the reverse is not the case — i.e., there are race beings without language, but no languages without race. All that is of race, therefore, possesses its proper expression, independent of any kind of waking consciousness and common to plant and animal. This expression — not to be confounded with the expression language which consists in an active alteration of the expression — is not meant for witnesses, but is simply there; it is physiognomy. Not that it stops at the plant; in every living language, too (and how significant the word “living”!) we can detect, besides the Taboo side that is learnable, an entirely untransferable quality of race that the old vessels of the language cannot pass on to alien successors; it lies in melody, rhythm, stress; in color, ring, and tempo of the expression; in idiom, in accompanying gesture. On this account it is necessary to distinguish between language and speaking, the first being in itself a dead stock of signs, and the second the activity that operates with the signs.³ When we cease to be able to hear and see directly how a language is spoken, thenceforward it is only its ossature and not its flesh that we can know. This is so with Sumerian, Gothic, Sanskrit, and all other languages that we have merely deciphered from texts and inscriptions, and we are right in calling these languages dead, for the human communities that were formed by them have vanished. We know the Egyptian tongue, but not the tongues of the Egyptians. Of Augustan Latin we know approximately the sound values of the letters and the meaning of the words, but we do not know how the oration of Cicero sounded from the rostra and still less how Hesiod and Sappho spoke their verses, or what a conversation in the Athenian marketplace was really like. If in the Gothic age Latin came into actual speech again, it was as a new language; this Gothic Latin did not take long to pass from the formation of rhythms and sounds characteristic of itself (but which our imagination today cannot recapture, any more than those of old Latin) to encroachments upon the word meanings and the syntax as well. But the anti-Gothic Latin of the Humanists, too, which was meant to be Ciceronian, was anything but a revival. The whole significance of the race element in language can be measured by comparing the German of Nietzsche and of Mommsen, the French of Diderot and of Napoleon, and observing that in idiom Voltaire and Lessing are much closer together than Lessing and Hölderlin.

It is the same with the most telling of all the expression languages, art. The Taboo side — namely, the stock of forms, the rules of convention, and style insofar as it means an armory of established expedients (like vocabulary and syntax in verbal language) — stands for the language itself, which can be learned. And it is learned and transmitted in the tradition of the great schools of painting, the cottage building tradition, and generally in the strict craft discipline which every genuine art possesses as a matter of course and which in all ages has been meant to give the sure command of the idiom that at a particular time is quite definitely living idiom of that time. For in this domain, too, there are living and dead languages. The form language of an art can only be called living, when the artist corps as a whole employs it like a mother tongue, which one uses without even thinking about its structure. In this sense Gothic in the sixteenth century and Rococo in 1800 were both dead languages. Contrast the unqualified sureness with which architects and musicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries expressed themselves with the hesitations of Beethoven, the painfully acquired, almost self-taught, philologicalart of Schinkel and Schadow,⁴ the manglings of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Neo-Gothics, and the baffled experimentalism of present day artists.

In an artistic form language, as presented to us by its products, the voice of the Totem side, the race, makes itself heard, and not less so in individual artists than in whole generations of artists. The creators of the Doric temples of South Italy and Sicily, and those of the brick Gothic of North Germany were emphatically race men, and so too the German musicians from Heinrich Schutz to Johann Sebastian Bach. To the Totem side belong the influences of the cosmic cycles — the importance of which in the structure of art history has hardly been suspected, let alone established — and the creative times of spring and love stirrings which (apart altogether from the executive sureness in imparting form) determine the force of the forms and the depth of the conceptions. The formalists are explained by depth of world fear or by defect of “race,” and the great formless ones by plethora of blood or defect of discipline. We comprehend that there is a difference between the history of artists and that of styles, and that the language of an art may be carried from country to country, but mastery in speaking it, never.

A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant takes root, there it dies also. There is certainly a sense in which we can, without absurdity, work backwards from a race to its “home,” but it is much more important to realize that the race adheres permanently to this home with some of its most essential characters of body and soul. If in that home the race cannot now be found, this means that the race has ceased to exist. A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in ever changing landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plant nature in them, and eventually the race expression is completely transformed by the extinction of the old and the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as Americans. It has long been obvious that the soil of the Indians has made its mark upon them — generation by generation they become more and more like the people they eradicated. Gould and Baxter have shown that Whites of all races, Indians, and Negroes have come to the same average in size of body and time of maturity — and that so rapidly that Irish immigrants, arriving young and developing very slowly, come under this power of the landscape within the same generation. Boas has shown that the American born children of long-headed Sicilian and short-headed German Jews at once conform to the same head type. This is not a special case, but a general phenomenon, and it should serve to make us very cautious in dealing with those migrations of history about which we know nothing more than some names of vagrant tribes and relics of languages (e.g., Danai, Etruscans, Pelasgi, Achaeans, and Dorians). As to the race of these “peoples” we can conclude nothing whatever. That which flowed into the lands of southern Europe under the diverse names of Goths, Lombards, and Vandals was without doubt a race in itself. But already by Renaissance times it had completely grown itself into the root characters of the Provençal, Castilian, and Tuscan soil.

Not so with language. The home of a language means merely the accidental place of its formation, and this has no relation to its inner form. Languages migrate in that they spread by carriage from tribe to tribe. Above all, they are capable of being, and are, exchanged — indeed, in studying the early history of races we need not, and should not, feel the slightest hesitation about postulating such speech changes. It is, I repeat, the form content and not the speaking of a language that is taken over, and it is taken over (as primitives are forever taking over ornament motives) in order to be used with perfect sureness as elements of their own form language. In early times the fact that a people has shown itself the stronger, or the feeling that its language possesses superior efficacy, is enough to induce others to give up their own language and — with genuinely religious awe — to take its language to themselves. Follow out the speech changes of the Normans, whom we find in Normandy, England, Sicily, and Constantinople with different languages in each place, and ever ready to exchange one for another. Piety towards the mother tongue — the very term testifies to deep ethical forces, and accounts for the bitterness of our ever recurring language battles — is a trait of the Late Western soul, almost unknowable for the men of other Cultures and entirely so for the primitive. Unfortunately, our historians not only are sensible of this, but tacitly extend it as a postulate over their entire field, which leads to a multitude of fallacious conclusions as to the bearing of linguistic discoveries upon the fortunes of “peoples” — think of the reconstruction of the “Dorian migration,” argued from the distribution of later Greek dialects. It is impossible, therefore, to draw conclusions as to the fortunes of the race side of peoples from mere place names, personal names, inscriptions, and dialects. Never do we know a priori, whether a folk name stands for a language body, or a race part, or both, or neither — besides which, folk names themselves, and even land names, have, as such, Destinies of their own.

II

Of all expressions of race, the purest is the House. From the moment when man, becoming sedentary, ceases to be content with mere shelter and builds himself a dwelling, this expression makes its appearance and marks off, within the race “man” (which is the element of the biological world picture⁵) the human races of world history proper, which are streams of being of far greater spiritual significance. The prime form of the house is everywhere a product of feeling and of growth, never at all of knowledge. Like the shell of the nautilus, the hive of the bee, the nest of the bird, it has an innate self-evidentness, and every trait of original custom and form of being, of marriage, of family life, and of tribal order is reflected in the place and in the room organization of parterre, hall, wigwam, atrium, court, chamber, and gymnasium. One need only compare the layout of the old Saxon and that of the Roman house to feel that the soul of the men and the soul of the house were in each case identical.

This domain art history ought never to have laid its hands on. It was an error to treat the building of the dwelling house as a branch of the art of architecture. It is a form that arises in the obscure courses of being and not for the eye that looks for forms in the light; no room scheme of the boor’s hovel was ever thought out by an architect as the scheme of a cathedral was thought out. This significant frontier line has escaped the observation of art research — although Dehio⁶ in one place remarks that the old German wooden house has nothing to do with the later great architecture, which arose quite independently — and the result has been a perpetual perplexity in method, of which the art savant is sensible enough, but which he cannot understand. His science gathers, indiscriminately in all the “pre-” and “primitive” periods, all sorts of gear, arms, pottery, fabrics, funerary monuments, and houses, and considers them from the point of view of form as well as that of decoration; and, proceeding thus, it is not until he comes to the organic history of painting, sculpture, and architecture (i.e., the self-contained and differentiated arts) that he finds himself on firm ground. But, unknowing, he has stepped over a frontier between two worlds, that of soul expression and that of visual expression language. The house, and like it the completely unstudied basic (i.e., customary) forms of pots, weapons, clothing, and gear, belong to the Totem side. They characterize, not a taste, but a way of fighting, of dwelling, of working. Every primitive seat is the offset of a racial mode of body posing, every jar handle an extension of the supple arm. Domestic painting and dressmaking, the garment as ornament, the decoration of weapons and implements, belong, on the contrary, to the Taboo side of life, and indeed for primitive man the patterns and motives on these things possess even magical properties.⁷ We all know the Germanic sword blades of the Migrations with their Oriental ornamentation, and the Mycenaean strongholds with their Minoan artistry. It is the distinction between blood and sense, race and speech, politics and religion.

There is, in fact, as yet no world history of the House and its Races, and to give us such a history should be one of the most urgent tasks of the researcher. But we must work with means quite other than those of art history. The peasant dwelling is, as compared with the tempo of all art history, something constant and “eternal” like the peasant himself. It stands outside the Culture and therefore outside the higher history of man; it recognizes neither the temporal nor the spacial limits of this history and it maintains itself, unaltered ideally, throughout all the changes of architecture, which it witnesses, but in which it does not participate. The round hut of ancient Italy is still found in Imperial times.⁸ The form of the Roman rectangular house, the existence mark of a second race, is found in Pompeii and even in the Imperial palaces. Every sort of ornament and style was borrowed from the Orient, but no Roman would ever think of imitating the Syrian house,⁹ any more than the Hellenistic city architect tampered with the megaron form of Mycenae and Tiryns and the old Greek peasant house described by Galen. The Saxon and Franconian peasant house kept its essential nucleus unimpaired right from the country farm, through the burgher house of the old Free Cities, up to the patrician buildings of the eighteenth century, while Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Empire styles glided over it one after the other, clothing it from cellar to garret with their essences, but never perverting the Soul of the House. And the same is true of the furniture forms, in which we have to distinguish carefully the psychological from the artistic treatment. In particular, the evolution of the Northern seat furniture is, right up to the club armchair, a piece of race history and not of what is called style history. Every other character can deceive us as to the fortunes of race — the Etruscan names amongst the “Sea folk” defeated by Rameses III, the enigmatic inscription of Lemnos, the wall paintings in the tombs of Etruria, afford no sure evidences of the bodily connection of these men. Although towards the end of the Stone Age a telling ornamentation arose and continued in the vast region east of the Carpathians, it is perfectly possible that race superseded race there. If we possessed in western Europe only pottery remains for the centuries between Trojan and Chlodwig, we should not have the least inkling of the event that we know as the “great Migrations.” But the presence of an oval house in the Aegean region¹⁰ and of another and very striking example of it in Rhodesia,¹¹ and the much discussed concordance of the Saxon peasant house with that of the Libyan Kabyle disclose a piece of race history. Ornaments spread when a people incorporates them in its form language, but a house type is only transplanted along with its race. The disappearance of an ornament means no more than a change of language, but when a house type vanishes it means that race is extinguished.

It follows that art history, besides taking care to begin properly with the Culture, must not neglect even in its course to separate the race side carefully from the language proper. At the outset of a Culture two well defined forms of a higher order rise up over the peasant village, as expressions of being and language of waking being. They are the castle and the cathedral.¹² In them the distinction between Totem and Taboo, longing and fear, blood and intellect, rises to a grand symbolism. The ancient Egyptian, the ancient Chinese, the Classical, the South Arabian, and the Western castle stands, as the home of continuing generations, very near to the peasant cottage, and both, as copies of the realities of living, breeding, and dying, lie outside all art history. The history of the German Burgen is a piece of race history throughout. On them both, early ornament does indeed venture to spread itself, beautifying here the beams, there the door, and there again the staircase, but it can be so, or so, at choice, omitted altogether, for there is no inward bond between the structure and the ornament. The cathedral, on the other hand, is not ornamented, but is itself ornament. Its history is coincident with that of the Gothic style, and the same is true of the Doric temple and all other Early Culture buildings. So complete is the congruence, in the Western and every other Culture whose art we know at all, that it has never occurred to anyone to be astonished at the fact that strict architecture (which is simply the highest form of pure ornament) is entirely confined to religious building. All the beauty of architecture that there is in Gelnhausen, Goslar, and the Wartburg has been taken over from cathedral art; it is decoration and not essence. A castle or a sword or a pitcher can do without this decoration altogether without losing its meaning or even its form.¹³ But in a Cathedral, or an Egyptian pyramid temple, such a distinction between essence and art is simply inconceivable.

We distinguish, then, the building that has a style and the building in which men have a style. Whereas in monastery and cathedral it is the stone that possesses form and communicates it to the men who are in its service, in farmhouse and feudal stronghold it is the full strength of the countryman’s and the knight’s life that forms the building forth from itself. Here the man and not the stone comes first, and here, too, there is an ornamentation; it is an ornament which is proper to man and consists in the strict nature and stable form of manners and customs. We might call this living, as distinct from rigid, style. But, just as the power of this living form lays hands on the priesthood also, creating in Gothic and in Vedic times the type of the knightly priest, so the Romanesque Gothic sacred form language seizes upon everything pertaining to this secular life — costume, arms, rooms, implements, and so forth — and stylizes their surface. But art history must not let itself lose its bearings in this alien world — it is only the surface.

In the early cities it is the same; nothing new supervenes. Amongst the race made houses, which now form streets, there are scattered the handful of cult buildings that have style. And, as having it, they are the seats of art history and the sources whence its forms radiate out on to squares, facades, and house rooms. Even though the castle develops into the urban palace and patrician residence, and thepalatium and the men’s hall, into guild house and town hall, one and all they receive and carry a style, they do not have it. True, at the stage of real burgherdom the metaphysical creativeness of the early religion has been lost. It develops the ornament further, but not the building as ornament, and from this point art history splits up into the histories of the separate arts. The picture, the statue, the house, become particular objects to which the style is to be applied. Even the church itself is now such a house. A Gothic cathedral is ornament, but a Baroque hall church is a building clothed with ornament. The process begun in the Ionic style and the sixteenth century is completed in the Corinthian and Rococo, wherein the house and its ornament are separated for good and all, so completely that even the masterworks amongst eighteenth century churches and monasteries cannot mislead us — we know that all this art of theirs is secular, is adornment. With Empire the style transforms itself into a “taste,” and with the end of this mode architecture turns into a craft art. And that is the end of the ornamental expression language, and of art history with it. But the peasant house, with its unaltered race form, lives on.

III

The practical importance of the house as race expression begins to be appreciated as and when one realizes the immense difficulty of approaching the kernel of race. I do not refer to its inner essence, its soul — as to that, feeling speaks to us clearly enough and we all know a man of race, a “thoroughbred,” when we see one. But what are the hallmarks for our sense, and above all for our eye, by which we recognize and distinguish races? This is a matter that belongs to the domain of Physiognomic just as surely as the classification of tongues belongs to that of Systematic. But how immense and how varied the material that would be required! How much of it is irretrievably lost by destruction, and how much more by corruption! In the most favorable cases, what we have of prehistoric men is their skeletons, and how much does a skeleton not tell us! Very nearly everything. Prehistoric research in its naive zeal is ready to deduce the incredible from a jaw bone or an arm bone. But think of one of those mass graves of the War in northern France, in which we know that men of all races, white and colored, peasants and townsmen, youths and men lie together. If the future had no collateral evidence as to their nature, it would certainly not be enlightened by anthropological research. In other words, immense dramas of race can pass over a land without the investigator of its grave skeletons obtaining the least hint of the fact. It is the living body that carries nine-tenths of the expression — not the articulation of the parts, but their articulate motions; not the bone of the face, but its mien. And, for that matter, how much potentially interpretable race expression is actually observed even by the keenest sensed contemporary? How much we fail to see and to hear! What is it for which — unlike many species of beasts — we lack a sense organ?

The science of the Darwinian age met this question with an easy assurance. How superficial, how glib, how mechanistic the conception with which it worked! In the first place, this conception groups an aggregate of such grossly palpable characters as are observable in the anatomy of the discoveries — that is, characters that even a corpse displays. As to observing the body qua living thing, there is no question of it. Secondly, it investigates only those signs which very little perspicacity is needed to detect, and investigates them only insofar as they are measurable and countable. The microscope and not the pulse sense determines. When language is used as a differentia, it is to classify races, not according to their way of speaking, but according to the grammatical structure of the speech, which is just anatomy and system of another sort. No one as yet has perceived that the investigation of these speech races is one of the most important tasks that research can possibly set itself. In the actuality of daily experience we all know perfectly well that the way of speaking is one of the most distinctive traits in present day man — examples are legion; each of us knows any number of them. In Alexandria the same Greek was spoken in the most dissimilar race modes, as we can see even today from the script of the texts. In North America the native born speak exactly alike, whether in English, in German, or for that matter in Indian. What in the speech of East European Jews is a race trait of the land, and present therefore in Russian also, and what is a race trait of the blood common to all Jews, independent of their habitat and their hosts, in their speaking of any of the European “mother” tongues? What in detail are the relations of the sound formations, the accentuations, the placing of words?

But science has completely failed to note that race is not the same for rooted plants as it is for mobile animals, that with the microcosmic side of life a fresh group of characters appears, and that for the animal world it is decisive. Nor again has it perceived that a completely different significance must be attached to “races” when the word denotes subdivisions within the integral race “Man.” With its talk of adaptation and of inheritance it sets up a soulless causal concatenation of superficial characters, and blots out the fact that here the blood and there the power of the land over the blood are expressing themselves — secrets that cannot be inspected and measured, but only livingly experienced and felt from eye to eye.

Nor are the scientists at one as to the relative rank of these superficial characters amongst themselves. Blumenbach classified the races of man according to skull forms, Friedrich Müller (as a true German) by hair and language structure, Topinard (as a true Frenchman) by skin color and shape of nose, and Huxley (as a true Englishman) by, so to say, sport characteristics. This last is undoubtedly in itself a very suitable criterion, but any judge of horses would tell him that breed characteristics cannot be hit off by scientific terminology. These “descriptions” of races are without exception as worthless as the descriptions of “wanted” men on which policemen exercise their theoretical knowledge of men.

Obviously, the chaotic in the total expression of the human body is not in the least realized. Quite apart from smell (which for the Chinese, for example, is a most characteristic mark of race) and sound (the sound of speech, song, and, above all, laughter, which enables us accurately to sense deep differences inaccessible to scientific method) the profusion of images before the eye is so embarrassingly rich in details, either actually visible or sensible to the inner vision, that the possibility of marshaling them under a few aspects is simply unthinkable. And all these sides to the picture, all these traits composing it, are independent of one another and have each their individual history. There are cases in which the bony structure (and particularly the skull form) completely alter without the expression of the fleshy parts — i.e., the face — becoming different. The brothers and sisters of the same family may all present almost every differentia posited by Blumenbach, Müller, and Huxley, and yet the identity of their living race expression may be patent to anyone who looks at them. Still more frequent is similarity of bodily build accompanied by thorough diversity of living expression — I need only mention the immeasurable difference between genuine peasant stock, like the Frisians or the Bretons, and genuine city stock.¹⁴ But besides the energy of the blood — which coins the same living features (“family” traits) over and over again for centuries — and the power of the soil — evidenced in its stamp of man — there is that mysterious cosmic force of the syntony of close human connections. What is called the “Versehen” of a pregnant woman¹⁵ is only a particular and not very important instance of the workings of a very deep and powerful formative principle inherent in all that is of the race side. It is a matter of common observation that elderly married people become strangely like one another, although probably Science with its measuring instruments would “prove” the exact opposite. It is impossible to exaggerate the formative power of this living pulse, this strong inward feeling for the perfection of one’s own type. The feeling for race beauty — so opposite to the conscious taste of ripe urbans for intellectual individual traits of beauty — is immensely strong in primitive men, and for that very reason never emerges into their consciousness. But such a feeling is race forming. It undoubtedly molded the warrior and hero type of a nomad tribe more and more definitely on one bodily ideal, so that it would have been quite unambiguous to speak of the race figure of Romans or Ostrogoths. The same is true of any ancient nobility — filled with a strong and deep sense of its own unity, it achieves the formation of a bodily ideal. Comradeship breeds races. French noblesse and Prussian Landadel are genuine race denotations. But it is just this, too, that has bred the types of the European Jew, with his immense race energy and his thousand years of ghetto life; and it always will forge a population into a race whenever it has stood for long together spiritually firm and united in the presence of its Destiny. Where a race ideal exists, as it does, supremely, in the Early period of the Culture — the Vedic, the Homeric, the knightly times of the Hohenstaufen — the yearning of a ruling class towards this ideal, its will to be just so and not otherwise, operates (quite independently of the choosing of wives) towards actualizing this ideal and eventually achieves it. Further, there is a statistical aspect of the matter which has received far less attention than it should. For every human being alive today there were a million ancestors even in A.D. 1300 and ten million in A.D. 1000. This means that every German now living, without exception, is a blood relative of every European of the age of the Crusades and that the relationship becomes a hundred and a thousand times more intensely close as we narrow the limits of its field, so that within twenty generations or less the population of a land grows together into one single family; and this, together with the choice and voice of the blood that courses through the generations, ever driving congeners into one another’s arms, dissolving and breaking marriages, evading or forcing all obstacles of custom, leads to innumerable procreations that in utter unconsciousness fulfill the will of the race.

Primarily, this applies to the vegetal race traits, the “physiognomy of position,” as apart from movement of the mobile — i.e., everything which does not differ in the living and in the dead animal body and cannot but express itself even in stiffened members. There is undoubtedly something cognate in the growth of an ilex or a Lombardy poplar and that of a man — “thickset,” “slim,” “drooping,” and so forth. Similarly, the outline of the back of a dromedary, or the striping of a tiger or zebra skin is a vegetal race mark. And so, too, are the motion actions of nature upon and with a creature — a birch tree or a delicately built child, which both sway in the wind, an oak with its splintered crown, the steady circles or frightened flutterings of birds in the storm, all belong to the plant side of race. But on which side of the line do such characters stand when blood and soil contend for the inner form of the “transplanted” species, human or animal? And how much of the constitution of the soul, the social code, the house, is of this kind?

It is quite another picture that presents itself when we attune ourselves to receive the impressions of the purely animal. The difference between plant-wise being and animal-wise waking being (to recall what has been said earlier) is such that we are here concerned, not simply with waking being itself and its language, but with the combination of cosmic and microcosmic to form a freely moving body, a microcosm vis-à-vis a macrocosm, whose independent life activity possesses an expression peculiar to itself, which makes use in part of the organs of waking consciousness and which — as the corals show — is mostly lost again with the cessation of mobility.

If the race expression of the plant consists predominantly in the physiognomy of position, the animal expression resides in a physiognomy of movement — namely, in the form as having motion, in the motion itself, and in the set of the limbs as figuring the motion. Of this race expression not very much is revealed in the sleeping animal, and far less still in the dead animal, whose parts the scientist explores; we have practically nothing to learn now about the skeleton of the vertebrate. Hence it is that in vertebrates the limbs are more expressive than the bones. Hence it is that the limb masses are the true seat of expressiveness in contrast to the ribs and skull bones — the jaw being an exception in that its structure discloses the character of the animal’s food, whereas the plant’s nutrition is a mere process of nature. Hence it is, again, that the insect’s skeleton, which clothes its body, is fuller of expression than the bird’s, which is clothed by its body. It is preeminently the organs of the outer sheath that more and more forcefully gather the race expression to themselves — the eye, not as a thing of form and color, but as glance and expressive visage; the mouth, which becomes through the usage of speech the expression of understanding; and the head (not the skull), with its lineaments formed by the flesh, which has become the very throne of the non-vegetable side of life. Consider how, on the one hand, we breed orchids and roses and, on the other, we breed horses and dogs — and would like human beings to be bred, too. But it is not, I repeat, the mathematical form of the visible parts, but exclusively the expression of the movement, that displays this physiognomy. When we seize at a glance the race expression of a motionless man, it is because our experienced eye sees the appropriate motion already potentially in the limbs. The real race appearance of a bison, a trout, a golden eagle, is not to be reproduced by any reckoning of the creature’s plane or solid dimensions; and the deep attractiveness that they possess for the creative artist comes precisely from the fact that the secret of race can reveal itself in the picture by way of the soul and not by any mere imitation of the visible. One has to see and, seeing, to feel how the immense energy of this life concentrates upon head and neck, how it speaks in the bloodshot eye, in the short compact horn, in the “aquiline” beak and profile of the bird of prey — to mention one or two only of the innumerable points that cannot be communicated by words and are only expressible, by me for you, in the language of an art.

But with such hallmarks as those quoted, characterizing the noblest sorts of animals, we come very near to the concept of race which enables us to perceive within the type “mankind” differences of a higher sort than either the vegetable or the animal — differences that are spiritual rather, and eo ipso less accessible to scientific methods. The coarse characters of the skeletal structure have ceased to possess independent importance. Already Retzius (d. 1860) had put an end to the belief of Blumenbach that race and skull formation are coincident, and J. Ranke summarizes his tenets in these words:¹⁶ “What in point of variety of skull formation is displayed by mankind in general is displayed also on the smaller scale by every tribe (Volksstamm) and even by many fair sized communities — a union of the different skull forms with the extremes led up to through finely graduated intermediate forms.” No one would deny that it is reasonable to seek for ideal basic forms, but the researcher ought not to lose sight of the fact that these are ideals and that, for all the objectivity of his measurements, it is his taste that really fixes his limits and his classification. Much more important than any attempts to discover an ordering principle is the fact that within the unit “humanity” all these forms occur and have occurred from the earliest ice times, that they have never markedly varied, and that they are found indiscriminately even within the same families. The one certain result of science is that observed by Ranke, that when skull forms are arranged serially with respect to transitions, certain averages emerge which are characteristic not of “race,” but of the land.

In reality, the race expression of a human head can associate itself with any conceivable skull form, the decisive element being not the bone, but the flesh, the look, the play of feature. Since the days of Romanticism we have spoken of an “Indogermanic” race. But is there such a thing as an Aryan or a Semitic skull? Can we distinguish Celtic and Frankish skulls, or even Boer and Kaffir? And if not, what may not the earth have witnessed in the way of history unknown to us, for which not the slightest evidences, but only bones, remain! How unimportant these are for that which we call race in higher mankind can be shown by a drastic experiment. Take a set of men with every conceivable race difference, and, while mentally picturing “race,” observe them in an X-ray apparatus. The result is simply comic. As soon as light is let through it, “race” vanishes suddenly and completely.

It cannot be too often repeated, moreover, that the little that is really illustrative in skeletal structure is a growth of the landscape and never a function of the blood. Elliot Smith in Egypt and von Luschen in Crete have examined an immense material yielded by graves ranging from the Stone Age to the present day. From the “Sea peoples” of the middle of the second millennium B.C. to the Arabs and the Turks one human stream after another has passed over this region, but the average bone structure has remained unaltered. It would be true, in a measure, to say that “race” has traveled as flesh over the fixed skeleton form of the land.¹⁷ The Alpine region today contains “peoples” of the most diverse origins — Teuton, Latin, Slav — and we need only glance backward to discover Etruscans and Huns there also. Tribe follows tribe. But the skeletal structure in the mankind of the region in general is ever the same, and only on the edges, towards the plains, does it gradually disappear in favor of other forms, which are themselves likewise fixed. As to race, therefore, and the race wanderings of primitive men, the famous finds of prehistoric bones, Neanderthal to Aurignacian, prove nothing. Apart from some conclusions from the jawbone as to the kinds of food eaten, they merely indicate the basic land form that is found there to this day.

Once more, it is the mysterious power of the soil, demonstrable at once in every living being as soon as we discover a criterion independent of the heavy hand of the Darwinian age. The Romans brought the vine from the South to the Rhine, and there it has certainly not visibly — i.e., botanically — changed. But in this instance “race” can be determined in other ways. There is a soil-born difference not merely between Southern and Northern, between Rhine and Moselle wines, but even between the products of every different site on every different hillside; and the same holds good for every other high grade vegetable “race,” such as tea and tobacco. Aroma, a genuine growth of the countryside, is one of the hallmarks (all the more significant because they cannot be measured) of true race. But noble races of men are differentiated in just the same intellectual way as noble wines. There is a like element, only sensible to the finest perceptions, a faint aroma in every form, that underneath all higher Culture connects the Etruscans and the Renaissance in Tuscany,¹⁸ and the Sumerians, the Persians of 500 B.C., and the Persians of Islam on the Tigris.

None of this is accessible to a science that measures and weighs. It exists for the feelings — with a plain certainty and at the first glance — but not for the savant’s treatment. And the conclusion to which I come is that Race, like Time and Destiny, is a decisive element in every question of life, something which everyone knows clearly and definitely so long as he does not try to set himself to comprehend it by way of rational — i.e., soulless — dissection and ordering. Race, Time, and Destiny belong together. But the moment scientific thought approaches them, the word “Time” acquires the significance of a dimension, the word “Destiny” that of causal connection, while Race, for which even at that stage of scientific askesis we still retain a very sure feeling, becomes an incomprehensible chaos of unconnected and heterogeneous characters that (under headings of land, period, culture, stock) interpenetrate without end and without law. Some adhere toughly and permanently to a stock and are transmissible; others glide over a population like mere cloud shadows; and many are, as it were, daemons of the land, which possess everyone who inhabits it for as long as he stays in it. Some expel one another, some seek one another. A strict classification of races — the ambition of all ethnology — is impossible. The attempt is foredoomed from the start, as it contradicts this very essence of the racial, and every systematic layout always has been and will be, inevitably, a falsification and misapprehension of the nature of its subject. Race, in contrast to speech, is unsystematic through and through. In the last resort every individual man and every individual moment of his existence have their own race. And therefore the only mode of approach to the Totem side is, not classification, but physiognomic fact.

IV

He who would penetrate into the essence of language should begin by putting aside all the philologist’s apparatus and observe how a hunter speaks to his dog. The dog follows the outstretched finger. He listens, tense, to the sound of the word, but shakes his head — this kind of man speech he does not understand. Then he makes one or two sentences to indicate his idea; he stands still and barks, which in his language is a sentence containing the question: “Is that what Master means?” Then, still in dog language, he expresses his pleasure at finding that he was right. In just the same way two men who do not really possess a single word in common seek to understand one another. When a country parson explains something to a peasant woman, he looks at her keenly, and, unconsciously, he puts into his look the essence that she would certainly never be able to understand from a parsonic mode of expression. The locutions of today, without exception, are capable of comprehension only in association with other modes of speech — adequate by themselves they are not, and never have been.

If the dog, now, wants something, he wags his tail; impatient of Master’s stupidity in not understanding this perfectly distinct and expressive speech, he adds a vocal expression — he barks — and finally an expression of attitude — he mimes or makes signs. Here the man is the obtuse one who has not yet learned to talk.

Finally something very remarkable happens. When the dog has exhausted every other device to comprehend the various speeches of his master, he suddenly plants himself squarely, and his eye bores into the eye of the human. Something deeply mysterious is happening here — the immediate contact of Ego and Tu. The look emancipates from the limitations of waking consciousness. Being understands itself without signs. Here the dog has become a “judge” of men, looking his opposite straight in the eye and grasping, behind the speech, the speaker.

Languages of these kinds we habitually use without being conscious of the fact. The infant speaks long before it has learned its first word, and the grownup talks with it without even thinking of the ordinary meanings of the words he or she is using — that is, the sound forms in this case subserve a language that is quite other than that of words. Such languages also have their groups and dialects; they, too, can be learned, mastered, and misunderstood, and they are so indispensable to us that verbal language would mutiny if we were to attempt to make it do all the work without assistance from tone and gesture language. Even our script, which is verbal language for the eye, would be almost incomprehensible but for the aid that it gets from gesture language in the form of punctuation.

It is the fundamental mistake of linguistic science that it confuses language in general with human word language — and that not merely theoretically, but habitually in the practical conduct of all its investigations. As a result, it has remained immensely ignorant of the vast profusion of speech modes of different kinds that are in common use amongst beasts and men. The domain of speech, taken as a whole, is far wider, and verbal speech, with its incapacity to stand alone (an incapacity not wholly shaken off, even now) has really a much more modest part in it, than its students have observed. As to the “origin of human speech,” the very phrase implies a wrong enunciation of the problem. Verbal speech — for that is what is meant — never had origins at all in the sense here postulated. It is not primary, and it is not unitary. The vast importance to which it has attained, since a certain stage in man’s history, must not deceive us as to its position in the history of free moving entity. An investigation into speech certainly ought not to begin with man.

But the idea of a beginning for animal language, too, is erroneous. Speaking is so closely bound up with the living being of the animal (in contradiction to the mere being of the plant) that not even unicellular creatures devoid of all sense organs can be conceived of as speechless. To be a microcosm in the macrocosm is one and the same thing as having a power to communicate oneself to another. To speak of a beginning of speech in animal history is meaningless. For that microcosmic existences are in plurality is a matter of simple self-evidence. To speculate on other possibilities is mere waste of time. Granted that Darwinian fancies about an original generation and first pairs of ancestors belong with the Victorian rearguard and should be left there, still the fact remains that swarms also are awake and aware, inwardly and livingly sensible, of a “we,” and reaching out to one another for linkages of waking consciousness.

Waking being is activity in the extended; and, further, is willed activity. This is the distinction between the movements of a microcosm and the mechanical mobility of the plant, the animal, or the man in the plant state — i.e., asleep. Consider the animal activity of nutrition, procreation, defense, attack — one side of it regularly consists in getting into touch with the macrocosm by means of the senses, whether it be the undifferentiated sensitivity of the unicellular creature or the vision of a highly developed eye that is in question. Here there is a definite will to receive impression; this we call orientation. But, besides, there exists from the beginning a will to produce impression in the other — what we call expression — and with that, at once, we have speaking as an activity of the animal waking consciousness. Since then nothing fundamentally new has supervened. The world languages of high Civilizations are nothing but exceedingly refined expositions of potentialities that were all implicitly contained in the fact of willed impressions of unicellular creatures upon one another.

But the foundations of this fact lie in the primary feeling of fear. The waking consciousness makes a cleft in the cosmic, projects a space between particulars, and alienates them. To feel oneself alone is one’s first impression in the daily awakening, and hence the primitive impulse to crowd together in the midst of this alien world, to assure oneself sensibly of the proximity of the other, to seek a conscious connection with him. The “thou” is deliverance from the fear of the being alone. The discovery of the Thou, the sense of another self resolved organically and spiritually out of the world of the alien, is the grand moment in the early history of the animal. Thereupon animals are. One has only to look long and carefully into the tiny world of a water droplet under the microscope to be convinced that the discovery of the Thou, and with it that of the I has been taking place here in its simplest imaginable form. These tiny creatures know not only the Other, but also the Others; they possess not merely waking consciousness but also relations of waking consciousness, and therewith not only expression, but the elements of an expression speech.

It is well to recall here the distinction between the two great speech groups. Expression speech treats the Other as witness, and aims purely at effects upon him, while communication speech regards him as a collocutor and expects him to answer. To understand means to receive impressions with one’s own feeling of their significance, and it is on this that the effect of the highest form of human expression speech, art, depends.¹⁹ To come to an understanding, to hold a conversation, postulates that the Other’s feeling of significances is the same as one’s own. The elementary unit of an expression speech before witnesses is called the Motive. Command of the motive is the basis of all expression technique. On the other hand, the impression produced for the purpose of an understanding is called the Sign, and is the elementary unit of all communication technique — including, therefore, at the highest level, human speech.

Of the extensiveness of both these speech worlds in the waking consciousness of man we today can scarcely form an idea. Expression speech, which appears in the earliest times with all the religious seriousness of the Taboo, includes not only weighty and strict ornament — which in the beginning coincides completely with the idea of art and makes every stiff, inert thing into a vehicle of the expression — but also the solemn ceremonial — whose web of formulas spreads over the whole of public life, and even over that of the family²⁰ — and the language of costume, which is contained in clothing, tattooing, and personal adornment, all of which have a uniform significance. The investigators of the nineteenth century vainly attempted to trace the origin of clothing to the feeling of shame or to utilitarian motives. It is in fact intelligible only as the means of an expression speech, and as such it is developed to a grandiose level in all the high Civilizations, including our own of today. We need only think of the dominant part played by the “mode” in our whole public life and doings, the regulation attire for important occasions, the nuances of wear for this and that social function, the wedding dress, mourning; of the military uniform, the priest’s robes, orders and decorations, miter and tonsure, periwig and queue, powder, rings, styles of hairdressing; of all the significant displays and concealments of person, the costume of the mandarin and the senator, the odalisque and the nun; of the court state of Nero, Saladin and Montezuma — not to mention the details of peasant costumes, the language of flowers, colors, and precious stones. As for the language of religion, it is superfluous to mention it, for all this is religion.

The communication languages, in which every kind of sense impression that it is possible to conceive more or less participates, have gradually evolved (so far as the peoples of the higher Cultures are concerned) three outstanding signs — picture, sound, and gesture, which in the script speech of the Western Civilization have crystallized into a unit of letter, word, and punctuation mark.

In the course of this long evolution there comes about at the last the detachment of speaking from speech. Of all processes in the history of language, none has a wider bearing than this. Originally all motives and signs are unquestionably the product of the moment and meant only for a single individual act of the active waking consciousness. Their actual and their felt and willed significances are one and the same. But this is no longer so when a definite stock of signs offers itself for the living act of giving the sign, for with that not only is the activity differentiated from its means, but the means are differentiated from their significance. The unity of the two not only ceases to be a matter of self-evidence, it ceases even to be a possibility. The feeling of significance is a living feeling and, like everything else belonging with Time and Destiny, it is uniquely occurring and non-recurring. No sign, however well known and habitually used, is ever repeated with exactly the same connotation; and hence it is that originally no sign ever recurred in the same form. The domain of the rigid sign is unconditionally one of things-become of the pure extended; it is not an organism, but a system, which possesses its own causal logic and brings the irreconcilable opposition of space and time, intellect and mood, also into the waking connections of two beings.

This fixed stock of signs and motives, with its ostensibly fixed meanings, must be acquired by learning and practice if one wishes to belong to the community of waking consciousness with which it is associated. The necessary concomitant of speech divorced from speaking is the notion of the school. This is fully developed in the higher animals; and in every self-contained religion, every art, every society, it is presupposed as the background of the believer, the artist, the “well brought up” human being. And from this point each community has its sharply defined frontier; to be a member one must know its language — i.e., its articles of faith, its ethics, its rules. In counterpoint and Catholicism alike, bliss is not to be compassed by mere feeling and goodwill. Culture means a hitherto unimagined intensification of the depth and strictness of the form language in every department; for each individual belonging to it, it consists — as his personal Culture, religious, ethical, social, artistic — in a lifelong process of education and training for this life. And consequently in all great arts, in the great Churches, mysteries and orders, there is reached such a command of form as astonishes the human being himself, and ends by breaking itself under the stress of its own exigences — whereupon, in every Culture alike, there is set up (expressly or tacitly) the slogan of a “return to nature.” This maestria extends also to verbal language. Side by side with the social polish of the period of the Tyrannis or of the troubadours, with the fugues of Bach and the vase paintings of Exekias,²¹ we have the art of Attic oratory and that of French conversation, both presupposing, like any other art, a strict and carefully matured convention and a long and exacting training of the individual.

Metaphysically the significance of this separating off of a set language can hardly be overestimated. The daily practice of intercourse in settled forms, and the command of the entire waking consciousness through such forms — of which there is no longer a sensed process of formation ad hoc, but which are just simply there, and require understanding in the strictest sense of the word — lead to an ever sharper distinction between understanding and feeling within the waking consciousness. An incipient language is felt understandingly; the practice of speaking requires one, first, to feel the known speech medium and, secondly, to understand the intention put into it on thisoccasion. Consequently the kernel of all schooling lies in the acquisition of elements of knowledge. Every Church proclaims unhesitatingly that not feeling but knowledge leads into its ways of salvation; all true artistry rests on the sure knowledge of forms that the individual has not to discover, but to learn. “Understanding” is knowledge conceived of as a being. It is that which is completely alien to blood, race, time; from the opposition of rigid speech to coursing blood and developing history come the negative ideals of the absolute, the eternal, the universally valid — the ideals of Church and School.

But just this, in the last analysis, makes languages incomplete and leads to the eternal contradiction between what is in fact spoken and what was willed or meant by the speaking. We might indeed say that lies came into the world with the separation of speech from speaking. The signs are fixed, but not so their meaning — from the outset we feel that this is so, then we know it, and finally we turn our knowledge to account. It is an old, old, experience that when one wills to say something, the words “fail” one (versagen, mis-say); that one does not “express oneself aright” and in fact says something other than what was meant; that one may speak accurately and be understood inaccurately. And so finally we get to the art — which is widespread even amongst animals (e.g., cats) — of “using words to conceal thoughts.” One says not everything, one says something quite different, one speaks formally about nothing, one talks briskly to cover the fact that one has said something. Or one imitates the speech of another. The red-backed shrike (Lanius collurio) imitates the strophes of small songbirds in order to lure them. This is a well known hunter’s dodge, but here again established motives and signs are precedent for it, just as much as they are a condition for the faking in antiques or the forgery of a signature. And all these traits, met with in attitude and mien as in handwriting and verbal utterance, reappear in the language of every religion, every art, every society — we need only refer to the ideas expressed by the words “hypocrite,” “orthodox,” “heretic,” the English “cant,” the secondary senses of “diplomat,” “Jesuit,” “actor,” the masks and warinesses of polite society, and the painting of today, in which nothing is honest more and which in every gallery offers the eye untruth in every imaginable form.

In a language that one stammers, one cannot be a diplomat. But in the real command of a language there is the danger that the relation between the means and the meaning may be made into a new means. There arises an intellectual art of playing with expression, practiced by the Alexandrines and the Romantics — by Theocritus and Brentano in lyric poetry, by Reger in music, by Kierkegaard in religion.

Finally, speech and truth exclude one another.²² And in fact this is just what brings up, in the age of fixed language, the typical “judge of men,” who is all race and knows how to take the being that is speaking. To look a man keenly in the eyes, to size up the speaker behind the stump speech or the philosophical discourse, to know behind the prayer the heart, and behind the common good tone the more intimate levels of social importance — and that instantaneously, immediately, and with the self-evident certainty that characterizes everything cosmic — that is what is lacking to the real Taboo man, for whom one language at any rate carries conviction. A priest who is also a diplomat cannot be genuinely a priest. An ethical philosopher of the Kant stamp is never a “judge of men.”

The man who lies in his verbal utterances betrays himself, without observing it, in his demeanor. One who uses demeanor to dissimulate with betrays himself in his tone. It is precisely because rigid speech separates means and intent that it never carries it off with the keen appraiser. The adept reads between the lines and understands a man as soon as he sees his walk or his handwriting. The deeper and more intimate a spiritual communion, the more readily it dispenses with signs and linkages through waking consciousness. A real comradeship makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is silent altogether. The purest symbol of an understanding that has again got beyond language is the old peasant couple sitting in the evening in front of their cottage and entertaining one another without a word’s being passed, each knowing what the other is thinking and feeling. Words would only disturb the harmony. From such a state of reciprocal understanding something or other reaches back, far beyond the collective existence of the higher animal world, deep in the primeval history of free moving life. Here deliverance from the waking consciousness is, at moments, very nearly achieved.

V

Of all the signs that have come to be fixed, none has led to greater consequences than that which in its present state we call “word.” It belongs, no doubt, to the purely human history of speech, but nevertheless the idea, or at any rate the conventional idea, of an “origin” of verbal language is as meaningless and barren as that of a zero point for speech generally. A precise beginning is inconceivable for the latter because it is compresent with and contained in the essence of the microcosm, and for the former because it presupposes many fully developed kinds of communication speech and constitutes only one element — though in the end the dominant element — of a slow and quiet evolution. It is a fundamental error in all theories (however diametrically opposed to each other) like those of Wundt and of Jespersen²³ that they investigate speaking in words as if it were something new and self-contained, which inevitably leads them into a radically false psychology. In reality verbal language is a very late phenomenon, not a young shoot, but the last blossom borne by one of the ramifications of the parent stem of all vocal speeches.

In actuality a pure word speech does not exist. No one speaks without employing, in addition to the set vocabulary, quite other modes of speech, such as emphasis, rhythm, and facial play, which are much more primary than the language of the word, and with which, moreover, it has become completely intertwined. It is highly necessary, therefore, to avoid regarding the ensemble of present day word languages, with its extreme structural intricacy, as an inner unity with a homogeneous history. Every word language known to us has very different sides, and each of these sides has its own Destiny within the history of the whole. There is not one sense perception that would be wholly irrelevant to an adequate history of the use of words. Further, we must distinguish very strictly between vocal and verbal languages; the former is familiar even to the simpler genera of animals, the latter is in certain characters — individual characters, it is true, but all the more significant for that — a radically different thing. For every animal voice language, further, expression motives (a roar of anger) and communication signs (a cry of warning) can be clearly distinguished, and doubtless the same may be said of the earliest words. But was it, then, as an expression or as a communication language that verbal language arose? Was it in quite primitive conditions, independent, more or less, of any and every visual language such as picture and gesture? To such questions we have no answer, since we have no inkling of what the pre-forms of the “word,” properly so called, were. Naive indeed is the philology which uses what we of today call “primitive” languages (in reality, incomplete pictures of very late language conditions) as premises for conclusions as to the origin of words and the Word. The word is in them an already established, highly developed, and self-evident means — i.e., precisely what anything “originally” is not.

There can be no doubt that the sign which made it possible for the future word language to detach itself from the general vocal speech of the animal world was that which I call “name” — a vocal image serving to denote a Something in the world-around, which was felt as a being, and by the act of naming became a numen. It is unnecessary to speculate as to how the first names came to be — no human speech accessible to us at this time of day gives us the least point d’appui here. But, contrary to the view of modern research, I consider that the decisive turn came not from a change of the throat formation or from a peculiarity of sound formation or from any other physiological factor — if any such changes ever took place at all, it would be the race side that they would affect — not even an increased capacity for self-expression by existing means, like, say, the transition from word to sentence (H. Paul²⁴), but a profound spiritual change. With the Name comes a new world outlook. And if speech in general is the child of fear, of the unfathomable terror that wells up when the waking consciousness is presented with the facts, that impels all creatures together in the longing to prove each other’s reality and proximity — then the first word, the Name, is a mighty leap upward. The Name grazes the meaning of consciousness and thesource of fear alike. The world is not merely existent, a secret is felt in it. Above and apart from the more ordinary objects of expression and communication language, man names that which is enigmatic. It is the beast that knows no enigmas. Man cannot think too solemnly, reverently, of this first name giving. It was not well always to speak the name, it should be kept secret, a dangerous power dwelt in it.With the name the step is taken from the everyday physical of the beast to the metaphysical of man. It was the greatest turning point in the history of the human soul. Our epistemology is accustomed to set speech and thought side by side, and it is quite right, if we take into consideration only the languages that are still accessible at the present day. But I believe that we can go much deeper than this and say that with the Name religion in the proper sense, definite religion in the midst of formless quasi-religious awe, came into being. Religion in this sense means religious thought. It is the new conception of the creative understanding emancipated from sensation. We say, in a very significant idiom, that we “reflect on,” “think over,” something. With the understanding of things named the formation of a higherworld, above all sensational existence, is begun — “higher” both according to obvious symbolism and in reference to the position of the head which man guesses (often with painful distinctness) to be the home of his thoughts. It gives to the primary feeling of fear both an object and a glimpse of liberation. On this religious first thought all the philosophical, scholarly, scientific thought of later times has been and remains dependent for its very deepest foundations.

These first names we have to think of as quite separate and individual elements in the stock of signs of a highly developed sound and gesture language, the richness of which we can no longer imagine, since these other means have come to be subordinate to the word languages, and their further developments have been in dependent connection therewith.²⁵ One thing, however, was assured when the name inaugurated the transformation and spiritualization of communication technique — the preeminence of the eye over the other sense organs. Man’s awakeness and awareness was in an illuminated space, his depth experience was a radiation outward towards light sources and light resistances, and he conceived of his ego as a middle point in the light. “Visible” or “invisible” was the alternative which governed the state of understanding in which the first names arose. Were the first numina, perhaps, things of the light world that were felt, heard, observed in their effects, but not seen? No doubt the group of names, like everything else that marks a turning point in the course of world happenings, must have developed both rapidly and powerfully. The entire light world, in which everything possesses the properties of position and duration in space, was — in the midst of what tensions of cause and effect, thing and property, object and subject! — very soon listed with innumerable names, and so anchored in the memory, for what we now call “memory” is the capacity of storing for the understanding, by means of the name, the named. Over the realm of understood visuals (Sehdinge) supervenes a more intellectual realm of namings, which shares with it the logical property of being purely extensive, disposed in polarity, and ruled by the causal principle. All word types like cases and pronouns and prepositions (which arise, of course, much later) have a causal or local meaning in respect of named units; adjectives, and verbs also, have frequently come into existence in pairs of opposites; often (as in the E’we languages of West Africa investigated by Westermann) the same word is pronounced low or high to denote for example great and small, far and near, passive and active.²⁶ Later these relics of gesture language pass completely into the word form,²⁷ as we see clearly, for example, in the Greek μακρός and μικρός and the u-sounds of Egyptian designations of suffering. It is the form of thinking in opposites which, starting from these antithetical word pairs, constitutes the foundation of all inorganic logic, and turns every scientific discovery of truths into a movement of conceptual contraries, of which the most universal instance is that of an old view and a new one being contrasted as “error” and “truth.”

The second great turning point was the use of grammar. Besides the name there was now the sentence, besides the verbal designation the verbal relation, and thereupon reflection — which is a thinking in word relations that follows from the perception of things for which word labels exist — became the decisive characteristic of man’s waking consciousness. The question whether the communication languages already contained effective “sentences” before the appearance of the genuine “name” is a difficult one. The sentence, in thepresent acceptation of the word, has indeed developed within these languages according to its own conditions and with its own phases, but nevertheless it postulates the prior existence of the name. Sentences as conceptual relations become possible only with the intellectual change that accompanied their birth. And we must assume further that within the highly developed wordless languages one character or trait after another, in the course of continuous practical use, was transformed into verbal form and as such fell into its place in an increasingly solid structure, the prime form of our present day languages. Thus the inner build of all verbal languages rests upon foundations of far older construction, and for its further development is not dependent upon the stock of words and its destiny.

It is in fact just the reverse. For with syntax the original group of individual names was transformed into a system of words, whose character was given, not by their proper, but by their grammatical significance. The name made its appearance as something novel and entirely self-contained. But word species arose as elements of the sentence, and thereafter the contents of waking consciousness streamed in overflowing profusion into this world of words, demanding to be labeled and represented in it, until finally even “all” became, in one shape or another, a word and available for the thought process.

Thenceforward the sentence is the decisive element — we speak in sentences and not words. Attempts to define the two have been frequent, but never successful. According to F.N. Finck, word formation is an analytical and sentence formation a synthetical activity of the mind, the first preceding the second. It is demonstrable that the same actuality received as impression is variously understood, and words, therefore, are definable from very different points of view.²⁸ But according to the usual definition, a sentence is the verbal expression of a thought, a symbol (says H. Paul) for the connection of several ideas in the soul of the speaker. It seems to me quite impossible to settle the nature of the sentence from its contents. The fact is simply that we call the relatively largest mechanical units employed “sentences” and the relatively smallest “words.” Over this range extends the validity of grammatical laws. But as soon as we pass from theory to practice, we see that language as currently used is no longer such a mechanism; it obeys not laws, but pulse. Thus a race character is involved, a priori, in the way in which the matter to be communicated is set in sentences. Sentences are not the same for Tacitus and Napoleon as for Cicero and Nietzsche. The Englishman orders his material syntactically in a different way from the German. Not the ideas and thoughts, but the thinking, the kind of life, the blood, determine in the primitive, Classical, Chinese, and Western speech communities the type of the sentence unit, and with it the mechanical relation of the word to the sentence. The boundary between grammar and syntax should be placed at the point where the mechanical of speech ceases and the organic of speaking begins — usages, custom, the physiognomy of the way that a man employs to express himself. The other boundary lies where the mechanical structure of the word passes into the organic factors of sound formation and expression. Even the children of immigrants can often be recognized by the way in which the English “th” is pronounced — a race trait of the land. Only that which lies between these limits is the “language,” properly so called, which has system, is a technical instrument, and can be invented, improved, changed, and worn out; enunciation and expression, on the contrary, adhere to the race. We recognize a person known to us, without seeing him, by his pronunciation, and not only that, but we can recognize a member of an alien race even if he speaks perfectly correct German. The great sound modifications, like the Old High German in Carolingian times and the Middle High German in the Late Gothic, have territorial frontiers and affect only the speaking of the language, not the inner form of sentence and word.

Words, I have just said, are the relatively smallest mechanical units in the sentence. There is probably nothing that is so characteristic of the thinking of a human species as the way in which these units are acquired by it. For the Bantu Negro a thing that he sees belongs first of all to a very large number of categories of comprehension. Correspondingly the word for it consists of a kernel or root and a number of monosyllabic prefixes. When he speaks of a woman in a field, his word is something like this: “living, one, big, old, female, outside, human”; this makes seven syllables, but it denotes a single, clearheaded, and to us quite alien act of comprehension.²⁹ There are languages in which the word is almost coextensive with the sentence.

The gradual replacement of bodily or sonic by grammatical gestures is thus the decisive factor in the formation of sentences, but it has never been completed. There are no purely verbal languages. The activity of speaking, in words, as it emerges more and more precise, consists in this, that through word sounds we awaken significance feelings, which in turn through the sound of the word connections evoke further relation feelings. Our schooling in speech trains us to understand in this abbreviated and indicative form not only light things and light relations, but also thought things and thought relations. Words are only named, not used definitively, and the hearer has to feel what the speaker means. This and this alone amounts to speech, and hence mien and tone play a much greater part than is generally admitted in the understanding of modern speech. Substantive signs may conceivably exist for many of the animals even, but verb signs never.

The last grand event in this history, which brings the formation of verbal speech more or less to a close, is the coming of the verb. This assumes at the outset a very high order of abstraction. For substantives are words whereby things sense defined in illuminated space³⁰ become evocable also in afterthought, while verbs describe types of change, which are not seen, but are extracted from the unendingly protean light world, by noting the special characters of the individual cases, and generating concepts from them. “Falling stone” is originally a unit impression, but we first separate movement and thing moved and then isolate falling as one kind of movement from innumerable other sorts and shades thereof — sinking, tottering, stumbling, slipping. We do not “see” the distinction, we “know” it. The difference between fleeing and running, or between flying and being wafted, altogether transcends the visual impression they produce and is only apprehensible by a word trained consciousness. But now, with this verb thinking, even life itself has become accessible to reflection. Out of the living impress made on the waking consciousness, out of the ambiance of the becoming (which gesture speech, being merely imitative, leaves unquestioned and unprobed) that which is life itself — namely, singularity of occurrence — is unconsciously eliminated, and the rest, as effect of a cause (the wind wafts, lightning flashes, the peasant plows), is put, under purely extensive descriptions, into suitable places in the sign system. One has to bury oneself completely in the solid definiteness of subject and predicate, active and passive, present and perfect, to perceive how entirely the understanding here masters the senses and unsouls actuality. In substantives one can still regard the mental thing (the idea) as a copy of the visual thing, but in the verb something inorganic has been put in place of something organic. The fact that we live — namely, that we at this instant perceive something — becomes eventually a property of the something perceived. In terms of word thought, the perceived endures — “is.” Thus, finally, are formed the categories of thought, graded according to what is and what is not natural to it; thus Time appears as a dimension, Destiny as a cause, the living as chemical or psychical mechanism. It is in this wise that the style of mathematical, judicial, and dogmatic thought arises.

And in this wise, too, arises that disunity which seems to us inseparable from the essence of man, but is really only the expression of the dominance of word language in his waking consciousness. This instrument of communication between Ego and Tu has, by reason of its perfection, fashioned out of the animal understanding of sensation, a thinking in words which stands proxy for sensation. Subtle thinking — “splitting hairs,” as it is called — is conversing with oneself in word significances. It is the activity that no kind of language but the language of words can subserve, and it becomes, with the perfection of the language, distinctive of the life habit of whole classes of human beings. The divorce of speech, rigid and devitalized, from speaking, which makes it impossible to include the whole truth in a verbal utterance, has particularly far reaching consequences in the sign system of words. Abstract thinking consists in the use of a finite word framework into which it is sought to squeeze the whole infinite content of life. Concepts kill Being and falsify Waking being. Long ago in the springtime of language history, while understanding had still to struggle in order to hold its own with sensation, this mechanization was without importance for life. But now, from a being who occasionally thought, man has become a thinking being, and it is the ideal of every thought system to subject life, once and for all, to the domination of intellect. This is achieved in theory by according validity only to the known and branding the actual as a sham and a delusion. It is achieved in practice by forcing the voices of the blood to be silent in the presence of universal ethical principles.³¹

Both, logic and ethics alike, are systems of absolute and eternal truths for the intellect, and correspondingly untruths for history. However completely the inner eye may triumph over the outer in the domain of thought, in the realm of facts the belief in eternal truths is a petty and absurd stage play that exists only in the heads of individuals. A true system of thoughts emphatically cannot exist, for no sign can replace actuality. Profound and honest thinkers are always brought to the conclusion that all cognition is conditioned a priori by its own form and can never reach that which the words mean — apart, again, from the case of technics, in which the concepts are instruments and not aims in themselves. And this ignorabimus is in conformity also with the intuition of every true sage, that abstract principles of life are acceptable only as figures of speech, trite maxims of daily use underneath which life flows, as it has always flowed, onward. Race, in the end, is stronger than languages, and thus it is that, under all the great names, it has been thinkers — who are personalities — and not systems — which are mutable — that have taken effect upon life.

VI

So far, then, the inner history of word languages shows three stages. In the first there appears, within highly developed but wordless communication languages, the first names — units in a new sort of understanding. The world awakens as a secret, and religious thought begins. In the second stage, a complete communication speech is gradually transformed into grammatical values. The gesture becomes the sentence, and the sentence transforms the names into words. Further, the sentence becomes the great school of understanding vis-à-vissensation, and an increasingly subtle significance feeling for abstract relations within the mechanism of the sentence evokes an immense profusion of inflexions, which attach themselves especially to the substantive and the verb, the space word and the time word. This is the blossoming time of grammar, the period of which we may probably (though under all reserves) take as the two millennia preceding the birth of the Egyptian and Babylonian Culture. The third stage is marked by a rapid decay of inflexions and a simultaneous replacement of grammar by syntax. The intellectualization of man’s waking consciousness has now proceeded so far that he no longer needs the sense props of inflexion and, discarding the old luxuriance of word forms, communicates freely and surely by means of the faintest nuances of idiom (particles, position of words, rhythm). By dint of speaking in words, the understanding has attained supremacy over the waking consciousness, and today it is in process of liberating itself from the restrictions of sensible verbal machinery and working towards pure mechanics of the intellect. Minds and not senses are making the contact.

In this third stage of linguistic history, which as such takes place in the biological plane and therefore belongs to man as a type, the history of the higher Cultures now intervenes with an entirely new speech, the speech of the distance — writing — an invention of such inward forcefulness that again there is a sudden decisive turn in the destinies of the word languages.

The written language of Egypt is already by 3000 in a state of rapid grammatical decomposition; likewise the Sumerian literary languages called eme-sal (women’s language). The written language of China — which vis-à-vis the vernaculars of the Chinese world has long formed a language apart — is, even in the oldest known texts, so entirely inflectionless that only recent research has established that it ever had inflections at all.³² The Indogermanic system is known to us only in a state of complete breakdown. Of the Case in Old Vedic (about 1500 B.C.) the Classical languages a thousand years later retained only fragments.³³ From Alexander the Great’s time the dual disappeared from the declension of ordinary Hellenistic Greek, and the passive vanished from the conjugation entirely. The Western languages, although of the most miscellaneous provenance imaginable — the Germanic from primitive and the Romanic from highly civilized stock — modify in the same direction, the Romanic cases having become reduced to one, and the English, after the Reformation, to zero. Ordinary German definitely shed the genitive at the beginning of the nineteenth century and is now in process of abolishing the dative. Only after trying to translate a piece of difficult and pregnant prose — say of Tacitus or Mommsen — “back”³⁴ into some very ancient language rich in inflexions does one realize how meantime the technique of signs has vaporized into a technique of thoughts, which now only needs to employ the signs — abbreviated, but replete with meaning — merely as the counters in a game that only the initiates of the particular speech communion understand. This is why to a west European, the sacred Chinese texts must always be in the fullest sense a sealed book; but the same holds good also for the primary words of every other Culture language — the Greekλογός and ἀρχή, the Sanskrit Atman and Braman — indications of the world outlook of their respective Cultures that no one not bred in the Culture can comprehend.

The external history of languages is as good as lost to us in just its most important parts. Its springtime lies deep in the primitive era, in which (to repeat what has been said earlier), we have to imagine “humanity” in the form of scattered and quite small troops, lost in the wide spaces of the earth. A spiritual change came when reciprocal contacts became habitual (and eventually natural) to them, but correspondingly there can be no doubt that this contact was first sought for and then regulated, or fended off, by means of speech, and that it was the impression of an earth filled with men that first brought the waking consciousness to the point of tense intelligent shrewdness, forcing verbal language under pressure to the surface. So that, perhaps, the birth of grammar is connected with the race hallmark of the grand Number.

Since then, no other grammatical system has ever come into existence, but only novel derivatives of what was already there. Of theseauthentic primitive languages and their structure and sound we know nothing. As far as our backward look takes us, we see only complete and developed linguistic systems, used by everyone, learned by every child, as something perfectly natural. And we find it more than difficult to imagine that once upon a time things may have been different, that perhaps a shudder of fear accompanied the hearing of such strange and enigmatic language — an awe like that which in historic times has been and still is excited by script. And yet we have to reckon with the possibility that at one time, in a world of wordless communication, verbal language constituted an aristocratic privilege, a jealously preserved class secret. We have a thousand examples — the diplomats with their French, the scholars with their Latin, the priests with their Sanskrit — to suggest that there may have been such a tendency. It is part of the thoroughbred’s pride to be able to speak to one another in a way that outsiders cannot understand — a language for everybody is a vernacular. To be “on conversational terms with” someone is a privilege or a pretension. So, too, the use of literary language in talking with educated people, and contempt for dialect, mark the true bourgeois pride. It is only we who live in a Civilization wherein it is just as normal for children to learn to write as to learn to walk — in all earlier Cultures it was a rare accomplishment, to which few could aspire. And I am convinced that it was just so once with verbal language.

The tempo of linguistic history is immensely rapid; here a mere century signifies a great deal. I may refer again to the gesture language of the North Indians, which became necessary because the rapidity of changes in the tribal dialects made intertribal understanding impossible otherwise. Compare, too, the Latin of the recently discovered Forum inscription³⁵ (about 500) with the Latin of Plautus (about 100) and this again with the Latin of Cicero (about 50). If we assume that the oldest Vedic texts have preserved the linguistic state of 1200 B.C., then even that of 2000 may have differed from it far more completely than any Indogermanic philologists working by a posteriori methods can even surmise.³⁶ But allegro changes to lento in the moment when script, the language of duration, intervenes and ties down and immobilizes the systems at entirely different age levels. This is what makes this evolution so opaque to research; all that we possess is remains of written languages. Of the Egyptian and Babylonian linguistic world we do possess originals from as far back as 3000, but the oldest Indogermanic relics are copies, of which the linguistic state is much younger than the contents.

Very various, under all these determinants, have been the destinies of the different grammars and vocabularies. The first attaches to the intellect, the second to things and places. Only grammatical systems are subject to natural inward change. The use of words, on the contrary, psychologically presupposes that, although the expression may change, inner mechanical structure is maintained (and all the more firmly) as being the basis on which denomination essentially rests. The great linguistic families are purely grammatical families. The words in them are more or less homeless and wander from one to another. It is a fundamental error in philological (especially Indogermanic) research that grammar and vocabulary are treated as a unit. All specialist vocabularies — the jargon of hunter, soldier, sportsman, seaman, savant — are in reality only stocks of words, and can be used within any and every grammatical system. The semi-Classical vocabulary of chemistry, the French of diplomacy, and the English of the racecourse have become naturalized in all modern languages alike. We may talk of “alien” words, but the same could have been said at some time or other of most of the “roots,” so called, in all the old languages. All names adhere to the things that they denote, and share their history. In Greek the names for metals are of alien provenance; words like ταῦρος, χιτῶν, οῖνος are Semitic. Indian numerals are found in the Hittite texts of Boghaz Keui,³⁷ and the contexts in which they occur are technical expressions which came into the country with horse breeding. Latin administrative terms invaded the Greek East,³⁸ German invaded Petrine Russia in multitudes, Arabic words permeate the vocabulary of Western mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy. The Normans, themselves Germanic, inundated English with French words. Banking, in German speaking regions, is full of Italian expressions,³⁹ and similarly and to a far greater extent masses of designations relating to agriculture and cattle breeding, to metals and weapons, and in general to all transactions of handicraft, barter, and intertribal law, must have migrated from one language to another, just as geographical nomenclature always passed into the proper vocabulary of the dominant language, with the result that Greek contains numerous Carian and German Celtic place names. It is no exaggeration to say that the more widely an Indogermanic word is distributed, the younger it is, the more likely it is to be an “alien” word. It is precisely the very oldest names that are hoarded as private possessions. Latin and Greek have only quite young words in common. Or do “telephone,” “gas,” “automobile,” belong to the word stock of the “primitive” people? Suppose, for the sake of argument that three-fourths of the Aryan “primitive” words came from the Egyptian or the Babylonian vocabularies of the third millennium; we should not find a trace of the fact in Sanskrit after a thousand years of unwritten development, for even in German thousands of Latin loan words have long ago become completely unrecognizable. The ending “-ette” in “Henriette” is Etruscan — how many genuine Aryan and genuine Semitic endings, not withstanding their thoroughly alien origin, defy us to prove them intruders? What is the explanation of the astounding similarity of many words in the Australian and the Indogermanic languages?

The Indogermanic system is certainly the youngest, and therefore the most intellectual. The languages derived from it rule the earth today, but did it really exist at all in 2000 as a specific grammatical edifice? As is well known, a single initial form for Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic is nowadays assumed as probable. The oldest Indian texts preserve the linguistic conditions of (probably) before 1200, the oldest Greek those of (probably) 700. But Indian personal and divine names occur in Syria and Palestine,⁴⁰ simultaneously with the horse, at a much later date, the bearers of these names being apparently first soldiers of fortune and afterwards potentates.⁴¹ May it be that about 1600 these land Vikings, these first Reiter — men grown up inseparable from their horses, the terrifying originals of the Centaur legend — established themselves more or less everywhere in the Northern plains as adventurer chiefs, bringing with them the speech and divinities of the Indian feudal age? And the same with the Aryan aristocratic ideals of breed and conduct. According to what has been said above on race, this would explain the race ideal of Aryan speaking regions without any necessity for “migrations” of a “primitive” folk. After all, it was in this way that the knightly Crusaders founded their states in the East — and in exactly the same locality as the heroes with Mitanni names had done so twenty-five hundred years before.

Or was this system of about 3000 merely an unimportant dialect of a language that is lost? The Romanic language family about A.D. 1600 dominated all the seas. About 400 B.C. the “original” language on the Tiber possessed a domain of little more than a thousand square miles. It is certain that the geographical picture of the grammatical families at about 4000 was still very variegated. The Semitic-Hamitic-Aryan group (if it ever did form a unit) can hardly have been of much importance at that time. We stumble at every turn upon the relics of old speech families — Etruscan, Basque, Sumerian, Ligurian, the ancient tongues of Asia Minor, and others — that in their day must have belonged to very extensive systems. In the archives of Boghaz Keüi eight new languages have so far been identified, all of them in use about the year 1000. With the then prevailing tempo of modification, Aryan may in 2000 have formed a unit with languages that we should never dream of associating with it.

VII

Writing is an entirely new kind of language, and implies a complete change in the relations of man’s waking consciousness, in that it liberates it from the tyranny of the present. Picture languages which portray objects are far older, older probably than any words; but here the picture is no longer an immediate denotation of some sight object, but primarily the sign of a word — i.e., something already abstract from sensation. It is the first and only example of a language that demands, without itself providing, the necessary preparatory training.

Script, therefore, presupposes a fully developed grammar, since the activity of writing and reading is infinitely more abstract than that of speaking and hearing. Reading consists in scanning a script image with a feeling of the significances of corresponding word sounds; what script contains is not signs for things, but signs for other signs. The grammatical sense must be enlarged by instantaneous comprehension.

The word is a possession of man generally, whereas writing belongs exclusively to Culture men. In contrast to verbal language it is conditioned, not merely partially, but entirely, by the political and religious Destinies of world history. All scripts come into being in theindividual Cultures and are to be reckoned amongst their profoundest symbols. But hitherto a comprehensive history of script has never been produced, and a psychology of its forms and their modifications has never even been attempted. Writing is the grand symbol of the Far, meaning not only extension distance, but also, and above all, duration and future and the will-to-eternity. Speaking and listening take place only in proximity and the present,⁴² but through script one speaks to men whom one has never seen, who may not even have been born yet; the voice of a man is heard centuries after he has passed away. It is one of the first distinguishing marks of the historicalendowment. But for that very reason nothing is more characteristic of a Culture than its inward relation to writing. If we know as little as we do about Indogermanic, it is because the two earliest Cultures whose people made use of this system — the Indian and the Classical — were so ahistoric in disposition that they not only formed no script of their own, but even fought off alien scripts until well into the Late period of their course. Actually, the whole art of Classical prose is designed immediately for the ear. One reads it as if one were speaking, whereas we, by comparison, speak every thing as though we were reading it — with the result that in the eternal seesaw between script image and word sound we have never attained to a prose style that is perfect in the Attic sense. In the Arabian Culture, on the other hand, each religion developed its own script and kept it even through changes of verbal language; the duration of the sacred books and teachings and the script as symbol of duration belong together. The oldest evidences of alphabetical script are found in southern Arabia in the Minaean and Sabaean scripts — differentiated, without doubt, according to sect — which probably go back to the tenth century before Christ.⁴³ The Jews, Mandaeans, and Manichaeans in Babylonia spoke Eastern Aramaic, but all of them had scripts of their own. From the Abbassid period onward Arabic ruled, but Christians and Jews wrote it in their own characters.⁴⁴ Islam spread the Arabic script universally amongst its adherents, irrespective of whether their spoken language was Semitic, Mongolian, Aryan, or a Negro tongue.⁴⁵ The growth of the writing habit brings with it, everywhere and inevitably, the distinction between the written and the colloquial languages. The written language brings the symbolism of duration to bear upon its own grammatical condition, which itself yields only slowly and reluctantly to the progressive modifications of the colloquial language — the latter, therefore, always representing at any given moment a younger condition. There is not one Hellenic κοινή, but two,⁴⁶ and the immense distance between the written and the living Latin of Imperial times is sufficiently evidenced in the structure of the early Romance languages.⁴⁷ The older a Civilization becomes, the more abrupt is the distinction, until we have the gap that today separates written Chinese from Kuan-Chua, the spoken language of educated North Chinese — a matter no longer of two dialects but of two reciprocally alien languages.

Here, it should be observed, we have direct expression of the fact that writing is above everything a matter of status, and more particularly an ancient privilege of priesthood. The peasantry is without history and therefore without writing. But, even apart from this, there is in Race an unmistakable antipathy to script. It is, I think, a fact of the highest importance to graphology that the more the writer has race (breed), the more cavalierly he treats the ornamental structure of the letters, and the more ready he is to replace this by personal line pictures. Only the Taboo man evidences a certain respect for the proper forms of the letters and ever, if unconsciously, tries to reproduce them. It is the distinction between the man of action, who makes history, and the scholar, who merely puts it down on paper, “eternalizes” it. In all Cultures the script is in the keeping of the priesthood, in which class we have to count also the poet and the scholars. The nobility despises writing; it has people to write for it. From the remotest times this activity has had something intellectual-sacerdotal about it. Timeless truths came to be such, not at all through speech, but only when there came to be script for them. It is the opposition of castle and cathedral over again: which shall endure, deed or truth? The archivist’s “sources” preserve facts, the holy scripture, truths. What chronicles and documents mean in the first named, exegesis and library mean in the second. And thus there is something besides cult architecture that is not decorated with, ornament, but is ornament — the book. The art history of all Cultural springtimes ought to begin with the script, and the cursive script even before the monumental. Here we can observe the essence of the Gothic style, or of the Magian, at its purest. No other ornament possesses the inwardness of a letter shape or a manuscript page; nowhere else is arabesque as perfect as it is in the Koran texts on the walls of a mosque. And, then, the great art of initials, the architecture of the marginal picture, the plastic of the covers! In a Koran in the Kufi script every page has the effect of a piece of tapestry. A Gothic book of the Gospels is, as it were, a little cathedral. As for Classical art, it is very significant that the one thing that it did not beautify with its touch was the script and the book roll — an exception founded in its steady hatred of that which endures, the contempt for a technique which insists on being more than a technique. Neither in Hellas nor in India do we find an art of monumental inscription as in Egypt. It does not seem to have occurred to anybody that a sheet of handwriting of Plato was a relic, or that a fine edition of the dramas of Sophocles ought to be treasured up in the Acropolis.

As the city lifted up its head over the countryside, as the burgher joined the noble and the priest and the urban spirit aspired to supremacy, writing, from being a herald of nobles’ fame and of eternal truths, became a means of commercial and scientific intercourse. The Indian and the Classical Cultures rejected the pretension and met the working requirement by importation from abroad; it was as a humble tool of everyday use that alphabetical script slowly won their acceptance. With this event rank, as contemporaneous and like in significance, the introduction into China of the phonetic script about 800, and the discovery of book printing in the West in the fifteenth century; the symbol of duration and distance was reinforced in the highest degree by making it accessible to the large number. Finally the Civilizations took the last step and brought their scripts into utilitarian form. As we have seen, the discovery of alphabetical script in the Egyptian Civilization, about 2000, was a purely technical innovation. In the same way Li Si, Chancellor to the Chinese Augustus, introduced the Chinese standard script in 227. And lastly, amongst ourselves — though as yet few of us have appreciated the real significance of the fact — a new kind of writing has appeared. That Egyptian alphabetic script is in no wise a final and perfected thing is proved by the discovery of its fellow, our stenography, which means no mere shortening of writing, but the overcoming of the alphabetic script by a new and highly abstract mode of communication. It is not impossible, indeed, that in the course of the next centuries script forms of the shorthand kind may displace letters completely.

VIII

May the attempt be made, thus early, to write a morphology of the Culture languages? Certainly, science has not as yet even discovered that there is such a task. Culture languages are languages of historical men. Their Destiny accomplishes itself not in biological spaces of time, but in step with the organic evolution of strictly limited lifetimes. Culture languages are historical languages, which means, primarily, that there is no historical event and no political institution that will not have been determined in part by the spirit of the language employed in it and, conversely, that will not have its influence upon the spiritual form of that language. The build of the Latin sentence is yet another consequence of Rome’s battles, which in giving her conquests compelled the nation as a whole to think administratively; German prose bears traces even today of the Thirty Years’ War in its want of established norms, and early Christian dogma would have acquired a different shape if the oldest Scriptures, instead of being one and all written in Greek, and been set down in Syriac form like those of the Mandaeans. But secondarily it means that world history is dependent — to a degree that students have hitherto scarcely imagined — upon the existence of script as the essentially historical means of communication. The State (in the higher sense of the word) presupposes intercourse by writing; the style of all politics is determined absolutely by the significance that the politico-historical thought of the nation attaches in each instance to charters and archives, to signatures, to the products of the publicist; the battle of legislation is a fight for or against a written law; constitutions replace material force by the composition of paragraphs and elevate a piece of writing to the dignity of a weapon. Speech belongs with the present, and writing with duration, but equally, oral understanding pairs with practical experience, and writing with theoretical thought. The bulk of the inner political history of all Late periods can be traced back to this opposition. The ever varying facts resist the “letter,” while truths demand it — that is the world historical opposition of two parties that in one form or another is met with in the great crises of all Cultures. The one lives in actuality, the other flourishes a text in its face; all great revolutions presuppose a literature.

The group of Western Culture languages appeared in the tenth century. The available bodies of language — namely, the Germanic and Romance dialects (monkish Latin included) — were developed into script languages under a single spiritual influence. It is impossiblethat there should not be a common character in the development of German, English, Italian, French, and Spanish from 900 to 1900, as also in the history of the Hellenic and Italic (Etruscan included) between 1100 and the Empire. But what is it that, irrespective of the area of extension of language families or races, acquires specific unity from the landscape limit of the Culture alone? What modifications have Hellenistic and Latin in common after 300 — in pronunciation and idiom, metrically, grammatically, and stylistically? What is present in German and Italian after 1000, but not in Italian and Rumanian? These and similar questions have never yet been systematically investigated.

Every Culture at its awakening finds itself in the presence of peasant languages, speeches of the cityless countryside, “everlasting,” and almost unconcerned with the great events of history, which have gone on through late Culture and Civilization as unwritten dialects and slowly undergone imperceptible changes. On the top of this now the language of the two primary Estates raises itself as the first manifestation of a waking relation that has Culture, that is Culture. Here, in the ring of nobility and priesthood, languages become Culture languages, and, more particularly, talk belongs with the castle, and speech to the cathedral. And thus on the very threshold of evolution the plantlike separates itself from the animal, the destiny of the living from the destiny of the dead, that of the organic side from that of the mechanical side of understanding. For the Totem side affirms and the Taboo side denies, blood and Time. Everywhere we meet, and very early indeed, rigid cult languages whose sanctity is guaranteed by their inalterability, systems long dead, or alien to life and artificially fettered, which have the strict vocabulary that the formulation of eternal truths requires. Old Vedic stiffened as a religious language, and with it Sanskrit as a savant language. The Egyptian of the Old Kingdom was perpetuated as priests’ language, so that in the New Empire sacred formulas were no more understandable than the Carmen Saliare and the hymn of the Fratres Arvales in Augustan times.⁴⁸ In the Arabian pre-Cutural period Babylonian, Hebrew, and Avestan simultaneously went out of use as workaday languages — probably in the second century before Christ — indeed on that very account Jews and Persians used them in their Scriptures as in opposition to Aramaic and Pehlevi. The same significance attached to Gothic Latin for the Church, Humanists’ Latin for the learning of the Baroque, Church Slavonic in Russia, and no doubt Sumerian in Babylonia.

In contrast with this, the nursery of talk is in the early castles and palaces of assize. Here the living Culture languages have been formed. Talk is the custom of speech, its manners — “good form” in the intonation and idiom, fine tact in choice of words and mode of expression. All these things are a mark of race; they are learned not in the monastery cell or the scholar’s study, but in polite intercourse and from living examples. In noble society, and as a hallmark of nobility, the language of Homer,⁴⁹ as also the old French of the Crusades and the Middle High German of the Hohenstaufen, were erected out of the ordinary talk of the countryside. When we speak of the great epic poets, the Skalds, the Troubadours, as creators of language, we must not forget that they began by being trained for their task, in language as in other things, by moving in noble circles. The great art by which the Culture finds its tongue is the achievement of a race and not that of a craft.

The clerical language on the other hand starts from concepts and conclusions. It labors to improve the dialectical capacities of the words and sentence forms to the maximum. There sets in, consequently, an ever increasing differentiation of scholastic and courtly, of the idiom of intellectual from that of social intercourse. Beyond all divisions of language families there is a component common to the expression of Plotinus and Thomas Aquinas, of Veda and Mishna. Here we have the starting point of all the ripe scholar languages of the West — which, German and English and French alike, bear to this day the unmistakable signs of their origin in scholars’ Latin — and, therefore, the starting point of all the apparatus of technical expression and logical sentence form. This opposition between the modes of understanding of “Society” and of Science renews itself again and again till far into the Late period. The center of gravity in the history of French was decisively on the side of race; i.e., of talk. At the Court of Versailles, in the salons of Paris, the esprit précieux of the Arthurian romances evolves into the “conversation,” the classical art of talk, whose dictature the whole West acknowledges. The fact that Ionic-Attic, too, was fashioned entirely in the halls of the tyrants and in symposia created great difficulties for Greek philosophy: for later on, it was almost impossible to discuss the syllogism in the language of Alcibiades. On the other hand, German prose, in the decisive phase of Baroque, had no central point on which it could rise to excellence, and so even today it oscillates in point of style between French and Latin — courtly and scholarly — according as the author’s intuition is to express himself well or accurately. Our Classical writers, thanks to their linguistic origin in office or study and their stay as tutors in the castles and the little courts, arrived indeed at personal styles, and others are able to imitate these styles, but a specifically German prose, standard for all, they were unable to create.

To these two class languages the rise of the city added a third, the language of the bourgeoisie, which is the true script speech, reasoned and utilitarian, prose in the strictest sense of the word. It swings gently between the expression modes of elegant society and of learning, in the one direction thinking forever of new turns and words à la mode, in the other keeping sturdy hold on its existing stock of ideas. But in its inner essence it is of a mercantile nature. It feels itself frankly as a class badge vis-à-vis the historyless changeless phrasing of the “people” which Luther and others employed, to the great scandal of their superficial contemporaries. With the final victory of the city the urban speech absorbs into itself that of elegance and that of learning. There arises in the upper strata of megalopolitan populations the uniform, keenly intelligent, practical κοινή, the child and symbol of its Civilization, equally averse from dialect and poetry — something perfectly mechanical, precise, cold, leaving as little as possible to gesture. These final homeless and rootless languages can be learned by every trader and porter — Hellenistic in Carthage and on the Oxus, Chinese in Java, English in Shanghai — and for their comprehension talk has no importance or meaning. And if we inquire what really created these languages, we find not the spirit of a race or of a religion, but the spirit of economics.

CHAPTER VI

CITIES AND PEOPLES

(C) PRIMITIVES, CULTURE PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN

I

Now at last it is possible to approach — if with extreme precaution — the conception “people” and to bring order into that chaos of people forms that the historical research of the present day has only succeeded in making worse confounded than before. There is no word that has been used more freely and more utterly uncritically, yet none that calls for a stricter critique, than this. Very careful historians, even, after going to much trouble to clear their theoretical basis (up to a point) slide back thereafter into treating peoples, race parts, and speech communities as completely equivalent. If they find the name of a people, it counts without more ado as the designation of a language as well. If they discover an inscription of three words, they believe they have established a racial connection. If a few “roots” correspond, the curtain rises at once on a primitive people with a primitive habitat in the background. And the modern nationalist spirit has only enhanced this “thinking in terms of peoples.”

But is it the Hellenes, the Dorians, or the Spartans that are a people? If the Romans were a people, what are we to say about the Latins? And what kind of a unit within the population of Italy at c. 400 do we mean by the name “Etruscan?” Has not their “nationality,” like that of Basques and Thracians, been made actually to depend upon the build of their language? What ethnic idea underlies the words “American,” “Swiss,” “Jew,” “Boer”? Blood, speech, faith, State, landscape — what in all these is determinative in the formation of a people? In general, relationships of blood and language are determined only by way of scholarship, and the ordinary individual is perfectly unconscious of them. “Indogermanic” is purely and simply a scientific, more particularly a philological, concept. The attempt of Alexander the Great to fuse Greeks and Persians together was a complete failure, and we have recently had experience of the real strength of Anglo-German community of feeling. But “people” is a linkage of which one is conscious. In ordinary usage, one designates as one’s “people” — and with feeling — that community, out of the many to which one belongs, which inwardly stands nearest to one.¹ And then he extends the use of this concept, which is really quite particular and derived from personal experience, to collectivities of the most varied kinds. For Caesar the Arverni were a “civitas” for us the Chinese are a “nation.” On this basis, it was the Athenians and not the Greeks who constituted a nation, and in fact there were only a few individuals who, like Isocrates, felt themselves primarily as Hellenes. On this basis, one of two brothers may call himself a Swiss and the other, with equal right, a German. These are not philosophical concepts, but historical facts. A people is an aggregate of men which feels itself a unit. The Spartiates² felt themselves a people in thissense; the “Dorians” of 1100, too, probably, but those of 400 certainly not. The Crusaders became genuinely a people in taking the oath of Clermont; the Mormons in their expulsion from Missouri, in 1839;³ the Mamertines⁴ by their need of winning for themselves a stronghold of refuge.⁵ Was the formative principle very different with the Jacobins and Hyksos? How many peoples may have originated in a chief’s following or a band of fugitives? Such a group can change race, like the Osmanli, who appeared in Asia Minor as Mongols; or language, like the Sicilian Normans; or name, like Achseans and Danaoi. So long as the common feeling is there, the people as such is there. We have to distinguish the destiny of a people from its name. The latter is often the only thing about which information remains to us; but can we fairly conclude from a name anything about the history, the descent, the language, or even merely the identity of those who bore it? Here again the historical researcher is to blame, in that, whatever his theory may have been, he has in practice treated the relation between name and bearer as simply as he would treat, say, the personal names of today. Have we any conception of the number of unexplored possibilities in this field? To begin with, the very act of name giving is of enormous importance in early associations. For with a name the human group consciously sets itself up with a sort of sacral dignity. But, here, cult and war names may exist side by side; others the land or the heritage may provide; the tribal name may be exchanged for that of an eponymous hero, as with the Osmanli;⁶ lastly, an unlimited number of alien names can be applied along the frontiers of a group without more than a part of the community ever hearing them at all. If only such names as these be handed down, it becomes practically inevitable that conclusions about the bearers of them will be wrong. The indubitably sacral names of Franks, Alemanni, and Saxons have superseded a host of names of the period of the Varus battle — but if we did not happen to know this, we should long ago have been convinced that an expulsion or annihilation of old tribes by new intruders had taken place here. The names “Romans” and “Quirites,” “Spartans” and “Lacedaemonians,” “Carthaginian” and “Punic” have endured side by side — here again there was a risk of supposing two peoples instead of one. In what relation the names “Pelasgi,” “Achaeans,” “Danai,” stand to one another we shall never learn, and had we nothing more than these names, the scholar would long ago have assigned to each a separate people, complete with language and racial affinities. Has it not been attempted to draw from the regional designation “Doric” conclusions as to the course of the Dorian migration? How often may a people have adopted a land name and taken it along with them? This is the case with the modern Prussians, but also with the modern Parsees, Jews, and Turks, while the opposite is the case in Burgundy and Normandy. The name “Hellenes” arose about 650, and, therefore, cannot be connected with any movement of population. Lorraine (Lothringen) received the name of a perfectly unimportant prince, and that, in connection with the decision of a heritage and not a folk migration. Paris called the Germans Allemands in 1814, Prussians in 1870, Boches in 1914 — in other circumstances three distinct peoples might have been supposed to be covered by these names. The West European is called in the East a Frank, the Jew a Spaniole — the fact is readily explained by historical circumstances, but what would a philologist have produced from the words alone?

It is not to be imagined at what results the scholars of A.D. 3000 might arrive if they worked by present day methods on names, linguistic remains, and the notion of original homes and migration. For example, the Teutonic Knights about 1300 drove out the heathen “Prussians,” and in 1870 these people suddenly appear on their wanderings at the gates of Paris! The Romans, pressed by the Goths, emigrate from the Tiber to the lower Danube! Or a part of them perhaps settled in Poland, where Latin was spoken? Charlemagne on the Weser defeated the Saxons, who thereupon emigrated to the neighborhood of Dresden, their places being taken by the Hanoverians, whose original settlement, according to the dynasty name, was on the Thames! The historian who writes down the history of names instead of that of peoples, forgets that names, too, have their destinies. So also languages, which, with their migrations, modifications, victories, and defeats, are inconclusive even as to the existence of peoples associated with them. This is the basic error of Indogermanic research in particular. If in historic times the names “Pfalz” and “Calabria” have moved about, if Hebrew has been driven from Palestine to Warsaw, and Persian from the Tigris to India, what conclusions can be drawn from the history of the Etruscan name and the alleged “Tyrsenian” inscription at Lemnos?⁷ Or did the French and the Haitian Negroes, as shown by their common language, once form a single primitive people? In the region between Budapest and Constantinople today two Mongolian, one Semitic, two Classical, and three Slavonic languages are spoken, and these speech communities all feel themselves essentially as peoples.⁸ If we were to build up a migration story here, the error of the method would be manifested in some singular results. “Doric” is a dialect designation — that we know, and that is all we know. No doubt some few dialects of this group spread rapidly, but that is no proof of the spread or even of the existence of a human stock belonging with it.⁹

II

Thus we come to the pet idea of modern historical thought. If a historian meets a people that has achieved something, he feels that he owes it to these people to answer the question: Whence did it come? It is a matter of dignity for a people to have come from somewhere and to have an original home. The notion that it is at home in the place where we find it is almost an insulting assumption. Wandering is a cherished saga motive of primitive mankind, but its employment in serious research also has become a sheer mania. Whether the Chinese invaded China or the Egyptians Egypt no one inquires, the question being always when and whence they did so. It would be less of an effort to originate the Semites in Scandinavia or the Aryans in Canaan than to abandon the notion of an original home.

Now, the fact that all early populations were highly mobile is unquestionable. In it, for example, lies the secret of the Libyan problem. The Libyans or their predecessors spoke Hamitic, but, as shown even by old Egyptian reliefs, they were all blond and blue eyed and, therefore, doubtless of North European provenance.¹⁰ In Asia Minor at least three migration strata since 1300 have been determined, which are related probably to the attacks of the “Sea peoples” in Egypt, and something similar has been shown in the Mexican Culture. But as to the nature of these movements we know nothing at all. In any case, there can be no question of migrations such as modern historians like to picture — movements of close pressed peoples traversing the lands in great masses, pushing and being pushed till finally they come to rest somewhere or other. It is not the alterations in themselves, but the conceptions we have formed about them, that have spoiled our outlook upon the nature of the peoples. Peoples in the modern sense of the word do not wander, and that which of olddid wander needs to be very carefully examined before it is labeled, as the label will not always stand for the same thing. The motive, too, that is everlastingly assigned to these migrations is colorless and worthy of the century that invented it — material necessity. Hunger would normally lead to efforts of quite a different sort, and it has certainly been only the last of the motives that drove men of race out of their nests — although it is understandable that it would very frequently make itself felt when such bands suddenly encountered a military obstacle. It was doubtless, in this simple and strong kind of man, the primary microcosmic urgency to move in free space which sprang up out of the depths of his soul as love of adventure, daring, liking for power and booty; as a blazing desire, to us almost incomprehensible, for deeds, for joy of carnage, for the death of the hero. Often, too, no doubt, domestic strife or fear of the revenge of the stronger, was the motive, but again a strong and manly one. Motives like these are infectious — the “man who stays at home” is a coward. Was it common bodily hunger, again, that induced the Crusades, or the expeditions of Cortez and Pizarro, or in our time the ventures of “wild west” pioneers? Where, in history, we find the little handful invading wide lands, it is ever the voices of the blood, the longing for high destinies, that drive them.

Further, we have to consider the position in the country traversed by the invaders. Its characteristics are always modified more or less, but the modifications are due not merely to the influence of the immigrants, but more and more to the nature of the settled population, which in the end becomes numerically overwhelming.

Obviously, in spaces almost empty of men it is easy for the weaker simply to evade the onslaught, and as a rule he was able to do so. But in later and denser conditions, the inroad spelled dispossession for the weaker, who must either defend himself successfully or else win new lands for old. Already there is the out thrust into space. No tribe lives without constant contacts on all sides and a mistrustful readiness to stand to arms. The hard necessity of war breeds men. Peoples grow by, and against, other peoples to inward greatness. Weapons become weapons against men and not beasts. And finally we have the only migration form that counts in historic times — warrior bands sweep through thoroughly populated countries, whose inhabitants remain, undisturbed and upstanding, as an essential part of the spoils of victory. And then, the victors being in a minority, completely new situations arise. Peoples of strong inward form spread themselves on top of much larger but formless populations, and the further transformations of peoples, languages, and races depend upon very complicated factors of detail. Since the decisive investigations of Beloch¹¹ and Delbrück¹² we know that all migrant peoples — and the Persians of Cyrus, the Mamertines and the Crusaders, the Ostrogoths and the “Sea peoples” of the Egyptian inscriptions were all peoples in this sense — were, in comparison with the inhabitants of the regions they occupied, very small in numbers, just a few thousand warriors, superior to the natives only in respect of their determination to be a Destiny and not to submit to one. It was not inhabitable, but inhabited, land of which they took possession, and thus the relation between the two peoples became a question of status, the migration turned into the campaign, and the process of settling down became a political process. And here again, in presence of the fact that at a historic distance of time the successes of a small war band, with the consequent spread of the victor’s names and language, may all too easily be taken for a “migration of peoples,” it is necessary to repeat our question, what, in fact, the men, things, and factors are that canmigrate.

Here are some of the answers — the name of a district or that of a collectivity (or of a hero, adopted by his followers), in that it spreads, becomes extinct here and is taken by or given to a totally different population there: in that it may pass from land to people and travel with the latter or vice versa — the language of the conqueror or that of the conquered, or even a third language, adopted for reciprocal understanding — the war band of a chief which subdues whole countries and propagates itself through captive women, or some accidental group of heterogeneous adventurers, or a tribe with its women and children, like the Philistines of 1200, who quite in the Germanic fashion trekked with their ox wagons along the Phoenician coast to Egypt.¹³ In such conditions, we may again ask, can conclusions be drawn from the destinies of names and languages as to those of peoples and races? There is only one possible answer, a decided negative.

Amongst the “Sea peoples” that repeatedly attacked Egypt in the thirteenth century appear the names of Danai and Achaeans — but in Homer both are almost mythical designations — the name of the Lukka — which adhered later to Lycia, though the inhabitants of that country called themselves Tramilas — and the names of the Etruscans, the Sards, the Siculi — but this in nowise proved that these “Tursha” spoke the later Etruscan, nor that there was the slightest physical connection with the like named inhabitants of Italy or anything else entitling us to speak of “one and the same people.” Assuming that the Lemnos inscription is Etruscan, and Etruscan an Indogermanic language, much could be deduced therefrom in the domain of linguistic history, but in that of racial history nothing whatever. Rome was an Etruscan city, but is not the fact completely without bearing upon the soul of the Roman people? Are the Romans Indogermanic because they happen to speak a Latin dialect? The ethnologists recognize a Mediterranean Race and an Alpine Race, and north and south of these an astonishing physical resemblance between North Germans and Libyans; but the philologists know that the Basques are in virtue of their speech a “pre-Indogermanic” — Iberian — population. The two views are mutually exclusive. Were the builders of Mycenae and Tiryns “Hellenes”? — it would be as pertinent to ask were the Ostrogoths Germans. I confess that I do not comprehend why such questions are formulated at all.

For me, the “people” is a unit of the soul. The great events of history were not really achieved by peoples; they themselves created the peoples. Every act alters the soul of the doer. Even when the event is preceded by some grouping around or under a famous name, the fact that there is a people and not merely a band behind the prestige of that name is not a condition, but a result of the event. It was the fortunes of their migrations that made the Ostrogoths and the Osmanli what they afterwards were. The “Americans” did not immigrate from Europe; the name of the Florentine geographer Amerigo Vespucci designates today not only a continent, but also a people in the true sense of the word, whose specific character was born in the spiritual upheavals of 1775 and, above all, 1861-1865.

This is the one and only connotation of the word “people.” Neither unity of speech nor physical descent is decisive. That which distinguishes the people from the population, raises it up out of the population, and will one day let it find its level again in the population is always the inwardly lived experience of the “we.” The deeper this feeling is, the stronger is the vis viva of the people. There are energetic and tame, ephemeral and indestructible, forms of peoples. They can change speech, name, race, and land, but so long as their soul lasts, they can gather to themselves and transform human material of any and every provenance. The Roman name in Hannibal’s day meant a people, in Trajan’s time nothing more than a population.

Of course, it is often quite justifiable to align peoples with races, but “race” in this connection must not be interpreted in the present day Darwinian sense of the word. It cannot be accepted, surely, that a people was ever held together by the mere unity of physical origin, or, if it were, could maintain that unity even for ten generations. It cannot be too often reiterated that this physiological provenance has no existence except for science — never for folk consciousness — and that no people was ever yet stirred to enthusiasm for this ideal of blood purity. In race there is nothing material, but something cosmic and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence of the march of historical Being. It is incoordination of this (wholly metaphysical) beat that produces race hatred, which is just as strong between Germans and Frenchmen as it is between Germans and Jews, and it is resonance on this beat that makes the true love — so akin to hate — between man and wife. He who has not race knows nothing of this perilous love. If a part of the human multitude that now speaks Indogermanic languages, cherishes a certain race ideal, what is evidenced thereby is not the existence of the prototype people so dear to the scholar, but the metaphysical force and power of the ideal. It is highly significant that this ideal is expressed, never in the whole population, but mainly in its warrior element and preeminently in its genuine nobility — that is, in men who live entirely in a world of facts, under the spell of historical becoming, destiny men who will and dare — and it was precisely in the early times (another significant point) that a born alien of quality and dignity could without particular difficulty gain admittance to the ruling class, and wives in particular were chosen for their “breed” and not their descent. Correspondingly, the impress of race traits is weakest (as may be observed even today) in the true priestly and scholarly natures,¹⁴ even though these often do stand in close blood relationship to the others. A strong spirit trains up the body into a product of art. The Romans formed, in the midst of the confused and even heteroclite tribes of Italy, a race of the firmest and strictest inward unity that was neither Etruscan nor Latin nor merely “Classical,” but quite specifically Roman.¹⁵ Nowhere is the force that cements a people set before us more plainly than in Roman busts of the late Republican period.

I will cite yet another example, than which none more clearly exhibits the errors that these scholars’ notions of people, language, and race inevitably entail, and in which lies the ultimate, perhaps the determining reason why the Arabian Culture has never yet been recognized as an organism. It is that of the Persians. Persian is an Aryan language, hence “the Persians” are an “Indogermanic people,” and hence Persian history and religion are the affair of “Iranian” philology.

To begin with, is Persian a language of equal rank with the Indian, derived from a common ancestor, or is it merely an Indian dialect? Seven centuries of linguistic development, scriptless and therefore very rapid, lie between the Old Vedic of the Indian texts and the Behistun Inscription¹⁶ of Darius. It is almost as great a gap as that between the Latin of Tacitus and the French of the Strassburg Oath of 842¹⁷ Now the Tell-el-Amarna letters and the archives of Boghaz Keüx tell us many “Aryan” names of persons and gods of the middle of the second millennium B.C. — that is, the Vedic Age of Chivalry. It is Palestine and Syria that furnish these names. Nevertheless, Eduard Meyer observes¹⁸ that they are Indian and not Persian, and the same holds good for the numerals that have now been discovered. There is not a unit of Persians, or of any other “people” in the sense of our historical writers. They were Indian heroes, who rode westward and with their precious weapon the war horse and their own ardent energy made themselves felt as a power far and wide in the aging Babylonian Empire.

About 600 there appears in the middle of this world Persis, a little district with a politically united population of peasant barbarians. Herodotus says that of its tribes only three were of genuine Persian nationality. Had the language of these knights of old lived on in the hills, and is “Persians” really a land name that passed to a people? The Medes, who were very similar, bear only the name of a land where an upper warrior stratum had learned through great political successes to feel itself as a unit. In the Assyrian archives of Sargon and his successors (about 700) are found, along with the non-Aryan place names, numerous “Aryan” names of persons, all leading figures, but Tiglath Pileser IV (745-727) calls the people blackhaired.¹⁹ It can only have been later that the “Persian people” of Cyrus and Darius was formed, out of men of varied provenance, but forged to a strong inner unity of lived experience. But when, scarce two centuries later, the Macedonians put an end to their lordship — was it that the Persians in this form were no longer in existence? (Was there still a Lombard people at all in Italy in A.D. 900?) It is certain that the very wide diffusion of the empire language of Persia, and the distribution of the few thousands of adult males from Persia over the immense system of military and administrative business, must long ago have led to the dissolution of the Persian nation and set up in its place, as carriers of the Persian name in upper class conscious of itself as a political unit, of whose members very few could have claimed descent from the invaders from Persia.²⁰ There is, indeed, not even a country that can be considered as the theater of Persian history. The events of the period from Darius to Alexander took place partly in northern Mesopotamia (that is, in the midst of an Aramaic speaking population), partly lower down in old Sinear, anywhere but in Persis, where the handsome buildings begun by Xerxes were never carried out. The Parthians of the succeeding Achsemenid period were a Mongol tribe which had adopted a Persian dialect and in the midst of this people sought to embody the Persian national feeling in themselves.

Here the Persian religion emerges as a problem no less difficult than those of race and language.²¹ Scholarship has associated it with these as though the association were self-evident, and has, therefore, treated it always with reference to India. But the religion of these land Vikings was not related to, it was identical with, the Vedic, as shown by the divine pairs Mitra-Varuna and Indra-Nasatya of the Boghaz Keüi texts. And within this religion which held up its head in the middle of the Babylonian world Zarathustra now appeared, from out of the lower ranks of the people, as reformer. It is known that he was not a Persian. That which he created (as I hope to show) was a transfer of Vedic religion into the forms of the Aramaean world contemplation, in which already there were the faint beginnings of the Magian religiousness. The daevas, the gods of the old Indian beliefs, grew to be the demons of the Semitic and the jinn of the Arabian. Yahweh and Beelzebub are related to one another precisely as Ahuramazda and Ahriman in this peasant religion, which was essentially Aramaean and, therefore, founded in an ethical dualistic world feeling. Eduard Meyer²² has correctly established the difference between the Indian and the Iranian view of the world, but, owing to his erroneous premises, has not recognized its origin. Zarathustra is a traveling companion of the prophets of Israel, who like him, and at the same time, transformed the old (Mosaic Canaanitish) beliefs of the people. It is significant that the whole eschatology is a common possession of the Persian and Jewish religions, and that the Avesta texts were originally written in Aramaic (in Parthian times) and only afterwards translated into Pehlevi.²³

But already in Parthian times there occurred amongst both Persians and Jews that profoundly intimate change which makes no longer tribal attachment but orthodoxy the hallmark of nationality.²⁴ A Jew who went over to the Mazda faith became thereby a Persian; a Persian who became a Christian belonged to the Nestorian “people.” The very dense population of northern Mesopotamia — the motherland of the Arabian Culture — is partly of Jewish and partly of Persian nationality in this sense of the word, which is not at all concerned with race and very little with language. Even before the birth of Christ, “Infidel” designates the non-Persian as it designates the non-Jew.

This nation is the “Persian people” of the Sassanid empire, and, connected with the fact, we find that Pehlevi and Hebrew die out simultaneously, Aramaic becoming the mother tongue of both communities. If we speak in terms of Aryans and Semites, the Persians in the time of the Tell-el-Amarna Correspondence were Aryans, but no “people”: in that of Darius a people, but without race: in Sassanid times a community of believers, but of Semitic origin. There is no proto-Persian “people” branched off from the Aryan, nor a general history of the Persians, and for the three special histories, which are held together only by certain linguistic relations, there is not even a common historical theater.

III

With this are laid, at last, the foundations for a morphology of peoples. Directly its essence is seen, we see also an inward order in the historical stream of the peoples. They are neither linguistic nor political nor zoological, but spiritual, units. And this leads at once to the further distinction between peoples before, within, and after a Culture. It is a fact that has been profoundly felt in all ages that Culture peoples are more distinct in character than the rest. Their predecessors I will call primitive peoples. These are the fugitive and heterogeneous associations that form and dissolve without ascertainable rule, till at last, in the presentiment of a still unborn Culture (as, for example, in the pre-Homeric, the pre-Christian, and the Germanic periods), phase by phase, becoming ever more definite in type, they assemble the human material of a population into groups, though all the time little or no alteration has been occurring in the stamp of man. Such a superposition of phases leads from the Cimbri and Teutones through the Marcomanni and Goths to the Franks, Lombards, and Saxons. Instances of primitive peoples are the Jews and Persians of the Seleucid age, the “Sea peoples,” the Egyptian Nomes of Menes’s time.²⁵ And that which follows a Culture we may call — from its best known example, the Egyptians of post-Roman times — fellah peoples.

In the tenth century of our era the Faustian soul suddenly awoke and manifested itself in innumerable shapes. Amongst these, side by side with the architecture and the ornament, there appears a distinctly characterized form of “people.” Out of the people shapes of the Carolingian Empire — the Saxons, Swabians, Franks, Visigoths, Lombards — arise suddenly the German, the French, the Spaniards, the Italians. Hitherto (consciously and deliberately or not) historical research has uniformly regarded these Culture peoples as something in being, as primaries, and have treated the Culture itself as secondary, as their product. The creative units of history, accordingly, were simply the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, and so on. As the Greek Culture was the work of the Hellenes, they must have been in existence as such far earlier; therefore they must have been immigrants. Any other idea of creator and creation seemed inconceivable.

I regard it, therefore, as a discovery of decisive importance that the facts here set forth lead to the reverse conclusion. It will be established in all rigor that the great Cultures are entities, primary or original, that arise out of the deepest foundations of spirituality, and that the peoples under the spell of a Culture are, alike in their inward form and in their whole manifestation, its products and not its authors. These shapes in which humanity is seized and molded possess style and style history no less than kinds of art and modes of thought. The people of Athens is a symbol not less than the Doric temple, the Englishman not less than modern physics. There are peoples of Apollinian, Magian, Faustian cast. The Arabian Culture was not created by “the Arabs” — quite the contrary; for the Magian Culture begins in the time of Christ, and the Arabian people represents its last great creation of that kind, a community bonded by Islam as the Jewish and Persian communities before it had been bonded by their religions. World history is the history of the great Cultures, and peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of these Cultures fulfill their Destinies.

In each of these Cultures, Mexican and Chinese, Indian and Egyptian, there is — whether our science is aware of it or not — a group of great peoples of identical style, which arises at the beginning of the springtime, forming states and carrying history, and throughout the course of its evolution bears its fundamental form onward to the goal. They are in the highest degree unlike amongst themselves — it is scarcely possible to conceive of a sharper contrast than that between Athenians and Spartans, Germans and Frenchmen, Tsin and Tsu — and all military history shows national hatred as the loftiest method of inducting historic decisions. But the moment that a people alien to the Culture makes an appearance in the field of history, there awakens everywhere an overpowering feeling of spiritual relationship, and the notion of the barbarian — meaning the man who inwardly does not belong to the Culture — is as clearcut in the peoples of the Egyptian settlements and the Chinese world of states as it is in the Classical. The energy of the form is so high that it grasps and recasts neighboring peoples, witness the Carthaginians of Roman times with their half Classical style, and the Russians who have figured as a people of Western style from Catherine the Great to the fall of Petrine Tsardom.

Peoples in the style of their Culture we will call Nations, the word itself distinguishing them from the forms that precede and that follow them. It is not merely a strong feeling of “we” that forges the inward unity of its most significant of all major associations;underlying the nation there is an Idea. This stream of a collective being possesses a very deep relation to Destiny, to Time, and to History, a relation that is different in each instance and one, too, that determines the relation of the human material to race, language, land, state, and religion. As the styles of the Old Chinese and the Classical peoples differ, so also the styles of their histories.

Life as experienced by primitive and by fellaheen peoples is just the zoological up and down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time, wherein occurrences are many, but, in the last analysis, devoid of significance. The only historical peoples, the peoples whose existence is world history, are the nations. Let us be perfectly clear as to what is meant by this. The Ostrogoths suffered a great destiny, and therefore, inwardly, they have no history. Their battles and settlements were not necessary and therefore were episodic; their end was insignificant. In 1500 B.C. that which lived about Mycenae and Tiryns was not as yet a nation, and that which lived in Minoan Crete was no longer a nation. Tiberius was the last ruler who tried to lead a Roman nation further on the road of history, who sought to retrieve it for history. By Marcus Aurelius there was only a Romanic population to be defended — a field for occurrences, but no longer for history. How many free pre-generations of Mede or Achaean or Hun folk there were, in what sort of social groups their predecessors and their descendants lived, cannot be determined and depends upon no rule. But of a nation the life period is determinate, and so are the pace and the rhythm in which its history moves to fulfillment. From the beginning of the Chôu period to the rulership of Shih-Hwang-ti, from the events on which the Troy legend was founded to Augustus, and from Thinite times to the XVIII Dynasty, the numbers of generations are more or less the same. The “Late” period of the Culture, from Solon to Alexander, from Luther to Napoleon, embraces no more than about ten generations. Within such limits the destiny of the genuine Culture people, and with it that of world history in general, reach fulfillment. The Romans, the Arabs, the Prussians, are late born nations. How many generations of Fabii and Junii had already come and gone as Romans by the time Cannae was fought?

Further, nations are the true city building peoples. In the strongholds they arose, with the cities they ripen to the full height of their world consciousness, and in the world cities they dissolve. Every town formation that has character has also national character. The village, which is wholly a thing of race, does not yet possess it; the megalopolis possesses it no longer. Of this essential, which so characteristically colors the nation’s public life that its slightest manifestation identifies it, we cannot exaggerate — we can scarcely imagine — the force, the self-sufficingness, and the loneliness. If between the souls of two Cultures the screen is impenetrable, if no Western may ever hope completely to understand the Indian or the Chinese, this is equally so, even more so, as between well developed nations. Nations understand one another as little as individuals do so. Each understands merely a self-created picture of the other, and individuals with the insight to penetrate deeper are few and far between. Vis-à-vis the Egyptians, all the Classical peoples necessarily felt themselves as relatives in one whole, but as between themselves they never understood each other. What sharper contrast is there than that between the Athenian and the Spartan spirit? German, French, and English modes of philosophical thinking are distinct, not merely in Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz, but already in the age of Scholasticism;²⁶ and even now, in modern physics and chemistry, the scientific method, the choice and type of experiments and hypotheses, their interrelations, and their relative importance for the course and aim of the investigation are markedly different in every nation. German and French piety, English and Spanish social ethics, German and English habits of life, stand so far apart that for the average man, and, therefore, for the public opinion of his community, the real inwardness of every foreign nation remains a deep secret and a source of continual and pregnant error. In the Roman Empire men began generally to understand one another, but this was precisely because there had ceased to be anything worth understanding in the Classical city. With the advent of mutual comprehension this particular humanity ceased to live in nations, and ipso facto ceased to be historic.

Owing to the very depth of these experiences, it is not possible for a whole people to be uniformly and throughout a Culture people, a nation. Amongst primitives each individual man has the same feeling of group obligations, but the awakening of a nation into self-consciousness invariably takes place in gradations — that is, preeminently in the particular class that is strongest of soul and holds the others spellbound by a power derived from what it has experienced. Every nation is represented in history by a minority. At the beginning of the springtime it is the nobility,²⁷ which in that period of its first appearance is the fine flowering of the people, the vessel in which the national character — unconscious, but felt all the more strongly in its cosmic pulse — receives its destined Style. The “we” is the knightly class, in the Egyptian feudal period of 2700 not less than in the Indian and the Chinese of 1200. The Homeric heroes are the Danai; the Norman barons are England. Centuries later, Saint Simon — the embodiment, it is true, of an older France — used to say that “all France” was assembled in the King’s anteroom, and there was a time in which Rome and the Senate were actually identical. With the advent of the town the burgher becomes the vessel of nationality, and (as we should expect from the growth of intellectuality) of a national consciousness that it gets from the nobility and carries through to its fulfillment. Always it is particular circles, graduated in fine shades, that in the name of the people live, feel, act, and know how to die, but these circles become larger and larger. In the eighteenth century arose the Western concept of the Nation which sets up (and on occasion energetically insists upon) the claim to be championed by everybody without exception; but in reality, as we know, the émigrés were just as convinced as the Jacobins that they were the people,the representatives of the French nation. A Culture people which is coincident with “air” does not exist — this is possible only in primitive and fellaheen peoples, only in a mere joint being without depth or historical dignity. So long as a people is a nation and works out the Destiny of a nation, there is in it a minority which in the name of all represents and fulfills its history.

IV

The Classical nations, in accordance with the static Euclidean soul of their Culture, were corporeal units of the smallest imaginable size. It was not Hellenes or Ionians that were nations, but in each city the Demos, a union of adult men, legally and by the same token nationally defined between the type of the hero as upper limit and the slave as lower.²⁸ Synoecism, that mysterious process of early periods in which the inhabitants of a countryside give up their villages and assemble themselves as a town, marks the moment at which, having arrived at self-consciousness, the Classical nation constitutes itself as such. We can still trace the way in which this form of the nation steadily makes good from Homeric times²⁹ to the epoch of the great colonizations. It responds exactly to the Classical prime symbol: each folk was a body, visible and surveyable, a σῶμο, the express negation of the idea of geographical space.

It is of no importance to Classical history whether or not the Etruscans in Italy were identical physically or linguistically with the bearers of this name amongst the “Sea peoples,” or what the relation was between the pre-Homeric units of the Pelasgi or Danai and the later bearers of the Doric or the Hellenic name. If, about 1100, there are Doric and Etruscan primitive peoples (as is probable), nevertheless a Doric or an Etruscan nation never existed. In Tuscany as in the Peloponnese there were only City-states, national points which in the period of colonization could only multiply, never expand. The Etruscan wars of Rome were always waged against one or more cities,³⁰ and the nations that the Persians and the Carthaginians confronted were of this same type. To speak of “the Greeks and the Romans” as the eighteenth century did (and as we still do) is completely erroneous. A Greek “nation” in our sense is a misconception — the Greeks themselves never knew such an idea at all. The  ame of “Hellenes,” which arose about 500, did not denote a people, but the aggregate of Classical Culture men, the sum of their nations,³¹ in contradistinction to the “Barbarian” world. And the Romans, a true urban people, could not conceive of their Empire otherwise than in the form of innumerable nation points, the civitates into which, juridically as in other respects, they dissolved all the primitive peoples of their Imperium.³² When national feeling in this shape is extinguished, there is an end to Classical history.

It will be the task — one of the heaviest tasks of historians — to trace, generation by generation, the quiet fading out of the Classical nations in the eastern Mediterranean during the “Late Classical” age, and the ever stronger inflow of a new nation spirit, the Magian.

A nation of the Magian type is the community of co-believers, the group of all who know the right way to salvation and are inwardly linked to one another by the ijma of this belief. Men belonged to a Classical nation by virtue of the possession of citizenship, but to a Magian nation by virtue of a sacramental act — circumcision for the Jews, specific forms of baptism for the Mandaeans or the Christians. An unbeliever was for a Magian folk what an alien was for a Classical — no intercourse with him, no connubium — and this national separation went so far that in Palestine a Jewish-Aramaic and a Christian-Aramaic dialect formed themselves side by side.³³;The Faustian nation, though necessarily bound up with a particular religiousness, is not so with a particular confession; the Classical nation is by type non-exclusive in its relations to different cults; but the Magian nation comprises neither more nor less than is covered by the idea of one or another of the Magian Churches. Inwardly the Classical nation is linked with the city, and the Western with a landscape, but the Arabian knows neither fatherland nor mother tongue. Outwardly its specific world outlook is only expressed by the distinctive script which each such nation develops as soon as it is born. But for that very reason the inwardness and hidden force — the magic, in fact — of a Magian nation feeling impresses us Faustians, who notice the absence of the home idea, as something entirely enigmatic and uncanny. This tacit, self-secure cohesion (that of the Jews, for example, in the homes of the Western peoples) is what entered “Roman Law” (called by a Classical label but worked out by Aramaeans) as the concept of the “juridical person”³⁴ which is nothing but the Magian notion of a community. Post-exilic Judaism was a juridical person long before anyone had discovered the concept itself.

The primitives who preceded this evolution were predominantly tribal associations, among them the South Arabian Minaeans,³⁵ who appear about the beginning of the first millennium, and whose name vanishes in the first century before Christ; the Aramaic speaking Chaldeans, who, likewise about 1000 B.C., sprang up as clan groups and from 659 to 539 ruled the Babylonian world; the Israelites before the Exile;³⁶ and the Persians of Cyrus.³⁷ So strongly already the populations felt this form that the priesthoods which developed here, there, and everywhere after the time of Alexander received the names of foundered or fictitious tribes. Amongst the Jews and the South Arabian Sabaeans they were called Levites; amongst the Medes and Persians, Magi (after an extinct Indian tribe); and amongst the adherents of the new Babylonian religion Chaldeans (also after a disintegrated clan grouping).³⁸ But here, as in all other Cultures, the energy of the national consensus completely overrode the old tribal arrangements of the primitives. Just as the Populus Romanusunquestionably contained folk elements of very varied provenance, and as the nation of the French took in Salian Franks and Romanic and Old Celtic natives alike, so the Magian nation also ceased to regard origin as a distinguishing mark. The process, of course, was an exceedingly long one. The tribe still counts for much with the Jews of the Maccabean period and even with the Arabs of the first Caliphs; but for the inwardly ripened Culture peoples of this world, such as the Jews of the Talmudic period, it no longer possessed any meaning. He  ho belongs to the Faith belongs to the Nation — it would have been blasphemy even to admit any other distinction. In early Christian times the Prince of Adiabene³⁹ went over to Judaism with his people in a body, and they were all ipso facto incorporated in the Jewish nation. The same applies to the nobility of Armenia and even the Caucasian tribes (which at that period must have Judaized on a large scale) and, in the opposite direction, to the Bedouins of Arabia, right down to the extreme south, and beyond them again to African tribes as far afield as Lake Chad.⁴⁰ Here evidently is a national common feeling proof even against such race distinctions as these. It is stated that even today Jews can amongst themselves distinguish very different races at the first glance, and that in the ghettos of eastern Europe the “tribes” (in the Old Testament sense) are clearly recognized. But none of this constitutes a difference of nation. According to von Erckert⁴¹ the West European Jew type is universally distributed within the non-Jewish Caucasian peoples, whereas according to Weissenberg⁴² it does not occur at all amongst the long-headed Jews of southern Arabia, where the Sabaean tomb sculptures show a human type that might almost claim to be Roman or Germanic and is the ancestor of these Jews who were converted by missionary effort at least by the birth of Christ.

But this resolution of the tribal primitives into the Magian nations of Persians, Jews, Mandaeans, Christians, and the rest must have occurred quite generally and on an immense scale. I have already drawn attention to the decisive fact that long before the beginning of our era the Persians represented simply a religious community, and it is certain that their numbers were indefinitely increased by accessions to the Mazdaist faith. The Babylonian religion vanished at that time — which means that its adherents became in part Jews and in part Persians — but emerging from it there is a new religion, inwardly alien to both Jewish and Persian, an astral religion, which bears the name of the Chaldees and whose adherents constituted a genuine Aramaic speaking nation. From this Aramaean population of Chaldean-Jewish-Persian nationality came, firstly the Babylonian Talmud, the Gnosis, and the religion of Mani, and secondly, in Islamic times, Sufism and the Shia.

Moreover, as seen from Edessa, the inhabitants of the Classical world, they also, appear as nations in the Magian style. “The Greeks” in the Eastern idiom means the aggregate of all who adhered to the Syncretic cults and were bound together by the ijma of the Late Classical religiousness. The Hellenistic city nations are no longer in the picture, which shows only one community of believers, the “worshipers of the mysteries,” who under the names of Helios, Jupiter, Mithras, θεός ὔψιστος, worshiped a kind of Yahweh or Allah. Throughout the East, Greekness is a definite religious notion, and for that matter one completely concordant with the facts as they then were. The feeling of the Polis is almost extinct, and a Magian nation needs neither home nor community of origin. Even the Hellenism of the Seleucid Empire, which made converts in Turkestan and on the Indus, was related in inward form to Persian and post-exilic Judaism. Later, the Aramaean Porphyry, the pupil of Plotinus, attempted to organize this Greekness as a cult church on the model of the Christian and the Persian, and the Emperor Julian raised it to the dignity of being the State Church — an act not merely religious, but also and above all national. When a Jew sacrificed to Sol or to Apollo, he thereby became a Greek. So, for example Ammonius Saccas (d. 242), the teacher of Plotinus and probably also of Origen, went over “from the Christians to the Greeks”; so also Porphyry, born Malchus and (like the “Roman” jurist Ulpian)⁴³ a Phoenician of Tyre.⁴⁴ In these cases we see jurists and State officials taking Latin, and philosophers Greek, names — and for the philological spirit of modern and religious research, this is quite historical enough to justify these men’s being regarded as Roman and Greek in the Classical city-national sense! But how many of the great Alexandrines may have been Greeks only in the Magian sense of the term? In point of birth were not Plotinus and Diophantus perhaps Jews or Chaldeans?

Now, the Christians also felt themselves from the outset as a nation of the Magian cast, and, moreover, the others, Greeks (“heathen”) and Jews alike, regarded them as such. Quite logically the latter considered their secession from Judaism as high treason, and the former their missionary infiltration into the Classical cities as an invasion and conquest, while the Christians, on their side, designated people of other faiths as τά ἔθνη.⁴⁵ When the Monophysites and the Nestorians separated themselves from the Orthodox, new nations came into being as well as new Churches. The Nestorians since 1450 have been governed by the Mar Shimun,⁴⁶ who was at once prince and patriarch of his people and, vis-à-vis the Sultan, occupied exactly the same position as, long before, the Jewish Resh Galutha had occupied in the Persian Empire.⁴⁷ This nation consciousness, derived from particular and defined world feeling and therefore self-evident with an a priori sureness, cannot be ignored if we are to understand the later persecutions of the Christians. The Magian State is inseparably bound up with the concept of orthodoxy. Caliphate, nation, and Church form an intimate unit. It was as states that Adiabene went over to Judaism, Osrhoene about 200 (so soon!) from Greekdom to Christendom, Armenia in the sixth century from the Greek to the Monophysite Church. Each of these events expresses the fact that the State was identical with the orthodox community as a juridical person.⁴⁸ If Christians lived in the Islamic State, Nestorians in the Persian, Jews in the Byzantine, they did not and could not as unbelievers belong to it, and consequently were thrown back upon their own jurisdictions.⁴⁹ If by reason of their numbers or their missionary spirit they became a threat to the continuance of the identity of state and creed community, persecution became a national duty. It was on this account that first the “orthodox” (or “Greek”) and then the Nestorian Christians suffered in the Persian Empire. Diocletian also, who as “Caliph” (Dominus et Deus) had linked the Imperium with the pagan cult Churches and saw himself in all sincerity as Commander of these Faithful, could not evade the duty of suppressing the second Church. Constantine changed the “true” Church and in that act changed the nationality of the Byzantine Empire. From that point on, the Greek name slowly passed over to the Christian nation, and specifically to that Christian nation which the Emperor as Head of the Faithful recognized and allowed to sit in the Great Councils. Hence the uncertain lines of the picture of Byzantine history — in 290 the organization that of a Classical Imperium, but the substance already a Magian national state; in 312, a change of nationality without change of name. Under this name of “Greeks,” first Paganism as a nation fought the Christians, and then Christianity as a nation fought Islam. And in the latter fight, Islam itself being a nation also (the Arabian), nationality stamped itself more and more deeply upon events. Hence the present day Greeks are a creation of the Magian Culture, developed first by the Christian Church, then by the sacred language of this Church, and finally by the name of this Church. Islam brought with it from the home of Mohammed the Arab name as the badge of its nationality. It is a mistake to equate these “Arabs” with the Bedouin tribes of the desert. What created the new nation, with its passionate and strongly characteristic soul, was theconsensus of the new faith. Its unity is no more derived from race and home than that of the Christian, Jewish, or Persian, and therefore it did not “migrate”; rather it owes its immense expansion to the incorporation within itself of the greater part of the early Magian nations. With the end of the first millennium of our era these nations one and all pass over into the form of fellah peoples, and it is as fellaheen that the Christian peoples of the Balkans under Turkish rule, the Parsees in India, and the Jews in Western Europe have lived ever since.⁵⁰

In the West, nations of Faustian style emerge, more and more distinctly, from the time of Otto the Great (936-973), and in them the primitive peoples of the Carolingian period are swiftly dissolved.⁵¹ Already by A.D. 1000 the men who “mattered most” were everywhere beginning to sense themselves as Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Frenchmen; whereas hardly six generations earlier their ancestors had been to the depths of their souls Franks, Lombards, and Visigoths.

The people form of this Culture is founded, like its Gothic architecture and its Infinitesimal Calculus upon a tendency to the Infinite, in the spatial as well as the temporal sense. The nation feeling comprises, to begin with, a geographical horizon that, considering the period and its means of communication, can only be called vast, and is not paralleled in any other Culture. The fatherland as extent, as a region whose boundaries the individual has scarcely, if ever, seen and which nevertheless he will defend and die for, is something that in its symbolic depth and force men of other Cultures can never comprehend. The Magian nation does not as such possess an earthly home; the Classical possesses it only as a point focus. The actuality that, even in Gothic times, united men from the banks of the Adige with men in the Order castles of Lithuania in an association of feeling would have been inconceivable even in ancient China and ancient Egypt, and stands in the sharpest opposition to the actuality of Rome and Athens, where every member of the Demos had the rest constantly in sight.

Still stronger is the sensitivity to distance in time. Before the fatherland idea (which is a consequence of the existence of the nation) emerged at all, this passion evolved another idea to which the Faustian nations owe that existence — the dynastic idea. Faustian peoples are historical peoples, communities that feel themselves bound together not by place or consensus, but by history; and the eminent symbol and vessel of the common Destiny is the ruling “house.” For Egyptian and for Chinese mankind the dynasty is a symbol of quite other meaning. Here what it signifies, as a will and an activity, is Time. All that we have been, all that we would be, is manifested in the being of the one generation; and our sense of this is much too profound to be upset by the worthlessness of a regent. What matters is not the person, but the idea, and it is for the sake of the idea that thousands have so often marched to their deaths with conviction in a genealogical quarrel. Classical history was for Classical eyes only a chain of incidents leading from moment to moment; Magian history was for its members the progressive actualization in and through mankind of a world plan laid down by God and accomplished between a creation and a cataclysm; but Faustian history is in our eyes a single grand willing of conscious logic, in the accomplishment of which nations are led and represented by their rulers. It is a trait of race. Rational foundations it has not and cannot have — it has simply been felt so, and because it has been felt so, the companion trust of the Germanic migration time developed on into the feudal troth of the Gothic, the loyalty of the Baroque, and the merely seemingly undynastic patriotism of the nineteenth century. We must not misjudge the depth and dignity of this feeling because there is an endless catalog of perjured vassals and peoples⁵² and an eternal comedy in the cringing of courtiers and the abjectness of the vulgar. All great symbols are spiritual and can be comprehended only in their highest forms. The private life of a pope bears no relation to the idea of the Papacy. Henry the Lion’s very defection⁵³ shows how fully in a time of nation forming a real ruler feels the destiny of “his” people incorporated in himself. He represents that destiny in the face of history, and at times it costs him his honor to do so.

All nations of the West are of dynastic origins. In the Romanesque and even in Early Gothic architecture the soul of the Carolingian primitives still quivers through. There is no French or German Gothic, but Salian, Rhenish, and Suabian, as there is Visigothic (northern Spain, southern France) and Lombard and Saxon Romanesque. But over it all there spreads soon the minority, composed of men of race, that feels membership in a nation as a great historical vocation. From it proceed the Crusades, and in them there truly were French and German chivalries. It is the hallmark of Faustian peoples that they are conscious of the direction of their history. But this direction attaches to the sequence of the generations, and so the nature of the race ideal is genealogical through and through — Darwinism, even, with its theories of descent and inheritance is a sort of caricature of Gothic heraldry — and the world-as-history, when every individual lives in the plane of it, contains not only the tree of the individual family, ruling or other, but also the tree of the people as the basic form of all its happenings.⁵⁴ It needs very exact observation to perceive that this Faustian genealogical principle, with its eminently historical notions of “Ebenbürtigkeit” (equivalence by virtue of birth) and of purity of blood, is just as alien to the Egyptians and Chinese, for all their historical disposition, as it is to the Roman nobility and the Byzantine Empire. On the other hand, neither our peasantry nor the patriciate of the cities is conceivable without it. The scientific conception of the people, which I have dissected above, is derived essentially from the genealogical sense of the Gothic period. The notion that the peoples have their trees has made the Italians proud to be the heirs of Rome, and the Germans proud to recall their Teuton forefathers, and that is something quite different from the Classical belief in timeless descent from heroes and gods. And eventually, when after 1789 the notion of mother tongue came to be fitted on to the dynastic principle, the once merely scientific fancy of a primitive Indogermanic people transformed itself into a deeply felt genealogy of “the Aryan race,” and in the process the word “race” became almost a designation for Destiny.

But the “races” of the West are not the creators of the great nations, but their result. Not one of them had yet come into existence in Carolingian times. It was the class ideal of chivalry that worked creatively in different ways upon Germany, England, France, and Spain and impressed upon an immense area that which within the individual nations is felt and experienced as race. On this rest (as I have said before) the nations — so historical, so alien to the Classical — of equivalence by birth (peer-age, Ebenbürtigkeit) and blood purity. It was because the blood of the ruling family incorporated the destiny, the being, of the whole nation, that the state system of the Baroque was of genealogical structure and that most of the grand crises assumed the form of wars of dynastic succession. Even the catastrophic ruin of Napoleon, which settled the world’s political organization for a century, took its shape from the fact than an adventurer dared to drive out with his blood that of the old dynasties, and that his attack upon a symbol made it historically a sacred duty to resist him. For all these peoples were the consequence of dynastic destinies. That there is a Portuguese people, and a Portuguese Brazil in the midst of Spanish America, is the result of the marriage of Count Henry of Burgundy in 1095. That there are Swiss and Hollanders is the result of a reaction against the House of Habsburg. That Lorraine is the name of a land and not of a people is an consequence of the childlessness of Lothar II.

It was the Kaiser idea that welded the disjunct primitives of Charlemagne’s time into the German nation. Germany and Empire are inseparable ideas. The fall of the Hohenstaufens meant the replacement of one great dynasty by a handful of small and tiny ones; and the German nation of Gothic style was inwardly shattered even before the beginning of the Baroque — that is, at the very time when the nation idea was being raised to higher levels of intellect in leader cities like Paris, Madrid, London, and Vienna. The Thirty Years’ War, so conventional history says, destroyed Germany in its flower. Not so; the fact that it could occur at all in this wretched form simply confirmed and showed up a long completed decadence — it was the final consequence of the fall of the Hohenstaufens. There could hardly be a more convincing proof that Faustian nations are dynastic units. But then again, the Salians and the Hohenstaufens created also — at least in idea — an Italian nation out of Romans, Lombards, and Normans. Only the Empire made it possible for them to stretch a hand back to the age of Rome. Even though alien power evoked the hostility of the townsmen, and split the two primary orders, the nobles to the Emperor, the priests to the Pope; even though in these conflicts of Guelph and Ghibelline the nobility soon lost its importance and the Papacy rose through the anti-dynastic cities to political supremacy; even though at the last there was but a tangle of predatory states whose “Renaissances” politics opposed the soaring world policy of the Gothic Empire, as Milan of old had defied the will of Frederick Barbarossa — yet the ideal of Una Italia, the ideal for which Dante sacrificed the peace of his life, was a pure dynastic creation of the great Germany emperors. The Renaissance, whose historical horizon was that of the urban patriciate, led the nation as far out of the path of self-fulfillment as it is possible to imagine. All through the Baroque and Rococo the land was depressed to the state of being a mere pawn in the power politics of alien houses. And not until after 1800 did Romanticism arise and reawaken the Gothic feeling with an intensity that made of it a political power.

The French people was forged out of Franks and Visigoths by its kings. It learned to feel itself as a whole for the first time at Bouvines in 1214.⁵⁵ Still more significant is the creation of the House of Habsburg, which, out of a population linked neither by speech nor folk feeling nor tradition caused to arise the Austrian nation, which proved its nationhood in defending Maria Theresa and in resisting Napoleon — its first tests, and its last. The political history of the Baroque age is in essentials the history of the Houses of Bourbon and Habsburg. The rise of the House of Wettin in place of that of Welf is the reason why “Saxony” was on the Weser in 800, and is on the Elbe today. Dynastic events, and finally the intervention of Napoleon, brought it about that half of Bavaria has shared in the history of Austria and that the Bavarian State consists for the most part of Franconia and Suabia.

The latest nation of the West is the Prussian, a creation of the Hohenzollerns as the Roman was the last creation of the Classical Polis feeling, and the Arabian the last product of a religious consensus. At Fehbellin⁵⁶ the young nation gained its recognition; at Rossbach⁵⁷ it won for Germany. It was Goethe who with his infallible eye for historic turning points described the then new “Minna von Barnhelm” as the first German poetry of specifically national content. It is one more example, and a deeply significant one, to show how dynastically the Western nations defined themselves, that Germany thus at one stroke rediscovered her poetic language. The collapse of the Hohenstaufen rule had been accompanied by that of Germany’s Gothic literature also. What did emerge here and there in the following centuries — the golden age of all the Western literatures — was undeserving of the name. But with the victories of Frederick the Great a new poesy began. “From Lessing to Hebber” means the same as “from Rossbach to Sedan.” The attempts that were made to restore the lost connection by consciously leaning upon, first the French, and then Shakespeare, upon the Volkslied, and finally (in Romanticism) upon the poetry of the age of chivalry, produced at least the unique phenomenon of an art history which, though it never really attained one aim, was constituted, for the greater part, of flashes of genius.

The end of the eighteenth century witnessed the accomplishment of that remarkable turn with which national consciousness sought to emancipate itself from the dynastic principle. To all appearance this had happened in England long before; In this connection Magna Charta (1215) will occur to most readers, but some will not have failed to observe that on the contrary, the very recognition of the nation involved in the recognition of its representatives gave the dynastic feeling a freshly enforced depth and refinement to which the peoples of the Continent remained almost utter strangers. If the modern Englishman is (without appearing so) the most conservative human being in the world, and if in consequence his political management solves its problems so much by wordless harmony of national pulse instead of express discussion, and therefore has been the most successful up to now, the underlying cause is the early emancipation of the dynastic feeling from its expression in monarchical power.

The French Revolution, on the contrary, was in this regard only a victory of Rationalism. It set free not so much the nation as the concept of the nation. The dynastic has penetrated into the blood of the Western races, and on that very account it is a vexation to their intellect. For a dynasty represents history, it is the history become flesh of a land, and intellect is timeless and unhistorical. The ideas of the Revolution were all “eternal” and “true.” Universal human rights, freedom, and equality are literature and abstraction and not facts. Call all this republican if you will, in reality it was one more case of a minority striving in the name of all to introduce the new ideal into the world of fact. It became a power, but at the cost of the ideal, and all it did was to replace the old felt adherence by the reasoned patriotism of the nineteenth century; by a civilized nationalism, only possible in our Culture, which in France itself and even today is unconsciously dynastic; and by the concept of the fatherland as dynastic unit which emerged first in the Spanish and Prussian uprisings against Napoleon and then in the German and Italian wars of dynastic unification. Out of the opposition of race and speech, blood and intellect, a new and specifically Western ideal arose to confront the genealogical ideal — that of the mother tongue. Enthusiasts there were in both countries who thought to replace the unifying force of the Emperor and King idea by the linking of republic and poetry — something of the “return to nature” in this, but a return of history to nature. In place of the wars of succession came language struggles, in which one nation sought to force its language and therewith its nationality upon the fragments of another. But no one will fail to observe that even the rationalistic conception of a nation as a linguistic unit can at best ignore, never abolish, the dynastic feeling, any more than a Hellenistic Greek could inwardly overcome his Polis consciousness or a modern Jew the national ijma. The mother tongue does not arise out of nothing, but is itself a product of dynastic history. Without the Capetian line there would have been no French language, but a Romance-Frankish in the north and a Provençal in the south. The Italian written language is to be credited to the German Emperors and above all to Frederick II. The modern nations are primarily the populations of an old dynastic history. Yet in the nineteenth century the second concept of the nation as a unit of written language has annihilated the Austrian, and probably created the American. Thenceforward there have been in all countries two parties representing the nation in two opposed aspects, as dynastic historical unit and as intellectual unit — the race party and the language party — but these are reflections that evoke too soon problems of politics that must await a later chapter.

V

At first, when the land was still without cities, it was the nobility that represented, in the highest sense of the word, the nation. The peasantry, “everlasting” and historyless, was a people before the dawn of the Culture, and in very fundamental characters it continued to be the primitive people, surviving when the form of the nation had passed away again. “The nation,” like every other grand symbol of the Culture, is intimately the cherished possession of a few; those who have it are born to it as men are born to art or philosophy, and the distinctions of creator, critic, and layman, or something like them, hold for it also — alike in a classical Polis, a Jewish consensus, and a Western people. When a nation rises up ardent to fight for its freedom and honor, it is always a minority that really fires the multitude. The people “awakens” — it is more than a figure of speech, for only thus and then does the waking consciousness of the whole become manifested. All these individuals whose “we” feeling yesterday went content with a horizon of family and job and perhaps hometown are suddenly today men of nothing less than the People. Their thought and feeling, their Ego, and therewith the “it” in them have been transformed to the very depths. It has become historic. And then even the unhistorical peasant becomes a member of the nation, and a day dawns for him in which he experiences history and not merely lets it pass him by.

But in the world cities, besides a minority which has history and livingly experiences, feels, and seeks to lead the nation, there arises another minority of timeless ahistoric, literary men, men not of destiny, but of reasons and causes, men who are inwardly detached from the pulse of blood and being, wide awake thinking consciousnesses, that can no longer find any “reasonable” connotation for the nation idea. Cosmopolitanism is a mere waking conscious association of intelligentsias. In it there is hatred of Destiny, and above all of history as the expression of Destiny. Everything national belongs to race — so much so that it is incapable of finding language for itself, clumsy in all that demands thought, and shiftless to the point of fatalism. Cosmopolitanism is literature and remains literature, very strong in reasons, very weak in defending them otherwise than with more reasons, in defending them with the blood.

All the more, then, this minority of far superior intellect chooses the intellectual weapon, and all the more is it able to do so as the world cities are pure intellect, rootless, and by very hypothesis the common property of the civilization. The born world citizens, world pacifists, and world reconcilers — alike in the China of the “Contending States,” in Buddhist India, in the Hellenistic age, and in the Western world today — are the spiritual leaders of fellaheen. “Panem et circenses” is only another formula for pacifism. In the history of all Cultures there is an anti-national element, whether we have evidences of it or not. Pure self-directed thinking was ever alien to life, and therefore alien to history, unwarlike, raceless. Consider our Humanism and Classicism, the Sophists of Athens, Buddha and Lao-tze — not to mention the passionate contempt of all nationalisms displayed by the great champions of the ecclesiastical and the philosophical world view. However the cases differ amongst themselves otherwise, they are alike in this, that the world feeling of race; the political (and therefore national) instinct for fact (“my country, right or wrong!”); the resolve to be the subject and not the object of evolution (for one or the other it has to be) — in a word, the will-to-power — has to retreat and make room for a tendency of which the standard bearers are most often men without original impulse, but all the more set upon their logic; men at home in a world of truths, ideals, and Utopias; bookmen who believe that they can replace the actual by the logical, the might of facts by an abstract justice, Destiny by Reason. It begins with the everlastingly fearful who withdraw themselves out of actuality into cells and study chambers and spiritual communities, and proclaim the nullity of the world’s doings, and it ends in every Culture with the apostles of world peace. Every people has such (historically speaking) waste products. Even their heads constitute physiognomically a group by themselves. In the “history of intellect” they stand high — and many illustrious names are numbered amongst them — but regarded from the point of view of actual history, they are inefficients.

The Destiny of a nation plunged in the events of its world depends upon how far its race quality is successful in making these events historically ineffective against it. It could perhaps be demonstrated even now that in the Chinese world of states the realm of Tsin won through (250 B.C.) because it alone had kept itself free from Taoist sentiments. Be this as it may, the Roman people prevailed over the rest of the Classical world because it was able to insulate its conduct of policy from the fellah instincts of Hellenism.

A nation is humanity brought into living form. The practical result of world improving theories is consistently a formless and therefore historyless mass. All world improvers and world citizens stand for fellaheen ideals, whether they know it or not. Their success means the historical abdication of the nation in favor, not of everlasting peace, but of another nation. World peace is always a one-sided resolve. The Pax Romana had for the later soldier emperors and Germanic band kings only the one practical significance that it made a formless population of a hundred millions a mere object for the will-to-power of small warrior groups. This peace cost the peaceful sacrifices beside which the losses of Cannae seem vanishingly small. The Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian worlds pass from one conqueror’s hands to another’s, and it is their own blood that pays for the contest. That is their — peace. When in 1401 the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia, they built a victory memorial out of the skulls of a hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad, which had not defended itself. From the intellectual point of view, no doubt, the extinction of the nations puts a fellaheen world above history, civilized at last and forever. But in the realm of facts it reverts to a state of nature, in which it alternates between long submissiveness and brief angers that for all the bloodshed — world peace never diminishes that — alter nothing. Of old they shed their blood for themselves; now they must shed it for others, often enough for the mere entertainment of others — that is the difference. A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.

“Lever doodt als Sklav (better dead than slave)” is an old Frisian peasant saying. The reverse has been the choice of every Late Civilization, and every Late Civilization has had to experience how much that choice costs it.

CHAPTER VII

PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE

(A) HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES

I

In a rock stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and cracks occur, water filters in, and the crystals are gradually washed out so that in due course only their hollow mold remains. Then come volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain; molten masses pour in, stiffen, and crystallize out in their turn. But these are not free to do so in their own special forms. They must fill up the spaces that they find available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind presenting the appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralogists call this phenomenon Pseudomorphosis.

By the term “historical pseudomorphosis” I propose to designate those cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness. All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old molds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous.

This is the case of the Arabian Culture. Its pre-history lies entirely within the ambit of the ancient Babylonian Civilization, which for two thousand years had been the prey of successive conquerors. Its “Merovingian period” is marked by the dictatorship of a small¹ Persian clan, primitive as the Ostrogoths, whose domination of two hundred years, scarcely challenged, was founded on the infinite weariness of a fellah world. But from 300 B.C. onwards there begins and spreads a great awakening in the young Aramaic speaking² peoples between Sinai and the Zagros range. As at the epoch of the Trojan War and at that of the Saxon emperors, a new relation of man to God, a wholly new world feeling, penetrated all the current religions, whether these bore the name of Ahuramazda, Baal, or Yahweh, impelling everywhere to a great effort of creation. But precisely at this juncture there came the Macedonians — so appositely that some inner connection is not altogether impossible, for the Persian power had rested on spiritual postulates, and it was precisely these that had disappeared. To Babylon these Macedonians appeared as yet another swarm of adventurers like the rest. They laid down a thin sheet of Classical Civilization over the lands as far as Turkestan and India. The kingdoms of the Diadochi might indeed have become, insensibly, states of pre-Arabian spirit — the Seleucid Empire, which actually coincided geographically with the region of Aramaic speech, was in fact such a state by 200 B.C. But from the battle of Pydna³ onwards it was, in its western part, more and more embodied in the Classical Imperium and so subjected to the powerful workings of a spirit which had its center of gravity in a distant region. And thus was prepared the Pseudomorphosis.

The Magian Culture, geographically and historically, is the midmost of the group of higher Cultures — the only one which, in point both of space and of time, was in touch with practically all others. The structure of its history as a whole in our world picture depends, therefore, entirely on our recognizing the true inner form which the outer molds distorted. Unhappily, that is just what we do not yet know, thanks to theological and philological prepossessions, and even more to the modern tendency of over-specialization which has unreasonably subdivided Western research into a number of separate branches — each distinguished from the others not merely by its materials and its methods, but by its very way of thinking — and so prevented the big problems from being even seen. In this instance the consequences of specialization have been graver perhaps than in any other. The historians proper stayed within the domain of Classical philology and made the Classical language frontier their eastern horizon; hence they entirely failed to perceive the deep unity of development on both sides of their frontier, which spiritually had no existence. The result is a perspective of “Ancient,” “Medieval,” and “Modern” history, ordered and defined by the use of the Greek and Latin languages. For the experts of the old languages, with their “texts,” Axum, Saba, and even the realm of the Sassanids were unattackable, and the consequence is that in “history” these scarcely exist at all . The literature researcher (he also a philologist) confuses the spirit of the language with the spirit of the work. Products of the Aramaean region, if they happen to be written in Greek or even merely preserved in Greek, he embodies in his “Late Greek literature” and proceeds to classify as a special period of that literature. The cognate texts in other languages are outside his department and have been brought into other groups of literature in the same artificial way. And yet here was the strongest of all proofs that the history of a literature never coincides with the history of a language.⁴ Here, in reality, was a self-contained ensemble of Magian national literature, single in spirit, but written in several languages — the Classical amongst others. For a nation of Magian type has no mother tongue. There are Talmudic, Manichaean, Nestorian, Jewish, or even Neo-pythagorean national literatures, but not Hellenistic or Hebrew.

Theological research, in its turn, broke up its domain into subdivisions according to the different West European confessions, and so the “philological” frontier between West and East came into force, and still is in force, for Christian theology also. The Persian world fell to the student of Iranian philology, and as the Avesta texts were disseminated, though not composed, in an Aryan dialect, their immense problem⁵ came to be regarded as a minor branch of the Indologist’s work and so disappeared absolutely from the field of vision of Christian theology. And lastly the history of Talmudic Judaism, since Hebrew philology became bound up in one specialism with Old Testament research, not only never obtained separate treatment, but has been completely forgotten by all the major histories of religions with which I am acquainted, although these find room for every Indian sect (since folklore, too, ranks as a specialism) and every primitive Negro religion to boot. Such is the preparation of scholarship for the greatest task that historical research has to face today.

II

The Roman world of the Imperial period had a good idea of its own state. The later writers are full of complaints concerning the depopulation and spiritual emptiness of Africa, Spain, Gaul, and, above all, the mother countries Italy and Greece. But those provinces which belong to the Magian world are consistently excepted in these mournful surveys. Syria in particular is densely peopled and, like Parthian Mesopotamia, flourishes in blood and spirit.

The preponderance of the young East, palpable to all, had sooner or later to find political expression also. Viewing the scene from this standpoint, we see behind the epic and pageant of Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, Antony and Octavian, this East striving ever more intensely to free itself from the historically dying West, the fellah world waking up. The transfer of the capital to Byzantium was a great symbol. Diocletian had selected Nicodemia; Caesar had had thoughts of Alexandria or Troy. A better choice than any would have been Antioch. But the act came too late by three centuries, and these had been the decisive period of the Magian Springtime.

The Pseudomorphosis began with Actium; there it should have been Antony who won. It was not the struggle of Rome and Greece that came there to an issue — that struggle had been fought out at Cannae and Zama, where it was the tragic fate of Hannibal to stand as champion not for his own land, but for Hellenism. At Actium it was the unborn Arabian Culture that was opposed to iron gray Classical Civilization; the issue lay between Principate and Caliphate. Antony’s victory would have freed the Magian soul; his defeat drew over its lands the hard sheet of Roman Imperium. A comparable event in the history of the West is the battle between Tours and Poitiers, A.D. 732. Had the Arabs won it and made “Frankistan” into a caliphate of the Northeast, Arabic speech, religion, and customs would have become familiar to the ruling classes, giant cities like Granada and Kairawan would have arisen on the Loire and the Rhine, the Gothic feeling would have been forced to find expression in the long stiffened forms of Mosque and Arabesque, and instead of the German mysticism we should have had a sort of Sufism. That the equivalent of these things actually happened to the Arabian world was due to the fact that the Syro-Persian peoples produced no Charles Martel to battle along with Mithradates or Brutus and Cassius or Antony (or for that matter without them) against Rome.

A second pseudomorphosis is presented to our eyes today in Russia. The Russian hero tales of the Bylini culminated in the epic cycle of Prince Vladimir of Kiev (c. A.D. 1000), with his Round Table, and in the popular hero Ilya Muromyets.⁶ The whole immense difference between the Russian and the Faustian soul is already revealed in the contrast of these with the “contemporary” Arthur, Ermanarich, and Nibelungen sagas of the Migration period in the form of the Hildebrandslied and the Waltharilied.⁷ The Russian “Merovingian” period begins with the overthrow of the Tatar domination by Ivan III (1480) and passes, by the last princes of the House of Rurik and the first of the Romanovs, to Peter the Great (1689-1725). It corresponds exactly to the period between Clovis (481-511) and the battle of Testry (687), which effectively gave the Carolingians their supremacy. I advise all readers to read the Frankish history of Gregory of Tours (to 591) in parallel with the corresponding parts of Karamzin’s patriarchal narrative, especially those dealing with Ivan the Terrible, and with Boris Godunov and Vassili Shuiski.⁸ There could hardly be a closer parallel. This Muscovite period of the great Boyar families and Patriarchs, in which a constant element is the resistance of an Old Russia party to the friends of Western Culture, is followed, from the founding of Petersburg in 1703, by the pseudomorphosis which forced the primitive Russian soul into the alien mold, first of full Baroque, then of the Enlightenment, and then of the nineteenth century. The fate figure in Russian history is Peter the Great, with whom we may compare the Charlemagne who deliberately and with all his might strove to impose the very thing which Charles Martel had just prevented, the rule of the Moorish-Byzantine spirit. The possibility was there of treating the Russian world in the manner of a Carolingian or that of Seleucid — that is, of choosing between Old Russian and “Western” ways, and the Romanovs chose the latter. The Seleucids liked to see Hellenes and not Aramaeans about them. The primitive tsarism of Moscow is the only form which is even today appropriate to the Russian world, but in Petersburg it was distorted to the dynastic form of western Europe. The pull of the sacred South — of Byzantium and Jerusalem — strong in every Orthodox soul, was twisted by the worldly diplomacy which set its face to the West. The burning of Moscow, that mighty symbolic act of a primitive people, that expression of Maccabean hatred of the foreigner and heretic, was followed by the entry of Alexander I into Paris, the Holy Alliance, and the concert of the Great Powers of the West. And thus a nationality whose destiny should have been to live without a history for some generations still was forced into a false and artificial history that the soul of Old Russia was simply incapable of understanding. Late period arts and sciences, enlightenment, social ethics, the materialism of world cities, were introduced, although in this pre-cultural time religion was the only language in which man understood himself and the world. In the townless land with its primitive peasantry, cities of alien type fixed themselves like ulcers — false, unnatural, unconvincing. “Petersburg,” says Dostoyevsky, “is the most abstract and artificial city in the world.” Born in it though he was, he had the feeling that one day it might vanish with the morning mist. Just so ghostly, so incredible, were the Hellenistic artifact cities scattered in the Aramaic peasant lands. Jesus in his Galilee knew this. St. Peter must have felt it when he set eyes on Imperial Rome.

After this everything that arose around it was felt by the true Russdom as lies and poison. A truly apocalyptic hatred was directed on Europe, and “Europe” was all that was not Russia, including Athens and Rome, just as for the Magian world in its time Old Egypt and Babylon had been antique, pagan, devilish. “The first condition of emancipation for the Russian soul,” wrote Aksakov in 1863 to Dostoyevsky, “is that it should hate Petersburg with all its might and all its soul.” Moscow is holy, Petersburg Satanic. A widespread popular legend presents Peter the Great as Antichrist. Just so the Aramaic Pseudomorphosis cries out in all the Apocalypses from Daniel and Enoch in Maccabean times to John, Baruch, and Ezra IV after the destruction of Jerusalem, against Antiochus the Antichrist, against Rome the Whore of Babylon, against the cities of the West with their refinement and their splendor, against the whole Classical Culture. All its works are untrue and unclean; the polite society, the clever artistry, the classes, the alien state with its civilized diplomacy, justice, and administration. The contrast between Russian and Western, Jew-Christian and Late Classical nihilisms is extreme — the one kind is hatred of the alien that is poisoning the unborn Culture in the womb of the land, the other a surfeited disgust of one’s own proper overgrowths. Depths of religious feeling, flashes of revelation, shuddering fear of the great awakening, metaphysical dreaming and yearning, belong to the beginning, as the pain of spiritual clarity belongs to the end of a history. In these pseudomorphoses they are mingled. Says Dostoyevsky: “Everyone in street and marketplace now speculates about the nature of Faith.” So might it have been said of Edessa or Jerusalem. Those young Russians of the days before 1914 — dirty, pale, exalted, moping in corners, ever absorbed in metaphysics, seeing all things with an eye of faith even when the ostensible topic is the franchise, chemistry, or women’s education — are the Jews and early Christians of the Hellenistic cities, whom the Romans regarded with a mixture of surly amusement and secret fear. In Tsarist Russia there was no bourgeoisie and, in general, no true class system, but merely, as in the Frankish dominions, lord and peasant. There were no Russian towns. Moscow consisted of a fortified residency (the Kreml) round which was spread a gigantic market. The imitation city that grew up and ringed it in, like every other city on the soil of Mother Russia, is there for the satisfaction and utilities of the Court, the administration, the traders, but that which lives in it is, on the top, an embodiment of fiction, an Intelligentsia bent on discovering problems and conflicts, and below, an uprooted peasantry, with all the metaphysical gloom, anxiety, and misery of their own Dostoyevsky, perpetually homesick for the open land and bitterly hating the stony gray world into which Antichrist has tempted them. Moscow had no proper soul. The spirit of the upper classes was Western, and the lower had brought in with them the soul of the countryside. Between the two worlds there was no reciprocal comprehension, no communication, no charity. To understand the two spokesmen and victims of the pseudomorphosis, it is enough that Dostoyevsky is the peasant, and Tolstoy the man of Western society. The one could never in his soul get away from the land; the other, in spite of his desperate efforts, could never get near it.

Tolstoy is the former Russia, Dostoyevsky the coming Russia. The inner Tolstoy is tied to the West. He is the great spokesman of Petrinism even when he is denying it. The West is never without a negative — the guillotine, too, was a true daughter of Versailles — and rage as he might against Europe, Tolstoy could never shake it off. Hating it, he hates himself and so becomes the father of Bolshevism. The utter powerlessness of this spirit, and “its” 1917 revolution, stands confessed in his posthumously published A Light Shines in the Darkness. This hatred Dostoyevsky does not know. His passionate power of living is comprehensive enough to embrace all things Western as well — “I have two fatherlands, Russia and Europe.” He has passed beyond both Petrinism and revolution, and from his future he looks back over them as from afar. His soul is apocalyptic, yearning, desperate, but of this future certain. “I will go to Europe,” says Ivan Karamazov to his brother, Alyosha; “I know well enough that I shall be going only to a churchyard, but I know too that that churchyard is dear, very dear to me. Beloved dead lie buried there, every stone over them tells of a life so ardently lived, so passionate a belief in its own achievements, its own truth, its own battle, its own knowledge, that I know — even now I know — I shall fall down and kiss these stones and weep over them.” Tolstoy, on the contrary, is essentially a great understanding, “enlightened” and “socially minded.” All that he sees about him takes the Late period, megalopolitan, and Western form of a problem, whereas Dostoyevsky does not even know what a problem is. Tolstoy is an event within and of Western Civilization. He stands midway between Peter and Bolshevism, and neither he nor these managed to get within sight of Russian earth. The thing they are fighting against reappears, recognizable, in the very form in which they fight. Their kind of opposition is not apocalyptic but intellectual. Tolstoy’s hatred of property is an economist’s, his hatred of society a social reformer’s, his hatred of the State a political theorist’s. Hence his immense effect upon the West — he belongs, in one respect as in another, to the band of Marx, Ibsen, and Zola.

Dostoyevsky, on the contrary, belongs to no band, unless it be the band of the Apostles of primitive Christianity. His “Daemons” were denounced by the Russian Intelligentsia as reactionaries. But he himself was quite unconscious of such conflicts — “conservative” and “revolutionary” were terms of the West that left him indifferent. Such a soul as his can look beyond everything that we call social, for the things of this world seem to it so unimportant as not to be worth improving. No genuine religion aims at improving the world of facts, and Dostoyevsky, like every primitive Russian, is fundamentally unaware of that world and lives in a second, metaphysical world beyond. What has the agony of a soul to do with Communism? A religion that has got as far as taking social problems in hand has ceased to be a religion. But the reality in which Dostoyevsky lives, even during this life, is a religious creation directly present to him. His Alyosha has defied all literary criticism, even Russian. His life of Christ, had he written it — as he always intended to do — would have been a genuine gospel like the Gospels of primitive Christianity, which stand completely outside Classical and Jewish literary forms. Tolstoy, on the other hand, is a master of the Western novel — Anna Karenina distances every rival — and even in his peasant’s garb remains a man of polite society.

Here we have beginning and end clashing together. Dostoyevsky is a saint, Tolstoy only a revolutionary. From Tolstoy, the true successor of Peter, and from him only, proceeds Bolshevism, which is not the contrary, but the final issue of Petrinism, the last dishonoring of the metaphysical by the social, and ipso facto a new form of the Pseudomorphosis. If the building of Petersburg was the first act of Antichrist, the self-destruction of the society formed of that Petersburg is the second, and so the peasant soul must feel it. For the Bolshevists are not the nation, or even a part of it, but the lowest stratum of this Petrine society, alien and western like the other strata, yet not recognized by these and consequently filled with the hate of the downtrodden. It is all megalopolitan and “Civilized” — the social politics, the Intelligentsia, the literature that first in the romantic and then in the economic jargon champions freedoms and reforms, before an audience that itself belongs to the society. The real Russian is a disciple of Dostoyevsky. Although he may not have read Dostoyevsky or anyone else, nay, perhaps because he cannot read, he is himself Dostoyevsky in substance; and if the Bolshevists, who see in Christ a mere social revolutionist like themselves, were not intellectually so narrowed, it would be in Dostoyevsky that they would recognize their prime enemy. What gave this revolution its momentum was not the intelligentsia’s hatred. It was the people itself, which,without hatred, urged only by the need of throwing off a disease, destroyed the old Westernism in one effort of upheaval, and will send the new after it in another. For what this townless people yearns for is its own life form, its own religion, its own history. Tolstoy’s Christianity was a misunderstanding. He spoke of Christ and he meant Marx. But to Dostoyevsky’s Christianity the next thousand years will belong.

III

Outside the Pseudomorphosis, and the more vigorously in proportion as the Classical influence is weaker over the country, there spring up all the forms of a genuine feudal age. Scholasticism, mysticism, feudal fealty, minstrelsy, the crusade spirit, all existed in the first centuries of the Arabian Culture and will be found in it as soon as we know how to look for them. The legion existed in name even after Septimius Severus, but in the East, legions look for all the world like ducal retinues. Officials are nominated, but what nomination amounts to in reality is the investiture of a count with his fief. While in the West the Caesar title fell into the hands of chieftains, the East transformed itself into an early Caliphate amazingly like the feudal state of mature Gothic. In the Sassanid Empire,⁹ in Hauran,¹⁰ in southern Arabia, there dawned a pure feudal period. The exploits of a king of Saba,¹¹ Shamir Juharish, are immortalized like those of a Roland or an Arthur, in the Arabic saga which tells of his advance through Persia as far as China.¹² The Kingdom of Ma’in¹³ existed side by side with the realm of Israel during the millennium before Christ, and its remains (which suggest comparisons with Mycenae and Tiryns) extend deeply into Africa.¹⁴ But now the feudal age flowered throughout Arabia and even in the mountains of Abyssinia.¹⁵ In Axum there arose during early Christian times mighty castles and kings’ tombs with the largest monoliths in the world.¹⁶ Behind the kings stands a feudal nobility of counts (kail) and wardens (kabir), vassals of often questionable loyalty whose great possessions more and more narrowed the power of the king and his household. The endless Christian Jewish wars between south Arabia and the kingdom of Axum¹⁷ have essentially the character of chivalry warfare, frequently degenerating into baronial feuds based on the castles. In Saba ruled the Hamdanids — who later became Christian. Behind them stood the Christian realm of Axum, in alliance with Rome, which about A.D. 300 stretched from the White Nile to the Somali coast and the Persian Gulf, and in 525 overthrew the Jewish-Himaryites.¹⁸ In 542 there was a diet of princes at Marib¹⁹ to which both the Roman and the Sassanid Empires sent ambassadors. Even today the country is full of innumerable relics of mighty castles, which in Islamic times were popularly attributed to supernatural builders. The stronghold of Gomdan is a work of twenty tiers.²⁰

In the Sassanid Empire ruled the Dikhans, or local lords, while the brilliant court of these early Eastern “Hohenstaufen” was in every respect a model for that of the Byzantines who followed Diocletian. Even much later the Abbassids in their new capital of Baghdad could think of nothing better than to imitate, on a grand scale, the Sassanid ideal of court life. In northern Arabia, at the courts of the Ghassanids²¹ and at those of the Lakhmids,²² there sprang up a genuine troubadour and Minne poetry; and knightly poets, in the days of the Early Fathers, fought out their duels with “word, lance, and sword.” One of them was the Jew Samuel, lord of the castle of Al Alblaq, who stood a famous siege by the King of Hira for the sake of five precious suits of armor.²³ In relation to this lyric poetry, the Late Arabic which flourished, especially in Spain, from 800 stands as Uhland and Eichendorff stand to Walter von der Vogelweide.

For this young world of the first centuries of our era our antiquarians and theologians have had no eyes. Busied as they are with the state of Late Republican and Imperial Rome, the conditions of the Middle East seem to them merely primitive and void of all significance. But the Parthian bands that again and again rode at the legions of Rome were a chivalry exalted by Mazdaism; in their armies there was the spirit of crusade. So, too, might it have been with Christianity if it had not been wholly bound under the power of the pseudomorphosis. The spirit was there — Tertullian spoke of the “militia Christi” and the sacrament was the soldier’s oath of fidelity.²⁴ But it was only later that Christ became the hero for whom his vassals went out against the heathen; for the time being, the hither side of the Roman frontier knew not Christian lords and knights, but only Roman legates; not the castle, but the castra; not tournaments, but executions. Yet in spite of all this it was not, strictly speaking, a Parthian war, but a true crusade of Jewry that blazed out in 115 when Trajan marched into the East, and it was as a reprisal for the destruction of Jerusalem that the whole infidel (“Greek”) population of Cyprus — traditionally 140,000 souls — was massacred.²⁵ Nisibis, defended by Jews, made an illustrious resistance. Warlike Adiabene (the upper Tigris plain) was a Jewish state. In all the Parthian and Persian wars against Rome the gentry and peasantry, the feudal levy, of Jewish Mesopotamia fought in the front line.

Byzantium, even, was not able entirely to evade the influence of the Arabian feudal age, and, under a crust of Late Classical administrative forms, the fief system (especially in the interior of Asia Minor) came into existence. There there were powerful families whose loyalty was doubtful and whose ambition was to possess the Imperial throne. “Originally tied to the capital, which they were not allowed to leave without the Emperor’s permission, this nobility settled down later on its broad estates in the provinces. From the fourth century onwards this provincial nobility was de facto an ‘Estate of the realm,’ and in course of time it claimed a certain independence of Imperial control.”²⁶

The “Roman Army” in the East, meanwhile, was transformed in less than two centuries from an army of modern type to one of the feudal order. The Roman legion disappeared in the reorganization of the age of Severus,²⁷ about A.D. 200. While in the West the army degenerated into hordes, in the East there arose, in the fourth century a genuine, if belated, knighthood — a fact that Mommsen long ago pointed out, without, however, seeing the significance of it.²⁸ The young noble received a thorough education in single combat, horsemanship, use of bow and lance. About A.D. 260 the Emperor Gallienus — the friend of Plotinus and the builder of the Porta Nigra of Trier, one of the most striking and most unfortunate figures of the period of the soldier emperors — formed, from Germans and Moors, a new type of mounted force, the personal military suite.²⁹ A significant light is thrown upon the changes by the fact that the old city gods give way, in the religion of the army, to the German gods of personal heroism, under the labels of Mars and Hercules.³⁰ Diocletian’spalatini are not a substitute for the praetorians abolished by Septimius Severus, but a small, well disciplined knight army, while the comitatenses, the general levy, are organized in “numeri” or companies. The tactics are those of every Early period, with its pride of personal courage. The attack takes the Germanic form of the so called “boar’s head” — the deep mass technically called theGevierthaufe.³¹ Under Justinian we find, fully developed, a system corresponding precisely to the Landsknecht system of Charles V, in which condottieri³² of the Frundsberg type³³ raise professional forces on a territorial basis. The expedition of Narses is described by Procopius³⁴ just as one might describe the great recruiting operations of Wallenstein.

But there appeared also in these early centuries a brilliant Scholasticism and Mysticism of Magian type, domesticated in the renowned schools of the Aramaean region — the Persian schools of Ctesiphon, Resaina, Gundisapora, the Jewish of Sura, Nehardea, Kinnesrin.³⁵ These are flourishing headquarters of astronomy, philosophy, chemistry, medicine. But towards the west these grand manifestations, too, become falsified by the Pseudomorphosis. The characteristically Magian elements of this knowledge assume at Alexandria the forms of Greek philosophy and at Beyrout those of Roman jurisprudence; they are committed to writing in the Classical languages, squeezed into alien and long petrified literary forms, and perverted by the hoary logic of a Civilization of quite other structure. It is in this, and not in the Islamic, time that Arabian science began. Yet, as our philologists only unearthed what had been put in Late Classical dress at Alexandria and Antioch, and had not an inkling either of the immense wealth of the Arabian spring or of the real pivots of its researches and ideas, there arose the preposterous notion that the Arabs were spiritual epigoni of the Classical. In reality, practically everything that was produced on the “other” side — from Edessa’s point of view — of the philologist’s frontier, though seeming to the Western eye an offspring of a “Late Classical” spirit, is nothing but a reflection of Early Arabian inwardness. And so we come to consider what the Pseudomorphosis did for the Arabian religion.

IV

The Classical religion lived in its vast number of separate cults, which in this form were natural and self-evident to Apollinian man, essentially inaccessible to any alien. As soon as cults of this kind arise, we have a Classical Culture, and when their essence changes, in later Roman times, then the soul of this Culture is at an end. Outside the Classical landscape they have never been genuine and living. The divinity is always bound to and bounded by one locality, in conformity with the static and Euclidean world feeling. Correspondingly the relation of man to the divinity takes the shape of a local cult, in which the significances lie in the form of its ritual procedure and not in a dogma underlying them. Just as the population was scattered geographically in innumerable points, so spiritually its religion was subdivided into these petty cults, each of which was entirely independent of the rest. Only their number, and not their scope, was capable of increase. Within the Classical religion multiplication was the only form of growth, and missionary effort of any sort was excluded, for men could practice these cults without belonging to them. There were no communities of fellow believers. Though the later thought of Athens reached somewhat more general ideas of God and his service, it was philosophy and not religion that it achieved; it appealed to only a few thinkers and had not the slightest effect on the feeling of the nation — that is, the Polis.

In the sharpest contrast to this stands the visible form of the Magian religion — the Church, the brotherhood of the faithful, which has no home and knows no earthly frontier, which believes the words of Jesus, “when two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” It is self-evident that every such believer must believe that only one good and true God can be, and that the gods of the others are evil and false.³⁶ The relation between this God and man rests, not in expression or profession, but in the secret force, the magic, of certain symbolic performances, which if they are to be effective must be exactly known in form and significance and practiced accordingly. The knowledge of this significance belongs to the Church — in fact, it is the Church itself, qua community of the instructed. And, therefore, the center of gravity of every Magian religion lies not in a cult, but in a doctrine, in the creed.

As long as the Classical remained spiritually strong, pseudomorphosis of all the Churches of the East into the style of the West continued. This is a most important aspect of Syncretism. The Persian religion enters in the shape of the Mithras cult, the Chaldean-Syrian element as the cults of the star gods and Baals (Jupiter Dolichenus, Sabazius, Sol Invictus, Atargatis), the Jewish religion in the form of a Yahweh cult (for no other name can be applied to the Egyptian communities of the Ptolemaic period³⁷) and primitive Early Christianity too — as the Pauline Epistles and the Catacombs of Rome clearly show — took substance as a Jesus cult. And however loudly each of these various religions (which from about Hadrian’s time drove the genuine old Classical deities completely into the background) might proclaim itself as the revelation of the one true faith — Isis styled herself deorum dearumque facies uniformis — in reality they carry, one and all, marks of the Classical separatism — that is, they multiply to infinity; every community stands for itself and is local; all the temples, catacombs, Mithraea, house chapels, are holy places to which (in feeling, even though not in formal expression) the deity is considered to be attached.³⁸ Nevertheless, there is Magian feeling even in this piety. Classical cults are practiced, and one may practice as many of them as one pleases, but of these newer, a man belongs to one and one alone. In the old, propaganda is unthinkable; in the new it goes without saying, and the purport of religious exercises tends more and more to the doctrinal side.

From the second century onwards, with the fading of the Apollinian and the flowering of the Magian soul, the relations are reversed. The consequences of the Pseudomorphosis continue, but it is now cults of the West which tend to become a new Church of the East — that is, from the sum of separate cults there evolves a community of those who believe in these gods and their rituals — and so there arises, by processes like those of the Early Persian and the Early Judaic, a Magian Greek nationality. Out of the rigorously established forms of detail procedure in sacrifices and mysteries grows a sort of dogma concerning the inner significance of these acts. The cults can now represent each other, and men no longer practice or perform them in the old way, but become “adherents” of them. And the little godof the place becomes — without the gravity of the change being noticed by anyone — the great God really present in the place.

Carefully as Syncretism has been examined in recent years, the clue to its development — the transformation of Eastern Churches into Western cults, and then the reverse process of transformation of Western cults into Eastern Churches — has been missed.³⁹ Yet without this key it is quite impossible to understand the religious history of Early Christianity. The battle that in Rome was between Christ and Mithras as cult deities took the form, east of Antioch, of a contest between the Persian and the Christian Churches. But the heaviest battle that Christianity had to fight, after it came itself under the influence of the Pseudomorphosis and began to develop spiritually with its face to the West, was not that against the true Classical deities. With these it was never face to face, for the public city cults had long been inwardly dead and possessed no hold whatever on men’s souls. The formidable enemy was Paganism, or Hellenism, emerging as a powerful new Church and born of the selfsame spirit as Christianity itself. In the end there were in the east of the Roman Empire not one cult Church, but two, and if one of these comprised exclusively the followers of Christ, the other, too, was made up of communities, which, under a thousand different labels, consciously worshiped one and the same divine principle.

Much has been written on the Classical toleration. The nature of a religion may perhaps be most clearly seen in the limits of its tolerance, and there were such limits in Classical religions as in others. It was, indeed, one essential character of these religions that they were numerous, and another that they were religions of pure performance; for them, therefore, the question of toleration, as the word is usually understood, did not arise. But respect for the cult formalities as such was postulated and required, and many a philosopher, even many an unwitting stranger, who infringed this law by word or deed, was made to realize the limits of Classical toleration. The reciprocal persecutions of the Magian Churches are something different from this; there it was the duty of the henotheist to his own faith that forbade him to recognize false tenets. Classical cults would have tolerated the Jesus cult as one of their own number. But the cult Churchwas bound to attack the Jesus Church. All the great persecutions of Christians (corresponding therein exactly to the later persecutions of Paganism) came, not from the “Roman” State, but from this cult church, and they were only political inasmuch as the cult church was both nation and fatherland. It will be observed that the mask of Caesar worship covered two religious usages. In the Classical cities of the West, Rome above all, the special cult of the Divus arose as a last expression of that Euclidean feeling which required that there should be legal and therefore sacral means of communication between the body unit man and the body unit God. In the East, on the other hand, the product was a creed of Caesar as Saviour, God man, Messiah of all Syncretists, which this Church brought to expression in a supremely national form. The sacrifice for the Emperor was the most important sacrament of the Church — exactly corresponding to the baptism of the Christians — and it is easy, therefore, to understand the symbolic significance in the days of persecution of the command and the refusal to do these acts. All these Churches had their sacraments: holy meals like the Haoma drinking of the Persians,⁴⁰ the Passover of the Jews, the Lord’s Supper of the Christians, similar rites for Attis and Mithras, and baptismal ceremonies amongst the Mandaeans, the Christians, and the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Indeed, the individual cults of the Pagan Church might be regarded almost as sects and orders — a view which would lead to a much better understanding of their reciprocal propaganda.

All true Classical mysteries, such as those of Eleusis and those founded by the Pythagoreans in the South Italian cities about 500 B.C., had been placebound,⁴¹ and had consisted in some symbolical act or process. Within the field of the Pseudomorphosis these freed themselves from their localities; they could be performed wherever initiates were gathered, and had now as their object the Magian ecstasy and the ascetic change of life. The visitors to the holy place had transformed themselves into practicing Orders. The community of the Neo-pythagoreans, formed about 50 B.C. and closely related to the Jewish Essenes, is anything but a Classical “school of philosophy”; it is a pure monastic order, and it is not the only such order in the Syncretic movement that anticipated the ideals of the Christian hermits and the Mohammedan dervishes. These Pagan Churches had their anchorites, saints, prophets, miraculous conversions, scriptures, and revelations.⁴² In the significance of images there came about a very remarkable transformation, which still awaits research. The greatest of Plotinus’s followers, Iamblichus, finally, about A.D. 300, evolved a mighty system of orthodox theology, ordered hierarchy, and rigid ritual for the Pagan Church, and his disciple Julian devoted, and finally sacrificed, his life to the attempt to establish this Church for all eternity.⁴³ He sought even to create cloisters for meditating men and women and to introduce ecclesiastical penance. This great work was supported by a great enthusiasm which rose to the height of martyrdom and endured long after the Emperor’s death. Inscriptions exist which can hardly be translated but by the formula: “There is but one god and Julian is his Prophet.”⁴⁴ Ten years more, and this Church would have become a historic, permanent fact. In the end not only its power, but also in important details its very form and content were inherited by Christianity. It is often stated that the Roman Church adapted itself to the structure of the Roman State; this is not quite correct. The latter structure was itself by hypothesis a Church. There was a period when the two were in touch — Constantine the Great acted simultaneously as convener of the Council of Nicaea and as Pontifex Maximus, and his sons, zealous Christians as they were, made him Divus and paid to him the prescribed rites. St. Augustine dared to assert that the true religion had existed before the coming of Christianity in the form of the Classical.⁴⁵

V

For the understanding of Judaism as a whole between Cyrus and Titus it is necessary constantly to bear in mind three facts, of which scholarship is quite aware, but which, owing to philological and theological parti pris, it refuses to admit as factors in its discussions. First, the Jews are a “nation without a land,” a consensus, and in the midst, moreover, of a world of pure nations of the same type. Secondly, Jerusalem is indeed a Mecca, a holy center, but it is neither the home nor the spiritual focus of the people. Lastly, the Jews are a peculiar phenomenon in world history only so long as we insist on treating them as such.

It is true that the post-exilic Jews, in contradistinction to the pre-exilic Israelites are — as Hugo Winckler was the first to recognize — a people of quite new type. But they are not the only representatives of the type. The Aramaean world began in those days to arrange itself in a great number of such peoples, including Persians and Chaldeans,⁴⁶ all living in the same district, yet in stringent aloofness from each other, and even then practicing the truly Arabian way of life that we call the ghetto.

The first heralds of the new soul were the prophetic religions, with their magnificent inwardness, which began to arise about 700 B.C. and challenged the primeval practices of the people and their rulers. They, too, are an essentially Aramaean phenomenon. The more I ponder Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah on the one hand, Zarathustra on the other, the more closely related they appear to me to be. What seems to separate them is not their new beliefs, but the objects of their attack. The first battled with that savage old Israel religion, which in fact is a whole bundle of religious elements⁴⁷ — belief in holy stones and trees, innumerable place gods (Dan, Bethel, Hebron, Shechem, Beersheba, Gilgal), a single Yahweh (or Elohim), whose name covers a multitude of most heterogeneous numina, ancestor worship and human sacrifices, dervish dancing and sacral prostitution — intermixed with indistinct traditions of Moses and Abraham and many customs and sagas of the Late Babylonian world, now after long establishment in Canaan degenerated and hardened into peasant forms. The second combated the old Vedic beliefs of heroes and Vikings, similarly coarsened, no doubt, and certainly needing to be recalled to actuality, time and again, by glorifications of the sacred cattle and of the care thereof. Zarathustra lived about 600 B.C., often in want, persecuted and misunderstood, and met his end as an old man in war against the unbelievers⁴⁸ — a worthy contemporary of the unfortunate Jeremiah, who for his prophesying was hated by his country men, imprisoned by his king, and after the catastrophe carried off by the fugitives to Egypt and there put to death. And it is my belief that this great epoch brought forth yet a third prophet religion, the Chaldean.

This, with its penetrating astronomy and its ever-amazing inwardness, was, I venture to guess, evolved at that time and by creative personalities of the Isaiah stature from relics of the old Babylonian religion.⁴⁹ About 1000, the Chaldeans were a group of Aramaic speaking tribes like the Israelites, and lived in the south of Sinear — the mother tongue of Jesus is still sometimes called Chaldean. In Seleucid times the name was applied to a widespread religious community, and especially to its priests. The Chaldean religion was an astral religion, which before Hammurabi the Babylonian was not. It is the deepest of all interpretations of the Magian universe, the World Cavern and Kismet working therein, and consequently it remained the fundamental of Islamic and Jewish speculation to their very latest phases. It was by it, and not by the Babylonian Culture, that after the seventh century there was formed an astronomy worthy to be called an exact science — that is, a priestly technique of observation of marvelous acuteness,⁵⁰ It replaced the Babylonian moon week by the planet week. Ishtar, the most popular figure of the old religion, the goddess of life and fruitfulness, now became a planet, and Tammuz, the ever-dying and ever-revived god of vegetation, a fixed star. Finally, the henotheistic feeling announced itself; for Nebuchadnezzar the Great Marduk⁵¹ was the one true god, the god of mercy, and Nebo, the old god of Borsippa, was his son and envoy to mankind. For a century (625-539) Chaldean kings were world rulers, but they were also the heralds of the new religion. When temples were being built, they themselves carried bricks. The accession prayer of Nebuchadnezzar, the contemporary of Jeremiah, to Marduk is still extant, and in depth and purity it is in nowise surpassed by the finest passages of Israelite prophecy. The Chaldean penitential psalms, closely related in rhythm and inner structure to those of the Jews, know the sin of which man is unconscious and the suffering that contrite avowal before the incensed god can avert. It is the same trust in the mercy of the Deity that finds a truly Christian expression in the inscriptions of the Bel temple of Palmyra.⁵²

The kernel of the prophetic teachings is already Magian. There is one god — be he called Yahweh, Ahuramazda or Marduk Baal — who is the principle of good, and all other deities are either impotent or evil. To this doctrine there attached itself the hope of a Messiah, very clear in Isaiah, but also bursting out everywhere during the next centuries, under pressure of an inner necessity. It is the basic idea of Magian religion, for it contains implicitly the conception of the world historical struggle between Good and Evil, with the power of Evil prevailing in the middle period, and the Good finally triumphant on the Day of Judgment. This moralization of history is common to Persians, Chaldees, and Jews. But with its coming, the idea of the localized people ipso facto vanished and the genesis of Magian nations without earthly homes and boundaries was at hand. The idea of the Chosen People emerged.⁵³ But it is easy to understand that men of strong blood, and in particular the great families, found these too spiritual ideas repugnant to their natures and harked back to the stout old tribal faiths. According to Cumont’s researches the religion of the Persian kings was polytheistic and did not possess the Haoma sacrament — that is, it was not wholly Zoroastrian. The same is true of most of the kings of Israel, and in all probability also of the last Chaldean Nabu-Nabid (Nabonidus), whose overthrow by Cyrus and his own subjects was in fact made possible by his rejection of the Marduk faith. And it was in the Captivity that circumcision and the (Chaldean) Sabbath were first acquired, as rites, by the Jews.

The Babylonian exile, however, did set up an important difference between the Jews and the Persians, in respect, not of the ultimate truths of conscious piety, but of all the facts of actuality and consequently men’s inward attitude to these facts. It was the Yahweh believers who were permitted to go home and the adherents of Ahuramazda who allowed them to do so. Of two small tribes that two hundred years before had probably possessed equal numbers of fighting men, the one had taken possession of a world — while Darius crossed the Danube in the north, his power extended in the south through eastern Arabia to the island of Sokotra on the Somali coast⁵⁴ — and the other had become an entirely unimportant pawn of alien policy.

This is what made one religion so lordly, the other so humble. Let the student read, in contrast to Jeremiah, the great Behistun inscription⁵⁵ of Darius — what a splendid pride of the King in his victorious god! And how despairing are the arguments with which the Israelite prophets sought to preserve intact the image of their god. Here, in exile, with every Jewish eye turned by the Persian victory to the Zoroastrian doctrine, the pure Judaic prophecy (Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah) passes into Apocalypse (Deutero-Isaiah,⁵⁶ Ezekiel, Zechariah). All the new visions of the Son of Man, of Satan, of archangels, of the seven heavens, of the last judgment, are Persian presentations of the common world feeling. In Isaiah xli appears Cyrus himself, hailed as Messiah. Did the great composer of Deutero-Isaiah draw his enlightenment from a Zoroastrian disciple? Is it possible that the Persians released the Jews out of a feeling of the inward relationship of their two teachings? It is certain at any rate that both shared one popular idea as to last things, and felt and expressed a common hatred of the old Babylonian and Classical religions, of unbelievers generally, which they did not feel towards one another.

We must not, however, forget to look at the “return from captivity” also from the point of view of Babylon. The great mass, strong in race force, was in reality far removed from these ideas, or regarded them as mere visions and dreams; and the solid peasantry, the artisans, and no doubt the nascent land aristocracy quietly remained in its holdings under a prince of their own, the Resh Galutha, whose capital was Nehardea.⁵⁷ Those who returned “home” were the small minority, the stubborn, the zealots. They numbered with their wives and children forty thousand, a figure which cannot be one-tenth or even one-twentieth of the total, and anyone who confuses these settlers and their destiny with Jewry as a whole⁵⁸ must necessarily fail to read the inner meaning of all following events. The little world of Judaism lived a spiritually separate life, and the nation as a whole, while regarding this life with respect, certainly did not share in it. In the East apocalyptic literature, the heiress of prophecy, blossomed richly. It was a genuine native poetry of the people, of which we still have the masterpiece, the Book of Job — a work in character Islamic and decidedly un-Jewish⁵⁹ — while a multitude of its other tales and sagas, such as Judith, Tobit, Achikar,⁶⁰ are spread as motives over all the literatures of the “Arabian” world. In Judea only the Law flourished; the Talmudic spirit appears first in Ezekiel (chs. xl, et seq.) and after 450 is made flesh in the scribes (Sopherim) headed by Ezra. From 300 B.C. to A.D. 200 the Tannaim (“Teachers”) expounded the Torah and developed the Mishnah. Neither the coming of Jesus nor the destruction of the Temple interrupted this abstract scholarship. Jerusalem became for the rigid believer a Mecca, and his Koran was a Code of laws to which was gradually added a whole primitive history compounded of Chaldeo-Persian motives reset according to Pharisaic ideas.⁶¹ But in this atmosphere there was no room for a worldly art, poetry, or learning. All that the Talmud contains of astronomical, medical, and juristic knowledge is exclusively of Mesopotamian origin.⁶² It is probable, too, that it was in Mesopotamia, and before the end of the Captivity, that there began that Chaldean-Persian-Jewish formation of sects which developed into the formation of great religions at the beginning of the Magian Culture, and reached its climax in the teaching of Mani. “The Law and the Prophets” — these two nouns practically define the difference between Judea and Mesopotamia. In the late Persian and in every other Magian theology both tendencies are united; it is only in the case here considered that they were separated in space. The decisions of Jerusalem were recognized everywhere, but it is a question how widely they were obeyed. Even as near as Galilee the Pharisees were the object of suspicion, while in Babylonia no Rabbi could be consecrated. For the great Gamaliel, Paul’s teacher, it was a title to fame that his rulings were followed by the Jews “even abroad.” How independent was the life of the Jews in Egypt is shown by the recently discovered documents of Elephantine and Assuan.⁶³ About 170, Onias asked the King for permission to build a temple “according to the measurements of the Temple in Jerusalem,” on the ground that the numerous non-conforming temples that existed were the cause of eternal bickerings amongst the communities.

One other subject must be considered. Jewry, like Persia, had since the Exile increased enormously beyond the old small clan limits; this was owing to conversions and secessions — the only form of conquest open to a landless nation and, therefore, natural and obvious to the Magian religions. In the north it very early drove, through the Jew State of Adiabene, to the Caucasus; in the south (probably along the Persian Gulf) it penetrated to Saba; in the west it was dominant in Alexandria, Cyrene, and Cyprus. The administration of Egypt and the policy of the Parthian Empire were largely in Jewish hands.

But this movement came out of Mesopotamia alone, and the spirit in it was the Apocalyptic and not the Talmudic. Jerusalem was occupied in creating yet more legal barriers against the unbeliever. It was not enough even to abandon the practice of making converts. A Pharisee permitted himself to summon the universally beloved King Hyrcanus (135-106) to lay down the office of High Priest because his mother had once been in the power of the infidels.⁶⁴ This is the same narrowness which in the primitive Christian brotherhood of Judea took the form of opposing the preaching of the Gospel to the heathen. In the East it would simply never have occurred to anyone to draw such barriers, which were contrary to the whole idea of the Magian nation. But in that very fact was based the spiritual superiority of the wide East. The Synedrion in Jerusalem might possess unchallenged religious authority, but politically, and therefore historically, the power of the Resh Galutha was a very different matter. Christian and Jewish research alike have failed to perceive these things. So far as I am aware, no one has noticed the important fact that the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes was directed not against “Jewry” but against Judea. And this brings us to another fact, of still greater importance.

The destruction of Jerusalem hits only a very small part of the nation, one moreover that was spiritually and politically by far the least important. It is not true that the Jewish people has lived “in the Dispersion” since that day, for it had lived for centuries (and so too had the Persian and others) in a form which was independent of country. On the other hand, we realize equally little the impression made by this war upon the real Jewry which Judea thought of and treated as an adjunct. The victory of the heathen and the ruin of the Sanctuary was felt in the inmost soul,⁶⁵ and in the crusade of 115 a bitter revenge was taken for it; but the ideal outraged and vindicated was the ideal of Jewry and not that of Judaism. Zionism then, as in Cyrus’s day and in ours, was a reality only for a quite small and spiritually narrow minority. If the calamity had been really felt in the sense of a “loss of home” (as we figure it to ourselves with the Western mind), a hundred opportunities after Marcus Aurelius’s time could have been seized to win the city back. But that would have contradicted the Magian sense of the nation, whose ideal organic form was the synagogue, the pure consensus — like the early Catholic “visible Church” and like Islam — and it was precisely the annihilation of Judea and the clan spirit of Judea that for the first time completely actualized this ideal.

For Vespasian’s War, directed against Judea, was a liberation of Jewry. In the first place, it ended both the claim of the people of this petty district to be the genuine nation, and the pretensions of their bald spirituality to equivalence with the soul life of the whole. The research, the scholasticism, and the mysticism of the Oriental academies entered into possession of their rights; so, for instance, the judge Kama — the contemporary, more or less, of Ulpian and Papinian — formulated at the academy of Nehardea the first code of civil law.⁶⁶ In the second place, it rescued this religion from the dangers of that pseudomorphosis to which Christianity in that same period was succumbing. Since 200 B.C. there had existed a half Hellenistic Jewish literature. The “Preacher” (Ecclesiastes, Koheleth) contains Pyrrhonic ideas.⁶⁷ The Wisdom of Solomon, 2 Maccabees, Theodotion, the Aristeas Letter, etc., follow; there are things like the Menander collection of Maxims, as to which it is impossible to say whether they ought to be regarded as Jewish or as Greek. There were, about 160, high priests who were so Hellenistic in spirit that they combated the Jewish religion, and later there were rulers like Hyrcanus and Herod who did the same by political methods. This danger came to an end instantly and for good in A.D.70.

In the time of Jesus there were in Jerusalem three tendencies which can be described as generally Aramaean, represented respectively by the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. Although the connotations of these names varied, and although both in Christian and in Jewish research most diverse views are held about them, it may at any rate be said that the first of these tendencies is found in greatest purity in Judaism, the second in Chaldeanism, the third in Hellenism.⁶⁸ Essene is the rise of the cult (almost the Order) of Mithras in the east of Asia Minor. The Sadducees, although in Jerusalem they appear as a small and distinguished group — Josephus compares them with the Epicureans — are thoroughly Aramaean in their apocalyptic and eschatological views, in virtue of a certain element which makes them, so to say, the Dostoyevskys of this Early period. They stand to the Pharisees in the relation of mysticism to scholasticism, of John to Paul, of Bundahish to Vendidad⁶⁹ in the Persian world. The Apocalyptic is popular, and many of its traits are spiritually common property throughout the Aramaean world; the Talmudic and Avestan Pharisaism is exclusive and tries to rule out every other religion with uncompromising rigor.

The Essenes appear in Jerusalem as a monastic order like the Neo-pythagoreans. They possessed secret texts.⁷⁰ In the broad sense they are representative of the Pseudomorphosis, and in consequence they disappear from Jewry completely after A.D. 70, while precisely in this period Christian literature was becoming purely Greek — not in the least of the causes of this being that the Hellenized Western Jews left Judaism to retreat into its East, and gradually adopted Christianity.

But also Apocalyptic, which is an expression form of townless and town fearing mankind, soon came to an end within the Synagogue, after a last wonderful reaction to the stimulus of the great catastrophe.⁷¹ When it had become evident that the teaching of Jesus would lead not to a reform of Judaism, but to a new religion, and when, about A.D. 100, the daily imprecation formula against the Jewish Christians was introduced, Apocalyptic for the short remainder of its existence resided in the young Church.

VI

The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above all religions of this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus. In all the great creations of those years there is nothing which can be set beside it. Tame and empty all the legends and holy adventures of Mithras, Attis, and Osiris must have seemed to any man reading or listening to the still recent story of Jesus’s sufferings — the last journey to Jerusalem, the last anxious supper, the hours of despair in Gethsemane, and the death on the cross.

Here was no matter of philosophy. Jesus’s utterances, which stayed in the memory of many of the devoted, even in old age, are those of a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world. They are not sociological observations, problems, debatings. Like a quiet island of bliss was the life of these fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of Gennesareth in the midst of the age of the great Tiberius, far from all world history and innocent of all the doings of actuality, while round them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theaters and temples, their refined Western society, their noisy mob diversions, their Roman cohorts, their Greek philosophy. When the friends and disciples of the sufferer had grown gray and his brother was president of their group in Jerusalem, they put together, from the sayings and narratives generally current in their small communities, a biography so arresting in its inward appeal that it evolved a presentation form of its own, of which neither the Classical nor the Arabian Culture has any example — the Gospel. Christianity is the one religion in the history of the world in which the fate of a man of the immediate present has become the emblem and the central point of the whole creation.

A strange excitement, like that which the Germanic world experienced about A.D. 1000, ran in those days through the whole Aramaean land. The Magian soul was awakened. That element which lay in the prophetic religions like a presentiment, and expressed itself in Alexander’s time in metaphysical outlines, came now to the state of fulfillment. And this fulfillment awakened, in indescribable strength, the primitive feeling of Fear. The birth of the Ego, and of the world anxiety with which it is identical, is one of the final secrets of humanity and of mobile life generally. In front of the Microcosm there stands up a Macrocosm wide and overpowering, an abyss of alien, dazzling existence and activity that frightens the small lonely ego back into itself. Even in the blackest hours of life no adult experiences fear like the fear which sometimes overpowers a child in the crisis of awakening. Over the dawn of the new Culture likewise lay this deathly anxiety. In this early morning of Magian world feeling, timorous and hesitant and ignorant of itself, young eyes saw the end of the world at hand — it is the first thought in which every Culture to this day has come to knowledge of itself. All but the shallower souls trembled before revelations, miracles, glimpses into the very fundament of things. Men now lived and thought only in apocalyptic images. Actuality became appearance. Strange and terrifying visions were told mysteriously by one to another, read out from fantastic veiled texts, and seized at once with an immediate inward certainty. These writings traveled from community to community, village to village, and it is quite impossible to assign them to any one particular religion.⁷² Their coloring is Persian, Chaldean, Jewish, but they have absorbed all that was circulating in men’s minds. Whereas the canonical books are national, the apocalyptic literature is international in the literal sense of the word. It is there, and no one seems to have composed it. Its content is fluid — today it reads thus and tomorrow otherwise. But this does not mean that it is a “poetry” — it is not.⁷³ These creations resemble the terrible figures of the Romanesque cathedral porches in France, which also are not “art,” but fear turned into stone. Everyone knows those angels and devils, the ascent to heaven and descent to hell of divine Essence, the Second Adam, the Envoy of God, the Redeemer of the last days, the Son of Man, the eternal city, and the last judgment.⁷⁴ In the alien cities and the high positions of strict Judaic and Persian priesthoods the different doctrines might be tangibly defined and argued about, but below in the mass of the people there was practically no specific religion, but a general Magian religiousness which filled all souls and attached itself to glimpses and visions of every conceivable origin. The Last Day was at hand. Men expected it and knew that on that day “He” of whom all these revelations spoke would appear. Prophets arose. More and more new communities and groups gathered, believing themselves to have found either a better understanding of the traditional religion, or the true religion itself. In this time of amazing, ever-increasing tension, and in the very years around Jesus’s birth year, there arose, besides endless communities and sects, another redemption religion, the Mandaean, as to which we know nothing of founder or origins. In spite of its hatred of the Judaism of Jerusalem and its definite preference for the Persian idea of redemption, the Mandaean religion seems to have stood very close to the popular beliefs of Syrian Jewry. One after another, pieces of its wonderful documents are becoming available, and they consistently show us a “Him,” a Son of Man, a Redeemer who is sent down into the depths, who himself must be redeemed and is the goal of man’s expectations. In the Book of John, the Father high upraised in the House of Fulfillment, bathed in light, says to his only begotten Son: “My Son, be to me an ambassador; go into the world of darkness, where no ray of light is.” And the Son calls up to him: “Father, in what have I sinned that thou hast sent me into the darkness?” And finally: “Without sin did I ascend and there was no sin and defect in me.”⁷⁵

All the characters of the great prophetic religions and of the whole store of profound glimpses and visions later collected into apocalypses are seen here as foundations. Of Classical thought and feeling not a breath reached this Magian underworld. No doubt the beginnings of the new religion are lost irrevocably. But one historical figure of Mandaeanism stands forth with startling distinctness, as tragic in his purpose and his downfall as Jesus himself — John the Baptist.⁷⁶ He, almost emancipated from Judaism, and filled with as mighty a hatred of the Jerusalem spirit as that of primitive Russia for Petersburg, preached the end of the world and the coming of the Barnasha, the Son of Man, who is no longer the longed for national Messiah of the Jews, but the bringer of the world conflagration.⁷⁷ To him came Jesus and was his disciple.⁷⁸ He was thirty years old when the awakening came over him. Thenceforth the apocalyptic, and in particular the Mandaean, thought world filled his whole being. The other world of historical actuality lying round him was to him as something sham, alien, void of significance. That “He” would now come and make an end of this unreal reality was his magnificent certainty, and like his master John, he stepped forth as its herald. Even now we can see, in the oldest Gospels that were embodied into the New Testament, gleams of this period in which he was, in his consciousness, nothing but a prophet.⁷⁹

But there was a moment in his life when an inkling, and then high certainty, came over him — “Thou art thyself It!” It was a secret that he at first hardly admitted to himself, and only later imparted to his nearest friends and companions, who thereafter shared with him, in all stillness, the blessed mission, till finally they dared to reveal the truths before all the world by the momentous journey to Jerusalem. If there is anything at all that clouds the complete purity and honor of his thought, it is that doubt as to whether he has deceived himself which from time to time seizes him, and of which, later, his disciples told quite frankly. He comes to his home. The village crowds to him, recognizes the former carpenter who left his work, is angered. The family — mother and all the brothers and sisters — are ashamed of him and would have arrested him. And with all these familiar eyes upon him he was confused and felt the magic power depart from him (Mark vi). In Gethsemane doubts of his mission⁸⁰ mingled themselves in the terrible fear of coming things, and even on the cross men heard the anguished cry that God had forsaken him.

Even in these last hours he lived entirely in the form of his own apocalyptic world, which alone was ever real to him. What to the Roman sentries standing below him was reality was for him an object of helpless wonder, an illusion that might at any moment without warning vanish into nothingness. He possessed the pure and unadulterated soul of the townless land. The life of the cities and their spirit were to him utterly alien. Did he really see the semi-Classical Jerusalem, into which he rode as the Son of Man, and understand its historical nature? This is what thrills us in the last days — and the collision of facts with truths, of two worlds that will never understand one another, and his entire incomprehension of what was happening about him.

So he went, proclaiming his message without reservation, through his country. But this country was Palestine. He was born in the Classical Empire and lived under the eyes of the Judaism of Jerusalem, and when his soul, fresh from the awful revelation of its mission, looked about, it was confronted by the actuality of the Roman State and that of Pharisaism. His repugnance for the stiff and selfish ideal of the latter, which he shared with all Mandaeanism and doubtless with the peasant Jewry of the wide East, is the hallmark of all his discourses from first to last. It angered him that this wilderness of cold hearted formulas was reputed to be the only way to salvation. Still, thus far it was only another kind of piety that his conviction was asserting against Rabbinical logic. Thus far it is only the Law versus the Prophets.

But when Jesus was taken before Pilate, then the world of facts and the world of truths were face to face in immediate and implacable hostility. It is a scene appallingly distinct and overwhelming in its symbolism, such as the world’s history had never before and has never since looked at. The discord that lies at the root of all mobile life from its beginning, in virtue of its very being, of its having both existence and awareness, took here the highest form that can possibly be conceived of human tragedy. In the famous question of the Roman Procurator: “What is truth?” — the one word that is race pure in the whole Greek Testament — lies the entire meaning of history, the exclusive validity of the deed, the prestige of the State and war and blood, the all powerfulness of success and the pride of eminent fitness. Not indeed the mouth, but the silent feeling of Jesus answers this question by that other which is decisive in all things of religion — What is actuality? For Pilate actuality was all; for him nothing. Were it anything, indeed, pure religiousness could never stand up against history and the powers of history, or sit in judgment on active life; or if it does, it ceases to be religion and is subjected itself to the spirit of history.

My kingdom is not of this world. This is the final word which admits of no gloss and on which each must check the course wherein birth and nature have set him. A being that makes use of a waking consciousness, or a waking consciousness which subjects being to itself; pulsation or tension, blood or intellect, history or nature, politics or religion — here it is one or the other, there is no honest way of compromise. A statesman can be deeply religious, a pious man can die for his country — but they must, both, know on which side they are really standing. The born politician despises the inward thought processes of the ideologue and ethical philosopher in a world of fact — and rightly. For the believer, all ambition and succession of the historical world are sinful and without lasting value — he, too, is right. A ruler who wishes to improve religion in the direction of political, practical purposes is a fool. A sociologist preacher who tries to bring truth, righteousness, peace, and forgiveness into the world of actuality is a fool also. No faith yet has altered the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between directional Time and timeless Eternity, between the course of history and the existence of a divine world order, in the structure of which the word “providence” or “dispensation” denotes the form of causality. This is the final meaning of the moment in which Jesus and Pilate confronted one another. In the one world, the historical, the Roman caused the Galilean to be crucified — that was his Destiny. In the other world, Rome was cast for perdition and the Cross became the pledge of Redemption — that was the “will of God.”⁸¹

Religion is metaphysic and nothing else — “Credo quia absurdum” — and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic — that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is. Moralizing is nineteenth century Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus is a blasphemy. His occasional utterances of a social kind, so far as they are authentic and not merely attributed sayings, tend merely to edification. They contain nothing whatever of new doctrine, and they include proverbs of the sort then in general currency. His teaching was the proclamation, nothing but the proclamation, of those Last Things with whose images he was constantly filled, the dawn of the New Age, the advent of heavenly envoys, the last judgment, a new heaven and a new earth.⁸² Any other conception of religion was never in Jesus, nor in any truly deep feeling period of history. Religion is, first and last, metaphysic, other worldliness (Jenseitigkeit), awareness in a world of which the evidence of the senses merely lights the foreground. It is life in and with the supersensible. And where the capacity for this awareness, or even the capacity for believing in its existence, is wanting, real religion is at an end. “My kingdom is not of this world,” and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them. It is the Late, city periods that, no longer capable of seeing into depths, have turned the remnants of religiousness upon the external world and replaced religion by humanities, and metaphysic by moralization and social ethics.

In Jesus we have the direct opposite. “Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” means: “Fit yourselves to the powers of the fact world, be patient, suffer, and ask it not whether they are ‘just.’” What alone matters is the salvation of the soul. “Consider the lilies” means: “Give no heed to riches and poverty, for both fetter the soul to cares of this world.” “Man cannot serve both God and Mammon” — by Mammon is meant the whole of actuality. It is shallow, and it is cowardly, to argue away the grand significance of this demand. Between working for the increase of one’s own riches, and working for the social ease of everyone, he would have felt no difference whatever. When wealth frightened him, when the primitive community in Jerusalem — which was a strict Order and not a socialist club — rejected ownership, it was the most direct opposite of “social” sentiment that moved them. Their conviction was, not that the visible state of things was all, but that it was nothing: that it rested not on appreciation of comfort in this world, but on unreserved contempt of it. Something, it is true, must always exist to be set against and to nullify worldly fortune, and so we come back to the contrast of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy, the townsman and Westerner, saw in Jesus only a social reformer, and in his metaphysical impotence — like the whole civilized West, which can only think about distributing, never renouncing — elevated primitive Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. Dostoyevsky, who was poor, but in certain hours almost a saint, never thought about social ameliorations — of what profit would it have been to a man’s soul to abolish property?

VII

Amongst Jesus’s friends and disciples, stunned as they were by the appalling outcome of the journey to Jerusalem, there spread after a few days the news of his resurrection and reappearance. The impression of this news on such souls and in such a time can never be more than partially echoed in the sensibilities of a Late mankind. It meant the actual fulfillment of all the Apocalyptic of that Magian Springtime — the end of the present eon marked by the ascension of the redeemed Redeemer, the second Adam, the Saoshyant, Enosh, Barnasha, or whatever other name man attached to “Him,” into the light realm of the Father. And therewith the foretold future, the new world eon, “the Kingdom of Heaven,” became immediately present. They felt themselves at the decisive point in the history of redemption.

This certainty completely transformed the world outlook of the little circles. “His” teachings, as they had flowed from his mild and noble nature — his inner feeling of the relation between God and man and of the high meaning of the times, and were exhaustively comprised in and defined by the word “love” — fell into the background, and their place was taken by the teaching of Him, As the Arisen he became for his disciples a new figure, in and of the Apocalyptic, and (what was more) its most important and final figure. But therewith their image of the future took form as an image of memory. Now, this was something of quite decisive importance, unheard of in the world of Magian thought — the transference of an actuality, lived and experienced, on to the plane of the high story itself. The Jews (amongst them the young Paul) and the Mandaeans (amongst them the disciples of John the Baptist) fought against it with passion and made of Jesus a “False Messiah” such as had been spoken of in the earliest Persian texts.⁸³ For them “He” was still to come from afar; for the little community “He” had already been — had they not seen him and lived with him? We have to enter into this conception unreservedly if we are to appreciate the enormous superiority it had in those times. Instead of an uncertain glimpse into the distance,⁸⁴ a compelling present; instead of fearful waiting for a liberating certainty, instead of a saga, a lived and shared human destiny — truly they were “glad tidings” that were proclaimed.

But to whom? Even in the first days the question arose which decided the whole Destiny of the new revelation. Jesus and his friends were Jews by birth, but they did not belong to the land of Judea. Here in Jerusalem men looked for the Messiah of their old sacred books, a Messiah who was to appear for the “Jewish people,” in the old tribal sense, and only for them. But all the rest of the Aramaean world waited upon the Saviour of the world, the Redeemer and Son of Man, the figure of all apocalyptic literature, whether written out in Jewish, Persian, Chaldean, or Mandaean terms.⁸⁵ In the one view the death and resurrection of Jesus were merely local events; in the other they betokened a world change. For, while everywhere else the Jews were a Magian nation without home or unity of birth, Jerusalem held firmly to the tribal idea. The conflict was not one between “preaching to the Jews” and “preaching to the Gentiles” — it went far deeper. The word “mission” had essentially here a twofold meaning. In the Judaic view there was essentially no need for recruiting — quite the reverse, as it was a contradiction to the Messiah idea. The words “tribe” and “mission” are reciprocally exclusive. The members of the Chosen People, and in particular the priesthood, had merely to convince themselves that their longing was now fulfilled. But to the Magian nation, based on consensus or community of feeling, what the Resurrection conveyed was a full and definitive truth, and consensus in the matter of this truth gave the principle of the true nation, which must necessarily expand till it had taken in all older and conceptually incomplete principles. “A Shepherd and his sheep” was the formula of the new world nation. The nation of the Redeemer was identical with mankind. When, therefore, we survey the early history of this Culture, we see that the controversy in the Apostles’ Council⁸⁶ had been already decided, five hundred years before, by facts. Post-exilic Jewry (with the sole exception of self-contained Judea) had, like the Persians, Chaldeans, and others, recruited widely amongst the heathen, from Turkestan to inner Africa, regardless of home and origin. As to this there is now no controversy. It never at any time entered the heads of this community to be anything but what it really was. It was itself already the result of a national existence in dispersion. In utter contrast to the old Jewish texts — which were a carefully preserved treasure, and of which the right interpretation, the Halakha, was reserved by the Rabbis to themselves — the apocalyptic literature was written so that it could reach all the souls to be wakened, and interpreted so that it might strike home in everyone.

It is easy to see which of these conceptions was that of Jesus’s oldest friends, for they established themselves as a community of the Last Days in Jerusalem and frequented the Temple. For these simple folk — amongst them his brothers, who erstwhile had openly rejected him, and his mother, who now believed in her executed Son⁸⁷ — the power of the Judaic tradition was even stronger than the spirit of Apocalypse. In their object of convincing the Jews they failed (although at first even Pharisees came over to them) and so they remained as one of the numerous sects within Judaism, and their product, the “Confession of Peter,” may fairly be characterized as an express assertion that they themselves were the true Jewry and the Synedrion the false.⁸⁸

The final destiny of this circle⁸⁹ was to fall into oblivion when, as very soon happened, the whole world of Magian thought and feeling responded to the new apocalyptic teaching. Amongst the later disciples of Jesus were many who were definitely and purely Magian, and wholly free from the Pharisaic spirit. Long before Paul, they had tacitly settled the mission question. Not to preach, for them, was not to live at all, and presently they had assembled, everywhere from the Tigris to the Tiber, small circles in which the figure of Jesus, in every conceivable presentation, merged with the mass of prior visions.⁹⁰ Out of this, a new discord arose, as between mission to the heathen and mission to the Jews, and this was far more important than the conflict between Judea and the world on issues already decided. Jesus had lived in Galilee. Was his teaching to look west or east? Was it to be a Jesus cult or an Order of the Saviour? Was it to seek intimacy with the Persian or with the Syncretic Church, both of which were in process of formation?

This was the question decided by Paul — the first great personality in the new movement, and the first who had the sense not only of truths, but of facts. As a young rabbi from the West, and a pupil of one of the most famous of the Tannaim, he had persecuted the Christians qua Jewish sectaries. Then, after an awakening of the sort that often happened in those days, he turned to the numerous small cult communities of the West and forged out of them a Church of his own modeling: so that thenceforward, the Pagan and the Christian cult Churches evolved in parallel, and with constant reciprocal action, up to Iamblichus and Athanasius (about A.D. 330). In the presence of this great ideal, Paul had for the Jesus communities of Jerusalem a scarcely veiled contempt. There is nothing in the New Testament more express and exact than the beginning of the Epistle to the Galatians; his activity is a self-assumed task; he has taught how it pleased him and he has built how it pleased him. Finally, after fourteen years, he goes to Jerusalem in order, by force of his superior mentality, his success, and his effective independence of the old comrades of Jesus, to compel them there to agree that his, Paul’s, creation contained the true doctrine. Peter and his people, alien to actualities, failed to seize and appreciate the far reaching significance of the discussion. And from that moment the primitive community was superfluous.

Paul was a rabbi in intellect and an apocalyptic in feeling. He recognized Judaism, but as a preliminary development. And thus there came to be two Magian religions with the same Scriptures (namely, the Old Testament), but a double Halakha, the one setting towards the Talmud — developed by the Tannaim at Jerusalem from 300 B.C. onwards — and the other, founded by Paul and completed by the Fathers, in the direction of the Gospel. But, further, Paul drew together the whole fullness of Apocalypse and salvation yearning then circulating in these fields⁹¹ into a salvation certainty, the certainty immediately revealed to him and to him alone near Damascus. “Jesus is the Redeemer and Paul is his Prophet” — this is the whole content of his message. The analogy with Mohammed could scarcely be closer. They differed neither in the nature of the awakening, nor in prophetic self-assuredness, nor in the consequent assertion of sole authority and unconditional truth for their respective expositions.

With Paul, urban man and his “intelligence” come on the scene. The others, though they might know Jerusalem or Antioch, never grasped the essence of these cities. They lived soilbound, rural, wholly soul and feeling. But now there appeared a spirit that had grown up in the great cities of Classical cast, that could only live in cities, that neither understood nor respected the peasant’s countryside. An understanding was possible with Philo, but with Peter never. Paul was the first by whom the Resurrection experience was seen as a problem; the ecstatic awe of the young countryman changed in his brain into a conflict of spiritual principles. For what a contrast! — the struggle of Gethsemane, and the hour of Damascus: Child and Man, soul anguish and intellectual decision, self-devotion to death and resolve to change sides! Paul had begun by seeing in the new Jewish sect a danger to the Pharisaism of Jerusalem; now, suddenly, he comprehended that the Nazarenes “were right” — a phrase that is inconceivable on the lips of Jesus — and took up their cause against Judaism, thereby setting up as an intellectual quantity that which had previously consisted in the knowledge of an experience. An intellectual quantity — but in making his cause into this he unwittingly drove it close to the other intellectual powers, the cities of the West. In the ambiance of pure Apocalyptic there is no “intellect.” For the old comrades it was simply not possible to understand him in the least — and mournfully and doubtfully they must have looked at him while he was addressing them. Their living image of Jesus (whom Paul had never seen) paled in this bright, hard light of concepts and propositions. Thenceforward the holy memory faded into a Scholastic system. But Paul had a perfectly exact feeling for the true home of his ideas. His missionary journeys were all directed westward, and the East he ignored. He never left the domain of the Classical city. Why did he go to Rome, to Corinth, and not to Edessa or Ctesiphon? And why was it that he worked only in the cities, and never from village to village?

That things developed thus was due to Paul alone. In the face of his practical energy the feelings of all the rest counted for nothing, and so the young Church took the urban and Western tendency decisively, so decisively that later it could describe the remaining heathen as “pagani,” country folk. Thus arose an immense danger that only youth and vernal force enabled the growing Church to repel; the fellah world of the Classical cities grasped at it with both hands, and the marks of that grasp are visible today. But — how remote already from the essence of Jesus, whose entire life had been bound to country and the country folk! The Pseudomorphosis in which he was born he had simply not noticed; his soul contained not the smallest trace of its influence — and now, a generation after him, probably within the lifetime of his mother, that which had grown up out of his death had already become a center of formative purpose for that Pseudomorphosis. The Classical City was soon the only theater of ritual and dogmatic evolution. Eastward the community extended only furtively and unobtrusively.⁹² About A.D. 100 there was already Christians beyond the Tigris, but as far as the development of the Church was concerned they and their beliefs might almost have been non-existent.

It was a second creation, then, that came out of Paul’s immediate entourage, and it was this creation that, essentially, defined the form of the new Church. The personality and the story of Jesus cried aloud to be put into poetic form, and yet it is due to one man alone, Mark, that Gospels came into existence at all.⁹³ What Paul and Mark had before them was a firm tradition in the community, the “Gospel,” a continued and propagated hearsay, supported by formless and insignificant notes in Aramaic and Greek, but in no way set out. In any case, of course, serious documents would have come into existence some time or another, but their natural form as products of the spirit of those who had lived with Jesus (and of the spirit of the East generally) would have been a canonical collection of his sayings, amplified, conclusively defined, and provided with an exegesis by the Councils and pivoting upon the Second Advent. But any tentatives in this direction were completely broken off by the Gospel of Mark, which was written down about A.D. 65, at the same time as the last Pauline Epistles, and, like them, in Greek. The writer had no suspicion, perhaps, of the significance of his little work, but it made him one of the supremely important personalities not only of Christianity, but of the Arabian Culture generally. All older attempts vanished, leaving writings in Gospel form as the sole sources concerning Jesus. (So much so that “Evangelium” from signifying the content of glad tidings, came to mean the form itself.) The work was the outcome of the wishes of Pauline, literate, circles that had never heard any one of Jesus’s companions discourse about him. It is an apocalyptic life picture from a distance; lived experience is replaced by narrative, and narrative so plain and straightforward that the apocalyptic tendency passes quite unperceived.⁹⁴ And yet Apocalyptic is its condition precedent. It is not the words of Jesus, but the doctrine of Jesus in the Pauline form, that constitutes the substance of Mark. The first Christian book emanates from the Pauline creation. But very soon the latter itself becomes unthinkable without the book and its successors.

For presently there arose something which Paul, the born schoolman, had never intended, but which nevertheless had been made inevitable by the tendency of his work — the cult church of Christian nationality. While the Syncretic creed community, in proportion as it attained to consciousness of itself, drew the innumerable old city cults and the new Magian together and by means of a supreme cult endowed the structure with henotheistic form, the Jesus cult of the oldest Western communities was so long dissected and enriched that it also came to consist of just such another mass of cults.⁹⁵ Around the birth of Jesus, of which the Disciples knew nothing, grew up a story of his childhood. In the Mark Gospel it has not yet come into existence. Already in the old Persian apocalyptic, indeed, the Saoshyant as Saviour of the Last Day was said to be born of a virgin. But the new western myth was of quite other significance and had incalculable consequences. For within the Pseudomorphosis region there arose presently beside Jesus a figure to which he was Son, which transcended his figure — that of the Mother of God. She, like her Son, was a simple human destiny of such arresting and attractive force that she towered above all the hundred and one Virgins and Mothers of Syncretism — Isis, Tanit, Cybele, Demeter — and all the mysteries of birth and pain, and finally drew them into herself. For Irenseus she is the Eve of a new mankind. Origen champions her continued virginity. By giving birth to Redeemer God it is she really who has redeemed the world. Mary the “Theotokos” (she who bare God) was the great stumbling block for the Christians outside the Classical frontier, and it was the doctrinal developments of this idea that led Monophysites and Nestorians to break away and reestablish the pure Jesus religion.⁹⁶ But the Faustian Culture, again, when it awoke and needed a symbol whereby to express its primary feeling for Infinity in time and to manifest its sense of the succession of generations, set up the “Mater Dolorosa” and not the suffering Redeemer as the pivot of the German Catholic Christianity of the Gothic age; and for whole centuries of bright fruitful inwardness this woman figure was the very synthesis of Faustian world feeling and the object of all art, poetry, and piety. Even today in the ritual and the prayers of the Roman Catholic Church, and above all in the thoughts of its people, Jesus takes second place after the Madonna.⁹⁷

Along with the Mary cult there arose the innumerable cults of the saints, which certainly exceeded in number those of the antique place gods; when the Pagan Church finally expired, the Christian had been able to absorb the whole store of local cults in the form of the veneration of saints.

Paul and Mark were decisive in yet another matter of inestimably wide import. It was a result of Paul’s mission that, contrary to all the initial probabilities, Greek became the language of the Church and — following the lead of the first Gospel — of a sacred Greekliterature. Let the reader consider what this meant, in one way and another. The Jesus Church was artificially separated from its spiritual origins and attached to an alien and scholarly element. Touch with the folk spirit of the Aramaean motherland was lost. Thenceforward both the cult churches possessed the same language, the same conceptual traditions, the same book literature from the same schools. The far less sophisticated Aramaic literatures of the East — the truly Magian, written and thought in the language of Jesus and his companions — were cut off from cooperating in the life of the Church. They could not be read, they dropped out of sight, and finally they were forgotten altogether. After all, notwithstanding that the Persian Scriptures were set down in Avestan and the Jewish in Hebrew, the language of their authors and exegetes; the language of the whole Apocalyptic from which the teachings of Jesus, and secondarily the teachings about Jesus, sprang; the language, lastly, of the scholars of all the Mesopotamian universities — was Aramaic. All this vanished from the field of view, to be replaced by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom were taken up, worked upon in common, and misunderstood in common by the Schoolmen of the two cult churches.

A final step in this direction was attempted by a man who was the equal of Paul in organizing talent and greatly his superior in intellectual creativeness, but who was inferior to him in the feeling for possibilities and actualities, and consequently failed to achieve his grandly conceived schemes — Marcion.⁹⁸ He saw in Paul’s creation and its consequences only the basis on which to found the true religion of salvation. He was sensible of the absurdity of two religions that were unreservedly at war with one another possessing the same Holy Writ — namely, the Jewish canon. To us today it seems almost inconceivable that this should have been, but in fact it was so, for a century — but we have to remember what a sacred text meant in every kind of Magian religiousness. In these texts Marcion saw the real “conspiracy against the truth” and the most urgent danger for the doctrines intended by Jesus and, in his view, not yet actualized. Paul the prophet had declared the Old Testament as fulfilled and concluded — Marcion the founder pronounced it defeated and canceled. He strove to cut out everything Jewish, down to the last detail. From end to end he was fighting nothing but Judaism. Like every true founder, like every religiously creative period, like Zarathustra, the prophets of Israel, like the Homeric Greeks, and like the Germans converted to Christianity, he transformed the old gods into defeated powers.⁹⁹ Jehovah as the Creator God, the Demiurge, is the “Just”and therefore the Evil: Jesus as the incarnation of the Saviour God in this evil creation is the “alien” — that is, the good Principle.¹⁰⁰ The foundation of Magian, and in particular Persian, feeling is perfectly unmistakable here. Marcion came from Sinope, the old capital of that Mithradatic Empire whose religion is indicated in the very name of its kings. Here of old, too, the Mithras cult had originated.

But to the new doctrine properly belonged new Scriptures. The “Law and Prophets” which had hitherto been canonical for the whole of Christendom was the Bible of the Jewish God, and in fact it had just been given final shape as such by the Synedrion at Jabna. Thus, it was a Devil’s book that the Christian had in his hands, and Marcion, therefore, now set up against it the Bible of the Redeemer God — likewise an assemblage and ordering of writings that had hitherto been current in the community¹⁰¹ as simple edification books without canonical claims. In place of the Torah he puts the — one and true — Gospel, which he builds up uniformly out of various separate, and, in his view, corrupted and falsified, Gospels. In place of the Israelite prophets he sets up the Epistles of the one prophet of Jesus, who was Paul.

Thus Marcion became the real creator of the New Testament. But for that reason it is impossible to ignore the mysterious personage, closely related to him, who not long before had written the Gospel “according to John.” The intention of this writer was neither to amplify nor to supersede the Gospels proper; what he did — and, unlike Mark, consciously did — was to create something quite new, the first sacred book of Christianity, the Koran of the new religion.¹⁰² The book proves that this religion was already conceived of as something complete and enduring. The idea of the immediately impending end of the world, with which Jesus was filled through and through and which even Paul and Mark in a measure shared, lies far behind “John” and Marcion. Apocalyptic is at an end, and Mysticism is beginning. Their content is not the teaching of Jesus, nor even the Pauline teaching about Jesus, but the enigma of the universe, the World Cavern. There is here no question of a Gospel; not the figure of the Redeemer, but the principle of the Logos, is the meaning and the means of happening. The childhood story is rejected again; a god is not “born,” he is “there,” and wanders in human form over the earth. And this god is a Trinity — God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. This sacred book of earliest Christianity contains, for the first time, the Magian problem of “Substance,” which dominated the following centuries of the exclusion of everything else and finally led to the religion’s splitting up into three churches. And — what is significant in more respects than one — the solution of that problem to which “John” stands closest is that which the Nestorian East stood for as the true one. It is, in virtue of the Logos idea (Greek though the word happens to be) the “easternmost” of the Gospels, and presents Jesus, emphatically not as the bringer of the final and total revelation, but as the second envoy, who is to be followed by a third (the Comforter, Paraclete, of John xiv, 16, 16; xv, 26). This is the astounding doctrine that Jesus himself proclaims, and the decisive note of this enigmatic book. Here is unveiled, quite suddenly, the faith of the Magian East. If the Logos does not go, the Paraclete¹⁰³ cannot come (John xvi, 7), but between them lies the last Eon, the rule of Ahriman (xiv, 30). The Church of the Pseudomorphosis, ruled by Pauline intellect, fought long against the John Gospel and gave it recognition only when the offensive, darkly hinted doctrine had been covered over by a Pauline interpretation. The real state of affairs is disclosed in the Montanist movement (Asia Minor, 160) which harked back to oral tradition and proclaimed in Montanus the manifested Paraclete and the end of the world. Its popularity was immense. Tertullian went over to it at Carthage in 207. About 245 Mani,¹⁰⁴ who was intimately in touch with the currents of Eastern Christianity,¹⁰⁵ cast out the Pauline, human Jesus as a demon and confessed the Johannine Logos as the true Jesus, but announced himself as the Paraclete of the fourth Gospel. In Carthage, Augustine became a Manichaean, and it is a highly suggestive fact that both movements finally fused with Marcionism.

To return to Marcion himself, it was he who carried through the idea of “John” and created a Christian Bible. And then, verging on old age, when the communities of the extreme west recoiled from him in horror,¹⁰⁶ he set out to build the masterly structure of his own Redeemer Church.¹⁰⁷ From 156 to 190 this was a power, and it was only in the following century that the older Church succeeded in degrading the Marcionites to the rank of heretics. Even so, in the broad East and as far out as Turkestan, it was still important at a much later date, and it ended, in a way deeply significant of its essential feeling, by fusing with the Manichaeans.¹⁰⁸

Nevertheless, though in the fullness of his conscious superiority he had underestimated the vis inertiae of existing conditions, his grand effort was not in vain. He was, like Paul before him and Athanasius after him, the deliverer of Christianity at a moment when it threatened to break up, and the grandeur of his idea is in no wise diminished by the fact that union came about in opposition to, instead of through, him. The early Catholic Church — that is, the Church of the Pseudomorphosis — arose in its greatness only about 190, and then it was in self-defense against the Church of Marcion and with the aid of an organization taken from that Church. Further, it replaced Marcion’s Bible by another of similar structure — Gospels and apostolic Epistles — which it then proceeded to combine with the Law and the Prophets in one unit. And finally, this act of linking the two Testaments having in itself settled the Church’s attitude towards Judaism, it proceeded to combat Marcion’s third creation, his Redeemer doctrine, by making a start with a theology of its own on the basis of his enunciation of the problem.

This development, however, took place on Classical soil, and, therefore, even the Church that arose in opposition to Marcion and his anti-Judaism was looked upon by Talmudic Jewry (whose center of gravity lay entirely in Mesopotamia and its universities) as a mere piece of Hellenistic paganism. The destruction of Jerusalem was a conclusive event that in the world of fact no spiritual power could nullify. Such is the intimacy of inward relationship between waking consciousness, religion, and speech that the complete severance after 70 of the Greek Pseudomorphosis and the Aramaic (that is, the truly Arabian) region was bound to result in the formation of two distinct domains of Magian religious development. On the Western margin of the young Culture the Pagan cult church, the Jesus Church (removed thither by Paul), and the Greek speaking Judaism of the Philo stamp were in point of language and literature so interlocked that the last named fell into Christianity even in the first century, and Christianity and Hellenism combined to form a common early philosophy. In the Aramaic speaking world from the Orontes to the Tigris, on the other hand, Judaism and Persism interacted constantly and intimately, each creating in this period its own strict theology and scholastic in the Talmud and the Avesta; and from the fourth century both these theologies exercised the most potent influence upon the Aramaic speaking Christendom that resisted the Pseudomorphosis, so that finally it broke away in the form of the Nestorian Church.

Here in the East the difference, inherent in every human waking consciousness, between sense understanding and word understanding — and, therefore between eye and letter — led up to purely Arabian methods of mysticism and scholasticism. The apocalyptic certainty, “Gnosis” in the first century sense, that Jesus intended to confer,¹⁰⁹ the divining contemplation and emotion, is that of the Israelite prophets, the Gathas, Sufism, and we have it recognizable still in Spinoza, in the Polish Messiah Baal Shem and in Mirza Ali Mohammed, the enthusiast founder of Bahaism, who was executed in Teheran in 1850. The other way, “Paradosis,” is the characteristically Talmudic method of word exegesis, of which Paul was a master;¹¹⁰ it pervades all later Avestan works, the Nestorian dialectic,¹¹¹ the entire theology of Islam alike.

On the other side, the Pseudomorphosis is single and whole both in its Magian believing acceptance (Pistis) and its metaphysical introversion (Gnosis).¹¹² The Magian belief in its Westerly shape was formulated for the Christians by Irenaeus and, above all, by Tertullian, whose famous aphorism “Credo quia absurdum” is the very summation of this certainty in belief. The Pagan counterpart is Plotinus in his Enneads and even more so Porphyry in his treatise On the Return of the Soul to God.¹¹³ But for the great schoolmen of the Pagan Church too, there were Father (Nus), Son, and the middle Being, just as already for Philo the Logos had been firstborn Son and second God. Doctrines concerning ecstasy, angels and demons, and the dual substance of soul were freely current amongst them, and we see in Plotinus and Origen, both pupils of the same master, that the scholasticism of the Pseudomorphosis consisted in the development of Magian concepts and thoughts, by systematic transvaluation of the texts of Plato and Aristotle.

The characteristic central idea of the whole thought of the Pseudomorphosis is the Logos,¹¹⁴ in use and development its faithful image. There is no possibility here of any “Greek,” in the sense of Classical, influence; there was not a man alive in those days whose spiritual disposition could have accommodated the smallest trace of the Logos of Heraclitus and the Stoa. But, equally, the theologies that lived side by side in Alexandria were never able to develop in full purity the Logos notion as they meant it, whereas both in Persian and Chaldean imaginings — as Spirit or Word of God — and in Jewish doctrine — as Ruach and Memra — it played a decisive part. What the Logos teaching in the West did was to develop a Classical formula, by way of Philo and the John Gospel (the enduring effect of which on the West was its mark upon the schoolmen) not only into an element of Christian mysticism, but, eventually, into a dogma.¹¹⁵ This was inevitable. This dogma which both the Western Churches held, corresponded, on the side of knowledge, to that which, on the side of faith, was represented both by the syncretic cults and the cults of Mary and the Saints. And against the whole thing, dogma and cult, the feeling of the East revolted from the 4th century on.

For the eye the history of these thoughts and feelings is repeated in the history of Magian architecture. The basic form of the Pseudomorphosis is the Basilica, which was known to the Jews of the West and to the Hellenistic sects of the Chaldeans even before the time of Christ. As the Logos of the John Gospel is a Magian fundamental in Classical shape, so the Basilica is a Magian room whose inner walls correspond to the outer surfaces of the old Classical temple, the cult building introverted. The architectural form of the pure East is the cupola building, the Mosque, which without doubt existed long before the oldest Christian Churches in the temples of the Persians and Chaldeans, the synagogues of Mesopotamia, and probably the temples of Saba as well. The attempts to reconcile East and West in the Church Councils of the Byzantine period were finally symbolized in the mixed form of the domed basilica. For this item of the history of ecclesiastical architecture is really another expression of the great change that set in with Athanasius and Constantine, the last great champions of Christianity. The one created the firm western dogma and also Monasticism, into whose hands dogma gradually passed from those of the aging schools. The other founded the State of Christian nationality, to which likewise the name of “Greek” passed in the end. And of this transition the domed basilica is the symbol.

CHAPTER VIII

PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE

(B) THE MAGIAN SOUL

I

The world, as spread out for the Magian waking consciousness, possesses a kind of extension that may be called cavern like,¹ though it is difficult for Western man to pick upon any word in his vocabulary that can convey anything more than a hint of the meaning of Magian “space.” For “space” has essentially unlike meanings for the perceptions of the two Cultures. The world-as-cavern is just as different from the world-as-extent of the passionate, far thrusting Faustian as it is from the Classical world-as-sum-of-bodily-things. The Copernican system, in which the earth, as it were, loses itself, must necessarily seem crazy and frivolous to Arabian thought. The Church of the West was perfectly right when it resisted an idea so incompatible with the world feeling of Jesus, and the Chaldean cavern astronomy, which was wholly natural and convincing for Persians, Jews, peoples of the Pseudomorphosis, and Islam, became accessible to the few genuine Greeks who knew of it at all only after a process of transvaluing its basic notions of space.

The tension between Macrocosm and Microcosm (which is identical with the waking consciousness) leads, in the world picture of every Culture, to further oppositions of symbolic importance. All a man’s sensations or understanding, faith or knowledge, receive their shape from a primary opposition which makes them not only activities of the individual, but also expressions of the totality. In the Classical the opposition that universally dominates the waking consciousness is the opposition of matter and form; in the West it is that of force and mass. In the former the tension loses itself in the small and particular, and in the latter it discharges itself in the character of work. In the World cavern, on the other hand, it persists in traversing and swaying to and fro in unsure strugglings, and so becomes that “Semitic” primary dualism which, ever the same under its thousand forms, fills the Magian world. The light shines through the cavern and battles against the darkness (John i, 5). Both are Magian substances. Up and down, heaven and earth become powers that have entity and contend with one another. But these polarities in the most primary sensations mingle with those of the refined and critical understanding, like good and evil, God and Satan. Death, for the author of the John Gospel as for the strict Moslem, is not the end of life, but a Something, a death force, that contends with a life force for the possession of man.

But still more important than all this is the opposition of Spirit and Soul (Hebrew Ruach and nephesh, Persian ahu and urvan, Mandaean monuhmed and gyan, Greek pneuma and psyche) which first comes out in the basic feeling of the prophetic religions, then pervades the whole of Apocalyptic, and finally forms and guides the world contemplations of the awakened Culture — Philo, Paul and Plotinus, Gnostics and Mandaeans, Augustine and the Avesta, Islam and the Kabbalah. Ruach means originally “wind” and nephesh“breath.”² The nephesh is always in one way or another related to the bodily and earthly, to the below, the evil, the darkness. Its effort is the “upward.” The ruach belongs to the divine, to the above, to the light. Its effects in man when it descends are the heroism of a Samson, the holy wrath of an Elijah, the enlightenment of the judge (the Solomon passing judgment³) and all kinds of divination and ecstasy. It is poured out.⁴ From Isaiah xi, 2, the Messiah becomes the incarnation of the ruach. Philo and the Islamic theology divide mankind into born Psychics and born Pneumatics (the “elect,” a concept thoroughly proper to the world cavern and Kismet). All the sons of Jacob are pneumatics. For Paul (1 Cor. xv) the meaning of the Resurrection lies in the opposition of a psychic and a pneumatic body, which alike for him and Philo and the author of the Baruch apocalypse coincides with the opposition of heaven and earth, light and darkness.⁵ For Paul, the Saviour is the heavenly Pneuma.⁶ In the John Gospel he fuses as Logos with the Light; in Neoplatonism he appears as Nus or, in the Classical terminology, the All One opposed to Physis.⁷ Paul and Philo, with their “Classical” (that is, western) conceptual criteria, equated soul and body with good and bad respectively, Augustine, as a Manichaean⁸ with Persian-Eastern bases of distinction, lumps soul and body together as the naturally bad, in contrast to God as the sole Good, and finds in this opposition the source of his doctrine of Grace, which developed also, in the same form (though quite independently of him) in Islam.

But souls are at bottom discrete entities, whereas the Pneuma is one and ever the same. The man possesses a soul, but he onlyparticipates in the spirit of the Light and the Good; the divine descends into him, thus binding all the individuals of the Below together with the one in the Above. This primary feeling, which dominates the beliefs and opinions of all Magian men, is something perfectly singular, and not only characterizes their world view, but marks off the essence and kernel of their religiousness in all its forms from that of every other kind of man. This Culture, as has been shown, was characteristically the Culture of the middle. It could have borrowed forms and ideas from most of the others, and the fact that it did not do so, that in the face of all pressure and temptation it remained so profoundly mistress of its own inward form, attests an unbridgeable gulf of difference. Of all the wealth of Babylonian and Egyptian religion it admitted hardly more than a few names; the Classical and the Indian Cultures, or rather the Civilizations heir to them — Hellenism and Buddhism — distorted its expression to the point of pseudomorphosis, but its essence they never touched. All religions of the Magian Culture, from the creations of Isaiah and Zarathustra to Islam, constitute a complete inward unit of world feeling; and, just as in the Avestan beliefs there is not to be found one trait of Brahmanism nor in early Christianity one breath of Classical feeling, but merely names and figures and outward forms, so also not a trace of this Jesus religion could be absorbed by the Germanic Catholic Christianity of the West, even though the stock of tenets and observances was taken over in its entirety.

Whereas the Faustian man is an “I” that in the last resort draws its own conclusions about the Infinite; whereas the Apollinian man, as one soma among many, represents only himself; the Magian man, with his spiritual kind of being, is only a part of a pneumatic “We”that, descending from above, is one and the same in all believers. As body and soul he belongs to himself alone, but something else, something alien and higher, dwells in him, making him with all his glimpses and convictions just a member of a consensus which, as the emanation of God, excludes error, but excludes also all possibility of the self-asserting Ego. Truth is for him something other than for us. All our epistemological methods, resting upon the individual judgment, are for him madness and infatuation, and its scientific results a work of the Evil One, who has confused and deceived the spirit as to its true dispositions and purposes. Herein lies the ultimate, for us unapproachable, secret of Magian thought in its cavern world — the impossibility of a thinking, believing, and knowing Ego is the presupposition inherent in all the fundamentals of all these religions. While Classical man stood before his gods as one body before another; whereas the Faustian willing “I” in its wide world feels itself confronted by deity, also Faustian, also willing, effective everywhere; the Magian deity is the indefinite, enigmatic Power on high that pours out its Wrath or its Grace, descends itself into the dark or raises the soul into the light as it sees fit. The idea of individual wills is simply meaningless, for “will” and “thought” in man are not prime, but already effects of the deity upon him. Out of this unshakable root feeling, which is merely re-expressed, never essentially altered, by any conversions, illumination or subtilizing in the world — there emerges of necessity the idea of the Divine Mediator, of one who transforms this state from a torment into a bliss. All Magian religions are by this idea bound together, and separated from those of all other Cultures.

The Logos idea in its broadest sense, an abstraction of the Magian light sensation of the Cavern, is the exact correlative of this sensation in Magian thought. It meant that from the unattainable Godhead its Spirit, its “Word,” is released as carrier of the light and bringer of the good, and enters into relation with human being to uplift, pervade, and redeem it. This distinctness of three substances, which does not contradict their oneness in religious thought, was known already to the prophetic religions. Ahuramazda’s light gleaming soul is the Word (Yasht 13, 31), and in one of the earliest Gathas his Holy Spirit (spenta mainyu) converses with the Evil Spirit (angra mainyu, Yasna 45, 2). The same idea penetrates the whole of the old Jewish literature. The thought which the Chaldeans built up on the separation of God and His Word and the opposition of Marduk and Nabu, which breaks forth with power in the whole Aramaean Apocalyptic remained permanently active and creative; by Philo and John, Marcion and Mani, it entered into the Talmudic teachings and thence into the Kabbalistic books Yesirah and Sohar, into the Church Councils and the works of the Fathers, into the later Avesta, and finally into Islam, in which a Mohammed gradually became the Logos and, as the mystically respent, living Mohammed of the popular religion, fused into the figure of Christ.⁹ This conception is for Magian man so self-evident that it was able to break through even the strictly monotheistic structure of the original Islam and to appear with Allah as the Word of God (kalimah), the Holy Spirit (rub) and the “light of Mohammed.”

For, for the popular religion, the first light that comes forth from the world creation is that of Mohammed, in the shape of a peacock¹⁰ “formed of white pearls” and walled about by veilings. But the peacock is the Envoy of God and the prime soul¹¹ as early as the Mandaeans, and it is the emblem of immortality on Early Christian sarcophagi. The light diffusing pearl that illumines the dark house of the body is the Spirit entered into man, and thought of as substance, for the Mandaeans as in the Acts of Thomas.¹² The Jezidi¹³ reverence the Logos as peacock and light; next to the Druses they have preserved most purely the old Persian conception of the substantial Trinity.

Thus again and again we find the Logos idea getting back to the light sensation from which the Magian understanding derived it. The world of Magian mankind is filled with a fairytale feeling.¹⁴ Devils and evil spirits threaten man; angels and fairies protect him. There are amulets and talismans, mysterious lands, cities, buildings, and beings, secret letters, Solomon’s Seal, the Philosophers’ Stone. And over all this is poured the quivering cavern light that the spectral darkness ever threatens to swallow up. If this profusion of figures astonishes the reader, let him remember that Jesus lived in it, and Jesus’s teachings are only to be understood from it. Apocalyptic is only a vision of fable intensified to an extreme of tragic power. Already in the Book of Enoch we have the crystal palace of God, the mountains of precious stone, and the imprisonment of the apostate stars. Fantastic, too, are the whole overpowering idea world of the Mandaeans, that of the Gnostics and the Manichaeans, the system of Origen, and the figures of the Persian “Bundahish”; and when the time of the great visions was over, these ideas passed into a legend poesy and into the innumerable religious romances of which we have Christian specimens in the gospels concerning Jesus’s childhood, the Acts of Thomas and the anti-Pauline Pseudo-Clementines. One such story is that of Abraham’s having minted the thirty pieces of silver of Judas. Another is the tale of the “treasure cave” in which, deep under the hill of Golgotha, are stored the golden treasure of paradise and the bones of Adam.¹⁵ Dante’s poetic material was after all poetic, but this was sheer actuality, the only world in which these people lived continuously. Such sensations are unapproachably remote from men who live in and with a dynamical world picture. If we would obtain some inkling of how alien to us all the inner life of Jesus is — a painful realization for the Christian of the West, who would be glad indeed if he could make that inner life the point of contact for his own inward piety — if we would discover why nowadays only a pious Moslem has the capacity livingly to experience it, we should sink ourselves in this wonder element of a world image that was Jesus’s world image. And then, and only then, shall we perceive how little Faustian Christianity has taken over from the wealth of the Church of the Pseudomorphosis — of its world feeling nothing, of its inward form little, and of its concepts and figures much.

II

The When, for the Magian Soul, issues from the Where. Here too, is no Apollinian clinging to pointlike Present, nor Faustian thrust and drive towards an infinitely distant goal. Here Being has a different pulse, and consequently Waking being has another sense of time, which is the counter-concept to Magian space. The prime thing that the humanity of this Culture, from poor slaves and porters to the prophets and the caliphs themselves, feels as the Kismet above him is not a limitless flight of the ages that never lets a lost moment recur, but a Beginning and an End of “This Day,” which is irrevocably ordained and in which the human existence takes the place assigned to it from creation itself. Not only world space, but world-time also is cavern like. Hence comes the thoroughly Magian certainty that everything has “a” time, from the origins of the Saviour, whose hour stood written in ancient texts, to the smallest detail of the everyday, in which Faustian hurry would be meaningless and unimaginable. Here, too, is the basis of the Early Magian (and in particular the Chaldean) astrology, which likewise presupposes that all things are written down in the stars and that the scientifically calculable course of the planets authorized conclusions as to the course of earthly things.¹⁶ The Classical oracle answered the only question that could perturb Apollinian man — the form, the “How?” of coming things. But the question of the Cavern is “When?” The whole of Apocalyptic, the spiritual life of Jesus, the agony of Gethsemane, and the grand movement that arose out of his death are unintelligible if we have not grasped this primary question of Magian being and the presuppositions lying behind it. It is an infallible sign of the extinction of the Classical Soul that astrology in its westward advance drove the oracle step by step before it. Nowhere is the stage of transition more clearly visible than in Tacitus, whose entire history is dominated by the confusion and dislocation of his world picture. First of all, as a true Roman, he brings in the power of the old city deities; then, as an intelligent cosmopolitan, he regards this very belief in their intervention as a superstition; and finally, as a Stoic (by that time the spiritual outlook of the Stoa had become Magian), he speaks of the power of the seven planets that rule the fortunes of men. And thus it comes about that in the following centuries Time itself as vessel of fate — namely, the Vault of Time, limited each way and therefore capable of being grasped as an entity by the inner eye — is by Persian mysticism set above the light of God as Zrvan, and rules the world conflict of Good and Evil. Zrvanism was the State religion of Persia in 438-457.

Fundamentally, too, it is this belief that all stands written in the stars, that makes the Arabian Culture characteristically that of “eras” — that is, of time reckonings that begin at some event felt as a peculiarly significant act of Providence. The first and most important is the generic Aramasan era, which begins about 300 B.C. with the growth of apocalyptic tension and is the “Seleucid era.” It was followed by many others, amongst them the Sabaean (about 115 B.C.), the starting point of which is not exactly known to us; that of Diocletian; the Jewish era, beginning with the Creation, which was introduced by the Synedrion in 346;¹⁷ the Persian, from the accession of the last Sassanid Jezdegerd in 632; and the Hijra, by which at last the Seleucid was displaced in Syria and Mesopotamia. Outside this land-field there is mere imitation for practical ends, like Varro’s “ab urbe condita”; that of the Marcionites, beginning with Marcion’s breach with the Church in 144; and that of the Christians, introduced shortly after 500 and beginning with the birth of Jesus.

World history is the picture of the living world into which man sees himself woven by birth, ancestry, and progeny, and which he strives to comprehend from out of his world feeling. The historical picture of Classical man concentrates itself upon the pure Present. Its content is no true Becoming, but a foreground Being with a conclusive background of timeless myth, rationalized as “the Golden Age.” This Being, however, was a variegated swarming of ups and downs, good and ill fortune, a blind “thereabouts,” an eternal alteration, yet ever in its changes the same, without direction, goal, or “Time.” The cavern feeling, on the contrary, requires a surveyable history consisting in a beginning and an end to the world that is also the beginning and the end of man — acts of God of mighty magic — and between these turns, spellbound to the limits of the Cavern and the ordained period, the battle of light and darkness, of the angels and Jazatas with Ahriman, Satan, and Eblis, in which Man, his Soul, and his Spirit are involved. The present Cavern God can destroy and replace by a new creation. The Persian-Chaldean apocalyptic offers to the gaze a whole series of such eons, and Jesus, along with his time, stood in expectation of the end of the existing one.¹⁸ The consequence of this is a historic outlook like that which is natural to Islam even today — the view over a given time. “The world view of the people falls naturally into three major parts — world beginning, world development, and world catastrophe. For the Moslem who feels so deeply ethically, the chief essentials in world development are the salvation story and the ethical way of life, knit into one as the “life” of man. This debouches into the world catastrophe, which contains the sanction of the moral history of humanity.”¹⁹

But, further, for the Magian human existence, the issue of the feeling of this sort of Time and the view of this sort of space is a quite peculiar type of piety, which likewise we may put under the sign of the Cavern — a will-less resignation, to which the spiritual “I” is unknown, and which feels the spiritual “We” that has entered into the quickened body as simply a reflection of the divine Light. The Arab word for this is Islam ( = submission) but this Islam was equally Jesus’s normal mode of feeling and that of every other personality of religious genius that appeared in this Culture. Classical piety is something perfectly different,²⁰ while, as for that of our own Culture, if we could mentally abstract from the piety of St. Theresa and Luther and Pascal their Ego — that Ego which wills to maintain itself against, to submit to, or even to be extinguished by the Divine Infinite — there would be nothing left. The Faustian prime sacrament of Contrition presupposes the strong and free will that can overcome itself. But it is precisely the impossibility of an Ego as a free power in the face of the divine that constitutes “Islam.” Every attempt to meet the operations of God with a personal purpose or even a personal opinion is “masiga,” — that is, not an evil willing, but an evidence that the powers of darkness and evil have taken possession of a man and expelled the divine from him. The Magian waking consciousness is merely the theater of a battle between these two powers and not, so to say, a power in itself. Moreover, in this kind of world happening there is no place for individual causes and effects, let alone any universally effective dynamic concatenation thereof, and consequently there is no necessary connection between sin and punishment, noclaim to reward, no old Israelitish “righteousness.” Things of this order the true piety of this Culture regards as far beneath it. The laws of nature are not something settled forever that God can alter only by the method of miracle — they are (so to put it) the ordinary state of an autocratic divine will, not possessing in themselves anything of the logical necessity that they have for Faustian souls. In the entire world cavern there is but one Cause, which lies immediately behind all visible workings, and this is the Godhead, which, as itself, acts without causes. Even to speculate upon causes in connection with God is sinful.

From this basic feeling proceeds the Magian idea of Grace. This underlies all sacraments of this Culture (especially the Magian proto-sacrament of Baptism) and forms a contrast of the deepest intensity with the Faustian idea of Contrition. Contrition presupposes the will of an Ego, but Grace knows of no such thing. It was Augustine’s high achievement to develop this essentially Islamic thought with an inexorable logic, and with a penetration so thorough that since Pelagius the Faustian Soul has tried by any and every route to circumvent this certainty — which for it constitutes an imminent danger of self destruction — and in using Augustinian propositions to express its own proper consciousness of God has ever misunderstood and transvalued them. Actually, Augustine was the last great thinker of Early Arabian Scholasticism, anything but a Western intellect.²¹ Not only was he at times a Manichaean, but he remained so even as a Christian in some important characteristics, and his closest relations are to be found amongst the Persian theologians of the later Avesta, with their doctrines of the Store of Grace of the Holy and of absolute guilt. For him grace is the substantial inflowing of something divine into the human Pneuma, itself also substantial.²² The Godhead radiates it; man receives it, but does not acquire it. From Augustine, as from Spinoza so many centuries later,²³ the notion of force is absent, and for both the problem of freedom refers not to the Ego and its Will, but to the part of the universal Pneuma that is infused into a man and its relation to the rest of him. Magian waking being is the theater of a conflict between the two world substances of light and darkness. The Early Faustian thinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Occam, on the contrary, see a contest inherent in dynamic waking consciousness itself, a contest of the two forces of the Ego — namely, will and reason,²⁴ and so imperceptibly the question posed by Augustine changes into another, which he himself would have been incapable of understanding — are willing and thinking free forces, or are they not? Answer this question as we may, one thing at any rate is certain, that the individual ego has to wage this war and not to suffer it. The Faustian Grace refers to the success of the Will and not to the species of a substance. Says the Westminster Confession of the Presbyterians (1646): “The rest of Mankind, God was pleased, according to the unsearchable Counsel of his own Will, whereby he extendeth, or withholdeth Mercy, as he pleaseth, for the Glory of his Sovereign Power over his Creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to Dishonor and Wrath, for their Sin, to the Praise of his glorious Justice.” The other conception, that the idea of Grace excludes every individual will and every cause but the One, that it is sinful even to question why man suffers, finds an expression in one of the most powerful poems known to world history, a poem that came into being in the midst of the Arabian pre-Culture and is in inward grandeur unparalleled by any product of that Culture itself — the Book of Job.²⁵ It is not Job, but his friends who look for a sin as the cause of his troubles. They — like the bulk of mankind in this and every other Culture, present day readers and critics of the work, therefore, included — lack the metaphysical depth to get near the ultimate meaning of suffering within the world cavern. Only the Hero himself fights through the fulfillment, to pure Islam, and he becomes thereby the only possible figure of tragedy that Magian feeling can set up by the side of our Faust.²⁶

III

The waking consciousness of every Culture allows of two ways of inwardness, that in which contemplative feeling spreads into understanding, and that in which the reverse takes place. The Magian contemplation is called by Spinoza “intellectual love of God,” and by his Sufist contemporaries in Asia “extinction in God” (mahw); it may be intensified to the Magian ecstasy that was vouchsafed to Plotinus several times, and to his pupil Porphyry once in old age. The other side,, the rabbinical dialectic, appears in Spinoza as geometrical method and in the Arabian-Jewish “Late” philosophy in general as Kalaam, Both, however, rest upon the fact that in Magian there is no individual ego, but a single Pneuma present simultaneously in each and all of the elect, which is likewise Truth. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the resultant root idea of the ijma is much more than a concept or notion, that it can be a lived experience of even overwhelming force, and that all community of the Magian kind rests upon it and, as doing so, is removed from community in any other Culture. “The mystic Community of Islam extends from the here into the beyond; it reaches beyond the grave, in that it comprises the dead Moslems of earlier generations, nay, even the righteous of the times before Islam. The Moslem feels himself bound up in one unity with them all. They help him, and he, too, can in turn increase their beatitude by the application of his own merit.”²⁷ The same, precisely, was what the Christians and the Syncretists of the Pseudomorphosis meant when they used the words Polis and Civitas — these words, which had formerly implied a sum of bodies, now denoted a consensus of fellow believers. Augustine’s famous Civitas Dei was neither a Classical Polis nor a Western Church, but a unity of believers, blessed, and angels, exactly as were the communes of Mithras, of Islam, of Manichaeism, and of Persia. As the community was based upon consensus, it was in spiritual things infallible. “My people,” said Mohammed, “can never agree in an error,” and the same is premised in Augustine’s State of God. With him there was not and could not be any question of an infallible Papal ego or of any other sort of authority to settle dogmatic truths; that would completely destroy the Magian concept of the Consensus. And the same applied in this Culture generally — not only to dogma, but also to law and to the State. The Islamic community, like that of Porphyry and that of Augustine, embraces the whole of the world cavern, the here and the beyond, the orthodox and the good angels and spirits, and within this community the State only formed a smaller unit of the visible side, a unit, therefore, of which the operations were governed by the major whole. In the Magian world, consequently, the separation of politics and religion is theoretically impossible and nonsensical, whereas in the Faustian Culture the battle of Church and State is inherent in the very conceptions — logical, necessary, unending. In the Magian, civil and ecclesiastical law are simply identical. Side by side with the Emperor of Constantinople stood the Patriarch, by the Shah was the Zarathustratema, by the Exilarch the Gaon, by the Caliph the Sheikh-ul-Islam, at once superiors and subjects. There is not in this the slightest affinity to the Gothic relation of Emperor and Pope; equally, all such ideas were alien to the Classical world. In the constitution of Diocletian this Magian embedding of the State in the community of the faithful was for the first time actualized, and by Constantine it was carried into full effect. It has been shown already that State, Church, and Nation formed a spiritual unit — namely, that part of the orthodox consensus which manifested itself in the living man. And hence for the Emperor, as ruler of the Faithful — that is, of that portion of the Magian community which God had entrusted to him — it was a self-evident duty to conduct the Councils so as to bring about the consensus of the elect.

IV

But besides the consensus there is another sort of revelation of Truth — namely, the “Word of God,” in a perfectly definite and purely Magian sense of the phrase, which is equally remote from Classical and from Western thought, and has, in consequence, been the source of innumerable misunderstandings. The sacred book in which it has become visibly evident, in which it has been captured by the spell of a sacred script, is part of the stock of every Magian religion.²⁸ In this conception three Magian notions are interwoven — each of which, even by itself, presents extreme difficulties for us, while their simultaneous separateness and oneness is simply inaccessible to our religious thought, often though that thought has managed to persuade itself to the contrary. These ideas are: God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. That which is written in the prologue of the John Gospel — “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” — had long before come to perfectly natural expression as something self-evident in the Persian ideas of Spenta Mainyu,²⁹ and Vohu Mano,³⁰ and in corresponding Jewish and Chaldean conceptions. And it was the kernel for which the conflicts of the fourth and fifth centuries concerning the substance of Christ were fought. But, for Magian thought, truth is itself a substance,³¹ and lie (or error) a second substance — again the same dualism that opposes light and darkness, life and death, good and evil. As substance, truth is identical now with God, now with the Spirit of God, now with the Word. Only in the light of this can we comprehend sayings like “I am the truth and the life” and “My word is the truth,” sayings to be understood, as they were meant, with reference to substance. Only so, too, can we realize with what eyes the religious man of this Culture looked upon his sacred book: in it the invisible truth has entered into a visible kind of existence, or, in the words of John i, 14: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” According to the Yasna the Avesta was sent down from heaven, and according to the Talmud Moses received the Torah volume by volume from God. A Magian revelation is a mystical process in which the eternal and unformed word of God — or the Godhead as Word — enters into a man in order to assume through him the manifest, sensible form of sounds and especially of letters. “Koran” means “reading.” Mohammed in a vision saw in the heaven treasured rolls of scripture that he (although he had never learned how to read) was able to decipher “in the name of the Lord.”³² This is a form of revelation that in the Magian Culture is the rule and in other Cultures is not even the exception,³³ but it was only from the time of Cyrus that it began to take shape. The old Israelitish prophets, and no doubt Zarathustra also, see and hear in ecstasy things that afterwards they spread abroad. The Deuteronomic code (621) was given out as having been “found in the Temple,” which meant that it was to be taken as the wisdom of the Father. The first (and a very deliberate) example of a “Koran” is the book of Ezekiel, which the author received in a thought out vision from God and “swallowed” (iii, 1-3). Here, expressed in the crudest imaginable form, is the basis on which later the idea and shape of all apocalyptic writing was founded. But by degrees this substantial form of reception came to be one of the requisites for any book to be canonical. It was in post-Exilic times that the idea arose of the Tables of the Law received by Moses on Sinai; later such an origin came to be assumed for the whole Torah, and about the Maccabean period for the bulk of the Old Testament. From the Council of Jabna (about 90 B.C.) the whole word was regarded as inspired and delivered in the most literal sense. But the same evolution took place in the Persian religion up to the sanctification of the Avesta in the third century, and the same idea of a literal delivery appears in the second vision of Hermas, in the Apocalypses, and in the Chaldean and Gnostic and Mandaean writings; lastly, it underlies, as a tacit natural basis, all the ideas that the Neo-Pythagoreans and the Neo-Platonists formed of the writings of their old masters. “Canon” is the technical expression for the totality of writings that are accepted by a religion as delivered. It was as canons in this sense that the Hermetic collection and the corpus of Chaldean oracles came into being from 200 — the latter a sacred book of the Neoplatonists which alone was admitted by Proclus, the “Father” of this Church, to stand with Plato’s Timaus.

Originally, the young Jesus religion, like Jesus himself, recognized the Jewish canon. The first Gospels set up no sort of claim to be the Word made visible. The John Gospel is the first Christian writing of which the evident purpose is that of a Koran, and its unknown author is the originator of the idea that there could be and must be a Christian Koran. The grave and difficult decision whether the new religion should break with that which Jesus had believed in clothed itself of deep necessity in the question whether the Jewish scriptures might still be regarded as incarnations of the one truth. The answer of the John Gospel was tacitly, and that of Marcion openly, no, but that of the Fathers was, quite illogically, yes.

It followed from this metaphysical conception of the essence of a sacred book that the expressions “God speaks” and “the Scripture says” were, in a manner wholly alien to our thought, completely identical. To us it is suggestive of the Arabian Nights that God himself should be spellbound in these words and letters and could be unsealed and compelled to reveal the truth by the adepts of this magic. Exegesis no less than inspiration and delivery is a process of mystical under-meaning (Mark i, 2.1). Hence the reverence — in diametrical opposition to the Classical feeling — with which these precious manuscripts were cared for, their ornamentation by every means known to the young Magian art, and the appearance again and again of new scripts which, in the eyes of their users, alone possessed the power of capturing the truth sent down.

But such a Koran is by its very nature unconditionally right, and therefore unalterable and incapable of improvement. There arose, in consequence, the habit of secret interpretations meant to bring the text into harmony with the convictions of the time. A masterpiece of this kind is Justinian’s Digests, but the same applies not only to every book of the Bible, but also (we need not doubt) to the Gathas of the Avesta and even to the then current manuscripts of Plato, Aristotle, and other authorities of the Pagan theology. More important still is the assumption, traceable in every Magian religion, of a secret revelation, or a secret meaning of the Scriptures, preserved not by being written down, but in the memory of adepts and propagated orally. According to Jewish notions, Moses received at Sinai not only the written, but also a secret oral Torah,³⁴ which it was forbidden to commit to writing. “God foresaw,” says the Talmud, “that one day a time would come when the Heathen would possess themselves of the Torah and would say to Israel: ‘We, too, are sons of God.’ Then will the Lord say: ‘Only he who knows my secrets is my son.’ And what are the secrets of God? The oral teachings.”³⁵ The Talmud, then, in the form in which it is generally accessible, contains only a part of the religious material, and it is the same with Christian texts of the early period. It has often been observed³⁶ that Mark speaks of the Visitation and of the Resurrection only in hints, and that John only touches upon the doctrine of the Paraclete and omits the institution of the Lord’s Supper entirely. The initiates understood what was meant, and the unbeliever ought not to know it. Later there was a whole “secret discipline” which bound Christians to observe silence in the presence of unbelievers concerning the baptismal confession and other matters. With the Chaldeans, Neo-pythagoreans, Cynics, Gnostics, and especially the sects from Jewish to Islamic, this tendency went to such lengths that the greater part of their secret doctrines is unknown to us. Concerning the Word thus preserved only in the minds there was a consensus of silence, the more so as each believer was certain that the other “knew.” We ourselves, as it is upon the most important things that we are most emphatic and forthright, run the risk of misinterpreting Magian doctrines through taking the part that was expressed for the whole that existed, and the profane literal meaning of words for their real significance. Gothic Christianity had no secrets and hence it doubly mistrusted the Talmud, which it rightly regarded as being only the foreground of Jewish doctrine.

Pure Magian, too, is the Kabbalah, which out of numbers, letter forms, points, and strokes, unfolds secret significances, and therefore cannot but be as old as the Word itself that was sent down as Substance. The secret dogma of the creation of the world out of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and that of the throne chariot of Ezekiel’s Vision, are already traceable in Maccabean times. Closely related to this is the allegorical exegesis of the sacred texts. All the tractates of the Mishnah, all the Fathers, all the Alexandrian philosophers are full of it; in Alexandria the whole Classical mythology and even Plato were treated in this way and brought into analogy (Moses = Musaeus) with the Jewish prophets.

The only strictly scientific method that an unalterable Koran leaves open for progressive opinion is that of commentary. As by hypothesis the “word” of an authority cannot be improved upon, the only resource is reinterpretation. No one in Alexandria would ever have asserted that Plato was in “error”; instead, he was glossed upon. It was done in the strictly constructed forms of the Halakha, and the fixation of this exegesis in writing takes the commentary shape that dominates all religious, philosophical, and savant literatures of this Culture. Following the procedure of the Gnostics, the Fathers compiled written commentaries upon the Bible, and similarly the Pehlevi commentary of the Zend appeared by the side of the Avesta, and the Midrash by the side of the Jewish canon. But the “Roman” jurists of about A.D. 200 and the “Late Classical” philosophers — that is, the Schoolmen of the growing cult church — went just the same way; the Apocalypse of this Church, commented over and over again after Posidonius, was the Timaeus of Plato. The Mishnah is one vast commentary upon the Torah. And when the oldest exegetes had become themselves authorities and their writings Korans, commentaries were written upon commentaries, as by Simplicius, the last Platonist, in the West, by the Amoraim, who added the Gemara to the Mishnah in the East, and by the jurists who compiled the Imperial Constitutions into the Digests at Byzantium.

This method, which fictitiously refers back every saying to an immediate inspired delivery, was brought to its keenest edge in the Talmudic and the Islamic theologies. A new Halakha or a Hadith is only valid when it can be referred through an unbroken chain of guarantors back to Moses or Mohammed.³⁷ The solemn formula for this in Jerusalem was “Let it come over me! So have I heard it from my teacher.”³⁸ In the Zend the citation of the chain of warranty is the rule, and Irenaeus justifies his theology by the fact that a chain goes back from him through Polycarp to the primitive Community. Into the Early Christian literature this Halakha form entered so self-evidently that no one remarked it for what it was. Apart altogether from the constant references to the Law and the Prophets, it appears in the superscription of the four Gospels (“according to” Mark), each of which had thus to present its warrant if authority was to be claimed for the words of the Lord that it presented.³⁹ This established the chain back to the Truth that was incarnate in Jesus, and it is impossible to exaggerate the intense reality of this in the world idea of an Augustine or a Jerome. This is the basis of the practice, which spread even more widely from the time of Alexander onwards, of providing religious and philosophical writings with names,⁴⁰ like Enoch, Solomon, Ezra, Hermes, Pythagoras — guarantors and vessels of divine wisdom, in whom, therefore, the Word had been made Flesh of old. We still possess a number of Apocalypses bearing the name of Baruch, who was then compared with Zarathustra, and we can scarcely form an idea of what in the way of literature circulated under the names of Aristotle and Pythagoras. The “Theology of Aristotle” was one of the most influential works of Neoplatonism. And, lastly, this the metaphysical presupposition for the style and the deeper meaning of citation, which was employed by Fathers, Rabbis, “Greek” philosophers, and “Roman” jurists, and eventuated on the one hand in the Law of Valentinian III, and on the other in the elimination from the Jewish and Christian canons of apocryphal writings — a fundamental notion, which differentiated the literary stock according to difference of substance.

V

With such researches to build upon, it will become possible in the future to write a history of the Magian group of religions. It forms an inseparable unit of spirit and evolution, and let no one imagine that any individual one of them can be really comprehended without reference to the rest. Their birth, unfolding, and inward confirmation occupy the period 0-500. It corresponds exactly to the rise of the Western religion from the Cluniac movement to the Reformation. A mutual give and take, a confusingly rich blossoming, ripening, transformation — overlayings, migrations, adaptations, rejections — fill these centuries, without any sort of dependence of one system upon the others being demonstrable. But only the forms and the structures change; in the depths it is one and the same spirituality, and in all the languages of this world of religions it is always itself that it brings to expression.

In the wide realm of old Babylonian fellahdom young peoples lived. There everything was making ready. The first premonitions of the future awoke about 700 B.C. in the prophetic religions of the Persians, Jews, and Chaldeans. An image of creation of the same kind that later was to be the preface of the Torah showed itself in clear outlines, and with that an orientation, a direction, a goal of desire, was set. Something was descried in the far future, indefinitely and darkly still, but with a profound certainty that it would come. From that time on men lived with the vision of this, with the feeling of a mission.

The second wave swelled up steeply in the Apocalyptic currents after 300. Here it was the Magian waking consciousness that arose and built itself a metaphysic of Last Things, based already upon the prime symbol of the coming Culture, the Cavern. Ideas of an awful End of the World, of the Last Judgment, of Resurrection, Paradise, and Hell, and with them the grand thought of a process of salvation in which earth’s destiny and man’s were one, burst forth everywhere — we cannot say what land or people it was that created them — mantled in wondrous scenes and figures and names. The Messiah figure presents itself, complete at one stroke. Satan’s temptation of the Saviour⁴¹ is told as a tale. But simultaneously there welled up a deep and ever increasing fear before this certainty of an implacable — and imminent — limit of all happening, before the moment in which there would be only Past. Magian Time, the “hour,” directedness under the Cavern, imparted a new pulse to life and a new import to the word “Destiny.” Man’s attitude before the Deity suddenly became completely different. In the dedicatory inscription of the great basilica of Palmyra (which was long thought to be Christian) Baal was called the good, the compassionate, the mild; and this feeling penetrated, with the worship of Rahman, right to southern Arabia. It fills the psalms of the Chaldeans and the teachings about the God sent Zarathustra that took the place of his teachings. And it stirred the Jewry of Maccabean time — most of the psalms were written then — and all the other communities, long forgotten now, that lay between the Classical and the Indian worlds.

The third upheaval came in the time of Caesar and brought to birth the great religions of Salvation. And with this the Culture rose to bright day, and what followed continuously throughout one or two centuries was an intensity of religious experience, both unsurpassable and at long last unbearable. Such a tension bordering upon the breaking point the Gothic, the Vedic, and every other Culture soul has known, once and once only, in its young morning.

Now arose in the Persian, the Mandaean, the Jewish, the Christian, circles of belief, and in that of the Western Pseudomorphosis as well — just as in the Indian, the Classical, and the Western ages of Chivalry — the Grand Myth. In this Arabian Culture religious and national heroism are no more distinctly separable than nation, church, and state, or sacred and secular law. The prophet merges with the fighter, and the story of a great Sufferer rises to the rank of a national epic. The powers of light and darkness, fabulous beings, angels and devils, Satan and the good spirits wrestle together; all nature is a battleground from the beginning of the world to its annihilation. Down below in the world of mankind are enacted the adventures and sufferings of the heralds, the heroes, and the martyrs of religion. Every nation, in the sense of the word attaching to this Culture, possessed its heroic saga. In the East the life of the Persian prophet inspired an epic poetry of grand outlines. At his birth the Zarathustra laughter pealed through the heavens, and all nature echoed it. In the West the suffering of Jesus, ever broadening and developing, became the veritable epic of the Christian nation, and by its side there grew up a chain of legends of his childhood which in the end fructified a whole genre of poetry. The figure of the Mother of God and the deeds of the Apostles became, like the stories of the Western Crusade heroes, the center of extended romances (Acts of Thomas, Pseudo-Clementines) which in the second century, sprang up everywhere from the Nile to the Tigris. In the Jewish Haggada and in the Targums is brought together a rich measure of legends about Saul, David, the Patriarchs, and the great Tannaim, like Schuda and Akiba,⁴² and the insatiable fancy of the age seized also upon what it could reach of the Late Classical cult legends and founder stories (lives of Pythagoras, Hermes, Apollonius of Tyana). With the end of the second century the sounds of this exaltation die away. The flowering of epic poetry is past, and the mystical penetration and dogmatic analysis of the religious material begin. The doctrines of the new Churches are brought into theological systems. Heroism yields to Scholastism, poetry to thought, the seer and seeker to the priest. The early Scholasticism which ends about 200 (as the Western about 1200) comprises the whole Gnosis — in the very broadest sense, the great Contemplation — the author of the John Gospel, Valentinus, Bardesanes, and Marcion, the Apologists and the early Fathers, up to Irenaeus and Tertullian, the last Tannaim up to Rabbi Jehuda, the completer of the Mishna, the Neo-pythagoreans and Hermetics of Alexandria. All this corresponds with, in the West, the School of Chartres, Anselm, Joachim of Floris, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugo de St. Victor. Full Scholasticism begins with Neoplatonism, with Clement and Origen, the first Amoraim, and the creators of the newer Avesta under Ardeshir (226-241) and Sapor I, the Mazdaist high priest Tanvasar above all. Simultaneously a higher religiousness begins to separate from the peasant’s piety of the countryside, which still lingered in the apocalyptic disposition, and thenceforth maintained itself almost unaltered under various names right into the fellahdom of the Turkish age, while in the urban and more intellectual upper world the Persian, Jewish, and Christian community was absorbed by that of Islam.

Slowly and steadily now the great Churches moved to fulfillment. It had been decided — the most important religious result of the second century — that the outcome of the teaching of Jesus was not to be a transformation of Judaism, but a new Church, which took its way westward while Judaism, without loss of inward strength, turned itself to the East. To the third century belong the great mental structures of theology. A modus vivendi with historical actuality had been reached, the end of the world had receded into the distance, and a new dogmatic grew up to explain the new world picture. The arrival of mature Scholasticism presupposes faith in the duration of the doctrines that it sets itself to establish.

Viewing the results of their efforts, we find that the Aramaean motherland developed its forms in three directions. In the East, out of the Zoroastrian religion of Achasmenid times and the remains of its sacred literature, there formed itself the Mazdaist Church, with a strict hierarchy and laborious ritual, with sacraments, mass, and confession (patet). As mentioned above, Tanvasar made a beginning with the collection and ordering of the new Avesta; under Sapor I (as contemporaneously in the Talmud) the profane texts of medicine, law, and astronomy were added; and the rounding off was the work of the Church magnate Mahraspand under Sapor II (309-379). The immediate accretion of a commentary in Pehlevi was only what was to be expected in the Magian Culture. The new Avesta, like the Jewish and the Christian Bibles, was a canon of separate writings, and we learn that amongst the Nasks (originally twenty-one) now lost there was a gospel of Zarathustra, the conversion story of Vishtaspa, a Genesis, a law book, and a genealogical book with trees from the Creation to the Persian kings, while the Vendidad, which Geldner calls the Leviticus of the Persians, was — most significantly — preserved complete.

A new religious founder appeared in 242, in the reign of Sapor I. This was Mani, who, rejecting “redeemerless” Judaism and Hellenism, knit together the whole mass of Magian religions in one of the most powerful theological creations of all times — for which in 276 the Mazdaist priesthood crucified him. Equipped by his father (who quite late in life abandoned his family to enter a Mandaean order) with all the knowledge of the period, he unified the basic ideas of the Chaldeans and Persians with those of Johannine, Eastern, Christianity — a task which had been attempted before in the Christian-Persian Gnosis of Bardesanes, but without any idea of founding a new church.⁴³ He conceived of the mystical figures of the Johannine Logos (for him identical with the Persian Vohu Mano), the Zarathustra of the Avesta legends, and the Buddha of the late texts as divine Emanations, and himself he proclaimed to be the Paraclete of the John Gospel and the Saoshyant of the Persians. As we now know, thanks to the Turfan discoveries which included parts of Mani’s works (till then completely lost), the Church language of the Mazdaists, Manichaeans, and Nestorians was — independently of the current languages — Pehlevi.

In the West the two cult churches developed (in Greek⁴⁴) a theology that was not only cognate with this, but to a great extent identical with it. In the time of Mani began the theological fusion of the Aramaean-Chaldean sun religion and the Aramaean-Persian Mithras cult into one system, whose first great “Father” was Iamblichus (c. 300) — the contemporary of Athanasius, but also of Diocletian, the Emperor who in 295 made Mithras the God of a henotheistic State religion. Spiritually, at any rate, its priests were in nowise distinguishable from those of Christianity. Proclus (he, too, a true “Father”) received in dreams elucidations of a difficult text passage; to him the Timaeus and the Chaldean oracles were canonical, and he would gladly have seen all other writings of the philosophers destroyed. His hymns, tokens of the lacerations of a true eremite, implore Helios and other helpers to protect him against evil spirits. Hierocles wrote a moral breviary for the believers of the Neo-pythagorean community, which it needs a keen eye to distinguish from Christian work. Bishop Synesius was a prince prelate of Neoplatonism before becoming one of Christianity — and the change did not involve an act of conversion; he kept his theology and only altered its names. It was possible for the Neoplatonist Asclepiades to write a great work on the likeness of all theologies. We possess Pagan gospels and hagiologies as well as Christian. Apollonius wrote the life of Pythagoras, Marinus that of Proclus, Damascius that of Isidore; and there is not the slightest difference between these works, which begin and end with prayers, and the Christian Acts of the Martyrs. Porphyry describes faith, love, hope, and truth as the four divine elements.

Between these Churches of the East and the West we see, looking south from Edessa, the Talmudic Church (the “Synagogue”) with Aramaic as its written language. Against these great and firm foundations Jewish-Christians (such as Ebionites and Elkazites), Mandaeans, and likewise Chaldeans (unless we regard Manichaeism as a reconstruction of that religion) were unable to hold their own. Breaking down into numberless sects, they either faded out in the shadow of the great Churches or were absorbed in their structure as the last Marcionites and Montanists were absorbed into Manichaeism. By about 300, outside the Pagan, Christian, Persian, Jewish, and Manichaean Churches no important Magian religions remained in being.

VI

Along with this ripe Scholasticism, there set in also, from 200, the effort to identify the visible community, as its organization became ever stricter, with the organism of the State. This followed of necessity from the world feeling of Magian man, and in turn it led to the transformation of the rulers into caliphs — lords of a creed society far more than of domains — to the idea of orthodoxy as the premise of real citizenship; to the duty of persecuting false religions (the “Holy War” of Islam is as old as the Culture itself, and the first centuries were full of it); and to a special regime within the State of unbelievers — just tolerated and under laws and governance of their own (for the law God had given was not for heretics) — and, with it, the ghetto manner of living.

First, Osrhoene, in the center of the Aramaean landscape, adopted Christianity as the State religion about 200. Then Mazdaism assumed the same position in the Sassanid Empire (226) while under Aurelian (d. 275) and above all Diocletian (295) Syncretism as a compound of the Divus, Sol, and Mithras cults became the state religion of the Roman Imperium. Constantine in 312, King Trdat of Armenia about 321, and King Mirian of Georgia a few years later, went over to Christianity. In the far South, Saba must already have become Christian in the third century, Axum in the fourth; on the other hand, simultaneously with these, the Himaryite State became Jewish, and there was one more effort, that of Julian, to bring back the Pagan Church to supremacy.

In opposition to this — likewise in all the religions of this Culture — we find the spread of Monasticism, with its radical aversion from State, history, and actuality in general. For after all the conflict of being and waking being — that is, of politics and religion, of history and nature — could not be completely mastered by the form of the Magian Church and its identification with State and nation. Race breaks forth into life in these mind creations and overpowers the divine, precisely because the latter has absorbed the worldly into itself. But here there was no conflict of Church and State as in the Gothic age, and consequently the split in the nation was between the worldly pious and the ascetics. A Magian religion relates exclusively to the divine spark, the Pneuma, in the man, that which he shares with the invisible community of the faithful and blessed spirits. The rest of the man belongs to Evil and Darkness. But in the man it is the divine that must rule, overcoming, suppressing, destroying the other. In this Culture the askete is not only the veritable priest — the secular priest, as today in Russia, is never really respected, and mostly he is allowed to marry — but, what is more, he is the true man of piety. Outside monasticism it was simply not possible to fulfill the demands of religion, and consequently communities of repentance, monasteries, and convents assume quite early a position that, for metaphysical reasons, they could never have had in India or China — let alone in the West, where the Orders were working and fighting — that is, dynamic — units.⁴⁵ Consequently, we must not regard the people of the Magian world as divided into the “world” and the “cloister” as two definitely separate modes of life, with equal possibilities of fulfilling all the demands of religion. Every pious person was a monk in some sort.⁴⁶ Between world and cloister there was no opposition, but only a difference of degree. Magian churches and orders are homogeneous communities which are only to be distinguished from one another by extent. The community of Peter was an Order, that of Paul a Church, while the Mithras religion is at once almost too wide for the one designation and too narrow for the other.

Every Magian Church is itself an Order and it was only in respect of human weakness that there were stages and grades of askesis, and these not ordered, but only permitted, as among the Marcionites and the Manichaeans (electi, auditores). And, in truth, a Magian nation is nothing but the sum, the order of all the orders, which, constituted in smaller and smaller, stricter and stricter groups, come out finally in the eremites, dervishes, and stylites, in whom nothing more is of the world, whose waking consciousness now belongs only to the Pneuma. Setting aside the prophetic religions — out of which, and between which, the excitation of Apocalypse generated numerous order-like communities — the two cult churches of the West produced unnumbered monks, friars, and orders, distinguishable from one another in the end only by the name of the Deity upon whom they called. All observed fasting, prayer, celibacy, poverty. It is very doubtful which of the two Churches in 300 was the more ascetic in its tendency. The Neoplatonist monk Sarapion went into the desert in order to devote himself entirely to studying the hymns of Orpheus. Damascius, guided by a dream, withdrew into a noisome cave in order to pray continuously to Cybele.⁴⁷ The schools of philosophy were nothing but ascetic orders; the Neo-pythagoreans stood close to the Jewish Essenes; the Mithras cult, a true order, admitted only men to its communion and its fraternities; the Emperor Julian had the intention of endowing pagan monasteries. The Mandaean religion seems to have been a group of order communities of varying rigor; amongst them was that of John the Baptist. Christian monasticism did not begin with Pachomius (320); he was merely the builder of the first cloister. The movement began with the original community in Jerusalem itself. The Gospel of Matthew and almost all “Acts of the Apostles” testify to rigorously ascetic sentiment.⁴⁸ The Persian and Nestorian Churches developed the monastic idea further, and finally Islam assimilated it to the full. To this day Oriental piety is dominated by the Moslem Orders and Brotherhoods. And Jewry followed the same line of evolution, from the Karaei⁴⁹ (Qaraites) of the eighth century to the Polish Hasidim of the eighteenth.⁵⁰

Christianity, which even in the second century was hardly more than an extended Order, and whose public influence was out of all proportion to the number of its adherents, grew suddenly vast about the year 250. This is the epochal moment in which the last city cults of the Classical effaced themselves before, not Christianity, but the newborn Pagan Church. The records of the Fratres Arvales in Rome break off in 241, and the last cult inscriptions at Olympia are of 265. At the same time, the cumulation of the most diverse priestly characters in one man became customary,⁵¹ implying that these usages were felt no longer as specific, but as usages of one single religion. And this religion set out to convert, spreading itself far and wide over the lands of the Hellenistic-Roman stock. The Christian religion, on the other hand, was alone in spreading (c. 300) over the great Arabian field. And for that very reason it was inevitable that inner contradiction should now be set up in it. Due, not now to the spiritual dispositions of particular men, but to the spirit of the particular landscapes, these contradictions led to the breakup of Christianity into several religions — and forever.

The controversy concerning the nature of Christ was the issue on which this conflict came up for decision. The matter in dispute was just those problems of substance which in the same form and with the same tendency fill the thoughts of all other Magian theologies. Neoplatonic Scholasticism, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and above all Proclus treated it in a Western formulation, by modes of thought closely akin to Philo’s and even to Paul’s. The relation between the Primary One, Nus, Logos, the Father, and the Mediator was considered with reference to the substantial. Was the process thereof one of emanation, of partition, or of pervasion? Was one contained in the other, are they identical, or mutually exclusive? Was the Triad at the same time a Monad? In the East a different constitution of the problem is evidenced already in the premises of the John Gospel and the Bardesanian Gnosis: the relation of Ahuramazda to the Holy Spirit (Spenta Mainyu) and the nature of Vohu Mano gave plenty of occupation to the Avestan “fathers”; and it was just at the time of the decisive Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon that we find the temporary triumph of Zrvanism (438-457), with its primacy of the divine world course (Zrvan as historic Time) over the divine substances marking a peak of dogmatic battle. Later, Islam took up the whole subject over again and sought to solve it in relation to the nature (Wesenheit) of Mohammed and the Koran. The problem had been there, ever since a Magian mankind had come into being — very much as the specifically Western will problem, our counterpart to the substance problem, was posed in the beginnings of Faustian thought. There is no need to look for these problems; they are there as soon as the Culture thinks, they are the fundamental form of its thought, and come to the front, uncalled for and sometimes not even perceived, in all its studies.

But the three Christian solutions predetermined by the three landscapes of East, West, and South were all present from the first, implicit already in the main tendencies of Gnosticism, which we may indicate by the names of Bardesanes, Basilides, and Valentinus. Their meeting point was Edessa, where the streets rang with the battle cries of the Nestorians against the victors of Ephesus and, anon, with the εἷς θεός shout of the Monophysites, demanding that Bishop Ibas should be thrown to the wild beasts of the circus.

The great question was formulated by Athanasius, whose intellectual origins lay in the Pseudomorphosis and who had many affinities with his Pagan contemporary Iamblichus. Against Arius, who saw in Christ a demigod, merely like in substance to the Father, he maintained that Father and Son were of the same substance (θεότης) which in Christ had assumed a human σῶμα. “The Word became Flesh” — this formula of the West depends upon visible facts of the cult churches, and the understanding of the Word upon constant contemplation of the picturable. Here in the iconodule West, where in these very times Iamblichus wrote his book concerning God statues in which the divine was substantially present and worked miracles,⁵² the abstraction of the Trinity was always effectively accompanied by the sensuous human relation of Mother and Son, and it is the latter which it is impossible to eliminate from the thought processes of Athanasius.

With the recognition of the homoousia of Father and Son the real problem was for the first time posed — namely, the attitude of the Magian dualism to the historical phenomenon of the Son himself. In the world cavern there was divine and human substance, in man a part in divine Pneuma and the individual soul somehow related to the “flesh” But what of Christ?

It was a decisive factor — one of the results of Actium — that the contest was fought out in the Greek tongue and in the territory of the Pseudomorphosis — that is, under the full influence of the “Caliph” of the Western Church. Constantine had even been the convener and president of the Council of Nicaea, where the doctrine of Athanasius carried the day. In the East, with its Aramaic speech and thought, these doings were (as we know from the letters of Aphrahat) hardly followed at all; there men saw no cause to quarrel about what, so far as they were concerned, had long ago been settled. The breach between East and West, a consequence of the Council of Ephesus (431) separated two Christian nations, that of the “Persian Church” and that of the Greek Church, but this was no more than the manifestation of a difference, inherent from the first, between modes of thought proper to the two different landscapes. Nestorius and the whole East saw in Christ the Second Adam, the Divine Envoy of the last eon. Mary had borne a man child in whose human and created substance (physis) the godly, uncreated element dwelt. The West, on the contrary, saw in Mary the Mother of a God: the divine and the human substance formed in his body (persona, in the Classical idiom) a unity, named by Cyril ἕνωσις.⁵³ When the Council of Ephesus had recognized the mother of God, her who gave birth to God, the city of Diana’s old renown burst into a truly Classical orgy of celebration.⁵⁴

But long ere this the Syrian Apollinaris⁵⁵ had heralded the “Southern” idea of the matter — that in the living Christ there was not merely a substance, but a single substance. The divine had transmuted itself into, not mingled itself with, a human substance (no κρᾶσις, as Gregory Nazianzen maintained in opposition; significantly enough, the best way of expressing the Monophysite idea is through concepts of Spinoza — the one substance in another mode). The Monophysites called the Christ of the Council of Chalcedon (451, where the West once more prevailed) “the idol with the two faces.” They not only fell away from the Church, they broke out in fierce risings in Palestine and Egypt; and when in Justinian’s time the troops of Persia — that is, of Mazdaism — penetrated to the Nile, they were hailed by the Monophysites as liberators.

The fundamental meaning of this desperate conflict which raged for a century — not over scholarly concepts, but over the soul of a landscape that sought to be set free in its people — was the reversal of the work of Paul. If we can transport ourselves into the inmost soul of the two newborn nations, making no reservations and ignoring all minor points of dogmatics, then we see how the direction of Christianity towards the Greek West and its intellectual affinity with the Pagan Church culminated in the position that the Ruler of the West was the Head of Christianity in general. In the mind of Constantine it was self-evident that the Pauline foundation within the Pseudomorphosis was synonymous with Christianity. The Jewish Christians of Petrine tendency were to him a heretical sect, and the Eastern Christians of “Johannine” type he never even noticed. When the spirit of the Pseudomorphosis had, in the three determining councils of Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, put its seal upon dogma, once and for all, the real Arabian world rose up with the force of nature and set up a barrier against it. With the end of the Arabian Springtime, Christianity fell apart for good into three religions, which can be symbolized by the names of Paul, Peter, and John, and of which none can henceforth claim to be regarded by the historically and doctrinally unprejudiced eye as the true and proper Christianity. These three religions are at the same time three nations, living in the old race areas of Greeks, Jews, and Persians, and the tongues that they used were the Church languages borrowed from them — namely, Greek, Aramaic, and Pehlevi.

VII

The Eastern Church, since the Council of Nicaea, had organized itself with an episcopal constitution, at the head of which stood the Katholikos of Ctesiphon, and with councils, liturgy, and law of its own. In 486 the Nestorian doctrine was accepted as binding, and the tie with Constantinople was thus broken. From that point on, Masdaists, Manichaeans, and Nestorians have a common destiny, of which the seed was sown in the Gnosis of Bardesanes. In the Monophysite Churches of the South, the spirit of the primitive Community emerged again and spread itself further; with its uncompromising monotheism and its hatred of images its closest affinity was with Talmudic Judaism, and its old battle cry of εἷς θεός had already marked it to be, with that Judaism, the starting point of Islam (“Allah il Allah”) The Western Church continued to be bound up with the fate of the Roman Empire — that is, the cult church became the State. Gradually it absorbed into itself the adherents of the Pagan Church, and thenceforth its importance lay not so much in itself — for Islam almost annihilated it — but in the accident that it was from it that the young peoples of the Western Culture received the Christian system as the basis for a new creation,⁵⁶ receiving it, moreover, in the Latin guise of the extreme West — which for the Greek Church itself was unmeaning, since Rome was now a Greek city, and the Latin language was far more truly at home in Africa and Gaul.

The essential and elemental concept of the Magian nation, a being that consists in extension, had been from the beginning active in extending itself. All these Churches were, deliberately, forcefully, and successfully, missionary Churches. But it was not until men had at last ceased to think of the end of the world as imminent, and dogma appropriate to prolonged existence in this World’s Cavern had been built up, and the Magian religions had taken up their standpoint towards the problem of substance, that the extending of the Culture took up that swift, passionate tempo that distinguished it from all others and found in Islam its most impressive, its last, but by no means its only example. Of these mighty facts Western theologians and historians give an entirely false picture. All that their gaze, riveted upon the Mediterranean lands, observes is the Western direction that fits in with their “Ancient-Medieval-Modern” schema, and even within these limits, accepting the ostensible unity of Christianity, they regard it as passing at a certain period from a Greek into a Latin form, whereby the Greek residue is lost sight of altogether.

But even before Christianity — and this is a fact of which the immense significance has never been observed, which has not even been correctly interpreted as mission effort — the Pagan Church had won for the Syncretic Cult the greater part of the population of North Africa, Spain, Gaul, Britain, and the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Of the Druidism that Caesar had found in Gaul, little remained extant by the time of Constantine. The assimilation of indigenous local gods under the names of the great Magian divinities of the Cult church (and especially Mithras-Sol-Jupiter) from the second century on, was essentially a process of conquest, and the same is true of the later emperor worship.⁵⁷ The missionary efforts of Christianity here would have been less successful than they were if the other cult church — its near relative — had not preceded it. But the latter’s propaganda was by no means limited to barbarian fields; even in the fifth century the missionary Asclepiodotus converted Aphrodisias, a Carian city, from Christianity to Paganism.

The Jews, as has been shown already, directed missionary effort on a large scale towards the East and the South. Through southern Arabia they drove into the heart of Africa, possibly even before the birth of Christ, while on the side of the East their presence in China is demonstrable, even in the second century. To the north the realm of the Khazars⁵⁸ and its capital, Astrakhan, later went over to Judaism. From this area came the Mongols of Jewish religion who advanced into the heart of Germany and were defeated, along with the Hungarians, in the battle of the Lechfeld in 955. Jewish scholars of the Spanish-Moorish universities petitioned the Byzantine Emperor (in A.D. 1000) for safe conduct for an embassy that was to ask the Khazars whether they were the Lost Tribes of Israel.

From the Tigris, Mazdaists and Manichaeans penetrated the empires on either hand, Roman and Chinese, to their utmost frontiers. Persian, as the Mithras cult, invaded Britain; Manichaeism had by 400 become a danger to Greek Christianity, and there were Manichaean sects in southern France as late as the Crusades;⁵⁹ but the two religions drove eastwards as well, along the Great Wall of China (where the great polyglot inscription of Kara Balgassun testifies to the introduction of the Manichasan faith in the Oigur realm) and even to Shantung. Persian fire temples arose in the interior of China, and from 700 Persian expressions are found in Chinese astrological writings.

The three Christian Churches everywhere followed up the blazed trails. When the Western Church converted the Frankish King Chlodwig in 496, the missionaries of the Eastern Church had already reached Ceylon and the westernmost Chinese garrisons of the Great Wall, and those of the Southern were in the Empire of Axum. At the same time as, after Boniface (718), Germany became converted, the Nestorian missionaries were within an ace of winning China itself. They had entered Shantung in 638. The Emperor Gao-dsung (651-84) permitted churches to be built in all provinces of the Empire, in 750 Christianity was preached in the Imperial palace itself, and in 781, according to the Aramaic and Chinese inscriptions upon a memorial column in Singafu which has been preserved, “all China was covered with the palaces of Concord.” But it is in the highest degree significant that the Confucians, who cannot be called inexpert in religious matters, regarded the Nestorians, Mazdaists, and Manichaeans as adherents of a single “Persian” religion,⁶⁰ just as the population of the Western Roman provinces were unable to discriminate between Mithras and Christ.

Islam, therefore, is to be regarded as the Puritanism of the whole group of Early Magian religions, emerging as a religion only formally new, and in the domain of the Southern Church and Talmudic Judaism. It is this deeper significance, and not merely the force of its warlike onslaught, that gives the key to its fabulous successes. Although on political grounds it practiced an astounding toleration — John Damascenus, the last great dogmatist of the Greek Church, was, under the name of Al Manzor, treasurer to the Caliph — Judaism, Mazdaism, and the Southern and Eastern churches of Christianity were swiftly and almost completely dissolved in it. The Katholikos of Seleucia, Jesujabh III, complains that tens of thousands of Christians went over to it as soon as it came on the scene, and in North Africa — the home of Augustine — the entire population fell away to Islam at once. Mohammed died in 632. In 641 the whole domain of the Monophysites and the Nestorians (and, therefore, of the Talmud and the Avesta) were in the possession of Islam. In 717 it stood before Constantinople, and the Greek Church was in peril of extinction. Already in 618 a relative of the prophet had brought presents to the Chinese Emperor Tai-dsung and obtained leave to institute a mission. From 700 there were mosques in Shantung, and in 720 Damascus sent instructions to the Arabs long established in southern France to conquer the realm of the Franks. Two centuries later, when in the West a new religious world was arising out of the remains of the old Western Church, Islam was in the Sudan and in Java.

For all this, Islam is significant only as a piece of outward religious history. The inner history of the Magian religion ends with Justinian’s time, as truly as that of the Faustian ends with Charles V and the Council of Trent. Any book on religious history shows “the”Christian religion as having had two ages of grand thought movements — 0-500 in the East and 1000-1500 in the West.⁶¹ But these are two springtimes of two Cultures, and in them are comprised also the non-Christian forms which belong to each religious development. The closing of the University of Athens by Justinian in 529 was not, as is always stated, the end of Classical philosophy — there had been no Classical philosophy for centuries. What he did, forty years before the birth of Mohammed, was to end the theology of the Pagan Church by closing this school and — as the historians forget to add — to end the Christian theology also by closing those of Antioch and Alexandria. Dogma was complete, finished — just as it was in the West with the Council of Trent (1564) and the Confession of Augsburg (1540), for with the city and intellectualism religious creative force comes to an end. So also in Jewry and in Persia, the Talmud was concluded about 500, and when Chosroes Nushirvan in 529 bloodily suppressed the Reformation of Mazdak — which was not unlike our Anabaptism in its rejection of marriage and worldly property, and had been supported by King Kobad I as counteracting the power of Church and nobility — Avestan dogma similarly passed into fixity.

CHAPTER IX

PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE

(C) PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL

I

Religion may be described as the Waking being of a living creature in the moments when it overcomes, masters, denies, and even destroys Being. Race life and the pulse of its drive dwindle as the eyes gaze into an extended, tense, and light filled world, and Time yields to Space. The plantlike desire for fulfillment goes out, and from primary depths there wells up the animal fear of the fulfillment, of the ceasing of direction, of death. Not hate and love, but fear and love are the basic feelings of religion. Hate and fear differ as Time and Space, blood and eye, pulse and tension, heroism and saintliness. And love in the race sense differs from love in the religious sense in the same way.

All religion is turned to light. The extended itself becomes religious as a world of the eye comprehended from the ego as center of light. Hearing and touch are adjusted to what is seen and the Invisible, whose workings are sensed, becomes the sum of the demonic. All that we designate by the words “deity,” “revelation,” “salvation,” “dispensation,” is in one way and another an element of illumined actuality. Death, for man, is something that he sees, and knows by seeing, and in relation to death birth is the other secret. They are the two visible limits of the sensible cosmic that is incarnate in a live body in lighted space.

There are two sorts of deeper fear — one is fear (known even to the animals) in presence of microcosmic freedom in space, before space itself and its powers, before death; the other is fear for the cosmic current of being, for life, for directional time. The first awakens a dark feeling that freedom in the extended is just a new and deeper sort of dependence than that which rules the vegetable world, and it leads the individual being, sensible of its weakness, to seek the propinquity and alliance of others. Anxiety produces speech, and our sort of speech is religion — every religion. Out of the fear of Space arise the numina of the world-as-nature and the cults of gods; out of the fear for time arise the numina of life, of sex and breed, of the State, centering on ancestor worship. That is the difference between Taboo and Totem — for the totemistic, too, always appears in religious form, out of holy awe of that which passeth all understanding and is forever alien.

The higher religion requires tense alertness against the powers of blood and being that ever lurk in the depths ready to recapture their primeval rights over the younger side of life. “Watch and pray, that ye fall not into temptation.” Nevertheless, “liberation” is a fundamental word in every religion and an eternal wish of every waking being. In this general, almost prereligious, sense, it means the desire for freedom from the anxieties and anguishes of waking consciousness; for relaxation of the tensions of fear-born thought and search; for the obliteration and removal of the consciousness of the Ego’s loneliness in the universe, the rigid conditionedness of nature, the prospect of the immovable boundary of all Being in eld and death.

Sleep, too, liberates — “Death and his brother Sleep.” And holy wine, intoxication, breaks the rigor of the spirit’s tension, and dancing, the Dionysus art, and every other form of stupefaction and ecstasy. These are modes of slipping out of awareness by the aid of being, the cosmic, the “it,” the escape out of space into time. But higher than all these stands the genuinely religious overcoming of fear by means of the understanding itself. The tension between microcosm and macrocosm becomes something that we can love, something in which we can wholly immerse ourselves.¹ We call this faith, and it is the beginning of all man’s intellectual life.

Understanding is causal only, whether deductive or inductive, whether derived from sensation or not. It is wholly impossible to distinguish being understood from being caused — both express the same thing. When something is “actual” for us, we see it and think it in causal (ursächlich) form, just as we feel and know ourselves and our activities as things originating, causes (Ursache). The assignment of causes is, however, different from case to case, not only in the religious, but also generally in the inorganic logic of man. A fact is thought of at one moment as having such and such, at another moment as having something else, as its cause. Every kind of thinking has for every one of its domains of application a proper “system.” In everyday life a causal connection in thought is never exactly repeated. Even in modern physics working hypotheses — that is, causal systems — which partially exclude one another are in use side by side; for instance, the ideas of electrodynamics and those of thermodynamics. The significance of the thought is not thereby nullified, for during a continuous spell of waking consciousness we “understand” always in the form of single acts of which each has its own causal inception. The viewing of the entire world-as-nature in relation to the individual consciousness as a single causally ordered concatenation is something perfectly unrealizable by our thought, inasmuch as our thinking proceeds always by unit acts. It remains a belief. It is indeed Faith itself, for it is the basis of religious understanding of the world, which, wherever something is observed, postulates numina as a necessity of thought — ephemeral numina for incidental events which are not again thought of, and enduring numina as place-definite indwellers (of springs, trees, stones, hills, stars, and so forth) or as universals (like the gods of Heaven, of War, of Wisdom) which can be present anywhere. These numina are limited only in virtue of the individualness of each separate act of thought. That which today is a property of the god is tomorrow itself the god. Others are now a plurality, now a unity, now a vague Ent. There are invisibles (shapes) and incomprehensibles (principles), which, to those to whom it is vouchsafed, may become phenomenal or comprehensible. Fate² in the Classical (εἰμαρμένη) and in the Indian (rta) is something which stands as origin-thing (Ur-Sache) above the picturable divinities; Magian Destiny, on the contrary, is the operation of the one and formless supreme God. Religious thought ever lets itself graduate values and rank within the causal succession, and leads up to supreme beings or principles, as very first and “governing” causes; “dispensation” is the word used for the most comprehensive of all systems based upon valuation. Science, on the contrary, is a mode of understanding which fundamentally abhors distinctions of rank amongst causes; what it finds is not dispensation, but law.

The understanding of causes sets free. Belief in the linkages discovered compels the world fear to retreat. God is man’s refuge from the Destiny which he can feel and livingly experience, but not think on, or figure, or name, and which sinks into abeyance for so long — only for so long — as the “critical” (literally, the separating) fear-born understanding can establish causes behind causes comprehensibly; that is, in order visible to the outer or inner eye. It is the desperate dilemma of the higher grade of man that his powerful will to understand is in constant contradiction with his being. It has ceased to serve his life, but is unable to rule it, and consequently in all important conjunctures there remains an insoluble element. “One has merely to declare oneself free, and one feels the moment to be conditioned. But if one has the courage to declare oneself conditioned, then one has the feeling of being free” (Goethe).

We name a causal linkage within the world-as-nature, as to which we are convinced that no further reflection can alter it — Truth. Truths are established, and they are timeless — “absolute” means detached from Destiny and history, but detached also from the facts of our own living and dying — and they are an inward liberation, consolation, and salvation, in that they disvalue and overcome the incalculable happenings of the world of facts. Or, as it mirrors itself in the mind, men may go, but truth remains.

In the world-around something is established — that is, fixed, spellbound. Understanding man has the secret in the hands, whether this be, as of old, some potent charm or, as nowadays, a mathematical formula. A feeling of triumph, even today, accompanies every experimental step in the realm of Nature which determines something — about the purposes and powers of the god of heaven or the storm spirits of the ground daemons; or about the numina of natural science (atom nuclei, the velocity of light, gravitation); or even about the abstract numina that thought conceives in contemplating its own image (concept, category, reason) — and, in determining, fixes it in the prison of an unalterable system of causal relations. Experience in this inorganic, killing, preserving sense, which is something quite different from life experience and knowledge of men, takes place in two modes — theory and technique, or, in religious language, myth and cult — according as the believer’s intention is to open up or to confine the secrets of the world-around. Both demand a high development of human understanding. Both may be born of either fear or love. There is a mythology of fear, like the Mosaic and the primitive generally, and a mythology of love, like that of early Christianity and Gothic mysticism. Similarly there is a technique of defensive, and another technique of postulant, magic, and this, no doubt the most fundamental, distinction between sacrifice and prayer³ distinguishes also primitive and mature mankind. Religiousness is a trait of soul, but religion is a talent. “Theory” demands the gift of vision that few possess to the extent of luminous insight and many possess not at all. It is world view, “Weltanschauung” in the most primary sense, whether what one sees in that world is the hand and the loom of powers, or (in a colder urban spirit, not fearing or loving, but inquisitive) the theater of law conform forces. The secrets of Taboo and Totem are beheld in god faiths and soul faiths, and calculated in theoretical physics and biology. “Technique” presupposes the intellectual gift of binding and conjuring. The theorist is the critical seer, the technician is the priest, the discoverer is the prophet.

The means, however, in which the whole force of intellect concentrates itself is the form of the actual, which is abstracted from vision by speech, and of which not every waking consciousness can discern the quintessence — the conceptual circumscription, the communicable law, name, number. Hence every conjuration of the deity is based on the knowledge of its real name and the use of rites and sacraments, known and available only to the initiated, of which the form must be exact and the words correct. This applies not merely to primitive magic, but just as much to our physical (and particularly our medical) technique. It is for this reason that mathematics have a character of sanctity and are regularly the product of a religious milieu (Pythagoras, Descartes, Pascal); that there is a mysticism of sacred numbers (3,7,12) in every religion,⁴ and that Ornament (of which cult architecture is the highest form) is essentially number felt as shape. It is rigid, compelling forms, expression motives and communication signs that the microcosm employs in the world of waking consciousness to get into touch with the macrocosm. In sacerdotal technique they are called precepts, and in scientific, laws — but both are really name and number, and primitive man would discover no difference between the magic wherewith the priests of his villages command the daemons and that wherewith the civilized technician commands his machines.

The first, and perhaps the only, outcome of man’s will-to-understanding is faith. “I believe” is the great word against metaphysical fear, and at the same time it is an avowal of love. Even though one’s researches or accumulation of knowledge may culminate in sudden illumination or conclusive calculation, yet all one’s own sense and comprehension would be meaningless unless there were set up along with it an inward certainty of a “something” which as other and alien is — and is, moreover, exactly under the ascertained shape — in the concatenation of cause and effect. The highest intellectual possession, therefore, known to man as a being of speech deduced thought, is the firm and hard won belief in this something, withdrawn from the courses of time and destiny, which he has separated out by contemplation and labeled by name and number. But what that something is remains in the last analysis obscure. Was it the something of secret logic of the universe that was touched, or only a silhouette? And all the struggle and passion starts afresh, and anxious investigation directs itself upon this new doubt, which may well turn to despair. He needs in his intellectual boring of belief a final something attainable by thought, an end of dissection that leaves no remainder of mystery. The corners and pockets of his world of contemplation must all be illuminated — nothing less will give him his release.

Here belief passes over into the knowledge evoked by mistrust, or, more accurately, becomes belief in that knowledge. For the latter form of the understanding is radically dependent upon the former; it is posterior, more artificial, more questionable. Further, religious theory — that is, the contemplation of the believer — leads to priestly practice, but scientific theory, on the contrary, liberates itself by contemplation from the technical knowledge of every day life. The firm belief that is bred by illuminations, revelations, sudden deep glimpses, can dispense with critical work. But critical knowledge presupposes the belief that its methods will lead to just that which is desired — that is, not to fresh imaginings, but to the “actual.” History, however, teaches that doubt as to belief leads to knowledge, and doubt as to knowledge (after a period of critical optimism) back again to belief. As theoretical knowledge frees itself from confiding acceptance, it is marching to self-destruction, after which what remains is simply and solely technical experience.

Belief, in its primitive, unclear condition, acknowledges superior sources of wisdom by which things that man’s own subtlety could never unravel are more or less manifest — such as prophetic words, dreams, oracles, sacred scriptures, the voice of the deity. The critical spirit, on the contrary, wants, and believes itself able, to look into everything for itself. It not only mistrusts alien truths, but even denies their possibility. Truth, for it, is only knowledge that it has proved for itself. But if pure criticism creates its means out of itself solely, it did not long go unperceived that this position assumed the reality of the result. De omnibus dubitandum is a proposition that is incapable of being actualized. It is apt to be forgotten that critical activity must rest upon a method, and the possibility of obtaining this method in turn by the way of criticism is only apparent. For, in reality, it follows from the momentary disposition of the thought.⁵ That is, the results of criticism themselves are determined by the basic method, but this in turn is determined by the stream of being which carries and perfuses the waking consciousness. The belief in a knowledge that needs no postulates is merely a mark of the immense naiveté of rationalist periods. A theory of natural science is nothing but a historically older dogma in another shape. And the only profit from it is that which life obtains, in the shape of a successful technique, to which theory has provided the key. It has already been said that the value of a working hypothesis resides not in its “correctness” but in its usableness. But discoveries of another sort, findings of insight, “Truths” in the optimistic sense, cannot be the outcome of purely scientific understanding, since this always presupposes an existing view upon which its critical, dissecting activity can operate; the natural science of the Baroque is one continuous dissection of the religious world picture of the Gothic.

The aim of faith and science, fear and curiosity, is not to experience life, but to know the world-as-nature. Of world-as-history they are the express negation. But the secret of waking consciousness is a twofold one; two fear-born, causally ordered pictures arise for the inner eye — the “outer world” and as its counter-image the “inner world.” In both are true problems, and the waking consciousness is not only a lookout, but is very busy within its own domains as well. The Numen out there is called God; in here Soul. By the critical understanding the deities of the believer’s vision are transmuted in thought into mechanical magnitudes referable to its world, but their essence and kernel remain the same — Classical matter and form, Magian light and darkness, Faustian force and mass — and its mode is ever the same dissection of the primitive soul belief, and its end is ever the same, a predetermined result. The physics of the within is called systematic psychology and it discovers in man, if it is Classical science, thing-like soul parts (νοῦς, θυμός, ἐπιθυμία); if Magian, soulsubstance (ruach, nephesh); if Faustian, soul forces (thinking, feeling, willing). These are the shapes that religious meditation, in fear and in love, then follows up in the causal relations of guilt, sin, pardon, conscience, reward, and punishment.

Being is a mystery that, as soon as faith and science turn their attention to it, illudes them into fateful error. Instead of the cosmic itself being reached (which is completely outside the possibilities of the active waking consciousness) the sensible mobility of body in the field of the eye, and the conceptual image of a mechanical causal chain abstracted therefrom, are subjected to analysis. But real life is led, not cognized. Only the Timeless is true. Truths lie beyond history and life, and vice versa life is something beyond all causes, effects, and truths. Criticism in both cases, critique of waking consciousness and critique of being, are contrary to happening and alien to life. But in the first case the application of a critique is entirely justified by the critical intention and the inner logic of the object that is referred to; in the second case it is not. It follows that the distinction between faith and knowledge, or fear and curiosity, or revelation and criticism, is not, after all, the ultimate distinction. Knowledge is only a late form of belief. But belief and life, love springing from the secret fear of the world, and love springing from the secret hate of the sexes, knowledge of inorganic and sense of organic logic, Causes and Destinies — this is the deepest opposition of all. And here we distinguish men, not according to what their modes of thinking are — religious or critical — nor according to the objects of their thought, but according to whether they are thinkers (no matter about what) or doers.

In the realm of doing the waking consciousness takes charge only when it becomes technique. Religious knowledge, too, is power — man is not only ascertaining causations, but handling them. He who knows the secret relationship between microcosm and macrocosm commands it also, whether the knowledge has come to him by revelation or by eavesdropping. Thus the magician and conjurer is truly the Taboo man. He compels the deity through sacrifice and prayer; he practices the true rites and sacraments because they are causes of inevitable results, and whosoever knows them, him they must serve. He reads in the stars and in the sacred books; in his power lies, timeless and immune from all accident, the causal relation of sin and propitiation, repentance and absolutions, sacrifice and grace. His chain of sacred origins and results makes him himself a vessel of mysterious power and, therefore, a cause of new effects, in which one must have faith before one may have them imparted.

From this starting point we can understand (what the European-American world of today has well nigh forgotten) the ultimate meaning of religious ethics, Moral. It is, wherever true and strong, a relation that has the full import of ritual act and practice; it is (to use Loyola’s phrase) “exercitium spirituale,” performed before the deity,⁶ who is to be softened and conjured thereby. “What shall I do to be saved?” This “what?” is the key to the understanding of all real moral. In its deeps there is ever a “wherefore” and a “why,” even in the case of those few sublimate philosophers who have imagined a moral that is “for its own sake” — confessing in the very phrase that deep down they feel a “wherefore,” even though but a sympathetic few of their own kind can appreciate it. There is only causal moral — that is, ethical technique — on the back ground of a convinced metaphysic.

Moral is a conscious and planned causality of the conduct, apart from all particulars of actual life and character, something eternal and universally valid, not only without time, but hostile to time and for that very reason “true.” Even if mankind did not exist, moral would be true and valid — this is no mere conceit, but an expression of the ethical inorganic logic of the world conceived as system that has actually been used. Never would the philosopher concede that it could have a historical evolution and fulfillment. Space denies Time; true moral is absolute, eternally complete and the same. In the depths of it there is ever a negation of life, a refraining and renunciation carried to the point of askesis and death itself. Negation is expressed in its very phrases — religious moral contains prohibitions, not precepts. Taboo, even where it ostensibly affirms, is a list of disclaimers. To liberate oneself from the world of fact, to evade the possibilities of Destiny, always to look upon the race in oneself as the lurking enemy — nothing but hard system, doctrine, and exercise will give that. No action must be causal or impulsive — that is, left to the blood — everything must be considered according to motives and results and “carried out” according to orders. Extreme tension of awareness is required lest we fall into sin. First of all things, continence in what pertains to the blood, love, marriage. Love and hate in mankind are cosmic and evil; the love of the sexes is the very polar opposite of timeless love and fear of God, and therefore it is the prime sin, for which Adam was cast forth from paradise and burdened man with the heritage of guilt. Conception and death define the life of the body in space, and the fact that it is the body that is in question makes the former sin and the latter punishment. Σῶμο σῆμα (the Classical body a grave!) was the confession of the Orphic religion. Aeschylus and Pindar comprehended Being as a reproach, and the saints of all Cultures feel it as an impiety that has to be killed off by askesis or (what is nearly related thereto) orgiastic squandering. Action, the field of history, the deed, heroism, delight in battle and victory and spoil, are evil. For in them the pulse of cosmic being knocks on the door too loudly and disturbingly for contemplativeness and thought. The whole world — meaning the world-as-history — is infamous. It fights instead of renouncing; it does not possess the idea of sacrifice. It prevails over truth by means of facts. As it follows impulse, it baffles thought about cause and effect. And therefore the highest sacrifice that intellectual man can offer is to make a personal present of it to the powers of nature. Every moral action is a piece of this sacrifice, and an ethical life course is an unbroken chain of such sacrifices. Above all, the offering of sympathy, compassion, in which the inwardly strong gives up his superiority to the powerless. The compassionate man kills something within himself. But we must not confuse this sympathy in the grand religious sense with the vague sentimentality of the everyday man, who cannot command himself, still less with the race feeling of chivalry that is not a moral of reasons and rules at all, but an upstanding and self-evident custom bred of the unconscious pulsations of a keyed up life. That which in civilized times is called social ethics has nothing to do with religion, and its presence only goes to show the weakness and emptiness of the religiousness of the day, which has lost that force of metaphysical sureness that is the condition precedent of strong, convinced, and self-denying moral. Think for instance of the difference between Pascal and Mill. Social ethic is nothing but practical politics. It is a very Late product of the same historical world whose Springtime (in all Cultures alike) has witnessed the flowering of an ethic of high courage and knightliness in a strong stock that does not wince under the life of history and fate; an ethic of natural and acquired reactions that polite society today would call “the instincts of a gentleman”; an ethic of which vulgarity and not sin is the antithesis. Once again it is the Castle versus the Cathedral. The castle character does not ask about precepts and reasons. In fact, it does not ask questions at all. Its code lies in the blood — which is pulse — and its fear is not of punishment or requital, but of contempt and especially self-contempt. It is not selfless; on the contrary, it springs from the very fullness of a strong self. But Compassion likewise demands inward greatness of soul, and so it is those selfsame Springtimes that produce the most saintly servants of pity, the Francis of Assisi, the Bernard of Clairvaux, in whom renunciation was a pervading fragrance, to whom self-offering was bliss, whose caritas was ethereal, bloodless, timeless, historyless, in whom fear of the universe had dissolved itself into pure, flawless love, a summit of causal moral of which Late periods are simply no longer capable.

To constrain one’s blood, one must have blood. Consequently it is only in knightly warrior times that we find a monasticism of the great style, and the highest symbol for the complete victory of Space over Time is the warrior become ascetic — not the born dreamer and weakling, who belongs by nature to the cloister, nor again the scholar, who works at a moral system in the study. Putting cant aside, that which is called moral today — a proper affection for one’s nearest, or the exercise of worthy inclinations, or the practice of caritaswith an arrière-pensée of acquiring political power by that means — is not honor-moral, or even a low grade of it, according to Springtime standards. To repeat: there is grand moral only with reference to death, and its sources are a fear, pervading the whole waking consciousness, of metaphysical causes and consequences, a love that overcomes life, a consciousness that one is under the inexorable magic of a causal system of sacred laws and purposes, which are honored as truths and which one must either wholly belong to or wholly renounce. Constant tension, self-watching, self-testing, accompany the exercise of this moral, which is an art, and in the presence of which the world-as-history sinks to nothingness. Let a man be either a hero or a saint. In between lies, not wisdom, but banality.

II

If there were truths independent of the currents of being, there could be no history of truths. If there were one single eternally right religion, religious history would be an inconceivable idea. But, however highly developed the microcosmic side of an individual’s life may be, it is nevertheless something stretched like a membrane over the developing life, perfused by the pulsing blood, ever betraying the hidden drive of cosmic directedness. Race dominates and forms all apprehension. It is the destiny of each moment of awareness to be a cast of Time’s net over Space.

Not that “eternal truths” do not exist. Every man possesses them — plenty of them — to the extent that he exists and exercises the understanding faculty in a world of thoughts, in the connected ensemble of which they are, in and for the instant of thought, unalterable fixtures — ironbound as cause-effect combinations in hoops of premises and conclusions. Nothing in this disposition can become displaced, he believes. But in reality it is just one surge of life that is lifting his waking self and its world together. Its unity remains integral, but as a unit, a whole, a fact, it has a history. Absolute and relative are to one another as transverse and longitudinal sections of a succession of generations, the latter ignoring Space, and the former Time. The systematic thinker stays in the causal order of a moment; only the physiognomist who reviews the sequence of positions realizes the constant alteration of that which “is” true.

Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis holds good for the eternal truths also, as soon as we follow their course in the stream of history, and watch them move on as elements in the world picture of the generations that live and die. For each man, during the short space of his existence, the one religion is eternal and true which Destiny, through the time and place of his birth, has ordained for him. With it he feels, out of it he forms, the views and convictions of his days. To its words and forms he holds fast, although what he means by them is constantly changing. In the world-as-nature there are eternal truths; in the world-as-history there is an eternally changing trueness.

A morphology of religious history, therefore, is a task that the Faustian spirit alone could ever formulate, and one that it is only now, at this present stage of its development, fit to deal with. The problem is enunciated, and we must dare the effort of getting completely away from our own convictions and seeing before us everything indifferently as equally alien. And how hard it is! He who undertakes the task must possess the strength not merely to imagine himself in an illusory detachment from the truths of his world understanding — illusory even to one for whom truths are just a set of concepts and methods — but actually to penetrate his own system physiognomically to its very last cells. And even then is it possible, in a single language, which structurally and spiritually carries the whole metaphysical content of its own Culture, to capture transmissible ideas of the truths of other-tongued men?

There is, to begin with, over the thousands of years of the first age, the colorless throng of primitive populations, which stand fearfully agape in the presence of the chaotic environment, whose enigmas continually weigh upon them, for no man amongst them is able logically to master it. Lucky in comparison with them is the animal, who is awake and yet not thinking. An animal knows fear only from case to case, whereas early man trembles before the whole world. Everything inside and outside him is dark and unresolved. The everyday and the demonic are tangled together without clue and without rule. The day is filled with a frightened and painful religiousness, in which it is rare to find even the suggestion of a religion of confidence — for from this elementary form of the world fear no way leads to the understanding love. Every stone on which a man stumbles, every tool that he takes in his hand, every insect buzzing past him, food, house, weather, all can be demonic; but the man believes in the powers that lurk in them only so long as he is frightened or so long as he uses them — there are quite enough of them even so. But one can love something only if one believes in its continuedexistence. Love presupposes the thought of a world order that has acquired stability. Western research has been at great pains, not only to set in order individual observations gathered from all parts of the world, but to arrange them according to assumed gradations that “lead up” from animism (or other beginnings, as you please) to the beliefs that it holds itself. Unfortunately, it is one particular religion that has provided the values of the scheme, and Chinese or Greeks would have built it quite differently. In reality no such gradation, leading a general human evolution up to one goal, exists. Primitive man’s chaotic world-around, born of his discontinuous understanding of separate moments and yet full of impressive meaning, is always something grownup, self-complete, and closed off, often with chasms and terrors of deep metaphysical premonition. Always it contains a system, and it matters little whether this is partially abstracted from the contemplation of the light world or remains wholly within it. Such a world picture does not “progress”; nor is it a fixed sum of particulars from which this one and that one ought to be (though usually they are) picked out for comparison irrespective of time, land, and people. In reality they form a world of organic religions, which, all over the world, possessed (and, where they linger, still possess) proper and very significant modes of originating, growing, expanding, and fading out, and a well established specific character in point of structure, style, tempo, and duration. The religions of the high Cultures are not developed from these, but different. They lie clearer and more intellectual in the light, they know what understanding love means, they have problems and ideas, theories and techniques, of strict intellect, but the religious symbolism of everyday light they know no more. The primitive religiousness penetrates everything; the later and individualized religions are self-contained form worlds of their own.

All the more enigmatic, therefore, are the “pre” periods of the grand Cultures, still primitive through and through, and yet more and more distinctly anticipating and pointing in a definite direction. It is just these periods, of some centuries’ duration, that ought to have been accurately examined and compared amongst themselves and for themselves. In what shape does the coming phenomenon prepare itself? In the case of the Magian religions the threshold period, as we have seen, produced the type of the Prophetic religion, which led up to the Apocalyptic. How comes it that this particular form is more deeply grounded in the essence of this particular Culture? Or why is it that the Mycenaean prelude of the Classical is filled from one end to the other with imaginings of beast formed deities?⁷ They are not the gods of the warriors up in the megaron of the Mycenaean castle, where soul and ancestor worship was practiced with a high and noble piety evidenced still in the monuments, but the gods of down below, the powers believed in in the peasant’s hut. The great men-like gods of the Apollinian religion, which must have arisen about 1100 out of a mighty religious upheaval, bear traces of their dark past on all sides. Hardly one of these figures is without some cognomen, attribute, or telltale transformation myth indicative of its origin. To Homer Hera is invariably the cow-eyed; Zeus appears as a bull, and the Poseidon of the Thelpusan legend as a horse. Apollo comes to be the name for countless primitive numina; now he was wolf (Lycaeus) like the Roman Mars, now dolphin (Delphinius), and now serpent (the Pythian Apollo of Delphi). A serpent, too, is the form of Zeus Meilichios on Attic grave reliefs and of Asclepios, and of the Furies even in Aeschylus;⁸ and the sacred snake kept on the Acropolis was interpreted as Erichthonios. In Arcadia the horse-headed figure of Demeter in the temple of Phigalia was still to be seen by Pausanias; the Arcadian Artemis-Callisto appears as a she bear, but in Athens too the priestesses of Artemis Brauronia were called “arktoi” (bears).⁹ Dionysus — now a bull, now a stag — and Pan retained a certain beast element to the end. Psyche (like the Egyptian corporal soul, bai) is the soul bird. And upon all this supervened the innumerable semi-animal figures like sirens and centaurs that completely fill up the Early Classical nature picture.¹⁰

But what are the features, now, of the primitive religion of Merovingian times that foreshadow the mighty uprising of the Gothic that was at hand? That both are ostensibly the same religion, Christianity, proves nothing when we consider the entire difference in their deeps. For (we must be quite clear in our own mind on this) the primitive character of a religion does not lie in its stock of doctrines and usages, but in the specific spirituality of the mankind that adopts them and feels, speaks, and thinks with them. The student has to familiarize himself with the fact that primitive Christianity (more exactly, the early Christianity of the Western Church) has twice subsequently become the expression vehicle of a primitive piety, and therefore itself a primitive religion — namely, in the Celtic-Germanic West between 500 and 900, and in Russia up to this day. Now, how did the world mirror itself to these “converted” minds? Leaving out of account some few clerics of, say, Byzantine education, what did one actually think and imagine about these ceremonies and dogmas. Bishop Gregory of Tours, who, we must remember, represents the highest intellectual outlook of his generation, once lauded the powder rubbed from a saint’s tombstone in these words: “O divine purgative, superior to all doctors’ recipes, which cleanses the belly like scammony and washes away all stains from our conscience!” For him the death of Jesus was a crime which filled him with indignation, but no more; the Resurrection, on the contrary, which hovered before him vaguely, he felt deep down as an athletic tour de force that stamped the Messiah as the grand wizard and so legitimated him as the true Saviour. Of any mystic meaning in the story of the Passion he has not an inkling.¹¹

In Russia the conclusions of the “Synod of a Hundred Chapters,” of 1551, evidence a wholly primitive order of belief. Shaving of the beard and wrong handling of the cross both figure here as deadly sins — they were affronts to the daemons. The “Synod of Antichrist,” of 1667, led to the vast secession of the Raskol movement, because thenceforward the sign of the cross was to be made with three fingers instead of two, and the name “Jesus” was to be pronounced “Yissus” instead of “Issus” — whereby, for the strict believer, the power of this magic over the daemons would be lost.¹² But this effect of fear is, after all, not the only one nor even the most potent. Why is it that the Merovingian period shows not the slightest trace of that glowing inwardness and longing to sink into the metaphysical that suffuses the Magian seed time of Apocalyptic and the closely analogous period of the Holy Synod (1721-1917) in Russia? What was it that from Peter the Great’s time on led all those martyr sects of the Raskolniki to celibacy, poverty, pilgrimage, self-mutilation, and asceticism in its most fearful forms, and in the seventeenth century had driven thousands, in religious frenzy, to throw themselves en masse into the flames? The doctrines of the Chlysti, with their “Russian Christs” (of whom seven are counted so far); the Dukhobors with their Book of Life, which they use as their Bible and hold to contain psalms of Jesus orally transmitted; the Skoptsi with their ghastly mutilation precepts — manifestations, one and all, of something without which Tolstoy, Nihilism, and the political revolutions are incomprehensible¹³ — how is it that in comparison the Frankish period seems so dull and shallow? Is it that only Aramaeans and Russians possess religious genius — and, if so, what have we to expect of the Russia that is to come, now that (just in the decisive centuries) the obstacle of scholarly orthodoxy has been destroyed?

III

Primitive religions have something homeless about them, like the clouds and the wind. The mass souls of the proto-peoples have accidentally and fugitively condensed into one being, and accidental, therefore, is and remains the “where” — which is an “anywhere” — of the linkages of waking consciousness arising from the fear and defensiveness that spread over them. Whether they stay or move on, whether they alter or not, is immaterial so far as concerns their inward significance.

From life of this order the high Cultures are separated by a deep soilboundness. Here there is a mother landscape behind all expression forms, and just as the State, as temple and pyramid and cathedral, must fulfill their history there where their idea originated, so too the great religion of every Springtime is bound by all the roots of its being to the land over which its world image has risen. Sacral practices and dogmas may be carried far and wide, but their inner evolution stays spellbound in the place of their birth. It is simply an impossibility that the slightest trace of evolution of Classical city cults should be found in Gaul, or a dogmatic advance of Faustian Christianity in America. Whatever disconnects itself from the land becomes rigid and hard.

It begins, in every case, like a great cry. The dull confusedness of terror and defense suddenly passes into a pure awakening of inwardness that blossoms up, wholly plantwise, from mother earth, and sees and comprehends the depth of the light world with oneoutlook. Wherever introspectiveness exists as a living sense, this change is felt and welcomed as an inward rebirth. In this moment — never earlier, and never (at least with the same deep intensity) later — it traverses the chosen spirits of the time like a grand light, which dissolves all fear in blissful love and lets the invisible appear, all suddenly, in a metaphysical radiance.

Every Culture actualizes here its prime symbol. Each has its own sort of love — we may call it heavenly or metaphysical as we choose — with which it contemplates, comprehends, and takes into itself its godhead, and which remains to every other Culture inaccessible or unmeaning. Whether the world be something set under a domed light cavern, as it was for Jesus and his companions, or just a vanishingly small bit of a star-filled infinity, as Giordano Bruno felt it; whether the Orphics take their bodily god into themselves, or the spirit of Plotinus, soaring in ecstasy, fuses in henosis with the spirit of God, or St. Bernard in his “mystic union” becomes one with the operation of infinite deity — the deep urge of the soul is governed always by the prime symbol of the particular Culture and of no other.

In the Vth Dynasty of Egypt (2680-2540), which followed that of the great pyramid builders, the cult of the Horus falcon, whose kadwelt in the reigning monarch, faded. The old local cults and even the profound Thot religion of Hermopolis fell into the background. The sun religion of Re appears. Out from his palace westward every king erects a Re sanctuary by his tomb temple, the latter a symbol of a life directional from birth to sarcophagus chamber, the former a symbol of grand and eternal nature. Time and Space, being and waking being, Destiny and sacred Causality are set face to face in this mighty twin creation as in no other architecture in the world. To both a covered way leads up; that to the Re is accompanied by reliefs figuring the power of the sun god over the plant and animal worlds and the changings of seasons. No god image, no temple, but only an altar of alabaster adorns the mighty terrace on which at daybreak, high above the land, the Pharaoh advances out of the darkness to greet the great god who is rising up in the East.¹⁴

This youthful inwardness proceeds always out of a townless countryside, out of villages, hovels, sanctuaries, solitary cloisters, and hermitages. Here is formed the community of high awareness, of the spiritual elect, which inwardly is separated by a whole world from the great being-currents of the heroic and the knightly. The two prime estates, priesthood and nobility — contemplation in the cathedral and deeds before the castles, askesis and Minne, ecstasy and high bred custom — begin their special histories from this point. Though the Caliph was also worldly ruler of the faithful, though the Pharaoh sacrificed in both holy places, though the German King built his family vault under the cathedral, nothing gets rid of the abyssal opposition of Time and Space that is reflected in the contrast of these two social orders. Religious history and political history, the histories of truths and facts, stand opposed and irreconcilable. Their opposition begins in cathedral and castle, it propagates itself in the ever growing towns as the opposition of wisdom and business, and in the last stages of historical capacity it closes as a wrestle of intellect and power.

But both these movements take place on the heights of humanity. Peasantdom remains historyless under it all, comprehending politics as little as it understands dogmatics. Out of the strong young religion of saintly groups, scholasticism and mysticism develop in the early towns; reformation, philosophy, and worldly learning in the increasing tumult of streets and squares; enlightenment and irreligion in the stone masses of the late megalopolis. The beliefs of the peasant outside remain “eternal” and always the same. The Egyptian hind understood nothing of this Re. He heard the name, but while a grand chapter of religious history was passing over his head in the cities, he went on worshiping the old Thinite beast gods, until with the XXVIth Dynasty and its fellah religion they regained supremacy. The Italian peasant prayed in Augustus’s time just as he had done long before Homer and as he does today. Names and dogmas of big religions, blossoming and dying in turn, have penetrated to him from the towns and have altered the sounds of his words — but the meaning remains ever the same. The French peasant lives still in the Merovingian Age. Freya or Mary, Druids or Dominicans, Rome or Geneva — nothing touches the innermost kernel of his beliefs.

But even in the towns one stratum hangs back, historically, relatively to another. Over the primitive religion of the countryside there is another popular religion, that of the small people in the underground of the towns and in the provinces. The higher a Culture rises — Middle Kingdom, Brahman period, Pre-Socratics, Pre-Confucians, Baroque — the narrower becomes the circle of those who possess the final truths of their time as reality and not as mere name and sound. How many of those who lived with Socrates, Augustine, and Pascal understood them? In religion as otherwise the human pyramid rises with increasing sharpness, till at the end of the Culture it is complete — thereafter, bit by bit, to crumble.

About 3000 in Egypt and Babylon two great religions began their life courses. In Egypt the “reformation” period at the end of the Old Kingdom saw solar monotheism firmly founded as the religion of priests and educated persons. All other gods and goddesses — whom the peasantry and the humble people continued to worship in their former meaning — are now only incarnations or servants of the one Re. Even the particular religion of Hermopolis, with its cosmology, was adapted to the grand system, and a theological negotiation brought even the Ptah of Memphis into harmony with dogma as an abstract prime principle of creation.¹⁵ Exactly as in the times of Justinian and Charles V, the city spirit asserted mastery over the soul of the land; the formative power of the Springtime had come to an end; the dogma was essentially complete, and its subsequent treatment by rational processes took down more of the structure than it improved. Philosophy began. In respect of dogma, the Middle Kingdom was as unimportant as the Baroque.

From 1500 three new religious histories begin — first the Vedic in the Punjab, then the Early Chinese in the Hwang-ho, and lastly the Classical on the north of the Aegean Sea. Distinctly as the Classical man’s world picture and his prime symbol of the unit body is presented to us, it is difficult even to guess the details of the great Early Classical religion. For this lacuna we have to thank the Homeric poems, which hinder rather than help us incomprehending it. The new notion of godhead that was the special ideal of this Culture is the human formed body in the light, the hero as mediator between man and god — so much, at any rate, the Iliad evidences. This body might be light transfigured by Apollo or disjected to the winds by Dionysus, but in every case it was the basic form of Being. The σῶμα as ideal of the extended, the cosmos as sum of these unit bodies, “Being” and “the one” as the extended-in-itself and “Logos”¹⁶ as the order thereof in the light — all this came up before the eyes of priest men, grandly visible and having the full force of a new religion.

But the Homeric poetry is purely aristocratic. Of the two worlds — that of the noble and that of the priest, that of Taboo and that of Totem, that of heroism and that of sanctity — only the one is here living. It not only does not understand, but actually despises, the other. As in the Edda, so in Homer, it is the greatest glory of an immortal to know the way and code of nobility. The thinkers of the Classical Baroque, from Xenophanes to Plato, regarded these scenes of god life as impudent and trivial, and they were right; they felt exactly as the theology and philosophy of the later West felt about the Germanic hero sagas and even about Gottfried of Strassburg, Wolfram, and Walther. If the Homeric epics did not vanish as the hero songs collected by Charlemagne vanished, it was only because there was no fully formed Classical priesthood, with the result that the Classical cities, when they arose, were intellectually dominated by a knightly and not a religious literature. The original doctrines of this religion, which out of opposition to Homer linked themselves with the (probably) still older name of Orpheus, were never written down.

All the same, they existed. Who knows what and how much is hidden behind the figures of Calchas and Tiresias? A mighty upheaval there must have been at the beginning of this Culture, as at that of others — an upheaval extending from the Aegean Sea as far as Etruria — but the Iliad shows as few signs of it as the lays of the Nibelungs and of Roland show of the inwardness and mysticism of Joachim of Floris, St. Francis, and the Crusades, or of the inner fire of that Dies Irae of Thomas of Celano, which would probably have excited mirth at a thirteenth century court of love. Great personalities there must have been to give a mystical metaphysical form to the new world outlook, but we know nothing of them and it is only the gay, bright, easy side of it that passed into the song of knightly halls. Was the “Trojan War” a feud, or was it also a Crusade? What is the meaning of Helen? Even the Fall of Jerusalem has been looked at from a worldly point of view as well as from a spiritual.

In the nobles’ poetry of Homer, Dionysus and Demeter, as priests’ gods, are unhonored.¹⁷ But even in Hesiod, the herdsman of Ascra, the enthusiast searcher inspired by his folk beliefs, the ideas of the great early time are not to be found pure, any more than in Jakob Bohme the cobbler.¹⁸ That is the second difficulty. The great early religions, too, were the possession of a class, and neither accessible to nor understandable by the generality; the mysticism of earliest Gothic, too, was confined to small elect circles, sealed by Latin and the difficulty of its concepts and figures, and neither nobility nor peasantry had any distinct idea of its existence. And excavation, therefore, important as it is in respect of the Classical country faiths, can tell us as little about the Early Classical religion as a village church can tell us about Abelard or Bonaventura.

But Aeschylus and Pindar, at any rate, were under the spell of a great priestly tradition, and before them there were the Pythagoreans, who made the Demeter cult their center (thereby indicating where the kernel of that mythology is to be sought), and earlier still were the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic reformation of the seventh century; and, finally, there are the fragments of Pherecydes and Epimenides, who were not the first but the last dogmatists of a theology in reality ancient. The idea that impiety was a heritable sin, visited upon the children and the children’s children, was known to Hesiod and Solon, as well as the doctrine (Apollinian also) of “Hybris.”¹⁹ Plato, however, as an Orphic opponent of the Homeric conception of life, sets forth very ancient doctrines of hell and the judgment of the dead in his Phaedo. We know the tremendous formula of Orphism, the Nay of the mysteries that answered the Yea of the agon, which arose, certainly by 1100 at latest, as a protest of Waking Consciousness against Being — σῶμο σῆμα, that splendid Classical body a grave! Here man is no longer feeling himself as a thing of breeding, strength, and movement; he knows himself and is terrified by what he knows. Here begins the Classical askesis, which by strictest rites and expiations, even by voluntary suicide, seeks deliverance from this Euclidean body-being. It is an entirely erroneous interpretation of the Pre-Socratics to suppose that it was from the viewpoint of enlightenment that they spoke against Homer. It was as ascetics that they did so. These “contemporaries” of Descartes and Leibniz were brought up in the strict traditions of the old great Orphism, which were as faithfully preserved in the almost claustral meditation schools — old and famous holy places — as Gothic Scholasticism was treasured in the wholly intellectual universities of the Baroque. From the self-immolation of Empedocles the line runs straight forward to the suicide of the Roman Stoic, and straight back to “Orpheus.”

Out of these last surviving traces, however, an outline of the Early Classical religion emerges bright and distinct. Just as all Gothic inwardness directed itself upon Mary, Queen of Heaven and Virgin and Mother, so in that moment of the Classical World there arose a garland of myths, images, and figures around Demeter, the bearing mother, around Gaia and Persephone, and also Dionysus the begetter, chthonian²⁰ and phallic cults, festivals and mysteries of birth and death. All this, too, was characteristically Classical, conceived under the aspect of present corporeality. The Apollinian religion venerated body, the Orphic rejected it, that of Demeter celebrated the moments of fertilization and birth, in which body acquired being. There was a mysticism that reverently honored the secret of life, in doctrine, symbol, and mime, but side by side with it there was orgiasm too, for the squandering of the body is as deeply and closely akin to asceticism as sacred prostitution is to celibacy — both, all, are negations of time. It is the reverse of the Apollinian “halt!” that checks on the threshold of Hybris; detachment is not kept, but flung away. He who has experienced these things in his soul has “from being a mortal become a god.” In those days there must have been great saints and seers who towered as far above the figures of Heraclitus and Empedocles as the latter above the itinerant teachers of Cynicism and Stoicism — things of this order do not happen namelessly and impersonally. As the songs of Achilles and Odysseus were dying down everywhere, a grand, strict doctrine arose at the famous old cult places, a mysticism and scholasticism with developed educational methods and a secret oral tradition, as in India. But all that is buried, and the relics of the later times barely suffice to prove that it once existed.

By putting the knightly poetry and folk cults quite aside, then, we can even now determine something more of this (the) Classical religion. But in doing so there is a third pitfall to be avoided — the opposing of Greek religion to Roman religion. For in reality there was no such opposition.

Rome is only one of innumerable city-states that arose during the great epoch of colonization. It was built by Etruscans. From the religious point of view it was re-created under the Etruscan dynasty of the sixth century, and it is possible indeed that the Capitoline group of deities, Jupiter, Juno, Minerva — which at that time replaced the ancient trinity, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, of the “Numa” religion — was in some way connected with the family cult of the Tarquins, in which case Minerva, as goddess of the city, is unmistakably a copy of Athene Polias.²¹ The cults of this single city are properly comparable only with those of individual Greek speaking cities of the same degree of maturity, say Sparta or Thebes, which were in nowise more colorful. The little that in these latter discloses itself as generally Hellenic will also prove to be generally Italian. And as for the claim that the “Roman” religion is distinguished from that of the Greek city-states by the absence of myth — what is the basis of our knowledge on the point? We should know nothing at all of the great god sagas of the Springtime if we had only the festival calendar and the public cults of the Greek city-states to go upon, just as we should learn nothing of Jesus’s piety from the proceedings of the Council of Ephesus or of that of St. Francis from a church constitution of the Reformation. Menelaus and Helen were for the Laconian state cult tree deities and nothing more. The Classical myth derives from a period when the Poleis with their festivals and sacral constitutions were not yet in existence, when there was not only no Rome, but no Athens. With the religious duties and notions of the cities — which were eminently rational — it has no connection at all. Indeed, myth and cult are even less in touch with one another in the Classical Culture than in others, The myth, moreover, is in no way a creation of the Hellenic culture field as a whole — it is not “Greek” — but originated (like the stories of Jesus’s childhood and the Grail legend) in this and that group, quite local, under pressure of deep inward stirrings. For instance, the idea of Olympus arose in Thessaly and thence, as a common property of all educated persons, spread out to Cyprus and to Etruria, thus, of course, involving Rome. Etruscan painting presupposes it as a thing of common knowledge, and therefore the Tarquins and their court must have been familiar with it. We may attach any implications we please to “belief” (whatever that may mean) in this myth; the point is that they will be as valid for Romans of the period of the Kings as for the inhabitants of Tegea or Corcyra.

That the pictures of Greek and Roman mythology that modern research has developed are quite different from this is the result not of the facts, but of the methods. In the case of Rome (Mommsen) the festal calendar and the State cults, in that of Greece the poetic literature, were taken as the starting points. Apply the “Latin” method which has led up to Wissowa’s picture to the Greek cities, and the result is a wholly similar picture, as, for example, in Nilsson’s Griechische Festen.

When this is taken into consideration, the Classical religion is seen to be a whole possessing an inner unity. The grand god legends of the eleventh century, which have the dew of Spring upon them, and in their tragic holiness remind us of Gethsemane, Balder’s death, and Francis, are the purest essence of “theoria,” contemplation, a world picture before the inner eye, and born of the common inward awakening of a group of chosen souls from the world of chivalry.²² But the much later city religions are wholly technique, formal worship, and as such represent only one side (and a different side) of piety. They are as far from the great myth as they are from the folk belief. They are concerned neither with metaphysic nor with ethic, but only with the fulfillment of sacral acts. And, finally, the choice of cults by the several cities very often originated, not, like the myth, from a single world view, but from the accidental ancestor and family cults of great houses, which (precisely as in the Gothic) made their sacred figures the tutelary deities of the city and at the same time reserved to themselves the rights of celebrating and worshiping them. In Rome, for example, the Lupercalia in honor of the field god Faunus were a privilege of the Quinctii and Fabii.

The Chinese religion, of which the great “Gothic” period lies between 1300 and 1100 and covers the rise of the Chôu dynasty, must be treated with extreme care. In presence of the superficial profundity and pedantic enthusiasm of Chinese thinkers of the Confucius and Lao-tse type — who were all born in the ancien régime period of their state world — it seems very hazardous to try to determine anything at all as to high mysticism and grand legends in the beginning. Nevertheless, such a mysticism and such legends must once have existed. But it is not from these over-rationalized philosophies of the great cities that we shall learn anything about them — as little as Homer can give us in the Classical parallel, though for another reason. What should we know about Gothic piety if all its works had undergone the censorship of Puritans and Retioralists like Locke, Rousseau, and Wolff! And yet we treat the Confucian close of Chinese inwardness as its beginning — if, indeed, we do not go farther and describe the syncretism of Han times as “the” religion of China.²³

We know nowadays that, contrary to the usual assumption, there was a powerful old Chinese priesthood.²⁴ We know that in the text of the Shu Ching, relics of the ancient hero sagas and god myths were worked over rationalistically, and were thus able to survive, and similarly the Hou-li, Ngi-li, and Shi-King²⁵ would still reveal a good deal more if only they were attacked with the conviction that there was in them something far deeper than Confucius and his like were capable of comprehending. We hear of chthonian and phallic cults in early Chôu times; of orgiastic rites in which the service of the gods was accompanied by ecstatic mass dances; of mimic representations and dialogs between god and priestess, out of which probably (as in Greece) the Chinese drama evolved.²⁶ And we obtain an inkling finally of why the luxuriant growth of early Chinese god figures and myths was necessarily swallowed up in an emperor mythology. For not only all saga emperors, but also most of the figures of the Hia and Shang dynasties before 1400 are — all dates and chronicles notwithstanding — nothing but nature transformed into history. The origins of such a process lie deep in the possibilities of every young Culture.²⁷ Ancestor worship ever seeks to gain power over the nature daemons. All Homeric heroes, and Minos and Theseus and Romulus, are gods become kings. In the Heliand,²⁸ Christ is about to become so. Mary is the crowned Queen of Heaven. It is the supreme (and perfectly unconscious) mode which enables men of breeding to venerate something — that is, for them, what is great must have breeding, race, must be mighty and lordly, the ancestor of whole families. A strong priesthood is able to make short work of this mythology of Time, but it won through partially in the Classical and completely in China — exactly in proportion to the disappearance of the priestly element. The old gods are now emperors, princes, ministers, and retainers; natural events have become acts of rulers, and onsets of peoples social enterprises. Nothing could have suited the Confucians better. Here was a myth which could absorb social ethical tendencies to an indefinite extent, and all that was necessary was to expunge the traces of the original nature myth.

To the Chinese waking consciousness heaven and earth were halves of the macrocosm, without opposition, each a mirror image of the other. In this picture there was neither Magian dualism nor Faustian unity of active force. Becoming appears in the unconstrained reciprocal working of two principles, the yang and the yin, which were conceived rather as periodic than as polar. Accordingly, there are two souls in man, the kwei which corresponded with the yin, the earthly, the dark, the cold, and disintegrated with the body; and the sen, which is higher, light, and permanent.²⁹ But, further, there are innumerable multitudes of souls of both kinds outside man. Troops of spirits fill the air and the water and the earth — all is peopled and moved by kweis and sens. The life of nature and that of man are in reality made out of the play of such units. Wisdom, will, force, and virtue depend on their relationship. Asceticism and orgiasm; the knightly custom of hiao, which requires the noble to revenge an impiety towards an ancestor even after centuries, and commands him never to survive defeat;³⁰ and the reasoning moral of the yen, which, according to the judgment of rationalism, followed from knowledge — all proceed from conceptions of the forces and possibilities of the kwei and the sen.

All this is concentrated in the basic word “tao.” The conflict between the yang and the yin in man is the tao of his life; the warp and woof of the spirit swarms outside him are the tao of Nature. The world possesses tao inasmuch as it possesses beat, rhythm, and periodicity. It possesses li, tension, inasmuch as man knows it and abstracts from it fixed relationships for future use. Time, Destiny, Direction, Race, History — all this, contemplated with the great world-embracing vision of the early Chôu times, lies in this one word. The path of the Pharaoh through the dark alley to his shrine is related to it, and so is the Faustian passion of the third dimension, but tao is nevertheless far removed from any idea of the technical conquest of Nature. The Chinese park avoids energetic perspective. It lays horizon behind horizon and, instead of pointing to a goal, tempts to wander. The Chinese “cathedral” of the early time, the Pi Yung, with its paths that lead through gates and thickets, stairs and bridges and courts, has never the inexorable march of Egypt or the drive into depth of the Gothic.

When Alexander appeared on the Indus, the piety of these three Cultures — Chinese, Indian, Classical — had long been molded into the historyless forms of a broad Taoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. But it was not long before the group of Magian religions arose in the region intermediate between the Classical and the Indian field, and it must have been at about the same time that the religious history of the Maya and Inca, now hopelessly lost to us, began. A thousand years later, when here also all was inwardly fulfilled and done with, there appeared on the unpromising soil of France, sudden and swiftly mounting, Germanic Catholic Christianity. It was in this case as in every other; whether the whole stock of names and practices came from the East, or whether thousands of particular details were derived from primeval Germanic and Celtic feelings, the Gothic religion is something so new and unheard of, something of which the final depths are so completely incomprehensible by anyone outside its faith, that to contrive linkages for them on the historical surface is meaningless jugglery.

The mythic world that thereupon formed itself around this young soul, an integer of force, will, and direction seen under the symbol of Infinity, a stupendous action into distance, chasms of terror and of bliss suddenly opening up — it was all, for the elect of this early religiousness, something so entirely natural that they could not even detach themselves sufficiently to “know” it as a unit. They lived in it. To us, on the contrary, who are separated from these ancestors by thirty generations, this world seems so alien and overpowering that we always seek to grasp it in detail, and so misunderstand its wholeness and undividedness.

The father godhead men felt as Force itself, eternal, grand, and ever present activity, sacred causality, which could scarcely assume any form comprehensible by human eyes. But the whole longing of the young breed, the whole desire of this strongly coursing blood, to bow itself in humility before the meaning of the blood found its expression in the figure of the Virgin and Mother Mary, whose crowning in the heavens was one of the earliest motives of the Gothic art. She is a light figure, in white, blue, and gold, surrounded by the heavenly hosts. She leans over the newborn Child; she fells the sword in her heart; she stands at the foot of the cross; she holds the corpse of the dead Son. From the turn of the tenth century on, Petrus Damiani and Bernard of Clairvaux developed her cult; there arose the Ave Maria and the angelic greeting and later, among the Dominicans, the crown of roses. Countless legends gathered round her figure.³¹ She is the guardian of the Church’s store of Grace, the Great Intercessor. Among the Franciscans arose the festival of the Visitation, amongst the English Benedictines (even before 1100) that of the Immaculate Conception, which elevated her completely above mortal humanity into the world of light.

But this world of purity, light, and utter beauty of soul would have been unimaginable without the counter idea, inseparable from it, an idea that constitutes one of the maxima of Gothic, one of its unfathomable creations — one that the present day forgets, and deliberatelyforgets. While she there sits enthroned, smiling in her beauty and tenderness, there lies in the background another world that throughout nature and throughout mankind weaves and breeds ill, pierces, destroys, seduces — namely, the realm of the Devil. It penetrates the whole of Creation, it lies ambushed everywhere. All around is an army of goblins, night spirits, witches, werewolves, all in human shape. No man knows whether or not his neighbor has signed himself away to the Evil One. No one can say of an unfolding child that it is not already a devil’s temptress. An appalling fear, such as is perhaps only paralleled in the early spring of Egypt, weighs upon man. Every moment he may stumble into the abyss. There were black magic, and devils’ masses and witches’ sabbaths, night feasts on mountaintops, magic draughts and charm formulas. The Prince of Hell, with his relatives — mother and grandmother, for as his very existence denies and scorns the sacrament of marriage, he may not have wife or child — his fallen angels and his uncanny henchmen, is one of the most tremendous creations in all religious history. The Germanic Loki is hardly more than a preliminary hint of him. Their grotesque figures, with horns, claws, and horses’ hoofs, were already fully formed in the mystery plays of the eleventh century; everywhere the artist’s fancy abounded in them, and, right up to Dürer and Grünewald, Gothic painting is unthinkable without them. The Devil is sly, malignant, malicious, but yet in the end the powers of light dupe him. He and his brood, bad tempered, coarse, fiendishly inventive, are of a monstrous imaginativeness, incarnations of hellish laughter opposed to the illumined smile of the Queen of Heaven, but incarnations, too, of Faustian world humor³² opposed to the panic of the sinner’s contrition.

It is not possible to exaggerate either the grandeur of this forceful, insistent picture or the depth of sincerity with which it was believed in. The Mary myths and the Devil myth formed themselves side by side, neither possible without the other. Disbelief in either of them was deadly sin. There was a Mary cult of prayer, and a Devil cult of spells and exorcisms. Man walked continuously on the thin crust of the bottomless pit. Life in this world is a ceaseless and desperate contest with the Devil, into which every individual plunges as a member of the Church Militant, to do battle for himself and to win his knight’s spurs. The Church Triumphant of angels and saints in their glory looks down from on high, and heavenly Grace is the warrior’s shield in the battle. Mary is the protectress to whose bosom he can fly to be comforted, and the high lady who awards the prizes of valor. Both worlds have their legends, their art, their scholasticism, and their mysticism — for the Devil, too, can work miracles. Characteristic of this alone among the religious Springtimes is the symbolism ofcolor — to the Madonna belong white and blue, to the Devil black, sulphur yellow, and red. The saints and angels float in the aether, but the devils leap and crouch and the witches rustle through the night. It is the two together, light and night, which fill Gothic art with its indescribable inwardness — that, and not any “artistic” fancifulness. Every man knew the world to be peopled with angel and devil troops. The light encircled angels of Fra Angelico and the early Rhenish masters, and the grimacing things on the portals of the great cathedrals, really filled the air. Men saw them, felt their presence everywhere. Today we simply no longer know what a myth is; for it is no mere aesthetically pleasing mode of representing something to oneself, but a piece of the most lively actuality that mines every corner of the waking consciousness and shakes the innermost structure of being. These creatures were about one all the time. They were glimpsed without being seen. They were believed in with a faith that felt the very thought of proof as a desecration. What we call myth nowadays, our litterateur’s and connoisseur’s taste for Gothic color, is nothing but Alexandrinism. In the old days men did not “enjoy” it — behind it stood Death.³³

For the Devil gained possession of human souls and seduced them into heresy, lechery, and black arts. It was war that was waged against him on earth,³⁴ and waged with fire and sword upon those who had given themselves up to him. It is easy enough for us today to think ourselves out of such notions, but if we eliminate this appalling reality from Gothic, all that remains is mere romanticism. It was not only the love glowing hymns to Mary, but the cries of countless pyres as well that rose up to heaven. Hard by the Cathedral were the gallows and the wheel. Every man lived in those days in the consciousness of an immense danger, and it was hell, not the hangman, that he feared. Unnumbered thousands of witches genuinely imagined themselves to be so; they denounced themselves, prayed for absolution, and in pure love of truth confessed their night rides and bargains with the Evil One. Inquisitors, in tears and compassion for the fallen wretches, doomed them to the rack in order to save their souls. That is the Gothic myth, out of which came the cathedral, the crusader, the deep and spiritual painting, the mysticism. In its shadow flowered that profound Gothic blissfulness of which today we cannot even form an idea.

In Carolingian times, all this was still strange and far. Charlemagne in the first Saxon Capitulary (787) put a ban on the ancient Germanic belief in were-wolves and night-gangers (strigae), and as late as 1120 it was condemned as an error in the decree of Burkard of Worms. But twenty years later it was only in a dilute form that the anathema reappeared in the Decretum Gratiani. Caesarius of Heisterbach, already, was familiar with the whole devil legend and in the Legenda Aurea it is just as actual and as effective as the Mary legends. In 1233, when the Cathedrals of Mainz and Speyer were being vaulted, appeared the bull Vox in Rama, by which the belief in Devil and witch was made canonical. St. Francis’s “Hymn to the Sun” had not long been written, and the Franciscans were kneeling in intimate prayer before Mary and spreading her cult afar, when the Dominicans armed themselves for battle with the Devil by setting up the Inquisition. Heavenly love found its focus in the Mary image, and eo ipso earthly love became akin to the Devil. Woman is Sin — so the great ascetics felt, as their fellows of the Classical, of China, and of India had felt. The Devil rules only through woman. The witch is the propagator of deadly sin. It was Thomas Aquinas who evolved the repulsive theory of Incubus and Succuba. Inward mystics like Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, developed a full metaphysic of the devilish.

The Renaissance had ever the strong faith of the Gothic at the back of its world outlook. When Vasari eulogized Cimabue and Giotto for returning to Nature as their teacher, it was this Gothic nature that he had in mind, a nature influenced in every nook by the encircling troops of angels and devils that stood there, ever threatening, in the light. “Imitation” of Nature meant imitation of its soul, not of its surface. Let us be rid at last of the fable of a renewal of Classical “Antiquity.” Renaissance, Rinascita, meant then the Gothic uplift from A.D. 1000 onward,³⁵ the new Faustian world feeling, the new personal experience of the Ego in the Infinite. For some individual spirits, no doubt, it meant a sentimental enthusiasm for the Classical (or what was thought to be the Classical), but that was a manifestation of taste, nothing more.³⁶ The Classical myth was entertainment material, an allegorical play, through the thin veil of which men saw, no less definitely than before, the old Gothic actuality. When Savonarola stood up, the antique trappings vanished from the surface of Florentine life in an instant. It was all for the church that the Florentines labored, and with conviction. Raphael was the most deeply intimate of all Madonna painters. A firm belief in the realm of Satan, and in deliverance from it through the saints, lay at the root of all this art and literature; and every one of them, painters, architects, and humanists — however often the names of Cicero and Virgil, Venus and Apollo were on their lips — looked upon the burning of witches as something entirely natural and wore amulets against the devil. The writings of Marsilius Ficinus are full of learned disquisitions on devils and witches. Francesco della Mirandola wrote (in elegant Latin) his dialog “The Witch” in order to warn the fine intellects of his circle against a danger.³⁷ When Leonardo da Vinci, at the summit of the Renaissance, was working upon his “Anna Selbdritt,”³⁸ the “Witches’ Hammer” was being written in Rome (1487) in the finest Humanistic Latin. It was these that constitute the real myth of the Renaissance, and without them we shall never understand the glorious and truly Gothic force of this anti-Gothic movement. Men who did not feel the Devil very near at hand could not have created the Divina Commedia or the frescoes of Orvieto³⁹ or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

It was the tremendous background of this myth that awakened in the Faustian soul a feeling of what it was. An Ego lost in Infinity, an Ego that was all force, but a force negligibly weak in an infinity of greater forces;⁴⁰ that was all will, but a will full of fear for its freedom. Never has the problem of Free Will been meditated upon more deeply or more painfully. Other Cultures have simply not known it. But precisely because here Magian resignation was totally impossible — because that which thought was not an “it” or particle of an all-soul, but an individual, fighting Ego, seeking to maintain itself — every limitation upon freedom was felt as a chain that had to be dragged along through life, and life in turn was felt as a living death. And if so — why? For what?

The result of this in-looking was that immense sense of guilt which runs throughout these centuries like one long, desperate lament. The cathedrals rose ever more supplicatingly to heaven, the Gothic vaulting became a joining of hands in prayer, and little comfort of light shone through the high windows into the night of the long naves. The choking parallel sequences of the church chants, the Latin hymns, tell of bruised knees and flagellations in the nocturnal cell. For Magian man the world cavern had been close and the heaven impending, but for Gothic man heaven was infinitely far. No hand seemed to reach down from these spaces, and all about the lone Ego the mocking Devil’s world lay in leaguer. And, therefore, the great longing of Mysticism was to lose created form (as Heinrich Seuse said), to be rid of self and all things (Meister Eckart), to abandon selfness (Theologie deutsch).⁴¹ And out of these longings there grew up an unending dogged subtilizing on notions which were ever more and more finely dissected to get at the “why,” and finally a universal cry for Grace — not the Magian Grace coming down as substance, but the Faustian Grace that unbinds the Will.

To be able to will freely is, at the very bottom, the one gift that the Faustian soul asks of heaven. The seven sacraments of the Gothic, felt as one by Peter Lombard, elevated into dogma by the Lateran Council of 1215, and grounded in mystical foundations by Thomas Aquinas, mean this and only this. They accompany the unit soul from birth to death and protect it against the diabolical powers that seek to nest themselves in its will. For to sell oneself to the Devil means to deliver up one’s will to him. The Church Militant on earth is the visible community of those who are enabled, by enjoyment of the sacraments, to will. This certainty of free being is held to be guaranteed in the altar sacrament, which accordingly suffers a complete change of meaning. The miracle of the holy transformation which takes place daily under the hands of the priest — the consecrated Host in the high altar of the cathedral, wherein the believer sensed the presence of him who of old sacrificed himself to secure for his own the freedom to will — called forth a sigh of relief of such depth and sincerity as we moderns can hardly imagine. It was in thanksgiving, therefore, that the chief feast of the Catholic Church, Corpus Christi, was founded in 1264.⁴²

But more important still — and by far — was the essentially Faustian prime sacrament of Contrition. This ranks with the Mary myth and the Devil myth as the third great creation of the Gothic. And, indeed, it is from this third that the other two derive depth and meaning; it discloses the last secrets of this Culture’s soul, and so sets it apart from all other Cultures. The effect of the Magian baptism was to incorporate a man in the great consensus — the one great “it” of the divine spirit took up its abode in him as in the others, and thereafter resignation to all that should happen became his duty. But in the Faustian contrition the idea of personality was implicit. It is not true that the Renaissance discovered personality;⁴³ what it did was to bring personality up to a brilliant surface, whereby it suddenly became visible to everyone. Its birth is in Gothic; it is the most intimate and peculiar property of Gothic; it is one and the same with Gothic soul. For this contrition is something that each one accomplishes for himself alone. He alone can search his own conscience. He alone stands rueful in the presence of the Infinite. He alone can and must in confession understand and put into words his own past. And even the absolution that frees his Ego for new responsible action is personal to himself. Baptism is wholly impersonal — one receives it because one is a man, not because one is this man — but the idea of contrition presupposes that the value of every act depends uniquely upon the man who does it. This is what differentiates the Western drama from the Classical, the Chinese, and the Indian. This is what directs our legislation more and more with reference to the doer rather than to the deed, and bases our primary ethical conceptions on individual doing and not typical behavior. Faustian responsibility instead of Magian resignedness, the individual instead of the consensus; relief from, instead of submissiveness under, burdens — that is the difference between the most active and the most passive of all sacraments, and at the back of it again lies the difference between the world cavern and infinity dynamics. Baptism is something done upon one, Contrition something done by oneself within oneself. And, moreover, this conscientious searching of one’s own past is both the earliest evidence of, and the finest training for, the historical sense of Faustian mankind. There is no other Culture in which the personal life of the living man, the conscientious tracing of each feature, has been so important, for this alone has required the accounts to be rendered in words. If historical research and biography are characteristic of the spirit of the West from its beginnings; if both in the last resort are self-examination and confession; if our lives are led with an assuredness and conscious reference to the historic background that nowhere else has been even imagined as possible or tolerable; if, lastly, we habitually look at history in terms of millennia, not rhapsodically or decoratively as in the Classical World and in China, but directionally and with the almost sacramental formula “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” ever in our minds — we have this sacrament of the Gothic Church, this continual unburdening of the Ego by historicaltest and justification to thank for it. Every confession is an autobiography. This peculiar liberation of the will is to us so necessary that the refusal of absolution drives to despair, even to destruction. Only he who senses the bliss of such an inward acquittal can comprehend the old name of the sacramentum resurgentium, the sacrament of those who are risen again.⁴⁴

When in this heaviest of decisions the soul is left to its own resources, something unresolved remains hanging over it like a perpetual cloud. It may be said, therefore, that perhaps no institution in any religion has brought so much happiness into the world as this. The whole inwardness and heavenly love of the Gothic rests upon the certainty of full absolution through the power invested in the priest. In the insecurity that ensued from the decline of this sacrament, both Gothic joy of life and the Mary world of the light faded out. Only the Devil’s world, with its grim all presentness, remained. And then, in place of the blissfulness irrecoverably lost, came the Protestant, and especially Puritan, heroism, which could fight on, even hopeless, in a lost position. “Auricular confession,” said Goethe once, “ought never to have been taken from mankind.” Over the lands in which it had died out, a heavy earnestness spread itself. Ethic and costume, art and thought, took on the night color of the only myth that remained outstanding. Nothing is less sunlit than the doctrines of Kant. “Every man his own priest” is a conviction to which men could win through, but only as to that part of priesthood that involves duties,not as to that which possesses powers. No man confesses himself with the inward certainty of absolution. And as the need of the soul to be relieved of its past and to be redirected remained urgent as ever, all the higher forms of communication were transmuted, and in Protestant countries music and painting, letter writing and memoirs, from being modes of description became modes of self-denunciation, penance, and unbounded confession. Even in Catholic regions too — in Paris above all — art as psychology set in as doubt in the sacrament of Contrition and Absolution grew. Outlook on the world was lost in ceaseless mine warfare within the self. In lieu of the Infinite, contemporaries and descendants were called in to be priests and judges. Personal art, in the sense that distinguishes Goethe from Dante, and Rembrandt from Michelangelo, was a substitute for the sacrament of confession. It was, also, the sign that this Culture was already in the condition of a Late period.⁴⁵

IV

In all Cultures, Reformation has the same meaning — the bringing back of the religion to the purity of its original idea as this manifested itself in the great centuries of the beginning. In no Culture is this movement missing, whether we know about it, as in the case of Egypt, or not, as in that of China. It means, further, that the city and with it the city spirit are gradually freeing themselves from the soul of the countryside, setting up in opposition to the latter’s all power and reconsidering the feelings and thoughts of the primitive pre-urban time with reference to its present self. It was Destiny and not intellectual necessities of thought that led, in the Magian and Faustian worlds, to the budding off of new religions at this point. We know today that, under Charles V, Luther was within an ace of becoming the reformer of the whole undivided Church.

For Luther, like all reformers in all Cultures, was not the first, but the last of a grand succession which led from the great ascetics of the open land to the city priest. Reformation is Gothic, the accomplishment and the testament thereof. Luther’s chorale “Ein feste Burg”does not belong to the spiritual lyricism of the Baroque. There rumbles in it still the splendid Latin of the Dies irae. It is the Church Militant’s last mighty Satan song.⁴⁶ Luther, like every reformer that had arisen since the year 1000, fought the Church not because it demanded too much, but because it demanded too little. The great stream flows on from Cluny: through Arnold of Brescia, who preached return to Apostolic simplicity and was burned in 1155; through Joachim of Floris, who was the first to use the world “reformare”; the spirituals of the Franciscan Order; Jacopone da Todi, revolutionary and singer of the Stabat Mater, the knight whom the death of a young wife turned into an ascetic and who tried to overthrow Boniface VIII for governing the Church too slackly; through Wyclif and Hus and Savonarola; to Luther, Karlstadt, Zwingli, Calvin, and — Loyola. The intention of these men, one and all, was not to overcome the Christianity of the Gothic, but to bring it to inward fulfillment. So also with Marcion, Athanasius, the Monophysites, and the Nestorians, who sought in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon to purify the faith and lead it back to its origins.⁴⁷ But so also the Orphics of the Classical seventh century were the last and not the first of a series that must have begun even before 1000 B.C. So with the establishment of the Re religion in Egypt at the close of the Old Kingdom, the Egyptian Gothic. It is an ending, not a new beginning, that these signify. Just so, again, a reform fulfillment happened in the Vedic religion about the tenth century and was followed by the setting in of late Brahmanism. And in the ninth century a corresponding epochal point must have occurred in the religious history of China.

However widely the Reformations of the various Cultures may differ amongst themselves, the purpose is the same for all — to bring the faith, which had strayed all too far into the world-as-history and time secularism (“Zeitlichkeit”) back into the realm of Nature, clean waking consciousness, and pure cause controlled and cause pervaded Space; out of the world of economics (“wealth”) into that of science (“poverty”), out of patrician and cavalier society (which was also that of Renaissance and Humanism) into that of spirituals and ascetics; and lastly (as significant as it is impossible) out of the political ambitions of vestmented human thoroughbreds into the realm of holy Causality that is not of this world.

In those times the West — and the situation was the same in the other Cultures — divided the Corpus Christianorum of the population into the three classes of status policticus, ecclesiasticus, and economicus (that is, urban), but as the outlook was that of the city and no longer that of the castle and the village, officials and judges belonged to the first named class, men of learning to the second — and the peasant was forgotten. This is the key to the opposition of the Renaissance and Reformation, which was an opposition of class and not a difference in world feeling like that of Renaissance and Gothic. Castle taste and cloister soul moved into town, and remained there, as before, in opposition — as in Florence the Medici to Savonarola, and as in old Greece the noble families of the cities — with their Homer now finally written down — to the last Orphics — these, too, writers. The Renaissance artists and Humanists are the legitimate successors of the Troubadours and Minnesingers, and just as there is a line from Arnold of Brescia to Luther, so there is a line from Bertrand de Born and Peire Cardinal, through Petrarch, to Ariosto. The castle has become the townhouse, the knight the patrician. The whole movement adhered to palaces, as courts; it limits itself to those fields of expression that affect and interest polite society; it is bright and gay, like Homer, because it is courtly — an atmosphere where problems were bad taste, where Dante and Michelangelo cannot but have felt themselves out of place — and it spread over the Alps to the courts of the North, not as a new world outlook, but as a new taste. The “Northern” Renaissance of the mercantile and capital cities consisted simply in the fact that the bon ton of the Italian patriciate replaced that of the French chivalry.

But the last reformers, too, the Luthers and Savonarolas, were urban monks, and this differentiates them profoundly from the Joachims and the Bernards. Their intellectual and urban askesis is the steppingstone from the hermitages of quiet valleys to the scholar’s study of the Baroque. The mystic experience of Luther which gave birth to his doctrine of justification is the experience, not of a St. Bernard in the presence of woods and hills and clouds and stars, but of a man who looks through narrow windows on the streets and house walls and gables. Broad God-perfused nature is remote, outside the city wall; and the free intellect, detached from the soil, is inside it. Within the urban, stone walled waking consciousness sense and reason part company and become enemies, and the city mysticism of the last reformers is thus a mysticism of pure reason through and through, and not one of the eye — an illumination of concepts, in presence of which the brightly colored figures of the old myth fade into paleness.

Necessarily, therefore, it was, in its real depths, a thing of the few. Nothing was left of that sensible content that formerly had offered even to the poorest something to grip. The mighty act of Luther was a purely intellectual decision. Not for nothing has he been regarded as the last great Schoolman of the line of Occam.⁴⁸ He completely liberated the Faustian personality — the intermediate person of the priest, which had formerly stood between it and the Infinite, was removed. And now it was wholly alone, self-oriented, its own priest and its own judge. But the common people could only feel, not understand, the element of liberation in it all. They welcomed, enthusiastically, indeed, the tearing up of visible duties, but they did not come to realize that these had been replaced by intellectual duties that were still stricter. Francis of Assisi had given much and taken little, but the urban Reformation took much and, as far as the majority of people were concerned, gave little.

The holy Causality of the Contrition sacrament Luther replaced by the mystic experience of inward absolution “by faith alone.” He came very near to Bernard of Clairvaux in this concept of contrition as lifelong, as a continuous intellectual askesis in contrast to the askesis of outward and visible works. Both of them understood absolution as a divine miracle: insofar as the man changes himself, it is God changing him. But what no purely intellectual mysticism can replace is the “Tu” outside, in free nature. The one and the other preached: “Thou must believe that God has forgiven thee,” but for Bernard belief was through the powers of the priest elevated to knowledge, whereas for Luther it sank to doubt and desperate insistence. This little “I,” detached from the cosmos, nailed up in an individual being and (in the most terrific sense of the word) alone, needed the proximity of a powerful “Thou,” and the weaker the intellect, the more urgent the need. Herein lies the ultimate meaning of the Western priest, who from 1215 was elevated above the rest of mankind by the sacrament of ordination and its character indelebilis: he was a hand with which even the poorest wretch could grasp God. This visible link with the Infinite, Protestantism destroyed. Strong souls could and did win it back for themselves, but for the weaker it was gradually lost. Bernard, although for him the inward miracle was successful of itself, would not deprive others of the gentler way, for the very illumination of his soul showed him the Mary world of living nature, all pervading, ever near, and ever helpful. Luther, who knew himself only and not men, set postulated heroism in place of actual weakness. For him life was desperate battle against the Devil, and that battle he called upon everyone to fight. And everyone who fought it fought alone.

The Reformation abolished the whole bright and consoling side of the Gothic myth — the cult of Mary, the veneration of the saints, the relics, the pilgrimages, the mass. But the myth of devildom and witchcraft remained, for it was the embodiment and cause of the inner torture, and now that torture at last rose to its supreme horror.⁴⁹ Baptism was, for Luther at least, an exorcism, the veritable sacrament of devil banning. There grew up a large, purely Protestant literature about the Devil.⁵⁰ Out of the Gothic wealth of color, there remained black; of its arts, music, in particular organ music. But in the place of the mythic light world, whose helpful nearness the faith of the common people could not, after all, forgo, there rose again out of long buried depths an element of ancient German myth. It came so stealthily that even today its true significance is not yet realized. The expressions “folktale” and “popular custom” are inadequate: it is a true Myth that inheres in the firm belief in dwarfs, bogies, nixies, house sprites, and sweeping clouds of the disembodied, and a true Cult that is seen in the rites, offerings, and conjurings that are still practiced with a pious awe. In Germany, at any rate, the Saga took the place, unperceived, of the Mary myth: Mary was now called Frau Holde, and where once the saints had stood, appeared the faithful Eckart. In the English people what arose was something that has long been designated “Bible fetishism.”

What Luther lacked — and it is an eternal fatality for Germany — was the eye for facts and the power of practical organization. He did not bring his doctrines to a clear system, nor did he lead the great movement and choose its aim. The one and the other were the work of his great successor Calvin. While the Lutheran movement advanced leaderless in central Europe, he viewed his rule in Geneva as the starting point of a systematic subjection of the world under a Protestantism unfalteringly thought out to its logical conclusion. Therefore he, and he alone, became a world power; therefore it was the decisive struggle between the spirit of Calvin and the spirit of Loyola that dominated, from the Spanish Armada on, the world politics of the Baroque and the struggle for sea supremacy. While in mid-Europe Reformation and Counter-Reformation struggled for some small imperial city or a few poor Swiss cantons, Canada, the mouth of the Ganges, the Cape, the Mississippi, were the scenes of great decisions fought to an issue by France and Spain, England and Holland. And in these decisions the two grand organizers of the Late religion of the West were ever present, ever opposed.

V

Intellectual creativeness of the Late period begins, not with, but after, the Reformation. Its most typical creation is free science. Even for Luther learning was still essentially the “handmaid of theology,” and Calvin had the free thinking doctor Servet burnt. The thought of the Springtimes — Faustian like Egyptian, Vedic, and Orphic — had felt its vocation to be the justification of faith by criticism. If criticism did not succeed, the critical method must be wrong. Knowledge was faith justified, not faith controverted.

Now, however, the critical powers of the city intellect have become so great that it is no longer content to affirm, but must test. The stock of believed probables, and especially that part of it which was received by the understanding and not the heart, was the first obvious target for dissecting activities. This distinguishes the Springtime Scholasticism from the actuality philosophy of the Baroque — as it distinguishes Neoplatonist from Islamic, Vedic from Brahmanic, Orphic from Pre-Socratic, thought. The (shall we say) profane Causality of human life, the world-around, the process and meaning of cognition, become a problem. The Egyptian philosophy of the Middle Kingdom measured up the value of life in this sense; and akin to it, in all probability, was the late pre-Confucian philosophy of China from 800 to 500 B.C. Only the book ascribed to Kwan-tse (d. 645) remains to give us some dim idea of this philosophy, but the indications, slight though they be, are that epistemological and biological problems occupied the center of the one genuine philosophy of China, now utterly lost.

Within Baroque philosophy, Western natural science stands by itself. No other Culture possesses anything like it, and assuredly it must have been from its beginnings, not a “handmaid of theology,” but the servant of the technical Will-to-Power, oriented to that end both mathematically and experimentally — from its very foundations a practical mechanics. And as it is firstly technique and only secondly theory, it must be as old as Faustian man himself. Accordingly, we find technical works of an astounding energy of combination even by 1000.⁵¹ As early as the thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste⁵² was treating space as a function of light. Petrus Peregrinus in 1289 wrote the best experimentally based treatise on magnetism that appeared before Gilbert (1600). And Roger Bacon, the disciple of both, developed a natural scientific theory of knowledge to serve as basis for his technical investigations.⁵³ But boldness in the discovery of dynamic interlinkages went further still. The Copernican system was hinted at in a manuscript of 1322 and a few decades later was mathematically developed by the Paris Occamists, Buridan, Albert of Saxony, and Oresme.⁵⁴ Let us not deceive ourselves as to the fundamental motive power of these explorations. Pure contemplative philosophy could have dispensed with experiment forever, but not so the Faustian symbol of the machine, which urged us to mechanical constructions even in the twelfth century and made “Perpetuum mobile” the Prometheus idea of the Western intellect. For us the first thing is ever the working hypothesis — the very kind of thought product that is meaningless to other Cultures. It is an astounding fact (to which, however, we must accustom ourselves) that the idea of immediately exploiting in practice any knowledge of natural relations that may be acquired is alien to every sort of mankind except the Faustian (and those who, like Japanese, Jews, and Russians, have today come under the intellectual spell of its Civilization). The very notion of the working hypothesis implicitly contains a dynamic layout of the universe. Theoria, contemplative vision of actuality, was for those subtly inquiring monks only secondary, and, being itself the outcome of the technical passion, it presently led them, quite imperceptibly, to the typically Faustian conception of God as the Grand Master of the machine, who could accomplish everything that they themselves in their impotence only dared to wish. Insensibly the world of God became, century by century, more and more like thePerpetuum mobile. And, imperceptibly also, as the scanning of nature became sharper and sharper in the school of experiment and technique, and the Gothic myth became more and more shadowy, the concepts of monkish working hypotheses developed, from Galileo onwards, into the critically illuminated numina of modern science, the collisions and the fields, gravitation, the velocity of light, and the “electricity” which in our electrodynamic world picture has absorbed into itself the other forms of energy and thereby attained to a sort of physical monotheism. They are the concepts that are set up behind the formulas, to endow them with a mythic visibility for the inner eye. The numbers themselves are technical elements, levers and screws, overhearings of the world’s secrets. The Classical Nature thought — and that of others also — required no numbers, for it strove for no powers. The pure mathematic of Pythagoras and Plato had no relation whatever to the nature views of Democritus and Aristotle.

Just as the Classical mind felt Prometheus’s defiance of the gods as “hybris,” so our Baroque felt the machine as diabolical.⁵⁵ The spirit of Hell had betrayed to man the secret of mastering the world mechanism and even of himself enacting the part of God. And hence it is that all purely priestly natures, that live wholly in the world of the spirit and expect nothing of “this world” — and notably the idealist philosophers, the Classicists, the Humanists, and even Nietzsche — have for technique nothing but silent hostility.

Every Late philosophy contains this critical protest against the uncritical intuitiveness of the Spring. But this criticism of the intellect that is sure of its own superiority affects also faith itself and evokes the one great creation in the field of religion that is the peculiarity of the Late period — every Late period — namely, Puritanism.

Puritanism manifests itself in the army of Cromwell and his Independents, iron, Bible firm, psalm singing as they rode into battle; in the ranks of the Pythagoreans, who in the bitter earnest of their gospel of duty wrecked gay Sybaris and branded it forever as the city without morals; in the armies of the early Caliphs, which subdued not only states, but souls. Milton’s Paradise Lost, many surahs of the Koran, the little that we know of Pythagorean teachings — all come to the same thing. They are enthusiasms of a sober spirit, cold intensities, dry mysticism, pedantic ecstasy. And yet, even so, a wild piety flickers up once more in them. All the transcendent inwardness that the City can produce after attaining to unconditional mastery over the soul of the Land is here concentrated, with a sort of terror lest it should prove unreal and evanescent, and is correspondingly impatient, pitiless, and unforgiving. Puritanism — not in the West only, but in all Cultures — lacks the smile that had illumined the religion of the Spring — every Spring — the moments of profound joy in life, the humor of life. Nothing of the quiet blissfulness that in the Magian Springtime flashes up so often in the stories of Jesus’s childhood, or in Gregory Nazianzen, is to be found in the Koran, nothing in the palpable blitheness of St. Francis’s songs in Milton. Deadly earnest broods over the Jansenist mind of Port Royal, over the meetings of the black clothed Roundheads, by whom Shakespeare’s “Merry England” —Sybaris over again — was annihilated in a few years. Now for the first time the battle against the Devil, whose bodily nearness they all felt, was fought with a dark and bitter fury. In the seventeenth century more than a million witches were burnt — alike in the Protestant North, the Catholic South, and even the communities in America and India. Joyless and sour are the duty doctrines of Islam (fikh), with its hard intellectuality, and the Westminster Catechisms of 1643, and the Jansenist ethics (Jansen’s Augustinus, 1640) as well — for in the realm of Loyola, too, there was of inward necessity a Puritan movement. Religion is livingly experienced metaphysic, but the company of the “godly,” as the Independents called themselves, and the Pythagoreans, and the disciples of Mohammed, all alike experienced it, not with the senses, but primarily as a concept. Parshva, who about 600 B.C. founded the sect of the “Unfettered”⁵⁶ on the Ganges, taught, like the other Puritans of his time, that salvation came, not from sacrifices and rights, but only from knowledge of the identity of Atman and Brahman. In all Puritan poetry the place of the old Gothic visions is taken by an unbridled, yet withal jejune, spirit of allegory. In the waking consciousness of these ascetics the concept is the only real power. Pascal’s wrestlings were about concepts and not, like Meister Eckart’s, about shapes. Witches were burnt because they were proved, and not because they were seen in the air o’ nights; the Protestant jurists employed the witches’ hammer of the Dominicans because it was built on concepts. The Madonnas of the early Gothic had appeared to their suppliants, but those of Bernini no man ever saw. They exist because they are proved — and there came to be a positive enthusiasm for existence of this sort. Milton, Cromwell’s great secretary of state, clothed concepts with shapes, and Bunyan brings a whole mythology of concepts into ethical allegorical activity. From that it is but a step to Kant, in whose conceptual ethics the Devil assumes his final shape as the Radically Evil.

We have to emancipate ourselves from the surfaces of history — and, especially, to thrust aside the artificial fences in which the methodology of Western sciences has paddocked it — before we can see that Pythagoras, Mohammed, and Cromwell embody one and the same movement in three Cultures.

Pythagoras was not a philosopher. According to all statements of the Pre-Socratics, he was a saint, prophet and founder of a fanatically religious society that forced its truths upon the people around it by every political and military means. The destruction of Sybaris by Croton — an event which, we may be sure, has survived in historical memory only because it was the climax of a wild religious war — was an explosion of the same hate that saw in Charles I and his gay Cavaliers not merely doctrinal error, but also worldly disposition as something that must be destroyed root and branch. A myth purified and conceptually fortified, combined with rigorous ethical precepts, imbued the Pythagoreans with the conviction that they would attain salvation before all other men. The gold tablets found in Thurii and Petelia, which were put into the hand of the dead initiate, carried the assurance of the god: “Happy and blessed one, thou shalt be no more a mortal, but a god.” It is the same certainty that the Koran gave to all believers who fought in the holy war against the infidel — “The monasticism of Islam is the religious war,” says a hadith of the Prophet — the same which filled Cromwell’s Ironsides when they scattered the King’s “Philistines” and “Amalekites” at Marston Moor and Naseby.

Islam was no more a religion of the desert in particular than Zwingli’s faith was a religion of the high mountains in particular. It is incident, and no more, that the Puritan movement for which the Magian world was ripe proceeded from a man of Mecca and not from a Monophysite or a Jew. For in the northern Arabian desert there were the Christian states of the Ghassanids and Lakhmids, and in the Sabasan South there were religious wars waged between Christians and Jews that involved the world of states from Assuan to the Sassanid Empire. The Congress of Princes at Marib⁵⁷ was attended by hardly a single pagan, and shortly after this date South Arabia came under Persian — that is, Mazdaist — government. Mecca was a little island of ancient Arabian paganism in the midst of a world of Jews and Christians, a mere relic that had long been mined by the ideas of the great Magian religions. The little of this paganism that filtered into the Koran was later explained away by the Commentary of the Sunna and its Syro-Mesopotamian intellect. At most Islam was a new religion only to the same extent as Lutheranism was one.⁵⁸ Actually, it was the prolongation of the great early religions. Equally, its expansion was not (as is even now imagined) a “migration of peoples” proceeding from the Arabian Peninsula, but an onslaught of enthusiastic believers, which like an avalanche bore along with it Christians, Jews, and Mazdaists and set them at once in its front rank as fanatical Moslems. It was Berbers from the homeland of St. Augustine who conquered Spain, and Persians from Iraq who drove on to the Oxus. The enemy of yesterday became the front rank comrade of tomorrow. Most of the “Arabs” who in 717 attacked Constantinople for the first time, had been born Christians. About 650 Byzantine literature⁵⁹ quite suddenly vanished, and the deeper meaning of the fact has so far never been noticed — it was just that the Arabian literature took up the tale. The soul of the Magian Culture found at last its true expression in Islam, and therewith became truly the “Arabian,” free thenceforth from all bondage to the Pseudomorphosis. The Iconoclastic movement, led by Islam, but long prepared by Monophysites and Jews, advanced to and even beyond Byzantium, where the Syrian Leo III (717-41) raised this Puritan movement of Islamic-Christian sects — the Paulicians about 650 and the Bogomils later⁶⁰ — to predominance. The great figures of Mohammed’s entourage, such as Abu Bekr and Omar, are the near relatives of the Pyms and Hampdens of the English Revolution, and we should see this relationship to be nearer still if we knew more than we do about the Hanifs, the Arabian Puritans before and about the Prophet. All of them had won out of Predestination the guarantee that they were God’s elect. The grand Old Testament exaltation of Parliament and the camps of Independency — which left behind it, in many an English family, even to the nineteenth century,⁶¹ the belief that the English are the descendants of the ten Lost Tribes of Israel, a nation of saints predestined to govern the world — dominated also the emigration to America which began with the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620. It formed that which may be called the American religion of today, and bred and fostered the trait which gives the Englishman even now his particular political insouciance, an assurance that is essentially religious and has its roots in predestination. The Pythagoreans themselves, too (an unheard of thing in the religious history of the Classical world) assumed political power for the furtherance of religious ends and sought to advance their puritanism from Polis to Polis. Everywhere else unit cults reigned in unit states, each of which left the other unconcernedly to its own religious duties; here and here only do we find a community of saints, and their practical energy as far surpassed that of the old Orphics as fighting Independency surpassed the spirit of the Reformation wars.

But in Puritanism there is hidden already the seed of Rationalism, and after a few enthusiastic generations have passed, this bursts forth everywhere and makes itself supreme. This is the step from Cromwell to Hume. Not cities in general, not even the great cities, but a few particular cities now become the theater of intellectual history — Socratic Athens, Abbassid Baghdad, eighteenth century London and Paris.⁶² “Enlightenment” is the cliche of that time. The sun bursts forth — but what is it that clears off the heavens of the critical consciousness to make way for that sun?

Rationalism signifies the belief in the data of critical understanding (that is, of the “reason”) alone. In the Springtime men could say “Credo quia absurdum” because they were certain that the comprehensible and the incomprehensible were both necessary constituents of the world — the nature which Giotto painted, in which the Mystics immersed themselves, and into which reason can penetrate, but only so far as the deity permits it to penetrate. But now a secret jealousy breeds the notion of the Irrational — that which, as incomprehensible, is therefore valueless. It may be scorned openly as superstition, or privily as metaphysic. Only critically established understanding possesses value. And secrets are merely evidences of ignorance. The new secretless religion is in its highest potentialities called wisdom (σοφία), its priests, philosophers, and its adherents “educated” people. According to Aristotle, the old religion is indispensable only to the uneducated,⁶³ and his view is Confucius’s and Gotama Buddha’s, Lessing’s and Voltaire’s. Men go away from Culture “back to nature,” but this nature is not something livingly experienced, but something proved, something born of, and accessible only to, the intellect — a Nature that has no existence at all for a peasantry, a Nature by which one is not in the least overawed but merely put into a condition of sensibility. Natural religion, rational religion, Deism — all this is not lived metaphysics, but a comprehended mechanics, called by Confucius the “Laws of Heaven” and by Hellenism τυχή. Formerly philosophy was the handmaid of transcendent religiousness, but now comes sensibility, and philosophy must therefore become scientific as epistemology and critique of nature and critique of values. No doubt there was a feeling that this philosophy was, even so, nothing but a diluted dogmatism, for the idea that pure knowledge waspossible itself involved a belief. Systems were woven out of phenomenally guaranteed beginnings, but in the long run the result was merely to say “Force” instead of “God,” and “Conservation of Energy” instead of “Eternity.” Under all Classical rationalism is to be found Olympus, under all Western the dogma of the sacraments. And so our Western philosophy swings to and fro between religion and technical science, and is defined thus, or thus, according as the author of the definition is a man with some relic of priesthood still in him, or is a pure expert and technician of thought.

“Weltanschauung” is the characteristic expression for an enlightened waking consciousness that, under the guidance of the critical understanding, looks about it in a godless light world and, when sense perceptions are found not to square with sound human reason, treats sense as a “lying jade.” That which was once myth — the most actual of the actual — is now subjected to the methods of what is called Euhemerism. The learned Euhemerus, about 300 B.C., “explained” the Classical divinities to the public that they had formerly served so well, and the process occurs under one form or another in every “age of enlightenment.” We have our Euhemeristic interpretations of Hell as a guilty conscience, the Devil as evil desire, and God as the beauty of nature, and it is the same tendency that declares itself when Attic tomb inscriptions of about 400 invoke, not the city goddess Athene, but a goddess “Demos” — a near relation, by the way, of the Jacobins’ Goddess of Reason — and where the δαιμονίον for Socrates, νοῦς for other philosophers, take the place of Zeus. Confucius says “heaven” instead of “Shang-ti,” which means that he believes only in laws of nature. The “collection” and “ordering” of the canonical writings of China by the Confucians was a colossal act of Euhemerism, in which actually almost all the old religious works were literally destroyed and the residue subjected to rationalist falsification. Had it been possible, the enlighteners of our eighteenth century would no doubt have served the Gothic heritage in the same way.⁶⁴ Confucius belongs to the Chinese “eighteenth century” through and through. Lao-tse (who despised him) stands at a midpoint in the Taoist movement, which manifested traits of Protestantism, Puritanism, and Pietism in turn, and both finally propagated a practical world tone based upon a wholly mechanistic world view. The word “tao” underwent in the Late period of China just the same continuous alteration of its fundamental content, and in the same mechanistic direction, as the word “Logos” in the history of Classical thought from Heraclitus to Posidonius, and as the word “Force” between Galileo’s day and ours. That which once had been grandly molded myth and cult is called, in this “religion of educated people,” Nature and Virtue — but this Nature is a reasonable mechanism, and this Virtue is knowledge.⁶⁵ Confucius and Buddha, Socrates and Rousseau are at one in this. Confucius contains little of prayer or of meditation upon the life after death, and nothing at all of revelation. To busy oneself overmuch with sacrifices and rites stamps one as uneducated and unreasoning, Gotama Buddha and his contemporary Mahavira, the founder of Jainism⁶⁶ — both of whom came from the political world of the lower Ganges, east of the old Brahmanic Culture field — recognized, as everyone knows, neither the idea of God nor myth and cult. Of the real teaching of Buddha little can now be ascertained — for it all appears in the colors of the later fellah religion baptized by his name — but one of the unquestionably authentic ideas concerning “conditioned arising”⁶⁷ is the derivation of Buffering from ignorance — ignorance, namely, of the “Four Noble Truths.” This is true rationalism. Nirvana, for them, is a purely intellectual release and corresponds exactly with the “Autarkeia” and “Eudaimonia” of the Stoics. It is that condition of the understanding and waking consciousness for which Being no longer is.

The great ideal of the educated of such periods is the Sage. The sage goes back to Nature — to Ferney or Ermenonville, to Attic gardens or Indian groves — which is the most intellectual way of being a megalopolitan. The sage is the man of the Golden Mean. His askesis consists in a judicious depreciation of the world in favor of meditation. The wisdom of the enlightenment never interferes with comfort. Moral with the great Myth to back it is always a sacrifice, a cult, even to extremes of asceticism, even to death; but Virtue with Wisdom at its back is a sort of secret enjoyment, a superfine intellectual egoism. And so the ethical teacher who is outside real religion becomes the Philistine. Buddha, Confucius, Rousseau, are arch-Philistines, for all the nobility of their ordered ideas, and the pedantry of the Socratic life wisdom is insurmountable.

Along with this (shall we call it) scholasticism of sane reason, there must of inner necessity be a rationalistic mysticism of the educated. The Western Enlightenment is of English origin and Puritan parentage. The rationalism of the Continent comes wholly from Locke. In opposition to it there arose in Germany the Pietists (Herrnhut, 1700, Spener and Francke, and in Württemberg Oetinger) and in England the Methodists (Wesley “awakened” by Herrnhut, 1738). It was Luther and Calvin over again — the English at once organized themselves for a world movement and the Germans lost themselves in mid-European conventicles. The Pietists of Islam are to be found in Sufism, which is not of “Persian” but of common Aramaean origin and in the eighth century spread all over the Arabian world. Pietists or Methodists, too, are the Indian lay preachers, who shortly before Buddha’s time were teaching release from the cycle of life (sansara) through immersion in the identity of Atman and Brahman. But Pietists or Methodists, too, are Lao-tse and his disciples and — notwithstanding their rationalism — the Cynic mendicants and itinerant preachers and the Stoic tutors, domestic chaplains, and confessors of early Hellenism.⁶⁸ And Pietism may ascend even to the peak of rationalist vision, of which Swedenborg is the great example, which created for Stoics and Sufists whole worlds of fancy, and by which Buddhism was prepared for its reconstruction as Mahayana. The expansion of Buddhism and that of Taoism in their original significations are closely analogous to the Methodist expansion in America, and it is no accident that they both reached their full maturity in those regions (lower Ganges and south of the Yang-tse-kiang) which had cradled the respective Cultures.

VI

Two centuries after Puritanism the mechanistic conception of the world stands at its zenith. It is the effective religion of the time. Even those who still thought themselves to be religious in the old sense, to be “believers in God,” were only mistaking the world in which their waking consciousness was mirroring itself. Religious truths were always in their understanding mechanistic truths, and in general it was only the habit of traditional words that imparted a color wash of myth to a Nature that was in reality regarded scientifically. Culture is ever synonymous with religious creativeness. Every great Culture begins with a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban countryside, is carried through in the cities of art and intellect, and closes with a finale of materialism in the world cities. But even the last chords are strictly in the key of the whole. There are Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian, Western materialisms, and each is nothing but the original stock of myth shapes, cleared of the elements of experience and contemplative vision and viewed mechanistically.

Confucianism as reasoned out by Yang-Chu concluded in this sense. The system of Lakayata was the prolongation of the contempt for a de-souled world which had been the common characteristic of Gotama Buddha, Mahavira, and the contemporary Pietists, and which they in turn had derived from Sankhya atheism. Socrates is alike the heir of the Sophists and the ancestor of the Cynic itinerants and of Pyrrhonian skepsis. All are manifestations of the superiority of the megalopolitan intellect that has done with the irrational for good and all and despises any waking consciousness that still knows or acknowledges mysteries. Gothic men shrank at every step before the fathomless, more awe inspiring still as presented in dogmatic truths. But today even the Catholic has arrived at the point of feeling these dogmas as a successful systematic exposition of the riddle of the universe. The miracle is regarded as a physical occurrence of a higher order, and an English bishop professes his belief in the possibility of electric power and the power of prayer both originating in one homogeneous nature system.⁶⁹ The belief is belief in force and matter, even if the words used be “God” and “world,” “Providence” and “man.”

Unique and self-contained, again, is the Faustian materialism, in the narrower sense of the word. In it the technical outlook upon the world reached fulfillment. The whole world a dynamic system, exact, mathematically disposed, capable down to its first causes of being experimentally probed and numerically fixed so that man can dominate it — this is what distinguishes our particular “return to Nature” from all others. That “Knowledge is Virtue” Confucius also believed, and Buddha, and Socrates, but “Knowledge is Power” is a phrase that possesses meaning only within the European-American Civilization. “Return to nature” here means the elimination of all forces that stand between the practical intelligence and nature — everywhere else materialism has contented itself with establishing (by way of contemplation or logic, as the case may be) supposedly simple units whose causal play accounts for everything without any residue of secrets, the supernatural being put down to want of knowledge. But the grand intellectual myth of Energy and Mass is at the same time a vast working hypothesis. It draws the picture of nature in such a way that men can use it. The Destiny element is mechanized as evolution, development, progress, and put into the center of the system; the Will is an albumen process; and all these doctrines of Monism, Darwinism, Positivism, and what not are elevated into the fitness moral which is the beacon of American business men, British politicians, and German progress Philistines alike — and turns out, in the last analysis, to be nothing but an intellectualist caricature of the old justification by faith.

Materialism would not be complete without the need of now and again easing the intellectual tension, by giving way to moods of myth, by performing rites of some sort, or by enjoying with an inward lightheartedness the charms of the irrational, the unnatural, the repulsive, and even, if need be, the merely silly. This tendency, which is visible enough, even to us, in the times of Meng-tse (371-289) and in those of the first Buddhist brotherhoods, is present also (and with the same significance) in Hellenism, of which indeed it is a leading characteristic. About 312 poetical scholars of the Callimachus type in Alexandria invented the Serapis cult and provided it with an elaborate legend. The Isis cult in Republican Rome was something very different both from the emperor worship that succeeded it and from the deeply earnest Isis religion of Egypt; it was a religious pastime of high society, which at times provoked public ridicule and at times led to public scandal and the closing of the cult centers.⁷⁰ The Chaldean astrology was in those days a fashion,⁷¹ very far removed from the genuine Classical belief in oracles and from the Magian faith in the might of the hour. It was “relaxation,” a “let’s pretend.” And, over and above this, there were the numberless charlatans and fake prophets who toured the towns and sought with their pretentious rites to persuade the half educated into a renewed interest in religion. Correspondingly, we have in the European American world of today the occultist and theosophist fraud, the American Christian Science, the untrue Buddhism of drawing rooms, the religious arts and crafts business (brisker in Germany than even in England) that caters for groups and cults of Gothic or Late Classical or Taoist sentiment. Everywhere it is just a toying with myths that no one really believes, a tasting of cults that it is hoped might fill the inner void. The real belief is always the belief in atoms and numbers, but it requires this highbrow hocus pocus to make it bearable in the long run. Materialism is shallow and honest, mock religion shallow and dishonest. But the fact that the latter is possible at all foreshadows a new and genuine spirit of seeking that declares itself, first quietly, but soon emphatically and openly, in the civilized waking consciousness.

This next phase I call the Second Religiousness. It appears in all Civilizations as soon as they have fully formed themselves as such and are beginning to pass, slowly and imperceptibly, into the non-historical state in which time periods cease to mean anything. (So far as the Western Civilization is concerned, therefore, we are still many generations short of that point.) The Second Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Caesarism, which is the final political constitution of Late Civilizations; it becomes visible, therefore, in the Augustan Age of the Classical and about the time of Shi-hwang-ti’s time in China. In both phenomena the creative young strength of the Early Culture is lacking. But both have their greatness nevertheless. That of the Second Religiousness consists in a deep piety that fills the waking consciousness — the piety that impressed Herodotus in the (Late) Egyptians and impresses West Europeans in China, India, and Islam — and that of Caesarism consists in its unchained might of colossal facts. But neither in the creations of this piety nor in the form of the Roman Imperium is there anything primary and spontaneous. Nothing is built up, no idea unfolds itself — it is only as if a mist cleared off the land and revealed the old forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness — only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts with Rationalism’s fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the Springtime become visible, and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase.

Every “Age of Enlightenment” proceeds from an unlimited optimism of the reason — always associated with the type of the megalopolitan — to an equally unqualified skepticism. The sovereign waking consciousness, cut off by walls and artificialities from living nature and the land about it and under it, cognizes nothing outside itself. It applies criticism to its imaginary world, which it has cleared of everyday sense experience, and continues to do so till it has found the last and subtlest result, the form of the form — itself: namely, nothing. With this the possibilities of physics as a critical mode of world understanding are exhausted, and the hunger for metaphysics presents itself afresh. But it is not the religious pastimes of educated and literature soaked cliques, still less is it the intellect, that gives rise to the Second Religiousness. Its source is the naive belief that arises, unremarked but spontaneous, among the masses that there is some sort of mystic constitution of actuality (as to which formal proofs are presently regarded as barren and tiresome word jugglery), and an equally naive heart need reverently responding to the myth with a cult. The forms of neither can be foreseen, still less chosen — they appear of themselves, and as far as we are ourselves concerned, we are as yet far distant from them.⁷² But already the opinions of Comte and Spencer, the Materialism and the Monism and the Darwinism, which stirred the best minds of the nineteenth century to such passion, have become the world view proper to country cousins.

The Classical philosophy had exhausted its ground by about 150 B.C. From that time on, “knowledge” was no longer a continually tested and augmented stock, but a belief therein, due basically to force of habit, but still able to convince, thanks to an old and well tried methodology. In the time of Socrates there had been Rationalism as the religion of educated men, with, above it, the scholar philosophy and, below it, the “superstition” of the masses. Now, philosophy developed towards an intellectual, and the popular syncretism towards a tangible, religiousness. The tendency was the same in both, and myth belief and piety spread, not downwards, but upwards. Philosophy had much to receive and little to give. The Stoa had begun in the materialism of the Sophists and Cynics, and had explained the whole mythology on allegorical lines, but the prayer to Zeus at table — one of the most beautiful relics of the Classical Second Religiousness⁷³— dates from as early as Cleanthes (d. 232). In Sulla’s time there was an upper class Stoicism that was religious through and through, and a popular syncretism which combined Phrygian, Syrian, and Egyptian cults with numberless Classical mysteries that had become almost forgotten — corresponding exactly to the development of Buddha’s enlightened wisdom into Hinayana for the learned and Mahayana for the masses, and to the relation between learned Confucianism and Taoism as the vessel of Chinese syncretism which it soon became.

Contemporary with the “Positivist” Meng-tse (371-289) there suddenly began a powerful movement towards alchemy, astrology, and occultism. It has long been a favorite topic of dispute whether this was something new or a recrudescence of old Chinese myth feeling — but a glance at Hellenism supplies the answer. This syncretism appears “simultaneously” in the Classical, in India and China, and in popular Islam. It starts always on rationalist doctrines — the Stoa, Lao-tse, Buddha — and carries these through with peasant and springtime and exotic motives of every conceivable sort. From about 200 B.C. the Classical Syncretism — which must not be confused with that of the later Magian Pseudomorphosis — raked in motives from Orphism, from Egypt, from Syria; from 67 B.C. the Chinese brought in Indian Buddhism in the popular Mahayana form, and the potency of the holy writings as charms, and the Buddha figures as fetishes, was thought to be all the greater for their alien origin. The original doctrine of Lao-tse disappeared very quickly. At the beginning of Han times (c. A.D. 100) the troops of the Sen had ceased to be “moral representations” and become kindly beings. The wind, cloud, thunder, and rain gods came back. Crowds of cults which purported to drive out the evil spirits by the aid of the gods acquired a footing. It was in that time that there arose — doubtless out of some basic principle of pre-Confucian philosophy — the myth of Pan-ku, the prime principle from which the series of mythical emperors descended. As we know, the Logos idea followed a similar line of development.⁷⁴

The theory and practice of the conduct of life that Buddha taught were the outcome of world weariness and intellectual disgusts, and were wholly unrelated to religious questions. And yet at the very beginning of the Indian “Imperial” period (250 B.C.) he himself had already become a seated god figure; and the Nirvana theories, comprehensible only to the learned, were giving place more and more to solid and tangible doctrines of heaven, hell, and salvation, which were probably borrowed, as in other syncretisms, from an alien source — namely, Persian Apocalyptic. Already in Asoka’s time there were eighteen Buddhist sects. The salvation doctrine of Mahayana found its first great herald in the poet scholar Asvagosha (c. 50 B.C.) and its fulfillment proper in Naganjuna (c. A.D. 150). But side by side with such teaching, the whole mass of proto-Indian mythology came back into circulation. The Vishnu and Shiva religions were already in 300 B.C. in definite shape, and, moreover, in syncretic form, so that the Krishna and the Rama legends were now transferred to Vishnu. We have the same spectacle in the Egyptian New Empire, where Amen of Thebes formed the center of a vast syncretism, and again in the Arabian world of the Abbassids, where the folk religion, with its images of Purgatory, Hell, Last Judgment, the heavenly Kaaba, Logos Mohammed, fairies, saints, and spooks drove pristine Islam entirely into the background.⁷⁵

There are still in such times a few high intellects like Nero’s tutor Seneca and his antitype Psellus⁷⁶ the philosopher, royal tutor and politician of Byzantium’s Caesarism phase; like Marcus Aurelius the Stoic and Asoka the Buddhist, who were themselves the Caesars;⁷⁷ like the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (Akhenaton), whose deeply significant experiment was treated as heresy and brought to naught by the powerful Amen priesthood — a risk that Asoka, too, had, no doubt, to face from the Brahmins.

But Caesarism itself, in the Chinese as in the Roman Empire, gave birth to an emperor cult, and thereby concentrated Syncretism. It is an absurd notion that the veneration of the Chinese for the living emperor is a relic of ancient religion. During the whole course of the Chinese Culture there were no emperors at all. The rulers of the States were called Wang (that is, kings), and scarcely a century before the final victory of the Chinese Augustus Meng-tse wrote — in the vein of our nineteenth century — “The people is the most important element in the country; next come the useful gods of the soil and the crops, and least in importance comes the ruler.” The mythology of the pristine emperors was without doubt put together by Confucius and his contemporaries, its constitutional and social ethical form was dictated by their rationalist aims, and from this myth the first Chinese Caesar borrowed both title and cult idea. The elevation of men to divinity is the full cycle return to the springtime in which gods were converted into heroes — exactly like these very emperors and the figures of Homer — and it is a distinguishing trait of almost all religions of this second degree. Confucius himself was deified in A.D. 57, with an official cult, and Buddha had been so long before. Al Ghazali (c. 1050), who helped to bring about the “Second Religiousness” of the Islamic world, is now, in the popular belief, a divine being and is beloved as a saint and helper. In the philosophy schools of the Classical there was a cult of Plato, and of Epicurus, and Alexander’s claim to descent from Heracles and Caesar’s to descent from Venus lead directly to the cult of the Divus, in which immemorial Orphic imaginings and family religions crop up afresh, just as the cult of Hwang-ti contains traits of the most ancient mythology of China.

But with the coming of the emperor cults there begins at once, in each of the two, an attempt to bring the Second Religiousness into fixed organizations, which, however named — sects, orders, Churches — are always stiff reconstructions of what had been living forms of the Springtime, and bear the same relation to these as “caste” bears to “status.”

There are signs of the tendency even in the Augustan reforms, with their artificial revival of long dead city cults, such as the rites of the Fratres Arvales, but it is only with the Hellenistic mystery religions, or even with Mithraism,⁷⁸ that community or Church organization proper begins, and its development is broken off in the ensuing downfall of the Classical. The corresponding feature in Egypt is the theocratic state set up by the priest kings of Thebes in the eleventh century. The Chinese analogue is the Tao churches of the Han period and especially that founded by Chang-lu, which gave rise to the fearful insurrection of the Yellow Turbans (recalling the religious provincial rebellions of the Roman Empire), which devastated whole regions and brought about the fall of the Han dynasty.⁷⁹ And the very counterpart of these ascetic Churches of Taoism, with their rigidity and wild mythology, is to be found in the late Byzantine monk states such as Studion and the autonomous group of monasteries on Athos, founded in 1100, which are as suggestive of Buddhism as anything could well be.

In the end Second Religiousness issues in the fellah religions. Here the opposition between cosmopolitan and provincial piety has vanished again, as completely as that between primitive and higher Culture. What this means the conception of the fellah people, discussed in an earlier chapter, tells us. Religion becomes entirely historyless; where formerly decades constituted an epoch, now whole centuries pass unimportantly, and the ups and downs of superficial changes only serve to show the unalterable finality of the inner state. It matters nothing that “Chufucianism” appeared in China (1200) as a variant of the Confucian state doctrine, when it appeared, and whether or not it succeeded. Equally, it signifies nothing that Indian Buddhism, long become a polytheistic religion of the people, went down before Neo-Brahmanism (whose great divine, Sankhara, lived about 800), nor is it of importance to know the date at which the latter passed over into the Hinduism of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. There always are and always will be a handful of superlatively intellectual, thoughtful, and perfectly self-sufficing people, like the Brahmins in India, the Mandarins in China, and the Egyptian priests who amazed Herodotus. But the fellah religion itself is once more primitive through and through — the animal cults of the Egyptian XXVIth dynasty; the composite of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism that constitutes the state religion of China; the Islam of the present day East. The religion of the Aztecs was very likely another case in point, for, as Cortez found it, it seems remote indeed from the intensely intellectualized religion of the Mayas.

VII

The religion of Jewry, too, is a fellah religion since the time of Jehuda ben Halevi who (like his Islamic teacher, Al Ghazali) regarded scientific philosophy with an unqualified skepticism, and in the Kuzari (1140) refused to it any role save that of handmaid of the orthodox theology. This corresponds exactly to the transition from Middle Stoicism to the later form of the Imperial period, and to the extinction of Chinese speculation under the Western Han Dynasty. Still more significant is the figure of Moses Maimonides,⁸⁰ who in 1175 collected the entire dogmatic material of Judaism, as something fixed and complete, in a great work of the type of the Chinese Li-ki, entirely regardless of whether the particular items still retained any meaning or not.⁸¹ Neither in this period nor in any other is Judaism unique in religious history, though from the viewpoint that the Western Culture has taken up on its own ground, it may seem so. Nor is it peculiar to Jewry that, unperceived by those who bear it, its name is forever changing in meaning, for the same has happened, step by step, in the Persian story.

In their “Merovingian” period — approximately the last five centuries before the birth of Christ — both Jewry and Persia evolve from tribal groups into nations of Magian cast, without land, without unity of origin, and (even so soon) with the characteristic ghetto mode of life that endures unchanged today for the Jews of Brooklyn and the Parsees of Bombay alike.

In the Springtime (first five centuries of the Christian era) this landless Consensus spread geographically from Spain to Shantung. This was the Jewish Age of Chivalry and its “Gothic” blossoming time of religious creative force. The later Apocalyptic, the Mishnah, and also primitive Christianity (which was not cast off till after Trajan’s and Hadrian’s time) are creations of this nation. It is well known that in those days the Jews were peasants, artisans, and dwellers in little towns, and “big business” was in the hands of Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans — that is, members of the Classical world.

About 500⁸² begins the Jewish Baroque, which Western observers are accustomed to regard, very one-sidedly, as part of the picture of Spain’s age of glory. The Jewish Consensus, like the Persian, Islamic, and Byzantine, now advances to an urban and intellectual awareness, and thenceforward it is master of the forms of city economics and city science. Tarragona, Toledo, and Granada are predominantly Jewish cities. Jews constitute an essential element in Moorish high society. Their finished forms, their esprit, their knightliness, amazed the Gothic nobility of the Crusades, which tried to imitate them; but the diplomacy also, and the war management and the administration of the Moorish cities would all have been unthinkable without the Jewish aristocracy, which was every whit as thoroughbred as the Islamic. As once in Arabia there had been a Jewish Minnesang, so now here there was a high literature of enlightened science. It was under the guidance of the Rabbi Isaac Hassan, and by the hand of Jewish and Islamic as well as Christian savants, that Alfonso X’s new work on the planets was prepared (c. 1250);⁸³ in other words, it was an achievement of Magian and not of Faustian world thought.⁸⁴ But Spain and Morocco after all contained but a very small fraction of the Jewish Consensus, and even this Consensus itself had not merely a worldly but also (and predominantly) a spiritual significance. In it, too, there occurred a Puritan movement, which rejected the Talmud and tried to get back to the pure Torah. The community of the Qaraites, preceded by many a forerunner, arose about 760 in northern Syria, the selfsame area which gave birth a century earlier to the Paulician iconoclasts and a century later to the Sufism of Islam — three Magian tendencies whose inner relationship is unmistakable. The Qaraites, like the Puritans of all other Cultures, were combated by both orthodoxy and enlightenment. Rabbinical counterblasts appeared from Cordova and Fez to southern Arabia and Persia. But in that period appeared also — an outcome of “Jewish Sufism,” and suggestive in places of Swedenborg — the chef d’oeuvre of rational mysticism, the Yesirah, germane in its Kabbalistic root ideas to Byzantine image symbolism and the contemporary magic of Greek “second degree Christianity,” and equally so to the folk religion of Islam.

But an entirely new situation was created when, from about the year 1000, the Western portion of the Consensus found itself suddenly in the field of the young Western Culture. The Jews, like the Parsees, the Byzantines, and the Moslems, had become by then civilized and cosmopolitan, whereas the German-Roman world lived in the townless land, and the settlements that had just come (or were coming) into existence around monasteries and marketplaces were still many generations short of possessing souls of their own. While the Jews were already almost fellaheen, the Western peoples were still almost primitives. The Jew could not comprehend the Gothic inwardness, the castle, the Cathedral; nor the Christian the Jew’s superior, almost cynical, intelligence and his finished expertness in “money thinking.” There was mutual hate and contempt, due not to race distinction, but to difference of phase. Into all the hamlets and country towns the Jewish Consensus built its essentially megalopolitan — proletarian — ghettos. The Judengasse is a thousand years in advance of the Gothic town. Just so, in Jesus’s days, the Roman towns stood in the midst of the villages on the Lake of Genesareth.

But these young nations were, besides, bound up with the soil and the idea of a fatherland, and the landless “Consensus,” which was cemented, not by deliberate organization, but by a wholly unconscious, wholly metaphysical impulse — an expression of the Magian world feeling in its simplest and directest form — appeared to them as something uncanny and incomprehensible. It was in this period that the legend of the Wandering Jew arose. It meant a good deal for a Scottish monk to visit a Lombard monastery, and nostalgia soon took him home again, but when a rabbi of Mainz — in 1000 the seat of the most important Talmudic seminary of the West — or of Salerno betook himself to Cairo or Merv or Basra, he was at home in every ghetto. In this tacit cohesion lay the very idea of the Magian nation — although the contemporary West was unaware of the fact, it was for the Jews, as for the Greeks of the period and the Parsees and Islam, State and Church and people all in one. This State had its own jurisprudence and (what Christians never perceived) its own public life,⁸⁵ and despised the surrounding world of the host peoples as a sort of outland; and it was a veritable treason trial that expelled Spinoza and Uriel Acosta — an event of which these host peoples could not possibly grasp the under meaning. And in 1799 the leading thinker among the Eastern Hasidim, Senior Salman, was handed over by the rabbinical opposition to the Petersburg Government as though to a foreign state.

Jewry of the West European group had entirely lost the relation to the open land which had still existed in the Moorish period of Spain. There were no more peasants. The smallest ghetto was a fragment, however miserable, of megalopolis, and its inhabitants (like those of hardened India and China) split into castes — the Rabbi is the Brahmin or Mandarin of the ghetto — and a coolie mass characterized by civilized, cold, superior intelligence and an undeviating eye to business. But this phenomenon, again, is not unique if our historical sense takes in the wider horizon, for all Magian nations have been in this condition since the Crusade period. The Parsee in India possesses exactly the same business power as the Jews in the European American world and the Armenians and Greeks in southern Europe. The same phenomenon occurs in every other Civilization, when it pushes into a younger milieu — witness the Chinese in California (where they are the targets of a true Anti-Semitism of western America), in Java, and in Singapore; that of the Indian trader in East Africa; and that of the Romans in the Early Arabian World. In the last instance, indeed, the conditions were the exact reverse of those of today, for the “Jews” of those days were the Romans, and the Aramaean felt for them an apocalyptic hatred that is very closely akin to our West European Anti-Semitism. The outbreak of 88, in which, at a sign from Mithridates, a hundred thousand Roman business people were murdered by the exasperated population of Asia Minor, was a veritable pogrom.

Over and above these oppositions there was that of race, which passed from contempt into hate in proportion as the Western Culture itself caught up with the Civilization and the “difference of age,” expressed in the way of life and the increasing primacy of intelligence, became smaller. But all this has nothing to do with the silly catchwords “Aryan” and “Semite” that have been borrowed from philology. The “Aryan” Persians and Armenians are in our eyes entirely indistinguishable from the Jews, and even in South Europe and the Balkans there is almost no bodily difference between the Christian and Jewish inhabitants. The Jewish nation is, like every other nation of the Arabian Culture, the result of an immense mission, and up to well within the Crusades it was changed and changed again by accessions and secessions en masse. One part of Eastern Jewry conforms in bodily respects to the Christian inhabitants of the Caucasus, another to the South Russian Tatars, and a large portion of Western Jewry to the North African Moors. What has mattered in the West more than any other distinction is the difference between the race ideal of the Gothic springtime, which has bred its human type, and that of the Sephardic Jew, which first formed itself in the ghettos of the West and was likewise the product of a particular spiritual breeding and training under exceedingly hard external conditions — to which, doubtless, we must add the effectual spell of the land and people about him, and his metaphysical defensive reaction to that spell, especially after the loss of the Arabic language had made this part of the nation a self-contained world. This feeling of being “different” is the more potent on both sides, the more breed the individual possesses. It is want of race, and nothing else, that makes intellectuals — philosophers, doctrinaires, Utopists — incapable of understanding the depth of this metaphysical hatred, which is the beat difference of two currents of being manifested as an unbearable dissonance, a hatred that may become tragic for both, the same hatred as has dominated the Indian Culture in setting the Indian of race against the Sudra. During the Gothic age this difference is deep and religious, and the object of hatred is the Consensus as religion; only with the beginning of the Western Civilization does it become materialist, and begin to attack Jewry on its intellectual and business sides, on which the West suddenly finds itself confronted by an even challenger.

But the deepest element of separation and bitterness has been one of which the full tragedy has been least understood. While Western man, from the days of the Saxon emperors to the present, has (in the most significant sense of the words) lived his history, and lived it with a consciousness of it that no other Culture can parallel, the Jewish Consensus ceased to have a history at all. Its problems were solved, its inner form was complete, conclusive, and unalterable. For it, as for Islam, the Greek Church, and the Parsees, centuries ceased to mean anything, and consequently no one belonging inwardly to the Consensus can even begin to comprehend the passion with which Faustians livingly experience the short crowded epochs in which their history and destiny take decisive turns — the beginning of the Crusades, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the German Wars of Liberation, and each and every turning point in the existence of the several peoples. All this, for the Jew, lies thirty generations back. Outside him history on the grand style flowed on and past. Epochs succeeded to epochs, every century witnessed fundamental human changes, but in the ghetto and in the souls of its denizens all stood still. And even when he regarded himself as a member of the people amongst whom he sojourned and took part in their good and evil fortune — as happened in so many countries in 1914 — he lived these experiences, not really as something his own, but as a partisan, a supporter; he judged them as an interested spectator, and hence it is just the deepest meanings of the struggle that must ever remain hidden from him. A Jewish cavalry general fought in the Thirty Years’ War (he lies buried in the old Jewish cemetery at Prague⁸⁶) — but what did the ideas of Luther or Loyola mean to him? What did the Byzantines — near relatives of the Jews — comprehend of the Crusades? Such things are among the tragic necessities of the higher history that consists in the life courses of individual Cultures, and often have they repeated themselves. The Romans, then an aging people, cannot possibly have understood what was at issue for the Jews in the trial of Jesus or the rising of Barcochebas.⁸⁷ The European American world has displayed a complete incomprehension of the fellah revolutions of Turkey (1908) and China (1911); the inner life and thought of these peoples, and consequently, even their notions of state and sovereignty (the Caliph in the one, the Son of Heaven in the other) being of an utterly different cast and, therefore, a sealed book, the course of events could neither be weighed up, nor even reckoned upon in advance. The member of an alien Culture can be a spectator, and therefore also a descriptive historian of the past, but he can never be a statesman, a man who feels the future working in him. If he does not possess the material power to enable him to act in the cadre of his own Culture, ignoring or manipulating those of the alien (which, of course, may occur, as with the Romans in the young East or Disraeli in England), he stands helpless in the midst of events. The Roman and the Greek always mentally projected the life conditions of his Polis into the alien event; the modern European always regards alien Destinies in terms of constitution, parliament, and democracy, although the application of such ideas to other Cultures is ridiculous and meaningless; and the Jew of the Consensus follows the history of the present (which is nothing but that of the Faustian Civilization spread over continents and oceans) with the fundamental feelings of Magian mankind, even when he himself is firmly convinced of the Western character of his thought.

As every Magian Consensus is non-territorial and geographically unlimited, it involuntarily sees in all conflicts concerning theFaustian ideas of fatherland, mother tongue, ruling house, monarchy, constitution, a return from forms that are thoroughly alien (therefore burdensome and meaningless) to him towards forms matching with his own nature. Hence the word “international,” whether it be coupled with socialism, pacifism, or capitalism, can excite him to enthusiasm, but what he hears in that word is the essence of his landless and boundless Consensus. While for the European American democracy constitutional struggles and revolutions mean an evolution towards the Civilized ideal, for him they mean (as he almost never consciously realizes) the breaking down of all that is of other build than himself. Even when the force of the Consensus in him is broken and the life of his host people exercises an outward attraction upon him to the point of an induced patriotism, yet the party that he supports is always that of which the aims are most nearly comparable with the Magian essence. Hence in Germany he is a democrat and in England (like the Parsee in India) an imperialist. It is exactly the same misunderstanding as when West Europeans regard Young Turks and Chinese reformers as kindred spirits — that is, as “constitutionalists.” If there is inward relationship, a man affirms even where he destroys; if inward alienness, his effect is negative even where his desire is to be constructive. What the Western Culture has destroyed, by reform efforts of its own type where it has had power, hardly bears thinking of; and Jewry has been equally destructive where it has intervened. The sense of the inevitableness of this reciprocal misunderstanding leads to the appalling hatred that settles deep in the blood and, fastening upon visible marks like race, mode of life, profession, speech, leads both sides to waste, ruin, and bloody excesses wherever these conditions occur.⁸⁸

This applies also, and above all, to the religiousness of the Faustian world, which feels itself to be threatened, hated, and undermined by an alien metaphysic in its midst. From the reforms of Hugh of Cluny and St. Bernard and the Lateran Council of 1215 to Luther, Calvin, and Puritanism and thence to the Age of Enlightenment, what a tide flowed through our waking consciousness, when for the Jewish religion history had long ceased altogether! Within the West European Consensus we see Joseph Qaro in his Schulehan Arukh(1565) restating the Maimonides material in another form, and this could equally well have been done in 1400 or 1800, or for that matter not at all. In the fixity of modern Islam of Byzantine Christianity since the Crusades (and, equally, of the life of Late China and of Late Egypt) all is formal and rolled even, not only the food prohibitions, the prayer runes, the phylacteries, but also the Talmudic casuistry, which is fundamentally the same as that applied for centuries to the Vendidad in Bombay and the Koran in Cairo. The mysticism, too, of Jewry (which is pure Sufism) has remained, like that of Islam, unaltered since the Crusades; and in the last centuries it has produced three more saints in the sense of Oriental Sufism — though to recognize them as such we have to see through a color wash of Western thought forms. Spinoza, with his thinking in substances instead of forces and his thoroughly Magian dualism, is entirely comparable with the last stragglers of Islamic philosophy such as Murtada and Shirazi. He makes use of the notions of his Western Baroque armory, living himself into mode of imagination of that milieu so thoroughly as to deceive even himself, but below the surface movements of his soul he remains the unchanged descendant of Maimonides and Avicenna and Talmudic “more geometrico” methodology. In Baal Shem, the founder of the Hasidim sect (born in Volhynia about 1698), a true Messiah arose. His wanderings through the world of the Polish ghettos teaching and performing miracles are comparable only with the story of primitive Christianity;⁸⁹ here was a movement that had its sources in ancient currents of Magian, Kabbalistic mysticism, that gripped a large part of Eastern Jewry and was undoubtedly a potent fact in the religious history of the Arabian Culture; and yet, running its course as it did in the midst of an alien mankind, it passed practically unnoticed by it. The peaceful battle that Baal Shem waged for God immanent against the Talmudic pharisees of his time, his Christlike figure, the wealth of legends that were rapidly woven about his person and the persons of his disciples — all this is of the pure Magian spirit, and at bottom as alien to us of the West as primitive Christianity itself. The thought processes of Hasidist writings are to non-Jews practically unintelligible, and so also is the ritual. In the excitement of the service some fall into convulsions and others begin to dance like the dervishes of Islam.⁹⁰ The original teaching of Baal Shem was developed by one of the disciples in Zaddikism, and this too, which was a belief in successive divine embassies of saints (Zaddiks), whose mere proximity brought salvation, has obvious kinship with Islamic Mahdism and still more with the Shiite doctrine of the imams in whom the “Light of the Prophet” takes up its abode. Another disciple, Solomon Maimon — of whom a remarkable autobiography exists — stepped from Baal Shem to Kant (whose abstract kind of thought has always possessed an immense attraction for Talmudic intellects). The third is Otto Weininger, whose moral dualism is a purely Magian conception and whose death in a spiritual struggle of essentially Magian experience is one of the noblest spectacles ever presented by a Late religiousness.⁹¹ Something of the sort Russians may be able to experience, but neither the Classical nor the Faustian soul is capable of it.

In the “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century the Western Culture in turn becomes megalopolitan and intellectual, and so, suddenly, accessible to the intelligentsia of the Consensus. And the latter, thus dumped into the middle of an epoch corresponding, for them, to the remote past of a long expired Sephardic life current, were inevitably stirred by echo feelings, but these echoes were of the critical and negative side only, and the tragically unnatural outcome was that a cohesion already historically complete and incapable of organic progress was swept into the big movement of the host peoples, which it shook, loosened, displaced, and vitiated to its depths. For, for the Faustian spirit, the Enlightenment was a step forward along its own road — a step over debris, no doubt, but still affirmative at bottom — whereas for Jewry it was destruction and nothing else, the demolition of an alien structure that it did not understand. And this is why we so often see the spectacle — paralleled by the case of the Parsees in India, of the Chinese and Japanese in a Christian milieu, and by modern Americans in China — of enlightenment, pushed to the point of cynicism and unqualified atheism, opposing an alien religion, while the fellah practices of its own folk go on wholly unaffected. There are Socialists who superficially — and yet quite sincerely — combat every sort of religion, and yet in their own case follow the food prohibitions and routine prayers and phylacteries with an anxious exactitude. More frequent actually is inward lapse from the Consensus qua creed — the spectacle that is presented to us by the Indian student who, after an English university training in Locke and Mill, acquires the same cynical contempt for Indian and Western faiths alike and must himself be crushed under the ruins of both. Since the Napoleonic era the old civilized Consensus has mingled unwelcome with the new civilized Western “society” of the cities and has taken their economic and scientific methods into use with the cool superiority of age. A few generations later, the Japanese, also a very old intellect, did the same, and probably with still greater success. Yet another example is afforded by the Carthaginians, a rear guard of the Babylonian Civilization, who, already highly developed when the Classical Culture was still in the Etrusco-Doric infancy, ended by surrendering to Late Hellenism⁹² — petrified in an end state in all that concerned religion and art, but far superior to the Greeks and Romans as men of business, and hated accordingly.

Today this Magian nation, with its ghetto and its religion, itself is in danger of disappearing — not because the metaphysics of the two Cultures come closer to one another (for that is impossible), but because the intellectualized upper stratum of each side is ceasing to be metaphysical at all. It has lost every kind of inward cohesion, and what remains is simply a cohesion for practical questions. The lead that this nation has enjoyed from its long habituation to thinking in business terms becomes ever less and less (vis-à-vis the American, it has already almost gone), and with the loss of it will go the last potent means of keeping up a Consensus that has fallen regionally into parts. In the moment when the civilized methods of the European-American world cities shall have arrived at full maturity, the destiny of Jewry — at least of the Jewry in our midst (that of Russia is another problem) — will be accomplished.

Islam has soil under it. It has practically absorbed the Persian, Jewish, Nestorian, and Monophysite Consensus into itself. The relic of the Byzantine nation, the modern Greeks, also occupy their own land. The relic of the Parsees in India dwells in the midst of the stiffened forms of a yet older and more fellahized Civilization and is thereby secured in its footing. But the West European American part of the Jewish Consensus, which has drawn to itself and bound to its destiny most of the other parts of Jewry, has now fallen into the machinery of a young Civilization. Detached from any land footing since, centuries ago, it saved its life by shutting itself off in the ghetto, it is fragmented and faced with dissolution. But that is a Destiny, not in the Faustian Culture, but of the Magian.

CHAPTER X

THE STATE

(A) THE PROBLEM OF THE ESTATES — NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD

I

A fathomless secret of the cosmic flowings that we call Life is their separation into two sexes. Already in the earthbound existence-streams of the plant world they are trying to part from one another, as the symbol of the flower tells us — into a something that is this existence and a something that keeps it going. Animals are free, little worlds in a big world — the cosmic — closed off as microcosms and set up against the macrocosm. And, more and more decisively as the animal kingdom unfolds its history, the dual direction of dual being, of the masculine and the feminine, manifests itself.

The feminine stands closer to the Cosmic. It is rooted deeper in the earth and it is immediately involved in the grand cyclic rhythms of Nature, The masculine is freer, more animal, more mobile — as to sensation and understanding as well as otherwise — more awake and more tense.

The male livingly experiences Destiny, and he comprehends Causality, the causal logic of the Become. The female, on the contrary, is herself Destiny and Time and the organic logic of the Becoming, and for that very reason the principle of Causality is forever alien to her. Whenever Man has tried to give Destiny any tangible form, he has felt it as of feminine form, and he has called it Moirai, Parcae, Norns. The supreme deity is never itself Destiny, but always either its representative or its master — just as man represents or controls woman. Primevally, too, woman is the seeress, and not because she knows the future, but because she is the future. The priest merely interprets the oracle; the woman is the oracle itself, and it is Time that speaks through her.

The man makes History, the woman is History. Here, strangely clear yet enigmatic still, we have a dual significance of all living happenings — on the one hand we sense cosmic flow as such, and on the other hand the chain and train of successive individuals brings us back to the microcosms themselves as the recipients, containers, and preservers of the flowing. It is this “second” history that is characteristically masculine — political, social, more conscious, freer, and more agitated than the other. It reaches back deep into the animal world, and receives highest symbolic and world historical expression in the life courses of the great Cultures. Feminine, on the contrary, is the primary, the eternal, the maternal, the plantlike (for the plant ever has something female in it), the cultureless history of the generation sequence, which never alters, but uniformly and stilly passes through the being of all animal and human species, through all the short lived individual Cultures. In retrospect, it is synonymous with Life itself. This history, too, is not without its battles and its tragedies. Woman in childbed wins through to her victory. The Aztecs — the Romans of the Mexican Culture — honored the woman in labor as a battling warrior, and if she died, she was interred with the same formulas as the fallen hero. Policy for Woman is eternally the conquest of the Man, through whom she can become mother of children, through whom she can become History and Destiny and Future. The target of her profound shyness, her tactical finesse, is ever the father of her son. The man, on the contrary, whose center of gravity lies essentially in the other kind of History, wants that son as his son, as inheritor and carrier of his blood and historical tradition.

Here, in man and in woman, the two kinds of History are fighting for power. Woman is strong and wholly what she is, and she experiences the Man and the Sons only in relation to herself and her ordained role. In the masculine being, on the contrary, there is a certain contradiction; he is this man, and he is something else besides, which woman neither understands nor admits, which she feels as robbery and violence upon that which to her is holiest. This secret and fundamental war of the sexes has gone on ever since there were sexes, and will continue — silent, bitter, unforgiving, pitiless — while they continue. In it, too, there are policies, battles, alliances, treaties, treasons. Race feeling of love and hate, which originate in depths of world yearning and primary instincts of directedness, prevail between the sexes — and with a still more uncanny potency than in the other History that takes place between man and man. There are love lyrics and war lyrics, love dances and weapon dances, there are two kinds of tragedy — Othello and Macbeth. But nothing in the political world even begins to compare with the abysses of a Clytemnestra’s or a Kriemhild’s vengeance.

And so woman despises that other History — man’s politics — which she never comprehends, and of which all that she sees is that it takes her sons from her. What for her is a triumphant battle that annihilates the victories of a thousand childbeds? Man’s history sacrifices woman’s history to itself, and no doubt there is a female heroism too, that proudly brings the sons to the sacrifice (Catherine Sforza on the walls of Imola), but nevertheless there was and is and ever will be a secret politic of the woman — of the female of the animal world even — that seeks to draw away her male from his kind of history and to weave him body and soul into her own plantlike history of generic succession — that is, into herself. And yet all that is accomplished in the man history is accomplished under the battle cries of hearth and home, wives and children, race and the like, and its very object is the covering and upholding of this history of birth and death. The conflict of man and man is ever on account of the blood, of woman. Woman, as Time, is that for which there is history at all.

The woman with race in her feels this even when she does not know it. She is Destiny, she plays Destiny. The play begins with the fight of men for the possession of her — Helen, and the tragedy of Carmen, and Catherine II, and the story of Napoleon and Désirée Clary, who in the end took Bernadotte over to the side of his enemies — and it is not a human play only, for this fight begins down in the animal world and fills the history of whole species. And it culminates in her swaying, as mother or wife or mistress, the Destiny of empires — Hallgerd in the Njal saga, the Frankish queen Brunhilde, Marozia who gave the Holy See to men of her choice. The man climbs up in his history until he has the future of a country in his hands — and then woman comes and forces him to his knees. Peoples and states may go down in ruin over it, but she in her history has conquered. This, in the last analysis, is always the aim of political ambition in a woman of race.¹

Thus history has two meanings, neither to be blasphemed. It is cosmic or politic, it is being or it preserves being. There are two sorts of Destiny, two sorts of war, two sorts of tragedy — public and private. Nothing can eliminate this duality from the world. It is radical, founded in the essence of the animal that is both microcosm and participant in the cosmic. It appears at all significant conjunctures in the form of a conflict of duties, which exists only for the man, not for the woman, and in the course of a higher Culture it is never overcome, but only deepened. There are public life and private life, public law and private law, communal cults and domestic cults. As Estate,² Being is “in form” for the one history; as race, breed, it is in flow as itself the other history. This is the old German distinction between the “sword side” and the “spindle side” of blood relationships. The double significance of directional Time finds its highest expression in the ideas of the State and the Family.

The ordering of the family is in living material what the form of the house is in dead. A change in the structure and import of family life, and the plan of the house changes also. To the Classical mode of housing corresponds the agnate family of Classical style. This is ever more sharply defined in Hellenic city law than in the later Roman.³ It refers entirely to the Estate as present in a Euclidean here and now, just as the Polis is conceived as an aggregate of bodies availably present. Blood relationship, therefore, is neither necessary nor sufficient for it; it ceases at the limit of patria potestas, of the “house.” The mother as such is not agnatically related to the offspring of her own body; only insofar as, like them, she is subject to the patria potestas of her living husband is she the agnatic sister of her children.⁴ To the “Consensus,” on the other hand, corresponds the Magian cognate family (Hebrew, “Mishpasba”) which is representatively extended by both the paternal and the maternal blood relationships, and possesses a “spirit,” a little consensus, of its own, but no special head.⁵ It is significant of the extinction of the Classical soul and the unfolding of the Magian that the “Roman” law of Imperial times gradually passes from agnatio to cognatio. Justinian’s 118th and 127th novels reforming the law of inheritance affirm the victory of the Magian family idea.⁶

On the other side, we see masses of individual beings streaming past, growing and passing, but making history. The purer, deeper, stronger, more taken for granted the common beat of these sequent generations is, the more blood, the more race they have. Out of the infinite they rise, every one with its soul, bands that feel themselves in the common wave beat of their being, as a whole — not mind communities like orders, craft guilds, or schools of learning, which are linked by common truths, but blood confederates in the melee of fighting life.

There are streams of being which are “in form” in the same sense in which the term is used in sports. A field of steeplechasers is “in form” when the legs swing surely over the fences, and the hoofs beat firmly and rhythmically on the flat. When wrestlers, fencers, ballplayers are “in form,” the riskiest acts and moves come off easily and naturally. An art period is in form when its tradition is second nature, as counterpoint was to Bach. An army is in form when it is like the army of Napoleon at Austerlitz and the army of Moltke at Sedan. Practically everything that has been achieved in world history, in war and in that continuation of war by intellectual means⁷ that we call politics; in all successful diplomacy, tactics, strategy; in the competition of states or social classes or parties; has been the product of living unities that found themselves “in form.”

The word for race or breed education is “training” (Zucht, Züchtung), as against the shaping (Bildung) which creates communities of waking consciousness on a basis of uniform teachings or beliefs. Books, for example, are shaping agents, while the constant felt pulse and harmony of milieu into which one feels oneself, lives oneself — like a novice or a page of early Gothic times — are training influences. The “good form” and ceremonies of a given society are sense presentations of the beat of a given species of Being, and to master them one must have the beat of them. Hence women, as more instinctive and nearer to cosmic rhythms, adapt themselves more readily than men to the forms of a new milieu. Women from the bottom strata move in elegant society with entire certainty after a few years — and sink again as quickly. But men alter slowly, because they are more awake and aware. The proletarian man never becomes wholly an aristocrat, the aristocrat never wholly a proletarian — only in the sons does the beat of the new milieu make its appearance.

The profounder the form, the stricter and more repellent it is. To the outsider, therefore, it appears to be a slavery; the member, on the contrary, has a perfect and easy command of it. The Prince de Ligne was, no less than Mozart, master of the form and not its slave; and the same holds good of every born aristocrat, statesman, and captain.

In all high Cultures, therefore, there is a peasantry, which is breed, stock, in the broad sense (and thus to a certain extent nature herself), and a society which is assertively and emphatically “in form.” It is a set of classes or Estates, and no doubt artificial and transitory. But the history of these classes and estates is world history at highest potential. It is only in relation to it that the peasant is seen as historyless. The whole broad and grand history of these six millennia has accomplished itself in the life courses of the high Cultures, because these Cultures themselves placed their creative foci in Estates possessing breed and training, and so in the course of fulfillment became trained and bred. A Culture is Soul that has arrived at self-expression in sensible forms, but these forms are living and evolving.⁸ Their matrix is in the intensified Being of individuals or groups — that is, in that which I have just called Being “in form.” And when, and not until, this Being is sufficiently formed to that high Tightness, it becomes representative of a representable Culture.⁹

This Culture is not only a grand thing, but wholly unlike any other thing in the organic world. It is the one point at which man lifts himself above the powers of Nature and becomes himself a Creator. Even as to race, breed, he is Nature’s creature — he is bred. But, as Estate, he breeds himself just as he breeds the noble kinds of animal-plant with which he surrounds himself — and that process, too, is in the deepest and most final sense “Culture.” Culture and class¹⁰ are interchangeable expressions; they arise together and they vanish together. The breeding of select types of wines or fruit or flowers, the breeding of blood horses, is Culture, and the culture, in exactly the same sense, of the human elite arises as the expression of a Being that has brought itself into high “form.”

For that very reason, there is found in every Culture a sharp sense of whether this or that man belongs thereto or not. The Classical notion of the Barbarian, the Arabian of the Unbeliever (Amhaarez, Giaour), the Indian of the Sudra — however differently the lines of cleavage were arrived at — are alike in that the words do not primarily express contempt or hatred, but establish that there are differences in pulse of Being which set an impassable barrier against all contacts on the deeper levels. This perfectly clear and unambiguous idea has been obscured by the Indian concept of a “fourth caste,” which caste, as we know now, has never existed at all.¹¹ The Code of Manu, with its celebrated regulations for the treatment of the Sudra, is the outcome of the fully developed state of fellahdom in his India, and — irrespective of practical actualities under either existing or even obtainable legislation — described the misty idea of Brahmanism by the negative mode of dealing with its opposite, very much as the Late Classical philosophy used the notion of the working Banausos. The one, has led us into misunderstanding caste as a specifically Indian phenomenon, the other to a basically false idea of the attitude of Classical man towards work.

In all such cases what really confronts us is the residue which does not count for the inward life of the Culture and its symbolism, and is in principle left out of every really significant classification, somewhat as the “outcast” is ignored in the far East. The Gothic expression “corpus christianum” indicates explicitly in its very terms that the Jewish Consensus does not belong to it. In the Arabian Culture the other believer is merely tolerated within the respective domains of the Jewish, the Persian, the Christian, and, above all, the Islamic, nations, and contemptuously left to his own administration and his own jurisdiction. In the Classical World it was not only barbarians that were “outcasts” — so also in a measure were slaves, and especially the relics of the autochthonous population like the Penestae in Thessaly and the Helots of Sparta, whom their masters treated in a way that reminds us of the conduct of the Normans in Anglo-Saxon England and the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic East. The Code of Manu preserves, as designations of Sudra classes, the names of ancient peoples of the “Colonial” region of the Lower Ganges. (As Magadha is amongst them, Buddha himself may have been a Sudra, like the “Caesar” Asoka, whose grandfather Chandragupta was of the most humble origin.) Others are names of callings, and this again reminds us that also in the West and elsewhere certain callings were outcast — the beggars, for example (who in Homer are a class), smiths, singers, and the professional poor, who have been bred literally en masse by the caritas of the Church and the benevolence of laymen in the Early Gothic.

But, in sum, “caste” is a word that has been at least as much abused as it has been used. There were no castes in the Old and Middle Kingdoms of Egypt, nor in India before Buddha, nor in China before Han times. It is only in very Late conditions that they appear, and then we find them in all Cultures. From the XXIst Dynasty onwards (c. 1100 B.C.) Egypt was in the hands, now of the Theban priest caste, now of the Libyan warrior caste; and thereafter the hardening process went on steadily till the time of Herodotus — whose view of the conditions of his day as characteristically Egyptian is just as inaccurate as our view of those prevailing in India. The distinction between Estate and Caste is that between earliest Culture and latest Civilization. In the rise of the prime Estates — noble and priest — the Culture is unfolding itself, while the castes are the expression of its definitive fellah state. The Estate is the most living of all, Culture launched on the path of fulfillment, “the form that living must itself unfold.” The caste is absolute finishedness, the phase in which development has been succeeded by immutable fixation.

But the great Estates are something quite different from occupation groups like those of artisans, officials, artists, which are professionally held together by technical tradition and the spirit of their work. They are, in fact, emblems in flesh and blood, whose entire being, as phenomenon, as attitude, and as mode of thought, possesses symbolic meaning. Within every Culture, moreover — while peasantry is a piece of pure nature and growth and, therefore, a completely impersonal manifestation — are the results of high breeding and forming and therefore express a thoroughly personal Culture, which, by the height of its form, rejects not merely barbarians, but presently also all who are not of their status, as a residue — regarded by the nobility as the “people” and by clergy as the “laity.” And this style of personality is the material that, when the fellah age arrives, petrifies into the type of a caste, which thereafter endures unaltered for centuries. As in the living Culture race and estate are in antithesis as the impersonal and the personal, in fellah times the mass and the caste, the coolie and the Brahmin, are in antithesis as the formless and the formal. The living form has become formula, still possessing style, but possessing it as stylistic rigidity. This petrified style of the caste is of an extreme subtlety, dignity, and intellectuality, and feels itself infinitely superior to the developing mankind of a Culture — we can hardly form an idea of the lofty height from which the Mandarin or the Brahmin looks down upon European thoughts and actions, or how fundamentally the Egyptian priest must have despised a visiting Pythagoras or Plato. It moves impassive through time with the Byzantine dignity of a soul that has left all its problems and enigmas far behind it.

II

In the Carolingian pre-Culture men distinguished Knechte, Freie, and Edle. This is a primitive differentiation based merely on the facts of external life. But in Early Gothic times it runs:

God hath shapen lives three,

Boor and knight and priest they be.¹²

Here we have status differences of a high Culture that has just awakened. And the stole and the sword stand together in face of the plow in strongest assertiveness as estates vis-à-vis the rest, the Non-Estate, that which, like themselves, is fact, but, unlike themselves, fact without deeper significance. The separation, inward and felt, is so destined, so potent, that no understanding can ignore it. Hatred wells up out of the villages, contempt flashes back from the castles. Neither possession nor power nor calling produced this abyss between the “lives.” Logical justification for it there is none. It is metaphysical nature.

Later, with the cities, but younger than they, burgherdom, bourgeoisie, arises as the “Third Estate.” The burgher, too, now looks with contempt upon the countryside, which lies about him dull, unaltered, and patient, and in contrast to which he feels himself more awake and freer and therefore further advanced on the road of the Culture. He despises also the primary estates, “squire and parson,” as something lying intellectually below him and historically behind him. Yet, as compared with these two, the burgher is, as the boor was, a residue, a non-estate. In the minds of the “privileged” the peasant hardly now counts at all — the burgher counts, but as an opposite and a background. He is the foil against which the others become conscious of their own significance and of the fact that this significance is something lying outside all practical considerations. When we find that in all Cultures the same occurs in exactly the same form, and that, however different the symbolism of one Culture from that of another, their history fulfills itself everywhere in and by opposition of these groups — impulsive peasant wars in the Springtime, intellectually based civil wars in the later period — then it is evident that the meaning of the facts must be looked for in the deepest foundations of Life itself.

It is an idea that lies at the base of these two prime Estates, and only these. It gives them the potent feeling of a rank derived from a divine investiture and therefore beyond all criticism — a standing which imposes self-respect and self-consciousness, but the sternest self-discipline as well (and death itself if need be), as a duty and imbues both with the historical superiority, the soul magic, that does not draw upon power but actually generates it. Those who — inwardly, and not merely nominally — belong to these Estates are actuallysomething other than the residue; their lives, in contrast to those of burgher and peasant, are sustained in every part by a symbolic dignity. These lives do not exist in order to be merely lived, but to have meaning. It is the two sides of all freely moving life that come to expression in these Estates; the one is wholly being, the other wholly waking consciousness.

Every nobility is a living symbol of Time, every priesthood of Space. Destiny and sacred Causality, History and Nature, the When and the Where, race and language, sex life and feeling life — all these attain in them to the highest possible expression. The noble lives in a world of facts, the priest in one of truths; the one has shrewdness, the other knowledge; the one is a doer, the other a thinker. Aristocratic world feeling is essentially pulse sense; priestly world feeling proceeds entirely by tensions. Between the time of Charlemagne and that of Conrad II something formed itself in the time stream that cannot be elucidated, but has to be felt if we are to understand the dawn of the new Culture. There had long been noblemen and ecclesiastics, but then first — and not for long — there were nobility and clergy, in the grand sense of the words and the full force of their symbolic significance.¹³ So mighty is this onset of a symbolism that at first all other distinctions, such as those of country, people, and language, fall into the background. In all the lands from Ireland to Calabria the Gothic hierarchy was a single great community; the Early Classical chivalry before Troy, or the Early Gothic before Jerusalem, seems to us as ofone great family. The old Egyptian nomes and the feudal states of the first Chôu times appear, in comparison with such Estates as these (and because of the comparison) just as colorless as Burgundy and Lorraine in the Hohenstaufen period. There is a cosmopolitan condition both at the beginning and at the end of every Culture, but in the first case it exists because the symbolic might of aristocratic hierarchic forms still towers above those of nationality, and in the second because the formless mass sinks below them.

The two Estates in principle exclude one another. The prime opposition of cosmic and microcosmic, which pervades all being that moves freely in space, underlies this dual existence also. Each is possible and necessary only through the other. The Homeric world maintained a conspiracy of hostile silence towards the Orphic, and in turn (as we see from the Pre-Socratics) the former became an object of anger and contempt for the latter. In Gothic times the reforming spirits set themselves with a sacred enthusiasm across the path of the Renaissance natures. State and Church have never really come to equilibrium, and in the conflict of Empire and Papacy their opposition rose to an intensity only possible for Faustian man.

Of the two, moreover, it is the nobility that is the true Estate, the sum of blood and race, being-stream in the fullest imaginable form. And therefore nobility is a higher peasantry. Even in 1250 the West had a widespread proverb: “One who plows in the forenoon jousts in the afternoon,” and it was quite usual for a knight to marry the daughter of a peasant. In contrast to the cathedral, the castle was a development, by way of the country noble’s house of Frankish times, from the peasant dwelling. In the Icelandic sagas peasants’ crofts are besieged and stormed like castles. Nobility and peasantry are plantlike and instinctive, deep rooted in the ancestral land, propagating themselves in the family tree, breeding and bred. In comparison with them the priesthood is essentially the counter estate, the estate of negation, of non-race, of detachment from earth — of free, timeless, and historyless waking consciousness. In every peasant village, in every peasant family from the Stone Age to the peaks of the Culture, world history plays itself out in little. Substitute for peoples families, and for lands farms — still the ultimate meaning of their strivings is the same — the maintenance of the blood, the succession of the generations, the cosmic, woman, power. Macbeth and King Lear might perfectly well have been thought out as village tragedies — and the fact is a proof of their tragic truth. In all Cultures nobility and peasantry appear in forms of family descent, and language itself connects them with the sexes, through which life propagates itself, has history, and is history. And as woman is history, the inward rank of peasant and noble families is determined by how much of race their women have in them, how far they are Destiny. And, therefore, there is deep meaning in the fact that the purer and more race pervaded world history is, the more the stream of its public life passes into and adapts itself to the private lives of individual great families. This, of course, is the basis of the dynastic principle, and not only that, but the basis of the idea of world historical personality. The existence of entire states comes to depend on a few private destinies, vastly magnified. The history of Athens in the fifth century is in the main that of the Alcmaeonidae, the history of Rome is that of a few families of the type of the Fabii or the Claudii. The history of states in the Baroque is, broadly speaking, that of the operations of Habsburg and Bourbon family politics, and its crises take form as marriages and wars of succession. The history of Napoleon’s second marriage comprises also the burning of Moscow and the battle of Leipzig. The history of the Papacy is, right into the eighteenth century, that of a few noble families which competed for the tiara in order to found princely family fortunes. This is true equally of Byzantine dignitaries and English premiers (witness the Cecils) and even, in numerous instances, of great revolution leaders.

Of all this the priesthood (and philosophy so far as it is priesthood) is the direct negative. The Estate of pure waking consciousness and eternal truths combats time and race and sex in every sense. Man as peasant or noble turns towards, man as priest turns away from, woman. Aristocracy runs the danger of dissipating and losing the broad being-stream of public life in the petty channels of its minor ancestors and relatives. The true priest, on the other hand, refuses in principle to recognize private life, sex, family, the “house.” For the man of race death begins to be real and appalling only when it is death without heirs — Icelandic sagas no less than Chinese ancestor worship teach us this. He does not entirely die who lives on in sons and nephews. But for the true priest media vita in morte sumus; what he shall bequeath is intellectual, and rejected woman bears no part in it. The phenomenal forms of this second Estate that occur again and again are celibacy, cloister, battlings with sex impulse fought to the extreme of self-emasculation, and a contempt for motherhood which expresses itself in orgiasm and hallowed prostitution, and not less in the intellectual devaluation of sexual life down to the level of Kant’s vile definition of marriage.¹⁴ Throughout the Classical world it was the rule that in the sacred precinct, the Temenos, no one must be born or die. The timeless must not come into contact with time. It is possible for the priest to have an intellectual recognition of the great moments of generation and birth, and to honor them sacramentally, but experience them he may not.

For while nobility is something, priesthood signifies something, and this alone would be enough to tell us that it is the opposite of all that is Destiny and Race and Estate. The castle, with its chambers and towers, walls and moats, tells of a strong flowing life, but the cathedral, with its vaulting and pillars and choir, is, through and through, Meaning — that is to say, Ornament — and every venerable priesthood has developed itself up to that marvelous gravity and beauty of bearing in which every item, from facial expression and voice inflection to costume and walk, is ornament, from which private life and even inward life have been eliminated as unessential — whereas that which a ripe aristocracy (such as that of eighteenth century France) displays and parades is a finished living. It was Gothic thought that developed out of the priest concept the character indelebilis, which makes the idea indestructible and wholly independent of the worthiness of its bearer’s life in the world-as-history — but every priesthood, and consequently also all philosophy (in the sense of the schools), contain it implicitly. If a priest has race, he leads an outward existence like peasant, knight, or prince. The Pope and cardinals of the Gothic period were feudal princes, leaders of armies, fond of the chase, connoisseurs and adepts in family politics. Among the Brahmins of the pre-Buddha “Baroque” were great landowners, well-groomed abbes, courtiers, spendthrifts, gourmets.¹⁵ But it was the early period that had learned to distinguish the idea from the person — a notion diametrically opposed to the essence of nobility — and not until the Age of Enlightenment did the priest come to be judged, as priest, by his private life, and then not because that age had acquired sharper eyes, but because it had lost the idea.

The noble is the man as history, the priest is the man as nature. History of the high kind is always the expression and effect of the being of a noble society; and the criterion for the relative importance of its different events is always the pulse of this stream of being. That is why the battle of Cannae matters much and the battles of Late Roman emperors matter not at all. The coming of a Springtime consistently coincides with the birth of a primary nobility, in whose sentiments the prince is merely “primus inter pares” and an object of mistrust. For not only does a strong race not need the big individual, but his existence is a reflection upon its worth; hence vassal wars are preeminently the form in which the history of Early periods fulfills itself, and thenceforth the nobility has the fate of the Culture in hand. With a creative force that is all the more impressive because it is silent, Being is brought into form and “condition.” The pulse in the blood is heightened and confirmed, and for good. For what this creative rise to living form is to the Spring — every Spring — the might of tradition is for the Late — every Late — period — namely, the old firm discipline, the life beat, so sure that it outlives the extinction of all the old families and continually draws under its spell new men and new being-streams out of the deep. Beyond a shadow of doubt, all the history of Late periods, in respect of form and beat and tempo, is inherent (and irrevocably so) in the very earliest generations. Its successes are neither more nor less than the strength of the tradition in the blood. In politics, as in all other great and mature arts, success presupposes a being in high condition, a great stock of pristine experiences unconsciously and unquestioningly stored up as instincts and impulses. There is no other sort of political maestria but this. The big individual is only something better than an incident, only master of the future, in that he is effective (or is made effective), is Destiny (or has Destiny), in and through this form. This is what distinguishes necessary from superfluous art and therefore, also, historically necessary from unnecessary politics. It matters little if many of the big men come up out of the “people” (that is, the aggregate of the traditionless) into the governing stratum, or even if they are the only ones left to occupy it — the great tide of tradition takes charge of them, all unwitting, forms their intellectual and practical conduct, and rules their methods. And this tradition is nothing but the pulse of ancient and long extinguished lines.

But Civilization, the real “return to Nature,” is the extinction of nobility — not as physical stock (which would not matter), but as living tradition — and the supplanting of destiny pulse by causal intelligence. With this, nobility becomes no more than a prefix. And, for that very reason, Civilized history is superficial history, directed disjointedly to obvious aims, and so become formless in the cosmic, dependent on the accident of great individuals, destitute of inward sureness, line, and meaning. With Caesarism history re lapses back into the historyless, the old beat of primitive life, with endless and meaningless battles for material power, such as those of the Roman soldier emperors of the third century and the corresponding “Sixteen States” of China (265-420), which differ only in unessentials from the events of beast life in a jungle.

III

It follows from this that true history is not “cultural” in the sense of anti-political, as the philosophers and doctrinaires of all commencing Civilizations assert. On the contrary, it is breed history, war history, diplomatic history, the history of being-streams in the form of man and woman, family, people, estate, state, reciprocally defensive and offensive in the wave beat of grand facts. Politics in the highest sense is life, and life is politics. Every man is willy nilly a member of this battle drama, as subject or as object — there is no third alternative. The kingdom of the spirit is not of this world. True, but it presupposes it, as waking being presupposes being. It is only possible as a consistent saying of “no” to the actuality that nevertheless exists and, indeed, must exist before it can be renounced. Race can dispense with language, but the very speaking of a language is an expression of antecedent race, as are religions and arts and styles of thought and everything else that happens in the history of the spirit — and that there is such a history is shown by the power that blood possesses over feeling and reason. For all these are active waking consciousness “in form,” expressive, in their evolution and symbolism and passion, of the blood (again the blood) that courses through these forms in the waking being of generation after generation. A hero does not need to know anything at all of this second world — he is life through and through — but a saint can only by the severest asceticism beat down the life that is in him and gain solitary communion with his spirit — and his strength for this again comes from life itself. The hero despises death and the saint life, but in the contrast between the heroism of great ascetics and martyrs and the piety of most (which is of the kind described in Revelation iii,16¹⁶ we discover that greatness, even in religion, presupposes Race, that life must be strong indeed to be worthy of such wrestlers. The rest is mere philosophy.

For this very reason nobility in the world historical sense is much more than comfortable Late periods consider it; it is not a sum of titles and privileges and ceremonies, but an inward possession, hard to acquire, hard to retain — worth, indeed, for those who understand, the sacrifice of a whole life. An old family betokens not simply a set of ancestors (we all have ancestors), but ancestors who lived through whole generations on the heights of history; who not merely had Destiny, but were Destiny; in whose blood the form of happening was bred up to its perfection by the experience of centuries. As history in the grand sense begins with the Culture, it was mere panache for a Colonna to trace back his ancestry into Late Roman times. But it was not meaningless for the grandee of Late Byzantium to derive himself from Constantine, nor is it so for an American of today to trace his ancestry to a Mayflower immigrant of 1620. In actual fact Classical nobility begins with the Trojan period and not the Mycenaean, and the Western with the Gothic and not the Franks and Goths — in England with the Normans and not the Saxons. Only from these real starting points is there History, and, therefore, only from then can there be an original aristocracy, as distinct from nobles and heroes. That which in the first chapter of this volume I called cosmic beat or pulse receives in this aristocracy its fulfillment. For all that in riper times we call diplomatic and social “tact” — which includes strategic and business flair, the collector’s eye for precious things, and the subtle insight of the judge of men — and generally all that which one has and does not learn; which arouses the impotent envy of the rest who cannot participate; which as “form” directs the course of events; is nothing but a particular case of the same cosmic and dreamlike sureness that is visibly expressed in the circlings of a flock of birds or the controlled movements of a thoroughbred horse.

The priest circumscribes the world-as-nature and deepens his picture of it by thinking into it. The noble lives in the world-as-history and deepens it by altering its picture. Both evolve towards the great tradition, but the evolution of the one comes of shaping and that of the other from training. This is a fundamental difference between the two Estates, and consequently only one of them is truly an Estate, and the other only appears to be such because of the completeness of the contrast. The field of effect of breed and training is the blood, and they pass on, therefore, from the fathers to the sons. Shaping (Bildung), on the other hand, presupposes talents, and consequently a true and strong priesthood is always a sum of individual gifts — a community of waking consciousness — having no relation to origin in the race sense; and thus, in this respect as in others, it is a negation of Time and History. Intellectual affinity and blood affinity — ponder and probe into the depths of these contrasted expressions! Heritable priesthood is a contradiction in terms. It existed in deed, in a sense, in Vedic India, but the basis of that existence was the fact that there was a second nobility, which reserved the privilege of priesthood to the gifted members of its own circle.¹⁷ And elsewhere celibacy made an end even of this much infringement of principle. The “priest in the man” — whether the man be noble or not — stands for a focus of sacred Causality in the world. The priestly power is itself of a causal nature, brought about by higher causes and itself in turn an efficient cause. The priest is the middleman in the timeless extended that is stretched taut between the waking consciousness and the ultimate secret; and, therefore, the importance of the clergy in each Culture is determined by its prime symbol. The Classical soul denies Space and therefore needs no middleman for dealings with it, and so the Classical priesthood disappears in its very beginnings. Faustian man stands face to face with the Infinite, nothing a priori shields him from the crushing force of this aspect, and so the Gothic priesthood elevated itself to the heights of the Papal idea.

As two world outlooks, two modes of blood flow in the veins and of thought in the daily being and doing, are interwoven, there arise in the end (in every Culture) two sorts of moral, of which each looks down upon the other — namely, noble custom, and priestly askesis, reciprocally censured as worldly and as servile. It has been shown already how the one proceeds from the castle and the other from the cloister and the minster, the one from full being in the flood of History and the other, aloof therefrom, out of pure waking consciousness in the ambiance of a God pervaded nature. The force with which these primary impressions act upon men is something that later periods will be unable even to imagine. The secular and the spiritual class feeling are starting on their upward career, and cutting out for themselves an ethical class ideal which is accessible only to the right people, and even to them only by way of long and strict schooling. The great being-stream feels itself as a unit as against the residue of dull, pulseless, and aimless blood. The great mind community knowsitself as a unit as against the residue of uninitiated. These units are the band of heroes and the community of saints.

It will always remain the great merit of Nietzsche that he was the first to recognize the dual nature of all moral.¹⁸ His designations of “master” and “slave” moral were inexact, and his presentation of “Christianity” placed it much too definitely on the one side of the dividing line, but at the basis of all his opinions this lies strong and clear, that good and bad are aristocratic, and good and evil priestly, distinctions. Good and bad, which are Totemistic distinctions among primitive groups of men and tribes, describe, not dispositions, but men, and describe them comprehensively in respect of their living being. The good are the powerful, the rich, the fortunate. Good means strong, brave, thoroughbred, in the idiom of every Springtime. Bad, cheap, wretched, common, in the original sense, are the powerless, propertyless, unfortunate, cowardly, negligible — the “sons of nobody” as ancient Egypt said.¹⁹ Good and evil, Taboo concepts, assign value to a man according to his perceptions and reason — that is, his waking disposition and his conscious actions. To offend against love ethic in the race sense is ungentle, to sin against the Church’s love command is wicked. The noble habit is the perfectly unconscious result of a long and continuous training. It is learned in intercourse and not from books. It is a felt rhythm, and not a notion. But the other moral is enunciated, ordered on the basis of cause and consequence, and therefore learnable and expressive of a conviction.

The one is historical through and through, and recognizes rank distinctions and privileges as actual and axiomatic. Honor is always class honor — there is no such thing as an “honor of humanity.” The duel is not an obligation of unfree persons. Every man, be he Bedouin or Samurai or Corsican, peasant or workman, judge or bandit, has his own binding notions of honor, loyalty, courage, revenge, that do not apply to other kinds of life. Every life has custom ethic — it is unthinkable without it. Children have it already in their play; they know at once, of themselves, what is fitting. No one has laid down these rules, but they exist. They arise, quite unconsciously, out of the “we” that has formed itself out of the uniform pulse of the group. Here, too, each being is “in form.” Every crowd that, under one or another stimulus, has collected in the street has for the moment its own ethic, and anyone who does not absorb it and stand for it as self-evident — to say “follow it” would presume more rationality in the action than there is — is a poor, mean creature, an outsider. Uneducated people and children possess an astonishingly fine reactivity to this. Children, however, are also required to learn the Catechism, and in it they hear about the good and evil that are laid down — and are anything rather than self-evident. Custom ethic is not that which is true, but that which is there; it is a thing of birth and growth, feeling and organic logic. Moral, in contrast to this, is never actuality (for, if it were, all the world would be saintly), but an eternal demand hanging over the consciousness — and, ex hypothesi, over that of all men alike, irrespective of all differences of actual life and history. And, therefore, all moral is negative and all custom ethic affirmative. In the latter “devoid of honor” is the worst, in the former “devoid of sin” is the highest, that can be said of anyone.

The basic concept of all living custom ethic is honor. Everything else — loyalty, modesty, bravery, chivalry, self-control, resolution — is comprised in it. And honor is a matter of the blood and not of the reason. One does not reflect on a point of honor — that is already dishonor. To lose honor means to be annulled so far as Life and Time and History are concerned. The honor of one’s class, one’s family, of man and woman, of one’s people and one’s country, the honor of peasant and soldier and even bandit — honor means that the life in a person is something that has worth, historical dignity, delicacy, nobility. It belongs to directional Time, as sin belongs to timeless Space. To have honor in one’s body means about the same as to have race. The opposite sort are the Thersites natures, the mud souled, the riff raff, the “kick me but let me live’s.” To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy — all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous. But this is not at all the same thing as priestly moral, for that moral does not cleave to life at any cost of degradation, but rather rejects and abstains from life as such, and therefore incidentally from honor. As has been said already, every moral action is, at the very bottom, a piece of askesis and a killing of being. And eo ipso it stands outside the field of life and the world of history.

IV

Here it is necessary to anticipate somewhat, and to consider whence it is that world history (especially in the Late periods of the grand Cultures and the beginnings of the Civilizations) derives its rich variety of color and the profound symbolism of its events. The primary Estates, nobility and clergy, are the purest expressions of the two sides of life, but they are not the only ones. In very early times — often, indeed, foreshadowed in the Primitive Age itself — yet other being-streams and waking linkages break forth, in which the symbolism of Time and Space comes to living expression, and which, when (and not until) combined with these two, make up the whole fullness of what we call social organization or society.

While Priesthood is microcosmic and animal-like, Nobility is cosmic and plantlike (hence its profound connection with the land). It is itself a plant, strongly rooted in the soil, established on the soil — in this, as in so many other respects, a supreme peasantry. It is from this kind of cosmic boundness that the idea of property arises, which to the microcosm as such, freely moving in space, is wholly alien. Property is a primary feeling and not a concept; it belongs to Time and History and Destiny, and not to Space and Causality. It cannot be logically based, but it is there.²⁰ “Having” begins with the plant, and propagates itself in the history of higher mankinds just to the precise extent that history contains plant character and race. Hence property in the most genuine sense is always ground property, and the impulse to convert other acquisitions into ground and soil is an evidence of sound stock. The plant possesses the ground in which it roots. It is its property,²¹ which it defends to the utmost, with the desperate force of its whole being, against alien seeds, against overshadowing neighbor plants, against all nature. So, too, a bird defends the nest in which it is hatching. The bitterest fights over property occur — not in the Late periods of great Cultures, between rich and poor, and about movable goods — but here in the beginnings of the plant world. When, in a wood, one feels all about one the silent, merciless battle for the soil that goes on day and night, one is appalled by the depth of an impulse that is almost identical with life itself. Here is a yearlong, tenacious, embittered wrestle, a hopeless resistance of the weak against the strong, that goes on to the point that the victor too is broken — such as is only paralleled in the most primitive of mankind when an old peasant family is expelled from the clod, from the nest, or a family of noble stock is uprooted or, more truly, cut off from its roots, by money.²² The far more conspicuous conflicts in the later cities have quite another meaning, for here — in communism of all kinds — it is not the experience of possessing, but the idea of property purely as material means that is fought for. The negation of property is never race impulse, but the doctrinaire protest of the purely intellectual, urban, uprooted, anti-vegetal waking consciousness of saints, philosophers, and idealists. The same reason actuates the monk of the hermitage and the scientific Socialist — be his name Moh-ti, Zeno, or Marx — to reject the plantlike; the same feeling impels men of race to defend it. Here, as ever, fact and truth are opposed. “Property is theft” is the ultra-materialistic form of the old thought: “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” When the priest gives up property, he is giving up something dangerous and alien; when a noble does so, he is giving up himself.

This brings us to a duality of the property idea feeling — Having as power and Having as spoil. Both, in primitive men of race, lie immediately together. Every Bedouin or Viking intends both. The sea hero is always a sea robber also; every war is concerned with possessions and, above all, possessions in land. But a step, and the knight becomes the robber knight, the adventurer becomes conqueror and king, like Rurik the Norman in Russia and many an Achaean and Etruscan pirate in Homeric times. In all heroic poetry we find, side by side with the strong and natural satisfaction of winning battles and power and women, and the unbridled outbursts of joy and grief, anger, and love, the immense delight of “having.” When Odysseus lands at home, the first thing he does is to count the treasures in his boat, and when, in the Icelandic Saga, the peasants Hjalmar and Ölvarod perceive each that the other has no goods in his ship, they abandon their duel at once — he who fights from pride and for honor is a fool for his pains. In the Indian hero epic, eagerness for battle means eagerness for cattle, and the “colonizing” Greeks of the tenth century were primarily corsairs like the Normans. On the high seas an alien ship is a priori good prize. But out of the feuds of South Arabian and Persian Knights of A.D. 200, and the “private wars” of the Provençal barons of A.D. 1200 — which were hardly more than cattle raids — there developed at the end of the feudal period the war proper, the great war with acquisition of land and people as its object. All this, in the end, brings the aristocratic Culture to the “top of its form,” while, correspondingly, priests and philosophers despise it.

As the Culture rises to its height, these two primary urges trend widely apart, and hostility develops between them. The history of this hostility is almost the same thing as world history. From the feeling of power come conquest and politics and law; from that of spoil, trade and economy and money. Law is the property of the powerful. Their law is the law of all. Money is the strongest weapon of the acquiring: with it he subdues the world. Economics likes and intends a state that is weak and subservient to it. Politics demands that economic life shall adapt itself to and within the State — Adam Smith and Friedrich List, Capitalism and Socialism. All Cultures exhibit at the outset a war and a trade nobility, then a land and a money nobility, and finally a military and an economic war management and a ceaseless struggle of money against law.

Equally, on the other hand, priesthood and learning separate out. Both are directed towards, not the factual, but the true; both belong to the Taboo side of life and to Space. Fear before death is the source, not merely of all religion, but of all philosophy and natural science as well. Now, however, there develops a profane Causality in contrast to the sacred. “Profane” is the new counter-concept to “religious,” which so far had tolerated learning only as a handmaiden. The whole of Late criticism, its spirit, its method, its aims, are profane — and the Late theology, even, is no exception to the rule. But invariably, nevertheless, the learning of all Cultures moves in the forms of the preceding priesthood — thus showing that it is merely a product of the contradiction itself, and how dependent it is and remains, in every particular, upon the primary image. Classical science, therefore, lives in cult communities of the Orphic style, such as the school of Miletus, the Pythagorean society, the medical schools of Croton and Cos, the Attic schools of the Academy, the Peripatos, and the Stoa, every one of whose leaders belongs to the type of the sacrificial priest and seer, and even the Roman legal schools of the Sabiniani and Proculiani. The sacred book, the Canon is, scientifically as in other respects, Arabian — the scientific canon of Ptolemy (Almagest), the medical of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and the philosophical corpus designated “Aristotle,” but so largely spurious — so also the (mostly unwritten) laws and methods of quotation: the Commentary as the form of thought development; the universities as cloisters (Medrashim) which provided teachers and students with cell, food, and clothing; and tendencies in scholarship taking form as brotherhoods. The learned world of the West possesses unmistakably the form of the Catholic Church, and more particularly so in Protestant regions. The connecting link between the learned orders of the Gothic period and the order like schools of the nineteenth century — the schools of Hegel, of Kant, of historical jurisprudence, and not a few of the English university colleges — is formed by the Maurists and Bollandists²³ of France, who from 1650 on mastered and largely created the ancillary “science” of history. In all the specialist sciences (medicine and lecture room philosophy included) there are fully developed hierarchies leading up to school popes, grades, and dignities (the doctor’s degree as an ordination), sacraments and councils. The uninitiate is rigorously treated as the “layman,” and the idea of a generalized priesthood residing in the believers themselves, which is manifested in “popular” science — for example, Darwinism — is passionately combated. The language of learning was originally Latin, but today all sorts of special languages have formed themselves which (in the domain of radioactivity, for example, or that of the law of contract) are unintelligible save to those who have received the higher initiation. There are founders of sects, such as many of Kant’s and Hegel’s disciples were; there are missionaries to the unbelievers, like the Monists. There are heretics, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, there is the weapon of the ban, and there is the Index in the form of the Conspiracy of Silence. There are ethical truths (for example, in Law the division of the objects into persons and things) and dogmas (like that of energy and mass, or the theory of inheritance), a ritual in the citation of orthodox writings, and even a scientific sort of beatification.²⁴

More, the savant type of the West (which in the nineteenth century reached its zenith, corresponding to the nadir of true priesthood) has brought to high perfection the study as the cell of a profane monarchism that has its unconscious vows — of Poverty, in the shape of honorable disdain for fat living and wealth, and unfeigned contempt for the commercial professional and for all exploitation of scientific results for gain; of Chastity, which has evolved a veritable celibacy of science, with Kant as exemplar and culmination; and of Obedience, even to the point of sacrificing oneself to the standpoint of the School. Further, and lastly, there is a sort of estrangement from the world which is the profane echo of the Gothic flight from it, and leads to an almost complete disregard of the life in public and the forms of good society — little “breeding,” much too much “shaping.” Nobility, even in its later ramifications — the judge, the squire, the officer — still retains the old root strong natural satisfaction in carrying on the stock, in possessions and honor, but the scientist counts these things as little beside the possession of a pure scientific conscience and the carrying on of a method or a view unimpaired by the commercialism of the world. The fact that the savant today has ceased to be remote from the world, and puts his science at the service of (not seldom, indeed, most shrewdly applies it to) technics and moneymaking, is a sign that the pure type is entering upon its decline and that the great age of intellectual optimism that is livingly expressed in him belongs already to the past.

In sum, we see that the Estates have a natural build which in its evolution and action forms the basic structure of every Culture’s life course. No specific decision made it; revolutions only alter it when they are forms of the evolution and not results of some private will. It never, in its full cosmic significance, enters the consciousness of men as doers and thinkers, because it lies too deep in human being to be other than a self-evident datum. It is merely from the surface that men take the catchwords and causes over which they fight on that side of history which theory regards as horizontally layered, but which in actuality is an aggregate of inseparable interpenetrations. First, arise out of the open landscape, and figure the pure symbolism of Being and Waking being, Time and Space. Then out of the one under the aspect of booty, and out of the other under the aspect of research, there develop doubled types of lower symbolic force, which in the urban Late periods rise to prepotency in the shapes of economy and science. In these two being-streams the ideas of Destiny and Causality are thought out to their limit, unrelentingly and anti-traditionally. Forces emerge which are separated by a deadly enmity from the old class ideals of heroism and saintliness — these forces are money and intellect, and they are related to those ideals as the city to the country. Henceforward property is called riches, and world outlook knowledge — a desanctified Destiny and a profane Causality. But science is in contradiction with Nobility too, for this does not prove or investigate, but is. “De omnibus dubitandum” is the attitude of a burgher and not of an aristocrat, while at the same time it contradicts the basic feeling of priesthood, for which the proper role of critique is that of a handmaid. Economy, too, finds an enemy here, in the shape of the ascetic moral which rejects money getting, just as the genuine land based nobility despises it. Even the old merchant nobility has in many cases perished (e.g., Hanse Towns, Venice, Genoa), because with its traditions it could not and would not fall in with the business outlook of the big city. And, with all this, economy and science are themselves at enmity; once more, in the conflicts of money getting and knowledge, between counting house and study, business liberalism and doctrinaire liberalism, we meet the old great oppositions of action and contemplation, castle and cathedral. In one form or in another this order of things emerges in the structure of every Culture — hence the possibility of a comparative morphology in the social as in the other aspects of history.

Wholly outside the category of the true Estates are the calling classes of the craftsmen, officials, artists, and laborers, whose organization in guilds (e.g., of smiths in China, of scribes in Egypt, and of singers in the Classical world) dates from pristine antiquity, and who because of their professional segregation (which sometimes goes as far as to cut off their connubium with others) actually develop into genuine tribes, as, for instance, the Falasha²⁵ of Abyssinia and some of the Sudra classes named in Manu’s code. Their separation is due merely to their technical accomplishments and therefore not to their being vessels of the symbolism of Time and Space. Their tradition, likewise, is limited to their techniques and does not refer to a customary ethic or a moral of their own, such as is always found in economy and science as such. As derived from a nobility, judges and officers are classes, whereas officials are a profession; as derived from priesthood, scholars are a class, while artists are a profession. Sense of honor, conscience, adhere in one case to the status, in the other to the achievement. There is something, slight though it may be, of symbolism in every category on the one side, and none in any category on the other. And consequently something of strangeness, irregularity, often disgrace, clings to them — consider, for example, executioners, actors, and strolling singers, or the Classical estimation of the artist. Their classes or guilds separate from general society, or seek the protection of other orders of society (or individual patrons and Maecenases), but fit themselves in with that society they cannot, and their inability to do so finds expression in the guild wars of the old cities and in uncouthness of every sort in the instincts and manners of artists.

V

A history of estates or classes, ignoring in principle that of profession classes, is therefore a presentation of the metaphysical element in higher mankind, so far as this rises to grand symbolism in species of onflowing life, species in and along which the history of the Cultures moves to fulfillment.

At the very beginning, the sharply defined type of the peasant is something new. In Carolingian times, and under the Tsarist system of the “Mir” in Russia,²⁶ there were freemen and hinds cultivating the soil, but no peasantry. Only when there emerges the feeling of being different from the two symbolic “lives” — Freidank’s Bescheidenheit²⁷ comes into our minds — does this life become an Estate, thenourishing estate in the fullest sense of the word, the root of the great plant Culture, which has driven its fibers deep into Mother Earth and darkly, industriously, draws all juices into itself and sends them to the upper parts, where trunks and branches tower up in the light of history. It serves the great lives not merely by the nourishment that it wins out of the soil for them, but also with that other harvest of mother earth — its own blood; for blood flowed up for centuries from the villages into the high places, received there the high forms, and maintained the high lives. The relation is called (from the noble’s point of view) vassalage, and we find it arising — whatever the superficial causes may be in each case — in the West between 1000 and 1400 and in the other Cultures at the “contemporary” periods. The Helotry of Sparta belongs with it, and equally so the old Roman clientela, from which after 471 the rural Plebs — that is, a free yeomanry — grew up.²⁸ Astonishing indeed is the force of this striving towards symbolic form in the Pseudomorphosis of the Late Roman East, where the caste system of the principate founded by Augustus (with its division into senatorial and equestrian officialdom) evolved backwards until, about 300, it had returned, wherever the Magian world feeling prevailed, to a condition parallel to that of the Gothic in 1300 — the condition, in fact, of the Sassanid Empire of its own time.²⁹ Out of the officialdom of a highly Civilized administration came a minor nobility of decurions, village knights, and town politicians, who were responsible to the sovereign in body and goods for all outgoings — a feudalism formed backwards — and gradually made their positions heritable, just as happened under the Egyptian Vth dynasty and the first Chôu centuries³⁰ and the Europe of the Crusades. Military status, of officers and soldiers alike, became hereditary in the same way,³¹ and service as a feudal obligation, and all the rest of what Diocletian presently reduced to formal law. The individual was firmly bound to the status (corpori adnexus), and the principle was extended as compulsory guild membership to all trades, as in the Gothic or in old Egypt. But, above all, there necessarily arose from the ruins of the Late Classical slave economy of “Latifundia”³² the colonate of hereditary small farmers, while the great estates became administrative districts and the lord was made responsible for its taxes and its recruit quota.³³ Between 250 and 300 the “colonus” became legally bound to the soil (adscriptus gleba). And with that the differentiation of feudal lord and vassal as class and class³⁴ was reached.

Every new Culture has potentially its nobility and its priesthood. The apparent exceptions to this are due merely to the absence to tangible tradition. We know today that a real priesthood existed in ancient China and we may assume as self-evident that there was a priest estate in the beginnings of Orphism in the eleventh century B.C. — the more confidently as we have plain indications of it in the epic figures of Calchas and Tiresias. Similarly the development of the feudal constitution in Egypt presupposes a primitive nobility as early as the Illrd Dynasty.³⁵ But the form in which, and the force with which, these Estates first realized themselves and then took charge of the course of history — shaped it, carried it, and even represented it in their own destinies — depend upon the Prime symbol on which each individual Culture, with its entire form language, is based.

The nobility, wholly plantlike, proceeds everywhere from the land, which is its primary property and with which it is fast bound. It possesses everywhere the basic form of the family, the gens (in which, therefore, the “other” gender of history, the feminine, is expressed also), and it manifests itself through the will-to-duration — duration, namely, of the blood — as the great symbol of Time and History. It will appear that the early officialdom of the vassal state, based on personal trustworthiness, everywhere — in China and Egypt, in the Classical and the Western World³⁶ — goes through the same development, first creating quasi-feudal court offices and dignities, then seeking hereditary connection with the soil, and so finally becoming the origin of noble family lines.

The Faustian will-to-infinity comes to expression in the genealogical principle, which — strange as it may seem — is peculiar to this Culture. And in this Culture, moreover, it intimately permeates and molds all the historical forms, and supremely those of the states themselves. The historical sense that insists upon getting to know the destinies of its own blood backwards through the centuries and seeing archival proofs of dates and provenances up to the first ancestors; the careful ordering of the genealogical tree, which is potent enough to make present possession and inheritance dependent upon the fortunes of a single marriage contracted perhaps five hundred years ago; the conceptions of pure blood, birth equivalence, mésalliance — all this is will-to-direction in time, will towards Time’s remote distances. There is no second example of it, save perhaps in the Egyptian nobility, and there the comparable forms that were attained were far weaker.

Nobility of the Classical style, on the contrary, relates to the present estate of the agnatic family, and from it straight to a mythicalorigin, which does not imply the historical sense in the least, but only a craving, sublimely regardless of historic probability, for splendid backgrounds to the here and now of the living. Only thus can we explain the otherwise baffling naiveté with which an individual saw behind his grandfather Theseus and Heracles in one plane, and fashioned himself a family tree (or several, perhaps, as Alexander did), and the lightheartedness with which respectable Roman families would forge the names of reputed ancestors into the old consular lists. At the funeral of a Roman noble the wax masks of great forefathers were introduced into the cortège, but it was only for the number and sound of the famous names and not in the least on account of any genealogical connection with the present. This trait appears throughout the Classical nobility, which like the Gothic formed, structurally and spiritually, one inward unit from Etruria to Asia Minor. On it rested the power that, even at the beginning of the Late period, was still in the possession of order like family groupings throughout the cities (phylae, phratriae, tribus, and what not) which maintained a purely present membership and unity by means of sacral forms — for example, the three Doric and the four Ionic phylae, and the three Etruscan tribes that appear in the earlier Roman history as Tities, Ramnes, and Luceres. In the Vedas the “father” and the “mother” souls had claims to soul rites only in respect of three nearer and three further generations,³⁷ after which the past claimed them; and nowhere do we find the Classical cult of souls reaching any further back than the Indian. It is the very reverse of the ancestor worship of the Chinese and the Egyptians, which was by hypothesis without end, and therefore maintained the family in a definite ordering even beyond bodily death. In China there still lives today a duke, Kong, who is the descendant of Confucius and equally the descendant of Lao-tse, of Chang-lu, and others. It is not a question of a many branched tree, but of carrying the line, the tao of being, straight on — if necessary, frankly by adoption (the adopted member, pledged to the ancestor cult, is thereby spiritually incorporated in the family) or other expedients.

An unbridled joy of life streams through the flourishing centuries of this estate, the Estate par excellence, which is direction and destiny and race through and through. Love, because woman is history, and war because fighting makes history, are the acknowledged foci of its thoughts and feelings. The Northern skald poetry and the Southern Minnesang correspond to the old love songs of the Chinese age of chivalry in the Shi-King,³⁸ which were sung in the Pi Yung, the places of noble training (hiao). And the ceremonial public archery displays, like the Early Classical agon, and the Gothic and the Persian-Byzantine³⁹ tourney, were manifestations of the life on its Homeric side.

In opposition to this side stands the Orphic — the expression of the space experience of a Culture through the style of its priesthood. It was in accord with the Euclidean character of Classical extension — which needed no intermediaries for intercourse with near and corporeal gods — that in this case priesthood, from beginnings as an estate, rapidly degenerated into city officialdom. Similarly, it was expressive of the Chinese tao that the place of the original hereditary priesthood came to be taken by professional classes of praying men, scribes, and oracle priests, who could accompany the religious performances of the authorities and heads of families with the prescribed rites. It was in conformity, again, with the Indian world feeling that lost itself in measureless infinity that the priest class there became a second nobility, which with immense power, intruding upon every sort of life, planted itself between the people and its wilderness of gods. It is an expression, lastly, of the “cavern” feeling that the priest of true Magian cast is the monk and the hermit, and becomes more and more so, while the secular clergy steadily loses in symbolic significance.

In contrast to all these there is the Faustian priesthood, which, still without any profound import or dignity in 900, rose up thereafter to that sublime role of intermediary which placed it in principle between humanity (all humanity) and a macrocosm strained to all imaginable expanse by the Faustian passion of the third dimension. Excluded from history by celibacy and from time by its character indelebilis, it culminated in the Papacy, which represented the highest symbol of God’s dynamic Space that it was possible to conceive; even the Protestant idea of a generalized priesthood has not destroyed it, but merely decentralized it from one point and one person into the heart of each individual believer.

The contradiction between being and waking being that exists in every microcosm necessarily drives the two Estates against one another. Time seeks to absorb and subordinate Space, Space Time. Spiritual and worldly power are magnitudes so different in structure and tendency that any reconciliation, or even understanding, between them seems impossible. But this conflict has not in all Cultures come to world historical expression. In China it promoted the tao idea that primacy should reside securely in an aristocracy. In India the conception of Space as infinite-indefinite required a primacy of the priesthood. In the Arabian Culture the Magian world feeling involved in principle the inclusion of the worldly visible society of believers as a constituent in the grand consensus, and therefore the unity of spiritual and temporal polity, law, and sovereignty. Not that there was not friction between the two estates; far from it; in the Sassanid Empire there were bloody feuds between the country aristocracy of the Dikhans and the party of the Magi — even in some instances murders of sovereigns — and in Byzantium the whole fifth century is full of the struggles between the Imperial power and the clergy, which from an ever present background to the Monophysite and Nestorian controversies.⁴⁰ But the basic interconnection of the two orders was not in dispute.

In the Classical world, which abhorred the infinite in every sense, Time was reduced to the present and Extension to tangible unit bodies; as the result, the grand symbolic estates became so voided of meaning that, as compared with the city-state, which expressed the Classical prime symbol in the strongest imaginable form, they did not count as independent forces at all. In the history of Egyptian mankind, on the other hand, which is the history of striving with equal force towards distances of time and of space, the struggle of the two estates and their symbolisms is constantly recognizable right into the period of complete fellahdom. For the transition from the IVth to the Vth Dynasty is accompanied also by a visible triumph of the priestly over the knightly world feeling; the Pharaoh, from being the body and vessel of the supreme deity, becomes its servant, and the Re sanctuary overpowers the tomb temple of the ruler both in architectural and in suggestive force. The New Empire witnessed, immediately after its great Caesars, the political autocracy of the Amen priesthood, Thebes, and then again the revolution of the “heretic” king Amenophis IV (Akhenaton) — in which one feels unmistakably a political as well as a religious side — and so on until after interminable conflicts between warrior and priestly castes, the Egyptian world ended in foreign domination.

In the Faustian Culture this battle between two high symbols of equal force has been waged in somewhat the same spirit, but with far greater passion still than in the Egyptian — so that, from the early Gothic onward, only armistice, never peace, has seemed possible between State and Church. But in this conflict the handicap against waking being tells — it would shake off its dependence upon being, but it cannot. The mind needs the blood, but the blood does not need the mind. War belongs to the world of time and history —intellectual battle is only a fight with reasons, only disputation — and, therefore a militant Church must step from the world of truths into the world of facts — from the world of Jesus into that of Pilate. And so it becomes an element in race history and subject to the formative powers of the political side of life. From early Feudalism to modern Democracy it fights with sword and cannon, poison and dagger, bribery and treason, all the weapons of party conflict in use at the time. It sacrifices articles of belief to worldly advantages, and allies itself with heretics and unbelievers against orthodox powers. The Papacy as an idea has a history of its own, but this bears no relation to the position of the popes in the sixth and seventh centuries as Byzantine viceroys of Syrian and Greek provenance; or to their later evolution into powerful landowners, with crowds of subject peasants; or to the Patrimonium Petri of the early Gothic — a sort of duchy in the possession of great families of the Campagna (Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Frangipani), which alternately set up the popes, until finally the general Western feudalism prevailed here also, and the Holy See came to be an object of investiture within the families of the Roman baronage, so that each new pope, like a German or a French king, had to confirm the rights of his vassals. In 1032 the Counts of Tusculum nominated a twelve year old boy as pope. In those days eight hundred castle towers stood up in the city area of Rome amongst and upon the Classical ruins. In 1045 three popes entrenched themselves in the Vatican, the Lateran, and Santa Maria Maggiore respectively, and were defended by their noble supporters.

Now supervened the city with its own soul, first emancipating itself from the soul of the countryside, then setting up as an equal to it, and finally seeking to suppress and extinguish it. But this evolution accomplished itself in kinds of life, and it also, therefore, is part of the history of the estates. The city life as such emerges — through the inhabitants of these small settlements acquiring a common soul, and becoming conscious that the life within is something different from the life outside — and at once the spell of personal freedom begins to operate and to attract within the walls life streams of more and more new kinds. There sets in a sort of passion for becoming urban and for propagating urban life. It is this, and not material considerations, that produced the fever of the colonization period in the Classical world, which is still recognizable to us in its last offshoots, and which it is not quite exact to speak of as colonization at all. For it was a creative enthusiasm in the man of the city that from the tenth century B.C. (and “contemporaneously” in other Cultures) drew generation after generation under the spell of a new life, with which there emerges for the first time in human history the idea of freedom. This idea is not of political (still less of abstract) origin, but is something bringing to expression the fact that within the city walls plantlike attachment to a soil has ceased, and that the threads that run through the whole life of the countryside have been snapped. And consequently the freedom idea ever contains a negative; it looses, redeems, defends, always frees a man from something. Of this freedom the city is the expression; the city spirit is understanding become free, and everything in the way of intellectual, social, and national movements that bursts forth in Late periods under the name of Freedom leads back to an origin in this one prime fact of detachment form the land.

But the city is older than the “citizen.” It attracts first the calling classes, which as such are outside the symbolic estates, and, when urban, take form as guilds. Then it draws in the primary estates themselves; the minor nobility moves its castles, the Franciscans their cloisters, within the contour. As yet, not much is inwardly altered. Not only Papal Rome, but all Italian cities of this time are filled with the fortified towers of the families, who issued thence to fight out their feuds in the streets. In a well known fourteenth century picture of Siena these towers stand up like factory chimneys round the marketplace.⁴¹ As for the Florentine palace of the Renaissance, if, in respect of the bright life within, it is the successor of Provençal courts, it is equally, with its “rusticated” facade, an offshoot of the Gothic castles that the French and German knights were still building on their hills. It was, in fact, only slowly that the new life separated out. Between 1250 and 1450, throughout the West, the immigrant families concentrated, vis-à-vis the guilds, into the patriciate, and in so doing detached themselves, spiritually as in other respects, from the country nobility. It was exactly the same in early China, Egypt, and the Byzantine Empire, and it is only in the light of this that we become able to understand the older Classical city leagues (such as the Etruscan and, it may be, even the Latin) and the sacral connections of colonial daughter cities with their mother city. It was not the Polis as such, so far, that was the backbone of events, but the patriciate of phylae and phratriae within it. The original Polis is identical with the nobility, as Rome was up to 471, and Sparta and the Etruscan cities throughout. Synoecism grew out of it, and the city-state was formed by it. But here, as in other Cultures, the difference between country and city nobility was at first quite unimportant as compared with the strong and deep distinction between the nobility (in general) and the residue.

The burgher proper emerges when the fundamental distinction between town and country has brought the “families and the guilds,” in spite of their otherwise implacable hostility to one another, to a sense of unity vis-à-vis the old nobility, the feudal system generally, and the feudal position of the Church. The notion of the “Third Estate” (to use the catchword of 1789) is essentially only a unit of contradiction, incapable of definition by positive content, and having neither customary ethic of its own — for the higher bourgeois society took after the nobility, and the urban piety after the older priesthood — nor symbolism of its own — for the idea that life was not for the service of practical aims, but for the consistent expression of a symbolism of Time and Space, and could claim true dignity only to the extent that it was the worthy vessel of these, was necessarily repugnant to the urban reason as such. This reason, which dominates the entire political literature of the Late period, asserts a new grouping of estates as from the rise of cities — at first only in theory, but finally, when rationalism becomes omnipotent, in practice, even the bloody practice of revolutions. Nobility and clergy, so far as they are still extant, appear rather markedly as privileged classes, the tacit significance of the emphasis being that their claim to prescriptive rights on the ground of historical status is (from the point of view of timeless rational or “natural” law) obsolete nonsense. They now have their center in the capital city (this also a Late period idea) and now, and now only, develop aristocratic forms to that imposing combination of hauteur and elegance that we see, for example, in the portraits of Reynolds and Lawrence. In opposition to them stand the intellectual powers of the now supreme city, economy and science, which in conjunction with the mass of artisans, functionaries, and laborers feel themselves as a party, diverse in its constituents, but invariably solid at the call to battle for freedom — that is, for urban independence of the great old time symbols and the rights that flowed from them. As components of the Third Estate, which counts by heads and not by rank, they are all, in all Late periods of all Cultures, “liberal” in one way or another — namely, free from the inward powers of non-urban life. Economy is freed to make money, science freed to criticize. And so in all the great decisions we perceive the intellect with its books and its meetings having the word (“Democracy”), and money obtaining the advantages (“Plutocracy”) — and it is never ideas, but always capital, that wins. But this again is just the opposition of truths and facts, in the form in which it develops from the city life. Moreover, by way of protest against the ancient symbols of the soilbound life, the city opposes to the aristocracy of birth the notion of an aristocracy of money and an aristocracy of intellect — the one not very explicit as a claim, but all the more effective as a fact; the other a truth, but nothing more than that and, as a spectacle for the eye, not very convincing. In every Late period there grows on to the ancient nobility — that in which some big bit of history (say, Crusades, or Norman conquest) has become stored as form and beat, but which often has inwardly decayed at the great courts — a genuine second crop. Thus in the fourth century B.C. the entry of great plebeian families asconscripti into the Roman Senate of patres produced within the senatorial order an aristocracy of “nobiles” — a nobility holding lands, but entitled by office. In just the same way a nobility of nepotism arose in Papal Rome; in 1650 there were scarcely fifty families of more than three centuries’ status. In the Southern States of the American Union there grew up, from Baroque times onward, that planter aristocracy which was annihilated by the money powers of the North in the Civil War of 1861-1865. The old merchant nobility of the type of the Fugger, Welser, and Medici and the great Venetian and Genoese houses — to this type, too, must be assigned practically the whole of the patriciate of the Hellenic colonial cities of 800 — had always something of aristocracy in them,⁴² race, tradition, high standards, and the nature impulse to reestablish connection with the soil by acquiring lands (although the old family house in town was no bad substitute). But the new money aristocracy of deals and speculations rapidly acquired a taste for polite forms and at last forced its way into the birth nobility — in Rome, as Equites, from the first Punic War, in France under Louis XIV⁴³ — which it disintegrated and corrupted, while the intellectual aristocracy of the Enlightenment, for its part, overwhelmed it with scorn. The Confucians took the old Chinese idea of Shi from the ethic of nobility and put it into the virtue of intellect, and made the Pi Yung, from a center of knightly battle play, into an “intellectual wrestling school,” a gymnasium — quite in the spirit of our eighteenth century.

With the close of the Late period of every Culture the history of its estates also comes to a more or less violent end. The mere desire to live in rootless freedom prevails over the great imperative Culture symbols, which a mankind now wholly dominated by the city no longer comprehends or tolerates. Finance sheds every trace of feeling for earthbound immovable values, and scientific criticism every residue of piety. Another such victory also, in a measure, is the liberation of the peasant, which consists in relieving him from the pressure of servage, but hands him over to the power of money, which now proceeds to turn the land into movable property — which happened in our case in the eighteenth century; in Byzantium about 740 under the Nomos Georgikos of the legislator Leo III (after which the colonate slowly disappeared); in Rome along with the founding of the Plebeian order in 471. In Sparta the simultaneous attempt of Pausanias to emancipate the Helots failed.

This Plebs is the Third Estate in the form in which it is constitutionally recognized as a unit; its representatives are the Tribunes, not officials, but trusted persons armed with a guaranteed immunity. The reform of 471,⁴⁴ which inter alia replaced the old three Etruscan tribes by four urban tribes or wards (a highly suggestive fact in itself), has been variously regarded as a pure emancipation of peasantry⁴⁵ or as an organization of the trading class.⁴⁶ But the Plebs, as Third Estate, as residue, is only susceptible of negative definition — as meaning everyone who does not belong to the land nobility or is not the incumbent of a great priestly office. The picture is as variegated as that of the French “Tiers État” of 1789. Only the protest holds it together. In it are traders, craftsmen, day laborers, clerks. The gens of the Claudii contained patrician and plebeian families — that is, great landlords and prosperous yeomen (for example, the Claudii Marcelli). The Plebs in the Classical city-state is what a combination of peasant and burgher is in a Baroque state of the West, when it protests in an assembled states general against the autocracy of a prince. Outside politics — that is, socially — the plebs, as a unit distinguished from nobility and priesthood, has no existence, but falls apart at once into special callings that are perfectly distinct in interests. It is a Party, and what it stands for as such is freedom in the urban sense of the word. The fact emerges still more distinctly from the success which the Roman land nobility won immediately afterwards, in adding sixteen country tribes, designated by family names and unchallengeably controlled by themselves, to the four urban tribes that stood for bourgeoisie proper — namely, money and mind. Not until the great social conflict during the Samnite wars (contemporary with Alexander, and corresponding exactly to the French Revolution), which ended with the Lex Hortensia of 287, was the status idea legally abolished and the history of the symbolic Estates closed. The Plebs became the Populus Romanus in the same way as in 1789 the “Tiers État” constituted itself the Nation. From this point on, in every Culture, it is something fundamentally different that happens under the label of social conflict.

The nobility of every Springtime had been the Estate in the most primary sense, history become flesh, race at highest potential. The priesthood was its counter-estate, saying no wherever nobility said yes and thus displaying the other side of life in a grand symbol.

The Third Estate, without proper inward unity, was the non-estate — the protest, in estate form, against the existence of estates; not against this or that estate, but against the symbolic view of life in general. It rejects all differences not justified by reason or practically useful. And yet it does mean something itself, and means it very distinctly — the city life as estate in contradistinction to that of the country, freedom as a condition in contrast to attachment. But, looked at from within its own field, it is by no means the unclassified residue that it appears in the eyes of the primary estates. The bourgeoisie has definite limits; it belongs to the Culture; it embraces, in the best sense, all who adhere to it, and under the name of people, populus, demos, rallies, money and mind, craftsman and wage earner, as constituents of itself.

This is the idea that Civilization finds prevailing when it comes on the scene, and this is what it destroys by its notion of the Fourth Estate, the Mass, which rejects the Culture and its matured forms, lock, stock, and barrel. It is the absolute of formlessness, persecuting with its hate every sort of form, every distinction of rank, the orderliness of property, the orderliness of knowledge. It is the new nomadism of the Cosmopolis, for which slaves and barbarians in the Classical world, Sudras in the Indian, and in general anything and everything that is merely human, provide an undifferentiated floating something that falls apart the moment it is born, that recognizes no past and possesses no future. Thus the Fourth Estate becomes the expression of the passing of a history over into the historyless. The mass is the end, the radical nullity.

CHAPTER XI

THE STATE

(B) STATE AND HISTORY

I

Within the world-as-history, in which we are so livingly woven that our perception and our reason constantly obey our feelings, the cosmic flowings appear as that which we call actuality, real life, being-streams in bodily form. Their common badge is Direction. But they can be grasped differently according as it is the movement or the thing moved that is looked at. The former aspect we call history and the latter family or stock or estate or people, but the one is only possible and existent through the other. History exists only as the history of something. If we are referring to the history of the great Cultures, then nation is the thing moved. State, status, means condition, and we obtain our impression of the State when, as a Being in moved Form flows past us, we fix in our eyes the Form as such, as something extended and timelessly standing fast, and entirely ignore direction and Destiny. State is history regarded as at the halt, history the State regarded as on the move. The State of actuality is the physiognomy of a historical unit of being; only the planned State of the theorist is a system.

A movement has form, and that which is moved is “in form,” or, to use another sporting expression, when it is “going all out” it is in perfect condition. This is equally true for a racehorse or a wrestler and for an army or a people. The form abstracted from the life stream of a people is the “condition” of that people with respect to its wrestle in and with history. But only the smallest part of this can be got at and identified by means of the reason. No real constitution, when taken by itself and brought down to paper as a system, is complete. The unwritten, the indescribable, the usual, the felt, the self-evident, so outweigh everything else that — though theorists never see it — the description of a state or its constitutional archives cannot give us even the silhouette of that which underlies the living actuality of a state as its essential form; an existence-unit of history is spoiled when we seriously subject its movement to the constraint of a written constitution.

The individual class or family is the smallest, the nation the largest unit in the stream of history.Primitive peoples are subject to a movement that is not historical in the higher sense — the movement may be a jog trot or may be a charge, but it has no organic character and no profound importance. Nevertheless, these primitive peoples are in motion through and through, to such an extent, indeed, as to seem perfectly formless to the hasty observer. Fellaheen, on the contrary, are the rigid objects of a movement that comes from outside and impinges on them unmeaningly and fortuitously. The former includes the “State” of the Mycenaean period; that of the Thinite period; that of the Shang dynasty in China up to, say, the migration to Yin (1400); the Frankish realm of Charlemagne; the Visigothic Kingdom to Eurich; and Petrine Russia — state forms often ample and efficient, but still destitute of symbolism and necessity. To the latter belong the Roman, Chinese, and other Imperia, whose form has ceased to have any expressive content whatever.

But between primitive and fellah lies the history of the great Culture. A people in the style of a Culture — a historical people, that is — is called a Nation. A nation, as a living and battling thing, possesses a State not merely as a condition of movement, but also (above all)as an idea. The State in the simplest sense of the term may be as old as free moving life itself. Swarms and herds of even very lowly animal genera may have “constitutions” of some sort — and those of the ants, of the bees, of many fish, or migrating birds, of beavers, have reached an astounding degree of perfection — but the State of the grand style is as old as and no older than its two prime Estates, nobility and priesthood. These emerge with the Culture, they vanish into it, their Destinies are to a high degree identical. Culture is the being of nations in State form.

A people is as State, a kindred is as family, “in form” — that is, as we have seen, the difference between political and cosmic history, public and private life, res publica and res privata. And both, moreover, are symbols of care.The woman is world history. By conceiving and giving birth she cares for the perpetuation of the blood. The mother with the child at her breast is the grand emblem of cosmic life. Under this aspect, the life of man and woman is “in form” as marriage. The man, however, makes history, which is an unending battle for the preservation of that other life. Maternal care is supplemented and paralleled by paternal. The man with weapon in hand is the other grand emblem of the will-to-duration. A people “in condition” is originally a band warriorhood, a deep and intimately felt community of men fit for arms. State is the affair of man, it is Care for the preservation of the whole (including the spiritual self-preservation called honor and self-respect), the thwarting of attacks, the foreseeing of dangers, and, above all, the positive aggressiveness which is natural and self-evident to every life that has begun to soar.

If all life were one uniform being-stream, the words “people,” “state,” “war,” “policy,” “constitution,” would never have been heard of. But the eternal forceful variety of life, which the creative power of the Culture elevates to the highest intensities, is a fact, and historically we have no choice but to accept it as such, with all that flows therefrom. Plant life is only plant life in relation to animal life; nobility and priesthood reciprocally condition one another. A people is only really such in relation to other peoples, and the substance of this actuality comes out in natural and ineradicable oppositions, in attack and defense, hostility and war. War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat.

A people shapes history inasmuch as it is “in condition” for the task of doing so. It livingly experiences an inward history — which gets it into this “condition” in which alone it becomes creative — and an outward history, which consists in this creation. Peoples as State, then, are the real forces of all human happening. In the world-as-history there is nothing beyond them. They are Destiny.

Res publica, the public life, the “sword side” of human being-currents, is in actuality invisible. The alien sees merely the men and not their inner connection, for indeed this resides very deep in the stream of life, and even there is felt rather than understood. Similarly, we do not in actuality see the family, but only certain persons, whose cohesion in a perfectly definite sense we know and grasp by way of our own inward experience. But for each such mental picture there exists a group of constituent persons who are bound together as a life unit by a like constitution of outer and inner being. This form in the flow of existence is called customary ethic (Sitte) when it arises of itself in the beat and march and is unconscious before it is conscious; and law (Recht) when it is deliberately stated and put forth for acceptance.

Law — irrespective of whether its authority derives from the feelings and impulse (unwritten law, customary law, English “equity”) or has been abstracted by reflection, probed, and brought into system as Statute Law (Gesetz) — is the willed form of Being. The jural facts that it embraces are of the two kinds, though both possess time symbolism — Care in two modes, prevision and provision — but, from the very difference in the proportions of consciousness that they respectively contain, it follows that throughout real history there must be two laws in opposition — the law of the fathers, of tradition, the inherited, grown, and well tried law, sacrosanct because immemorially old, derived from the experience of the blood and therefore dependable; and the thought and planned law of reason, nature, and broad humanity, the product of reflection and therefore first cousin to mathematics, a law that may not be very workable, but is at any rate “just.” It is in these two orders of law that the opposition between land life and city life, life experience and study experience, ripens till it bursts out in that revolutionary embitterment in which men take a law instead of being given it, and break a law that will not yield.

A law that has been laid down by a community expresses a duty for every member, but it is no proof of every member’s power. On the contrary, it is a question of Destiny, who makes the law and for whom it is made. There are subjects and there are objects in the makingof laws, although everyone is an object as to the validity thereof — and this holds good without distinction for the inner law of families, guilds, estates, and states. But for the State, which is the highest law-subject existing in historical actuality, there is, besides, an external law that it imposes upon aliens by hostilities. Ordinary civil law is a case of the first kind, a peace treaty of the second. But in all cases the law of the stronger is the law of the weaker also. To “have the right” is an expression of power. This is a historical fact that every moment confirms, but it is not acknowledged in the realm of truth, which is not of this world. In their conceptions of right, therefore, as in other things, being and waking being, Destiny and Causality, stand implacably opposed. To the priestly and idealistic moral of good and evil belongs the moral distinction of right and wrong, but in the race-moral of good and bad the distinction is between those who give and those who receive the law. An abstract idea of justice pervades the minds and writings of all whose spirit is noble and strong and whose blood is weak, pervades all religions and all philosophies — but the fact world of history knows only the success which turns the law of the stronger into the law of all. Over ideals it marches without pity, and if ever a man or a people renounces its power of the moment in order to remain righteous — then, certainly, his or its theoretical fame is assured in the second world of thought and truth, but assured also is the coming of a moment in which it will succumb to another life power that has better understood realities.

So long as a historical power is so superior to its constituent units — as the State or the estate so often is to families and calling classes, or the head of the family to its children — a just law between the weaker is possible as a gift from the all powerful hand of the disinterested. But Estates seldom, and states almost never, feel a power of this magnitude over themselves, and consequently between them the law of the stronger acts with immediate force — as is seen in a victor’s treaty, unilateral in terms and still more so in interpretation and observance. That is the difference between the internal and the external rights of historical life units. In the first the will of an arbiter to be impartial and just can be effective — although we are apt to deceive ourselves badly as to the degree of effective impartiality even in the best codes of history, even in those which call themselves “civil” or “bürgerlich” for the very adjective indicates that an estate has possessed the superior force to impose them on everyone.¹ Internal laws are the result of strict logical-causal thought centering upon truths, but for that very reason their validity is ever dependent upon the material power of their author, be this Estate or State. A revolution that annihilates this power annihilates also these laws — they remain true, but they are no longer actual. External laws on the other hand, such as all peace treaties, are essentially never true and always actual — indeed appallingly so. They set up no pretension whatever of being just — it is quite enough that they are valid. Out of them speaks Life, which possesses no causal and moral logic, but is organically all the more consistent and consequent for the lack of it. Its will is to possess validity itself; it feels with an inward certainty what is required to that end and, seeing that, knows what is law for itself and has to be made law for others. This logic is seen in every family, and particularly in old true born peasant families as soon as authority is shattered and someone other than the head tries to determine “what is.” It appears in every state, as soon as one party therein dominates the position. Every feudal age is filled with the contests between lords and vassals over the “right to rights.” In the Classical world this conflict ended almost everywhere with the unconditional victory of the First Estate, which deprived the kingship of its legislative powers and made it an object of its own law making — as the origin and significance of the Archons in Athens and the Ephors in Sparta prove beyond doubt. But the same happened in the Western field too — for a moment in France (institution of the States General, 1302), and for good in England, where in 1215 the Norman baronage and the higher clergy imposed Magna Charta and thus sowed the seed that was to ripen into the effective sovereignty of Parliament. Hence it was that the old Norman law of the Estates here remained permanently valid. In Germany, on the contrary, the weak Imperial power, hard pressed by the claims of the great feudatories, called in the “Roman” law of Justinian (that is, the law of the unlimited central power) to aid it against the early German land laws.²

The Draconian Constitution, the πατρίος πολιτεία of the Oligarchs, was dictated by the nobility like the strictly patrician law of the Twelve Tables in Rome; but by then the Late period of the Culture was well under way and the power of the city and of money were already fully developed, so that laws directed against these powers necessarily gave way very promptly to laws of the Third Estate (Solon, the Tribunate). Yet these, too, were estate founded laws not less than their predecessors. The struggle between the two primary estates for the right of law making has filled the entire history of the West, from the early Gothic conflict of secular and canon law for supremacy, to the controversy (not ended even today) concerning civil marriage.³ And, for that matter, what are the constitutional conflicts that have occurred since the end of the eighteenth century but the acquisition by the Tiers État (which, according to Sieyes’s famous remark in 1789, “was nothing, but could be all”) of the right to legislate bindingly upon all, producing a law that is just as much burghers’ law as ever Gothic was nobles’ law. The nakedest form in which right appears as the expression of might is (as I have already observed) in interstate treaty making, in peace treaties, and in that Law of Nations of which already Mirabeau could say it is the law of the strong of which the observance is imposed upon the weak. A large part of the decisions of world history is contained in laws of this kind. They are the constitution under which militant history progresses, so long as it does not revert to the original form of the armed conflict — original, and also basic; for every treaty that is valid and is meant to have real effects is an intellectual continuation thereof. If policy is war by other means, the “right to give the law” is the spoil of the successful party.

II

It is clear, then, that on the heights of history two such life forms, Estate and State, contend for supremacy, both being-streams of great inward form and symbolic force, each resolved to make its own destiny the Destiny of the whole. That — if we try to understand the matter in its depths and unreservedly put aside our everyday conceptions of people, economy, society, and politics — is the meaning of the opposition between the social and the political conduct of events. Social and political ideas do not begin to be differentiated till a great Culture has dawned, or even till feudalism is declining and the lord vassal relation represents the social, and the king-people relation the political, side. But the social powers of the early time (nobility and priesthood) not less actively than those of the later (money and mind) — and the vocational groups of the craftsmen and officials and workers, too, as they were rising to their power in the growing cities — sought, each for itself, to subordinate the State ideal to its own Estate ideal, or more usually to its estate interests. And so there arose, at all planes from that of the national unit to that of the individual consciousness, a fight over the respective limits and claims each — the result of which, in extreme cases, is that the one element succeeds so completely as to make the other its tool.⁴

In all cases, however, it is the State that determines the external position, and therefore the historical relations between peoples are always of a political and not a social nature. In domestic politics, on the contrary, the situation is so dominated by class oppositions that at first sight social and political tactics appear inseparable, and indeed, in the thought of people who (as, for example, a bourgeoisie) equate their own class ideal with historical actuality — and consequently cannot think in external politics at all — identical. In the external battle the State seeks alliances with other States, in the internal it is always in alliance with one or another Estate — the sixth century Tyrannis, for instance, rested upon the combination of the State idea with the interests of the Third Estate vis-à-vis the ancient noble oligarchy, and the French Revolution became inevitable from the moment that the Tiers — that is, intellect and money — left its friend the Crown in the lurch and joined the two other Estates (from the Assembly of Notables, 1787). We are thoroughly right therefore in feeling a distinction between State history and class history,⁵ between political (horizontal) and social (vertical) history, war and revolution.⁶ But it is a grave error of modern doctrinaires to regard the spirit of domestic history as that of history in general. World history is, and always will be, State history. The inner constitution of a nation aims always at being “in condition” for the outer fight (diplomatic, military, or economic) and anyone who treats a nation’s constitution as an aim and ideal in itself is merely ruining the nation’s body. But, from the other point of view, it falls to the inner political pulse sense of a ruling stratum (whether belonging to the First or to the Fourth Estate) so to manage the internal class oppositions that the focus and ideas of the nation are not tied up in party conflict, nor treason to the country thought of as an ace of trumps.

And here it becomes manifest that the State and the first Estate are cognate down to the roots — akin, not merely by reason of their symbolism of Time and Care, their common relation to race and the facts of genealogical succession, to the family and to the primary impulses of all peasantry (on which in the last analysis every State and every nobility is supported) — not merely in their relation to the soil, the clan domain (be this heritable estate or fatherland), which even in nations of the Magian style is lowered in significance only because there the dignity of orthodoxy so completely surpasses everything else — but above all in high practice amidst all the facts of the historical world, in the unforced unity of pulse and impulse, diplomacy, judgment of men, the art of command and masculine will to keep and extend power, which even in earliest times differentiated a nobility and a people out of the one and the same war gathering; and, lastly, in the feeling for honor and bravery. Hence, right up to the latest phases, that State stands firmest in which the nobility or the tradition shaped by the nobility is wholly at the service of the common cause — as it was in Sparta as compared with Athens, in Romevis-à-vis Carthage, in Tsin as against the tao-colored state of Tsu.

The distinction is that a nobility self-contained as a class — or for that matter any Estate — experiences the residue of the nation only with reference to itself, and only desires to exercise power in that sense, whereas the very principle of the State is that it cares for all, and cares for the nobility as such only in relation to the major care. But a genuine old nobility assimilates itself to the State, and cares for all as though for a property. This care, in fact, is one of its grandest duties and one of which it is most deeply conscious; it feels it, indeed, an innate privilege, and regards service in the army and the administration as its special vocation.

It is, however, a distinction of quite another kind that holds as between the State idea and the idea of any one of the other Estates. All these are inwardly alien to the State as such, and the State ideals that they fashion out of their own lives have not grown up out of the spirit and the political forces of actual history — hence, indeed, the conscious emphasis with which they are labeled as social. And while in Early times the situation is simply that historical facts oppose the Church community in its efforts to actualize religious ideals, in Late periods both the business ideal of the free economic life, and the Utopian ideal of the enthusiast who would actualize this or that abstraction, also come into the field.

But in the historical world there are no ideals, but only facts — no truths, but only facts. There is no reason, no honesty, no equity, no final aim, but only facts, and anyone who does not realize this should write books on politics — let him not try to make politics. In the real world there are no states built according to ideals, but only states that have grown, and these are nothing but living peoples “in form.” No doubt it is “the form impressed that living doth itself unfold,” but the impress has been that of the blood and beat of a being, wholly instinctive and involuntary; and as to the unfolding, if it is guided by the master of politics, it takes the direction inherent in the blood; if by the idealist, that dictated by his own convictions — in other words, the way to nullity.

But the destiny question, for States that exist in reality and not merely in intellectual schemes, is not that of their ideal task or structure, but that of their inner authority, which cannot in the long run be maintained by material means, but only by a belief — of friend and foe — in their effectiveness. The decisive problems lie, not in the working out of constitutions, but in the organization of a sound working government; not in the distribution of political rights according to “just” principles (which at bottom are simply the idea that a class forms of its own legitimate claims), but in the efficient pulse of the whole (efficient in the sense that the play of muscle and sinew is efficient when an extended racehorse nears the winning post), in that rhythm which attracts even strong genius into syntony; not, lastly, in any world alien moral, but in the steadiness, sureness, and superiority of political leadership. The more self-evident all these things are, the less is said or argued about them; the more fully matured the State, the higher the standing, the historical capacity, and therefore the Destiny of the Nation. State majesty, sovereignty, is a life symbol of the first order. It distinguishes subjects and objects⁷ in political events not only in inner, but also (which is far more important) in external, history. Strength of leadership, which comes to expression in the clear separation of these two factors, is the unmistakable sign of the life force in a political unity — so much so that the shattering of existing authority (for example, by the supporters of an opposed constitutional ideal) almost always results not in this new party’s making itself the subject of domestic policy, but in the whole nation’s becoming the object of alien policy — and not seldom forever.

For this reason, in every healthy State the letter of the written constitution is of small importance compared with the practice of the living constitution, the “form” (to use again the sporting term), which has developed of itself out of the experience of Time, the situation, and, above all, the race properties of the Nation. The more powerfully the natural form of the body politic has built itself up, the more surely it works in unforeseen situations; indeed, in the limit, it does not matter whether the actual leader is called King or Minister or party leader, or even (as in the case of Cecil Rhodes) that he has no defined relation to the State. The nobility which managed Roman politics in the period of the three Punic Wars had, from the point of view of constitutional law, no existence whatever.⁸ The leader’s responsibility is always to a minority that possesses the instincts of statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of history.

The fact, therefore, express and unequivocal, is that class States — that is, States in which particular classes rule — are the only States. This must not be confused with the class States to which the individual is merely attached in view of belonging to an estate, as in the case of the older Polis, the Norman States of England and Sicily, the France of the Constitution of 1791, and Soviet Russia today. The true class State is an expression of the general historical experience that it is always a single social stratum which, constitutionally or otherwise, provides the political leading. It is always a definite minority that represents the world historical tendency of a State; and, within that again, it is a more or less self-contained minority that in virtue of its aptitudes (and often enough against the spirit of the Constitution) actually holds the reins. And, if we ignore, as exceptions proving the rule, revolutionary interregna and Caesarian conditions, in which individuals and fortuitous groupings maintain their power merely by material means (and often without any aptitude for ruling), it is always the minority within an Estate that rules by tradition. In by far the greater number of cases this minority is one within the nobility — for example, the “gentry” which governed the Parliamentary style of England, the nobiles at the helm of Roman politics in Punic War times, the merchant aristocracy of Venice, the Jesuit trained (nobles who conducted the diplomacy of the Papal Curia in the Baroque).⁹ Similarly, we find the political aptitude in self-contained groups within the religious Estate — not only in the Roman Catholic Church, but also in Egypt and India and still more in Byzantium and Sassanid Persia. In the Third Estate — though this seldom produces it, not being in itself a life unit — there are cases such as those of third century Rome, where a stratum of the plebs contains men trained in commerce, and France since 1789, where an element of the bourgeoisie has been trained in law; in these cases, it is ensured by a closed circle of persons possessing homogeneous practical gifts, which constantly recruits itself and preserves in its midst the whole sum of unwritten political tradition and experience.

That is the organization of actual states in contradistinction to those conceived on paper and in the minds of pedants. There is no best, or true, or right State that could possibly be actualized according to plan. Every State that emerges in history exists as it is but once and for a moment; the next moment it has, unperceived, become different, whatever the rigidity of its legal constitutional crust. Therefore, words like “republic,” “absolutism,” “democracy,” mean something different in every instance, and what turns them into catch words is their use as definite concepts by philosophers and ideologues. A history of States is physiognomic and not systematic. Its business is not to show how “humanity” advances to the conquest of its eternal rights, to freedom and equality, to the evolving of a super-wise and super-just State, but to describe the political units that really exist in the fact world, how they grow and flourish and fade, and how they are really nothing but actual life “in form.” Let us make the attempt on this basis.

III

History in the high style begins in every Culture with the feudal State, which is not a State in the coming sense of the word, but an ordering of the common life with reference to an Estate. The noblest fruit of the soil, its race in the proudest sense, here builds itself up in a rank order from the simple knighthood to the primus inter pares, the feudal Overlord amongst his Peers. This sets in simultaneously with the architecture of the great cathedrals and the Pyramids — the stone and the blood elevated into symbols, the one meaning, the other being. The idea of feudalism, which has dominated all Springtimes, is the transition from the primitive, purely practical and factual, relationship of potentate to those who obey him (whether they have chosen him or have been subdued by him) into the private law (and, therefore, deeply symbolical) relation of the lord to the vassal. This relation rests entirely upon the ethic of nobility, honor, and loyalty, and conjures up the cruellest conflicts between duty to one’s lord and duty to one’s own family. The decadence of Henry the Lion is a tragic example of it.

The “State” exists here only to the extent of the limits of the feudal tie, and it expands its domain by the entry of alien vassals therein. Service to, and agency for, the ruler — originally personal and limited in time — very soon became the permanent fief which, if it escheated, had to be reassigned (already by 1000 the principle of the West was “No land without a lord”), and from that presently passed to the stage of being hereditary (law of Emperor Conrad II, 28th May 1037). Thereby the formerly immediate subjects of the ruler were mediatized, and henceforth they were only his subjects as being subjects of a vassal of his. Nothing but the strong social interbonding of the Estate ensured the cohesion of what must be called, even under these conditions, the State.

The idea of power and booty are seen here in classic union. When, in 1066, William and his Norman chivalry conquered England, the whole land was made King’s property and fee, and it remains so in name to this day. Here is a true Viking delight in “having,” the care of an Odysseus who begins by counting his treasure.¹⁰ From this booty sense of shrewd conquerors there came, quite suddenly, the famous exchequer practice and officialdom of the early Cultures. It is well to distinguish these officials from the incumbents of the great confidential offices which had arisen out of the older personal agency; they were clerici or clerks, and not ministeriales or ministers — “servants,” but in a prouder sense now. The financial and clerical officialdom is an expression of Care, and it develops in exact proportion with the development of the dynastic idea. Thus in Egypt it reached an astonishingly high level at the very beginning of the Old Kingdom.¹¹ The early Chinese official State described in the Tshou-li is so comprehensive and complicated that the authenticity of the book has been doubted,¹² but in spirit and tendency it corresponds exactly with that of Diocletian, which enabled a feudal order to arise out of an immense fiscal machinery. In the early Classical world it is markedly absent. “Carpe diem” was the motto of Classical economics from the first to last, and in this domain as in others Improvidence, the autarkeia of the Stoics, was elevated into a principle. Even the best calculators were no exception — thus Eubulus in Athens, 330 B.C., managed business with an eye to surpluses, but only to distribute them, when gained, amongst the citizens.

The extreme contrast to Eubulus’s finance is afforded by the canny Vikings of the early West, who by the financial administration of their Norman states laid the foundations of the Faustian economics that extend today over the whole world. It is from the chequered table in the Norman counting house of Robert the Devil (1018-35) that we have the name of the English “Exchequer” and hence the word “cheque.” Here also originated the words “control,” “quittance,” “record.”¹³ Here it was that after 1066 England was organized as booty, with ruthless reduction of the Anglo-Saxons, to serfdom, and here too originated the Norman State of Sicily — for it was not upon nothing that Frederick II of Hohenstaufen later built; his most personal work, the constitutions of Melfi (1231) he did not create, but only (by methods borrowed from the money economics of high Arabian Civilization) polished and perfected. From this center the methodic and descriptive technique of finance spread into the business world of Lombardy and so into all the trading cities and administrations of the West.

But in Feudalism buildup and breakdown lie close together. When the primary estates were still in full bloom and vigor, the future nations, and with them the germ of the State idea proper, were stirring into life. The opposition between temporal and spiritual power and that between crown and vassals was cut across again and again by oppositions of nationhood — German-French even from Otto the Great’s times; German-Italian, which rent Italy between the Guelphs and Ghibellines and destroyed the German Empire; French-English, which brought about the English dominion over western France. Still, all this was far less important than the great decisions within the feudal order itself, where the idea of nationality was unknown. England was broken up into 60,251 fiefs, cataloged in the Domesday Book of 1084 (consulted even today upon occasion), and the strictly organized central power required allegiance to itself even from the sub-tenants of the peers, but all the same it was less than a hundred and fifty years later that Magna Charta was forced through (1215), and actual power transferred from the King to the Parliament of the vassals — made up of great barons and ecclesiastics in the Upper house, gentry and patricians in the Lower — which thenceforward became the support and champion of national development. In France the baronage, in conjunction with the clergy and the towns, forced the calling of the States General in 1302; the General Privilege of Saragossa in 1283 made Aragon into a quasi-republic of nobles ruled by its Cortes, and in Germany a few decades earlier a group of great vassals made the election of the German Kingship dependent upon themselves as Electors.

The mightiest expression that the feudal idea found for itself — not merely in the West, but in any Culture — came out in the struggle between Empire and Papacy, both of which dreamed of a consummation in which the entire world was to become an immense feudal system, and so intimately enwove themselves into the dream that, with the decay of feudalism, both together fell from their heights in lamentable ruin.

The idea of a Ruler whose writ should run throughout the whole historical world, whose Destiny should be that of all mankind, has taken visible shape in, so far, three instances — firstly, in the conception of the Pharaoh as Horus; secondly, in the great Chinese imagining of the Ruler of the Middle, whose domain is tien-hia, everything lying below the heavens;¹⁴ and, thirdly, in early Gothic times. In 962. Otto the Great, answering to the deep mystical sense and yearning for historical and spatial infinity that was sweeping through the world of those days, conceived the idea of the “Holy Roman Empire, German by nation.” But even earlier, Pope Nicolas I (860), still completely involved in Augustinian — that is, Magian — lines of thought, had dreamed of a Papal democracy which was to stand above the princes of this world, and from 1059 Gregory VII with all the prime force of his Faustian nature set out to actualize a papal world dominion under the forms of a universal feudalism, with kings as vassals. The Papacy itself, indeed, under its domestic aspect, constituted the small feudal State of the Campagna, whose noble families controlled the election of popes, and which very rapidly converted the college of cardinals (to which the duty was entrusted from 1059 on) into a sort of noble oligarchy. But under the broader aspect of external policy Gregory VII actually obtained feudal supremacy over the Norman states of England and Sicily, both of which were created with his support, and actually awarded the Imperial crown as Otto the Great had awarded the tiara. But a little later Henry VI of Hohenstaufen succeeded in the opposite sense; even Richard Coeur de Lion swore the vassal’s oath to him for England, and the universal Empire was on the point of becoming a fact when the greatest of all popes, Innocent III (1198-1216) made the papal overlordship of the world real for a short time. England became a Papal fief in 1213; Aragon and Leon and Portugal, Denmark and Poland and Hungary, Armenia and the recently founded Latin Empire in Byzantium followed. But with Innocent’s death disintegration set in within the Church itself, and the great spiritual dignitaries, whom their investitures turned into vassals of the Pope as overlord, soon followed the lay vassals’ example and set about limiting him by means of representative institutions for their order.¹⁵ The notion that a General Council stood higher than a pope was not of religious origin, but arose primarily out of the feudal principle. Its tendency corresponded precisely to that which the English magnates had made good in Magna Charta. In the councils of Constance (1414) and Basel (1431) the last attempts were made to turn the Church, under its temporal aspect, into a clerical feudalism, in which an oligarchy of cardinals would have become the representative of the whole Clerical Estate of the West and taken the place hitherto held by the Roman nobility. But by that time the feudal idea had long taken second place to that of the State, and so the Roman barons won the victory. The field of candidature for the Papacy was limited to the narrowest environs of Rome, and unlimited power over the organizations of the Church was ipso facto secured to the center. As for the Empire, it had long ago become a venerated shadow, like the Egyptian and the Chinese.

In comparison with the immense dynamism of these decisions, the building up of feudalism in the Classical world was slow, static, almost noiseless, so that it is hardly recognizable save from the traces of transition. In the Homeric epos as we have it now, every locality possesses its Basileus, who, it is fairly evident, was once a great vassal — we can see in the figure of Agamemnon the conditions in which the ruler of a wide region took the field with the train of his peers. But in the Greek world the dissolution of the feudal world was associated with the formation of the city-state, the political “point.” In consequence, the hereditary court offices, the archai and timai, the prytaneis, the Archons, and perhaps the original Praetor,¹⁶ were all urban in nature; and the great families therefore developed, not separately in their counties, as in Egypt, China, and the West, but in the closest touch with the city, where they obtained possession of the rights of the King, one after the other, until nothing was left to the ruling house but that which could not be touched because of the gods — namely, the title attaching to its sacrificial function (hence the rex sacrorum). In the later parts of the Homeric epic (c. 800) it is the nobles who invite the king to take his seat, and even unseat him. The Odyssey really knows the kingship only as part of the saga — the actual Ithaca that it shows us is a city dominated by oligarchs.¹⁷ The Spartiates, like the Roman partriciate of the Comitia Curiata, are the product of a feudal relation.¹⁸ In the phiditiae¹⁹ there are evident remains of the old open table of the noble, but the power of the king has sunk to the shadowy dignity of the rex sacrorum of Rome, or the “kings” of Sparta, who were liable to be imprisoned or removed at any time by the Ephors. The essential similarity of these conditions forces us to presume that in Rome the Tarquinian Tyrannis of 500 was preceded by a period of oligarchical dominance, and this view is supported by the unquestionably genuine tradition of the Interrex, a person appointed by the council of the nobles (the Senate) from amongst its own members to act until it should please them to elect a king again.

Here, as elsewhere, there comes a time in which feudalism is falling into decay, but the coming State is not yet completed, the nation not yet “in form.” This is the fearful crisis that emerges everywhere in the shape of the Interregnum, and forms the boundary between the feudal union and the class State. In Egypt feudalism was fully developed by about the middle of the Vth Dynasty. The Pharaoh Asosi gave away his domains literally piece by piece to the vassals, and, further, the rich fiefs of the priesthood were (exactly as in the West) free of taxation and gradually became the permanent property (“mortmain,” as we should say) of the great temples.²⁰ With the Vth Dynasty (c. 2530 B.C.) the “Hohenstaufen” age comes to an end. Under the shadow kingship of the short-lived Vlth Dynasty the princes (rpati) and counts (hetio) become independent; the high offices are all hereditary and the tomb inscriptions show us more and more proud stress upon ancient lineage. That which later Egyptian historians have hidden under the reputed Vllth and Vlllth dynasties²¹ is really half a century of anarchy and lawless conflicts between princes for each other’s domains or for the Pharaoh title. In China, even I-Wang (934-909) was obliged by his vassals to give out all conquered lands, and to do so to sub-tenants nominated by them. In 842 Li-Wang was forced, with his heir, to flee, and the administration of the Empire was carried on by two individual princes. In this interregnum began the fall of the House of Chôu and the decline of the Imperial name into an honorable but meaningless title. It is the corresponding picture to that of the Interregnum in Germany, which began in 1254 and brought the Imperial power to its nadir of 1400 under Wenceslaus, simultaneously with the Renaissance style of the condottieri and the complete decay of the Papal power. After the death of Boniface VIII, who in 1302 had once again asserted the feudal power of the Papacy in the Bull Unam sanctum and had consequently been arrested by the representatives of France, the Papacy experienced a century of banishment, anarchy, and impotence, while in the following century the Norman nobility of England for the most part perished in the contest of the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne.

IV

What this fall of Papacy and Empire meant was the victory of State over Estate. At the root of the feudal system there had been the feeling that the purpose of existence was that a “life” should be led in the light of what it meant. History was exhaustively comprised in the destinies of noble blood. But now the feeling sprang up that there was something else besides, something to which even nobility was subordinate, and which it shared with all other classes (whether of status or of vocation), something intangible, an idea. Events came to be viewed, no longer from a frankly private law standpoint, but under a “public” law aspect. The State might (and almost without exception did) remain aristocratic to its core; its outward appearance might be scarcely altered by the transition from the feudal group to the Class State; the idea that those outside the Estates possessed rights as well as duties might be still unknown; but the feeling had become different, and the consciousness that Life existed to be lived on the heights of history had given way to the other sentiment, that it contained a task. The difference becomes very distinct when we contrast the policy of Rainald van Dassel (d. 1167) — one of the greatest German statesmen of all periods — with that of the Emperor Charles IV (d. 1378), and consider in parallel therewith the transition in Classical feeling from the “Themis” of the knightly age to the “Dike” of the growing Polis.²² Themis involves only a claim, Dike implies a task as well.

The State idea in its sturdy youth is always — and self-evidently, with a naturalness rooted deep in animality itself — bound up with the conception of an individual ruler. The same holds good, with the same self-evidence, for every roused crowd in every decisive situation — as every riotous assembly and every moment of sudden danger demonstrates afresh. Such crowds are units of feeling, but blind. They are “in form” for the onrush of events only when they are in the hands of the leader, who suddenly appears in their midst, is set at the head in a moment by that very unity of feeling, and finds an unconditional obedience. This process repeats itself in the formation of the great life units that we call peoples and States, only more slowly and with surer meaning. In the high Cultures it is sometimes set aside or set back in favor of other modes of being “in form,” for the sake of a great symbol and artificially; but even then under the mask of these forms we practically always find de facto an individual rulership, whether it be that of a King’s adviser or a party leader; and in every revolutionary upheaval the original state of things reappears.

With this cosmic fact is bound up one of the most intimately inward traits of all directional life, the inherited will, which presents itself with the force of a natural phenomenon in every strong race and compellingly urges even the momentary leader (often quite unconsciously) to uphold his rank for the duration of his personal existence or, beyond it, for that of his blood streaming on through children and grandchildren. The same deep and plantlike trait inspires every real following, which feels in the continuance of the blood of leadership both a surety for and a symbol of the continuance of its own. It is precisely in revolutions that this primitive instinct comes out, full and strong and regardless of all principles. Precisely because of it the France of 1800 saw not only Napoleon, but also his hereditary position, as the true fulfillment of the Revolution. Theorists who, like Marx and Rousseau, start from conceptual ideals instead of from blood facts have never grasped this immense force that dwells in the historical world, and have in consequence labeled its manifested effects as damnable and reactionary. But they are there, and with a force so insistent that even the symbolism of the high Cultures can only override them temporarily and artificially, as is shown in the engrossing of elective officers by particular families in the Classical, and the nepotism of the Baroque popes in our own case. Behind the fact that leadership is very often freely resigned, and the saying that “merit should rule,” there is practically always the rivalry of magnates, who have no objection of principle to hereditary rulership, but prevent it in practice because each one of them secretly claims it for his own blood. This state of active, creative jealousy is the foundation on which the forms of Classical oligarchy are built up.

The combination of both elements produces the idea of Dynasty. This is so deeply rooted in the Cosmic and so closely interwoven into the factual web of historical life that the State ideas of each and all the Cultures are modifications of this one principle, from the passionate affirmative of the Faustian to the resolute negative of the Classical Soul. The ripening of the State idea of a Culture is associated with the city and even the adolescence of the city. Nations, historical peoples, are town building peoples. The capital takes the place of the castle and the palace as the center of high history, and in it the feeling of the exercise of power, Themis, transforms itself into that of government, Dike. Here feudal unity is inwardly overcome by national, even in the consciousness of the First Estate itself, and here the bare fact of rulership elevates itself into the symbol of Sovereignty.

And so, with the sinking of feudalism, Faustian history becomes dynastic history. From little centers where princely families have their seats (whence they “spring,” as the phrase goes, reminding us of plant and property), the shaping of nations proceeds — nations of strictly aristocratic constitution, but yet so that the State conditions the being of the Estate. The genealogical principle already ruling in the feudal nobility and the yeoman families, the expression of the feeling for expanse and the will-to-history, has become so powerful that the appearance of nations transcending the strong unities of language and landscape is dependent upon the destinies of ruling houses. Marriages and deaths sever or unite the blood of whole populations. Where a Lotharingian and a Burgundian dynasty failed to take shape, there also nations already embryonic failed to develop. The doom that overhung the Hohenstaufen involved more than the imperial crown. For Germany and Italy it meant for centuries a deep unsatisfied longing for a united German-Italian nation, while the House of Habsburg, on the contrary, enabled, not a German, but an Austrian nation to develop.

In the Magian world, with its cavern feeling, the dynastic principle was quite otherwise constituted. The Classical princeps, the legitimate successor of tyrants and tribunes, was the embodiment of the Demos. As Janus was the door and Vesta the hearth, so Caesar was the people. He was the last creation of Orphic religiousness. The “Dominus et Deus,” on the contrary, was Magian, a Shah participating in the divine Fire (the hvareno of the Mazdaist empire of the Sassanids, which becomes the aureole in Pagan and Christian Byzantium), which radiates about him and makes him pius, felix, invictus (the last named, from Commodus’s reign, his official title).²³ In Byzantium in the third century of our era the ruler type underwent the same transition as was implied in the taking down of Augustus’s civil service state to build Diocletian’s feudalism. “The new creation begun by Aurelian and Probus and built up on the ruins by Diocletian and Constantine was about as alien to the Classical world and the principate as the empire of Charlemagne.”²⁴ The Magian ruler governed the visible portion of the general Consensus of the orthodox, which was Church, State, and Nation in one, as Augustine described it in his Civitas Dei. The Western ruler is by the grace of God monarch in the historical world; his people is subordinated to him because God has invested him with it. But in matters of faith he is himself a subordinate — to God’s Vicar on earth, or to his own conscience, as the case may be. That is the separation of State authority and Church authority, the great Faustian conflict between Time and Space. When, in 800, the Pope crowned the Emperor, he chose a new ruler for himself in order that he himself might thrive. Whereas the Emperor in Byzantium was, according to Magian world feeling, his spiritual as well as his secular superior, an Emperor in the Frank lands was his servant in spiritual matters, besides being (perhaps) his arm in secular affairs. As an idea, the Papacy could arise only by separation from the Caliphate, for the Pope is included in the Caliph.

For this very reason, however, the choice of the Magian ruler cannot be bound down to a genealogical succession law. It issues from the consensus of the ruling blood kindred, out of whom the Holy Ghost speaks and designates the Chosen One. When Theodosius died, in 550, a relative, the nun Pulcheria, formally gave her hand to the old senator Marcianus, thereby incorporating this statesman in the family and securing the throne to him and continuance to the “dynasty”;²⁵ and this act, like many similar occurrences in the Sassanid and Abbassid houses, was taken as the outcome of a hint from above.

In China, the Emperor idea of the early Chôu period, which was strictly bound up with feudalism, soon became a dream, which, rapidly and with increasing distinctness, came to reflect a whole preceding world in the form of three dynasties of Emperors and myth Emperors more ancient still.²⁶ But, for the dynasties of the system of states that thereupon grew up (in which the title King, Wang, came at last into perfectly general use) strict rules came into force for royal successions, legitimacy — a notion quite alien to the early time — became a power to conjure with,²⁷ and extinction of lines, adoptions and mésalliances led, as in the Baroque of the West, to innumerable wars of succession.²⁸ Some principle of legitimacy, too, surely underlay the remarkable fact that the rulers of the Egyptian Xllth dynasty, with whom the late period of the Culture ended, had their sons crowned during their own lifetime.²⁹ The inward relationship between these three dynastic ideas is yet another proof that Being in these three Cultures was akin.

It requires a close insight into the political form language of the Classical world to perceive that here also the course of things was exactly the same, and that it comprised not only the transition from feudal union to class State, but even the dynastic principle as well. Classical being, indeed, said no to everything that might draw it into distances either of space or of time, and even in the fact world of history ringed itself with creations that had something of the defensive in them. But all this narrowing and curtailing presupposes the thing against which it is striving to maintain itself. The Dionysiac squandering, and the Orphic negation, of the Classical body contained in the very form of their protest the Apollinian ideal of perfect bodily being.

Individual rulership and the will to transmit to heirs were unmistakably taken for granted in the oldest kingship.³⁰ But they had become questionable even by 800, as the role of Telemachus in the older parts of the Odyssey indicates. The royal title was frequently borne by great vassals and the most conspicuous of the nobles. In Sparta and in Lycia there were two of them, and in the Phaeacian city of the epic and in many actual cities there were more. Next comes the splitting off of offices from dignities. Lastly, the kingship itself becomes an office which the nobility confers (though at first, perhaps, only upon members of the old royal family); thus in Sparta the Ephors, as representing the First Estate, were in no wise limited in their choice by rule; and in Corinth from about 750 the royal clan of the Bacchiadae abolished hereditary succession, and on each occasion set up a prytaneus with royal rank from within their own body. The great offices, which likewise were hereditary at first, came to be for one life only, then were limited to a term, and lastly became annual, and, further, were so arranged that there were more holders than offices, and the leadership was exercised by each in turn — the custom which, as is well known, led to the disaster of Cannae. These annual offices, from the Etruscan annual dictature³¹ to the Doric ephorate (which is found in Heraclea and Messene as well as Sparta) are firmly bound up with the essence of the Polis, and they reach their full structure about 650. Exactly at the corresponding date of the Western class State (end of the fifteenth century), the hereditary power of dynasties was being secured by the Emperor Maximilian and his marriage politics (against the claims of the Electors), by Ferdinand of Aragon, Henry VII of England, and Louis XI of France.³²

But with the increasing emphasis upon the Classical here and now, the priesthood, which had the beginnings of an Estate in it, becamepari passu a mere aggregate of city officials. The capital, so to call it, of the Homeric kingship, instead of being the center for the radiation of State influence in all directions into the distance, contracted its magic circle until State and city became identical. Thereby, of course, the nobility was fused with the patriciate, and if even in the Gothic the representation of the young cities (for example, the English Commons or the French States General) was exclusively by patricians, how much more so in the powerful city-state of the Classical! Not indeed in idea, but in fact, it was a pure kingless aristocratic State. The strictly Apollinian “form” of the growing Polis is called oligarchy.

And thus, at the close of the early periods of both these Cultures, we see two principles parallel and contrasted, the Faustian-genealogical and the Apollinian-oligarchic; two kinds of constitutional law, of Dike. The one is supported by an unmeasured sense of expanse, reaches back deep into the past with form tradition, thinks forward with the same intense will-to-endure into the remotest future; but in the present, too, works for political effectiveness over broad expanses by well considered dynastic marriages and by the truly Faustian, dynamic, and contrapuntal politics that we call diplomacy. The other, wholly corporeal and statuesque, is self-limited by its policy of autarkeia to the nearest and the most immediate present, and at every point stoutly denies that which Western being affirms.

Both the dynastic state and the city-state presuppose the city itself. But there is this difference, that a seat of government in the West, though it may be (and frequently is) far from being the greatest city of the land, is a force center in a field of political tensions such that every occurrence, in however remote a corner, vibrates generally throughout the whole — whereas in the Classical, life huddles closer and closer until it reaches the grotesque phenomenon of Synoecism — the very acme of the Euclidean will-to-form in the political world. It is impossible to imagine the State unless and until the nation sits physically concentrated in one heap, as one body; it must be seen, and even seen “at a glance.” And while the Faustian tendency is more and more to diminish the number of dynastic centers — so that even Maximilian I could see looming in the distance a dynastically secure universal monarchy of his house — the Classical world fell apart into innumerable petty points, which, almost as soon as they came into existence, started to do that which for Classical mankind was almost a necessity of thought and the purest expression of autarkeia — to destroy one another.³³

Synoecism with its consequence, the creation of the Polis type proper, was exclusively the work of aristocracy. It was they that established the Classical city-state, and for themselves alone; it was the drawing together of country nobility and patriciate that brought it into form. The vocational classes were already on the spot, and the peasantry ceased to count from the class point of view. And by the concentration of noble power at one point the kingship of the feudal period was shattered.

With these glimpses into Greece to go upon, we may venture, though under all reserves of course, to outline the history of primitive Rome. The Roman synoecism — the assembling of widely scattered noble families — is identical with the “founding” of the city, an Etruscan undertaking of the beginning of the seventh century.³⁴ Facing the royal stronghold of the Capitol, there had long been two other settlements on the Palatine and the Quirinal. To the first of these belonged the ancient goddess Diva Rumina³⁵ and the Etruscan Ruma clan;³⁶ the god of the second was Quirinus Pater. From these comes the dual name of Romans and “Quirites,” and the dual priesthoods of the Salii and Luperci, which adhered to the two hills. Now, as the three blood tribes named Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres are in all probability common to all Etruscan localities, they must have existed in both of those which concern us here; and thus are explained, on the one hand, the number six of centuries of equites, of military tribunes, of aristocratic Vestals, and, on the other, the number two of the praetors (or consuls) who were, quite early, attached to the King as representatives of the nobles and gradually deprived him of all influence. Already by 600 the constitution of Rome must have been a strong oligarchy of “Patres” with a shadow kingship³⁷ as figurehead. Thus both the older theory of an expulsion of the kings, and the newer of a slow disintegration of the royal power, can stand side by side after all, the former as referring to the fall of the Tarquinian Tyrannis, which (as everywhere else in the Classical world — Pisistratus in Athens, for example) had set itself up in opposition to the oligarchy about the middle of the sixth century; the latter as referring to the slow disintegration of the feudal power of the (may we say) Homeric kingship by the aristocratic city-state, before the “foundation,” so called — the crisis, probably, in which the praetors emerged, as the Archons and Ephors emerged elsewhere.

This Polis was no less strictly aristocratic than the Western class State, with its nobility, clergy, and higher burgesses. The residue of the people belonging to it was merely its object, but — in the West the object of its political care, and in the Classical the object of its political carelessness. For here “Carpe diem” was the motto of the oligarchy as well as of others. It proclaims itself aloud in the poems of Theognis and the Song of Hybrias the Cretan. It made Classical finance till right into its latest phases — from the piracy practiced by Polycrates upon his own people to the proscriptions of the Roman Triumvirs — into a more or less hand to mouth seizing of resources for the moment. In jurisprudence it emerges with unparalleled logic in the limitation of Roman edict law to the term of office of the one year praetor. And, lastly, it is seen in the ever growing practice of filling military, legal, and administrative offices (particularly the moreimportant of them) by lot — a kind of homage to Tyche, the goddess of the Moment.

This was the Classical world’s manner of being politically “in form” and, correspondingly, of thinking and feeling. There are no exceptions. The Etruscans were as much under its domination as the Dorians and the Macedonians. When Alexander and his successors dotted the Orient far and wide with their Hellenistic cities, they did so without conscious choice, for they could not imagine any other form of political organization. Antioch was to be Syria, and Alexandria Egypt. The latter, under the Ptolemies and later under the Caesars, was, not indeed legally, but certainly in practice, a Polis on a vast scale — for the country outside, long reverted to townless fellahdom and managed by immemorial precedents, stood at its gates like an alien frontier.³⁸ The Roman Imperium was nothing but the last and greatest Classical city-state standing on foundations of a colossal synoecism. Under Marcus Aurelius the rhetor Aristides could say with perfect justification that it had “brought together this world in the name of one city: wheresoever a man may be born in it, it is at its center that he dwells.” Even the conquered populations of the Empire — the wandering desert tribes, the upland valley communities of the Alps — were constituted as civitates. Livy thinks invariably in the forms of the city-state, and for Tacitus provincial history simply does not exist. When, in 49, Pompey, withdrawing before Caesar, gave up Rome as militarily unimportant and betook himself to the East to create there a firm base of operations, he was doomed. Giving up the city, he had, in the eyes of the ruling classes, given up the State. To them Rome was all.³⁹

These city-states were in principle inextensible. Their number could increase, but not their ambit. The notion that the transformation of the Roman clientela into a voting plebs, and the creation of the country tribes, meant a breach in the Polis idea is incorrect. It was in Rome as in Attica — the whole life of the State remained as before limited to one point, which was the Agora, the Forum. However far away those to whom citizenship was granted might live — in Hannibal’s day it might be anywhere in Italy, and later anywhere in the world — the exercise of his political right depended upon personal presence in the Forum. Hence the majority of the citizens were, not legally, but practically without influence in political business.⁴⁰ What citizenship meant for them, therefore, was simply the duty of military service and the enjoyment of the city’s domestic law.⁴¹ But even for the citizen coming to Rome, political power was limited by a second and artificial synoecism which came into existence after, and as the result of, enfranchisement of the peasant, and can only be understood as an unconscious effort to maintain the idea of the Polis strictly unimpaired; the new citizens were inscribed, regardless of their numbers, in a very few tribes (eight, under the Lex Julia), and were always, therefore, in a minority in the Comitia relatively to the citizens of the older franchise.

And naturally so, for this civitas was regarded through and through as one body, a σῶμα. That which did not belong to it was out of its law, hostis. The gods and the heroes stood above, the slave (not quite to be called human, according to Aristotle) below, this aggregate of persons. But the individual was a ζῶον πολιτικόν in a sense that would be regarded by us, who think and live in our expanse feeling, as an utter slavery; he existed only by reason of his membership of an individual Polis. Owing to this Euclidean feeling, the nobility as a self-contained body was at first synonymous with the Polis — to such an extent, indeed, that even in the Twelve Tables marriage between patricians and plebeians was forbidden and the Spartan Ephors began their term of office, according to ancient custom, with a declaration of war against the Helots. The relation was reversed whenever in consequence of a revolution the non-noble became the Demos — but its meaning remained. As in inward, so also in outward relationships, the body politic was the foundation of all events throughout Classical history. The cities, hundreds of them, lay in wait for each other, each as self-gathered, politically and economically, as it was possible to make it, ready to bite, letting fly on the smallest excuse, and having as its war aim, not the extension of its own state, but the extinction of the other side’s. Wars ended with the destruction of the enemy’s city and the killing or enslavement of his citizens, just as revolutions ended with the massacre or expulsion of the losers and the confiscation of their property by the victorious party. The natural interstate condition of the West is a close network of diplomatic relations, which may be broken through by wars; but the Classical law of nations assumes war as a normal condition, interrupted from time to time by peace treaties, and a declaration of war merely reestablished the natural state of policy. Only so do the forty and fifty year peace treaties, spondai (such as the famous one of Nicias in 421), become intelligible, as temporary guarantee treaties.

These two State forms, with the styles of policy appropriate to each, are assured by the close of the Early period. The State idea has triumphed over the feudal union, but it is the Estates that carry that idea, and the nation has political existence only as their sum.

V

With the beginning of the Late period there is a decisive turn, where city and country are in equilibrium and the powers proper to the city, money and brains, have become so strong that they feel themselves, as non-estate, an equal match for the old Estates. It is the moment when the State idea finally rises superior to the Estates and begins to set up in their place the concept of the Nation.

The State has fought and won to its rights along a line of advance from feudal union to the aristocratic State. In the latter the Estates exist only with reference to the State, instead of vice versa, but, on the other hand, the disposition of things is such that the Government only meets the governed nation when and insofar as the nation is class ordered. Everyone belongs to the nation, but only an elite to the classes, and these alone count politically.

But the nearer the State approaches its pure form, and the more it becomes absolute — that is, independent of any other form ideal — the more heavily the concept of the nation tells against that of class, and there comes a moment when the nation is governed as such, and distinctions of “standing” become purely social. Against this evolution — which is one of the necessities of the Culture, inevitable, irrevocable — the old noble and priestly classes make one more effort of resistance. For them, now, everything is at stake — the heroic and the saintly, the old law, rank, blood — and, from their point of view, against what?

In the West this struggle of the old Estates against the State power took the form of the Fronde. In the Classical world, where there was no dynasty to represent the future and the aristocracy alone had political existence, we find that a dynastic or quasi-dynastic embodiment of the State idea actually formed itself, and, supported by the non-privileged part of the nation, raised this latter for the first time to power. That was the mission of the Tyrannis.

In this change from the class State to the absolute State, which allowed no measures of validity but its own, the dynasties of the West — and those of Egypt and of China likewise — called the non-estate to their aid, thereby recognizing it as a political quantity. Herein lies the real importance of the struggle against the Fronde, in which, initially, the powers of the greater cities could not but see advantage to themselves, for here the ruler was standing forth in the name of the State, the care of all, and he was fighting the nobility because it wanted to uphold the Estate as a political magnitude.

In the Polis, on the contrary, where the State consisted exclusively in the form and embodied no hereditary head, the necessity of bringing out the unclassed on behalf of the State idea produced the Tyrannis, in which a family or a faction of the nobility itself assumed the dynastic role, without which action on the part of the Third Estate would have been impossible. Late Classical historians were too remote from this process to seize its meaning, and dealt with it merely in terms of externals of private life. In reality, the Tyrannis was the State, and oligarchy opposed it under the banner of class, it rested, therefore, upon the support of peasants and burghers — in Athens (c. 580) the Diakrii and Paralii parties. Therefore, again, it backed the Dionysiac and Orphic cults against the Apollinian; thus in Attica Pisistratus forced the worship of Dionysus⁴² on the peasantry, in Sicyon Clisthenes forbade the recital of the Homeric poems,⁴³ and in Rome it was almost certainly in the time of the Tarquins that the trinity Demeter (Ceres), Dionysus, Kore was introduced.⁴⁴ Its temple was dedicated in 483 by Spurius Cassius, the same who perished later in an attempt to reintroduce the Tyrannis. The Ceres temple was the sanctuary of the Plebs, and its managers, the sediles, were their trusted spokesmen before the tribunate was ever heard of.⁴⁵ The Tyrants, like the princes of the Western Baroque, were liberals in a broad sense of the word that ceased to be possible for them in the subsequent stage of bourgeois dominance. But the Classical also began at that time to pass round the word that “money makes the man (χρήματ᾿ ῾ανήρ)”⁴⁶ The sixth century Tyrannis brought the Polis idea to its conclusions and created the constitutional concept of the Citizen, the Polites, the Civis, the sum of these, irrespective of their class provenance, forming the soma of the city-state. When, therefore, the oligarchy contrived to win after all — thanks once more to the Classical craving for the present, and the consequent fear and hatred evoked by the quasi-will-to-duration of the dynasts — the concept of the citizen was there, firmly established, and the non-patrician had learned to regard himself as an estate vis-à-vis a “rest.” He had become a political party — the word “democracy” (in its specifically Classical sense) now acquired a really serious content — and what he set himself to do was, no longer to come to the aid of the State, but to be himself the State as the nobility had been before. He began to count — money and heads, for the money census and the general franchise are alike bourgeois weapons — whereas an aristocracy does not count, but values, and votes not by heads, but by classes. As the absolute State came out of Fronde and First Tyrannis, so it perished in French Revolution and Second Tyrannis. In this second conflict, which is already one of defense, the dynasty returns to the side of the nobility in order to guard the State idea against a new class rule, that of the bourgeois.

In Egypt, too, the period between Fronde and Revolution is hallmarked. It is the Middle Kingdom. The Xllth Dynasty (2000-1788) — in particular Amenemhet I and Sesostris I — had established the absolute State in severe conflicts with the baronage. The first of these rulers, as a famous poem of the time relates, barely escaped from a court conspiracy, and the biography of Sinuhet⁴⁷ shows us that after his death, which was kept secret for a time, rebellion threatened. The third was murdered by palace officials. We learn from the inscriptions in the family grave of the earl Chmenotep⁴⁸ that the cities had become rich and almost independent, and warred with each other. Certainly they cannot have been smaller at that time than the Greek cities at the time of the Persian Wars. It was on them and on a certain number of loyal magnates that the dynasty rested.⁴⁹ Finally, Sesostris III (1887-1850) succeeded in completely abolishing feudal nobility. Thenceforward there was only a court nobility and a single, admirably ordered bureau State;⁵⁰ but already some lamented that people of standing were reduced to misery and that the “sons of nobodies” enjoyed rank and consideration.⁵¹ Democracy was beginning and the great social evolution of the Hyksos period was brewing.

The corresponding place in China is that of the Ming Chu (or Pa, 685-591). These were Protectors of princely origin, who exercised an unconstitutional, but none the less real, power over a world of states weltering in anarchy, and called congresses of princes for the restoration of order and the recognition of stable political principles, even summoning the “Ruler of the Middle” himself (now become totally unimportant) out of the house of Chôu. The first was Hwang of Tsi (d. 645), who called the Diet of 659 and of whom Confucius wrote that he had rescued China from a reversion to barbarism. Their name Ming-dshu became later, like the word “tyrant,” a term of obloquy, because later men were unwilling to see in the phenomenon anything but a power unauthorized by law — but it is beyond all question that these great diplomatists were an element working with a devoted care for the State and the historical future against the old Estates, and supported by the young classes of mind and money. It is a high Culture that speaks to us in the little that we so far know about them from Chinese sources. Some were writers; others selected philosophers to be their ministers. It is a matter of indifference whether we mentally parallel them with Richelieu or with Wallenstein or with Periander — in any case it is with them that the “people” first emerges as a political quantity.⁵² It is the outlook and high diplomacy of genuine Baroque — the absolute State sets itself up in principle as the opponent of the aristocratic State, and wins through.

In this lies the close parallelism of these events with the Fronde of Western Europe. In France the Crown after 1614 ceased to summon the State General, this body having shown itself to be too strong for the united forces of State and bourgeoisie. In England Charles I similarly tried to govern without Parliament after 1618. In Germany, at the same time, the Thirty Years’ War broke out. The magnitude of its religious significance is apt to overshadow for us the other issue involved, and it must not be forgotten that it was also an effort to bring to a decision the struggle between imperial power and the Fronde of the great electors, and that between the individual princes and the lesser Frondes of their local estate assemblies. But the center of world politics then lay in Spain. There, in conjunction with the high courtesies generally, the diplomatic style of the Baroque had evolved in the cabinet of Philip II; and the dynastic principle — which embodied the absolute State vis-à-vis the Cortes — had attained to its highest development in the course of the long struggle with the House of Bourbon. The attempt to align England also in the Spanish system had failed under Philip II, when Queen Mary, his wife, was disappointed of an heir already expected and announced. But now, under Philip IV, the idea of a universal monarchy spanning the oceans revived — no longer the mystic dream monarchy of the early Gothic, the “Holy Roman Empire, German by nation,” but the tangible ideal of a world dominion in Habsburg hands, which was to center in Madrid and to have the solid possession of India and America and the already sensible power of money as its foundations. It was at this time, too, that the Stuarts were tempted to secure their endangered position by marrying the heir of the English and Scottish thrones to a Spanish Infanta; but in the end Madrid preferred to link itself with its own collateral line in Vienna, and so James I readdressed his marriage alliance proposals to the opposition party of the Bourbons. The futile complications of this family policy contributed more than anything else to bind the Puritan movement and the English Fronde into one great Revolution.

In these great decisions the actual occupants of the thrones were — as in “contemporary” China — only secondary figures compared with great individual statesmen, in whose hands the fate of the West rested for whole decades. Olivarez in Madrid and the Spanish Ambassador Onate in Vienna were then the most powerful personages in Europe. Their opponents were Wallenstein, standing for the Empire idea in Germany, and Richelieu, standing for the absolute State in France — and these were succeeded a little later by Mazarin in France, Cromwell in England, Oldenbarneveldt in Holland, Oxenstierna in Sweden. Not until the Great Elector of Brandenburg do we meet again a monarch having political importance of his own.

Wallenstein, unconsciously, began where the Hohenstaufen had stopped. Since the death of Frederick II, in 1250, the power of the Estates of the Empire had become unlimited, and it was against them, and as champion of an absolute emperor’s state, that he fought during the first tenure of command. Had he been a greater diplomatist, had he been clearer and above all more resolute (for actually he was timid in the presence of decisive turnings), and had he, in particular, taken the trouble as Richelieu did to bring the person of the monarch under his influence — then probably it would have been all up with princedom within the Empire. He saw in these princes rebels, to be unseated and dispossessed of their lands; at the peak of his power (end of 1629), when militarily he held Germany in the hollow of his hand, he said aloud in conversation that the Emperor ought to be master in the Empire as the Kings of France and Spain were masters of their own. His army, which was “self supporting” and by reason of its numbers also independent of the Estates, was the first instance in German history of an Imperial army of European significance; in comparison with it Tilly’s army of the Fronde (for that was what the League really was) counted for little. When Wallenstein, in 1628, leaguered before Stralsund, visualizing a Habsburg sea power in the Baltic wherewith to take the Bourbon system in the rear — and just then Richelieu was besieging La Rochelle, with better fortune — hostilities between himself and the League had become almost unavoidable. He absented himself from the Diet of Regensburg in 1630, saying that its seat “would presently be in Paris.” This was the most serious political error of his life, for in his absence the Frondist Electors defeated the Emperor by threatening to displace him in favor of Louis XIII, and forced him to dismiss his general. And with that, though it did not realize the consequence of the step, the central power in Germany gave away its army. Henceforth Richelieu supported the greater Fronde in Germany with the object of breaking the Spanish power there, while on the other side Olivarez, and Wallenstein as soon as he regained his power, allied themselves with the French aristocrats, who thereupon took the offensive under the Queen mother and Gaston of Orleans. But the Imperial power had missed its grand chance. The Cardinal won in both games. In 1632 he executed the last of the Montmorencys⁵³ and brought the Catholic Electors of Germany into open alliance with France. And thenceforward Wallenstein, becoming unsure of his own final purposes, learned more and more against the Spanish idea, thinking that he could keep the Empire idea clear of it, and so ipso facto approached nearer and nearer to the standpoint of the Estates — like Marshal Turenne in the French Fronde a few years later. This was the decisive turn in later German history. With Wallenstein’s secession the absolute emperor state became impossible, and his murder in 1634 did not remedy matters, for the Emperor had no substitute to take his place.

And yet it was just then that the conjuncture was favorable once more. For in 1640 the decisive conflict between Crown and estates broke out simultaneously in Spain, France, and England. In almost every Spanish province the Cortes rose against Olivarez; Portugal, and with it India and Africa, fell away forever, and it took years to regain even Catalonia and Naples. In England — just as in the Thirty Years’ War — the constitutional conflict between the Crown and the gentry who dominated the Commons was carefully separated from the religious side of the Revolution, deep as was the interpenetration of the two. But the growing resistance that Cromwell encountered in the lower class in particular — which drove him, all unwillingly, into military dictatorship — and the later popularity of the restored monarchy show the extent to which, over and above all religious differences, aristocratic interest had been concerned in bringing about the fall of the dynasty.

At the very time of Charles I’s trial and execution an insurrection in Paris was forcing the French Court to flee. Men shouted for a republic and built barricades. Had Cardinal de Retz been more of a Cromwell, victory of the Estates over Mazarin would have been at least a possibility. But the issue of this grand general crisis of the West was determined by the weight and the destinies of a few personalities, and took shape in such a way that it was in England alone that the Fronde (represented by Parliament) subjected the State and the kingship to its control — confirming this control, in the “glorious Revolution” of 1688, so permanently that even today essential parts of the old Norman State continue established. In France and Spain the kingship won unqualified victory. In Germany the Peace of Westphalia placed the Fronde of the greater princes in an English relation towards the Emperor and in the French relation towards the lesser Fronde of the local princes. In the Empire as such, the Estates ruled; in its provinces, the Dynasty. Thenceforth the Imperial dignity, like the English kingship, was a name, surrounded by relics of Spanish stateliness dating from the early Baroque; while the individual princes, like the leading families of the English aristocracy, succumbed to the model of Paris and their duodecimo absolutism was, politically and socially, bound in the Versailles style. So, in this field and in that, the decision fell in favor of the Bourbons and against the Habsburgs, a decision already visible to all men in the Peace of the Pyrenees of 1659.

With this epochal turn the State, which as a possibility is inherent in every Culture, was actualized and attained to such a height of “condition” as could neither be surpassed nor for long maintained. Already there is a quiet breath of autumn in the air when Frederick the Great is entertaining at Sans Souci. These are the years too, in which the great special arts attain to their last, most refined, and most intellectual maturity — side by side with the fine orators of the Athenian Agora there are Zeuxis and Praxiteles, side by side with the filigree of Cabinet diplomacy the music of Bach and Mozart.

This cabinet politics has itself become a high art, an artistic satisfaction to all who have a finger in it, marvelous in its subtlety and elegance, courtly, refined, working mysteriously at great distances — for already Russia, the North American colonies, even the Indian states are put into play in order by the mere weight of surprising combinations to bring about decisions at quite other points on the globe. It is a game with strict rules, a game of intercepted letters and secret confidants, of alliances and congresses within a system of governments which even then was called (with deep meaning) the “concert” of the powers — full of noblesse and esprit, to use the phrases of the period, a mode of keeping history “in form” never and nowhere else imagined, or even imaginable.

In the Western world, whose sphere of influence is already almost the sphere itself, the period of the absolutist State covers scarcely a century and a half — from 1660, when Bourbon triumphed over Habsburg in the Peace of the Pyrenees and the Stuarts returned to England, to the Coalition Wars directed against the French Revolution, in which London triumphed over Paris, or, if one prefers it so, over that Congress of Vienna in which the old diplomacy, that of blood and not money, gave the world its grand farewell performance. Corresponding periods are the Age of Pericles between the First and the Second Tyrannis, and the Tshun-tsiu, “Spring and Autumn,” as the Chinese call the time, between the Protectors and the “Contending States.”

In this last phase of dignified politics with forms traditional but not popular, familiar but not smiled at, the culminating points are marked by the extinction of the two Habsburg lines in quick succession and the diplomatic and warlike events that throng in 1700-1710 round the Spanish, and in 1740-1760 round the Austrian succession.⁵⁴ It is the climax also of the genealogical principle. Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Austria, nube! was indeed “an extension of war by other means.” The phrase indeed was coined long before (in connection with Maximilian I), but it was not until now that it reached its fullest effects. Fronde Wars pass over into Succession Wars, decided upon in cabinets and fought out chivalrously by small armies and according to strict conventions.⁵⁵ What was contended for was the heritage of half the world which the marriage politics of early Baroque had brought together in Habsburg hands. The State is still “well up to form”; the nobility has become a loyal aristocracy of court and service, carrying on the wars of the Crown and organizing its administration. Side by side with the France of Louis XIV, there presently arose in Prussia a masterpiece of State organization. From the conflicts of the Great Elector with his Estates (1660) to the death of Frederick the Great (who received Mirabeau in audience three years before the Fall of the Bastille) Prussia’s road is the same as France’s, and the outcome in each case is a State which was in every point the opposite of the English order.

For the situation was otherwise in the Empire and in England. There the Frondes had won, and the nations were governed, not absolutely, but aristocratically. But between England and the Empire, again, there was the immense difference that England, as an island, could largely dispense with govern mental watchfulness, and that her peers in the Upper House and her gentry in the Lower founded their actions on the self-evidentness of England’s greatness;⁵⁶ whereas in the Empire the upper stratum of the land princes — with the Diet at Regensburg as their Upper House — were chiefly concerned with educating into distinct “peoples” the fragments of the nation that had accidentally fallen to their respective hands, and with marking off their scattered bits of fatherland as strictly as possible from other “peoples’” bits. In place of the world horizon that there had been in Gothic days, provincial horizon was cultivated by thought and deed. The idea of the Nation itself was abandoned to the realm of dreams — that other world which is not of race but of language, not of Destiny but of Causality. And in it arose the idea, and finally the fact, of the “people” as conceived by poets and thinkers, who founded themselves a republic in the clouds of verse and logic and at last came to believe that politics consisted in idealistic writing and reading and speaking, and not in deed and resolve — so that even today real deeds and resolves are confused with mere expressions of inclination.

In England the victory of the gentry and the Declaration of Rights (1689) in reality put an end to the State. Parliament put William III on his throne, just as later it prevented George I and George II from vacating theirs, in the interest of its class. The word “State,” which had been current as early as the Tudors, fell into disuse — it has become impossible to translate into English either Louis XIV’s “L’état ’cest moi” or Frederick the Great’s “Ich bin der erste Diener meiner Staates.” On the other hand, the word “society” established itself as the expression of the fact that the nation was “in form” under the class and not under the state regime; the same word that with a significant misunderstanding Rousseau and the Continental rationalists generally took over to express the hatred of the Third Estate for authority.⁵⁷ But in England authority as “the Government” was clear cut and well understood. From George I onwards its center was the Cabinet, a body which constitutionally did not exist at all⁵⁸ and factually was an executive committee of the faction of the nobility in command for the time being. Absolutism existed, but it was the absolutism of a class delegation. The idea of “lèse majeste” was transferred to Parliament, as the immunity of the Roman kings passed to the tribunes. The genealogical principle is there, too, but it is expressed in the family relations within the higher nobility and the influence of the same upon the parliamentary situation. Even in 1902 Lord Salisbury acted as a Cecil in proposing his nephew Balfour as his successor as against Joseph Chamberlain. The noble factions of Tory and Whig separated themselves more and more distinctly, very often, indeed, within the same family, according to whether the “power” outweighed the “booty” outlook — that is, according as land was valued above money⁵⁹ — or vice versa, a contrast that even in the eighteenth century was expressed within the higher bourgeoisie by the words “respectable” and “fashionable,” standing for two opposed conceptions of the gentleman. The State’s care for all is frankly replaced by class interest. It is for this that the individual claims his freedom — that is what “freedom” means in English — but the insular existence and the build of “society” have created such relations that in the last resort everyone who belongs to it (which is a matter of moment in a status dictatorship) finds his interests represented by those of one or the other noble party.

This steadiness of last, deepest, and ripest form, which springs from the historical feeling of Western mankind, was denied to the Classical. Tyrannis vanished. Strict oligarchy vanished. The Demos which the politics of the sixth century had created as the sum of all men belonging to the Polis burst into factions and spasmodic shocks of noble versus non-noble, and conflicts began within states, and between states, in which each party tried to exterminate the other lest it should itself be exterminated. When in 511 — that is, still in the age of the Tyrants — Sybaris was annihilated by the Pythagoreans, the event, the first of its kind, shocked the entire Classical world; even in distant Miletus mourning was worn. But now the elimination of a Polis or a party was so usual that a regular form and choice of methods — corresponding to the typical peace treaties of Western Baroque — arose for the disposal of the vanquished — for example, the inhabitants might be massacred or sold into slavery, the houses razed or divided as spoil. The will to absolutism is there — after the Persian Wars it is universal, in Rome and Sparta no less than in Athens — but the willed narrowness of the Polis, the point politic, and thewilled brevity of office holding and immediacy of schemes made it impossible ever to reach a firm decision as to who should be “the State.”⁶⁰ The high craft of diplomacy, which in the West was practiced by cabinets inspired by a tradition, was here handicapped by an amateurism founded not on any accidental inadequacy of persons — the men were available — but solely in the political form itself. The course of this form from the First to the Second Tyrannis is unmistakable and corresponds to the same evolution in all other Late periods; but the specifically Classical style of it appears in the disorder and subjection to incidentals which naturally and inevitably followed from a life that could not and would not dissociate itself from the moment.

The most important example of this is the evolution of Rome during the fifth century — a period over which hitherto historians have wrangled, precisely because they have tried to find in it a consistency that can no more have existed there than anywhere else in the Classical State. A further source of misunderstanding is that the conditions of that development have been regarded as something quite primitive, whereas in fact even the city of the Tarquins must have already been in a very advanced state, and primitive Rome lay much further back. The relations of the fifth century are on a small scale in comparison with those of Caesar’s age, but they were not antiquated. Because written tradition is defective (as it was everywhere save in Athens), the literary movement which followed the Punic Wars set itself to fill the blanks with poetry and in particular (as was to be expected in the Hellenistic age) with the evocation of an idyllic past, as, for example, in the story of Cincinnati. And modern scholarship, though it has ceased to believe these legends, has nevertheless remained under the influence of the taste that inspired their invention, and continues to look at the conditions of the time through its eyes — the more readily as Greek and Roman history are treated as two separate worlds, and the evil practice of identifying the beginning of history with the beginning of sure documentation is followed as usual. In truth, the conditions of 500 B.C. are anything but Homeric. The trace of its walls shows that Rome under the Tarquins was, with Capua, the greatest city in Italy and bigger than the Athens of Themistocles.⁶¹ A city that concludes commercial treaties with Carthage is no peasant commune. And it follows that the population in the four city tribes of 471 must have been very numerous, probably greater than the whole total of the sixteen country tribes scattered insignificantly in space.

The great success of the landowning nobility in overthrowing a Tyrannis that was almost certainly very popular, and establishing unrestricted senatorial rule, was nullified again by a series of violent events about 471 — the replacement of the family tribes by four great city wards, the representation of these by tribunes (who were sacrosanct — i.e., who enjoyed a royal privilege that no single official of the aristocratic administration possessed) and lastly the liberation of the small peasantry from the clientela of the nobility.

The Tribunate was the happiest inspiration, not only of this period, but of the Classical Polis generally. It was the Tyrannis raised to the position of an integral part of the Constitution, and set in parallel, moreover, with the old oligarchical offices, all of which continued in being. This meant that the social revolution also was carried out in legal forms, so that what was elsewhere a wild discharge in shock and counter-shock became here a forum contest, limited as a rule to debate and vote. There was no need to evoke the tyrant, for he was there already. The Tribune possessed rights inherent in position, not rights arising out of an office, and with his immunity he could carry out revolutionary acts that would have been inconceivable without street fighting in any other Polis. This creation was an incident, but no other of its creations helped Rome to rise as this did. In Rome alone the transition from the First to the Second Tyrannis, and the further development therefrom till beyond the days of Zama, was accomplished, not indeed without shocks, but at any rate without catastrophe. The Tribune was the link between the Tarquins and Caesar. With the Lex Hortensia of 287 he became all powerful, he is the Second Tyrannis in constitutional “form.” In the second century, tribunes caused consuls and censors to be arrested. The Gracchi were tribunes, Caesar assumed the perpetual tribunate, and in the principate of Augustus the tribunician dignity was the essential element of his position, the only one in virtue of which he possessed sovereign rights.

The crisis of 471 was not unique but generically Classical. Its target was the oligarchy, which even now, within the Demos created by the Tyrannis, strove to be the impulsive force in affairs. It was no longer, as in Hesiod’s day, the oligarchy as estate versus non-estate, but the oligarchic party against a second party — both in the cadre of the absolute state, which as such was not brought into the controversy. In Athens, 487 B.C., the archons were overthrown and their rights transferred to the college of strategi.⁶² In 461 the Areopagus, the Athenian equivalent of the Senate, was overthrown. In Sicily (where relations with Rome were close) the democracy triumphed at Acragas (Agrigentum) in 471, at Syracuse in 465, at Rhegium and Messana in 461. In Sparta the kings Cleomenes (488) and Pausanias (470) tried in turn, without success, to free the Helots — in Roman terms, the Clientela — and thereby to acquire for the kingship, vis-à-vis the oligarchic Ephors, the importance of the tribunate in Rome. The missing element in this case, which was present (though overlooked by our scholars) in that of Rome, was the population strength of the mercantile city that gives such movements both weight and leadership; it was on this that even the great Helot rising of 464 broke down (an event which probably inspired the Roman legends of a secession of the Plebs to the Mons Sacer).

In a Polis, the country nobility and the patriciate fuse (that is the object of synoecism, as we have seen), but not so the burgher and the peasant. So far as concerns their struggle with the oligarchy these are a single party — namely, the democratic — but otherwise they are two. This is what comes to expression in the next crisis. In this (c. 450) the Roman patriciate sought to reestablish its power as a party — for so we must interpret the introduction of the Decemvirs and the abolition of the Tribunate; the legislation of the Twelve Tables by which the plebs, which had recently attained political existence, was denied “Connubium” and “Commercium”; and above all the creation of the small country tribes in which the influence of the old families (not legally but in fact) predominated and which (in the Comitia Tributa now set up alongside the old Centuriata) enjoyed the unchallengeable majority of 16 to 4. This, of course, meant the disfranchisement of the townspeople by the peasantry, and there can be no doubt that it was a move of the Patrician party to make effective in one common blow the common antipathy of the countryside and themselves towards the money economics of the city.

The counterstroke came quickly; it is recognizable in the number ten of the tribunes who appear after the withdrawal of the Decemvirs,⁶³ but there were other events too that cannot but have belonged with it — the attempt of Sp. Maelius to set up a Tyrannis (439), the setting up of Consular Tribunes by the army in place of the civil officials (438), and the Lex Canuleia (445) which made an end of the prohibition of connubium between patricians and plebeians.

There can be no doubt, of course, that there were factions within both the patrician and the plebeian parties which would have liked to upset this fundamental trait of the Roman Polis, the opposition of Senate and Tribunate, by abolishing the one or the other; but the form turned out to be so right that it was never seriously challenged. With the enforcement by the Army of plebeian eligibility to the highest offices (399) the contest took a quite different turn. The fifth century may be summed up, under the aspect of internal politics, as that of the struggle for lawful Tyrannis; thenceforward the polarity of the constitution was admitted, and the parties contended no longer for the abolition, but for the capture, of the great offices. This was the substance of the revolution that took place in the period of the Samnite Wars. From 287 the Plebes had the entree to all offices, and the proposals of the tribunes, when approved by them, automatically became law; on the other hand, it was thenceforward always practicable for the Senate by corruption or otherwise to induce some one tribune to exercise his veto and thus to deprive the institution of its power. It was in the struggle of two competent authorities that the juristic subtlety of the Romans was developed. Elsewhere decisions were usually by way of fist and bludgeon — the technical word is “Cheirocracy” — but in this “best” period of Roman constitutional law, the fourth century, the habit was formed of using the weapons of thesis and interpretation, a mode of contest in which the slightest points of legal wording could be decisive.

But Rome was unique in all Classical history in this equilibrium of Senate and Tribunate. Everywhere else it was a matter not of swaying balance, but of sheer alternatives, namely Oligarchy or Ochlocracy. The absolute Polis and the Nation which was identical with it were accepted as given premises, but of the inward forms none possessed stability. The victory of one party meant the abolition of all the institutions of the other, and people became accustomed to regard nothing as either venerable enough or useful enough to be exempt from the chances of the day’s battle. Sparta’s “form,” so to say, was senatorial, Athens’s tribunician, and by the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, in 431, the idea that forms must be alternative was so firmly fixed that only radical solutions were henceforth possible.

With this, the future was set for Rome. It was the one state in which political passions had persons only, and no longer institutions, as their target; the only one which was firmly in “form.” Senatus Populusque Romanus — that is, Senate and Tribunate — was the form of forged bronze that no party would henceforward batter, whereas all the rest, with the narrowness of their individual power horizons in the world of Classical states, were only able to prove once more the fact that domestic politics exist simply in order that foreign politics may be possible.

VI

At this point, when the Culture is beginning to turn itself into the Civilization, the non-Estate intervenes in affairs decisively — and for the first time — as an independent force. Under the Tyrannis and the Fronde, the State has invoked its aid against the Estates proper, and it has for the first time learned to feel itself a power. Now it employs its strength for itself, and does so as a class standing for its freedom against the rest. It sees in the absolute State, in the Crown, in rooted institutions, the natural allies of the old Estates and the true and last representatives of symbolic tradition. This is the difference between the First and the Second Tyrannis, between Fronde and Bourgeois Revolution, between Cromwell and Robespierre.

The State, with its heavy demands on each individual in it, is felt by urban reason as a burden. So, in the same phase, the great forms of the Baroque arts begin to be felt as restrictive and become Classicist or Romanticist — that is, sickly or unformed; German literature from 1770 is one long revolt of strong individual personalities against strict poetry. The idea of the whole nation being “in training” or “in form” for anything becomes intolerable, for the individual himself inwardly is no longer in condition. This holds good in morals, in arts, and in modes of thought, but most of all in politics. Every bourgeois revolution has as its scene the great city, and as its hallmark the incomprehension of old symbols, which it replaces by tangible interests and the craving (or even the mere wish) of enthusiastic thinkers and world improvers to see their conceptions actualized. Nothing now has value but that which can be justified by reason. But, deprived thus of the exaltation of a form that is essentially symbolical and works metaphysically, the national life loses the power of keeping its head up in the being-streams of history. Follow the desperate attempts of the French Government — the handful of capable and farsighted men under the mediocre Louis XVI — to keep their country in “condition” when, after the death of Vergennes in 1787, the whole gravity of the external situation had become manifest. With the death of this diplomatist France disappeared for years from the political combinations of Europe; at the same time the great reform that the Crown had carried through against all resistances — above all, the general administrative reform of that year, based on the freest self-management — remained completely ineffective, because in view of the pliancy of the State, the question of the moment for the Estates became, suddenly, the question of power.⁶⁴ As a century before and a century afterwards, European war was drawing visibly nearer with an inexorable necessity, but no one now took any notice of the external situation. The nobility as an Estate had rarely, but the bourgeoisie as an Estate had never, thought in terms of foreign policy and world history. Whether the State in its new form would be able to hold its own at all amongst the other States, no one asked. All that mattered was whether it secured men’s “rights.”

But the bourgeoisie, the class of urban “freedom,” strong as its class feeling remained for generations (in West Europe even beyond 1848), was at no time wholly master of its actions. For, first of all, it became manifest in every critical situation that its unity was anegative unity, only really existent in moments of opposition to something, anything, else — “Tiers État” and “Opposition” are almost synonymous — and that when something constructive of its own had to be done, the interests of the various groups pulled all ways. To be free from something — that, all wanted. But the intellectual desired the State as an actualization of “justice” against the force of historical facts; or the “rights of man”; or freedom of criticism as against the dominant religion. And Money wanted a free path to business success. There were a good many who desired rest and renunciation of historical greatness, or wished this and that tradition and its embodiments, on which physically or spiritually they lived, to be spared. But there was another element, now and henceforth, that had not existed in the conflicts of the Fronde (the English Civil War included) or the first Tyrannis, but this time stood for a power — namely, that which is found in all Civilizations under different contemptuous labels — dregs, canaille, mob, Pöbel — but with the same tremendous connotation. In the great cities, which alone now spoke the decisive words — the open land can at most accept or reject faits accomplis, as our eighteenth century proves⁶⁵ — a mass of rootless fragments of population stands outside all social linkages. These do not feel themselves as attached either to an Estate or to a vocational class, nor even to the real working class, although they are obliged to work. Elements drawn from all classes and conditions belong to it instinctively — uprooted peasantry, literates, ruined businessmen, and above all (as the age of Catiline shows with terrifying clarity) derailed nobles. Their power is far in excess of their numbers, for they are always on the spot, always on hand at the big decisions, ready for anything, devoid of all respect for orderliness, even the orderliness of a revolutionary party. It is from them that events acquire the destructive force which distinguishes the French Revolution from the English, and the Second Tyrannis from the First. The bourgeoisie looks at these masses with real uneasiness, defensively, and seeks to separate itself from them — it was to a defensive act of this category, the 13th Vendémiaire, that Napoleon owed his rise.⁶⁶ But in the pressure of facts the separating frontier cannot be drawn; wherever the bourgeoisie throws into the scale against the older orders its feeble weight of aggressiveness — feeble in relative numbers and feeble because its inner cohesion is risked at every moment — this mass has forced itself into their ranks, pushed to the front, imparted most of the drive that wins the victory, and very often managed to secure the conquered position for itself — not seldom with the continued idealistic support of the educated who are intellectually captivated, or the material backing of the money powers, which seek to divert the danger from themselves on to the nobility and the clergy.

There is another aspect, too, under which this epoch has its importance — in it for the first time abstract truths seek to intervene in the world of facts. The capital cities have become so great, and urban man so superior and influential over the waking consciousness of the whole Culture (this influence is what we call Public Opinion) that the powers of the blood and the tradition inherent in the blood are shaken in their hitherto unassailable position. For it must be remembered that the Baroque State and the absolute Polis in their final development of form are thoroughly living expressions of a breed, and that history, so far as it accomplishes itself in these forms, possesses the full pulse of that breed. Any theory of the State that may be fashioned here is one that is deduced from the facts, that bows to the greatness of the facts. The idea of the State had finally mastered the blood of the first Estate, and put it wholly and without reserve at the State’s service. “Absolute” means that the great being-stream is as a unit in form, possesses one kind of pulse and instinct, whether the manifestations of that pulse be diplomatic or strategic flair, dignity of moral and manners, or fastidious taste in arts and thoughts.

As the contradictory to this grand fact, now, Rationalism appears and spreads, that which has been described above as the community of waking consciousness in the educated, whose religion is criticism and whose numina are not deities but concepts. Now begins the influence of books and general theories upon politics — in the China of Lao-tse as in the Athens of the Sophists and the Europe of Montesquieu — and the public opinion formed by them plants itself in the path of diplomacy as a political magnitude of quite a new sort. It would be absurd to suppose that Pisistratus or Richelieu or even Cromwell determined their actions under the influence of abstract systems, but after the victory of “Enlightenment” that is what actually happens.

Nevertheless the historical role of the great concepts of the Civilization is very different from the complexion that they presented in the minds of the ideologues who conceived them. The effect of a truth is always quite different from its tendency. In the world of facts, truths are simply means, effective insofar as they dominate spirits and therefore determine actions. Their historical position is determined not by whether they are deep, correct, or even merely logical, but by whether they tell. We see this in the phrase “catchword,” “Schlagwort.”What certain symbols, livingly experienced, are for the Springtime religions — the Holy Sepulchre for the Crusader, the Substance of Christ for the times of the Council of Nicaea — that two or three inspiriting word sounds are for every Civilized revolution. It is only the catchwords that are facts — the residue of the philosophical or sociological system whence they come does not matter to history. But, ascatchwords, they are for about two centuries powers of the first rank, stronger even than the pulse of the blood, which in the petrifying world of the outspread cities is beginning to be dulled.

But — the critical spirit is only one of the two tendencies which emerge out of the chaotic mass of the Non-Estate. Along with abstract concepts abstract Money, — money divorced from the prime values of the land — along with the study the counting house, appear as political forces. The two are inwardly cognate and inseparable — the old opposition between priest and noble continued, acute as ever, in the bourgeois atmosphere and the city framework. Of the two, moreover, it is the Money that, as pure fact, shows itself unconditionally superior to the ideal truths, which so far as the fact world is concerned exist (as I have just said) only as catchwords, as means. If by “democracy” we mean the form which the Third Estate as such wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the tragic comedy of the world improvers’ and freedom teachers’ desperate fight against money that they are ipso facto assisting money to be effective. Respect for the big number — expressed in the principles of equality for all, natural rights, and universal suffrage — is just as much a class ideal of the unclassed as freedom of public opinion (and more particularly freedom of the press) is so. These are ideals, but in actuality the freedom of public opinion involves the preparation of public opinion, which costs money; and the freedom of the press brings with it the question of possession of the press, which again is a matter of money; and with the franchise comes electioneering, in which he who pays the piper calls the tune. The representatives of the ideas look at one side only, while the representatives of money operate with the other. The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in effective motion only by money. It was the Equites, the big money party, which made Tiberius Gracchus’s popular movement possible at all; and as soon as that part of the reforms that was advantageous to themselves had been successfully legalized, they withdrew and the movement collapsed. Caesar and Crassus financed the Catilinarian movement, and so directed it against the Senatorial party instead of against property. In England politicians of eminence laid it down as early as 1700 that “on ’Change one deals in votes as well as in stocks, and the price of a vote is as well known as the price of an acre of land.”⁶⁷ When the news of Waterloo reached Paris, the price of French government stock rose⁶⁸ — the Jacobins had destroyed the old obligations of the blood and so had emancipated money; now it stepped forward as lord of the land.⁶⁹ There is no proletarian, not even a Communist, movement that has not operated in the interest of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time permitted by money — and that, without the idealist amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.⁷⁰ Intellect rejects, money directs — so it runs in every last act of a Culture drama, when the megalopolis has become master over the rest. And, in the limit, intellect has no cause of complaint. For, after all, it has won its victory — namely, in its own realm of truths, the realm of books and ideals that is not of this world. Its conceptions have become venerabilia of the beginning Civilization. But Money wins, through these very concepts, in its realm, which is only of this world.

In the Western world of States, it was in England that both sides of Third Estate politics, the ideal and the real, graduated. Here alone it was possible for the Third Estate to avoid the necessity of marching against an absolute State in order to destroy it and set up its own dominion on the ruins. For here it could grow up into the strong form of the First Estate, where it found a fully developed form of interest politics, and from whose methods it could borrow for its own purposes a traditional tactic such as it could hardly wish to improve upon. Here was the home of Parliamentarism, genuine and quite inimitable, which had insular position instead of the state as its starting point, and the habits of the First and not the Third Estate as its background. Further, there was the circumstance that this form had grown up in the full bloom of Baroque and, therefore, had Music in it. The Parliamentary style was completely identical with that of cabinet diplomacy;⁷¹ and in this anti-democratic origin lay the secret of its successes.

But it was on British soil, too, that the rationalistic catchwords had, one and all, sprung up, and their relation to the principles of the Manchester School was intimate — Hume was the teacher of Adam Smith. “Liberty” self-evidently meant intellectual and trade freedom. An opposition between fact politics and enthusiasm for abstract truths was as impossible in the England of George III as it was inevitable in the France of Louis XVI. Later, Edmund Burke could retort upon Mirabeau that “we demand our liberties, not as rights of man, but as rights of Englishmen.” France received her revolutionary ideas without exception from England, as she had received the style of her absolute monarchy from Spain. To both she imparted a brilliant and irresistible shape that was taken as a model far and wide over the Continent, but of the practical employment of either she had no idea. The successful utilization of the bourgeois catchwords⁷² in politics presupposes the shrewd eye of a ruling class for the intellectual constitution of the stratum which intends to attain power, but will not be capable of wielding it when attained. Hence in England it was successful. But it was in England too that money was most unhesitatingly used in politics — not the bribery of individual high personages which had been customary in the Spanish or Venetian style, but the “nursing” of the democratic forces themselves. In eighteenth century England, first the Parliamentary elections and then the decisions of the elected Commons were systematically managed by money;⁷³ England, too, discovered the ideal of a Free Press, and discovered along with it that the press serves him who owns it. It does not spread “free” opinion — it generates it.

Both together constitute liberalism (in the broad sense); that is, freedom from the restrictions of the soilbound life, be these privileges, forms, or feelings — freedom of the intellect for every kind of criticism, freedom of money for every kind of business. But both, too, unhesitatingly aim at the domination of a class, a domination which recognizes no overriding supremacy of the State. Mind and money, being both inorganic, want the State, not as a matured form of high symbolism to be venerated, but as an engine to serve a purpose. Thus the difference between these forces and those of Frondism is fundamental, for the latter’s reaction had been a defense of the old Gothic against the intrusive Baroque way of living and being “in form,” — and now both these are on the defensive together and almost indistinguishable. Only in England (it must be emphasized again and again) the Fronde had disarmed, not only the State in open battle, but also the Third Estate by its inward superiority, and so attained to the one kind of first class form that democracy is capable of working up to, a form neither planned nor aped, but naturally matured, the expression of an old breed and an unbroken sure tact that can adapt itself to the use of every new means that the changes of Time put into its hands. Thus it came about that the English Parliament, while taking part in the Succession Wars of the Absolute States, handled them as economic wars with business aims. The mistrust felt for high form by the inwardly formless Non-Estate is so deep that everywhere and always it is ready to rescue its freedom — from all form — by means of a dictatorship, which acknowledges no rules and is, therefore, hostile to all that has grown up, which, moreover, in virtue of its mechanizing tendency, is acceptable to the taste both of intellect and of money — consider, for example, the structure of the state machine of France which Robespierre began and Napoleon completed. Dictatorship in the interests of a class ideal appealed to Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Rodbertus, and Lassalle as it had to the Classical ideologues of the fourth century — Xenophon in the Cyropaedia and Isocrates in the Nicocles.⁷⁴

But the well known saying of Robespierre that “the Government of the Revolution is the despotism of freedom against tyranny” expresses more than this. It lets out the deep fear that shakes every multitude which, in the presence of grave conjunctures, feels itself “not up to form.” A regiment that is shaken in its discipline will readily concede to accidental leaders of the moment powers of an extent and a kind which the legitimate command could never acquire, and which if legitimate would be utterly intolerable. But this, on a larger scale, is the position of every commencing Civilization. Nothing reveals more tellingly the decline of political form than that upspringing of formless powers which we may conveniently designate, from its most conspicuous example, Napoleonism. How completely the being of Richelieu or of Wallenstein was involved in the unshakable antecedents of their period! And how instinct with form, under all its outer unform, was the English Revolution! Here, just the reverse; the Fronde fights about the form, the absolute State in the form, but the bourgeoisie against the form. The mere abolition of an order that had become obsolete was no novelty — Cromwell and the heads of the First Tyrannis had done that. But, that behind the ruins of the visible there is no longer the substance of an invisible form; that Robespierre and Napoleon find nothing either around or in them to provide the self-evident basis essential to any new creation; that for a government of high tradition and experience they have no choice but to substitute an accidental regime, whose future no longer rests secure on the qualities of a slowly and thoroughly trained minority, but depends entirely on the chance of the adequate successor turning up — such are the distinguishing marks of this turning of the times, and hence comes the immense superiority that is enjoyed for generations still by those states which manage to retain a tradition longer than others.

The First Tyrannis had completed the Polis with the aid of the non-noble; the latter now destroyed it with the aid of the Second Tyrannis. As an idea, it perishes in the bourgeois revolutions of the fourth century, for all that it may persist as an arrangement or a habit or an instrument of the momentary powers that be. Classical man never ceased, in fact, to think and live politically in its form. But never more was it for the multitude a symbol to be respected and venerated, any more than the Divine Right of Kings was venerated in the West after Napoleon had almost succeeded in making his own dynasty “the oldest in Europe.”

Further, in these revolutions too, as ever in Classical history, there were only local and temporary solutions — nothing resembling the splendid sweep of the French Revolution from the Bastille to Waterloo — and the scenes in them were more atrocious still, for the reason that in this Culture, with its basically Euclidean feeling, the only possible way seemed to be that of physical collision of party against party, and the only possible end for the loser, not functional incorporation in the victor’s system as in the West, but destruction root and branch. At Corcyra (427) and Argos (370) the possessing classes were slaughtered en masse; in Leontini (422) they were expelled from the city by the lower classes, which carried on affairs for a while with slaves until, in fear of an avenging return, they evacuated altogether and migrated to Syracuse. The refugees from hundreds of these revolutions inundated the cities, recruited the mercenary armies of the Second Tyrannis, and infested the routes by land and sea. The readmission of such exiled fractions is a standing feature in the peace terms offered by the Diadochi and later by the Romans. But the Second Tyrannis itself secured its positions by acts of this kind. Dionysius I (407-367) secured his hegemony over Syracuse — the city in whose higher society, along with that of Athens, centered the ripest culture of Hellas, the city where Aeschylus had produced his Persian trilogy in 470 — by wholesale executions of educated people and confiscations of their property; this he followed up by entirely rebuilding the population, in the upper levels by granting large properties to his adherents, and in the lower by raising masses of slaves to the citizenship and distributing amongst them (as was not uncommon) the wives and daughters of the victims.⁷⁵

After the characteristically Classical fashion, the type of these revolutions was such as to produce always an increase of number, never of extent. Multitudes of them happened, but each proceeded purely for itself and at one point of its own, and it is only the fact that they were contemporary with one another that gives them the character of a collective phenomenon, which marks an epoch. Similarly with Napoleonism; here again, a formless regimen for the first time raised itself above the framework of the State, yet without being able to attain to complete inward detachment therefrom. It supported itself on the Army, which, vis-à-vis the nation that had lost its “form,” began to feel itself as an independent power. That is the brief road from Robespierre to Bonaparte — with the fall of the Jacobins the center of gravity passed from the administration to the ambitious generals. How deeply this new tendency implanted itself in the West may be seen from the example of Bernadotte and Wellington, and even more from the story of Frederick William Ill’s “call to my People” in 1813 — in  his case the continuance of the dynasty would have been challenged by the military had not the King stiffened himself to break with Napoleon.⁷⁶

This anti-constitutionality of the Second Tyrannis declared itself also in the position taken by Alcibiades and Lysander in the armed forces of their respective cities during the latter stages of the Peloponnesian War, a position incompatible with the basic form of the Polis. The first named, destitute as an exile of official position, and against the will of the home authorities, exercised from 411 the de factocommand of the Athenian Navy; the second, though not even a Spartiate, felt himself entirely independent at the head of an army devoted to his person. In the year 408 the contest of the two powers for the supremacy over the Aegean world took the form of a contest between these two individuals.⁷⁷ Shortly after this, Dionysius of Syracuse built up the first large scale professional army and introduced engines of war (artillery)⁷⁸ — a new form which served as a model for the Diadochi and Rome also. Thereafter the spirit of the army was a political power on its own account, and it became a serious question how far the State was master, and how far tool, of its army. The fact that the government of Rome was exclusively in the hands of a military committee⁷⁹ from 390 to 367⁸⁰ reveals pretty clearly that the army had a policy of its own. It is well known that Alexander, the Romanticist of the Second Tyrannis, fell more and more under the influence of his generals, who not only compelled the retreat from India but also disposed of his inheritance amongst themselves as a matter of course.

This is essentially Napoleonism, and so is the extension of personal rule over regions united by ties neither national nor jural, but merely military and administrative. But extension was just what was essentially incompatible with the Polis. The Classical State is the one State that was incapable of any organic widening, and the conquests of the Second Tyrannis therefore resolved themselves into ajuxtaposition of two political units, the Polis and the subjugated territory, the cohesion of which was initially accidental and perpetually in danger. Thus arose that strange picture of the Hellenistic-Roman world, the true significance of which is not even yet recognized — a circle of border regions, and within them a congeries of Poleis to which, small as they were, the conception of the State proper, the res publica, continued to be bound as exclusively as ever. In this middle (indeed, so far as concerned each individual, hegemony was in one point) was the theater of all real politics. The “orbis terrarum” — a significant expression — was merely a means or object to it. The Roman notions of “imperium” — dictatorial powers of administration outside the city moat (which were automatically extinguished when its holder entered the Pomoerium) — and of “provincia” as the opposite of “res publica” express the common Classical instinct, which knew only the city’s body as the State and political subject, and the “outside” only in relation to it, as object to it. Dionysius made his city of Syracuse into a fortress surrounded by a “scrap heap of states,” and extended his field of power thence, over Upper Italy and the Dalmatian coast, into the northern Adriatic, where he possessed Ancona and Hatria at the mouth of the Po. Philip of Macedon, following the example of his teacher Jason of Pherse (murdered in 370), adopted the reverse plan, placing his center of gravity in the periphery (that is, practically in the army) and thence exercising a hegemony over the Hellenic world of States. Thus Macedonia came to extend to the Danube, and after Alexander’s death there were added to this outer circle the empires of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies — each governed from a Polis (Antioch, Alexandria), but through the intermediary of existing native machinery, which, be it said, was at its lowest better than any Classical administration of it could have been. Rome herself in the same period (c. 326-265) built up her Middle Italian territory as a border state, secured in all directions by a system of colonies, allies, and settlements with Latin right. Then, from 237, we find Hamilcar Barca winning for Carthage, a city old established in the Classical way of life, an empire in Spain; C. Flaminius (115) conquering the Po Valley for Rome; and finally Caesar making his Gallic empire. These were the foundations upon which rested, first, the Napoleonic struggles of the Diadochi in the East, then those of Scipio and Hannibal in the West — the limits of the Polis outgrown in both cases — and lastly the Caesarian struggles of the Triumvirs, who supported themselves on the total of all the border states and used their means, in order to be — “the first in Rome.”

VII

In Rome the strong and happily conceived form of the State that was reached about 340 kept the social revolution within constitutional limits. A Napoleonic figure like Appius Claudius the Censor of 310, who built the first aqueduct and the Appian Way, and ruled in Rome almost as a tyrant, very soon failed when he tried to eliminate the peasantry by means of the great city masses and so to impart the one-sided Athenian direction to politics — for that was his aim in taking up the sons of slaves into the Senate, in reorganizing the Centuries on a money instead of a land assessment basis,⁸¹ and in distributing freedmen and landless men amongst the country tribes, so that they might outvote the rustics (as they were always able to do, since the latter rarely attended). But his successors in the censorship lost no time in reversing this, and relegated the landless to the great city tribes again. The non-estate itself, well led by a minority of distinguished families, saw its aim (as has been said before) not in the destruction, but in the acquisition, of the senatorial organs of administration. In the end, it forced its way into all offices (even, by the Lex Ogulnia, of 300, into the politically important priesthoods of the Pontifices and Augurs), and by the outbreak of 287 it secured force of law for plebiscita even without the Senate’s approval.

The practical result of this freedom movement was precisely the reverse of that which ideologues would have expected — there were no idealogues in Rome. The greatness of its success robbed the non-estate of its object and thereby deprived it of its driving force, for positively, when not “in opposition,” it was null. After 287 the state form existed for the purpose of being politically used, and used, too, in a world in which only the states of the great fringe — Rome, Carthage, Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt — really counted. It had ceased to be in any danger of becoming the passive of “peoples’ rights” activities. And it was precisely this security that formed the basis on which the one people that had remained “in form” rose to its grandeur.

On the one hand, it had developed within the Plebs, formless and long weakened in its race impulses by the mass intake of freedmen,⁸² an upper stratum distinguished by great practical aptitudes, rank, and wealth, which joined forces with a corresponding stratum within the patriciate. Hence there came into existence a very narrow circle of men of the strongest race quality, dignified life, and broad political outlook, in whom the whole stock of experience in governing and generalship and negotiation was concentrated and transmitted; who regarded the direction of the State as the one profession worthy of their status, considered themselves as inheritors of a privilege to exercise it, and educated their children solely in the art of ruling and the convictions of a measurelessly proud tradition. This nobility, which as such had no constitutional existence, found its constitutional engine in the Senate, which had originally been a body representing the interests of the patricians (that is, the “Homeric” aristocracy), but in which from the middle of the fourth century ex-consuls — men who had both ruled and commanded — sat as life members, forming a close group of eminent talents that dominated the assembly and, through it, the State. Even by 279 the Senate appeared to Cineas, the ambassador of Pyrrhus, like a council of kings, and finally its kernel was a small group of leading men, holding the titles “princeps” and “clarissimus” men in every respect — rank, power, and public dignity — the peers of those who reigned over the empires of the Diadochi.⁸³ There came into being a government such as no megalopolis in any other Culture whatsoever has possessed, and a tradition to which it would be impossible to find parallels save perhaps in the Venice and the Papal Curia of the Baroque, and there under a wholly different set of conditions. Here were no theories such as had been the ruin of Athens, none of the provincialism that had made Sparta in the long run contemptible, but simply a praxis in the grand style. If “Rome” is a perfectly unique and marvelous phenomenon in world history, it is due, not to the Roman “people,” which in itself, like any other, was raw material without form, but to this class which brought Rome into condition and kept her so, willy nilly — with the result that this particular stream of being, which in 350 was still without importance save to middle Italy, gradually drew into its bed the entire history of the Classical, and made the last great period of that history a Roman period.

It was the very perfection of political flair that was displayed by this small circle (which possessed no sort of public rights) in managing the democratic forms created by the Revolution — forms that here as elsewhere derive all value from the use that is made of them. The only factor in them that if mishandled would have been dangerous in an instant — namely, the interpenetration of two mutually exclusive powers — was handled so superbly and so quietly that it was always the higher experience that gave the note, while the people remained throughout convinced that decisions were made by, and in the sense desired by, itself. To be popular, and yet historically successful in the highest degree — here is the secret of this policy, and for that matter the only possibility of policy existing at all in such times, an art in which the Roman regime has remained unequaled to this day.

Nevertheless, on the other side of the picture, the result of the Revolution was the emancipation of Money. Thenceforward money was master in the Comitia Centuriata. That which called itself “populus” there became more and more a tool in the hands of big money, and it required all the tactical superiority of the ruling circles to maintain a counterpoise in the Plebs, and to keep effective a representation of the yeomanry, under the leadership of the noble families, in the thirty-one country tribes from which the great city mass continued to be excluded. Hence the drastic energy with which the arrangements made by Appius Claudius were revoked. The natural alliance between high finance and the mass, though we see it actually at work later (under the Gracchi and Marius) for the destruction of the tradition of the blood,⁸⁴ was at any rate made impossible for many generations. Bourgeoisie and yeomanry, money and landowning, maintained a reciprocal equilibrium of separate organisms, and were held together and made efficient by the State idea (of which the nobility was the incarnation) until this inward form fell to pieces, and the two tendencies broke apart in enmity. The First Punic War was a traders’ war and directed against the agrarian interest, and, therefore, the consul Appius Claudius (a descendant of the great Censor) laid the decision of the matter in 284 before the Comitia Centuriata. The conquest of the Po plain, on the other hand, was in the interests of the peasantry and it was, therefore, in the Comita Tributa that it was carried by the Tribune C. Flaminius — the first genuinely Caesarian type in Roman history, builder of the Via Flaminia and the Circus Flaminius. But when in pursuance of his policy he (as Censor in 220) forbade the Senators to engage in trade, and also at the same time made the old noble centuries accessible to plebeians, he was practically benefiting only the new financial nobility of the First Punic War period, and thus (entirely in spite of himself) he became the creator of high finance organized as an Estate — that is, that of the Equites, who a century later put an end to the great age of the nobility. Hence forth, when Hannibal (before whom Flaminius had fallen on the field of battle) had been disposed of, money steadily became, even for the government as such, the “ultima ratio” in the accomplishment of its policy — the last true State policy that the Classical world was to know.

When the Scipios and their circle had ceased to be the governing influence, nothing remained but the private policies of individuals, who followed their own interests without scruple, and looked upon the “orbis terrarum” as passive booty. The historian Polybius (who belonged to that circle) regarded Flaminius as a mere demagogue and traced to him all the misfortunes of the Gracchan period. He was wholly in error as to Flaminius’s intentions, but he was right as to his effect. Flaminius — like the elder Cato, who with the blind zeal of the agrarian overthrew the great Scipio on account of his world policy — achieved the reverse of what he intended. Money stepped into the place of blood leadership, and money took less than three generations to exterminate the yeomanry.

If it was an improbable piece of good luck in the destinies of the Classical peoples that Rome was the only city-state to survive the Revolution with an unimpaired constitution, it was, on the contrary, almost a miracle that in our West — with its genealogical forms deep rooted in the idea of duration — violent revolution broke out at all, even in one place — namely, Paris. It was not the strength, but the weakness of French Absolutism which brought the English ideas, in combination with the power of money, to the point of an explosion which gave living form to the catchwords of the “Enlightenment,” which bound together virtue and terror, freedom and despotism, and which echoed still even in the minor catastrophes of 1830 and 1848 and the more recent Socialistic longing for catastrophe.⁸⁵ In England itself, when the aristocracy ruled more absolutely than ever in France, there was certainly a small circle round Fox and Sheridan which was enthusiastic for the ideas of the Revolution — all of which were of English provenance — and men talked of universal suffrage and Parliamentary reform.⁸⁶ But that was quite enough to induce both parties, under the leadership of a Whig (the younger Pitt), to take the sharpest measures to defeat any and every attempt to interfere in the slightest degree with the aristocratic regime for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. The English nobility let loose the twenty year war against France, and mobilized all the monarchs of Europe to bring about in the end, not the fall of Napoleon, but the fall of the Revolution — the Revolution that had had the naive daring to introduce the opinions of private English thinkers into practical politics, and so to give a position to the Tiers État of which the consequences were all the better foreseen in the English lobbies for having been overlooked in the Paris salons.⁸⁷

What was called “Opposition” in England was — the attitude of one aristocratic party while the other was running the Government. It did not mean there, as it meant all over the Continent, professional criticism of the work which it was someone else’s profession to do, but the practical endeavor to force the activity of Government into a form in which the opposition was ready and fit at any moment to take it over. But this Opposition was at once — and in complete ignorance of its social presuppositions — taken as a model for that which the educated in France and elsewhere aimed at creating, namely, a class domination of the Tiers État under the eyes of a dynasty, no very clear idea being formed as to the latter’s future. The English dispositions were, from Montesquieu onwards, lauded with enthusiastic misunderstanding — although these Continental countries, not being islands, lacked the first condition precedent for an “English” evolution. Only in one point was England really a model. When the bourgeoisie had got so far as to turn the absolute state back again into an Estate state, they found over there a picture which in fact had never been other than it was. True, it was the aristocracy alone who ruled in it — but at least it was not the Crown.

The result of the turn, and the basic form of the Continental States at the beginning of the Civilization, is “Constitutional Monarchy,” the extremest possibility of which appears as what we call nowadays a Republic. It is necessary to get clear, once and for all, of the mumblings of the doctrinaires who think in timeless and therefore unreal concepts and for whom “Republic” is a form-in-itself. The republican ideal of the nineteenth century has no more resemblance to the Classical res publica, or even to Venice or the original Swiss cantons, than the English constitution to a “constitution” in the Continental sense. That which we call republic is a negation, which of inward necessity postulates that the thing denied is an ever present possibility. It is non-monarchy in forms borrowed from the monarchy. The genealogical feeling is immensely strong in Western mankind; it strains its conscience so far as to pretend that Dynasty determines its political conduct even when Dynasty no longer exists at all. The historical is embodied therein, and unhistorically we cannot live. It makes a great difference whether, as in the case of the Classical world, the dynastic principle conveys absolutely nothing to the inner feelings of a man, or, as in the case of the West, it is real enough to need six generations of educated people to fight it down in themselves. Feeling is the secret enemy of all constitutions that are plans and not growths; they are in last analysis nothing but defensive measures born of fear and mistrust. The urban conception of freedom — freedom from something — narrows itself to a merely anti-dynastic significance, and republican enthusiasm lives only on this feeling.

Such a negation inevitably involves a preponderance of theory. While Dynasty and its close congener Diplomacy conserve the old tradition and pulse, Constitutions contain an overweight of systems, bookishness, and framed concepts — such as is entirely unthinkable in England, where nothing negative and defensive adheres to the form of government. It is not for nothing that the Faustian is par excellence the reading and writing Culture. The printed book is an emblem of temporal, the Press of spatial, infinity. In contrast with the immense power and tyranny of these symbols, even the Chinese Civilization seems almost empty of writing. In Constitutions, literature is put into the field against knowledge of men and things, language against race, abstract right against successful tradition — regardless of whether a nation involved in the tide of events is still capable of work and “maintaining its form” Mirabeau was quite alone and unsuccessful in combating the Assembly, which “confused politics with fiction.” Not only the three doctrinaire constitutions of the age — the French of 1791, the German of 1848 and 1919 — but practically all such attempts shut their eyes to the great Destiny in the fact world and imagine that that is the same as defeating it. In lieu of unforeseen happenings, the incidents of strong personality and imperious circumstances, it is Causality that is to rule — timeless, just, unvarying, rational cohesion of cause and effect. It is symptomatic that no written constitution knows of money as a political force. It is pure theory that they contain, one and all.

This rift in the essence of constitutional monarchy is irremediable. Here actual and conceptual, work and critique, are frontally opposed, and it is their mutual attrition that constitutes what the average educated man calls internal politics. Apart from the cases of Prussia-Germany and Austria — where constitutions did come into existence at first,⁸⁸ but in the presence of the older political traditions were never very influential — it was only in England that the practice of government kept itself homogeneous. Here, race held its own against principle. Men had more than an inkling that real politics, politics aiming at historical success, is a matter of training and not of shaping. This was no aristocratic prejudice, but a cosmic fact that emerges much more distinctly in the experience of any English racehorse trainer than in all the philosophical systems in the world. Shaping can refine training, but not replace it. And thus the higher society of England, Eton and Balliol, became training grounds where politicians were worked up with a consistent sureness the like of which is only to be found in the training of the Prussian officer corps — trained, that is, as connoisseurs and masters of the underlying pulse of things (not excluding the hidden course of opinions and ideas). Thus prepared, they were able, in the great flood of bourgeois revolutionary principles that swept over the years after 1831, to preserve and control the being-stream which they directed. They possessed “training,” the suppleness and collectedness of the rider who, with a good horse under him, feels victory coming nearer and nearer. They allowed the great principles to move the mass because they knew well that it is money that is the “wherewithal” by which motion is imparted to these great principles, and they substituted, for the brutal methods of the eighteenth century, methods more refined and not less effective — one of the simpler of these being to threaten their opponents with the cost of a new election. The doctrinaire constitutions of the Continent saw only the one side of the fact democracy. Here, where there was no constitution, but men were in “condition,” it was seen as a whole.

A vague feeling of all this was never quite lost on the Continent. For the absolute State of the Baroque there had been a perfectly clear form, but for “constitutional monarchy” there were only unsteady compromises, and Conservative and Liberal parties were distinguished — not, as in England after Canning, by the possession of different but well tested modes of government, applied turn and turn about to the actual work of governing — but according to the direction in which they respectively desired to alter the constitution — namely, towards tradition or towards theory. Should the Parliament serve the Dynasty, or vice versa? — that was the bone of contention, and in disputing over it it was forgotten that foreign policy was the final aim. The “Spanish” and the misnamed “English” sides of a constitution would not and could not grow together, and thus it befell that during the nineteenth century the diplomatic service outwards and the Parliamentary activity inwards developed in two divergent directions. Each became in fundamental feeling alien to, and contemptuous of, the other. Life fretted itself to soreness in a form that it had not developed out of itself. After Thermidor, France succumbed to the rule of the Bourse, mitigated from time to time by the setting up of a military dictature (1800, 1851, 1871, 1918). Bismarck’s creation was in fundamentals of a dynastic nature, with a parliamentary component of decidedly subordinate importance, and in it the inner friction was so strong as to monopolize the available political energy, and finally, after 1916, to exhaust the organism itself. The Army had its own history, with a great tradition going back to Frederick William I,⁸⁹ and so also had the administration. In them was the source of Socialism as one kind of true political “training,” diametrically opposed to the English⁹⁰ but, like it, a full expression of strong race quality. The officer and the official were trained high. But the necessity of breeding up a corresponding political type was not recognized. Higher policy was handled “administratively” and minor policy was hopeless squabbling. And so army and administration finally became aims in themselves, after Bismarck’s disappearance had removed the one man who even without a supply of real politicians to back him (this tradition alone could have produced) was big enough to treat both as tools of policy. When the issue of the World War removed the upper layers, nothing remained but parties educated for opposition only, and these brought the activity of Government down to a level hitherto unknown in any Civilization.

But today Parliamentarism is in full decay. It was a continuation of the Bourgeois Revolution by other means, the revolution of the Third Estate of 1789 brought into legal form and joined with its opponent the Dynasty as one governmental unit. Every modern election, in fact, is a civil war carried on by ballot box and every sort of spoken and written stimulus, and every great party leader is a sort of Napoleon. In this form, meant to remain infinitely valid, which is peculiar to the Western Culture and would be nonsensical and impossible in any other, we discern once more our characteristic tendency to infinity, historical foresight⁹¹ and forethought, and will to order the distant future, in this case according to bourgeois standards of the present.

All the same, Parliamentarism is not a summit as the absolute Polis and the Baroque State were summits, but a brief transition — namely, between the Late Culture period with its mature forms and the age of great individuals in a formless world. It contains, like the houses and furniture of the first half of the nineteenth century, a residue of good Baroque. The parliamentary habit is English Rococo — but, no longer un-self-conscious and in the blood, but superficial initiative and at the mercy of goodwill. Only in the brief periods of first enthusiasms has it an appearance of depth and duration, and then only because in the flush of victory respect for one’s newly won status makes it incumbent to adopt the high manners of the defeated class. To preserve the form, even when it contradicts the advantage, is the convention which makes parliamentarism possible. But when this convention comes to be fully observed, the very fact that it is so means that the essence of parliamentarism has already been evaporated. The Non-Estate falls apart again into its natural interest groups, and the passion of stubborn and victorious defense is over. And as soon as the form ceases to possess the attractiveness of a young ideal that will summon men to the barricades, unparliamentary methods of attaining an object without (and even in spite of) the ballot box will make their appearance — such as money, economic pressure, and, above all, the strike. Neither the megalopolitan masses nor the strong individuals have any real respect for this form without depth or past, and when the discovery is made that it is only a form, it has already become a mark and shadow. With the beginning of the twentieth century Parliamentarism (even English) is tending rapidly towards taking up itself the role that it once assigned to the kingship. It is becoming an impressive spectacle for the multitude of the Orthodox, while the center of gravity of big policy, already de jure transferred from the Crown to the people’s representatives, is passing de facto from the latter to unofficial groups and the will of unofficial personages. The World War almost completed this development. There is no way back to the old parliamentarism from the domination of Lloyd George and the Napoleonism of the French militarists. And for America, hitherto lying apart and self-contained, rather a region than a State, the parallelism of President and Congress which she derived from a theory of Montesquieu has, with her entry into world politics, become untenable, and must in times of real danger make way for formless powers such as those with which Mexico and South America have long been familiar.

VIII

With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts, in which we find ourselves today. It is the transition from Napoleonism to Caesarism, a general phase of evolution, which occupies at least two centuries and can be shown to exist in all the Cultures. The Chinese call it Shan-Kwo, the “period of the Contending States” (480-230, corresponding to the Classical 300-50).⁹² At the beginning are reckoned seven great powers, which, first planlessly, but later with clearer and clearer purpose, tend to the inevitable final result of this close succession of vast wars and revolutions. A century later there are still five. In 441 the ruler of the Chôu dynasty became a state pensioner of the “Eastern Duke,” and the remains of territory that he possessed ceased accordingly to figure in later history. Simultaneously began in the unphilosophical northwest⁹³ the swift rise of the “Roman” state of Tsin, which extended its influence westward and southward over Tibet and Yunnan and enclosed the other states in a great arc. The focus of the opposition was in the kingdom of Tsu in the Taoist south,⁹⁴ whence the Chinese Civilization pressed slowly outwards into the still little known lands south of the great river. Here we have in fact the opposition of Rome and the Hellenistic — on the one side, hard, clear will-to-power; on the other, the tendency to dreaming and world improvement. In 368-320 (corresponding to the Second Punic War) the contest intensified itself into an uninterrupted struggle of the whole Chinese world, fought with mass armies, for which the population was strained to the extreme limit. “The allies, whose lands were ten times as great as those of Tsin, in vain rolled up a million men — Tsin had ever reserves in hand still. From first to last a million men fell,” writes Sze-ma-tsien. Su-tsin, who began by being Chancellor of Tsin, but later became a supporter of the League of Nations (hoh-tsung) idea and went over to the Opposition, worked up two great coalitions (333 and 321), which, however, collapsed from inward disunity at the first battles. His great adversary, the Chancellor Chang-I, resolutely Imperialist, was in 311 on the point of bringing the Chinese world to voluntary subjection when a change of occupancy of the throne caused his combination to miscarry. In 294 began the campaigns of Pe-Ki.⁹⁵ It was in the prestige of his victories that the King of Tsin took the mystic Emperor title of the legendary age, which openly expressed the claim to world rule, and was at once imitated by the ruler of Tsi in the east.⁹⁶ With this began the second maximum phase of the decisive struggles. The number of independent states grew steadily less. In 255 even the home state of Confucius, Lu, vanished, and in 249 the Chôu dynasty came to an end. In 246 the mighty Wang-Cheng became, at the age of thirteen, Emperor of Tsin, and in 241, with the aid of his Chancellor Lui-Shi (the Chinese Maecenas⁹⁷), he fought out to victory the last bout that the last opponent, the Empire of Tsu, ventured to challenge. In 221, sole ruler in actual fact, he assumed the title Shi (Augustus). This is the beginning of the Imperial age in China.

No era confronts its mankind so distinctly with the alternative of great form or great individual powers as this “Period of the Contending States.” In the degree in which the nations cease to be politically in “condition,” in that degree possibilities open up for the energetic private person who means to be politically creative, who will have power at any price, and who as a phenomenon of force becomes the Destiny of an entire people or Culture. Events have become unpredictable on the basis of form. Instead of the given tradition that can dispense with genius (because it is itself cosmic force at highest capacity), we have now the accident of great fact men. The accident of their rise brings a weak people (for example, the Macedonians), to the peak of events overnight, and the accident of their death (for example, Caesar’s) can immediately plunge a world from personally secured order into chaos.

This indeed had been manifested earlier in critical times of transition. The epoch of the Fronde, the Ming-shu, the First Tyrannis, when men were not in form, but fought about form, has always thrown up a number of great figures who grew too big for definition and limitation in terms of office. The change from Culture to Civilization, with its typical Napoleonism, does so too. But with this, which is the preface to unredeemed historical formlessness, dawns the real day of the great individual. For us this period attained almost to its climax in the World War; in the Classical World it began with Hannibal, who challenged Rome in the name of Hellenism (to which inwardly he belonged), but went under because the Hellenistic East, in true Classical fashion, apprehended the meaning of the hour too late, or not at all. With his downfall began that proud sequence that runs from the Scipios through Aemilius Paullus, Flamininus, the Catos, the Gracchi, Marius, and Sulla to Pompey, Caesar, and Augustus. In China, correspondingly, during the period of the “Contending States,” a like chain of statesmen and generals centered on Tsin as the Classical figures centered on Rome. In accordance with the complete want of understanding of the political side of Chinese history that prevails, these men are usually described as Sophists.⁹⁸ They were so, but only in the same sense as leading Romans of the same period were Stoics — that is, as having been educated in the philosophy and rhetoric of the Greek East. All were finished orators and all from time to time wrote on philosophy, Caesar and Brutus no less than Cato and Cicero, but they did so not as professional philosophers, but because otium cum dignitate was the habit of cultivated gentlemen. In business hours they were masters of fact, whether on battlefield or in high politics, and precisely the same is true of the Chancellors Chang-I and Su-tsin;⁹⁹ the dreaded diplomatist Fan-Sui who overthrew Pe-Ki, the general; Wei Yang the legislator of Tsin; Lui-Shi, the first Emperor’s Maecenas, and others.

The Culture had bound up all its forces in strict form. Now they were released, and “Nature” — that is, the cosmic — broke forth immediate. The change from the absolute State to the battling Society of nations that marks the beginning of every Civilization may mean for idealists and ideologues what they like — in the world of facts it means the transition from government in the style and pulse of a strict tradition to the sic volo, sic jubeo of the unbridled personal regime. The maximum of symbolic and super-personal form coincides with that of the Late period of the Culture — in China about 600, in the Classical about 450, for ourselves about 1700. The minimum in the Classical lies in the time of Sulla and Pompey, and for us will be reached (and possibly passed) in the next hundred years. Great interstate and internal conflicts, revolutions of a fearful kind, interpenetrate increasingly, but the questions at issue in all of them without exception are (consciously and frankly or not) questions of unofficial, and eventually purely personal, power. It is historically of no importance what they themselves aimed at theoretically, and we need not know the catchwords under which the Chinese and Arabian revolutions of this stage broke out, nor even whether there were such catchwords. None of the innumerable revolutions of this era — which more and more become blind outbreaks of uprooted megalopolitan masses — has ever attained, or ever had the possibility of attaining, an aim. What stands is only the historical fact of an accelerated demolition of ancient forms that leaves the path clear for Caesarism.

But the same is true also of the wars, in which the armies and their tactical methods become more and more the creation, not of the epoch, but of uncontrolled individual captains, who in many cases discovered their genius very late and by accident. While in 300 there were Roman armies, in 100 there were the armies of Marius and Sulla and Caesar; and Octavian’s army, which was composed of Caesar’s veterans, led its general much more than it was led by him. But with this the methods of war, its means, and its aims assumed raw natural and ferocious forms,¹⁰⁰ very different from those prevailing before. Their duels were not eighteenth century Trianon duels, encounters in knightly forms with fixed rules to determine when a man might declare himself exhausted, what maximum of force might be employed, and what conditions the chivalry permitted a victor to impose. They were ring battles of infuriated men with fists and teeth, fought to the bodily collapse of one and exploited without reserve or restraint by the victor. The first great example of this “return to Nature” is afforded by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, which, instead of artificial maneuvers with small bodies, practiced the mass onset without regard to losses and thereby shattered to atoms the refined strategy of the Rococo. To bring the whole muscular force of a nation on to the battlefields by the universal service system was an idea utterly alien to the age of Frederick the Great.¹⁰¹

Similarly, in every Culture, the technique of war hesitatingly followed the advance of craftsmanship, until at the beginning of the Civilization it suddenly takes the lead, presses all mechanical possibilities of the time relentlessly into its service, and under pressure of military necessity even opens up new domains hitherto unexploited — but at the same time renders largely ineffectual the personal heroism of the thoroughbred, the ethos of the noble, and the subtle intellect of the Late Culture. In the Classical world, where the Polis made mass armies essentially impossible — for relatively to the general smallness of Classical forms, tactical included, the numbers of Cannae, Philippi, and Actium were enormous and exceptional — the second Tyrannis (Dionysius of Syracuse leading) introduced mechanical technique into warfare, and on a large scale.¹⁰² Then for the first time it became possible to carry out sieges like those of Rhodes (305), Syracuse (213), Carthage (146) and Alesia (52), in which also the increasing importance of rapidity, even for Classical strategy, became evident. It was in line with this tendency that the Roman legion, the characteristic structure of which developed only in the Hellenistic age, worked like a machine as compared with the Athenian and Spartan militias of the fifth century. In China, correspondingly, iron was worked up for cutting and thrusting weapons from 474, light cavalry of the Mongolian model displaced the heavy war chariot, and fortress warfare suddenly acquired outstanding importance.¹⁰³ The fundamental craving of Civilized mankind for speed, mobility, and mass effects finally combined, in the world of Europe and America, with the Faustian will to domination over Nature and produced dynamic methods of war that even to Frederick the Great would have seemed like lunacy, but to us of today, in close proximity to our technics of transportation and industry, are perfectly natural. Napoleon horsed his artillery and thereby made it highly mobile (just as he broke up the mass army of the Revolution into a system of self-contained and easily moved corps), and already at Wagram and Borodino it had augmented its purely physical effectiveness to the point of what we should call rapid fire and drum fire.¹⁰⁴ The second stage is — most significantly — marked by the American Civil War of 1861-1865 — which even in the numbers of troops it involved far surpassed the order of magnitude of the Napoleonic Wars¹⁰⁵ and in which for the first time the railway was used for large troop movements, the telegraph network for messages, and a steam fleet, keeping the sea for months on end, for blockade, and in which armored ships, the torpedo, rifled weapons, and monster artillery of extraordinary range were discovered.¹⁰⁶,¹⁰⁷ The third stage is that of the World War, preluded by the Russo-Japanese conflict;¹⁰⁸ here submarine and aircraft were set to work, speed of invention became a new arm in itself, and the extent (though most certainly not the intensity) of the means used attained a maximum. But to this expenditure of force there corresponds everywhere the ruthlessness of the decisions. At the very outset of the Chinese Shan-Kwo period we find the utter annihilation of the State of Wu — an act which in the preceding Chun-tsiu period chivalry would have made impossible. Even in the peace of Campo Formio Napoleon outraged the convenances of the eighteenth century, and after Austerlitz he introduced the practice of exploiting military success without regard to any but material restrictions. The last step still possible is being taken in the peace treaty of the Versailles type, which deliberately avoids finality and settlement, and keeps open the possibility of setting up new conditions at every change in the situation. The same evolution is seen in the chain of the three Punic Wars. The idea of wiping out one of the leading great powers of the world — which eventually became familiar to everyone through Cato’s deliberately dry insistence on his “Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam” — never crossed the mind of the victor of Zama and, for all the wild war ethics of the Classical Poleis, it would have seemed to Lysander, as he stood victorious in Athens, an impiety towards every god.

The Period of the Contending States begins for the Classical world with the battle of Ipsus (301) which established the trinity of Eastern great powers, and the Roman victory over the Etruscans and Samnites at Sentinum (295), which created a mid-Italian great power by the side of Carthage. Then, however, the characteristic Classical preference for things near and in the present resulted in eyes’ being shut while Rome won, first the Italian south in the Pyrrhic adventure, then the sea in the first Punic War, and then the Celtic north through C. Flaminius. The significance even of Hannibal (probably the only man of his time who clearly saw the trend of events) was ignored by all, the Romans themselves not excepted. It was at Zama, and not merely later at Magnesia and Pydna, that the Hellenistic Eastern powers were defeated. All in vain the great Scipio, truly anxious in the presence of the destiny to which a Polis overloaded with the tasks of a world dominion was marching, sought thereafter to avoid all conquest. In vain his entourage forced through the Macedonian War, against the will of every party, merely in order that the East could thenceforth be ignored as harmless. Imperialism is so necessary a product of any Civilization that when a people refuses to assume the role of master, it is seized and pushed into it. The Roman Empire was notconquered — the “orbis terrarum” condensed itself into that form and forced the Romans to give it their name. It is all very Classical. While the Chinese states defended even the mere remnants of their independence with the last bitterness, Rome after 146 only took upon herself to transform the Eastern land masses into provinces because there was no other resource against anarchy left. And even this much resulted in the inward form of Rome — the last which had remained upright — melting in the Gracchan disorders. And (what is unparalleled elsewhere) it, was not between states that the final rounds of the battle for Imperium were fought, but between the parties of a city — the form of the Polis allowed of no other outcome. Of old it had been Sparta versus Athens, now it was Optimate versus Popular Party. In the Gracchan revolution, which was already (134) heralded by a first Servile War, the younger Scipio was secretly murdered and C. Gracchus openly slain — the first who as Princeps and the first who as Tribune were political centers in themselves amidst a world become formless. When, in 104, the urban masses of Rome for the first time lawlessly and tumultuously invested a private person, Marius, with Imperium, the deeper importance of the drama then enacted is comparable with that of the assumption of the mythic Emperor title by the ruler of Tsin in 288. The inevitable product of the age, Caesarism, suddenly outlines itself on the horizon.

The heir of the Tribune was Marius, who like him linked mob and high finance and in 87 murdered off the old aristocracy in masses. The heir of the Princeps was Sulla, who in 82 annihilated the class of the great merchants by his proscriptions. Thereafter the final decisions press on rapidly, as in China after the emergence of Wang Cheng. Pompey the Princeps and Caesar the Tribune — tribune not in office, but in attitude — were still party leaders, but nevertheless, already at Lucca, they were arranging with Crassus and each other for the first partition of the world amongst themselves. When the heirs of Caesar fought his murderers at Philippi, both had ceased to be more than groups. By Actium the issue was between individuals, and Caesarism will out, even in such a process as this.

In the corresponding evolution within the Arabian world it is, of course, the Magian Consensus that takes the place of the bodily Polis as the basic form in and through which the facts accomplish themselves; and this form, as we have seen, excluded any separation of political and religious tendencies to such an extent that even the urban bourgeois urge towards freedom (marking, here as elsewhere, the beginning of the Period of Contending States) presents itself in orthodox disguise, and so has hitherto almost escaped notice.¹⁰⁹ It appeared as a will to break loose from the Caliphate, which the Sassanids, and Diocletian following them, had created in the forms of the feudal state. From the times of Justinian and Chosroes Nushirvan this had had to meet the onset of Frondeurs — led by the heads of the Greek and Mazdaist Churches, the nobility, both Persian Mazdaist (above all Iraq) and Greek (particularly the Asiatic), and the high chivalry of Armenia, which was divided into two parts by the difference of religion. The absolutism almost attained in the seventh century was then suddenly destroyed by the attack of Islam. In its political beginnings Islam was strictly aristocratic; the handful of Arabian families¹¹⁰ who everywhere kept the leading in their hands, very soon formed in the conquered territories a new higher nobility of strong breed and immense self-sufficingness which thrust the dynasty down to the same level as its English “contemporaries” thrust theirs. The Civil War between Othman and Ali (656-661) was the expression of a true Fronde, and its movements were all in the interests of two clans and their respective adherents. The Islamic Whigs and Tories of the eighth century, like the English of the eighteenth, alonepracticed high politics, and their coteries and family quarrels are more important to the history of the time than any events in the reigning house of the Ommaiyads (661-750).

But with the fall of the gay and enlightened dynasty that has resided in Damascus — that is, West Aramaean and Monophysite Syria — the natural center of gravity of the Arabian Culture reappeared; it was the East Aramaean region. Once the basis of Sassanid and now of Abbassid power, but always — irrespective of whether its shaping was Persian or Arabian, or its religion Mazdaist, Nestorian, or Islamic — it expressed one and the same grand line of development and was the exemplar for Syria as for Byzantium alike. From Kufa the movement started which led to the downfall of the Ommaiyads and their ancien régime, and the character of this movement — of which the whole extent has never to this day been observed — was that of a social revolution directed against the primary orders of society and the aristocratic tradition.¹¹¹ It began among the Mavali, the small bourgeoisie in the East, and directed itself with bitter hostility against the Arabs, not qua champions of Islam but qua new nobility. The recently converted Mavali, almost all former Mazdaists, took Islam more seriously than the Arabs themselves, who represented also a class ideal. Even in the army of Ali the wholly democratic and Puritan Qaraites had split off,¹¹² and in their ranks we see for the first time the combination of fanatic sectarianism and Jacobinism. Here and now there emerged not only the Shiite tendency, but also the first impulses towards the Communistic Karramiyya movement, which can be traced to Mazdak and later produced the vast outbreaks under Babek. The Abbassids were anything but favorites with the insurgents of Kufa, and it was only owing to their great diplomatic skill that they were first allowed a footing as officers and then — almost like Napoleon — were able to enter into the heritage of a Revolution that had spread over the whole East. After their victory they built Baghdad — a resurrected Ctesiphon, symbol of the downfall of feudal Arabism — and this first world city of the new Civilization became from 800 to 1050 the theater of the events which led from Napoleonism to Caesarism, from the Caliphate to the Sultanate, which, in Baghdad no less than in Byzantium, is the Magian type of power without form — here also the only kind of power still possible.

We have to recognize quite clearly, then, that in the Arabian world as elsewhere democracy was a class ideal — the outlook of townsmen and the expression of their will to be free from the old linkages with land, be it a desert or plow land. The “no” which answered the Caliph tradition could disguise itself in very numerous forms, and neither free thought nor constitutionalism in our sense was necessary to it. Magian mind and Magian money are “free” in quite a different way. The Byzantine monkhood was liberal to the point of turbulence, not only against court and nobility, but also against the higher ecclesiastical powers, which had developed a hierarchy (corresponding to the Gothic) even before the Council of Nicaea. The consensus of the Faithful, the “people” in the most daring sense, was looked upon as willed by God (“Nature,” Rousseau would have said), as equal and free from all powers of the blood. The celebrated scene in which the Abbot Theodore of Studion adjured the Emperor Leo V to obey (813) is a Storming of the Bastille in Magian forms.¹¹³ Not long afterwards there began the revolt of the Paulicians, very pious and in social matters wholly radical, who set up a state of their own beyond the Taurus, ravaged all Asia Minor, defeated one Imperial levy after another, and were not subjugated till 874. This corresponds in every way to the communistic religious movement of the Karramiyya, which extended from the Tigris to Merv and whose leader Babek succumbed only after a twenty years’ struggle (817-837);¹¹⁴ and the other like outbreak of the Carmathians¹¹⁵ in the West (890-904), whose liaisons reached from Arabia into all the Syrian cities and who propagated rebellion as far as the Persian coast. But, besides these, there were still other disguises of the political party battle. When now we are told that the Byzantine army was Iconoclast and that the military party was consequently opposed by an Iconodule monkish party, we begin to see the passions of the century of the image controversy (740-840) in quite a new light, and to understand that the end of the crisis (843) — the final defeat of the Iconoclasts and simultaneously of the free church monkish policy — signifies a Restoration in the 1815 sense of the word.¹¹⁶ And, lastly, this period is the time of the fearful slave rebellion in Iraq — the kernel of the Abbassids’ realm — which throws sudden light upon a series of other social upheavals. Ali, the Spartacus of Islam, founded in 869, south of Baghdad, a veritable Negro state out of the masses of runaways, built himself a capital, Muktara, and extended his power far in the directions of Arabia and Persia alike, where he gained the support of whole tribes. In 871 Basra, the first great port of the Islamic world, inhabited by nearly a million souls, was taken, deluged in massacre, and burnt. Not till 883 was this slave state destroyed.

Thus slowly the Sassanid-Byzantine forms were hollowed out, and in the place of the ancient traditions of the higher officialdom and nobility there arose the inconsequent and wholly personal power of incidental geniuses — the Sultanate, For this is the specifically Arabian form, and it appears simultaneously in Byzantium and Baghdad and takes its steady course from the Napoleonic beginnings about 800 to the completed Caesarism of the Seljuk Turks about 1050. This form is purely Magian, belongs only to that Culture, and is incomprehensible without the most fundamental axioms of its soul. The Caliphate, a synthesis of political (not to say cosmic) beat and style, was not abolished — for the Caliph as the representative of God recognized by the Consensus of the elect is sacred — but he was deprived of all powers that Caesarism needed to possess, just as Pompey and Augustus in fact, and Sulla and Caesar in fact and in name, abstracted these powers from the old constitutional forms of Rome. In the end there remained to the Caliph about as much power as the Senate and the Comitias had under Tiberius. The whole richness of being in high form — in law, costume, ethic — that had once been a symbol, was now mere trappings covering a formless and purely factual regime.

Sowe find by the side of Michael III (842-867) Bardas, and by Constantine VII (912-959) Romanos — the latter even formally Co-Emperor.¹¹⁷ In 867 the ex-groom Basileios, a Napoleonic figure, overthrew Bardas and founded the sword dynasty of the Armenians (to 1081), in which generals instead of Emperors mostly ruled — force men like Romanos, Nicephorus, and Bardas Phocas. The greatest amongst them was John Tzimisces (969-976) in Armenian Kiur Zan. In Baghdad it was the Turks who played the Armenian role; in 842 the Caliph Vathek invested one of their leaders for the first time with the title of Sultan. From 862 the Turkish praetorians held the ruler in tutelage, and in 945 Achmed, the founder of the Sultan dynasty of the Buyids, formally restricted the Abbassid Caliph to his religious dignities. And then there set in, in both the world cities, an unrestrained competition between the mighty provincial families for possession of the supreme power. In the case of the Christian we find, indeed, Basileios II and others challenging the great lati fundia lords, but this does not in the least mean social purposes in the legislator. It was an act of self-defense on the part of the momentary potentate against possible heirs, and closely analogous, therefore, to the proscriptions of Sulla and the Triumvirs. Half Asia Minor belonged to the Dukas, Phocas, and Skleros connections; the Chancellor Basileios, who could keep an army on pay out of his own fabulous resources, has long ago been compared with Crassus.¹¹⁸ But the imperial age proper begins only with the Seljuk Turks.¹¹⁹ Their leader Togrulbek won Iraq in 1043 and Armenia in 1049, and in 1055 forced the Caliph to grant him the hereditary Sultanate. His son Alp Arslan conquered Syria and, by the victory of Manzikert, gained eastern Asia Minor. The remnant of the Byzantine Empire thenceforward possessed no importance to, or influence on, the further destinies of the Turkish-Islamic Imperium.

This is the phase, too, which in Egypt is concealed under the name of the “Hyksos.” Between the Xllth and the XVIIIth Dynasties lay two centuries,¹²⁰ which began with the collapse of the ancien régime which had culminated with Sesostris III, and ended with the beginning of the New Empire. The numbering of the dynasties itself suffices to disclose something catastrophic. In the lists of kings the names appear successive or parallel, usurpers of obscurest origin, generals, people with strange titles, often reigning only a few days. With the very first king of the XIIIth Dynasty the high Nile records at Semne break off, and with his successor the archives at Kahun come to an end. It is the time out of which the Leiden Papyrus portrays the great social revolution.¹²¹ The fall of the Government and the victory of the mass is followed by outbreaks of the army and the rise of ambitious soldiers. In Egypt from about 1680 appears the name of the “Hyksos,”¹²² a designation with which the historians of the New Empire, who no longer understood or wished to understand the meaning of the epoch, covered up the shame of these years. These Hyksos, there can be no doubt whatever, played the part that the Armenians played in Byzantium; and in the Classical world too, the destinies of the Cimbri and Teutones, would have gone the same way had they defeated Marius and his legions of city canaille; they would have filled the armies of the Triumvirs again and again, and in the end probably set up barbarian chieftains in their place — for the case of Jugurtha shows the lengths to which foreigners dared to go with the Rome of those days. The provenance or constitution of the intruders does not matter — they might be bodyguards, insurgent slaves, Jacobins, or purely alien tribes. What does matter is what they were for the Egyptian world in that century of theirs. In the end they set up a state in the Western Delta and built a capital, Auaris, for it.¹²³ One of their leaders, Khyan by name, who styled himself, not Pharaoh, but “Embracer of the Country” and “prince of the young men” (names as essentially revolutionary as the Consul sine collega or dictator prepetuus of Caesar’s time) a man probably of the stamp of John Tzimisces, ruled over all Egypt and spread his renown as far as Crete and the Euphrates. But after him began a fight of all the districts for the Imperium, and out of that fight Amasis and the Theban dynasty eventually emerged victorious.

For us this time of Contending States began with Napoleon and his violent arbitrary government by order. His head was the first in our world to make effective the notion of a military and at the same time popular world domination — something altogether different from the Empire of Charles V and even the British Colonial Empire of his own day. If the nineteenth century has been relatively poor in great wars — and revolutions — and has overcome its worst crises diplomatically by means of congresses, this has been due precisely to the continuous and terrific war preparedness which has made disputants, fearful at the eleventh hour of the consequences, postpone the definitive decision again and again, and led to the substitution of chess moves for war. For this is the century of gigantic permanent armies and universal compulsory service. We ourselves are too near to it to see it under this terrifying aspect. In all world history there is no parallel. Ever since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and latterly millions, of men have stood ready to march, and mighty fleets renewed every ten years have filled the harbors. It is a war without war, a war of overbidding in equipment and preparedness, a war of figures and tempo and technics, and the diplomatic dealings have been not of court with court, but of headquarters with headquarters. The longer the discharge was delayed, the more huge became the means and the more intolerable the tension. This is the Faustian, the dynamic, form of “the Contending States” during the first century of that period, but it ended with the explosion of the World War. For the demand of these four years has been altogether too much for the principle of universal service — child of the French Revolution, revolutionary through and through, as it is in this form — and for all tactical methods evolved from it.¹²⁴ The place of the permanent armies as we know them will gradually be taken by professional forces of volunteer war keen soldiers; and from millions we shall revert to hundreds of thousands. But ipso facto this second century will be one of actually Contending States. These armies are not substitutes for war — they are for war, and they want war. Within two generations it will be they whose will prevails over that of all the comfortables put together. In these wars of theirs for the heritage of the whole world, continents will be staked, India, China, South Africa, Russia, Islam called out, new technics and tactics played and counterplayed. The great cosmopolitan foci of power will dispose at their pleasure of smaller states — their territory, their economy and their men alike — all that is now merely province, passive object, means to end, and its destinies are without importance to the great march of things. We ourselves, in a very few years, have learned to take little or no notice of events that before the War would have horrified the world; who today seriously thinks about the millions that perish in Russia?

Again and again between these catastrophes of blood and terror the cry rises up for reconciliation of the peoples and for peace on earth. It is but the background and the echo of the grand happening, but, as such, so necessary that we have to assume its existence even if, as in Hyksos Egypt, in Baghdad and Byzantium, no tradition tells of it. Esteem as we may the wish towards all this, we must have the courage to face facts as they are — that is the hallmark of men of race quality and it is by the being of these men that alone history is. Life if it would be great, is hard; it lets choose only between victory and ruin, not between war and peace, and to the victory belong the sacrifices of victory. For that which shuffles querulously and jealously by the side of the events is only literature, — written or thought or lived literature — mere truths that lose themselves in the moving crush of facts. History has never deigned to take notice of these propositions. In the Chinese world Hiang-Sui tried, as early as 535, to found a peace league. In the period of the Contending States, imperialism (Lien-heng) was opposed by the League of Nations idea (Hoh-tsung),¹²⁵ particularly in the southern regions, but it was foredoomed like every half measure that steps into the path of a whole, and it had vanished even before the victory of the North. But both tendencies alike rejected the political taste of the Taoists, who, in those fearful centuries, elected for intellectual self-disarmament, thereby reducing themselves to the level of mere material to be used up by others and for others in the grand decisions. Even Roman politics — deliberately improvident as the Classical spirit was in all other respects — at least made one attempt to bring the whole world into one system of equal coordinated forces which should do away with all necessity for further wars — that is, when at the fall of Hannibal Rome forwent the chance of incorporating the East. But reluctance was useless; the party of the younger Scipio went over to frank Imperialism in order to make an end of chaos, although its clear sighted leader foresaw therein the doom of his city, which possessed (and in a high degree) the native Classical incapacity for organizing anything whatever. The way from Alexander to Caesar is unambiguous and unavoidable, and the strongest nation of any and every Culture, consciously or unconsciously, willing or unwilling, has had to tread it.

From the rigor of these facts there is no refuge. The Hague Conference of 1907 was the prelude of the World War; the Washington Conference of 1921 will have been that of other wars. The history of these times is no longer an intellectual match of wits in elegant forms for pluses and minuses, from which either side can withdraw when it pleases. The alternatives now are to stand fast or to go under — there is no middle course. The only moral that the logic of things permits to us now is that of the climber on the face of the crag — a moment’s weakness and all is over. Today all “philosophy” is nothing but an inward abdication and resignation, or a craven hope of escaping realities by means of mysticisms. It was just the same in Roman times. Tacitus tells us¹²⁶ how the famous Musonius Rufus tried, by exhortations on the blessings of peace and the evils of war, to influence the legions that in 70 stood before the gates of Rome, and barely escaped alive from their blows. The military commander Avidius Cassius called the Emperor Marcus Aurelius a “philosophical old woman.”

In these conditions so much of old and great traditions as remains, so much of historical “fitness” and experience as has got into the blood of the twentieth century nations, acquires an unequalled potency. For us creative piety, or (to use a more fundamental term) the pulse that has come down to us from first origins, adheres only to forms that are older than the Revolution and Napoleon,¹²⁷ forms which grew and were not made. Every remnant of them, however tiny, that has kept itself alive in the being of any self-contained minority whatever will before long rise to incalculable values and bring about historical effects which no one yet imagines to be possible. The traditions of an old monarchy, of an old aristocracy, of an old polite society, in so much as they are still healthy enough to keep clear of professional or professorial politics, insofar as they possess honor, abnegation, discipline, the genuine sense of a great mission (race quality, that is, and training), sense of duty and sacrifice — can become a center which holds together the being-stream of an entire people and enables it to outlast this time and make its landfall in the future. To be “in condition” is everything. It falls to us to live in the most trying times known to the history of a great Culture. The last race to keep its form, the last living tradition, the last leaders who have both at their back, will pass through and onward, victors.

X

By the term “Caesarism” I mean that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. It does not matter that Augustus in Rome, and Hwang-ti in China, Amasis in Egypt and Alp Arslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. The spirit of these forms was dead,¹²⁸ and so all institutions, however carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and weight. Real importance centered in the wholly personal power exercised by the Caesar, or by anybody else capable of exercising it in his place. It is the récidive of a form fulfilled world into primitivism, into the cosmic historyless. Biological stretches of time once more take the place vacated by historical periods.

At the beginning, where the Civilization is developing to full bloom (today), there stands the miracle of the Cosmopolis, the great petrifact, a symbol of the formless — vast, splendid, spreading in insolence. It draws within itself the being-streams of the now impotent countryside, human masses that are wafted as dunes from one to another or flow like loose sand into the chinks of the stone. Here money and intellect celebrate their greatest and their last triumphs. It is the most artificial, the cleverest phenomenon manifested in the light world of human eyes — uncanny, “too good to be true,” standing already almost beyond the possibilities of cosmic formation.

Presently, however, the idealess facts come forward again, naked and gigantic. The eternal cosmic pulse has finally overcome the intellectual tensions of a few centuries. In the form of democracy, money has won. There has been a period in which politics were almost its preserve. But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the Culture, the chaos gives forth a new and overpowering factor that penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming — the Caesar men. Before them the money collapses. The Imperial Age, in every Culture alike, signifies the end of the politics of mind and money. The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. “Race” springs forth, pure and irresistible — the strongest win and the residue is their spoil. They seize the management of the world, and the realm of books and problems petrifies or vanishes from memory. From now on, new destinies in the style of the pre-Culture time are possible afresh, and visible to the consciousness without cloaks of causality. There is no inward difference more between the lives of Septimius Severus and Gallienus and those of Alaric and Odoacer. Rameses, Trajan, Wu-ti belong together in a uniform up-and-down of historyless time-stretches.

Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political problems. People manage with the situation as it is and the powers that be. In the period of Contending States, torrents of blood had reddened the pavements of all world cities, so that the great truths of Democracy might be turned into actualities, and for the winning of rights without which life seemed not worth the living. Now these rights are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved, even by punishment, to make use of them. A hundred years more, and even the historians will no longer understand the old controversies. Already by Caesar’s time reputable people had almost ceased to take part in the elections.¹²⁹ It embittered the life of the great Tiberius that the most capable men of his time held aloof from politics, and Nero could not even by threats compel the Equites to come to Rome in order to exercise their rights. This is the end of the great politics. The conflict of intelligences that had served as substitute for war must give place to war itself in its most primitive form.

It is, therefore, a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the period to presume, as Mommsen did,¹³⁰ a deep design of subdivision in the “dyarchy” fashioned by Augustus, with its partition of powers between Princeps and Senate. A century earlier this constitution would have been a real thing, but that would in itself suffice to make it impossible for such an idea to have entered the heads of the present force men. Now it meant nothing but the attempt of a weak personality to deceive itself as to inexorable facts by mantling them in empty forms. Caesar saw things as they were and was guided in the exercise of his rulership by definite and unsentimental practical considerations. The legislation of his last months was concerned wholly with transitional provisions, none of which were intended to be permanent. This precisely is what has generally been overlooked. He was far too deep a judge of things to anticipate development or to settle its definitive forms at this moment, with the Parthian War impending. But Augustus, like Pompey before him, was not the master of his following, but thoroughly dependent upon it and its views of things. The form of the Principate was not at all his discovery, but the doctrinaire execution of an obsolete party ideal that Cicero — another weakling — had formulated.¹³¹ When, on the 13th January 27, Augustus gave back the state power to the “Senate and People” of Rome — a scene all the more meaningless because of its sincerity — he kept the Tribunate for himself. In fact, this was the one element of the polity that could manifest itself in actuality. The Tribune was the legitimate successor of the Tyrant, and as long ago as 122 B.C. Caius Gracchus had put into the title a connotation limited no longer by the legal bounds of the office, but only by the personal talents of the incumbent. From him it is a direct line through Marius and Caesar to the young Nero, who set himself to defeat the political purposes of his mother Agrippina. The Princeps, on the other hand, was thenceforth only a costume, a rank — very likely a fact in society, certainly not a fact in politics. And this, precisely, was the conception invested with light and glamor by the theory of Cicero, and already — and by him of all people — associated with the Divus idea.¹³² The “cooperation” of the Senate and People, on the contrary, was an antiquated ceremonial, with about as much life in it as the rites of the Fratres Arvales — also restored by Augustus. The great parties of the Gracchan age had long become retinues — Caesarians and Pompeians — and finally there only remained on the one side the formless omnipotence, the plain brutal “fact,” the Caesar — or whoever managed to get the Caesar under his influence — and on the other side the handful of narrow ideologues who concealed dissatisfaction under philosophy and thenceforward sought to advance their ideals by conspiracy. What these Stoics were in Rome, the Confucians were in China — and, seen thus, the episode of the “Burning of the Books,” decreed by the Chinese Augustus in 212, begins to be intelligible through the reproach of immense vandalism that the minds of later literates fastened upon it. But, after all, these Stoic enthusiasts for an ideal that had become impossible had killed Caesar:¹³³ to the Divus cult they opposed a Cato and Brutus cult; the philosophers in the Senate (which by then was only a noble club) never wearied of lamenting the downfall of “freedom” and fomenting conspiracies such as Piso’s in 65. Had this been the state of things at Nero’s death, it would have been Sulla over again; and that is why Nero put to death the Stoic Thrasea Psetus, why Vespasian executed Helvidius Priscus, and why copies of the history of Cremutius Cordus, which lauded Brutus as the last of the Romans, were collected and burnt in Rome. These were acts of defensive State necessityvis-à-vis blind ideology — acts such as those we know of Cromwell and Robespierre — and it was in exactly the same position that the Chinese Caesars found themselves vis-à-vis the school of Confucius, which had formerly worked out their ideal of a state constitution and now had no notion of enduring the actuality. This great Burning of the Books was nothing but the destruction of one part of the politico-philosophical literature and the abolition of propaganda and secret organizations.¹³⁴ This defensive lasted in both Imperia for a century, and then even reminiscences of party political passions faded out and the two philosophies became the ruling world outlook of the Imperial age in its maturity.¹³⁵ But the world was now the theater of tragic family histories into which state histories were dissolved; the Julian-Claudian house destroyed Roman history, and the house of Shi-hwang-ti (even from 206 B.C.) destroyed Chinese, and we darkly discern something of the same kind in the destinies of the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut and her brothers (1501-1447). It is the last step to the definitive. With world peace — the peace of high policies — the “sword side” of being retreats and the “spindle side” rules again; henceforth there are only private histories, private destinies, private ambitions, from top to bottom, from the miserable troubles of fellaheen to the dreary feuds of Caesars for the private possession of the world. The wars of the age of world peace are private wars, more fearful than any State wars because they are formless.

For world peace — which has often existed in fact — involves the private renunciation of war on the part of the immense majority, but along with this it involves an unavowed readiness to submit to being the booty of others who do not renounce it. It begins with the State-destroying wish for universal reconciliation, and it ends in nobody’s moving a finger so long as misfortune only touches his neighbor. Already under Marcus Aurelius each city and each land patch was thinking of itself, and the activities of the ruler were his private affair as other men’s were theirs. The remoter peoples were as indifferent to him and his troops and his aims as they were to the projects of Germanic war bands. On this spiritual premise a second Vikingism develops. The state of being “in form” passes from nations to bands and retinues of adventurers, self-styled Caesars, seceding generals, barbarian kings, and what not — in whose eyes the population becomes in the end merely a part of the landscape. There is a deep relation between the heroes of the Mycenaean primitive age and the soldier emperors of Rome, and between, say, Menes and Rameses II. In our Germanic world the spirits of Alaric and Theodoric will come again — there is a first hint of them in Cecil Rhodes — and the alien executioners of the Russian preface, from Jenghiz Khan to Trotski (with the episode of Petrine Tsarism between them) are, when all is said and done, very little different from most of the pretenders of the Latin American republics, whose private struggles have long since put an end to the form rich age of the Spanish Baroque.

With the formed state, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timeless village and the “eternal” peasant reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth — a busy, not inadequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier emperors passingly blows. In the midst of the land lie the old world cities, empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a historyless mankind slowly nests itself. Men live from hand to mouth, with petty thrifts and petty fortunes, and endure. Masses are trampled on in the conflicts of the conquerors who contend for the power and the spoil of this world, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive fertility and suffer on. And while in high places there is eternal alternance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts forever. There, in the souls, world peace, the peace of God, the bliss of gray haired monks and hermits, is become actual — and there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it — but it is there.

CHAPTER XII

THE STATE

(C) PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS

I

To Politics as an idea we have given more thought than has been good for us, since, correspondingly, we have understood all the less about the observation of Politics as a reality. The great statesmen are accustomed to act immediately and on the basis of a sure flair for facts. This is so self-evident, to them, that it simply never enters their heads to reflect upon the basic general principles of their action — supposing indeed that such exist. In all ages they have known what they had to do, and any theory of this knowledge has been foreign to both their capacities and their tastes. But the professional thinkers who have turned their attention to the faits accomplis of men have been so remote, inwardly, from these actions that they have just spun for themselves a web of abstractions — for preference, abstraction myths like justice, virtue, freedom — and then applied them as criteria to past and, especially, future historical happening. Thus in the end they have forgotten that concepts are only concepts, and brought themselves to the conclusion that there is a political science whereby we can form the course of the world according to an ideal recipe. As nothing of the kind has ever or anywhere happened, political doing has come to be considered as so trivial in comparison with abstract thinking that they debate in their books whether there is a “genius of action” at all.

Here, on the contrary, the attempt will be made to give, instead of an ideological system, a physiognomy of politics as it has actually been practiced in the course of general history, and not as it might or ought to have been practiced. The problem was, and is, to penetrate to the final meaning of great events, to “see” them, to feel and to transcribe the symbolically important in them. The projects of world improvers and the actuality of History have nothing to do with one another.¹

The being-streams of humanity are called History when we regard them as movement, and family, estate, people, nation, when we regard them as the object moved. Politics is the way in which this fluent Being maintains itself, grows, triumphs over other life streams.All living is politics, in every trait of instinct, in the inmost marrow. That which we nowadays like to call life energy (vitality), the “it” in us that at all costs strives forward and upward, the blind cosmic drive to validity and power that at the same time remains plantwise and racewise, bound up with the earth, the “home” land; the directedness, the need to actualize — it is this that appears in every higher mankind, as its political life, seeking naturally and inevitably the great decisions that determine whether it shall be, or shall suffer, a Destiny. For it grows or it dies out; there is no third possibility.

For this reason the nobility, as expression of a strong race quality, is the truly political Order, and training and not shaping is the truly political sort of education. Every great politician, a center of forces in the stream of happening, has something of the noble in his feeling of self-vocation and inward obligation. On the other hand, all that is microcosmic and “intellect” is unpolitical, and so there is a something of priestliness in all program politics and ideology. The best diplomats are the children; in their play, or when they want something, a cosmic “it” that is bound up in the individual being breaks out immediately and with the sure tread of the sleepwalker. They do not learn, but unlearn, this art of early years as they grow older — hence the rarity in the world of adults of the Statesman.

It is only in and between these being-streams that fill the field of the high Culture that high policy exists. They are only possible, therefore, in the plural. A people is, really, only in relation to peoples. But the natural, “race,” relation between them is for that very reason a relation of war — this is a fact that no truths avail to alter. War is the primary politics of everything that lives, and so much so that in the deeps battle and life are one, and being and will-to-battle expire together. Old Germanic words for this, like “orrusta” and“orlog,” mean seriousness and destiny in contrast to jest and play — and the contrast is one of intensity, not of qualitative difference. And even though all high politics tries to be a substitution of more intellectual weapons for the sword and though it is the ambition of the statesman at the culminations of all the Cultures to feel able to dispense with war, yet the primary relationship between diplomacy and the war art endures. The character of battle is common to both, and the tactics and stratagems, and the necessity of material forces in the background to give weight to the operations. The aim, too, remains the same — namely, the growth of one’s own life unit (class or nation) at the cost of the other’s. And every attempt to eliminate the “race” element only leads to its transfer to other ground; instead of the conflict of states we have that of parties, or that of areas, or (if there also the will to growth is extinct) that of the adventurers’ retinues, to whose doings the rest of the population unresistingly adjusts itself.

In every war between life-powers the question at issue is which is to govern the whole. It is always a life, never a system, law, or program that gives the beat in the stream of happening.² To be the center of action and effective focus of a multitude, to make the inward form of one’s own personality into that of whole peoples and periods, to be history’s commanding officer, with the aim of bringing one’s own people or family or purposes to the top of events — that is the scarce conscious but irresistible impulse in every individual being that has a historical vocation in it. There is only personal history, and consequently only personal politics. The struggle of, not principles but men, not ideals but race qualities, for executive power is the alpha and omega. Even revolutions are no exception, for the “sovereignty of the people” only expresses the fact that the ruling power has assumed the title of people’s leader instead of that of king. The method of governing is scarcely altered thereby, and the position of the governed not at all. And even world peace, in every case where it has existed, has been nothing but the slavery of an entire humanity under the regimen imposed by a few strong natures determined to rule.

The conception of executive power implies that the life unit — even in the case of the animals — is subdivided into subjects and objects of government. This is so self-evident that no mass unit has ever for a moment, even in the severest crises (such as 1789), lost the sense of this inner structure of itself. Only the incumbent vanishes, not the office, and if a people does actually, in the tide of events, lose all leadership and float on haphazard, it only means that control has passed to outside hands, that it has become in its entirety the mere object.

Politically gifted peoples do not exist. Those which are supposed to be so are simply peoples that are firmly in the hands of a ruling minority and in consequence feel themselves to be in good form. The English as a people are just as unthinking, narrow, and unpractical in political matters as any other nation, but they possess — for all their liking for public debate — a tradition of confidence. The difference is simply that the Englishman is the object of a regimen of very old and successful habits, in which he acquiesces because experience has shown him their advantage. From an acquiescence that has the outward appearance of agreement, it is only one step to the conviction that this government depends upon his will, although paradoxically it is the government that, for technical reasons of its own, unceasingly hammers the notion into his head. The ruling class in England has developed its aims and methods quite independently of the “people,” and it works with and within an unwritten constitution of which the refinements — which have arisen from practice and are wholly innocent of theory — are to the uninitiated as opaque as they are unintelligible. But the courage of a troop depends on its confidence in the leadership, and confidence means involuntary abstention from criticism. It is the officer who makes cowards into heroes, or heroes into cowards, and this holds good equally for armies, peoples, classes, and parties. Political talent in a people is nothing but confidence in its leading. But that confidence has to be acquired; it will ripen only in its own good time, and success will stabilize it and make it into a tradition. What appears as a lack of the feeling of certainty in the ruled is really lack of leadership talent in the ruling classes, which generates that sort of uninstinctive and meddlesome criticism which by its very existence shows that a people has got “out of condition.”

II

How is politics done? The born statesman is above all a valuer — a valuer of men, situations, and things. He has the “eye” which unhesitatingly and inflexibly embraces the round of possibilities. The judge of horses takes in an animal with one glance and knows what prospects it will have in a race. To do the correct thing without “knowing” it, to have the hands that imperceptibly tighten or ease the bit — his talent is the very opposite to that of the man of theory. The secret pulse of all being is one and the same in him and in the things of history. They sense one another, they exist for one another. The fact man is immune from the risk of practicing sentimental or program politics. He does not believe in the big words. Pilate’s question is constantly on his lips — truths? The born statesman stands beyond true and false. He does not confuse the logic of events with the logic of systems. “Truths” or “errors” — which here amount to the same — only concern him as intellectual currents, and in respect of workings. He surveys their potency, durability, and direction, and duly books them in his calculations for the destiny of the power that he directs. He has convictions, certainly, that are dear to him, but he has them as a private person; no real politician ever felt himself tied to them when in action. “The doer is always conscienceless; no one has a conscience except the spectator,” said Goethe, and it is equally true of Sulla and Robespierre as it is of Bismarck and Pitt. The great Popes and the English party leaders, so long as they had still to strive for the mastery of things, acted on the same principles as the conquerors and upstarts of all ages. Take the dealings of Innocent III, who very nearly succeeded in creating a world dominion of the Church, and deduce therefrom the catechism of success; it will be found to be in the extremest contradiction with all religious moral. Yet without it there could have been no bearable existence for any Church, not to mention English Colonies, American fortunes, victorious revolutions, or, for that matter, states or parties or peoples in general. It is life, not the individual, that is conscienceless.

The essential, therefore, is to understand the time for which one is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces, who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day — he is not of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his. Look not back to the past for measuring rods! Still less sideways for some system or other! There are times, like our own present and the Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic logic as character.

But the true statesman must also be, in a large sense of the word, an educator — not the representative of a moral or a doctrine, but an exemplar in doing. It is a patent fact that a religion has never yet altered the style of an existence. It penetrated the waking consciousness, the intellectual man, it threw new light on another world, it created an immense happiness by way of humanity, resignation, and patience unto death, but over the forces of life it possessed no power. In the sphere of the living only the great personality — the “it,” the race, the cosmic force bound up in that personality — has been creative (not shaping, but breeding and training) and has effectively modified the type of entire classes and peoples. It is not “the” truth or “the” good or “the” upright, but “the” Roman or “the” Puritan or “the” Prussian that is a fact. The sum of honor and duty, discipline, resolution, is a thing not learned from books, but awakened in the stream of being by a living exemplar; and that is why Frederick William I was one of those educators, great for all time, whose personal race forming conduct does not vanish in the course of the generations. The genuine statesman is distinguished from the “mere politician” — the player who plays for the pleasure of the game, the arriviste on the heights of history, the seeker after wealth and rank — as also from the schoolmaster of an ideal, by the fact that he dares to demand sacrifices — and obtains them, because his feeling that he is necessary to the time and the nation is shared by thousands, transforms them to the core, and renders them capable of deeds to which otherwise they could never have risen.³

Highest of all, however, is not action, but the ability to command. It is this that takes the individual up out of himself and makes him the center of a world of action. There is one kind of commanding that makes obedience a proud, free, and noble habit. That kind Napoleon, for example, did not possess. A residue of subaltern outlook in him prevented him from training men to be men and not bureau personnel, and led him to govern through edicts instead of through personalities; as he did not understand this subtlest tact of command and, therefore, was obliged to do everything really decisive himself, he slowly collapsed from inability to reconcile the demands of his position with the limit of human capabilities. But one who, like Caesar or Frederick the Great, possesses this last and highest gift of complete humanity feels — on a battle evening when operations are sweeping to the willed conclusion, and the victory is turning out to be conclusive of the campaign; or when the last signature is written that rounds off a historical epoch — a wondrous sense of power that the man of truths can never know. There are moments — and they indicate the maxima of cosmic flowings — when the individual feels himself to be identical with Destiny, the center of the world, and his own personality seems to him almost as a covering in which the history of the future is about to clothe itself.

The first problem is to make oneself somebody; the second — less obvious, but harder and greater in its ultimate effects — to create a tradition, to bring on others so that one’s work may be continued with one’s own pulse and spirit, to release a current of like activity that does not need the original leader to maintain it in form. And here the statesman rises to something that in the Classical world would doubtless have been called divinity. He becomes the creator of a new life, the spirit ancestor of a young race. He himself, as a unit, vanishes from the stream after a few years. But a minority called into being by him takes up his course and maintains it indefinitely. This cosmic something, this soul of a ruling stratum, an individual can generate and leave as a heritage, and throughout history it is this that has produced the durable effects. The great statesman is rare. Whether he comes, or wins through, too soon or too late, incident determines. Great individuals often destroy more than they have built up — by the gap that their death makes in the flow of happening. But the creation of tradition means the elimination of the incident. A tradition breeds a high average, with which the future can reckon — no Caesar, but a Senate, no Napoleon, but an incomparable officer corps. A strong tradition attracts talents from all quarters, and out of small gifts produces great results. The schools of painting of Italy and Holland are proof of this, no less than the Prussian army and the diplomacy of the Roman Curia. It was the great flaw in Bismarck, as compared with Frederick William I, that he could achieve, but could not form a tradition; that he did not parallel Moltke’s officer corps by a corresponding race of politicians who would identify themselves in feeling with his State and its new tasks, would constantly take up good men from below and so provide for the continuance of the Bismarckian action pulse forever. If this creation of a tradition does not come off, then instead of a homogeneous ruling stratum we have a congeries of heads that are helpless when confronted by the unforeseen. If it does, we have a Sovereign People in the one sense of the phrase that is worthy of a people and possible in the world of fact — a highly trained, self-replenishing minority with sure and slowly ripened traditions, which attracts every talent into the charmed circle and uses it to the full, and ipso facto keeps itself in harmony with the remainder of the nation that it rules. Such a minority slowly develops into a true “breed,” even when it had begun merely as a party, and the sureness of its decisions comes to be that of blood, not of reason. But this means that what happens in it happens “of itself” and does not need the Genius. Great politics, so to put it, takes the place of the great politician.

What, then, is politics? It is the art of the possible — an old saying, and almost an all inclusive saying. The gardener can obtain a plant from the seed, or he can improve its stock. He can bring to bloom, or let languish, the dispositions hidden in it, its growths and color, its flower and fruit. On his eye for possibilities — and, therefore, necessities — depends its fulfillment, its strength, its whole Destiny. But the basic form and direction of its being, the stages and tempo and direction thereof, are not in his power. It must accomplish them or it decays, and the same is true of the immense plant that we call a “Culture” and the being-streams of human families that are bound up in its form world. The great statesman is the gardener of a people.

Every doer is born in a time and for a time, and thereby the ambit of his attainable achievement is fixed. For his grandfather, for his grandson, the data, and therefore the task and the object, are not the same. The circle is further narrowed by the limits of his personality, the properties of his people, the situation, and the men with whom he has to work. It is the hallmark of the high politician that he is rarely caught out in a misappreciation of this limit, and equally rarely overlooks anything realizable within it. With this — one cannot too often repeat, especially to Germans — goes a sure discrimination between what “ought” to be and what will be. The basic forms of the state and of political life, the direction and the degree of their evolution, are given values unalterably dependent on the given time. They are the track of political success and not its goal. On the other hand the worshipers of political ideals create out of nothing. Their intellectual freedom is astounding, but their castles of the mind, built of airy concepts like wisdom and righteousness, liberty and equality, are in the end all the same; they are built from the top story downwards. The master of fact, for his part, is content to direct imperceptibly that which he sees and accepts as plain reality. This does not seem very much, yet it is the very starting point of freedom, in a grand sense of the word. The knack lies in the little things, the last careful touch of the helm, the fine sensing of the most delicate oscillations of collective and individual souls. The art of the statesman consists not only in a clear idea of the main lines drawn undeniably before him,but also in the sure handling of the single occurrences and the single persons, encountered along those lines, which can turn an impending disaster into a decisive success. The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious. An adept in the game can, like Talleyrand, go to Vienna as ambassador of the vanquished party and make himself master of the victor. At the Lucca meeting, Caesar, whose position was well nigh desperate, not only made Pompey’s power serviceable to his own ends, but undermined it at the same time, and without his opponent’s becoming aware of the fact. But the domain of the possible has dangerous edges, and if the finished tact of the great Baroque diplomatists almost always managed to keep clear, it is the very privilege of the ideologues to be always stumbling over it. There have been turns in history in which the statescraftman has let himself drift with the current awhile, in order not to lose the leadership. Every situation has its elastic limit, and in the estimation of that limit not the smallest error is permissible. A revolution that reaches explosion point is always a proof of lack of the political pulse in the governors and in their opponents.

Further, the necessary must be done opportunely — namely, while it is a present wherewith the governing power can buy confidence in itself, whereas if it has to be conceded as a sacrifice, it discloses a weakness and excites contempt. Political forms are living forms whose changes inexorably follow a definite direction, and to attempt to prevent this course or to divert it towards some ideal is to confess oneself “out of condition.” The Roman nobility possessed this congruence of pulse, the Spartan did not. In the period of mounting democracy we find again and again (as in France before 1789 and Germany before 1918) the arrival of a fatal moment when it is too late for the necessary reform to be given as a free gift; then that which should be refused with the sternest energy is given as a sacrifice, and so becomes the sign of dissolution. But those who fail to detect the first necessity in good time will all the more certainly fail to misunderstand the second situation. Even a journey to Canossa can be made too soon or too late — the timing may settle the future of whole peoples, whether they shall be Destiny for others, or themselves the objects of another’s Destiny. But the declining democracy also repeats the same error of trying to hold what was the ideal of yesterday. This is the danger of our twentieth century. On the path towards Caesarism there is ever a Cato to be found.

The influence that a statesman — even one in an exceptionally strong position — possesses over the methods of politics is very small, and it is one of the characteristics of the high grade statesman that he does not deceive himself on this matter. His task is to work in and with the historical form that he finds in existence; it is only the theorist who enthusiastically searches for more ideal forms. But to be politically “in form” means necessarily, amongst other things, an unconditional command of the most modern means. There is no choice about it. The means and methods are premises pertaining to the time and belong to the inner form of the time — and one who grasps at the inapposite, who permits his taste or his feelings to overpower the pulse in him, loses at once his grip of realities. The danger of an aristocracy is that of being conservative in its means, the danger of a democracy is the confusion of formula and form. The means of the present are, and will be for many years, parliamentary — elections and the press. He may think what he pleases about them, he may respect them or despise them, but he must command them. Bach and Mozart commanded the musical means of their times. This is the hallmark of mastery in any and every field, and statecraft is no exception. Now, the publicly visible outer form thereof is not the essential but merely the disguise, and consequently it may be altered, rationalized, and brought down to constitutional texts — without its actualities being necessarily affected in the slightest — and hence the ambitions of all revolutionaries expend themselves in playing the game of rights, principles, and franchises on the surface of history. But the statesman knows that the extension of a franchise is quite unimportant in comparison with the technique — Athenian or Roman, Jacobin or American or present day German — of operating the votes. How the English constitution reads is a matter of small import compared with the fact that it is managed by a small stratum of high families, so that an Edward VII is simply a minister of his Ministry. And as for the modern Press, the sentimentalist may beam with contentment when it is constitutionally “free” — but the realist merely asks at whose disposal it is.

Politics, lastly, is the form in which is accomplished the history of a nation within a plurality of nations. The great art is to maintain one’s own nation inwardly “in form” for events outside; this is the natural relation of home and foreign politics, holding not only for Peoples and States and Estates, but for living units of every kind, down to the simplest animal swarms and down into the individual bodies. And, as between the two, the first exists exclusively for the second and not vice versa. The true democrat is accustomed to treat home politics as an end in itself; the rank and file of diplomats think solely of foreign affairs; but just because of this the individual successes of either “cut no ice.” No doubt, the political master exhibits his powers most obviously in the tactics of home reform; in his economic and social activities; in his cleverness in maintaining the public form of the whole, the “rights and liberties,” both in tune with the tastes of the period and at the same time effective; and in the education of the feelings without which it is impossible for a people to be “in condition” — namely, trust, respect for the leading, consciousness of power, contentment, and (when necessary) enthusiasm. But the value of all this depends upon its relation to this basic fact of higher history — that a people is not alone in the world, and that its future will be decided by its force relationships towards other peoples and powers and not by its mere internal ordering. And, since the ordinary man is not so longsighted, it is the ruling minority that must possess this quality on behalf of the rest, and not unless there is such a minority does the statesman find the instrument wherewith he can carry his purposes into effect.⁴

III

In the early politics of all Cultures the governing powers are pre-established and unquestioned. The whole being is strictly in patriarchal and symbolic form. The connections with the mother soil are so strong, the feudal tie, and even its successor the aristocratic state, so self-evident to the life held in their spell, that politics in a Homeric or Gothic age is limited to plain action within the cadre of the given forms. Insofar as these forms change, they do so more or less spontaneously, and the idea that it is a task of politics to bring about the changes never definitely emerges into anyone’s mind, even if a kingdom be overthrown or a nobility reduced to subjection. There is only class politics, Imperial or Papal or vassal politics. Blood and race speak in actions undertaken instinctively or half consciously — even the priest behaves, qua politician, as the man of race. The “problems” of the State are not yet awakened. The sovereignty, the primary orders, the entire early form world, are God given, and it is on them as premises, not about them as objects of dispute, that the organic minorities fight their battles. These minorities we call Factions.

It is of the essence of the Faction that it is wholly inaccessible to the idea that the order of things can be changed to a plan. Its object is to win for itself status, power, or possessions within this order — like all growing things in a growing world. There are groups in which relationships of houses, honor and loyalty, bonds of union of almost mythic inwardness, play a part, and from which abstract ideas are totally excluded. Such were the factions of the Homeric and Gothic periods, Telemachus and the suitors in Ithaca, the Blues and Greens under Justinian, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Houses of Lancaster and York, the Protestants,⁵ the Huguenots, and even later the motive forces of Fronde and First Tyrannis. Machiavelli’s book rests entirely on this spirit.

The change sets in as soon as, with the great city, the Non-Estate, the bourgeoisie, takes over the leading role. Now it is the reverse, the political form becomes the object of conflict, the problem. Heretofore it was ripened, now it must needs be shaped. Politics becomes awake, not merely comprehended, but reduced to comprehensible ideas. The powers of intellect and money set themselves up against blood and tradition. In place of the organic we have the organized; in place of the Estate, the Party. A party is not a growth of race, but an aggregate of heads, and therefore as superior to the old estates in intellect as it is poorer in instinct. It is the mortal enemy of naturally matured class ordering, the mere existence of which is in contradiction with its essence. Consequently, the notion of party is always bound up with the unreservedly negative, disruptive, and socially leveling notion of equality. Noble ideals are no longer recognized, but only vocational interests.⁶ It is the same with the freedom idea, which is likewise a negative. Parties are a purely urban phenomenon. With the emancipation of the city from the country, everywhere (whether we happen to know it evidentially or not) Estate politics gives way to party politics — in Egypt at the end of the Middle Kingdom, in China with the Contending States, in Baghdad and Byzantium with the Abbassid period. In the capitals of the West the parties form in the parliamentary style, in the city-states of the Classical they are forum parties, and we recognize parties of the Magian style in the Mavali and the monks of Theodore of Studion.⁷

But always it is the Non-Estate, the unit of protest against the essence of Estate, whose leading minority — “educated” and “well to do” — comes forward as a party with a program, consisting of aims that are not felt but defined, and of the rejection of everything that cannot be rationally grasped. At bottom, therefore, there is only one party, that of the bourgeoisie, the liberal, and it is perfectly conscious of its position as such. It looks on itself as coextensive with “the people.” Its opponents (above all, the genuine Estates — namely, “squire and parson”) are enemies and traitors to “the people,” and its opinions are the “voice of the people” — which is inoculated by all the expedients of party political nursing, oratory in the Forum, press in the West, until these opinions do fairly represent it.

The prime Estates are nobility and priesthood. The prime Party is that of money and mind, the liberal, the megalopolitan. Herein lies the profound justification, in all Cultures, of the ideas of Aristocracy and Democracy. Aristocracy despises the mind of the cities, Democracy despises the boor and hates the countryside.⁸ It is the difference between Estate politics and party politics, class consciousness and party inclination, race and intellect, growth and construction. Aristocracy in the completed Culture, and Democracy in the incipient cosmopolitan Civilization, stand opposed till both are submerged in Caesarism. As surely as the nobility is the Estate (and the Tiers Étatnever manages to get itself into real form in this fashion), so surely the nobility fails to feel as a party, though it may organize itself as one.

It has in fact no choice but to do so. All modern constitutions repudiate the Estates and are built on the Party as self-evidently the basic form of politics. The nineteenth century — correspondingly, therefore, the third century B.C. — is the heyday of party politics. Its democratic character compels the formation counter-parties, and whereas formerly, as late even as the eighteenth century, the “Tiers” constituted itself in imitation of the nobility as an Estate, now there arises the defensive figure of the Conservative party, copied from the Liberal,⁹ dominated completely by the latter’s forms, bourgeois-ized without being bourgeois, and obliged to fight with rules and methods that liberalism has laid down. It has the choice of handling these means better than its adversary¹⁰ or of perishing; but it is of the intimate structure of an Estate that it does not understand the situation and challenges the form instead of the foe, and is thus involved in that use of extreme methods which we see dominating the inner politics of whole states in the early phases of every Civilization, and delivering them helpless into the hands of the enemy. The compulsion that there is upon every party to be bourgeois, at any rate in appearance, turns to sheer caricature when below the bourgeoisie of education and possessions the Residue also organizes itself as a party. Marxism, for example, is in theory a negation of bourgeoisie, but as a party it is in attitude and leadership essentially middle class. There is a continuous conflict between its will — which necessarily steps outside the bounds of party politics and therefore of constitutionalism (both being exclusively liberal phenomena), and can in honesty only be called civil war — and the appearances which it feels obliged, in justice to itself, to keep up. But for Marxism, again, these appearances are indispensable, at this particular period, if durable success is to be attained. A noble party in a parliament is inwardly just as spurious as a proletarian. Only the bourgeoisie is in its natural place there.

In Rome, from the introduction of the Tribunes, in 471, to the recognition of their legislative omnipotence, in the revolution of 287, patricians and plebeians had fought their fight essentially as Estates, classes. But thereafter these opposite terms possessed hardly more than genealogical significance, and there developed instead parties, to which the terms liberal and conservative respectively may quite reasonably be applied — namely, the Populus,¹¹ supreme in the forum, and the nobility, with its fulcrum in the Senate. The latter had transformed itself (about 287) from a family council of the old clans into a state council of the administrative aristocracy. The associations of the Populus are with the property graded Comitia Centuriata and the big money group of the Equites, those of the nobility with the yeomanry that was influential in the Comitia Tributa. Think on the one hand of the Gracchi and Marius, and on the other of C. Flaminius, and a little penetration will disclose the complete change in the position of the Consuls and the Tribunes. They are no longer the chosen trustees of the first and third Estates, with lines of conduct determined by that fact, but they represent party, and on occasion change it. There were “liberal” consuls like the Elder Cato and “conservative” Tribunes like the Octavius who opposed Ti. Gracchus. Both parties put up candidates at elections, and used every sort of demagogic operation to get them in — and when money had failed to win an election, it got to work afterwards with (increasing) success upon the person elected.

In England Tories and Whigs constituted themselves, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, as parties, both becoming in form bourgeois and both taking up the liberal program literally, whereby public opinion as usual was completely convinced and set at rest. This was a master stroke, delivered at the correct moment, and prevented the formation of a party hostile to the Estate principle such as arose in France in 1789. The members of the lower House, hitherto emissaries of the ruling stratum, became popular representatives, but still continued to depend financially upon it. The leading remained in the same hands, and the opposition of the parties, which from 1830 assumed the titles of Liberal and Conservative almost as a matter of course, was always one of pluses and minuses, never of blank alternatives. In these same years the literary freedom movement of “young Germany” changed into a party movement, and in America under Andrew Jackson the National Whig and Democratic parties organized themselves as opposites, and open recognition was given to the principle that elections were a business, and state offices from top to bottom the “spoils of the victors.”¹²

But the form of the governing minority develops steadily from that of the Estate, through that of the Party, towards that of the Individual’s following. The outward sign of the end of Democracy and its transition into Caesarism is not, for example, the disappearance of the party of the Tiers État, the Liberal, but the disappearance of party itself as a form. The sentiments, the popular aim, the abstract ideals that characterize all genuine party politics, dissolve and are supplanted by private politics, the unchecked will-to-power of the race strong few. An Estate has instincts, a party has a program, but a following has a master. That was the course of events from Patricians and Plebeians, through Optimates and Populares, to Pompeians and Caesarians. The period of real party government covers scarcely two centuries, and in our own case is, since the World War, well on the decline. That the entire mass of the electorate, actuated by a common impulse, should send up men who are capable of managing their affairs — which is the naive assumption in all constitutions — is a possibility only in the first rush, and presupposes that not even the rudiments of organization by definite groups exists. So it was in France in 1789 and in 1848. An assembly has only to be, and tactical units will form at once within it, whose cohesion depends upon the will to maintain the dominant position once won, and which, so far from regarding themselves as the mouthpieces of their constituents, set about making all the expedients of agitation amenable to their influence and usable for their purposes. A tendency that has organized itself in the people, has already ipso facto become the tool of the organization, and continues steadily along the same path until the organization also becomes in turn the tool of the leader. The will-to-power is stronger than any theory. In the beginning the leading and the apparatus come into existence for the sake of the program. Then they are held on to defensively by their incumbents for the sake of power and booty — as is already universally the case today, for thousands in every country live on the party and the offices and functions that it distributes. Lastly the program vanishes from memory, and the organization works for its own sake alone.

With the elder Scipio or Quinctius Flamininus comradeship on campaign is still the implication when we speak of their “friends.” But the younger Scipio went further and his “Conors Amicorum” was no doubt the first example of an organized following whose activity extended to the law courts and the elections.¹³ In the same way the old purely patriarchal and aristocratic relation of loyalty between patron and client evolved into a community of interest based on very material foundations, and even before Caesar there were written compacts between candidates and electors with specific provisions as to payment and performances. On the other side, just as in present day America,¹⁴ clubs and election committees were formed, which so controlled or frightened the mass of the electors of their wards as to be able to do election business with the great leaders, the pre-Caesars, as one power with another. Far from this being the shipwreck of democracy, it is its very meaning and necessary issue, and the lamentations of unworldly idealists over this destruction of their hopes only show their blind ignorance of the inexorable duality of truths and facts and of the intimate linkage of intellect and money.

Politico-social theory is only one of the bases of party politics, but it is a necessary one. The proud series that runs from Rousseau to Marx has its anti-type in the line of the Classical Sophists up to Plato and Zeno. In the case of China the characteristics of the corresponding doctrines have still to be extracted from Confucian and Taoist literature; it suffices to name the Socialist Moh-ti. In the Byzantine and Arabian literature of the Abbassid period — in which radicalism, like everything else, is orthodox religious in constitution — they hold a large place, and they were driving forces in all the crises of the ninth century. That they existed in Egypt and in India also is proved by the spirit of events in the Hyksos time and in Buddha’s. Literary form is not essential to them — they are just as effectively disseminated by word of mouth, by sermon and propaganda in sects and associations, which indeed is the standard method at the close of the Puritan movements (Islam and Anglo-American Christianity amongst them).

Whether these doctrines are “true” or “false” is — we must reiterate and emphasize — a question without meaning for political history. The refutation of, say, Marxism belongs to the realm of academic dissertation and public debates, in which everyone is always right and his opponent always wrong. But whether they are effective — from when, and for how long, the belief that actuality can be ameliorated by a system of concepts is a real force that politics must reckon with — that does matter. We of today find ourselves in a period of boundless confidence in the omnipotence of reason. Great general ideas of freedom, justice, humanity, progress are sacrosanct. The great theories are gospels. Their power to convince does not rest upon logical premises, for the mass of a party possesses neither the critical energy nor the detachment seriously to test them, but upon the sacramental hypostasis in their keywords. At the same time, the spell is limited to the populations of the great cities and the period of Rationalism as the “educated man’s religion.” On a peasantry it has no hold, and even on the city masses its effect lasts only for a certain time. But for that time it has all the irresistibleness of a new revelation. They are converted to it, hang fervently upon the words and the preachers thereof, go to martyrdom on barricades and battlefield and gallows; their gaze is set upon a political and social other world, and dry sober criticism seems base, impious, worthy of death.

But for this very reason documents like the Contrat Social and the Communist Manifesto are engines of highest power in the hands of forceful men who have come to the top in party life and know how to form and to use the convictions of the dominated masses.

The power that these abstract ideals possess, however, scarcely extends in time beyond the two centuries that belong to party politics, and their end comes not from refutation, but from boredom — which has killed Rousseau long since and will shortly kill Marx. Men finally give up, not this or that theory, but the belief in theory of any kind and with it the sentimental optimism of an eighteenth century that imagined that unsatisfactory actualities could be improved by the application of concepts. When Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries defined and blended the various kinds of Classical constitution so as to obtain a wise and beautiful resultant, all the world listened, and Plato himself tried to transform Syracuse in accordance with an ideological recipe — and sent the city downhill to its ruin.¹⁵ It appears to me equally certain that it was philosophical experimentation of this kind that put the Chinese southern states out of condition and delivered them up to the imperialism of Tsin.¹⁶ The Jacobin fanatics of liberty and equality delivered France, from the Directory onward, into the hands of Army and Bourse forever, and every Socialistic outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism. But when Cicero wrote his De republica for Pompey, and Sallust his two comminations for Caesar, nobody any longer paid attention. In Tiberius Gracchus we may discover perhaps an influence derived from the Stoic enthusiast Blossius, who later committed suicide after having similarly brought Aristonicus of Pergamum to ruin;¹⁷ but in the first century B.C. theories had become a threadbare school exercise, and thenceforward power and power alone mattered.

For us, too — let there be no mistake about it — the age of theory is drawing to its end. The great systems of Liberalism and Socialism all arose between about 1750 and 1850. That of Marx is already half a century old, and it has had no successor. Inwardly it means, with its materialist view of history, that Nationalism has reached its extreme logical conclusion; it is therefore an end term. But, as belief in Rousseau’s Rights of Man lost its force from (say) 1848, so belief in Marx lost its force from the World War. When one contrasts the devotion unto death that Rousseau’s ideas found in the French Revolution with the attitude of the Socialists of 1918, who had to keep up before and in their adherents a conviction that they themselves no longer possessed — for the sake, not of the idea, but of the power that depended on it — one discerns also the stretches of the road ahead, where what still remains of program is doomed to fall by the way as being henceforth a mere handicap in the struggle for power. Belief in program was the mark and the glory of our grandfathers — in our grandsons it will be a proof of provincialism. In its place is developing even now the seed of a new resigned piety, sprung from tortured conscience and spiritual hunger, whose task will be to found a new Hither side that looks for secrets instead of steel bright concepts and in the end will find them in the deeps of the “Second Religiousness.”

IV

This is the one side, the verbal side, of the great fact Democracy. It remains now to consider the other, the decisive side, that of race. Democracy would have remained in minds and on paper had there not been amongst its champions true master natures for whom — unconscious though they may be, and often have been, of the fact — the people is nothing but an object and the ideal nothing but a means. All, even the most irresponsible, methods of demagogy — which inwardly is exactly the same as the diplomacy of the ancien régime, but designed for application to masses instead of to princes and ambassadors, to wild opinions and sentiments and will-outbursts instead of to choice spirits, an orchestra of brass instead of old chamber music — have been worked out by honest but practical democrats, and it was from them that the parties of tradition learned them.

It is characteristic, however, of the course of democracy, that the authors of popular constitutions have never had any idea of the actual workings of their schemes — neither the authors of the “Servian” Constitution in Rome nor the National Assembly in Paris. Since these forms of theirs are not, like feudalism, the result of growth, but of thought (and based, moreover, not on deep knowledge of men and things, but on abstract ideas of right and justice), a gulf opens between the intellectual side of the laws and — the practical habits that silently form under the pressure of them, and either adapt them to, or fend them off from, the rhythm of actual life. Only experience has ever taught the lesson, and only at the end of the whole development has it been assimilated, that the rights of the people and the influence of the people are two different things. The more nearly universal a franchise is, the less becomes the power of the electorate.

In the beginning of a democracy the field belongs to intellect alone. History has nothing nobler and purer to show than the night session of the 4th August 1789 and the Tennis Court Oath, or the assembly in the Frankfurt Paulskirche on the 18th May 1848 — when men, with power in their very hands, debated general truths so long that the forces of actuality were able to rally and thrust the dreamers aside. But, meantime, that other democratic quantity lost no time in making its appearance and reminding men of the fact that one can make use of constitutional rights only when one has money.¹⁸ That a franchise should work even approximately as the idealist supposes it to work presumes the absence of any organized leadership operating on the electors (in its interest) to the extent that its available money permits. As soon as such leadership does appear, the vote ceases to possess anything more than the significance of a censure applied by the multitude to the individual organizations, over whose structure it possesses in the end not the slightest positive influence. So also with the ideal thesis of Western constitutions, the fundamental right of the mass to choose its own representatives — it remains pure theory, for in actuality every developed organization recruits itself. Finally the feeling emerges that the universal franchise contains no effective rights at all, not even that of choosing between parties. For the powerful figures that have grown up on their soil control, through money, all the intellectual machinery of speech and script, and are able, on the one hand, to guide the individual’s opinions as they please abovethe parties, and, on the other, through their patronage, influence, and legislation, to create a firm body of wholehearted supporters (the “Caucus”) which excludes the rest and induces in it a vote apathy which at the last it cannot shake off even for the great crises.

In appearance, there are vast differences between the Western, parliamentary, democracy and the democracies of the Egyptian, Chinese, and Arabian Civilizations, to which the idea of a universal popular franchise is wholly alien. But in reality, for us in this age of ours, the mass is “in form” as an electorate in exactly the same sense as it used to be “in form” as a collectivity of obedience — namely, as an object for a subject — as it was “in form” in Baghdad as the sects, and in Byzantium in its monks, and elsewhere again as a dominant army or a secret society or a “state within a state.” Freedom is, as always, purely negative. It consists in the repudiation of tradition, dynasty, Caliphate; but the executive power passes, at once and undiminished, from these institutions to new forces — party leaders, dictators, presidents, prophets, and their adherents — towards which the multitude continues to be unconditionally the passive object.¹⁹ “Popular self-determination” is a courteous figure of speech — in reality, under a universal inorganic franchise, election has soon ceased to possess its original meaning. The more radical the political elimination of the matured old order of Estates and callings, the more formless and feckless the electoral mass, the more completely is it delivered into the hands of the new powers, the party leaders, who dictate their will to the people through all the machinery of intellectual compulsion; fence with each other for primacy by methods which in the end the multitude can neither perceive nor comprehend; and treat public opinion merely as a weapon to be forged and used for blows at each other. But this very process, viewed from another angle, is seen as an irresistible tendency driving every democracy further and further on the road to suicide.²⁰

The fundamental rights of a Classical people (demos, populus) extended to the holding of the highest state and judicial offices.²¹ For the exercise of these the people was “in form” in its Forum, where the Euclidean point mass was corporeally assembled, and there it was the object of an influencing process in the Classical style; namely, by bodily, near, and sensuous means — by a rhetoric that worked upon every ear and eye; by devices many of which to us would be repellent and almost intolerable, such as rehearsed sob effects and the rending of garments;²² by shameless flattery of the audience, fantastic lies about opponents; by the employment of brilliant phrases and resounding cadenzas (of which there came to be a perfect repertory for this place and purpose) by games and presents; by threats and blows; but, above all, by money. We have its beginnings in the Athens of 400,²³ and its appalling culmination in the Rome of Caesar and Cicero. As everywhere, the elections, from being nominations of class representatives, have become the battleground of party candidates, an arena ready for the intervention of money, and, from Zama onwards, of ever bigger and bigger money. “The greater became the wealth which was capable of concentration in the hands of individuals, the more the fight for political power developed into a question of money.”²⁴ It is unnecessary to say more. And yet, in a deeper sense, it would be wrong to speak of corruption. It is not a matter of degeneracy, it is the democratic ethos itself that is foredoomed of necessity to take such forms when it reaches maturity. In the reforms of the Censor Appius Claudius (310), who was beyond doubt a true Hellenist and constitutional ideologue of the type of Madame Roland’s circle, there was certainly no question but that of the franchise as such, and not at all of the arts of gerrymandering — but the effect was simply to prepare the way for those arts. Not in the scheme as such, but from the first applications of it, race quality emerged, and very rapidly it forced its way to complete dominance. And, after all, in a dictatorship of money it is hardly fair to describe the employment of money as a sign of decadence.

The career of office in Rome from the time when its course took form as a series of elections, required so large a capital that every politician was the debtor of his entire entourage. Especially was this so in the case of the aedileship, in which the incumbent had to outbid his predecessors in the magnificence of his public games, in order later to have the votes of the spectators. (Sulla failed in his first attempt on the praetorship precisely because he had not previously been aedile.) Then again, to flatter the crowd of loafers it was necessary to show oneself in the Forum daily with a brilliant following. A law forbade the maintenance of paid retainers, but the acquisition of persons in high society by lending them money, recommending them for official and commercial employments, and covering their litigation expenses, in return for their company in the Forum and their attendance at the daily levee, was more expensive still. Pompey waspatronus to half the world. From the peasant of Picenum to the kings of the Orient, he represented and protected them all, and this was his political capital which he could stake against the non-interest-bearing loans of Crassus and the “gilding”²⁵ of every ambitious fellow by the conqueror of Gaul. Dinners were offered to the electors of whole wards,²⁶ or free seats for the gladiatorial shows, or even (as in the case of Milo) actual cash, delivered at home — out of respect, Cicero says, for traditional morals. Election capital rose to American dimensions, sometimes hundreds of millions of sesterces; vast as was the stock of cash available in Rome, the elections of 54 locked up so much of it that the rate of interest rose from four to eight percent. Caesar paid out so much as aedile that Crassus had to underwrite him for twenty millions before his creditors would allow him to depart to his province, and in his candidature for the office of Pontifex Maximus he so over-strained his credit that failure would have ruined him, and his opponent Catulus could seriously offer to buy him off. But the conquest and exploitation of Gaul — this also an undertaking motived by finance — made him the richest man in the world. In truth, Pharsalus was won there in advance.²⁷ For it was for power that Caesar amassed these milliards, like Cecil Rhodes, and not because he delighted in wealth like Verres or even like Crassus, who was first and foremost a financier and only secondarily a politician. Caesar grasped the fact that on the soil of a democracy constitutional rights signify nothing without money and everything with it. When Pompey was still dreaming that he could evoke legions by stamping on the ground, Caesar had long since condensed the dream to reality with his money. It must be clearly understood, however, that he did not introduce these methods but found them in existence, that he made himself master of them but never identified himself with them. For practically a century parties grouped on principles had been dissolving into personal followings grouped upon men who pursued private political aims and were expert in handling the political weapons of their time.

Amongst these means, besides money, was influence upon the courts. Since Classical assemblies voted, but did not debate, the trial before the rostra was a form of party battle and the school of schools for political persuasiveness. The young politician began his career by indicting and if possible annihilating some great personage,²⁸ as the nineteen year old Crassus annihilated the renowned Papirius Carbo, the friend of the Gracchi, who had later gone over to the Optimates. This was why Cato was tried no less than forty-four times, though acquitted in every case. The legal side of the question was entirely subordinate in these affairs.²⁹ The decisive factors were the party affinities of the judges, the number of patrons, and the size of the crowd of backers — the number of the witnesses was really only paraded in order to bring the financial and political power of the plaintiff into the limelight. The intention in all Cicero’s oratory against Verres was to convince the judges, under the veil of fine ethical passion, that the condemnation of the accused was in the interests of their order. Given the general outlook of the Classical, the courts self-evidently existed to serve private and party interests. Democratic complainants in Athens were accustomed at the end of their speeches to remind the jurymen from the people that they would forfeit their fees by acquitting the wealthy defendant.³⁰ The tremendous power of the Roman Senate consisted mainly in their occupancy of every seat of the judicial (jurors’) bench, which placed the destinies of every citizen at their mercy; hence the far-reachingness of the Gracchan law of 122 which handed over the judicature to the Equites and delivered over the nobility — that is, the official class — to the financial world.³¹ In 83 Sulla, simultaneously with his proscription of the financial magnates, restored the judicature to the Senate, as political weapon, of course, and the final duel of the potentates finds one more expression in the ceaseless changing of the judges selected.

Now, whereas the Classical, and supremely the Forum of Rome, drew the mass of the people together as a visible body in order to compel it to make that use of its rights which was desired of it, the “contemporary” English-American politics have created through the press a forcefield of worldwide intellectual and financial tensions in which every individual unconsciously takes up the place allotted to him, so that he must think, will, and act as a ruling personality somewhere or other in the distance thinks fit. This is dynamics against statics, Faustian against Apollinian world feeling, the passion of the third dimension against the pure sensible present. Man does not speak to man;³² the press and its associate, the electrical news service, keep the waking consciousness of whole peoples and continents under a deafening drum fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year, so that every Ego becomes a mere function of a monstrous intellectual Something. Money does not pass, politically, from one hand to the other. It does not turn itself into cards and wine. It is turned into force, and its quantity determines the intensity of its working influence.

Gunpowder and printing belong together — both discovered at the culmination of the Gothic, both arising out of Germanic technical thought — as the two grand means of Faustian distance tactics. The Reformation in the beginning of the Late period witnessed the first flysheets and the first field guns, the French Revolution in the beginning of the Civilization witnessed the first tempest of pamphlets of the autumn of 1788 and the first mass fire of artillery at Valmy. But with this the printed word, produced in vast quantity and distributed over enormous areas, became an uncanny weapon in the hands of him who knew how to use it. In France it was still in 1788 a matter of expressing private convictions, but England was already past that, and deliberately seeking to produce impressions on the reader. The war of articles, flysheets, spurious memoirs, that was waged from London on French soil against Napoleon is the first great example. The scattered sheets of the Age of Enlightenment transformed themselves into “the Press” — a term of most significant anonymity. Now the press campaign appears as the prolongation — or the preparation — of war by other means, and in the course of the nineteenth century the strategy of outpost fights, feints, surprises, assaults, is developed to such a degree that a war may be lost ere the first shot is fired — because the Press has won it meantime.

Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thoroughgoing enslavement that has ever existed. The liberal bourgeois mind is proud of the abolition of censorship, the last restraint, while the dictator of the press — Northcliffe! — keeps the slave gang of his readers under the whip of his leading articles, telegrams, and pictures. Democracy has by its newspaper completely expelled the book from the mental life of the people. The book world, with its profusion of standpoints that compelled thought to select and criticize, is now a real possession only for a few. The people reads the one paper, “its” paper, which forces itself through the front doors by millions daily, spellbinds the intellect from morning to night, drives the book into oblivion by its more engaging layout, and if one or another specimen of a book does emerge into visibility, forestalls and eliminates its possible effects by “reviewing” it.

What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears. A forlorn little drop may settle somewhere and collect grounds on which to determine “the truth” — but what it obtains is just its truth. The other, the public truth of the moment, which alone matters for effects and successes in the fact world, is today a product of the Press. What the Press wills, is true. Its commanders evoke, transform, interchange truths. Three weeks of press work, and the truth is acknowledged by everybody.³³ Its bases are irrefutable for just so long as money is available to maintain them intact. The Classical rhetoric, too, was designed for effect and not content — as Shakespeare brilliantly demonstrates in Antony’s funeral oration — but it did limit itself to the bodily audience and the moment. What the dynamism of our Press wants is permanent effectiveness. It must keep men’s minds continuously under its influence. Its arguments are overthrown as soon as the advantage of financial power passes over to the counter-arguments and brings these still oftener to men’s eyes and ears. At that moment the needle of public opinion swings round to the stronger pole. Everybody convinces himself at once of the new truth, and regards himself awakened out of error.

With the political press is bound up the need of universal school education, which in the Classical world was completely lacking. In this demand there is an element — quite unconscious — of desiring to shepherd the masses, as the object of party politics, into the newspaper’s power area. The idealist of the early democracy regarded popular education, without arrière pensée, as enlightenment pure and simple, and even today one finds here and there weak heads that become enthusiastic on the Freedom of the Press — but it is precisely this that smooths the path for the coming Caesars of the world press. Those who have learned to read succumb to their power, and the visionary self-determination of Late democracy issues in a thoroughgoing determination of the people by the powers whom the printed word obeys.

In the contests of today tactics consists in depriving the opponent of this weapon. In the unsophisticated infancy of its power the newspaper suffered from official censorship which the champions of tradition wielded in self defense, and the bourgeoisie cried out that the freedom of the spirit was in danger. Now the multitude placidly goes its way; it has definitively won for itself this freedom. But in the background, unseen, the new forces are fighting one another by buying the press. Without the reader’s observing it, the paper, and himself with it, changes masters.³⁴ Here also money triumphs and forces the free spirits into its service. No tamer has his animals more under his power. Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated, terrifying and breaking windows; a hint to the press staff and it will become quiet and go home. The Press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war aims and operation plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as hisliberty.

And the other side of this belated freedom — it is permitted to everyone to say what he pleases, but the Press is free to take notice of what he says or not. It can condemn any “truth” to death simply by not undertaking its communication to the world — a terrible censorship of silence, which is all the more potent in that the masses of newspaper readers are absolutely unaware that it exists.³⁵ Here, as ever in the birth pangs of Caesarism, emerges a trait of the buried springtime. The arc of happening is about to close on itself. Just as in the concrete and steel buildings the expression will of early Gothic once more bursts forth, but cold, controlled, and Civilized, so the iron will of the Gothic Church to power over souls reappears as — the “freedom of democracy.” The age of the “book” is flanked on either hand by that of the sermon and that of the newspaper. Books are a personal expression, sermon and newspaper obey an impersonalpurpose. The years of Scholasticism afford the only example in world history of an intellectual discipline that was applied universally and permitted no writing, no speech, no thought to come forth that contradicted the willed unity. This is spiritual dynamics. Classical, Indian, or Chinese mankind would have been horrified at this spectacle. But the same things recur, and as a necessary result of the European American liberalism — “the despotism of freedom against tyranny,” as Robespierre put it. In lieu of stake and faggots there is the great silence. The dictature of party leaders supports itself upon that of the Press. The competitors strive by means of money to detach readers — nay, peoples — en masse from the hostile allegiance and to bring them under their own mind training. And all that they learn in this mind training, is what it is considered that they should know — a higher will puts together the picture of their world for them. There is no need now, as there was for Baroque princes, to impose military service liability on the subject — one whips their souls with articles, telegrams, and pictures (Northcliffe!) until they clamor for weapons and force their leaders into a conflict to which they willed to be forced.

This is the end of Democracy. If in the world of truths it is proof that decides all, in that of facts it is success. Success means that one being triumphs over the others. Life has won through, and the dreams of the world improvers have turned out to be but the tools of masternatures. In the Late Democracy, race bursts forth and either makes ideals its slaves or throws them scornfully into the pit. It was so, too, in Egyptian Thebes, in Rome, in China — but in no other Civilization has the will-to-power manifested itself in so inexorable a form as in this of ours. The thought, and consequently the action, of the mass are kept under iron pressure — for which reason, and for which reason only, men are permitted to be readers and voters — that is, in a dual slavery — while the parties become the obedient retinues of a few, and the shadow of coming Caesarism already touches them. As the English kingship became in the nineteenth century, so parliaments will become in the twentieth, a solemn and empty pageantry. As then scepter and crown, so now peoples’ rights are paraded for the multitude, and all the more punctiliously the less they really signify — it was for this reason that the cautious Augustus never let pass an opportunity of emphasizing old and venerated customs of Roman freedom. But the power is migrating even today, and correspondingly elections are degenerating for us into the farce that they were in Rome. Money organizes the process in the interests of those who possess it,³⁶ and election affairs become a preconcerted game that is staged as popular self-determination. If election was originally revolution in legitimate forms, it has exhausted those forms, and what takes place is that mankind “elects” its Destiny again by the primitive methods of bloody violence when the politics of money become intolerable.

Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect. But, just because the illusion that actuality can allow itself to be improved by the ideas of any Zeno or Marx has fled away; because men have learned that in the realm of reality one power will can be overthrown only by another (for that is the great human experience of Contending States periods); there wakes at last a deep yearning for all old and worthy tradition that still lingers alive. Men are tired to disgust of money economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honor and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty. And now dawns the time when the form filled powers of the blood, which the rationalism of the Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken in the depths. Everything in the order of dynastic tradition and old nobility that has saved itself up for the future, everything that there is of high money disdaining ethic, everything that is intrinsically sound enough to be, in Frederick the Great’s words, the servant — the hard working, self-sacrificing, caring servant — of the State, all that I have described elsewhere in one word as Socialism in contrast to Capitalism³⁷ — all this becomes suddenly the focus of immense life forces. Caesarism grows on the soil of Democracy, but its roots thread deeply into the underground of blood tradition. The Classical Caesar derived his power from the Tribunate, and his dignity and therewith his permanency from his being the Princeps. Here too the soul of old Gothic wakens anew. The spirit of the knightly orders overpowers plunderous Vikingism. The mighty ones of the future may possess the earth as their private property — for the great political form of the Culture is irremediably in ruin — but it matters not, for, formless and limitless as their power may be, it has a task. And this task is the unwearying care for this world as it is, which is the very opposite of the interestedness of the money power age, and demands high honor and conscientiousness. But for this very reason there now sets in the final battle between Democracy and Caesarism, between the leading forces of dictatorial money economics and the purely political will-to-order of the Caesars. And in order to understand this final battle between Economics and Politics, in which the latter reconquers its realm, we must now turn our glance upon the physiognomy of economic history.

CHAPTER XIII

THE FORM WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE

(A) MONEY

I

The standpoint from which to comprehend the economic history of great Cultures is not to be looked for on economic ground. Economic thought and action are a side of life that acquires a false appearance when regarded as a self-contained kind of life. Least of all is the secure standpoint to be had on the basis of the present day world economics, which for the last 150 years has been mounting fantastically, perilously, and in the end almost desperately — an economics, moreover, that is exclusively Western-dynamic, anything but common-human.

That which we call national economy today is built up on premises that are openly and specifically English. The industry of machines, which is unknown to all other Cultures, stands in the center as though it were a matter of course and, without men being conscious of the fact, completely dominates the formulation of ideas and the deduction of so called laws. Credit money, in the special form imparted to it by the relations of world trade and export industry in a peasantless England, serves as the foundation whereupon to define words like capital, value, price, property — and the definitions are then transferred without more ado to other Culture stages and life cycles. The insular position of England has determined a conception of politics, and of its relation to economics, that rules in all economic theories. The creators of this economic picture were David Hume¹ and Adam Smith.² Everything that has since been written about them or against them always presupposes the critical structure and methods of their systems. This is as true of Carey and List as it is of Fourier and Lassalle. As for Smith’s greatest adversary, Marx, it matters little how loudly one protests against English capitalism when one is thoroughly imbued with its images; the protest is itself a recognition, and its only aim is, through a new kind of accounting, to confer upon objects the advantage of being subjects.

From Adam Smith to Marx it is nothing but self-analysis of the economic thinking of a single Culture on a particular development level. Rationalistic through and through, it starts from Material and its conditions, needs, and motives, instead of from the Soul — of generations, Estates, and peoples — and its creative power. It looks upon men as constituent parts of situations, and knows nothing of the big personality and history shaping will, of individuals or of groups, the will that sees in the facts of economics not ends but means. It takes economic life to be something that can be accounted for without remainder by visible causes and effects, something of which the structure is quite mechanical and completely self-contained and even, finally, something that stands in some sort of causal relation to religion and politics — these again being considered as individual self-contained domains. As this outlook is the systematic and not the historical, the timeless and universal validity of its concepts and rules is an article of faith, and its ambition is to establish the one and only correct method of applying “the” science of management. And accordingly, wherever its truths have come into contact with the facts, it has experienced a complete fiasco — as was the case with the prophecies of bourgeois theorists concerning the World War,³ and with those of proletarian theorists on the induction of the Soviet economy.

Up to now, therefore, there has been no national economy, in the sense of a morphology of the economic side of life and more particularly of that side in the life of the high Cultures, with their formations — concordant as to stage, tempo, and duration — of economic styles. Economics has no system, but a physiognomy. To fathom the secret of its inner form, its soul, demands the physiognomic flair. To succeed in it it is necessary to be a “judge” of it as one is a “judge” of men or of horses, and requires even less “knowledge” than that which a horseman needs to have of zoology. But this faculty of “judgment” can be awakened, and the way to awaken it is through the sympathetic outlook on history which gives a shrewd idea of the race instincts, which are at work in the economic as in other constituents of active existence, symbolically shaping the external position — the economic “stuff,” the need — in harmony with their own inner character. All economic life is the expression of a soul life.

This is a new, a German, outlook upon economics, an outlook from beyond all Capitalism and Socialism — both of which were products of the jejune rationality of the eighteenth century, and aimed at nothing but a material analysis and subsequent synthesis of the economic surface. All that has been taught hitherto is no more than preparatory. Economic thought, like legal, stands now on the verge of its true and proper development, which (for us, as for the Hellenistic-Roman age) sets in only where art and philosophy have irrevocably passed away.

The attempt which follows is meant only as a flying survey of the possibilities here available.

Economics and politics are sides of the one livingly flowing current of being, and not of the waking consciousness, the intellect. In each of them is manifested the pulse of the cosmic flowings that are occluded in the sequent generations of individual existences. They may be said, not to have history, but to be history. Irreversible Time, the When, rules in them. They belong, both of them, to race and not, as religion and science belong, to language with its spatial-causal tensions; they regard facts, not truths. There are economic Destinies as there are political, whereas in scientific doctrines, as in religious, there is timeless connection of cause and effect.

Life, therefore, has a political and an economic kind of “condition” of fitness for history. They overlie, they support, they oppose each other, but the political is unconditionally the first. Life’s will is to preserve itself and to prevail, or, rather, to make itself stronger in order that it may prevail. But in the economic state of fitness the being-streams are fit as self-regarding, whereas in a political they are fit asother-regarding. And this holds good all along the series, from the simplest unicellular plant to swarms and to peoples of the highest free mobility in space. Nourishment and winning through — the difference of dignity between the two sides of life is recognizable in their relation to death. There is no contrast so profound as that between hunger death and hero death. Economically life is in the widest sense threatened, dishonored, and debased by hunger — with which is to be included stunting of possibilities, straitened circumstances, darkness, and pressure not less than starvation in the literal sense. Whole peoples have lost the tense force of their race through the gnawing wretchedness of their living. Here men die of something and not for something. Politics sacrifices men for an idea; they fall for an idea; but economy merely wastes them away. War is the creator, hunger the destroyer, of all great things. In war life is elevated by death, often to that point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory, but in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, vulgar, and wholly unmetaphysical sort of fearfulness for one’s life under which the higher form world of a Culture miserably collapses and the naked struggle for existence of the human beasts begins.

The double sense of all history that is manifested in man and woman has been discussed in an earlier chapter. There is a private history which represents “life in space” as a procreation series of the generations, and a public history that defends and secures it as a political “in form”-ness — the “spindle side” and the “sword side” of being. They find expression in the ideas of Family and of State, but also in the primary form of the house wherein the good spirits of the marriage bed — the Genius and the Juno of every old Roman dwelling — were protected by that of the door, the Janus. To this private history of the family the economic now attached itself. The duration of a flourishing life is inseparable from its strength; its secret of begetting and conceiving is seen at its purest in the being of breed-strong peasant stock that is rooted, healthy and fruitful, in its soil. And as in the form of the body the organ of sex is bound up with that of the circulation, so the middle of the house in another sense is formed by the sacred hearths, the Vesta.

For this very reason the significance of economic history is something quite different from that of political. In the latter the foreground is taken up by the great individual destinies, which fulfill themselves indeed in the binding forms of their epoch, but are nevertheless, each in itself, strictly personal. The concern of the former, and of family history, is the course of development of the form language; everything once occurring and personal is an unimportant private destiny, and only the basic form common to the million cases matters. But even so economics is only a foundation, for Being that is in any way meaningful. What really signifies is not that an individual or a people is “in condition,” well nourished and fruitful, but for what he or it is so; and the higher man climbs historically, the more conspicuously his political and religious will to inward symbolism and force of expression towers above everything in the way of form and depth that the economic life as such possesses. It is only with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form world begins to ebb, that mere life preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and insistently — this is the time when the banal assertion that “hunger and love” are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a matter of “happiness of the greatest number,” of comfort and ease, of “panem et circenses”; and when, in the place of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end in itself.

Since economics belongs to the race side of life, it possesses, like politics, a customary ethic and not a moral — yet again the distinction of nobility and priesthood, facts and truths. A vocation class, like an Estate, possesses a matter of course feeling for (not good and evil, but) good and bad. Not to have this feeling is to be void of honor, law. For those engaged in the economic life, too, honor stands as central criterion, with its tact and fine flair for what is “the right thing” — something quite separate from the sin idea underlying the religious contemplation of the world. There exist, not only a very definite vocational honor amongst merchants, craftsmen, and peasants, but equally definite gradations downward for the shopkeeper, the exporter, the banker, the contractor, and even, as we all know, for thieves and beggars, insofar as two or three of them feel themselves as fellow practitioners. No one has stated or written out these customary ethics, but they exist, and, like class ethics everywhere and always, they are binding only within the circle of membership. Along with the noble virtues of loyalty and courage, chivalry and comradeship, which are found in every vocational society, there appear clean-cut notions of the ethical value of industry, of success, of work, and an astonishing sense of distinction and apartness. This sort of thing a man has — and without knowing much about it, for custom is evidenced to consciousness only when it is infringed — while, on the contrary, the prohibitions of religion which are timeless, universally valid, but never realizable ideals, must be, learned before a man can know or attempt to follow them.

Religious ascetic fundamentals such as “selfless,” “sinless,” are without meaning in the economic life. For the true saint economics in itself is sinful,⁴ and not merely taking of interest or pleasure in riches or the envy of the poor. The saying concerning the “lilies of the field” is for deeply religious (and philosophical) natures unreservedly true. The whole weight of their being lies outside economics and politics and all other facts of “this world.” We see it in Jesus’s times and St. Bernard’s and in the Russian soul of today; we see it too in the way of life of a Diogenes and a Kant. For its sake men choose voluntary poverty and itinerancy and hide themselves in cells and studies. Economic activity is never found in a religion or a philosophy, always only in the political organism of a church or the social organism of a theorizing fellowship; it is ever a compromise with “this world” and an index of the presence of a will-to-power.⁵

II

That which may be called the economic life of the plant is accomplished on and in it without its being itself anything but the theater and will-less object of a natural process. This element underlies the economy of the human body also, still unalterably vegetal and dreamy, pursuing its will-less (in this respect almost alien) existence in the shape of the circulatory organs. But when we come to the animal body freely mobile in space, being is not alone — it is accompanied by waking being, the comprehending apprehension, and, therefore, the compulsion to provide by independent thought for the preservation of life. Here begins life anxiety, leading to touch and scent, sight and hearing with ever sharper senses; and presently to movements in space for the purpose of searching, gathering, pursuing, tricking, stealing, which develop in many species of animals (such as beavers, ants, bees, numerous birds and beasts of prey) into a rudimentary economy technique which presupposes a process of reflection and, therefore, a certain emancipation of understanding from sensation. Man is genuinely man inasmuch as his understanding has freed itself from sensation and, as thought, intervened creatively in the relations between microcosm and macrocosm. Quite animal still is the trickery of woman towards man, and equally so the peasant’s shrewdness in obtaining small advantages — both differing in no wise from the slyness of the fox, both consisting in the ability to see into the secret of the victim at one glance. But on the top of this there supervenes, now, the economic thought that sows a field, tames animals, changes and appreciates and exchanges things, and finds a thousand ways and means of better preserving life and transforming a dependence upon the environment into a mastery over it. That is the underlayer of all Cultures. Race makes use of an economic thought that can become so powerful as to detach itself from given purposes, build up castles of abstraction, and finally lose itself in Utopian expanses.

All higher economic life develops itself on and over a peasantry. Peasantry, per se, does not presuppose any basis but itself.⁶ It is, so to say, race-in-itself, plantlike and historyless, producing and using wholly for itself, with an outlook on the world that sweepingly regards every other economic existence as incidental and contemptible. To this producing kind of economy there is presently opposed anacquisitive kind, which makes use of the former as an object — as a source of nourishment, tribute, or plunder. Politics and trade are in their beginnings quite inseparable, both being masterful, personal, warlike, both with a hunger for power and booty that produces quite another outlook upon the world — an outlook not from an angle into it, but from above down on its tempting disorder, an outlook which is pretty candidly expressed in the choice of the lion and the bear, the hawk and the falcon, as armorial badges. Primitive war is always also booty war, and primitive trade intimately related to plunder and piracy. The Icelandic sagas narrate how, often, the Vikings would agree with a town population for a market peace of a fortnight, after which weapons were drawn and booty making started.

Politics and trade in developed form — the art of achieving material successes over an opponent by means of intellectual superiority — are both a replacement of war by other means. Every kind of diplomacy is of a business nature, every business of a diplomatic, and both are based upon penetrative judgment of men and physiognomic tact. The adventure spirit in great seafarers like the Phoenicians, Etruscans, Normans, Venetians, Hanseatics, the spirit of shrewd banking lords like the Fugger and the Medici and of mighty financiers like Crassus and the mining and trust magnates of our own day, must possess the strategic talent of the general if its operations are to succeed. Pride in the clan house, the paternal heritage, the family tradition, develops and counts in the economic sphere as in the political; the great fortunes are like the kingdoms and have their history,⁷ and Polycrates and Solon, Lorenzo de’ Medici and Jurgen Wullenweber are far from being the only examples of political ambitions developing out of commercial.

But the genuine prince and statesman wants to rule, and the genuine merchant only wants to be wealthy, and here the acquisitive economy divides to pursue aim and means separately.⁸ One may aim at booty for the sake of power, or at power for the sake of booty. The great ruler, too, the Hwang-ti, the Tiberius, the Frederick II — has the will to wealth, the will to be “rich in land and subjects,” but it is with and under a sense of high responsibilities. A man may lay hands on the treasurers of the whole world with a good conscience, not to say as a matter of course: he may lead a life of radiant splendor or even dissipation — if only he feels himself (Napoleon, Cecil Rhodes, the Roman Senate of the third century) to be the engine of a mission. When he feels so, the idea of private property can scarcely be said to exist so far as he is concerned.

He who is out for purely economic advantages — as the Carthaginians were in Roman times and, in a far greater degree still, the Americans in ours — is correspondingly incapable of purely political thinking. In the decisions of high politics he is ever deceived and made a tool of, as the case of Wilson shows — especially when the absence of statesmanlike instinct leaves a chair vacant for moral sentiments. This is why the great economic groupings of the present day (for example, employers’ and employees’ unions) pile one political failure on another, unless indeed they find a real political politician as leader, and he — makes use of them. Economic and political thinking, in spite of a high degree of consonance of form, are in direction (and therefore in all tactical details) basically different. Great business successes⁹ awaken an unbridled sense of public power — in the very word “capital” one catches an unmistakable undertone of this. But it is only in a few individuals that the color and direction of their willing and their criteria of situations of things undergo change. Only when a man has really ceased to feel his enterprise as “his own business,” and its aim as the simple amassing of property, does it become possible for the captain of industry to become the statesman, the Cecil Rhodes. But, conversely, the men of the political world are exposed to the danger of their will and thought for historical tasks degenerating into mere provision for their private life upkeep; then a nobility can become a robber order, and we see emerging the familiar types of princes and ministers, demagogues and revolution heroes, whose zeal exhausts itself in lazy comfortableness and the piling up of immense riches — there is little to choose in this respect between Versailles and the Jacobin Club, business bosses and trade union leaders, Russian governors and Bolshevists. And in the maturity of democracy the politics of those who have “got there” is identical, not merely with business, but with speculative business of the dirtiest great city sort.

All this, however, is the very manifestation of the hidden course of a high Culture. In the beginning appear the primary orders, nobility and priesthood, with their symbolism of Time and Space. The political life, like the religious experience, has its fixed place, its ordained adepts, and its allotted aims for facts and truths alike, in a well ordered society, and down below, the economic life moves unconscious along a sure path. Then the stream of being becomes entangled in the stone structures of the town, and intellect and money thence forward take over its historical guidance. The heroic and the saintly with their youthful symbolic force become rarer, and withdraw into narrower and narrower circles. Cool bourgeois clarity takes their place. At bottom, the concluding of a system and the concluding of a deal call for one and the same kind of professional intelligence. Scarcely differentiated now by any measure of symbolic force, political and economic life, religious and scientific experience make each other’s acquaintance, jostle one another, commingle. In the frictions of the city the stream of being loses its strict rich form. Elementary economic factors come to the surface and interplay with the remains of form-imbued politics, just as sovereign science at the same time adds religion to its stock of objects. Over a life of economics political self-satisfaction spreads a critical edifying world sentiment. But out of it all emerge, in place of the decayed Estates, the individual life courses, big with true political or religious force, that are to become destiny for the whole.

And thus we begin to discern the morphology of economic history. First there is a primitive economy of “man,” which — like that of plants and animals — follows a biological time scale in the development of its forms. It completely dominates the primitive age, and it continues to move on, infinitely slowly and confusedly, underneath and between the high Cultures. Animals and plants are brought into it and transformed by taming and breeding, selection and sowing; fire and metals are exploited, and the properties of inorganic nature made by technical processes serviceable for the conduct of life. All this is perfused with political-religious ethic and meaning, without its being possible distinctly to separate Totem and Taboo, hunger, soul fear, sexual love, art, war, sacrificial rites, belief, and experience.

Wholly different from this, both in idea and in evolution, and sharply marked off in tempo and duration, are the economic histories of the high Cultures, each of which has its own economic style. To feudalism belongs the economy of the townless countryside. With the State ruled radially from cities appears the urban economy of money, and this rises, with the oncoming of the Civilization, into the dictature of money, simultaneously with the victory of world-city democracy. Every Culture has its own independently developed form world. Bodily money of the Apollinian style (that is, the stamped coin) is as antithetical to relational money of the Faustian dynamic style (that is, the booking of credit units) as the Polis is to the State of Charles V. But the economic life, just like the social, forms itself pyramidally. In the rustic underground a thoroughly primitive condition maintains itself almost unaffected by the Culture. The Late urban economy, which is already the activity of a resolute minority, looks down with steady contempt upon the pristine land economy that continues all around it, while the latter in turn glares sulkily at the intellectualized style that prevails within the walls. Finally the cosmopolis brings in a Civilized world economy, which radiates from very small nuclei within a few centers, and subjects the rest to itself as a provincial economy, while in the remoter landscapes thoroughly primitive (“patriarchal”) custom often prevails still. With the growth of the cities the way of life becomes ever more artificial, subtle and complex. The great city worker of Caesar’s Rome, of Haroun-al-Raschid’s Baghdad, and of the present day Berlin feels as self-evidently necessary much that the richest yeoman deep in the country regards as silly luxury, but this self-evident standard is hard to reach and hard to maintain. In every Culture the quantum of work grows bigger and bigger till at the beginning of every Civilization we find an intensity of economic life, of which the tensions are even excessive and dangerous, and which it is impossible to maintain for a long period. In the end a rigid, permanent set condition is reached, a strange hodge podge of refined intellectual and crude primitive factors, such as the Greeks found in Egypt and we have found in modern India and China — unless, of course, the crust is being disintegrated from below by the pressure of a young Culture, like the Classical in Diocletian’s time.

Relatively to this economic movement, men are economically “in form” as an economic class, just as they are in form for world history as a political Estate. Each individual has an economic position within the economic order just as he has a grade of some sort in the society. Now, both these kinds of allegiances make claims upon the feelings, thoughts, and relations all at once. A life insists on being, and on meaning something as well, and the confusion of our ideas is made worse confounded by the fact that, today, as in Hellenistic times, political parties, in their desire to ameliorate the upkeep standards of certain economic groups, have elevated these groups to the dignity of a political Estate, as Marx, for instance, elevated the class of factory workers.

Confusion — for the first and genuine Estate is nobility. From it the officer and the judge and all concerned in the highest duties of government and administration are direct derivatives. They are Estate-like formations that mean something. So, too, the body of scholars and scientists belongs to the priesthood¹⁰ and has a very sharply definite kind of class exclusiveness. But the grand symbolism of the Estates goes out with castle and cathedral. The Tiers, already, is the Non-Estate, the remainder, a miscellaneous and manifold congeries, which means very little as such save in the moments of political protest, so that the importance it creates for itself is a party importance. The individual is conscious of himself not as a bourgeois, but because he is a “liberal” and thus part and parcel of a great thing, not indeed as representing it in his person, but as adhering to it from conviction. In consequence of this weakness of its social “form,” the economic “form” of the bourgeoisie becomes all the more relatively conspicuous in its callings, guilds and unions. In the cities, at any rate, a man is primarily designated according to the way in which he makes his living.

Economically, the first (and anciently almost the only) mode of life is that of the peasant,¹¹ which is pure production, and therefore the precondition of every other mode. Even the primary Estates, too, in early times, base their way of life entirely upon hunting, stock keeping, and agricultural landowning, and even in Late periods land is regarded by nobles and priests as the only truly honorable kind of property. In opposition to it stands trade, the mode of the acquisitive middleman or intervener,¹² powerful out of all proportion to its numbers, already indispensable even in quite early conditions — a refined parasitism, completely unproductive and, therefore, land alien and far ranging, “free,” and unhampered spiritually, too, by the ethic and the practice of the countryside, a life sustaining itself on another life. Between the two, now, a third kind of economy, the preparatory economy of technics, grows up in numberless crafts, industries, and callings, which creatively apply reflections upon nature and whose honor and conscience are bound up in achievement.¹³ Its oldest guild, which reaches back into the sheer primitive and fills the picture of this primitive with its dark sagas and rites and notions, is the guild of the smiths, who — as the result of their proud aloofness from the peasantry and the fear that hangs about them, and leads to their being venerated and banned by turns — have often become true tribes with a race of their own, as in the case of the Abyssinian Falasha or “Black Jews.”¹⁴

In these three economics of production, preparation, and distribution, as in everything else belonging to politics and life at large, there are the subjects and objects of leading — in this case, whole groups that dispose, decide, organize, discover; and other whole groups whose function is simply to execute. The grading may be hard and definite or it may be scarcely perceptible,¹⁵ promotion may be impossible or unimpeded, the relative dignity of the task may be almost equal throughout a long scale of slow transitions or different beyond comparison. Tradition and law, talent and possessions, population numbers, cultural level, and economic situation may effectively override this basic antithesis of subjects and objects — but it exists, it is as much a premise as life itself, and it is unalterable. Nevertheless, economically there is no worker class; that is an invention of theorists who have fixed their eyes on the position of factory workers in England — an industrial, peasantless land in a transitional phase — and then extended the resultant scheme so confidently over all the Cultures and all the ages that the politicians have taken it up and used it as a means of building themselves parties. In actuality there is an almost uncountable number of purely serving activities in workshop and counting houses, office and cargo deck, roads, mine shafts, fields, and meadows. This counting up, portering, running of errands, hammering, serving, and minding often enough lacks that element which elevates life above mere upkeep and invests work with the dignity and the delight attaching, for example, to the status duties of the officer and the savant, or the personal triumphs of the engineer, the manager, and the merchant — but, even apart from that, all these things are quite incapable of being compared amongst themselves. The brain or brawn of the work, its situation in village or in megalopolis, the duration and intensity of the doing of it, bring it to pass that farm laborers, bank clerks, and tailors’ hands live in perfectly different economic worlds, and it is only, I repeat, the party politics of quite Late phases that lures them by means of catchwords into a protest combination, with the intention of making use of its aggregate mass. The classical slave, on the contrary, is such chiefly in terms of constitutional law — that is, so far as the body Polis was concerned, he simply did not exist — but economically he might be land worker or craftsman, or even director or wholesale merchant with a huge capital (peculium), with palaces and country villas and a host of subordinates — freemen included. And what he could become, over and above this, in late Roman times will appear in the sequel.

III

With the oncoming of Spring there begins in every Culture an economic life of settled form.¹⁶ The life of the population is entirely that of the peasant on the open land. The experience of the town has not yet come. All that elevates itself from amongst the villages, castles, palaces, monasteries, temple closes, is not a city, but a market, a mere meeting point of yeomen’s interests, which also acquired, and at once, a certain religious and political meaning, but certainly cannot be said to have had a special life of its own. The inhabitants, even though they might be artisans or traders, would still feel as peasants, and even in one way or another work as such.

That which separates out from a life in which everyone is alike producer and consumer is goods, and traffic in goods is the mark of all early intercourse, whether the object be brought from the far distance or merely shifted about within the limits of the village or even the farm. A piece of goods is that which adheres by some quiet threads of its essence to the life that has produced it or the life that uses it. A peasant drives “his” cow to market, a woman puts away “her” finery in the cupboard. We say that a man is endowed with this world’s “goods”; the word “possession” takes us back right into the plantlike origin of property, into which this particular being — no other — has grown, from the roots up. Exchange in these periods is a process whereby goods pass from one circle of life into another. They are valued with reference to life, according to a sliding scale of felt relation to the moment. There is neither a conception of value nor a kind or amount of goods that constitutes a general measure — for gold and coin are goods too, whose rarity and indestructibility causes them to be highly prized.¹⁷

Into the rhythm and course of this barter the dealer only comes as an intervener.¹⁸ In the market the acquisitive and the creative economics encounter one another, but even at places where fleets and caravans unload, trade only appears as the organ of countryside traffic.¹⁹ It is the “eternal” form of economy, and is even today seen in the immemorially ancient figure of the peddler of the country districts remote from towns, and in out of the way suburban lanes where small barter circles form naturally, and in the private economy of savants, officials, and in general everyone not actively part of the daily economic life of the great city.

With the soul of the town a quite other kind of life awakens. As soon as the market has become the town, it is not longer a question of mere centers for goods streams traversing a purely peasant landscape, but of a second world within the walls, for which the merely producing life “out there” is nothing but object and means, and out of which another stream begins to circle. The decisive point is this — the true urban man is not a producer in the prime terrene sense. He has not the inward linkage with soil or with the goods that pass through his hands. He does not live with these, but looks at them from outside and appraises them in relation to his own life upkeep.

With this goods become wares, exchange turnover, and in place of thinking in goods we have thinking in money.

With this a purely extensional something, a form of limit defining, is abstracted from the visible objects of economics just as mathematical thought abstracts something from the mechanistically conceived environment. Abstract money corresponds exactly to abstract number.²⁰ Both are entirely inorganic. The economic picture is reduced exclusively to quantities, whereas the important point about “goods” had been their quality. For the early period peasant “his” cow is, first of all, just what it is, a unit being, and only secondarily an object of exchange; but for the economic outlook of the true townsman the only thing that exists is an abstract money value which at the moment happens to be in the shape of a cow that can always be transformed into that of, say, a banknote. Even so the genuine engineer sees in a famous waterfall not a unique natural spectacle, but just a calculable quantum of unexploited energy.

It is an error of all modern money theories that they start from the value token or even the material of the payment medium instead of from the form of economic thought.²¹ In reality, money, like number and law, is a category of thought. There is a monetary, just as there is a juristic and a mathematical and a technical, thinking of the world around. From the sense experience of a house we obtain quite different abstracts, according as we are mentally appraising it from the point of view of a merchant, a judge, or an engineer, and with reference to a balance sheet, a lawsuit, or a danger of collapse. Next of kin to thinking in money, however, is mathematics. To think in terms of business is to calculate. The money value is a numerical value measured by a unit of reckoning.²² This exact “value-in-itself,” like number-in-itself, the man of the town, the man without roots, is the first to imagine; for peasants there are only ephemeral felt values in relation to now this and now that object of exchange. What he does not use, or does not want to possess, has “no value” for him. Only in the economy picture of the real townsman are there objective values and kinds of values which have an existence apart from his private needs, as thought elements of a generalized validity, although in actuality every individual has his proper system of values and his proper stock of the most varied kinds of value, and feels the ruling prices of the market as “cheap” or “dear” with reference to these.²³

Whereas the earlier mankind compares goods, and does so not by means of the reason only, the later reckons the values of wares, and does so by rigid unqualitative measures. Now gold is no longer measured against the cow, but the cow against the gold, and the result is expressed by an abstract number, the price. Whether and how this measure of value finds symbolic expression in a value sign — as the written, spoken, or represented number sign is, in a sense, number — depends on the economic style of the particular Culture, each of which produces a different sort of money. The common condition for the appearance of this is the existence of an urban population that thinks economically in terms of it, and it is its particular character that settles whether the value token shall serve also as payment medium; thus the Classical coin and probably the Babylonian silver did so serve, whereas the Egyptian deben (raw copper weighed out in pounds) was a measure of exchange, but neither token nor payment medium. The Western and the “contemporary” Chinese bank note,²⁴ again, is a medium, but not a measure. In fact we are accustomed to deceive ourselves thoroughly as to the role played by coins of precious metal in our sort of economy; they are just wares fashioned in imitation of the Classical custom, and hence, measured against book values of credit money, they have a “price.”

The outcome of this way of thinking is that the old possession, bound up with life and the soil, gives way to the fortune, which is essentially mobile and qualitatively undefined: it does not consist in goods, but it is laid out in them. Considered by itself, it is a purely numerical quantum of money value.²⁵

As the seat of this thinking, the city becomes the money market, the center of values, and a stream of money values begins to infuse, intellectualize, and command the stream of goods. And with this the trader, from being an organ of economic life, becomes its master. Thinking in money is always, in one way or another, trade or business thinking. It presupposes the productive economy of the land, and, therefore, is always primarily acquisitive, for there is no third course. The very words “acquisition,” “gain,” “speculation,” point to a profit tricked off from the goods en route to the consumer — an intellectual plunder — and for that reason are inapplicable to the early peasantry. Only by attuning ourselves exactly to the spirit and economic outlook of the true towns man can we realize what they mean. He works not for needs, but for sales, for “money.” The business view gradually infuses itself into every kind of activity. The countryman, inwardly bound up with traffic in goods, was at once giver and taker, and even the trader of the primitive market was hardly an exception to this rule. But with money traffic there appears between producer and consumer, as though between two separate worlds, the third party, the middleman, whose thought is dominated a priori by the business side of life. He forces the producer to offer, and the consumer to inquire of him. He elevates mediation to a monopoly and thereafter to economic primacy, and forces the other two to be “in form” in his interest, to prepare the wares according to his reckonings, and to cheapen them under the pressure of his offers.

He who commands this mode of thinking is the master of money.²⁶ In all the Cultures evolution takes this road. Lysias informs us in his oration against the corn merchants that the speculators at the Pirseus frequently spread reports of the wreck of a grain fleet or of the outbreak of war, in order to produce a panic. In Hellenistic-Roman times it was a widespread practice to arrange for land to go out of cultivation, or for imports to be held in bond, in order to force up prices. In the Egyptian New Empire wheat corners in the American style were made possible by a bill discounting that is fully comparable with the banking operations of the West.²⁷ Cleomenes, Alexander the Great’s administrator for Egypt, was able by book transactions to get the whole corn supply into his own hands, thereby producing a famine far and wide in Greece and raking in immense gains for himself. To think economically on any terms but these is simply to become a mere pawn in the money operations of the great city. This style of thought soon gets hold of the waking consciousness of the entire urban population and, therefore, of everyone who plays any serious part in the conduct of economic history. “Peasant” and “burgher” stand not only for the difference of country and city, but for that of possessions and money as well. The splendid Culture of Homeric and Provençal princely courts was something that waxed and waned with the men themselves — we can often, even today, see it in the life of old families in their country seats — but the more refined culture of the bourgeoisie, its “comfort,” is something coming from outside, something that can be paid for.²⁸ All highly developed economy is urban economy. World economy itself, the characteristic economy of all Civilizations, ought properly to be called world-city economy. The destinies even of this world economy are now decided in a few places, the “money markets of the world”²⁹ — in Babylon, Thebes, and Rome, in Byzantium and Baghdad, in London, New York, Berlin, and Paris. The residue is a starveling provincial economy that runs on in its narrow circles without being conscious of its utter dependence. Finally, money is the form of intellectual energy in which the ruler will, the political and social, technical and mental, creative power, the craving for a full sized life, are concentrated. Shaw is entirely right when he says: “The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization... the two things [money and life] are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it is life...”³⁰ What is here described as Civilization, then, is the stage of a Culture at which tradition and personality have lost their immediate effectiveness, and every idea, to be actualized, has to be put into terms of money. At the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful — now he is powerful because he has money. Intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy is the completed equating of money with political power.

Through the economic history of every Culture there runs a desperate conflict waged by the soil rooted tradition of a race, by its soul, against the spirit of money. The peasant wars of the beginning of a Late period (in the Classical, 700-500; in the Western, 1450-1650; in the Egyptian, end of Old Kingdom) are the first reaction of the blood against the money that is stretching forth its hand from the waxing cities over the soil. Stein’s warning that “he who mobilizes the soil dissolves it into dust” points to a danger common to all Cultures; if money is unable to attack possession, it insinuates itself into the thoughts of the noble and peasant possessors, until the inherited possession that has grown with the family’s growth begins to seem like resources merely “put into” land and soil and, so far as their essence is concerned, mobile.³¹ Money aims at mobilizing all things. World economy is the actualized economy of values that are completely detached in thought from the land, and made fluid.³² The Classical money thinking, from Hannibal’s day, transformed whole cities into coin and whole populations into slaves and thereby converted both into money that could be brought from everywhere to Rome, and used outwards from Rome as a power.

The Faustian money thinking “opens up” whole continents, the water power of gigantic river basins, the muscular power of the peoples of broad regions, the coal measures, the virgin forests, the laws of Nature, and transforms them all into financial energy, which is laid out in one way or in another — in the shape of press, or elections, or budgets, or armies — for the realization of masters’ plans. Ever new values are abstracted from whatever world stock is still, from the business point of view, unclaimed, “the slumbering spirits of gold,” as John Gabriel Borkman says; and what the things themselves are, apart from this, is of no economic significance at all.

IV

As every Culture has its own mode of thinking in money, so also it has its proper money symbol through which it brings to visible expression its principle of valuation in the economic field. This something, a sense actualizing of the thought, is in importance fully the equal of the spoken, written, or drawn figures and other symbols of the mathematic. Here lies a deep and fruitful domain of inquiry, so far almost unexplored. Not even the basic notions have been correctly enunciated, and it is therefore quite impossible today to translate intelligibly the money idea that underlay the barter and the bill business of Egypt, the banking of Babylonia, the bookkeeping of China, and the capitalism of the Jews, Parsees, Greeks, and Arabs from Haroun-al-Raschid’s day. All that is possible is to set forth the essential opposition of Apollinian and Faustian money — the one, money as magnitude, and the other, money as function.³³

Economically, as in other ways, Classical man saw his world-around as a sum of bodies that changed their place, traveled, drove or hit or annihilated one another, as in Democritus’s description of Nature. Man was a body among bodies, and the Polis as sum thereof a body of higher order. All the needs of life consisted in corporeal quantities, and money, too, therefore represented such a body, in the same way as an Apollo statue represented a god. About 650, simultaneously with the stone body of the Doric temple and the free statue truly modeled in the round, appeared the coin, a metal weight of beautiful impressed form. Value as a magnitude had long existed — in fact as long as this Culture itself. In Homer, a talent is a little aggregate of gold, in bullion and decorative objects, of a definite total weight. The Shield of Achilles represents “two talents” of gold, and even as late as Roman times it was usual to specify silver and gold vessels by weight.³⁴

The discovery of the Classically formed money body, however, is so extraordinary that we have not even yet grasped it in its deep and purely Classical significance. We regard it as one of the “achievements of humanity,” and so we strike these coinages everywhere, just as we put statues in our streets and squares. So much and no more it is within our power to do; we can imitate the shape, but we cannot impart the same economic significance thereto. The coin as money is a purely Classical phenomenon — only possible in an environment conceived wholly on Euclidean ideas, but there creatively dominant over all economic life. Notions like income, resources, debt, capital, meant in the Classical cities something quite different from what they mean to us. They meant, not economic energy radiating from a point, but a sum of valuable objects in hand. Wealth was always a mobile cash supply, which was altered by addition and subtraction of valuable objects and had nothing at all to do with possessions in land — for in Classical thinking the two were completely separate. Credit consisted in the lending of cash in the expectation that the loan would be repaid in cash. Catiline was poor because, in spite of his wide estates,³⁵ he could find nobody to lend him the cash that he needed for his political aims; and the immense debts of Roman politicians had for their ultimate security, not their equivalent in land, but the definite prospect of a province to be plundered of its movable assets.³⁶

In the light of this, and only in the light of this, we begin to understand certain phenomena such as the mass execution of the wealthy under the Second Tyrannis, and the Roman proscriptions (with the object of seizing a large part of the cash current in the community), and the melting down of the Delphian temple treasure by the Phocians in the Sacred War, of the art treasures of Corinth by Mummius, and of the last votive offerings in Rome by Caesar, in Greece by Sulla, in Asia Minor by Brutus and Cassius, without regard to artistic value when the noble stuffs and metals and ivory were needed.³⁷ The captured statues and the vessels borne in the triumphs were, in the eyes of the spectators, sheer cash, and Mommsen³⁸ could attempt to determine the site of Varus’s disaster by the places in which coin hoards were unearthed — for the Roman veteran carried his whole property in precious metal on his person. Classical wealth does not consist in having possessions, but piling money; a Classical money market was not a center of credit like the bourses of our world and of ancient Thebes, but a city in which an important part of the world’s cash was actually collected. It may be taken that in Caesar’s time much more than half of the Classical world’s gold was in Rome.

But when, from about Hannibal’s time, this world advanced into the state of unlimited plutocracy, the naturally limited mass of precious metals and materially valuable works of art in its sphere of control became hopelessly inadequate to cover needs, and a veritable craving set in for new bodies capable of being used as money. Then it was that men’s eyes fell upon the slave, who was another sort of body, but a thing and not a person and capable, therefore, of being thought of as money. From that point Classical slavery became unique of its kind in all economic history. The properties of the coin were extended to apply to living objects, and the stock of men in the regions “opened up” to the plunderings of proconsuls and tax farmers became as interesting as the stock of metal. A curious sort of double valuation developed. The slave had a market price, although ground and soil had not. He served for the accumulation of great uninvested fortunes, and hence the enormous slave masses of the Roman period, which are entirely inexplicable by any other sort of necessity. So long as man needed only as many slaves as he could gainfully employ, their number was small and easily covered by the prisoners of war and judgment debtors.³⁹ It was in the sixth century that Chios made a beginning with the importation of bought slaves (Argyronetes). The difference between these and the far more numerous paid laborers was originally of a political and legal, not an economic kind. As the Classical economy was static and not dynamic, and was ignorant of the systematic opening up of energy sources, the slaves of the Roman age did not exist to be exploited in work, but were employed — more or less — so that the greatest possible number of them could be maintained. Specially presentable slaves possessing particular qualifications of one sort or another were preferred, because for equal cost of maintenance they represented a better asset; they were loaned as cash was loaned; and they were allowed to have businesses on their account, so that they could become rich; free labor was undersold — all this so as to cover at any rate the upkeep of this capital.⁴⁰ The bulk of them cannot have been employed at all. They answered their purpose by simply existing, as a stock of money in hand which was not bound up to a natural limit like the stock of metal available in those days. And through that very fact the need of slaves grew and grew indefinitely and led, not only to wars that were undertaken simply for slave getting, but to slave hunting by private entrepreneurs all along the Mediterranean coasts (which Rome winked at) and to a new way of making the proconsuls’ fortunes, which consisted in bleeding the population of a region and then selling it into slavery for debt. The market of Delos must have dealt with ten thousand slaves a day. When Caesar went to Britain, the disappointment caused in Rome by the money poverty of the Britons was compensated by the prospect of rich booty in slaves. When, for example, Corinth was destroyed, the melting down of the statues for coinage and the auctioning of the inhabitants at the slave mart were, for Classical minds, one and the same operation — the transformation of corporeal objects into money.

In extremest contrast to this stands the symbol of Faustian money — money as Function, the value of which lies in its effect and not its mere existence. The specific style of this economic thinking appears already in the way in which the Normans of A.D. 1000 organized their spoils of men and land into an economic force.⁴¹ Compare the pure book valuation of these ducal officials (commemorated in our words “cheque,” “account,” and “checking”)⁴² with the “contemporary” gold talent of the Iliad, one meets at the very outset of the Culture the rudiments of its modern credit system, which is the outcome of confidence in the force and durability of its economic mode, and with which the idea of money in our sense is almost identical. These financial methods, transplanted to the Roman Kingdom of Sicily by Roger II, were developed by the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II (about 1230) into a powerful system far surpassing the original in dynamism and making him the “first capitalist power of the world”;⁴³ and while this fraternization of mathematical thinking power and royal will-to-power made its way from Normandy into France and was applied on the grand scale to the exploitation of conquered England (to this day English soil is nominally royal demesne) its Sicilian side was imitated by the Italian city republics, and (as their ruling patricians soon took the methods of the civic economy into use for their private bookkeeping,) spread over the commercial thought and practice of the whole Western world. Little later, the Sicilian methods were adopted by the Order of the Teutonic Knights and by the dynasty of Aragon, and it is probably to these origins that we should assign the model accountancy of Spain in the days of Philip II, and of Prussia in those of Frederick William I.

The decisive event, however, was the invention — “contemporary” with that of the Classical coin about 650 — of double entry bookkeeping by Fra Luca Pacioli in 1494. Goethe calls this in Wilhelm Meister, “one of the finest discoveries of the human intellect,” and indeed its author may without hesitation be ranked with his contemporaries Columbus and Copernicus. To the Normans we owe our modes of reckoning and to the Lombards our bookkeeping. These, be it observed, were the same two Germanic stocks which created the two most suggestive juristic works of the early Gothic, and whose longing into distant seas gave the impulses for the two discoveries of America. “Double entry bookkeeping is born of the same spirit as the system of Galileo and Newton... With the same means as these, it orders the phenomenon into an elegant system, and it may be called the first Cosmos built up on the basis of a mechanistic thought. Double entry bookkeeping discloses to us the Cosmos of the economic world by the same method as later the Cosmos of the stellar universe was unveiled by the great investigation of natural philosophy... Double entry bookkeeping rests on the basic principle, logically carried out, of comprehending all phenomena purely as quantities.”⁴⁴

Double entry bookkeeping is a pure Analysis of the space of values, referred to a coordinate system, of which the origin is the “Firm.”The coinage of the Classical world had only permitted of arithmetical compilations with value magnitudes. Here, as ever, Pythagoras and Descartes stand opposed. It is legitimate for us to talk of the “integration” of an undertaking, and the graphic curve is the same optical auxiliary to economics as it is to science. The Classical economy world was ordered, like the cosmos of Democritus, according to stuff and form. A stuff, in the form of a coin, carries the economic movement and presses against the demand unit of equal value quantity at the place of use. Our economy world is ordered by force and mass. A field of money tensions lies in space and assigns to every object, irrespective of its specific kind, a positive or negative effect value,⁴⁵ which is represented by a book entry. “Quod non est in libris, non est in mundo.” But the symbol of the functional money thus imagined, that which alone may be compared with the Classical coin, is not the actual book entry, nor yet the share voucher, cheque, or note, but the act by which the function is fulfilled in writing, and the role of the value paper is merely to be the generalized historical evidence of this act.

Yet side by side with this the West, in its unquestioning admiration of the Classical, has gone on striking coins, not merely as tokens of sovereignty, but in the belief that this evidenced money was money corresponding in reality to the economics in thought. In just the same way, even within the Gothic age, we took over Roman law with its equating of things to bodily magnitudes, and the Euclidean mathematic, which was built upon the concept of number as magnitude. And so it befell that the evolution of these three intellectual form worlds of ours proceeded, not like the Faustian music in a pure and flower-like unfolding, but in the shape of a progressive emancipation from the notion of magnitude. The mathematic had already achieved this by the close of the Baroque age.⁴⁶ The jurisprudence, on the other hand, has not yet even recognized its coming task, but this century is going to set it, and to demand that which for Roman jurists was the self-evident basis of law, namely, the inward congruence of economic and legal thought and an equal practical familiarity with both. The conception of money that was symbolized in the coin agreed precisely with the Classical thing-law, but with us there is nothing remotely like such an agreement. Our whole life is disposed dynamically, not statically and Stoically; therefore our essentials are forces and performances, relations and capacities — organizing talents and intuitive intellects, credit, ideas, methods, energy sources — and not mere existence of corporeal things. The “Romanist” thing-thought of our jurists, and the theory of money that consciously or unconsciously starts from the coin, are equally alien to our life. The vast metallic hoard to which, in imitation of the Classical, we were continually adding till the World War came, has indeed made a role for itself off the main road, but with the inner form, tasks, and aims of modern economy it has nothing to do; and if as the result of the war it were to disappear from currency altogether, nothing would be altered thereby.⁴⁷

Unhappily, the modern national economics were founded in the age of Classicism. Just as statues and vases and stiff dramas alone counted as true art, so also finely stamped coins alone counted as true money. What Josiah Wedgwood (1758) aimed at with his delicately toned reliefs and cups, that also, at bottom, Adam Smith aimed at in his theory of value — namely, the pure present of tangible magnitudes. For it is entirely consonant with the illusion that money and pieces of money are the same, to measure the value of a thing against the magnitude of a quantity of work. Here work is no longer an effecting in a world of effects, a working which can differ infinitely from case to case as to inward worth and intensity and range, which propagates itself in wider and wider circles and like an electric field may be measured but not marked off — but the result of the effecting, considered entirely materially, that which is worked up, a tangible thing showing nothing noteworthy about it except just its extent.

In reality, the economy of the European American Civilization is built up on work of a kind in which distinctions go entirely according to the inner quality — more so than ever in China or Egypt, let alone the Classical World. It is not for nothing that we live in a world of economic dynamism, where the works of the individual are not additive in the Euclidean way, but functionally related to one another. The purely executive work (which alone Marx takes into account) is in reality nothing but the function of an inventive, ordering, and organizing work; it is from this that the other derives its meaning, relative value, and even possibility of being done at all. The whole world economy since the discovery of the steam engine has been the creation of a quite small number of superior heads, without whose high grade work everything else would never have come into being. But this achievement is of creative thinking, not a quantum,⁴⁸ and its value is not to be weighed against a certain number of coins. Rather it is itself money — Faustian money, namely, which is not minted, but thought of as an efficient center coming up out of a life — and it is the inward quality of that life which elevates the thought to the significance of a fact. Thinking in money generates money — that is the secret of the world economy. When an organizing magnate writes down a million on paper, that million exists, for the personality as an economic center vouches for a corresponding heightening of the economic energy of his field. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the word “Credit” for us. But all the gold pieces in the world would not suffice to invest the actions of the manual worker with a meaning, and therefore a value, if the famous “expropriation of the expropriators” were to eliminate the superior capacities from their creations; were this to happen, these would become soulless, will-less, empty shells. Thus, in fact, Marx is just as much a Classical, just as truly a product of the Romanist law thought as Adam Smith; he sees only the completed magnitude, not the function, and he would like to separate the means of production from those whose minds, by the discovery of methods, the organization of efficient industries, and the acquisition of outlet markets, alone turn a mass of bricks and steel into a factory, and who, if their forces find no field of play, do not occur.⁴⁹

If anyone seeks to enunciate a theory of modern work, let him begin by thinking of this basic trait of all life. There are subjects and objects in every kind of life as lived, and the more important, the more rich in form, the life is, the clearer the distinction between them. As every stream of Being consists of a minority of leaders and a huge majority of led, so every sort of economy consists in leader work and executive work. The frog’s perspective of Marx and the social ethical ideologues shows only the aggregate of last small things, but these only exist at all in virtue of the first things, and the spirit of this world of work can be grasped only through a grasp of its highest possibilities. The inventor of the steam engine and not its stoker is the determinant. The thought is what matters.

And, similarly, thinking in money has subjects and objects: those who by force of their personality generate and guide money, and those who are maintained by money. Money of the Faustian brand is the force distilled from economy dynamics of the Faustian brand, and it appertains to the destiny of the individual (on the economic side of his life destiny) that he is inwardly constituted to represent a part of this force, or that he is, on the contrary, nothing but mass to it.

V

The word “Capital” signifies the center of this thought — not the aggregate of values, but that which keeps them in movement as such. Capitalism comes into existence only with the world city existence of a Civilization, and it is confined to the very small ring of those who represent this existence by their persons and intelligence; its opposite is the provincial economy. It was the unconditional supremacy achieved by the coin in Classical life (including the political side of that life) that generated the static capital, the ἀφορμή or starting point, that by its existence drew to itself, in a sort of magnetic attraction, things and again things en masse. It was the supremacy of book values, whose abstract system was quickly detached from personality by double entry bookkeeping and worked forward by virtue of its own inward dynamism, that produced the modern capital that spans the whole earth with its field of force.⁵⁰

Under the influence of its own sort of capital the economic life of the Classical world took the form of a gold stream that flowed from the provinces to Rome and back, and was ever seeking new areas whose stock of worked up gold had not yet been “opened up.” Brutus and Cassius carried the gold of Asia Minor on long mule trains to the battlefield of Philippi — one can imagine what sort of an economic operation the plunder of a camp after a battle must have been — and even C. Gracchus, almost a century earlier, alluded to the amphorae that went out from Rome to the provinces full of wine and came back full of gold. This hunt for the gold possessions of alien peoples corresponds exactly to the present day hunt for coal, which in its deeper meaning is not a thing, but a store of energy.

But, equally, the Classical craving for the near and present could not but match the Polis ideal with an economic ideal of Autarkeia, an economic atomization corresponding to the political. Each of these tiny life units desired to have an economic stream wholly of its own, wholly self-contained, circling independently of all others and within the radius of visibility. The polar opposite of this is the Western notion of the Firm, which is thought of as an entirely impersonal and incorporeal center of force, from which activity streams out in all directions to an indefinite distance, and which the proprietor by his ability to think in money does not represent, but possesses and directs— that is, has in his power — like a little cosmos. The duality of firm and proprietor would have been utterly unimaginable for the Classical mind.⁵¹

Consequently, as the Western Culture presents a maximum, so the Classical shows a minimum, of organization. For this was completely absent even as an idea from Classical man. His finance was one of provisional expedients made rule and habit. The wealthy burgher of Athens and Rome could be burdened with the equipment of warships. The political power of the Roman aedile (and his debts) rested on the fact that he not only produced the games and the streets and the buildings, but paid for them too — of course, he could recoup himself later by plundering his province. Sources of income were thought of only when the need of income presented itself, and then drawn upon, without any regard for the future, as the moment required — even at the cost of entirely destroying them. Plunder of the treasures of one’s own temples, sea piracy against one’s own city, confiscation of the wealth of one’s own fellow citizens were everyday methods of finance. If surpluses were available, they were distributed to the citizens — a proceeding to which plenty of people besides Eubulus of Athens owed their popularity.⁵² Budgets were as unknown as any other part of financial policy. The “economic management” of Roman provinces was a system of robbery, public and private, practiced by senators and financiers without the slightest consideration as to whether the exported values could be replaced. Never did Classical man think of systematically intensifying his economic life, but ever looked to the result of the moment, the tangible quantum of cash. Imperial Rome would have gone down in ruin had it not been fortunate enough to possess in old Egypt a Civilization that had for a thousand years thought of nothing but the organization of its economy. The Roman neither comprehended nor was capable of copying this style of life,⁵³ but the accident that Egypt provided the political possessor of this fellah world with an inexhaustible source of gold rendered it unnecessary for him to make a settled habit of proscription at home; the last of these financial operations in massacre form was that of 43, shortly before the incorporation of Egypt.⁵⁴ The amassed gold of Asia Minor that Brutus and Cassius were then bringing up, which meant an army and the dominion of the world, made it necessary to put to the ban some two thousand of the richest inhabitants of Italy, whose heads were brought to the Forum in sacks for the offered rewards. It was no longer possible to spare even relatives, children, and gray heads, or people who had never concerned themselves with politics. It was enough that they possessed a stock of cash and that the yield would otherwise have been too small.

But with the extinction of the Classical world feeling in the early Imperial age, this mode of thinking in money disappeared also. Coins again became wares — because men were again living the peasant life⁵⁵ — and this explains the immense outflow of gold into the farther East after Hadrian’s reign, which has hitherto been unaccountable. And as economic life in forms of gold streams was extinguished in the upheaval of a young Culture, so also the slave ceased to be money, and the ebb of the gold was paralleled by that mass emancipation of the slaves which numerous Imperial laws, from Augustus’s reign onwards, tried in vain to check — till under Diocletian, in whose famous maximum tariff⁵⁶ money economy was no longer the standpoint, the type of the Classical slave had ceased to exist.

CHAPTER XIV

THE FORM WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE

(B) THE MACHINE

I

Technique is as old as free moving life itself. Only the plant — so far as we can see into Nature — is the mere theater of technical processes. The animal, in that it moves, has a technique of movement so that it may nourish and protect itself.

The original relation between a waking microcosm and its macrocosm — “Nature” — consists in a touch through the senses which rises from mere sense impressions to sense judgment, so that already it works critically (that is, separatingly) or, what comes to the same thing, causal analytically. The stock of what has been determined then is enlarged into a system, as complete as may be, of the most primary experiences — identifying marks — a spontaneous method by which one is enabled to feel at home in one’s world; in the case of many animals this has led to an amazing richness of experience that no human science has transcended. But the primary waking being is always an active one, remote from mere theory of all sorts, and thus it is in the minor technique of everyday life, and upon things insofar as they are dead, that these experiences are involuntarily acquired. This is the difference between Cult and Myth, for at this level there is no boundary line between religion and the profane — all waking consciousness is religion.

The decisive turn in the history of the higher life occurs when the determination of Nature (in order to be guided by it) changes into afixation — that is, a purposed alteration of Nature. With this, technique becomes more or less sovereign and the instinctive prime experience changes into a definitely “conscious” prime knowing. Thought has emancipated itself from sensation. It is the language of words that brings about this epochal change. The liberation of speech from speaking gives rise to a stock of signs for communication speech which are much more than identification marks — they are names bound up with a sense of meaning, whereby man has the secret of numina (deities, nature forces) in his power, and number (formulas, simple laws), whereby the inner form of the actual is abstracted from the accidentally sensuous.

With that, the system of identification marks develops into a theory, a picture which detaches itself from the technique of the day¹ — whether this be a day of high level Civilized technics or a day of simplest beginnings — by way of abstraction, as a piece of waking consciousness uncommitted to activity. One “knows” what one wants, but much must have happened for one to have that knowledge, and we must make no mistake as to its character. By numerical experience man is enabled to switch the secret on and off, but he has not discovered it. The figure of the modern sorcerer — a switchboard with levers and labels at which the workman calls mighty effects into play by the pressure of a finger without possessing the slightest notion of their essence — is only the symbol of human technique in general. The picture of the light world around us — insofar as we have developed it critically, analytically, as theory, as picture — is nothing but a switchboard of the kind, on which particular things are so labeled that by (so to say) pressing the appropriate button particular effects follow with certainty. The secret itself remains nonetheless oppressive on that account.² But through this technique the waking consciousness does, all the same, intervene masterfully in the fact world. Life makes use of thought as an “open sesame,” and at the peak of many a Civilization, in its great cities, there arrives finally the moment when technical critique becomes tired of being life’s servant and makes itself tyrant. The Western Culture is even now experiencing an orgy of this unbridled thought, and on a tragic scale.

Man has listened in to the march of Nature and made notes of its indices. He begins to imitate it by means and methods that utilize the laws of the cosmic pulse. He is emboldened to play the part of God, and it is easy to understand how the earliest preparers and experts of these artificial things — for it was here that art came to be, as counter-concept to nature — and how in particular the guardians of the smith’s art, appeared to those around them as something uncanny and were regarded with awe or horror as the case might be. The stock of such discoveries grew and grew. Often they were made and forgotten and made again, were imitated, shunned, improved. But in the end they constituted for whole continents a store of self-evident means — fire, metal working, instruments, arms, plows, boats, houses, animal taming, and husbandry. Above all, the metals, to whose site in the earth primitive man is led by some uncannily mystical trait in him. Immemoriably old trade routes lead to ore deposits that are kept secret, through the life of the settled Countryside and over frequented seas, and along these, later, travel cults and ornaments and persistent legends of islands of tin and lands of gold. The primary trade of all is the metal trade, and with it the economics of production and of work are joined intrusively by a third — alien, venturesome, free ranging over the lands.

On this foundation, now, arises the technique of the higher Cultures, expressive in quality and color and passion of the whole soul of these major entities. It need hardly be said that Classical man, who felt himself and his environment alike Euclidean, set himself a priori in hostile opposition to the very idea of technique. If by “Classical” technique we mean something that (along with the rest that we comprehend in the adjective) rose with determined effort above the universal dead perfection of the Mycenaean age, then there was no Classical technique.³ Its triremes were glorified rowboats, its catapults and onagers mere substitutes for arms and fists — not to be named in the same breath with the war engines of Assyria and China — and as for Hero and his like, it was flukes and not discoveries that they achieved. They lacked the inner weight, the fatedness of their moment, the deep necessity. Here and there men played with data (and why not?) that probably came from the East, but no one devoted serious attention to them and, above all, no one made a real effort to introduce them into the ensemble picture of life.

Very different is the Faustian technics, which with all its passion of the third dimension, and from earliest Gothic days, thrusts itself upon Nature, with the firm resolve to be its master. Here, and only here, is the connection of insight and utilization a matter of course.⁴ Theory is working hypothesis from the outset. The Classical investigator “contemplated” like Aristotle’s deity, the Arabian sought as alchemist for magical means (such as the Philosophers’ Stone) whereby to possess himself of Nature’s treasures without effort,⁵ but the Western strives to direct the world according to his will.

The Faustian inventor and discoverer is a unique type. The primitive force of his will, the brilliance of his visions, the steely energy of his practical ponderings, must appear queer and incomprehensible to anyone at the standpoint of another Culture, but for us they are in the blood. Our whole Culture has a discoverer’s soul. To dis-cover that which is not seen, to draw it into the light world of the inner eye so as to master it — that was its stubborn passion from the first days on. All its great inventions slowly ripened in the deeps, to emerge at last with the necessity of a Destiny. All of them were very nearly approached by the high hearted, happy research of the early Gothic monks.⁶ Here, if anywhere, the religious origins of all technical thought are manifested.⁷ These meditative discoverers in their cells, who with prayers and fastings wrung God’s secret out of him, felt that they were serving God thereby. Here is the Faust figure, the grand symbol of a true discovering Culture. The Scientia experimentalis, as Roger Bacon was the first to call nature research, the insistentquestioning of Nature with levers and screws, began that of which the issue lies under our eyes as a countryside sprouting factory chimneys and conveyor towers. But for all of them, too, there was the truly Faustian danger of the Devil’s having a hand in the game, the risk that he was leading them in spirit to that mountain on which he promises all the power of the earth. This is the significance of the perpetuum mobile dreamed of by those strange Dominicans like Petrus Peregrinus, which would wrest the almightiness from God. Again and again they succumbed to this ambition; they forced this secret out of God in order themselves to be God. They listened for the laws of the cosmic pulse in order to overpower it. And so they created the idea of the machine as a small cosmos obeying the will of man alone. But with that they overpassed the slender borderline whereat the reverent piety of others saw the beginning of sin, and on it, from Roger Bacon to Giordano Bruno, they came to grief. Ever and ever again, true belief has regarded the machine as of the Devil.

The passion of discovery declares itself as early as the Gothic architecture — compare with this the deliberate form poverty of the Doric! — and is manifest throughout our music. Book printing appeared, and the long range weapon.⁸ On the heels of Columbus and Copernicus come the telescope, the microscope, the chemical elements, and lastly the immense technological corpus of the early Baroque.

Then followed, however, simultaneously with Rationalism, the discovery of the steam engine, which upset everything and transformed economic life from the foundations up. Till then nature had rendered services, but now she was tied to the yoke as a slave, and her work was as though in contempt measured by a standard of horsepower. We advanced from the muscle force of the Negro, which was set to work in organized routines, to the organic reserves of the Earth’s crust, where the life forces of millennia lay stored as coal; and today we cast our eyes on inorganic nature, where water forces are already being brought in to supplement coal. As the horsepowers run to millions and milliards, the numbers of the population increase and increase, on a scale that no other Culture ever thought possible. This growth is a product of the Machine, which insists on being used and directed, and to that end centuples the forces of each individual. For the sake of the machine, human life becomes precious. Work becomes the great word of ethical thinking; in the eighteenth century it loses its derogatory implication in all languages. The machine works and forces the man to cooperate. The entire Culture reaches a degree of activity such that the earth trembles under it.

And what now develops, in the space of hardly a century, is a drama of such greatness that the men of a future Culture, with other soul and other passions, will hardly be able to resist the conviction that “in those days” nature herself was tottering. The politics stride over cities and peoples; even the economics, deeply as they bite into the destinies of the plant and animal worlds, merely touch the fringe of life and efface themselves. But this technique will leave traces of its heyday behind it when all else is lost and forgotten. For this Faustian passion has altered the Face of the Earth.

This is the outward and upward straining life feeling — true descendant, therefore, of the Gothic — as expressed in Goethe’s Faust monologue when the steam engine was yet young. The intoxicated soul wills to fly above space and Time. An ineffable longing tempts him to indefinable horizons. Man would free himself from the earth, rise into the infinite, leave the bonds of the body, and circle in the universe of space amongst the stars. That which the glowing and soaring inwardness of St. Bernard sought at the beginning, that which Grünewald and Rembrandt conceived in their backgrounds, and Beethoven in the trans-earthly tones of his last quartets, comes back now in the intellectual intoxication of the inventions that crowd one upon another. Hence the fantastic traffic that crosses the continents in a few days, that puts itself across oceans in floating cities, that bores through mountains, rushes about in subterranean labyrinths, uses the steam engine till its last possibilities have been exhausted, and then passes on to the gas engine, and finally raises itself above the roads and railways and flies in the air; hence it is that the spoken word is sent in one moment over all the oceans; hence comes the ambition to break all records and beat all dimensions, to build giant halls for giant machines, vast ships and bridge spans, buildings that deliriously scrape the clouds, fabulous forces pressed together to a focus to obey the hand of a child, stamping and quivering and droning works of steel and glass in which tiny man moves as unlimited monarch and, at the last, feels nature as beneath him.

And these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric. They weave the earth over with an infinite web of subtle forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become ever more and more immaterial, ever less noisy. The wheels, rollers, and levers are vocal no more. All that matters withdraws itself into the interior. Man has felt the machine to be devilish, and rightly. It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It delivers sacred Causality over to man and by him, with a sort of foreseeing omniscience is set in motion, silent and irresistible.

II

Never save here has a microcosm felt itself superior to its macrocosm, but here the little life units have by the sheer force of their intellect made the unliving dependent upon themselves. It is a triumph, so far as we can see, unparalleled. Only this our Culture has achieved it, and perhaps only for a few centuries.

But for that very reason Faustian man has become the slave of his creation. His number, and the arrangement of life as he lives it, have been driven by the machine on to a path where there is no standing still and no turning back. The peasant, the hand worker, even the merchant, appear suddenly as inessential in comparison with the three great figures that the Machine has bred and trained up in the cause of its development: the entrepreneur, the engineer, and the factory worker. Out of a quite small branch of manual work — namely, the preparation economy — there has grown up (in this one Culture alone) a mighty tree that casts its shadow over all the other vocations — namely, the economy of the machine industry.⁹ It forces the entrepreneur not less than the workman to obedience. Both become slaves, and not masters, of the machine, that now for the first time develops its devilish and occult power. But although the Socialistic theory of the present day has insisted upon looking only at the latter’s contribution and has claimed the word “work” for him alone, it has all become possible only through the sovereign and decisive achievement of the former. The famous phrase concerning the “strong arm” that bids every wheel cease from running is a piece of wrong headedness. To stop them — yes! but it does not need a worker to do that. To keep them running — no! The center of this artificial and complicated realm of the Machine is the organizer and manager. The mind, not the hand, holds it together. But, for that very reason, to preserve the ever endangered structure, one figure is even more important than all the energy of enterprising master men that make cities to grow out of the ground and alter the picture of the landscape; it is a figure that is apt to be forgotten in this conflict of politics — the engineer, the priest of the machine, the man who knows it. Not merely the importance, but the very existence of the industry depends upon the existence of the hundred thousand talented, rigorously schooled brains that command the technique and develop it onward and onward. The quiet engineer it is who is the machine’s master and destiny. His thought is as possibility what the machine is as actuality. There have been fears, thoroughly materialistic fears, of the exhaustion of the coalfields. But so long as there are worthy technical pathfinders, dangers of this sort have no existence. When, and only when, the crop of recruits for this army fails — this army whose thought work forms one inward unit with the work of the machine — the industry must flicker out in spite of all that managerial energy and the workers can do. Suppose that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find their soul’s health more important than all the powers of this world; suppose that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the place of rationalism today, the very elite of intellect that is now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its Satanism (it is the step from Roger Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux) — then nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries.

The Western industry has diverted the ancient traditions of the other Cultures. The streams of economic life move towards the seats of King Coal and the great regions of raw material. Nature becomes exhausted, the globe sacrificed to Faustian thinking in energies. Theworking earth is the Faustian aspect of her, the aspect contemplated by the Faust of Part II, the supreme transfiguration of enterprising work — and contemplating, he dies. Nothing is so utterly antipodal to the motionless satiate being of the Classical Empire. It is the engineer who is remotest from the Classical law thought, and he will see to it that his economy has its own law, wherein forces and efficiencies will take the place of Person and Thing.

III

But titanic, too, is the onslaught of money upon this intellectual force. Industry, too, is earthbound like the yeoman. It has its station, and its materials stream up out of the earth. Only high finance is wholly free, wholly intangible. Since 1789 the banks, and with them the bourses, have developed themselves on the credit needs of an industry growing ever more enormous, as a power on their own account, and they will (as money wills in every Civilization) to be the only power. The ancient wrestle between the productive and the acquisitive economies intensifies now into a silent gigantomachy of intellects, fought out in the lists of the world cities. This battle is the despairing struggle of technical thought to maintain its liberty against money thought.¹⁰

The dictature of money marches on, tending to its material peak, in the Faustian Civilization as in every other. And now something happens that is intelligible only to one who has penetrated to the essence of money. If it were anything tangible, then its existence would be forever — but, as it is a form of thought, it fades out as soon as it has thought its economic world to finality, and has no more material upon which to feed. It thrust into the life of the yeoman’s countryside and set the earth amoving; its thought transformed every sort of handicraft; today it presses victoriously upon industry to make the productive work of entrepreneur and engineer and laborer alike its spoil. The machine with its human retinue, the real queen of this century, is in danger of succumbing to a stronger power. But with this, money, too, is at the end of its success, and the last conflict is at hand in which the Civilization receives its conclusive form — the conflict between money and blood.

The coming of Caesarism breaks the dictature of money and its political weapon democracy. After a long triumph of world city economy and its interests over political creative force, the political side of life manifests itself after all as the stronger of the two. The sword is victorious over the money, the master will subdues again the plunderer will. If we call these money powers “Capitalism,”¹¹ then we may designate as Socialism the will to call into life a mighty politico-economic order that transcends all class interests, a system of lofty thoughtfulness and duty sense that keeps the whole in fine condition for the decisive battle of its history, and this battle is also the battle of money and law. The private powers of the economy want free paths for their acquisition of great resources. No legislation must stand in their way. They want to make the laws themselves, in their interests, and to that end they make use of the tool they have made for themselves, democracy, the subsidized party. Law needs, in order to resist this onslaught, a high tradition and an ambition of strong families that finds its satisfaction not in the heaping up of riches, but in the tasks of true rulership, above and beyond all money advantage. A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic on-flow in microcosmic form. It is the fact of facts within the world-as-history. Before the irresistible rhythm of the generation sequence, everything built up by the waking consciousness in its intellectual world vanishes at the last. Ever in History it is life and life only — race quality, the triumph of the will-to-power — and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money that signifies. World history is the world court, and it has ever decided in favor of the stronger, fuller, and more self-assured life — decreed to it, namely, the right to exist, regardless of whether its right would hold before a tribunal of waking consciousness. Always it has sacrificed truth and justice to might and race, and passed doom of death upon men and peoples in whom truth was more than deeds, and justice than power. And so the drama of a high Culture — that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities — closes with the return of the pristine facts of the blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever circling cosmic flow. The bright imaginative Waking being submerges itself into the silent service of Being, as the Chinese and Roman empires tell us. Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man — a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light world of our eyes.

For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this moment of its development — the moment when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarism that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step — our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not worth the living. We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing. And a task that historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the individual or against him.

Ducunt Fata volentem, nolentem trahunt.

Notes - Volume 2

Chapter 1

¹ In what follows I have drawn upon a metaphysical work that I hope shortly to be able to publish. [Return]

² Even scientific astronomy, when applied to everyday work, states the movements of the heavenly bodies in terms referred to our perception of them. — Tr. [Return]

³ A very similar notion of the light world diffused from the light center forms the cardinal point of the philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (1175-1273). — Tr. [Return]

⁴ The coming of radio broadcasting has in no way altered, but has rather confirmed, the validity of this. The listener either translates his aural impressions into those of the light world or else yields even more readily than usual to the “illusion” here discussed. — Tr. [Return]

⁵ The original reads: “An Stelle des völlig einheitlichen verstehenden Empfindens erscheint oft und öfter ein Verstehen der Bedeutung von kaum noch beachteten Sinneseindrücken.” — Tr. [Return]

⁶ Hence we call that which we observe in the faces of men who have not the habit of thought “animal” — admiringly or contemptuously as the case may be. [Return]

⁷ Hence Bayle’s profound observation that the understanding is capable only of discovering errors. [Return]

⁸ Original: “aus dem Erlebnis.” — Tr. [Return]

⁹ A.D. 553 (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xliii). — Tr. [Return]

¹⁰ G. Le Bon’s Psychologie des Foules (which has been translated into English under the title The Crowd) is the pioneer work on this subject, and though unduly colored perhaps by the author’s personal prepossessions, still retains its interest and value, — Tr. [Return]

Chapter 2

¹ Meaning here names, dates, numbers — the chronology in the usual extensive sense, and not the intensive or deep sense. — Tr. [Return]

² He affirmed, on the first page of his history (about 400 B.C.) that before his time nothing of significance had happened (οὐ μεγάλα νομίζω γενέσθαι ὄυτε κατὰ τοὺς πολέμους οὔτε ἐς τα ἄλλα. Thucydides, I,1). [Return]

³ Original: “Alles Bedeutemde, nämlich das Einmalige der Geschichte.” — Tr. [Return]

⁴ I suppose the meaning of these words to be that generalization and flair are not really opposed, but interdependent. — Tr. [Return]

⁵ Original: (“So geschicht dies stets...) im Hinblick auf das im Augenblick gefordette Bild als der beständigen Funktion der Zeit und des Menschen.” — Tr. [Return]

⁶ Even at the level of the Trojan War the timeless mythological figures of gods and demigods are still involved, intimately and in detail, in the human story. See, on the whole question of the Greek attitude towards time and history, Vol. I, p. 7 and passim. — Tr. [Return]

⁷ See Chapter VIII. — Tr. [Return]

⁸ Introduced in Rome in 522 during the Ostrogoth domination, not until Charlemagne’s times did it make headway in the Germanic lands. Then, however, its spread was rapid. [Return]

⁹ On the other hand — and very significantly — the field of the history-picture livingly experienced in the consciousness of the sincere Renaissance classicist markedly contracted. [Return]

¹⁰ The Emperor Henry VI reigned 1190-97. — Tr. [Return]

¹¹ During his Italian sojourn of 1786-88 Goethe made up his mind to resign his political offices at Weimar, retaining merely a non-executive seat on the Council and definitely devoting himself to art and science. This resolution he carried into effect on his return to Weimar in 1788; Tasso finally appeared in 1790. — Tr, [Return]

¹² The Civilization is the outcome of the Culture of which it is in one sense the final phase, but in another the distinct and unlike sequel. — Tr. [Return]

¹³ Christian Leopold von Buch, 1774-1853; Cuvier, 1769-1832.— Tr. [Return]

¹⁴ The first proof that the basic forms of plants and animals did not evolve, but were suddenly there, was given by H. de Vries in hisMutation Theory (1886). In the language of Goethe, we see how the “impressed form” [See Vol. I, p. 118. — Tr.] works itself out in the individual samples, but not how the die was cut for the whole genus. [Return]

¹⁵ With this it becomes unnecessary to postulate vast periods of time for the original states of man, and we can regard the interval between the oldest man type hitherto discovered and the beginning of the Egyptian Culture as a span, greater indeed, but certainly not unthinkably greater, than the 5,000 years of recognized cultural history. [Return]

¹⁶ It is perhaps not unnecessary to remark that the word “epoch” is used throughout this book in its proper sense of “turning point” or “moment of change” and not in the loose sense of “period” which it has acquired. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁷ Und Afrika Sprach (1912); Paideuma, Umrisse einer Kultur und Seelenlehre (1920). Frobenius distinguishes three ages. [Return]

¹⁸ This work appeared before the discovery of the Sumerian (or Pre-Sumerian) tombs of Ur. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁹ Goethe, in his little essay “Geistesepochen,” has characterized the four parts of a Culture — its preliminary, early, late, and civilized stages — with such a depth of insight that even today there is nothing to add. See the tables at the end of Vol. I, which agree with this exactly. [Return]

²⁰ Another blank is the history of the countryside or landscape (i.e., of the soil, with its plant mantle and its weathering) in which man’s history has been staged for five thousand years. And yet man has so painfully wrested himself from the history of the landscape, and withal is so held to it still by myriad fibers, that without it life, soul, and thought are inconceivable.

So far as concerns the South European field, from the end of the Ice Age, a hitherto rank luxuriance gradually gave place in the plant world to poverty. In the course of the successive Egyptian, Classical, Arabian, and Western Cultures, a climatic change developed all around the Mediterranean, which resulted in the peasant’s being compelled to fight no longer against the plant world, but for it — first against the primeval forest and then against the desert. In Hannibal’s time the Sahara lay very far indeed to the south of Carthage, but today it already penetrates to northern Spain and Italy. Where was it in the days of the pyramid builders, who depicted sylvan and hunting scenes in their reliefs? When the Spaniards expelled the Moriscos, their countryside of woods and plow land, already only artificially maintained, lost its character altogether, and the towns became oases in the waste. In the Roman period such a result could not have ensued. [Return]

²¹ The new method of comparative morphology affords us a safe test of the datings which have been arrived at by other means for the beginnings of past Cultures. The same kind of argument which would prevent us, even in the absence of positive information, from dating Goethe’s birth more than a century earlier than the “Urfaust,” or supposing the career of Alexander the Great to have been that of an elderly man, enables us to demonstrate, from the individual characteristics of their political life and the spirit of their art, thought, and religion, that the Egyptian Culture dawned somewhere about 3000 and the Chinese about 1400. The calculations of French investigators and more recently of Borchardt (Die Annalen und die zeitliche Festlegung des Alten Reiches, 1919) are as unsound intrinsically as those of Chinese historians for the legendary Hsia and Shang dynasties. Equally, it is impossible that the Egyptian calendar should have been introduced in 4241 B.C. As in every chronology we have to allow that evolution has been accompanied by radical calendar changes, the attempt to fix the exact starting date a posteriori is objectless. [[Return]

²² Eduard Meyer (Gesch. d. Altertums, III, 97) estimates the Persians, probably too highly, at half a million as against the fifty millions of the Babylonian Empire. The numerical relation between the Germanic peoples and legions of the third century Roman emperors and the Roman population as a whole, and that of the Ptolemaic and Roman armies to that of the Egyptian people, was of much the same order.

[H. Delbrück, in his well-known Gesch. der Kriegskunst (1908), Vol. I, Part I, chapter i, and elsewhere, deals in considerable detail with the strengths of ancient armies. — Tr.] [Return]

²³ A.D. 378. See C.W.C. Oman, History of the Art of War: Middle Ages (1898), ch. i; H. Del brück, Gesch. der Kriegskunst, Vol. II, book I, ch. x, and book II. — Tr. [Return]

²⁴ In the case of Rome, the idea of a fixed frontier against the barbarian emerged soon after the defeat of Varus, and the fortifications of the Limes were laid down before the close of the first century of our era. — Tr. [Return]

²⁵ For at that time imperialistic tendencies found expression even in India, in the Maurya and Sunga dynasty; these, however, could only be confused and ineffective, Indian nature being what it was. [Return]

²⁶ Chapters VII-IX. [Return]

²⁷ On the history of the Avesta see Ency. Brit., XI ed., articles “Zend-Avesta” and “Zoroaster.”  — Tr. [Return]

²⁸ Sir Thomas Roe, 1620. A similar mission went to Turkey on the part of Frederick and the Bohemian nobles to ask for assistance and to justify to the Turk their action in deposing the Habsburg King. The answer they received was what might be expected of a great imperialist power asked to intervene in the affairs of lesser neighbors — namely, material guarantees of the reality of the movement it was asked to support and pledges that no settlement would be made without its agreement. — Tr. [Return]

²⁹ Mexico City, or, better, the agglomeration of towns and villages in the valley of Mexico. — Tr. [Return]

³⁰ According to Prescott, Cortez’s force on landing had thirteen hand firearms and fourteen cannon, great and small, altogether. The whole of these were lost in the first defeat at Mexico. Later a pure accident gave Cortez the contents of a supply ship from Europe. In a military sense horses contributed to the Spanish victories nearly if not quite as much as firearms, but these, too, were in small numbers, sixteen at the outset. — Tr. [Return]

³¹ The following attempt is based upon the data of two American works — L. Spence, The Civilization of Ancient Mexico (Cambridge, 1912); and H. J. Spinden, Maya Art: Its Subject matter and Historical Development (Cambridge, 1913) — which independently of one another attempt to work out the chronology and which reach a certain measure of agreement. [Return]

³² Since the publication of the German original, Spinden’s further researches (Ancient Civilizations of Mexico) have placed the historical zero date at 613 B.C. (and the cosmological zero of back reckoning at 3373 B.C.). This historical zero seems to lie deep in the pre-Cultural period, if later events have the dates given in the text. — Tr. [Return]

³³ These are the names of nearby villages serving as labels; the true names are lost. [Return]

³⁴ And was there an element of panem et circenses in the mass sacrifice of captives? May it be that the acceptance of the Spaniard as the expected manifestation of the god Quetzalcoatl (“redeunt Saturnia regna”) and the serious disputations on matters of religion that took place between Montezuma and the Christians, were presages of the phase which Spengler calls the “Second Religiousness” of the Civilization? — Tr. [Return]

³⁵ “Zur Theorie und Methodik der Geschichte” (Kleine Scbriften, 1910), which is by far the best piece of historical philosophy ever written by an opponent of all philosophy. [Return]

³⁶ Varus’s disaster in the Teutoburger Wald. — Tr. [Return]

³⁷ The Japanese belonged formerly to the Chinese Civilization and again belong to a Civilization — the Western — today. A Japanese Culture in the genuine sense there has never been. Japanese Americanism must, therefore, be judged otherwise than as an outgrowth of what never was there. [Return]

³⁸ Caesars Monarchic und das Principat des Pompejus (1918) pp. 501, et seq. [Return]

Chapter 3

¹ I.e., that sensation consists in the absorption of small particles radiated by the object. — Tr. [Return]

² See Ch. VIII. — Tr. [Return]

³ See R. Hirzel, Die Person (1914), p. 7. [Return]

⁴ L. Wenger, Das Recht der Griechen und Romer (1914), p. 170; R. v. Mayr, Römische Rechtsgeschichte, II, 1, p. 87. [Return]

⁵ A curious sidelight on this appears in the provisions of the savage law against recalcitrant debtors, who (after certain delays and formalities) could be put to death and even hewn in pieces by their creditors, or — “sold as slaves beyond the Tiber.” — Tr. [Return]

⁶ A thirteenth century collection by Eike von Repgow of German customs and customary law (ed. K.G. Homeyer, 1861). — Tr. [Return]

⁷ And were judged by a different authority, the peregrin praetor. — Tr. [Return]

⁸ The “dependence” of Classical law upon Egyptian is, as it chances, still traceable. Solon the wholesale merchant introduced into his Attic legislation provisions concerning debt slavery, contract, work shyness, and unemployment taken from Egypt. Diodorus, I, 77, 79, 94. [Return]

⁹ The process is clearly explained in Goudy’s article “Roman Law,” Ency. Brit., XI ed. Very roughly, the praetor corresponded to the judge, and the judges to the jury, of modern English law, but such a parallel must not be pressed far. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁰ L. Wenger, Recht der Griechen und Römer, pp. 166, et seq. [Return]

¹¹ See Ency. Brit. , XI ed. , Vol. XII, p. 502. Fragments of the older collection referred to were found in the vicinity. — Tr. [Return]

¹² In English legal theory the judge does not make law by a new decision, but “declares” the law — i.e., makes explicit what has been implicit in the law from the first, though the occasion for its manifestation has not hitherto arisen. — Tr. [Return]

¹³ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol XXVI, p. 315. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁴ See Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, I, 1, p. 350. [Return]

¹⁵ The background of this is Etruscan law, the primitive form of the Roman. Rome was an Etruscan city. [Return]

¹⁶ Busolt, Griechische Staatskunde, p. 518. [Return]

¹⁷ Compare the famous ironical judgment of Mr. Justice Maule which led to the reform of the divorce laws in England (1857): “... It is true that the course which you should legally have taken would have cost you many hundreds of pounds, whereas probably you have not as many pence. But the Law knows no distinction between rich and poor.” — Tr. [Return]

¹⁸ What is important to us, therefore, in the Law of the Twelve Tables is not the supposed contents (of which scarcely an authentic clause survived even in Cicero’s day), but the political act of codification itself, the tendency of which corresponded to that of the overthrow of the Tarquinian Tyrannis by senatorial Oligarchy — a success which, now endangered, it was sought to stabilize for the future. The text which schoolboys learned in detail in Caesar’s time must have had the same destiny as the consular lists of the old time, in which had been interpolated names upon names of families whose wealth and influence was of much later origin. In recent years Pais and Lambert have disputed the whole story of the Twelve Tables, and so far as concerns the authenticity of the reputed text, they may well be right — not so, however, as regards the course of political events in the years about 450. [Return]

¹⁹ Only half a century separates the traditional dates of these events (509, 451), in spite of the wealth of traditional history afterwards attached to the period. The “coup,” in the case of the Decemvirs, was the capture by the patricians of a machine set up for the redress of plebeian grievances. — Tr. [Return]

²⁰ Cf. Ch. IV. [Return]

²¹ Sohm, Institutionen (14) p. 101. [This is the edict of “Julian” (Salvius Julianus, urban praetor). Romanists are not agreed as to how far, if at all, it included material derived from the decisions of the peregrin praetor. See Professor Goudy’s article “Roman Law,” Ency. Brit., XI ed., p. 563. — Tr.] [Return]

²² Lenel, Das Edictum perpetuum (1907); L. Wenger, p. 168. [Return]

²³ Even the multiplication table of the children assumes the elements of dynamics in counting. [Return]

²⁴ V. Mayr II, i, p. 85; Sohm, p. 105. [Return]

²⁵ Enzyklopädia der Rechtswissensch., I, 357. [Return]

²⁶ Egyptian law of the Hyksos period, and Chinese of the Period of Contending States, in contrast to the Classical and the Indian tew of the Dharmasutras, must have been built up on basic ideas quite other than the idea of the corporeality of persons and things. It would be a grand emancipation from the load of Roman “antiquities” if German research were to succeed in establishing these. [Return]

²⁷ Sohm, p. 220. [Return]

²⁸ Acts XV. Herein lies the germ of the idea of a Church law. [Return]

²⁹ For Islam as a “juristic person” see M. Horten, Die religiose Gedankenwelt des Volkes im beutigem Islam (1917), p. xxiv. [Return]

³⁰ See Ch. VII. We can venture to make the label so positive because the adherents of all the Late Classical cults were bound together in devout consensus, just as the primitive Christian communities were. [Return]

³¹ The Persian Church came into the Classical field only in the Classical form of Mithraism, which was assimilable in the ensemble of Syncretism. [Return]

³² It is difficult to describe this class in a few words. Roughly, they (and the “Junian Latins,” so called, who were excepted with them) represented a stratum of Roman society, largely composed of “undesirables,” which was only just not servile. In the older legislation they were necessarily lumped with the outer world as peregrins, but when Caracalla made this outer world “Roman,” there were obvious reasons against bringing these people into the fold as well. In some what the same way the word “outsider” is used in colloquial English with the dual meaning of a foreigner or non-member, and a socially undesirable person. — Tr. [Return]

³³ In the Twelve Tables connubium was disallowed even between the patrician and plebian citizens of Rome itself. [The hold of the patricians on this privilege, however, was already exceedingly precarious, and it vanished a few years later in the lex Canuleia. — Tr.] [Return]

³⁴ See Ch. VI. [Return]

³⁵ Lend, I, 380. [Return]

³⁶ Here, as in every line of the history of the “Pseudomorphosis,” we are reminded of Christ’s parable of new wine and old bottles (Matt, ix, 17), an expression not of mere abstract shrewdness, as it seems to us now, but of intense living force and even passion. It is only one short verse, not obligatory in its context, but leaping out of depths. — Tr. [Return]

³⁷ As long ago as 1891 Mitteis (Reichsrecht und Volksrecht, p. 13) drew attention to the Oriental vein in Constantine’s legislation. Collinet (Études historiques sur le droit de Justinien I, 1912.). chiefly on the basis of German researches, throws an immense amount back on Hellenistic law; but how much, after all, of this “Hellenistic” was really Greek and not merely written in Greek? The results of interpolation research have proved truly devastating for the “Classical spirit” in Justinian’s Digests. [Return]

³⁸ See Ch. VII. [Return]

³⁹ Coupled with the destruction of all other documents. [Return]

⁴⁰ Fromer, Der Talmud (1920), p. 190. [The English student will find a fairly full account of the main groups of Jewish literature in the article “Hebrew Literature” and cognate articles in the Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.] [Return]

⁴¹ Mitteis (Röm. Privatrecht bis auf die Zeit Dioklezians (1908), preface) remarks how, “while the ancient law forms were retained, the law itself nevertheless became something quite different.” [Return]

⁴² Head of the exilic Jews under Persian overlordship. — TV. [Return]

⁴³ Mayr, IV, pp. 45, et seq. [Return]

⁴⁴ Hence the fictitious names of authors on innumerable books in every Arabian literature — Dionysius the Areopagite, Pythagoras, Hermes Trismegistus, Hippocrates, Enoch, Baruch, Daniel, Solomon, the Apostle names attached to the numerous gospels and apocalypses [Return]

⁴⁵ For example, Hebrew was supplanted by Aramaic for all ordinary purposes as early as the Maccabees — and to such an extent that in the synagogues the Scriptures had to be translated for the people — but has held its ground as a religious vehicle, and above all as a script, even to this day. (The present use of a spoken Hebrew represents a revival in more recent times, after the wider dispersion of the early Middle Ages had broken the connection with the Aramaic lands.) In the Persian field the older Zend survived alongside the newer Pehlevi. In Egypt somewhat similar influences were contemporaneously determining the evolution of popular Demotic and official Greek into the Coptic language with Greek characters. — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁶ M. Horten, D. rel. Gedankenwelt d. Volkes im beut. Islam, p. xvi. Cf. Chapter VII below. [Return]

⁴⁷ Mayr, IV, 45, et seq. [Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XXIII, p. 570. — Tr.] [Return]

⁴⁸ 471. See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article “Chalcedon, Council of,” and references therein. — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁹ Wenger, p. 180. [Return]

⁵⁰ Krumbacher, Byzantinische Literatur-Geschichte, p. 606. [Return]

⁵¹ Sachau, Syrische Rechtsbücher, Vol. III. [Return]

⁵² Bertholet, Kulturgeschichte Israels, pp. 200, et seq. [Return]

⁵³ We get a hint of this in the famous code of Hammurabi, though unfortunately we cannot tell in what relation this single work stood, in point of intrinsic importance, to the general level of contemporary jurisprudence in the Babylonian world. [Return]

⁵⁴ See Professor Maitland’s article “English Law” in Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. IX. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁵ Sohm, Inst., p. 156. [Return]

⁵⁶ See J. Janssen, Hist. German People at the End of the Middle Ages, English translation, Book IV, Ch. I-II. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁷ Lenel, I, p. 395. [Return]

⁵⁸ The punning contrast of Lombard faex (excrement) and Roman lex is Huguccio’s (1200). [Return]

⁵⁹ W. Goetz, Arch. für Kulturgeschichte, 10, 28, et seq. [Return]

⁶⁰ See the article “Canon Law” in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁶¹ See Sohm’s last work, Das altkatholische Kirchenrecht und das Dekret Gratians (1918). [Return]

⁶² See Ch. VII. [Return]

⁶³ See Ch. X. [Return]

⁶⁴ The permanently valid element in English law is the constant form of an incessant development by the courts. [Return]

⁶⁵ If the higher courts alone are meant, the number is well below fifty for England and Wales. Scots law is independent of English and has its own jurisprudence. — Tr. [Return]

⁶⁶ Inst., p. 170. [Return]

⁶⁷ Similar problems are now (1927) arising in connection with radio broadcasting. — Tr. [Return]

⁶⁸ Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, § 90. [Return]

⁶⁹ As evidenced in terms of French law like “Société anonyme,” “raison sociale,” “ personne juridique.” — Tr. [Return]

⁷⁰ Note, in this connection, the remarkable development in modern American industry of a professional managerial class, distinct from the capitalist, the technician, and the “worker.” — Tr. [Return]

Chapter 4

¹ Published 1857. English translation, 1871. — Tr. [Return]

² Without Alexander, and even before him, for Alexander neither kindled nor spread that light; he did not lead, but followed its path to the East. [Return]

³ See G. Glotz’s recent work La Civilisation égéenne, 1923 (English translation, 1927). — Tr. [Return]

⁴ This is now recognized by art research; cf. Salis, Die Kunst der Griechen (1919), pp. 3, et seq.; H. Th. Bosser, Alt-Kreta (1921), introduction. [Return]

⁵ D. Fimmen, Die kretisch-mykenische Kultur (1921), p. 210. [Return]

⁶ Dehio, Gesch. d. deutsch. Kunst (1919), pp. 16, et seq. [Return]

⁷ Dieterich, Byzant. Charakterköpfe, pp. 136, et seq. [Return]

⁸ Even admitting within itself the animals of its fields. — Tr. [Return]

⁹ Dehio, Gesch. d. deutschen Kunst (1919), pp. 13, et seq. [Return]

¹⁰ Eduard Meyer, Gesch. d. Altertums, I, p. 188. [Return]

¹¹ The English parallel is Winchester. — Tr. [Return]

¹² The phenomenon is perhaps too well known in our days to need exemplification. But it is worthwhile recalling that the usual form of disgrace for a minister or courtier of the seventeenth or eighteenth century was to be commanded to “retire to his estates,” and that a student expelled from the universities is said to be “rusticated.” Since this volume was written, a remarkable proof of the reality of this spiritual indrawing by the Megalopolis has been given by the swift spread of radio broadcasting over the West European and American world. For the country dweller, radio reception means intimate touch with the news, the thought, and the entertainment of the great city, and relieves the grievance of “isolation” that the older countryfolk would never have felt as a grievance at all. — Tr. [Return]

¹³ In the case of the Venetians the money outlook was already potent during the earlier Crusades. But the fact that their financial exploitation of the great religious adventure was regarded as scandalous indicates sufficiently that the rural world of the West was not yet face to face with the money idea. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁴ See Ch. XIII. [Return]

¹⁵ Samarra exhibits, like the Imperial Fora of Rome and the ruins of Luxor, truly American proportions. The city stretches for 33 km. [20 miles] along the Tigris. The Balkuwara Palace, which the Caliph Mutawakil built for one of his sons, forms a square of 1250 m. [say, three-quarters of a mile] on each side. One of the giant mosques measures in plan 260 X 180 m. [858 X 594 ft.]. Schwarz, Die Abbasidenresidenz. Samarra (1910); Herzfeld, Ausgrabungen von Samarra (1912). Pataliputra, in the days of Chandragupta and Asoka, measured intra muros 10 miles X 2 miles (equal to Manhattan Island or London along the Thames from Greenwich to Richmond. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁶ Karlsruhe, with its fan scheme, and Mannheim, with its rectangles, are earlier than Washington. But both are small places. The one is a sort of extension of the prince’s Rococo park and centered on his point de vue; the other, though its block numbering, unique in Europe, seems to relate it to the American city, was really planned as a self-contained military capital, rectangular only within its oval enceinte, whereas the American rectangles are meant to be added to. The lay out of Petersburg by Peter the Great (which has been adhered to to this day and is still incompletely filled in in detail) is a much more forcible example of the arbitrary planning of a megalopolis. Though outside the “European” world, it is of it, for it was the visible symbol of Peter’s will to force Europe upon Russia. It is contemporary with Mannheim and Karlsruhe (early eighteenth century), but its creator conceived of it as a city of the future. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁷ In the case of Canada, not merely great regions, but the whole country has been picketed out in equal rectangles for future development. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁸ It has been left to the Western Civilization of present day Rome to build the garden suburbs that the Classical Civilization could have built. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁹ Friedländer, Sittengeschichte Roms, I, p. 5. Compare this with Samarra, which had nothing like this population. The “Late Classical city on Arabian soil was un-Classical in this respect as in others. The garden suburb of Antioch was renowned throughout the East.” [Return]

²⁰ The city which the Egyptian “Julian the Apostate,” Amenophis IV (Akhenaton) built himself in Tell-el-Amarna had streets up to 45 m. [149 ft.] wide. [Return]

²¹ Pöhlmann, Aus Altertum und Gegenwart (1910), pp. 211, et seq. [Return]

²² Some years ago a French peasant was brought to notice whose family had occupied its glebe since the ninth century. — Tr. [Return]

²³ Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsen. [Return]

²⁴ An ancient Hindu materialism. — Tr. [Return]

²⁵ For what follows see Eduard Meyer, Kl. Schriften (1910), pp. 145, et seq. [Return]

²⁶ Hist. Nat., XVIII, 7. — Tr. [Return]

²⁷ We know of measures to promote increase of population in China in the third century B.C., precisely the Augustan Age of Chinese evolution. See Rosthorn, Das soziale Leben der Chinesen (1919), p. 6. [Return]

²⁸ The amphitheaters of Nîmes and Arles were filled up by mean townlets that used the outer wall as their fortifications. — Tr. [Return]

²⁹ Strabo, Pausanias, Dio Chrysostom, Avienus, etc. See E. Meyer, Kl. Schriften, pp. 164, et seq. [Return]

³⁰ The Colosseum of Rome itself in due course fell into this decay and we read in the guide-books that “ its flora were once famous” — 410 wild species lived in its ruins. If this could happen in Rome, we need not be surprised at the quick, almost catastrophic, conquest of the Maya cities by tropical vegetation. — Tr. [Return]

³¹ According to the researches of K. Sethe. Cf. Robert Eisler, Die kenitischen Weihinschriften der Hyksoszeit, etc. (1919). [Return]

Chapter 5

¹ Henceforward, and indeed throughout this work, the word “language” is not to be regarded as limited to spoken and written language. As the above definition indicates, it includes all modes of intelligible conscious expression — “affective language” in the widest sense. — Tr. [Return]

² Obviously, Totemistic facts, so far as they come under the observation of the waking consciousness, obtain a significance of the Taboo kind also; much in man’s sexual life, for example, is performed with a profound sense of fear, because his will-to-understand is baffled by it. [Return]

³ W. von Humboldt (Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues) was the first to emphasize the fact that a language is not a thing, but an activity. “If we would be quite precise, we can certainly say there is no such thing as ‘language,’ just as there is no such thing as ‘intellect’; but man does speak, and does act intellectually.” [Return]

⁴ Haas Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), architect of the Opera House, the Altes Museum, and the Königswache of Berlin. Gottfried Schadow (1764-1850), sculptor (statues of Frederick II, Zieten, etc.; Quadriga of Brandenburger Tor), a classicist malgré lui (not to be confused with two other artists of the same name, quasi-contemporaries). — Tr. [Return]

⁵ See Chapter II. [Return]

⁶ Gescb. d. Deutsch. Kunst (1919), pp. 14, et seq. [Return]

⁷ This practice of inscription survives till deep into the Civilization. Even in 1914 the guns of the German Army, true products of the advanced machine shop though they were, carried a Latin threat to the foe. From the magic rune of the blade it is a step to the motto on the shield, and then to the motto alone as unity charm of the regiment or the Order. — Tr, [Return]

⁸ W. Altmann, Die ital. Rundbauten (1906). [Return]

⁹ A striking case in point is the Roman military camp. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁰ Bulle, Orchomenos, pp. 26, et seq.; Noack, Ovalhaus und Palast in Kreta, pp. 53, et seq. The house plans still traceable in Latin times in the Aegean and Asia Minor may perhaps allow us to order our notions of human conditions in the pre-Classical period; but the linguistic remains, never. [Return]

¹¹ Medieval Rhodesia (London, 1906). [Return]

¹² Cf. Ch. X [Return]

¹³ Though magic or prestige may of course be involved in their ornamentation, these are supervening and not radical virtues. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁴ In this connection it ought to be someone’s business to undertake physiognomic studies upon the massy, thoroughly peasantish, Roman busts; the portraits of Early Gothic; those of the Renaissance, already visibly urban; and, most of all, the polite English portraiture from the late eighteenth century onward. The great galleries of “ancestors” contain an endless wealth of material. [Return]

¹⁵ The sudden fear of some animal or object seen, believed to result in her child’s bearing the mark of it. Cf. Jacob and the speckled cattle (Genesis xxx, 37). The attitude of biologists to this question is not negative, but non-committal. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁶ J. Ranke, Der Mensch (1912), II, p. 105. [Return]

¹⁷ This suggestive sentence should, of course, be read with its reservation. The cranial evidences of Crete are highly illustrative in this connection; they would not indeed be trusted by a modern historian without weighty collateral evidence, but here this evidence exists. Up to the latter part of Middle Minoan, the “long” head predominated heavily, not only from the outset, but increasingly as the Culture rose, until it included two-thirds of the whole, intermediates forming a quarter and “short” heads a mere handful. But from about the time of the catastrophic fall of Late Minoan II, the long heads fall to a startlingly low figure, while intermediates account for half, and short heads for more than a third. It marks the end of Minoan Civilization and the coming of the Achaeans. But just as the Minoan skull held its own throughout the Minoan Age, so now, after its fall, the short head maintained itself, as stated in the text, through all subsequent vicissitudes, from the “Sea peoples” through Roman, Arab, and Turk, to this day. Thus the Cretan landscape has had two skull types successively; but the change from one to the other occurred in connection with an immense cataclysm, nothing less than the collapse of a Civilization. The rough deduction that seems to emerge from this case is that a great Culture holds its skull, no doubt in the course of its striving towards ideal physical type of its own (see p. 108), but that where that major organism does not exist, the skull endures as the land endures and the peasant endures. This applies also to the Alpine region, which has received the deposit of migrations, but has never been the center of a high Culture. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁸ Cf. D. Randall-Maclver, The Etruscans (1928), Ch. I. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁹ Art is fully developed in the animals. So far as man can get at it by way of analogy, it consists for them in rhythmic movement (“dance”) and sound formation (“song”). But this is by no means the limit of artistic impression on the animal itself. [Return]

²⁰ Jesus says to the Seventy whom he is sending out on mission: “And salute no man on the way” (Luke x, 4). The ceremonial of greeting on the high road is so complicated that people in a hurry have to omit it. A. Bertholet, Kulturgeschichte Israels (1919), p. 162. [Return]

²¹ Exekias — represented in the British Museum by his “Achilles and Penthesilea” (Ency. Brit., XI ed., article “Ceramics,” Plate I) — stands at the end of Black Figure as the master of the possibilities of refinement in it — on the verge of the style change to Red Figure, yet apart from it. Sebastian Bach is his “contemporary.” — Tr. [Return]

²² “All forms, even those that are most felt, contain an element of untruth” (Goethe). In systematic philosophy the intent of the thinker coincides neither with the written words nor with the understanding of his readers, as it consists in his thinking meanings into words in the course of using the words themselves (da es ein Denken in Wortbedeutungen ist, im Verlauf der Darstellung mit sich selbst). [Return]

²³ Jespersen deduces language from poesy, dance, and particularly courtship. Progress in Language (1894), p. 357. [Return]

²⁴ Sentence like complexes of sound are known also to the dog. When the Australian dingo reverted from domestication to the wild state, he reverted also from the house dog’s bark to the wolf’s howl — a phenomenon that indicates a transition to very much simpler sound-signs, but has nothing to do with “words.” [Return]

²⁵ The gesture languages of today (Delbrück, Grundfragen d. Sprachforsch. pp. 49, et seq., with reference to the work of Jorio on the gestures of the Neapolitans) without exception presuppose word language and are completely dependent upon its intellectual systematism. Examples: the mimicry of the actor, and the language which the American Indians have formed for themselves for the purpose of mutually understanding one another in spite of extreme differences and fluidity in the verbal languages of the various tribes. Wundt (Völkerpsychologie, I, p. 212) quotes the following to show how complicated sentences can be handled in this language: “White soldiers, led by an officer of high rank, but little intelligence, took the Mescalero Indians prisoners.” [Return]

²⁶ The case of voice differentiations of the same word in Chinese is not analogous. It arose only out of scholars’ work in the later phases of the Chinese Civilization as understood in this work. And it is a mechanical expedient and not a structural character — i.e., it lacks thepolarity mentioned in the text. Voice management distinguishes, not “great” from “small,” but “pig” from “God,” “bamboo” from “to dwell.” English students will find a clear and understandable account of this and other Chinese differential devices in Karlgren’s little book: Sound and Symbol in Chinese (English translation, 1923). — Tr. [Return]

²⁷ Possibly connected with this is the emphatic antithesis characterizing many of our proverbs and everyday idioms — e.g., “up hill and down dale” (“par monts et vaux,” “bergauf bergab”), meaning hardly more than “everywhere.” — Tr. [Return]

²⁸ Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaus, 1910. [Return]

²⁹ See the article “Bantu Languages,” by Sir H.H. Johnston, Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

³⁰ Even calling something “invisible” is a definition of it under the light aspect. [Return]

³¹ Only technics are entirely true, for here the words are merely the key to actuality, and the sentences are continually modified until they are, not “truth,” but actuality. A hypothesis claims, not Tightness, but usefulness. [Return]

³² The English reader may refer to Karlgren’s Sound and Symbol in Chinese, already mentioned, for details. — Tr. [Return]

³³ See the article “Indo-European Languages,” Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

³⁴ Translation, it must be remembered, is normally from older into younger linguistic conditions. [Return]

³⁵ See Ency. Brit., XI. ed., Vol. XVI, p. 251b. — Tr. [Return]

³⁶ See the articles “Sanskrit” and “Indo-European Languages,” Ency. Brit., XI ed — Tr. [Return]

³⁷ P. Jensen, Sitz. Preuss. Akademie (1919), pp. 367, et seq. [Return]

³⁸ L. Hahn, Rom und Romanismus im griech-röm. Osten (1906). [Return]

³⁹ See the article “Bookkeeping” in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁰ Ed. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt., I, §§ 455, 465. [Return]

⁴¹ See below. [Return]

⁴² Radio broadcasting does not controvert this. Its characteristic quality is not (as is often supposed) dissemination to vast numbers irrespective of physical distance, but a special intimacy of address to the listening individual. — Tr. [Return]

⁴³ See the article “Semitic Language,” Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁴ Similarly the modern Jews of the Dispersion write Yiddish, which is a modified German, in Hebrew characters. — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁵ See Lidzbarski, Sitz. Berl. Akad. (1916), p 1218. There is plentiful material in M. Miese, Die Gesetze der Schriftgeschichte (1919). [Return]

⁴⁶ P. Kretschmer, in Gercke-Norden, Einl. i. d. Altertumswissenschaft, I, p. 551. [Return]

⁴⁷ See the articles “Romance Languages” and “Latin Language,” Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁸ For this reason I am one of those who believe that, even quite late, Etruscan still played a very important part in the colleges of the Roman priesthood. [Return]

⁴⁹ Precisely for this reason it has to be recognized that the Homeric poems, which were first fixed in the colonization period, can only give us an urban literary language and not the courtly conversation language in which they were originally declaimed. [Return]

Chapter 6

¹ So much so that the workers of the great cities call themselves the People, thereby excluding the bourgeoisie, with which no community feeling conjoins them. The bourgeoisie of 1789 did exactly the same. [Return]

² The dominant nucleus within the Spartan ensemble. — Tr. [Return]

³ Ed. Meyer, Ursprung und Geschichte der Mormonen (1912), pp. 128, et seq. [An extended summary of Mormon history will be found in the article “Mormons,” Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.] [Return]

⁴ Ex-mercenaries of Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse, who seized and settled in Messina. The questions arising out of this act precipitated the First Punic War. — Tr. [Return]

⁵ A still more celebrated case is the “ambulatory Polis” formed by Xenophon’s Ten Thousand. — Tr. [Return]

⁶ And in numerous Classical instances. — Tr. [Return]

⁷ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. IX, p. 860. — Tr. [Return]

⁸ In Macedonia, in the nineteenth century, Serbs, Bulgars, and Greeks all founded school for the anti-Turkish population. If it happens that a village has been taught Serb, even the next generation consists of fanatical Serbs. The present strength of the “nations” is thus merely a consequence of previous school policy. [Return]

⁹ For Beloch’s skepticism concerning the reputed Dorian migration see his Griechische Geschichte, I, 2, Section VIII. [A brief account of the question, by J. L. Myres, is in Ency. Brit., XI ed., article “Dorians.” — Tr.] [Return]

¹⁰ C. Mehlis, Die Berberfrage (Archiv für Anthropologie 39, pp. 249, et seq.) where relations between North German and Mauretanian ceramics, and even resemblances of toponymy (rivers, mountains) are dealt with. The old pyramid buildings of West Africa are closely related, on the one hand, to the Nordic dolmens (Hünengräber) of Holstein and, on the other, to the graves of the Old Kingdom (some illustrations in L. Frobenius, Der kleinafrikanische Grabbau, 1916). [Return]

¹¹ Die Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt (1886). [Return]

¹² Geschichte der Kriegskunst (from 1900). [Return]

¹³ Rameses III, who defeated them, portrayed their expedition in the relief of Medinet Habet. W.M. Müller, Asien und Europa, p. 366. [Return]

¹⁴ Which, therefore, have discovered for themselves the nonsensical designation “aristocracy of intellect” (Geistesadel). [Return]

¹⁵ Although — or should we say “thus” — Rome accorded citizenship to freedmen, who in general were of wholly alien blood, and sons of ex-slaves were admitted to the Senate even by Appius Claudius the Censor in 310. One of them, Flavius, had already been curule aedile. [Return]

¹⁶ See articles “Persia (history: ancient),” “Behistun,” “Cuneiform,” in Ency. Brit., XI ed., or indeed almost any work upon Babylonian and Persian antiquities. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁷ Sworn by Louis the German and Charles the Bald in both languages. The manuscript of the oath, however, is later — say, 950. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁸ “Die ältesten datierten Zeugnisse der iranischen Sprache” (Zeitschr. f. vgl. Sprachf. 42, p. 26.) [Return]

¹⁹ Ed. Meyer, op. cit., pp. 1, et seq. [Return]

²⁰ Compare the absorption of the Norman conquerors into England and the subsequent development of an English aristocracy. — Tr. [Return]

²¹ For what follows, cf. Ch. VII — Tr. [Return]

²² Geschichte des Altertums, I, § 590, et seq. [Return]

²³ Andreas and Wackernagel, Nachrichten der Göttingischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (1911), p. 1, et seq. [On the subject generally, see articles by K. Geldner, “Zend-Avesta” and “Zoroaster,” and by Ed. Meyer, “Parthia,” in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.] [Return]

²⁴ See, further, below. [Return]

²⁵ Dynasty I. — Tr. [Return]

²⁶ Albertus Magnus; St. Thomas Aquinas; Grosseteste, and Roger Bacon. — Tr. [Return]

²⁷ Cf. Ch. X. [Return]

²⁸ See p. 41 above. The slave did not belong to the nation. On this account the enrollment of non-citizens in the army of a city, which on occasions of dire crisis was inevitable, was always felt as a profound blow to the national idea. [Return]

²⁹ Even in the Iliad we can perceive the tendency to the nation-feeling in the small, and even the smallest, aggregates. [Return]

³⁰ And she had rarely to deal with anything more formidable than a loose partial confederacy. Often Etruscan cities were in alliance with Rome against other Etruscan cities. — Tr. [Return]

³¹ It is not to be overlooked that both Plato and Aristotle in their political writings were unable to conceive of the ideal people otherwise than in the Polis form. But it was equally natural for the eighteenth century thinkers to regard “the Ancients” as nations after the fashion of Shaftesbury and Montesquieu — it is we their successors who ought not to have stayed on that note. [Return]

³² Mommsen described the Roman Empire as a “universal Empire founded upon municipal autonomy.” And even Alexander’s empire was originally conceived, and to a great extent actually organized, in this spirit. See P. Jouguet, L’ Impérialisme macédonien (1926), Ch. IV. — Tr. [Return]

³³ F.N. Finck, Die Sprachstämme des Erdkreises (1915), pp. 29, et seq. [Return]

³⁴ About the end of the second century of our era. [Return]

³⁵ See footnote #14, p. 139 (Chapter VII), et seq. — Tr. [Return]

³⁶ A loose group of Edomite tribes which, with Moabites, Amalekites, Ishmaelites, and others, thus constituted a fairly uniform Hebrew speaking population. [Return]

³⁷ See p. 137. [Return]

³⁸ Aristotle says that “philosophers are called Calani among the Indians, and Jews among the Syrians.” Exactly the same is stated by Megasthenes, the Seleucid ambassador at Pataliputra, of Brahmins and Jews. — Tr. [Return]

³⁹ The district south of Lake Van, of which the capital was Arbela, the old home of the goddess Ishtar. [Return]

⁴⁰ As evidenced by the Falasha, the black Jews of Abyssinia. [Return]

⁴¹ Arch. f. Anthrop., Vol. XIX. [Return]

⁴² Zeitschr. f. Ethnol. (1919). [Return]

⁴³ Digesta, 50, 15. [Return]

⁴⁴ Geffcken, Der Ausgang des griech.-röm. Heidentum (1920), p. 57 [English readers may refer to the article “Neoplatonism” and shorter articles under the personal names, in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.] [Return]

⁴⁵ Which we translate by “Gentiles,” but which literally means “the nations” or “peoples.” — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁶ See the article “Nestorians,” Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁷ See the articles “Jews” (§ 43), “Exilarch,” and “Gaon,” Ency. Brit., XI. ed. In Europe, too, far into the Dispersion, there are rabbis recognized by the State as governors of their communities, such as the famous Rabbi Low of Prague (1513-1609). — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁸ It may not be at all fanciful to connect the Reception of “Roman” law in Germany and the rise of the doctrine of cujus regio, ejus religio which played so great a part in the religious wars and treaties of our sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At any rate, “practical politics” so called provides an inadequate motive by itself to account for the latter. Considering it in contrast to the notion of Mortmain, and having regard to the intensity of religious belief in many of the princes who applied it, the idea appears as something much more positive than a mere formula of com promise. — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁹ The “capitulations” under which until recently Europeans were exempt from the jurisdiction of Turkish courts are regarded nowadays as a right enforced by more civilized powers to protect their subjects from the laws of a less civilized state, and their abolition is a symbol of the rise of the latter to the rank of a civilized power. But originally it was quite the reverse. The first “capitulation” was sued for by France in an hour of danger when Turkish aid was essential to her. See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article “Capitulations.” — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁰ The author’s meaning may perhaps be precised thus: so much of the old Magian nations as was not Arabized became fellah peoples, either outside the Magian sphere (as in Europe and India) or within it, under the Turkish (Mongol) domination, but even the old Arab element itself was largely ripe for the change into the fellah condition when the Turks came. — Tr. [Return]

⁵¹ I am convinced that the nations of China which sprang up in members in the middle, Hwang Ho region at the beginning of the Chôu dynasty, as also the regional peoples of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (which had each its own capital and its own religion, and as late as Roman times fought each other in definitely religious wars), were in their inward form more closely akin to the peoples of the West than to those of the Classical and the Arabian worlds. However, research into such fields has hitherto been conspicuous by its absence. [Return]

⁵² That the dynasts themselves have contributed heavily to the catalog of perjury and bad faith only reinforces the argument. — Tr. [Return]

⁵³ His desertion of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in the Lombard war, 1176. The details of the long struggle between Frederick and Henry will be found in any fairly full history of Europe or in the respective articles devoted to them in the Ency. Brit., XI ed. While Frederick stood — and with real hopes as well as ideals — for the inclusive Empire, Henry through all his vicissitudes stood for Germany’s eastern expansion, the colonization of the Slavonic northeast, and the development of the Baltic. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁴ In medieval hymns the cross is symbolically regarded as a tree bearing Christ as its last and grandest fruit; it is identified, indeed, with the Tree of Knowledge. (See Yrjo Hirn, The Sacred Shrine.) — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁵ And every English schoolboy knows the meaning of the “Early Plantagenets.” — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁶ Against the Swedes, 1675. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁷ Against the French and their German dependent allies, 1757. — Tr. [Return]

Chapter 7

¹ Less than one percent of the population. [Return]

² It is to be noted that the home of the Babylonian Culture, the ancient Sinear, plays no part of any importance in the coming events. For the Arabian Culture only the region north of Babylon, not that to south, comes into question. [Return]

³ The victory of L. Aemilius Paullus over Perseus, 168 B.C. — Tr. [Return]

⁴ This has an important bearing also in the histories of the Western literatures. The German is written in part in Latin, and English in French. [Return]

⁵ See Professor Geldner’s article “Zend-Avesta,” Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁶ See Woliner, Untersuchungen über die Volksepik des Grossrussen (1879). [A convenient edition of the Kiev Stories is Mary Gill, Les Légendes slaves (Paris, 1912). — Tr.] [Return]

⁷ The former is dated about 800, the latter about 930. — Tr. [Return]

⁸ These two figures — the one an authorized Mayor of the Palace before he was Tsar, the other a crude usurper — dominate the period of Russian history called the “Period of Troubles” — i.e., that between the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584 and the election of Michael Romanov in 1613. — Tr. [Return]

⁹ Covering, before its later extensions, Persia and Iraq to the Euphrates. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁰ The region south of Damascus and east of the Sea of Galilee. — Tr. [Return]

¹¹ Saba (Sheba) is, roughly, the modern Yemen, though the center of gravity of the Sabaean Kingdom may earlier have been in northern Arabia. See Dr. D. H. Müller’s article “Sabaeans” in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

¹² Schiele, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, I, 647. [Return]

¹³ The “Minaean” and the Sabaean kingdoms were the two outstanding hegemonies of early Arabian history. Ma’in, in southern Arabia, should not be confused with the Ma’an which lies northeast of the Gulf of Akaba. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁴ Bent, The Sacred City of the Ethiopians (London 1893), pp. 134, et seq., deals with the remains of Jeha, the inscriptions of which are dated by Glaser between the seventh and fifth centuries before Christ. See D. H. Müller, Burgen und Schlösser Südarabiens. [Return]

¹⁵ Grimme, Mohammed, pp. 16, et seq. [Return]

¹⁶ German Axum Expedition record (1913), Vol. II. [Return]

¹⁷ An ancient trade route from Persia crossed the straits of Ormus and of Bab-el-Mandeb, traversing South Arabia and terminating in Abyssinia and the Nile region. It is historically more important than the northern route over the Isthmus of Suez. [Return]

¹⁸ So little is known as to these events by British (or any other) students that a brief record may be useful. The original Himaryites or Homerites, a people of the southwest angle of Arabia, had displaced the Sabaeans in control of South Arabia in the second century B.C. The Himaryitc hegemony was overthrown by invaders from Axum over the water about A.D. 300, and the Axumite rulers were, inter alia, kings of Hadramaut — hence the mention in the text of the Persian Gulf. But a Himaryite opposition continued, and, adopting Judaism as a counter-religion, it succeeded for a time in throwing off the Abyssinian rule. Axum, however (aided, as a Christian state, by Rome), reasserted her dominion in 525 and held it for fifty years, till an attack of Sassanid Persians displaced them again. Thereafter southern Arabia fell into the swaying chaos in which the coming of Mohammed found it. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁹ The capital of Saba. — Tr. [Return]

²⁰ Grimme, p. 43. Illustrations of these immense ruins of Gomdan, ibid., p. 81, and reconstructions in the German Axum report. [Return]

²¹ The country of Ghassan extends east of the Jordan, parallel to and inland of Palestine and Syria, approximately from Petra to the middle Euphrates. — Tr. [Return]

²² The Lakhmids were the ruling dynasty, from the third to the sixth century after Christ, of the realm of Hira, which ran in a strip between the Euphrates and the present Nejd coast on the one hand and the desert of Arabia on the other. — Tr. [Return]

²³ Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabiscben Literatur, p. 34. [Return]

²⁴ The whole structure of Mithraism (so far as we know it) presents strong analogies with that of a military order. — Tr. [Return]

²⁵ As well as it is said 220,000 at Cyrene. At Alexandria, too, there were émeutes and counter-émeutes. — Tr. [Return]

²⁶ Roth, Sozial und Kulturgeschichte des Byzantinischen Reiches, p. 15. [Return]

²⁷ Delbrück, Geschichte der Kriegskunst, II, p. 222. [For British students C.W.C. Oman’s Art of War: Middle Ages will be more readily available, although Oman treats the subject more as a matter of formal military organization than does Delbrück. Neither writer deals with any special features of the change as it worked itself out in the East, both being concerned almost entirely with its Western aspects and phases. The origin of the late Byzantine army system, as military historians are aware, is an obscure and difficult subject. By what stages, after the decadence of the legion, was the “Landsknecht” army of Justinian reached? Like other elements of middle East history in the epoch of the Arabian Culture, it still awaits the full investigation that the West has already had. — Tr. [Return]

²⁸ Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 532. [Return]

²⁹ Gefolgstreuen in German. The choice of an equivalent medieval term in English is difficult, since any one that may be selected carries with it certain implications for students of feudal origins. — Tr. [Return]

³⁰ Domaszewski, Die Religion der römischen Heeres, p. 49. [Return]

³¹ The typical form, for instance, of the Swiss in their independence battles, and of Western infantry generally in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the transition from handarm to firearm warfare. — Tr. [Return]

³² Buccellarii; see Delbrück, op. cit., II, 354. [Return]

³³ Georg von Frundsberg (1473-1528). Short article in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

³⁴ Gothic War, IV, 26. [The same holds good for Belisarius’s armies. — Tr.] [Return]

³⁵ Nisibis and Edessa in the up-country between Euphrates and Tigris are represented today by Nasibin (Nezib) and Urfa respectively; just to the west of them, east of the Euphrates above Sura, were the three Jewish academies, in which Talmudic Judaism took shape after the Dispersion. Kinnesrin lay just south of Aleppo. Ctesiphon is, of course, the classical city on the Tigris, still dominant under the Sassanids, and Resaina lies in the up country southwest of Nisibis. Gundi sapora is Gunder-Shapur (Jundaisapur), near the site of the old Elamite capital Susa in Arabistan. — Tr. [Return]

³⁶ Not “non-existent.” It would be a misconception of the Magian world-feeling to attach a Faustian dynamic meaning to the phrase “true God.” In combating the worship of godlings, the reality of godlings and demons is presupposed. The Israelite prophets never dreamed of denying the Baals, and similarly Isis and Mithras for the Early Christians, Jehovah for the Christian Marcion, Jesus for the Manichaeans, are devilish, but perfectly real, powers. Disbelieving in them would have had no meaning for the Magian soul — what was required was that one should not turn to them. To use an expression now long current, it is “Henotheism” and not Monotheism. [Return]

³⁷ Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, III, 499; Wendland, Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur, p. 192. [Return]

³⁸ Contrast with this the exactly opposite process in Jewry before the Pseudomorphosis had begun to affect it, — to wit, the battle against the local “high places” and the concentration of sanctity in Jerusalem. — Tr. [Return]

³⁹ With the result that Syncretism is presented as a mere hodgepodge of every conceivable religion. Nothing is further from the truth. The process of taking shape moved first from East to West and then from West to East. [Return]

⁴⁰ The Haoma plant symbolized the Tree of Life (Gaokerena) like the Soma plant of Brahmanism. — Tr. [Return]

⁴¹ Hence the expression “profaning” the mysteries, which meant, not revealing them, but bringing them outside their fane. — Tr. [Return]

⁴² J. Geffcken, Der Ausgang des griechisch-römischen Heidentums (1920), pp. 197, et seq. [Return]

⁴³ Geffcken, op. cit., pp. 131, et seq. [Return]

⁴⁴ Geffcken, op. cit., p. 292., note 149. [Return]

⁴⁵ “Res ipsa, qua nunc religio Christiana nuncupatur, erat apud antiquos nec defecit ab initio generis humani, quousque Christus veniret in carnem. Unde vera religio, qua jam erat coepit appellari Christiana” (Retractationes, I, 13). [Return]

⁴⁶ The name Chaldean signifies, before the Persian epoch, a tribe; later, a religious society. [Return]

⁴⁷ A. Bertholet, Kulturgeschichte Israels (1919), pp. 253, et seq. [Clear and useful English manuals are G. Moore, Literature of the Old Testament; R. H. Charles, Between the Old and the New Testaments. See also the article “Hebrew Religion” in Ency. Brit., XL ed. — Tr.] [Return]

⁴⁸ According to Williams Jackson’s Zoroaster (1901). [Return]

⁴⁹ Research has treated the Chaldean, like the Talmudic, as a stepchild. The investigator’s whole attention has been concentrated on the religion of the Babylonian Culture, and the Chaldean has been regarded as its dying echo. Such a view inevitably excludes any real understanding of it. The material is not even separated out, but is dispersed in all the books on Assyrian-Babylonian religion. (H. Zimmern, Die Keilinschriften und das alte Testament II; Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos; M. Jastrow, C. Bezold, etc.) On the other hand the subject is assumed by some (e.g., Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, 1907) to have been exhausted. [Return]

⁵⁰ The fact that Chaldean science was, in comparison with Babylonian empiricism, a new thing has been clearly recognized by Bezold (Astronomic, Himmelsschau und Astrallehre bei den Babyloniern, 1911, pp. 17, et seq.). Its data were taken and developed by different Classical savants according to their own way of reasoning — that is, as a matter of applied mathematics, and to the exclusion of all feeling for distance. [Return]

⁵¹ See Jastrow’s articles “Babylonian and Assyrian Religion” and “Marduk” in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁵² J. Helm, Hymnen und Gebete an Marduk (1905). [Return]

⁵³ For Chaldeans and Persians there was no need to trouble here about proof — they had by their God conquered the world. But the Jews had only their literature to cling to, and this accordingly turned to theoretical proof in the absence of positive. In the last analysis, this unique national treasure owes its origin to the constant need of reacting against self-depreciation. [For example, the repeated restatement of the date of the Messiah’s advent in the successive works of the age of the prophets. — Tr.] [Return]

⁵⁴ Glaser, Die Abessinier in Arabien und in Afrika (1895), p. 124. Glaser is convinced that Abyssinian, Pehlevi, and Persian cuneiform inscriptions of the highest importance await discovery there. [Return]

⁵⁵ The inscription and sculptures of Behistun (on an almost inaccessible cliff in the Zagros range on the Baghdad-Hamadan road) were reinvestigated by a British Museum expedition in 1904; see The Inscription of Darius the Great at Behistun (London, 1907). “Thus saith Darius the King. That what I have done I have done altogether by the grace of Ahuramazda. Ahuramazda and the other gods that be, brought aid to me. For this reason did Ahuramazda and the other gods that be bring aid to me because I was not hostile nor a liar nor a wrongdoer, neither I nor my family, but according to Rectitude have I ruled” (A.V. Williams Jackson, Persia Past and Present). — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁶ Isaiah xl-lxvi. For the critical questions arising on Deutero-Isaiah see Dr. T.K. Cheyne’s article “Isaiah” in the Encyclopaedia Biblica, the same scholar’s summary in Ency. Brit., XI ed., article “Isaiah,” or G. Moore’s summary, Literature of the Old Testament, Ch. XVI. —Tr. [Return]

⁵⁷ This “King of the Banishment” (Exilarch) was long a conspicuous and politically important figure in the Persian Empire. He was only removed by Islam. [Return]

⁵⁸ As Christian and Jewish theology both do — the only difference between these is in their respective interpretations of the later development of Israelite literature (recast in Judea as the literature of Judaism), the one inflecting it towards Evangelism, the others towards Talmudism. [Return]

⁵⁹ Later it occurred to some Pharisee mind to Judaize it by interpolating chs. xxxii-xxxvii. [Return]

⁶⁰ See the articles “Tobit,” etc., in Jewish Encyclopedia and Ency. Biblica. — Tr. [Return]

⁶¹ If the assumption of a Chaldean prophecy corresponding to Isaiah and Zarathustra be correct, it is to this young, inwardly cognate, and contemporary astral religion (and not to the Babylonian) that Genesis owes its amazingly profound cosmogony, just as it owes to the Persian religion its visions of the end of the world. [Return]

⁶² S. Funk, Die Entstebung des Talmuds (1919), p. 106. [Return]

⁶³ E. Sachau, Aramäische Papyros und Ostraka aus Elephantine (1911). [Return]

⁶⁴ Josephus, Antiq., 13,10. [Return]

⁶⁵ Much as, say, the destruction of the Vatican would be felt by the Catholic Church. [Return]

⁶⁶ Cf. p. 48. [Return]

⁶⁷ Pyrrho himself had studied under Magian priests. See, for Pyrrhonism, Ency. Brit., XI ed., articles “Skepticism,” “Megarian School,” “Pyrrho.” — Tr. [Return]

⁶⁸ Schiele (Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, III, 812) reverses the two latter names; this, however, does not affect the phenomenon in any way. [Return]

⁶⁹ The Cosmogony and the Law, in the Zoroastrian Scriptures. — Tr. [Return]

⁷⁰ Bousset, Rel. d. Jud., p. 532. [Return]

⁷¹ Baruch, Ezra IV (2. Esdras), the original text of John’s Revelation. [Return]

⁷² For instance, the Book of Naasenes (P. Wendland, Hellenistisch-römische Kultur, pp. 177, et seq.); the “Mithras Liturgy” (ed. A. Dieterich); the Hermetic Poemander (ed. Reitzenstein), the Psalms of Solomon, the Gospels of Thomas and Peter, the Pistis-Sophia, etc. [Information as to these will be found in the articles “Ophites,” “Mithras,” “Hermes Trismegistus,” “Apocalyptic Literature,” “Apocryphal Literature,” “Gnosticism,” in the Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.] [Return]

⁷³ Any more than Dostoevsky’s “Dream of a Ridiculous Person” is so. [Return]

⁷⁴ Our definitive ideas of this early Magian vision world we owe to the manuscripts of Turfan, which have reached Berlin since 1903. It was these which at last freed our knowledge and, above all, our criteria from the deformations due to the preponderance of Western-Hellenistic material — a preponderance that had been augmented by Egyptian papyrus finds — and radically transformed all our existing views. Now at last the pure, almost unknown, East is seen operative in all the apocalypses, hymns, liturgies, and books of edification of the Persians, Mandaeans, Manichaeans, and countless other sects; and primitive Christianity for the first time really takes its place in the movement to which it owes its spiritual origins (see H. Lüders, Sitzungen der Berliner Akademie, 1914, and R. Reitzenstein, Das iranische Erlösungsmysterium (1921). [Return]

⁷⁵ Lidzbarski, Das Johannesbuch der Mandäer, Ch. LXVI. Also W. Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis (1907) and Reitzenstein, Das Mandäische Buch der Herrn der Grösse (1919), an apocalypse approximately contemporary with the oldest Gospels. On the Messiah texts, the Descent-into-Hell texts, and the Songs of the Dead see Lidzbarski, Mandäische Liturgien (1920); also the Book of the Dead (especially the second and third books of the left Genza) in Reitzenstein’s Das iranische Erlösungsmysterium (especially pp. 43, et seq.). [The Mandaean religion survives today in the region of the Shatt-el-Arab and the Karun valley or Khuzistan. — Tr.] [Return]

⁷⁶ See Reitzenstein, pp. 124, et seq., and references there quoted. [Return]

⁷⁷ In the New Testament, of which the final redaction lies entirely in the sphere of Western Classical thought, the Mandaean religion and the sects belonging thereto are no longer understood, and indeed everything Oriental seems to have dropped out. Acts xviii-xix, however, discloses a perceptible hostility between the then widespread John communities and the Primitive Christians (see Dibelius Die Urchristliche Überlieferungen von Johannes dem Täufer). The Mandaeans later rejected Christianity as flatly as they had rejected Judaism. Jesus was for them a false Messiah. In their Apocalypse of the Lord of Greatness the apparition of Enosh was also announced. [Return]

⁷⁸ According to Reitzenstein (Das Buch von Herrn der Grösse) Jesus was condemned at Jerusalem as a John disciple. According to Lidzbarski (Mand. Lit., 1920, XVI and Zimmern Ztschr. d. D. Morg. Gesellschaft, 1920, p. 429), the expression “Jesus the Nazarene” or “Nasorene,” which was later by the Christian communities referred to Nazareth (Matthew ii, 23, with a doubtful citation), really indicates the membership in a Mandaean Order. [Return]

⁷⁹ E.g., Mark vi; and then the great change, Mark viii, 27, et seq. There is no religion which has given us more honestly the tale of its birth. [Return]

⁸⁰ Similarly in Mark i, 38, et seq., when he arose in the night and sought a lonely place in order to fortify himself by prayer. [Return]

⁸¹ The method of the present work is historical. It therefore recognizes the anti-historical as well as the historical as a fact. The religious method, on the contrary, necessarily looks upon itself as the true and the opposite as false. This difference is quite insuperable. [Return]

⁸² Hence Mark xiii, taken from an older document, is perhaps the purest example of his usual daily discourse. Paul (I Thess. iv, 15-17) quotes another, which is missing in the Gospels. With these, we have the priceless — but, by commentators dominated by the Gospel tone, misunderstood — contributions of Papias, who about 100 was still in a position to collect much oral tradition. The little that we have of his work suffices amply to show us the apocalyptic character of Jesus’s daily discourses. It is Mark xiii and not the Sermon on the Mount that reproduces the real note of them. But as his teaching became modified into a teaching of Him, this material likewise was transformed and the record of his utterances became the narrative of his manifestation. In this one respect the picture given by the Gospels is inevitably false. [Return]

⁸³ Jesus himself was aware of this (Matt. xxiv, 5,11). [Return]

⁸⁴ Made more uncertain perhaps by the failure of previous prophecies that had been so confidently dated — e.g., Jeremiah xxv, 11; xxiv, 5-6; reinterpreted in Daniel vii, ix; 1 Enoch lxxxiii-xc; and again to be reinterpreted in 2. Baruch xxxvi-xl and 4 Ezra x-xii. — Tr. [Return]

⁸⁵ The designation “Messiah (Christ)” was old-Jewish, those of “Lord” (κυριός, divus) and “Saviour” (σῶτηρ, Asklepios) were east Aramaean in origin. In the course of the pseudomorphosis “Christ” became the name of Jesus, and “Saviour” the title; but already “Lord” and “Saviour” were titles current in the Hellenistic Emperor worship; and in this was implicit the whole destiny of westward looking Christianity (compare here Reitzenstein, Das iranische Erlösungsmysterium, p. 132, note), [Return]

⁸⁶ Acts xv; Gal. ii. [Return]

⁸⁷ Acts i,14; cf. Mark vi. [Return]

⁸⁸ As against Luke, Matthew is the representative of this conception. His is the only Gospel in which the word “Ecclesia” is used, and it denotes the true Jews, in contradistinction to the masses that refuse to listen to Jesus. This is not the missionary idea, any more than Isaiah was a missionary. Community, in this connection, means an Order within Judaism. The prescriptions of Matt, xviii, 15-10 are wholly incompatible with any general dissemination. [Return]

⁸⁹ It fell apart later into sects, amongst which were the Ebionites and the Elkazites (the latter having a strange sacred book, the Elxai; see Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, p. 154). [See the articles “Ebionites” and “Sabians” in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁹⁰ Such sects were attacked in the Acts of the Apostles and in all Paul’s Epistles, and indeed there was hardly a Late Classical or Aramaean religion or philosophy which did not give rise to some sort of Jesus sect. The danger was indeed real of the Passion story becoming, not the nucleus of a new religion, but an integrating element of all existing ones. [Return]

⁹¹ Of this he was fully aware. Many of his deepest intuitions are unimaginable without Persian and Mandaean influences (e.g., Romans vii, 22-24; I Corinthians xv, 26; Ephesians v, 6, et seq., with a quotation of Persian origin. See Reitzenstein, Das iran. Erlbs.-Myst., pp. 6, 133, et seq.). But this does not prove familiarity with Persian-Mandaean literature. The stories were spread in these days as sagas and folktales were amongst us. One heard about them in childhood as things of daily hearsay, but without being in the least aware of how deeply one was under their spell. [Return]

⁹² The early missionary effort in the East has scarcely been investigated and is still very difficult to establish in detail. Sachau, Chronik von Arbela (1915) and “Die Ausbreitung der Christentums in Asien” in Abb. Pr. Akad. d. Wiss. (1919); Harnack, Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums, II, 117; et seq. [Return]

⁹³ The researchers who argue with such over-learnedness about a proto-Mark, Source Q, the “Twelve” source, and so on, overlook the essential novelty of Mark, which is the first “Book” of Christendom, plan-uniform and entire. Work of this sort is never the natural product of an evolution, but the merit of an individual man, and it marks, here if anywhere, a historical turning point. [Return]

⁹⁴ Mark is generally the Gospel; after him the partisan writings (Matthew, Luke) begin; the tone of narrative passes into that of legend and ends, beyond the Hebrew and John gospels, in Jesus romances like the gospels of Peter and James. [Return]

⁹⁵ If the word “catholic” be used in its oldest sense (Ignatius ad Smyrn., 8) — namely, to signify the sum of the cult communities, both the Churches were Catholic. In the East the word had no meaning. The Nestorian Church was no more a sum than was the Persian: it was a Magian unit. [Return]

⁹⁶ A brief survey of the Mary doctrine is given in article “Mary,” Ency Brit., XI ed. The symbolism involved in the details of the story of Mary, as told in writing and in art, is very fully gone into in Yrjo Hirn, The Sacred Shrine. — Tr. [Return]

⁹⁷ Ed. Meyer, Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums (1921), pp. 77, et seq. [Return]

⁹⁸ c. 85-155. See the recent work of Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (1921). [Harnack’s article “Marcion” in Ency. Brit., XI ed., is dated 1910. — Tr.] [Return]

⁹⁹ Harnack, op. cit., pp. 136, et seq.; N. Bonwetsch, Grundr. d. Dogmengesch. (1919), p. 45, et seq. [Return]

¹⁰⁰ This is one of the profoundest ideas in all religious history, and one that must forever remain inaccessible to the pious average man. Marcion’s identification of the “Just” with the Evil enables him in this sense to oppose the Law of the Old Testament to the Evangel of the New. [Return]

¹⁰¹ About A.D. 150. See Harnack, op. cit., pp. 32, et seq. [Return]

¹⁰² For the notions of Koran and Logos, see below. Again as in the case of Mark, the really important question is, not what the material before him was, but how this entirely novel idea for such a book, which anticipated and indeed made possible Marcion’s plan for a Christian Bible, could arise. The book presupposes a great spiritual movement (in eastern Asia Minor?) that knew scarcely anything of Jewish Christianity and was yet remote from the Pauline, westerly thought world. But of the region and type of this movement we know nothing whatever. [Return]

¹⁰³ Vohu Mano, the Spirit of Truth, in the shape of the Saoshyant. [Return]

¹⁰⁴ See the article by Harnack and Conybeare “Manichasism,” Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁰⁵ Bardesanes, too, and the system of the “Acts of Thomas” are very near to him and to “John.” [See the articles “Bardaisan,” “Thomas,” and “Gnosticism,” Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.] [Return]

¹⁰⁶ Harnack, p. 24. The break with the established Church occurred at Rome, in 144. [Return]

¹⁰⁷ Harnack, pp. 181, et seq. [Return]

¹⁰⁸ It had, like each of the other Magian religions, a script of its own, and this script steadily came to resemble the Manichaean more and more closely. [Return]

¹⁰⁹ Matthew xi, 25, et seq., on which see Eduard Meyer, Urspr. u. Anf. d. Christ., pp. 286, et seq.; here it is the old and Eastern (i.e., the genuine) form of gnosis that is described. [Return]

¹¹⁰ As a drastic instance, Galatians iv, 24-26. [Return]

¹¹¹ Loofs, Nestoriana (1905), pp. 176, et seq. [Return]

¹¹² The best exposition of the mass of thought common to both Churches is Windelband’s Ge schichte der Philosophie (1900), pp. 177, et seq.; for the dogmatic history of the Christian Chruch see Harnack, Dogmengeschichte (1914), while — unconsciously — Geffcken (Der Ausgang des griechisch römischen Heidentums, 1920) gives the corresponding “dogmatic history of the Pagan Church.” [Return]

¹¹³ Geffcken, op. cit., p. 69 [article “Neoplatonism” in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.]. [Return]

¹¹⁴ See the following chapter. [Return]

¹¹⁵ Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, p. 165. [Return]

Chapter 8

¹ The expression is Leo Frobenius’s (Paideuma, 1920, p. 92.). [Return]

² The soul stones on Jewish, Sabaean, and Islamic tombs are also called nephesh. They are unmistakable symbols of the “upward.” With them belong the huge storeyed stelae of Axum which belong to the first to third centuries of our era — i.e., the great period of the early Magian religions. The giant stele, long overthrown, is the largest monolith known to art history, larger than any Egyptian obelisk (German Axum Expedition report, Vol. II, pp. 28, et seq.). [Return]

³ On this rests the whole theory and practice of Magian law (see p. 69 above). [Return]

⁴ Isaiah xxxii, 15; 4 Ezra xiv, 39; Acts ii. [Return]

⁵ Reitzenstein Das iran. Erlösungsmysterium, pp. 108, et seq. [Return]

⁶ Bousset, Kyrios Christos, p. 1421. [Return]

⁷ Windelband, Gesch. d. Phil. (1900), pp. 189, et seq.; Windelband-Bonhöffer, Gesch. d. antiken Phil. (1912), pp. 328, et seq.; Geffcken,Der Ausgang des griech.-röm. Heidentums (1920), pp. 51, et seq. [Return]

⁸ Jodl, Geschichte der Ethik, I, p. 58. [Return]

⁹ M. Horten, Die religiöse Gedankemvelt der Volkes im heutigen Islam (1917), pp. 381, et seq. By the Shiites the Logos idea was transferred to Ali. [Return]

¹⁰ Wolff, Muhammedanische Eschatologie, 3, 2, et seq. [Return]

¹¹ Mandaean Book of John, Ch. LXXV. [Return]

¹² Usener, Vortr. u. Aufs., p. 117. [Return]

¹³ The “devil worshipers” in Armenia; M. Horten in Der neue Orient (March 1918). The name arose from the fact that they did not recognize Satan as a being, and accordingly derived the Evil, by a very complicated set of ideas, from the Logos itself. Under old Persian influences the Jews also busied themselves with the same problem — observe the difference between 1 Samuel xxiv, 1, and 1 Chron. xxi, 1. [Return]

¹⁴ M. Horten, op. cit., p. xxi. This book is the best introduction to the actually existing popular religion of Islam, which deviates considerably from the official doctrines. [Return]

¹⁵ Baumstark, Die christl. Literaturen des Orients, I, p. 64. [Return]

¹⁶ The Babylonian view of the heavens had not definitely distinguished between astronomical and atmospheric elements; e.g., the covering of the moon by clouds was regarded as a kind of eclipse. For this soothsaying the momentary figure of the heavens served only the same purpose as the inspection of the victim’s liver. But the Chaldeans’ intention was to forecast the actual course of the stars; here, therefore, astrology presupposed a genuine astronomy. [Return]

¹⁷ B. Cohn, “Die Anfangsepoche der jüd. Kalenders” (Sitz. Pr. Akad., 1914). The date of the first day of Creation was on this occasion fixed by calculation from a total eclipse of the sun — of course with the aid of Chaldean astronomy. [See, in general, the articles “Chronology,” “Calendar,” in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.] [Return]

¹⁸ The Persian notion of total time is 12,000 years. The Parsees of today consider A.D. 1920 as the 11,550th. [Return]

¹⁹ M. Horten, Die religiöse Gedankenwelt des Volkes im heutigen Islam, p. xxvi. [Return]

²⁰ It shows a great gap in our research that although we possess a whole library of works on Classical religion and particularly its gods and cults, we have not one about Classical religiousness and its history. [Return]

²¹ “He is in truth the conclusion and completion of the Christian Classical, its last and greatest thinker, its intellectual practitioner and tribune. This is the starting point from which he must be understood. What later ages have made of him is another affair. His own real mind, the synthesizer of Classical Culture, ecclesiastical and episcopal authority, and intimate mysticism, could not possibly have been handed on by those who, environed by different conditions, have to deal with different tasks” (E. Troeltsch, Augustin, die christliche Antike und das Mittelalter, 1915, p. 7). His power, like Tertullian’s, rested also on the fact that his writings were not translated into Latin, but thought in this language, the sacred language of the Western Church; it was precisely this that excluded both from the field of Aramaean thought. [Return]

²² “Inspiratio bonae voluntatis” (De corr. et grat., 3). His “good will” and “ill will” are, quite dualistically, a pair of opposite substances. For Pelagius, on the contrary, will is an activity without moral quality as such; only that which is willed has the property of being good or evil, and the Grace of God consists in the “possibilitas utriusque partis,” the freedom to will this or that. Gregory I transmuted Augustinian doctrines into Faustian when he taught that God rejected individuals because he foreknew their evil will. [Return]

²³ All the elements of the Magian metaphysic are to be found in Spinoza, hard as he tried to replace the Arabian-Jewish conceptual world of his Spanish masters (and above all Moses Maimonides) by the Western of early Baroque. The individual human mind is for him not an ego, but only a mode of the one divine attribute, the “cogitatio” — which is just the Pneuma. He protests against notions like “God’s Will.” His God is pure substance and in lieu of the dynamic causality of the Faustian universe he discovers simply the logic of the divine cogitatio. All this is already in Porphyry, in the Talmud, in Islam; and to Faustian thinkers like Leibniz and Goethe it is as alien as anything can possibly be. (Allgem. Gesch. d. Pbilos. in Kultur der Gegenwart, I, v, p. 484, Windelband.) [Return]

²⁴ Here, therefore, “good” is an evaluation and not a substance. [Return]

²⁵ The period at which it was written corresponds to our Carolingian. Whether the latter really brought forth any poetry of like rank we do not know, but that it may possibly have done so is shown by creations like the Voluspa, Muspilli, the Heliand, and the universe conceived by John Scotus Erigena. [Return]

²⁶ See, for example, Bertholet Kulturgesch. Israels, p. 242. [Return]

²⁷ Horten, op. cit., p. xii. [Return]

²⁸ It is almost unnecessary to say that in all religions of the Germanic West the Bible stands in a quite other relationship to the faith — namely, in that of a source in the strictly historical sense, irrespective of whether it is taken as inspired and immune from textual criticism or not. The relation of Chinese thought to the canonical books is similar. [Return]

²⁹ The Holy Spirit, different from Ahuramazda and yet one with him, opposed to the Evil (Angra Mainyu). [Return]

³⁰ Identified by Mani with the Johannine Logos. Compare also Yasht 13, 31. Ahuramazda’s shining soul is the Word. [Return]

³¹ Aletheia (Truth) is generally employed in this way in the John Gospel, and drug (= lie) is used for Ahriman in Persian cosmology. Ahriman is often shown as though a servant of the drug. [Return]

³² Sura 96; cf. 80, 11 and 85, 21, where in connection with another vision it is said: “This is a noble Koran on a treasured tablet.” The best commentary on all this is Eduard Meyer’s (Geschichte der Mormonen, pp. 70, et seq.). [Return]

³³ Classical man receives, in states of extreme bodily excitation, the power of unconsciously predicting future events. But these visions are completely unliterary. The Classical Sibylline books (which have no connection with the later Christian works bearing that name) are meant to be nothing more than a collection of oracles. [Return]

³⁴ IV Ezra xiv; S. Funk, Die Entstehung des Talmuds, p. 17; Hirsch’s commentary on Exodus xxi, 2. [Return]

³⁵ Funk, op. cit., p. 86. [Return]

³⁶ For example, Ed. Meyer, Urspr. u. Anf. d. Christ., p. 95. [Return]

³⁷ In the West, Plato, Aristotle, and above all Pythagoras were regarded as prophets in this sense. What could be referred back to them, was valid. For this reason the succession of the heads of the schools became more and more important, and often more work was done in establishing — or inventing — them than was done upon the history of the doctrine itself. [Return]

³⁸ Fromer, Der Talmud, p. 190. [Return]

³⁹ We today confuse authorship and authority. Arabian thought knew not the idea of “intellectual property.” Such would have been absurd and sinful, for it is the one divine Pneuma that selects the individual as vessel and mouthpiece. Only to that extent is he the “author,” and it does not matter even whether he or another actually writes down the material. “The Gospel according to Mark” means that Mark vouches for the truth of this evangel. [Return]

⁴⁰ On the pseudonyma and anonyma of Biblical apocryphal literature the English reader will find much of interest in three small books (already referred to) of the “Home University” series: Moore, Literature of the Old Testament; Charles, Between the Old and the New Testaments; and Bacon, The Making of the New Testament. — Tr. [Return]

⁴¹ Vendidad 19,1; here it is Zarathustra who is tempted. [Return]

⁴² M.J. ben Gorion, Die Sagen der juden (1913). [Return]

⁴³ It is reasonable to suppose that he must through oral tradition have had a very accurate knowledge of the fundamental doctrines of the John Gospel. Even Bardesanes (d. 254), and the “Acts of St. Thomas” that originated in his circle, are very far removed indeed from Pauline doctrines, an alienation that in Mani rose to downright hostility and to the historical Jesus’s being described as an evil demon. We obtain here a glimpse into the essence of the almost subterranean Christianity of the East, which was ignored by the Greek-writing churches of the Pseudomorphosis and for that reason has hitherto escaped the attention of Church history. But Marcion and Montanus also came from eastern Asia Minor; here originated the Naasene book, basically Persian, but overlaid first with Judaism and then with Christianity; and further east, probably in the Matthew monastery of Mosul, Aphrahat wrote, about 340, those strange epistles whose Christianity the Western development from Irenaeus to Athanasius left wholly unaffected. The history of Nestorian Christianity, in fact, was already beginning in the second century. [Return]

⁴⁴ For the later writings of (for example) Tertullian and Augustine remained wholly without effect save insofar as they were translated. In Rome itself even, Greek was the true language of the Church. [Return]

⁴⁵ The Faustian monk represses his evil will, the Magian the evil substance in himself. Only the latter is dualistic. [Return]

⁴⁶ The purity and food laws of the Talmud and the Avesta cut far deeper into everyday life than, for example, the Benedictine rule. [Return]

⁴⁷ Asmus, “Damaskios” (Philos. Bibl., 125 (1911). Christian anchoritism is later than pagan: Reitzenstein, “Des Athanasius Werk über das Leben des Antonius” (Sitf,. Heid. Ak. (1914), VIII, 12). [Return]

⁴⁸ Even to the point indicated in Matt, xix,12, which Origen followed to the letter. [Return]

⁴⁹ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article “Qaraites.” The outlook of these Protestants so resembled that of the Western Protestants that their name was used as a term of contempt for the latter by the Catholics, and not greatly resented. It is significant also that this movement in Jewry almost coincided in date with the vaster Reformation of Islam. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁰ The followers of Baal Shem above mentioned (p. 181) not to be confused with the Hasidim or Assideans of the second century. — Tr. [Return]

⁵¹ Wissowa, Religion und Kulturs der Römer, p. 493; Geffcken pp. 4, 144. [Return]

⁵² This is the metaphysical basis also of the Christian image worship, which presently set in and of the appearance of wonder working pictures of Mary and the Saints. [Return]

⁵³ The Nestorians protested against Mary Theotokos (she who bore God), opposing to her the concept of Christ the Theophorus (he who carried God in him). The deep difference between an image loving and an image hating religiousness is here clearly manifested. [Return]

⁵⁴ Note the “Western” outlook on the substance questions in the contemporary writings of Proclus — his double Zeus, his triad of πατήρ, δύναμις, νοήσις and νοητόν, and so forth (Zeller, Philosophie der Griechen, V, pp. 857, et seq.). Proclus’s beautiful “Hymn to Athene” is a veritable Ave Maria: 

“But when an evil lapse of my being puts me into bondage

(And, ah, I know indeed how I am tossed about by many unholy deeds that in my

blindness I have done), 

Be thou gracious to me, thou gentle one, thou blessing of mankind,

And let me not lie upon the earth as prey to fearful punishments, 

For I am, and I remain, thy chattel.”

(Hymn VII, Eudociae Aug. rel. A. Ludwich, 1897.) [Return]

⁵⁵See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article “Apollinaris, the Younger.” — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁶ And Russia, too, though hitherto Russia has kept it as a buried treasure. [Return]

⁵⁷ The Christian missionary efforts of the West very generally followed the same method, maintaining the local places of prayer, and merely substituting crucifixes or relics for the idols. Gregory the Great even sanctioned the sacrifice of animals in Britain. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁸ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., art. “Khazars.” — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁹ The Albigensian movement of the twelfth century. — Tr. [Return]

⁶⁰ Hermann, Chines. Geschichte (1912), p. 77 [Return]

⁶¹ A third, “contemporary,” movement should follow in the Russian world in the first half of the coming millennium. [Return]

Chapter 9

¹ “He who loves God with inmost soul, transforms himself into God” (Bernard of Clairvaux). [Return]

² For religious thought Destiny is always a causal quantity. Epistemology knows it, therefore, only as an indistinct word for causality. Only so long as we do not think upon it do we really know it. [Return]

³ The distinction between the two is one of inner form. A sacrifice made by Socrates is at bottom a prayer; and generally the Classical sacrifice is to be looked upon as a prayer in bodily form. The ejaculated prayer of the criminal, on the contrary, is a sacrifice to which fear drives him. [Return]

⁴ And herein philosophy differs not in the least from soil sprung folk belief. Think of Kant’s category table with its 3 X 4 units, of Hegel’s method, of Iamblichus’s triads. [Return]

⁵ And even so the thought has a different disposition according as it is primitive or cultured; Chinese, Indian, Classical, Magian, or Western; and even German, English, or French. In the last resort, there are not even two individuals with exactly the same method. [Return]

⁶ Anatole France’s story Le Jongleur de Notre Dame is something deeper than a beautiful fancy. — Tr. [Return]

⁷ Was it that highly civilized Crete, the outpost of Egyptian modes of thought, afforded a pattern? But, after all, the numerous local and tribal gods of the primitive Thinite time (before 3000), which represented the numina of particular beast-genera, were essentially different in meaning. The more powerful the Egyptian deity of this preliminary period is, the more particular individual spirits (ka) and individual souls (bai) he possesses, and these hide and lurk in the various animals — Bastet in the cat, Sechmet in the lion, Hathor in the cow, Mut in the vulture (hence the human formed ka that figures behind the beast head in the figures of the gods) — making of this earliest world picture a very abortion of monstrous fear, filling it with powers which rage against man even after his death and which only the greatest sacrifices avail to placate. The union of the North and the South lands was represented by the common veneration of the Horns falcon, whose first ka resided in the Pharaoh of the time. Cf. Eduard Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., I, §§ 182, et seq. [See also Moret and Davy: Des clans aux empires and Moret: Le Nil et la civilisation égyptienne (available in English translations). — Tr.] [Return]

⁸ Eumenides, 126. [Return]

⁹ Moreover, in the full maturity of Athens, every little girl of the upper classes was consecrated as a bear to this Artemis. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁰ For further information the reader may consult the articles “Demeter,” etc., in the Ency. Brit., XI ed.; and, for a suggestive introduction in the fewest possible words, Dr. Jane Harrison’s pamphlet, Myths of Greece and Rome. — Tr. [Return]

¹¹ Bernoulli, Die Heiligen der Merowinger (1900) — a good account of this primitive religion. [Return]

¹² For an account of Russian sectarian movements see A.P. Stanley, Hist. of the Eastern Church; for a summary, Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XXIII, p. 886. — Tr. [Return]

¹³ Kattenbusch, Lehrb. d. vgl. Konfessionsk., I (1892), pp. 234, et seq.; N.P. Milyukov, Skizz. russ. Kulturg. (1901) II, pp. 104, et seq. [Return]

¹⁴ Borchardt, Reheiligtum des Newoserrê, I (1905). The Pharaoh is no longer an incarnation of godhead, and not yet, as the theology of the Middle Kingdom was to make him, the son of Re; notwithstanding all earthly greatness, he is small, a servant, as he stands before the god. [Return]

¹⁵ Erman, “Ein Denkmal memphitsiche Theologie” Ber. Berl. Ak. (1911), pp. 916, et. seq. [Return]

¹⁶ Not, of course, to be connected in any profound sense with that which emerged under the name in the Magian Culture. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁷ And because they were the gods of the eternal peasant, they outlived the Olympians. [Return]

¹⁸ Even though Hesiod is two centuries nearer to the source of his Culture than the German mystic is to that of our own. See the article “Boehme,” Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁹ Insolent prosperity tempting Nemesis. — Tr. [Return]

²⁰ The work of J.J. Bachofen in this field has recently been assembled in concentrated form under the title Mythus von Occident und Orient (1926). — Tr. [Return]

²¹ Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, p. 41. What has been said above concerning the Talmudic religion applies also to the Etruscan religion by which all Italy — i.e., no less than half of the Classical field — was so deeply influenced. It lies outside the province of both the conventional “Classical” philologies and in consequence has been practically ignored, as compared with the Achaean and Doric religions. In reality (as its tombs, temples, and myths prove), it forms with them a single unit of spirit and evolution. [Return]

²² It is immaterial whether or not Dionysus was “borrowed” from Thrace, Apollo from Asia Minor, Aphrodite from Phoenicia. It is the fact that out of the thousands of alien motives these particular few were chosen and combined in so splendid a unity that implies the fundamental newness of the creation — just as does the Mary cult of the Gothic, although in that case the whole form material was taken over from the East. [Return]

²³ As in De Groot’s Universismus (1918), where, in fact, the systems of Taoists, Confucians, and Buddhists are handled without a qualm as the religions of China. This amounts to the same as saying that the Classical religion dates from Caracalla. [Return]

²⁴ Conrady, in Wassiljew, Die Erschliessung Chinas (1909), p. 232; B. Schindler, Das Priestertum im alten China, I (1919). [Return]

²⁵ The Shu-Ching or Canon of History is a collection of ancient annals, the Shi-King a canonical anthology of rhymed tales made by Confucius. — Tr. [Return]

²⁶ Conrady, China, p. 516. [Return]

²⁷ Of which an outstanding example is the Edda. — Tr. [Return]

²⁸ See article “Heliand” in Ency. Brit., XI ed., and works there referred to. A handy edition of the text is included in the “Reclam” series. — Tr. [Return]

²⁹ This idea differs essentially from that of the Egyptian duality of the spiritual ka and the soul bird bai, and still more so from the Magian duality of soul substances. [Return]

³⁰ O. Franke, Studien für d. Gesch. der Konfuzianischen Dogmas (1920), p. 202. [Return]

³¹ Reference may again be made to Yrjo Hirn, The Sacred Shrine. — Tr. [Return]

³² Consider, for example, the fantastic paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Breughel’s similar humor, too, is unthinkable without the tradition of a rank and file of evil creatures. — Tr. [Return]

³³ So also in the Classical, the Homeric figures were for educated people of Hellenistic times nothing but literature, representation, artistic motive. Even for Plato’s period they were little more than this. But in 1100 B.C., Demeter and Dionysus were a fearful actuality before which men collapsed. [Return]

³⁴ The stern object of Roger Bacon’s science; see p. 399 (Chapter XIV), footnote #15. — Tr. [Return]

³⁵ This is the real conclusion that emerges from Burdach’s Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus (1918). [Return]

³⁶ In this connection, it is important to observe that the education movement of Humanism took into its field modern Italian, Hebrew, etc., as well as the Classical knowledge. A Dante professorship was founded in Florence in 1373. As for the Classical itself, side by side with all the enthusiasm we find a significant note in Boccaccio, who thanks Jesus Christ for a victory over unbelief that has delivered up theenemy’s camp to the victor’s enjoyment. Burkhardt, Renaissance, Vol. I, p. 262. (Reclam edition). — Tr. [Return]

³⁷ Bezold, Hist. Zeitschr., 45, p. 208. [Return]

³⁸ Italian, “Anna Metterza.” The reference is to the St. Anne of the Louvre and the Royal Academy Diploma Gallery, London. — Tr. [Return]

³⁹ Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli. — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁰ The sense of such a relativity led to a mathematic (the calculus) which is literally based on the ignoring of second and third order magnitudes. — Tr. [Return]

⁴¹ See article “Mysticism” in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁴² After its confirmation in 1311, the character of this festival as one of popular joy became still more marked by its association with the nascent drama (see Ency. Brit., XI ed., articles “Corpus Christi,” “Drama”; and Y. Hirn, op. cit., pp. 144-5. [Return]

⁴³ Or even rediscovered it. For Classical man as a spirit filled body is one amongst many quite independent units, while Faustian man is a center in the universe, which with its soul embraces the whole. But personality (individuality) means, not something separate (einzelnes), but something single (einziges). [Return]

⁴⁴ Hence it is that this sacrament has conferred a position of such immense power upon the Western priest. He receives the personal confession, and speaks personally, in the name of the Infinite, the absolution, without which life would be unbearable.

The notion of confession as a duty, which was finally established in 1215, first arose in England, whence came also the first confession books (Penitentials). In England, too, originated, the idea of the Immaculate Conception, and even the idea of the Papacy — at a time when Rome itself thought of it as a question of power and precedence. It is evidence of the independence of Faustian Christianity from Magian that its decisive ideas grew up in those remote parts of its field which lay beyond the Frankish Empire. [Return]

⁴⁵ The immeasurable difference between the Faustian and the Russian souls is disclosed in certain word-sounds. The Russian word for heaven is “nyebo” which contains in its n a negative element. Western man looks up, the Russian looks horizontally into the broad plain. The death impulse, too, of the respective souls is distinguishable, in that for the West it is the passion of drive all ways into infinite space, whereas for Russians it is an expressing and expanding of self (Sichentäussern), till “it” in the man becomes identical with the boundless plain itself. It is thus that a Russian understands the words “man” and “brother.” He sees even mankind as a plane. The idea of a Russian’s being an astronomer! He does not see the stars at all, he sees only the horizon. Instead of the vault he sees the down hang of the heavens — something that somewhere combines with the plain to form the horizon. For him the Copernican system, be it never so mathematical, is spiritually contemptible.

While our German “Schicksal” rings like a trumpet call, “Sud’bá” is a genuflection. There is no room for the upstanding “I” beneath this almost flat roofed heaven. That “All are responsible for all” — the “it” for the “it” in this boundlessly extended plain — is the metaphysical fundament of all Dostoevsky’s creation. That is why Ivan Karamazov must name himself murderer although another had done the murder. The criminal is the “unfortunate,” the “wretch” — it is the utter negation of Faustian personal responsibility. Russian mysticism has nothing of that up striving inwardness of Gothic, of Rembrandt, of Beethoven, which can swell up to a heaven storming jubilation — its god is not the azure depth up above. Mystical Russian love is love of the plain, the love of brothers under equal pressure all along the earth, ever along and along; the love of the poor tortured beasts that wander on it, the love of plants — never of birds and clouds and stars. The Russian “volya” our “will,” means principally non-compulsion, freedom not for something but from something, and particularly freedom from compulsion to personal doing. Free will is seen as a condition in which no one else can command “it,” and in which, therefore, one may give way to one’s own disposition. “Geist,” “esprit,” “spirit,” go thus: ; the Russian “duch” goes thus: . What sort of a Christianity will come forth one day from this world feeling? [Return]

⁴⁶ “Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär 

Und wollten uns verschlingen 

So fürchten wir uns nimmermehr 

Es soll uns dock gelingen.” [Return]

⁴⁷ And, as the secession of a reformed Church necessarily transforms the parent Church, there was a Magian counter-reformation also. In the Decretum Gelasii (c. 500, Rome) even Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Lactantius, and in the Synod of Byzantium (543) Origen, were declared heretical. [Return]

⁴⁸ Boehmer, Luther im Lichte der neueren Forschung (1918), pp. 54, et. seq. [Return]

⁴⁹ See, for instance, H.T. Buckle, Hist. Civilization in England, Vol. Ill, ch. iv, for the Scottish outlook, which at times attributed all this horror, not even to an anti-God, but to God himself. “Consider, who is the contriver of these torments. There have been some very exquisite torments contrived by the wit of men... but all these fall as far short of the torments ye are to endure as the wisdom of man falls short of that of God... Infinite wisdom has contrived that evil” (The Great Concern of Salvation, by T. Halyburton, 1722). — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁰ M. Osborn, Die Teufelsliteratur des 16. Jahrh. (1893). [Return]

⁵¹ Clocks being an outstanding example. See Vol. I., p. 11 (Chapter I), footnote #8. — Tr. [Return]

⁵² The famous Bishop of Lincoln (1175-1253), scholar and philosopher, scientist and statesman — the British Oresme. — Tr. [Return]

⁵³ A clear summary of Grosseteste’s, Pierre de Maricourt’s, and Roger Bacon’s work and outlook will be found in Ch. ix of E. Gilson’s short manual, La Philosophic du Moyen Age (Paris, 1925). Ency. Brit., XI ed., may also be consulted for Roger Bacon, but the article “Grosseteste” deals almost entirely with the bishop’s political and ecclesiastical career. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁴ M. Baumgartner, Gesch. der Philos. des Mittelalters (1915), pp. 425, 571, 620, et seq. [Brief account in Ch. xi (3) of Gilson’s manual above cited. — Tr.] [Return]

⁵⁵ See Ch. XIV. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁶ Nigantha. See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article “Jains.” — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁷ 542. [Return]

⁵⁸ “Mahommedanism must be regarded as an eccentric heretical form of Eastern Christianity.” This in fact was the ancient mode of regarding Mahommet. He was considered, not in the light of the founder of a new religion, but rather as one of the chief heresiarchs of the Church. Among them he is placed by Dante in the “Inferno.” Dean Stanley, Eastern Church (1861), Lecture VIII. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁹ Krumbacher, Byzant. Literaturgesch., p. 12. [Return]

⁶⁰ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., under these names. — Tr. [Return]

⁶¹ Not to say the twentieth. — Tr. [Return]

⁶² To which may be added Edinburgh. — Tr. [Return]

⁶³ ηπὸς τὴν πειβὼ τῶν ηολλῶν, Metaphysics XI, 8, p. 1074 (Bekker) 13. — Tr. [Return]

⁶⁴ Caliphs like Al Maimun (813-33) and the last Ommayads would have entirely approved of similar measures in Islam. In those times there was a club in Baghdad in which Christians, Jews, Moslems, and Atheists debated, and appeals to the authority of Bible or Koran were “out of order.” [Return]

⁶⁵ Whereas “virtù” in Dante always carries a connotation of vital force, as also does the older English use of the word; e.g., in Chaucer’s “of which vertue engendred is the flour,” (Canterbury Tales, Prol. 4) and in the Bible (Mark v, 30). In Medieval Latin “virtutes” is used for miracles. — Tr. [Return]

⁶⁶ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article 44 “Jains.” — Tr. [Return]

⁶⁷ E.g., “Given eye and visible object, visual consciousness arises; the conjunction of the three is contact; whereby conditioned, arises feeling; whereby conditioned, arises perception...” Majjima Nikhaya, I, 111 (quoted by Mrs. Rhys Davids, Buddhism). — Tr. [Return]

⁶⁸ Gercke-Norden, Einleit. in die Altertumswiss., II, 210. [Return]

⁶⁹ Compare the renewed controversy as to Transubstantiation in the English Church, 1916-8, in which a bishop actually proposed that physical tests could be applied to the altar miracle. — Tr. [Return]

⁷⁰ Which was ordered no less than four times in the decade 58-49. [Return]

⁷¹ Horace’s fine lady, Leuconoë. — Tr. [Return]

⁷² It is perhaps possible for us to make some guess already as to these forms, which (it is self-evident) must lead back to certain elements of Gothic Christianity. But be this as it may, what is quite certain is that they will not be the product of any literary taste for Late Indian or Late Chinese speculation, but something of the type, for example, of Adventism and suchlike sects. [Return]

⁷³ Arnim, Stoic. vet.fragm., 537. [Return]

⁷⁴ The Lü-shi Chun-tsiu of Lü-pu-Wei (d. 237 B.C., Chinese Augustan Age) is the first monument of this syncretism, of which the final deposit was the ritual work Li-ki of the Han period (B. Schindler, Das Priestertum im alten China, I, 93). [Return]

⁷⁵ M. Horten, Die religiöse Gedankenwelt des Volkes im heutigen Islam (1917). [Return]

⁷⁶ 1018-78; cf. Dieterich, Byzant. Charakterköpfe (1909), p. 63. [Or Ency. Brit., XI ed., article “Psellus.” — Tr.] [Return]

⁷⁷ It was only in old age and after long and heavy warring that both these Caesars gave themselves up to a mild and weary piety, and both of them held aloof from the more definite religions. From the point of view of dogma, Asoka was no Buddhist; what he did was to understand the currents and take them under his protection (Hillebrandt, Altindien, p. 143). [Asoka’s life is dealt with in several of the works of Rhys Davids; for example, Ch. xv of his Buddhist India. — Tr.] [Return]

⁷⁸ Insofar as it is permissible to reckon Mithraism as Classical at all — for it is really a religion of the Magian Spring. [Return]

⁷⁹ De Groot, Universismus (1918), p. 134. [Return]

⁸⁰ See the article “Maimonides” in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁸¹ Fromer, Der Talmud, p. 217. The “red cow” and the ritual of anointing a Jewish king were treated in this work with the same seriousness as the most important provisions of private law. [See J. and J. Tharaud, Petite Histoire des Juifs, Ch. I, (1927). — Tr.] [Return]

⁸² See, for the following paragraphs, the articles “Jews,” “Hebrew Religion,” “Hebrew Literature,” “Kabbalah,” “Qaraites,” etc., in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁸³ Strunz, Gesch. der Naturwiss. im Mittelalter, p. 89. [Return]

⁸⁴ Only with Nicolaus Cusanus was this state of things reversed. [Return]

⁸⁵ The reader is recommended to study, in the light of all this, recent literature of the type of Hajim Bloch’s Golem and the works of the brothers Tharaud. — Tr. [Return]

⁸⁶ Prague contains a veritable corpus of commentary upon these pages. — Tr. [Return]

⁸⁷ A.D. 132. See Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XV, p. 402, and Vol. III, p. 395. — Tr. [Return]

⁸⁸ Instances — besides that of Mithradates and the Cyprus massacre quoted above — are the Sepoy Mutiny in India, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the Bolshevist fury of Jews, Letts, and other alien peoples against Tsarist Russia. [Return]

⁸⁹ P. Levertoff, Die religiöse Denkweise der Chassidim (1918), pp. 128, et seq.; M. Buber, Die Legend des Baalschem (1907). [Brief account in J. and J. Tharaud, Petite histoire des Juifs, Ch. vii. — Tr.] [Return]

⁹⁰ Levertoff, op. cit., p. 136. [Return]

⁹¹ O. Weininger, Taschenbuch (1919), above all pp. 19, et seq. [Return]

⁹² Their shipbuilding was in Roman times more Classical than Phoenician, their state was organized as a Polis, and their educated people, like Hannibal, were familiar with Greek. [Return]

Chapter 10

¹ And not until women cease to have race enough to have or to want children, not until they cease to be history, does it become possible for them to make or to copy the history of men. Conversely, it is deeply significant that we are in the habit of calling thinkers, doctrinaires, and humanity enthusiasts of anti-political tendency “old women.” They wish to imitate the other history, the history of woman, although they — cannot. [Return]

² No exact equivalent exists in common English for the German word “Stand” “Aristocracy” is too narrow, as under most aspects the clergy and under some even the Tiers have to be reckoned in. “Class” fails because, for logical completeness, it has to be stretched so as to bring in the qualitatively unclassed as a distinct category. (A whole social history is contained in the use of these and similar words at different periods.) The word “Estate” itself is used nowadays for the “masses” (“Fourth Estate” = “Proletariat”), but this very use, by Socialists, is an assertion that the masses, as workers, possess a qualitative peculiarity and condition of their own, and the word thus continues to connote ideas of differentiation, specific constitution, and oriented outlook. It may, therefore, be employed here without fear of misunderstanding or reproach of pedantry. — Tr. [Return]

³ Mitteis, Reichsrecht und Volksrecht (1891), p. 63. [Return]

⁴ Sohm, Institutionen (1911), p. 614. [Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XXIII, pp. 540-41. — Tr.] [Return]

⁵ This principle formed the basis of the dynastic idea of the Arabian world (Ommayads, Com neni, Sassanids), which is so hard for us to grasp. When a usurper had seized a throne, he hastened to marry one or another of the female members of the blood community and so prolonged the dynasty; of law made succession rights there was no question, nor under this idea could there be. (See also J. Wellhausen,Ein Gemeinwesen ohne Obrigheit, (1900). [Return]

⁶ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XXIII, p. 574. — Tr. [Return]

⁷ An inversion of Clausewitz’s famous expression that war is a continuation of policy by other means. (On War, I, i, § 14). — Tr. [Return]

⁸ Not excluding art, although we are not conscious of them save through deduction from art history. [Return]

⁹ Original: “Sie liegen im gesteigerten Dasein von Einzelnen und Kreisen, eben in dem, was soeben ‘Dasein in Form’ genannt worden ist, und durch diese Höhe des Geformtseins erst die Kultur repräsentirt.” [Return]

¹⁰ So in the German, but see footnote #2 above (Chapter X). “Stand” would have expressed the sense better. — Tr. [Return]

¹¹ R. Fick, Die soziale Gliederung im nordöstlichen Indien zu Buddhas Zeit (1897), p. 201; K. Hillebrandt, Alt-lndien (1899), p. 82. [Also the article “Brahmanism,” Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.] [Return]

¹² Got hât driu lehen geschaffen 

Gebûre, fitter, phaffen. 

[Note the collective ge- attached to the first-named. — Tr.] [Return]

¹³ The ease with which Bolshevism extinguished the four so called estates or classes of Petrine Russia nobles, merchants, small townspeople, and peasants — shows that these were mere imitations and administrative conveniences, and destitute of all symbolism — for symbolism no power on earth can choke. They correspond to the outward differences of rank and possessions that existed in the Visigothic and Frankish Kingdoms, and — as glimpses afforded by the earliest parts of the Iliad show — in Mycenaean times. It is reserved for the future to develop a true nobility and clergy in Russia. [Return]

¹⁴ As a treaty of reciprocal possession by the two parties which is made effective by the reciprocal use of their sex properties. [Return]

¹⁵ Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden (1915), p. 5. [Return]

¹⁶ “So, then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.” [Return]

¹⁷ The case of Egypt is of course similar. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁸ Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 260. [Return]

¹⁹ In contrast, the Spanish word “Hidalgo” means “son of somebody.” — Tr. [Return]

²⁰ Conversely, it can successfully be controverted — and often has been so in the Chinese and Classical, Indian and Western philosophies — but it does not get abolished. [Return]

²¹ The possession of movable things (food, equipment, arms) comes later, and is of much lower symbolic weight. It occurs widely in the animal world. The bird’s nest, on the contrary, is a property of plantlike kind. [Return]

²² Property in this most significant sense — the having grown up with something — refers therefore less to the particular person than to the family tree to which he belongs. In every quarrel within a peasant or even within a princely family, this is the deep and violent element. The master for the time being holds possession only in the name of the family line. Hence, too, the terror of death without heirs.Property also is a Time symbol, and consequently it is closely related to marriage, which is a firm plantlike intergrowth and mutual possession of two human beings, so real as to be even reflected in an increasing facial similarity. [Return]

²³ See these headings in Ency. Brit., XI. ed. — TV. [Return]

²⁴ After death the teachers of error are excluded from the eternal bliss of the textbook and cast into the purgatorial fires of footnotes, whence, purged by the intercession of the believer, they ascend into the paradise of the paragraphs. [Return]

²⁵ Black Jews, who are smiths to a man. [Return]

²⁶ The genuinely primitive Mir, contrary to the assertions of enthusiastic socialists and pan slavists, dates only from after 1600, and has been abolished since 1861. Here the soil is communal soil, and the villagers are as far as possible held fast, in order to ensure that the tilling of this soil shall cover the demands of taxation. [Return]

²⁷ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XI, pp. 94, 786, or any histories of German literature. — Tr. [Return]

²⁸ See, further, below. [Return]

²⁹ Brentano, Byzant. Volkswirtschaft (1917), p. 15. [Return]

³⁰ Even I-wang (934-909) was obliged to leave conquered territories to his vassals, who put in counts and reeves of their own choice. [Return]

³¹ See H. Delbrück, Gesch. der Kriegskunst, Vol. II, Book I, Ch. x; or C.W.C. Oman, Art of War: Middle Ages, Ch. i. — Tr. [Return]

³² The slave in the Classical sense disappears automatically and completely in these centuries — one of the most significant indications that the Classical world feeling, and with it its economic feeling, were extinct. [Return]

³³ Thus, later, under Justinian, Belisarius could furnish seven thousand cavalry from his own domains for the Gothic War. Very few German princes could have done so much in Charles V’s time. [The last of such armies in Western history was the army of the House of Condé in the seventeenth century. These centuries of ours “correspond” with the period that set in with Justinian. — Tr.] [Return]

³⁴ Pöhlmann, Röm. Kaiserzeit (Pflugk-Harttungs Weltgesch., I, pp. 200, et seq.). [Return]

³⁵ In spite of Ed. Meyer (Gesch. d. Altertums, I, § 243). [Return]

³⁶ Our marshal and the Chinese sse-ma, chamberlain and Chen, high steward and ta-tsai, high bailiff and nan, earl and peh (the Chinese ranks as in Schindler, Das Priestertum im alten China, p. 61, et seq.). Precisely corresponding Egyptian grades in Ed. Meyer, Gesch. des Altertums, I, §222; Byzantine in the “Notitia Dignitatum” (derived in part from the Sassanid Court). In the Classical city-states certain official titles of ancient origin suggest court functions (Colacretae, Prytanes, Consuls). See further below. [Return]

³⁷ Hardy, Indische Religionsgesch., p. 160. [Return]

³⁸ M. Graftet, Coutumes matrimoniales de la Chine antique, T’oung Pao (1912), pp. 517, et seq. [Return]

³⁹ The tournament was an institution in the other, western, half of the Magian world as well. — Tr. [Return]

⁴⁰ The life of John Chrysostom is an instance. [Return]

⁴¹ Another example (beloved of artists) stands to this day in the town of San Gimigniano, which is almost nothing but a group of family towers ranging up to 150 ft. in height. — Tr. [Return]

⁴² Ambrogio Spinola is a case in point. — Tr. [Return]

⁴³ The memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon give a vivid picture of this evolution. [Return]

⁴⁴ Corresponding to our seventeenth century. [Return]

⁴⁵ K.J. Neumann, Die Grundherrschaft der römischen Republik (1900); Ed. Meyer, Kl. Schriften, pp. 351, et. seq. [Return]

⁴⁶ A. Rosenberg, Studien zur Entstehung der Plebs, Herm. XLVIII (1913), pp. 359, et seq. [Return]

Chapter 11

¹ Hence such codes throw out the privileges of nobility and clergy and sustain those of money and intellect, and display a frank preference for movable as against real property. [Return]

² The corresponding attempt of the absolutist Stuarts to introduce Roman Law into England was defeated chiefly by the Puritan jurist Coke (d. 1634) — yet another proof that the spirit of laws is always a party spirit. [Return]

³ Above all in connection with divorce, in which the civil and the ecclesiastical views both hold good, literally side by side. [Return]

⁴ Thus come about the much satirized forms of the “patrol” or “barrack state,” as opponents call it with an unintelligent scorn. Similar points of view appear also in Chinese and Greek constitutional theories (O. Franke, Studien zur Geschichte des konfuzianischen Dogmas(1910), pp. 211, et seq.; Pöhlmann, Geschichte der sozialen Frage und der Sozialismus in der antiken Welt (1912). On the other hand, the political tastes of, for example, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who as a Classicist opposed the individual to the State, belong, not to political history at all, but to literature. For what he looked at was, not the capacity of the State to thrive in the real State world around it, but its private existence within itself, without regard to the fact that such an ideal could not endure for an instant in the face of a neglected outer situation. It is a basic error of the ideologues that, in concentrating on the private life and referring to it the whole inner structure of the State, they entirely ignore the latter’s position in point of outward power, though this in fact completely conditions its freedom for the inward development. The difference between the French and the German Revolutions, for example, consists in the fact that the one commanded the external situation and therewith the internal also, while the other commanded neither and was foredoomed to farce. [Return]

⁵ Which is most definitely not identical with economic history in the sense of the materialist historian. More of this in the next chapter. [Return]

⁶ It is to be noted that the author uses the terms “horizontal” and “vertical” here in the reverse sense to that in which they commonly figure in present day political literature, although in economic works the usage is the same as that of the text. — Tr. [Return]

⁷ Attention is drawn to this phrase, so as to avoid misconceptions as to the meaning of “subject” in the sequel. — Tr. [Return]

⁸ Compare the position of the aristocratic families of the South in the history of the United States up to 1850-60. — Tr. [Return]

⁹ For in those centuries the high dignities of the Church were invariably given to the nobility of Europe, who put the political qualities of the blood at her service. From this school in turn emanated statesmen like Richelieu, Mazarin, and Talleyrand, to name but a few. [Return]

¹⁰ I.e., Domesday Book. — Tr. [Return]

¹¹ Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Altertums, I, § 244. [Return]

¹² Even by Chinese critics. See, however, Schindler, Das Priestertum im alten China , I, pp. 61, et seq.; Conrady, China, p. 533. [Return]

¹³ “Compotes,” “contrarotulus” (the counter roll retained for checking), “quittancia,” “recordatum.” [Return]

¹⁴ “For the ruler of the Middle there is no foreign land” (Kung-yang). “The heaven speaks not; it causes its thoughts to be promulgated by a man” (Tung Chung-shu). His errors affect the whole Cosmos and bring about cataclysms in Nature (O. Franke, Zur Geschichte des konfuzianischen Dogmas (1920), pp. 212, et seq., 244, et seq.). Such mystic universalism was completely alien to Indian and Classical state notions. [Return]

¹⁵ It must not be forgotten that the immense domains of the Church had become hereditary fiefs of the bishops and archbishops, who were no more disposed than the lay peers to permit interferences on the part of the overlord. [Return]

¹⁶ After the overthrow of the Tyrannis, c. 500, the two regents of the Roman patriciate bear the title praetor or judex. But it seems to me probable that these go back beyond the Tyrannis and even the preceding oligarchic period into that of the kingship proper, and that as court offices they have the same origin as our Herzog, duke (prae-itor); Heerwart, in Athens polemarch; and Graf, earl (“Ding-graf”hereditary arbiter, in Athens archon). The name “consul” (from 366) is philologically thoroughly archaic, and therefore implies no new creation, but the renascence of a title (king’s adviser?) which oligarchic sentiment had long repudiated. [Return]

¹⁷ Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, I, 1, pp. 214, et seq. [Return]

¹⁸ The Spartiates mustered in the best period of the sixth century some 4000 warriors, out of a total population of nearly 300,000, including Perioeci and Helots (Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., III, §264). The Roman families must at that time have been of about the same strength relatively to the clientela and the Latins. [Return]

¹⁹ Men’s messes. See the article Συσσίτια in Smith’s Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. — Tr. [Return]

²⁰ Ed. Meyer, Geschichte des Alt., I, §264. [Return]

²¹ Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., I, §267, et seq. [Return]

²² See Ehrenberg, Die Rechtsidee im frühen Griechentum (1921), pp. 65, et seq. [Return]

²³ F. Cumont, Mysterien der Mithra (1910), pp. 74, et seq. The Sassanid government, which about A.D. 300 changed from the feudal union to the aristocratic State, was in all respects the pattern for Byzantium in ceremonial, in the knightly character of its Empire, in administrative management, and above all in the type of its Ruler. Cf. also A. Christensen, L’ Empire des Sassanides, le peuple, l’ état, la cour (Copenhagen, 1907). [Return]

²⁴ Ed. Meyer, Kl. Schriften, p. 146. [Return]

²⁵ Krumbacher, Byzant. Literaturgesch., p. 918. [Return]

²⁶ A bright light is thrown upon the formation of this picture by the fact that the descendants of the repeatedly overthrown dynasties of Hia and Shang reigned in the states of Ki-Sung throughout the Chôu period (Schindler, Das Priestertum im alten China, I, p. 30). This shows, firstly, that the picture of the Empire was mirrored back on some earlier or even perhaps a contemporary eminence of these states; and, secondly and above all, that here too “dynasty” was not what we currently mean by the name, but followed some quite different idea of the family. We may compare the fiction which made the German King, who was always chosen on Frankish territory and crowned in the sepulchral chapel of Charlemagne, into a “Frank,” so that if circumstances had been different, there might have evolved the notion of a Frankish dynasty running from Charles to Conradin (see Amira, German. Recht in Herm. Paul, Grundriss, III, p. 147, note). From the Confucian age of enlightenment this picture became the basis of a State theory, and later still it was turned to account by the Caesars (p. 313). [Return]

²⁷ O. Franke, Studien zur Gesch. d. Konfuz. Dogmas, pp. 247, 251. [Return]

²⁸ An illuminating example is the “personal union” of the Ki and Tseng states, contested as contrary to law (Franke, op. cit., p. 151). [Return]

²⁹ Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., I, §281. [Return]

³⁰ G. Busolt, Griech. Staatskundt (1920), pp. 319, et. seq. U. von Wilamowitz (Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen, 1910, p. 53), in disputing the existence of the patriarchal kingdom, misunderstands the immense difference between the conditions of the eighth century, indicated in the Odyssey, and those of the tenth. [Return]

³¹ A. Rosenberg, Der Staat der alten Italiker (1913), pp. 75, et seq. [Return]

³² Estate or Class was the basis, too, of the two great political associations in Byzantium, which are quite wrongly described as “Circus parties.” These Blues and Greens called themselves “Demoi” and had their regular leaders. The circus was simply like the Palais Royal of 1789, the scene of public manifestations, and behind them were the class associations of the Senate. When in 520 Anastasius I gave effect to the Monophysite tendency, the Greens sang orthodox hymns all day there, and so forced the Emperor publicly to cry off. The Western counterpart to this is formed by the Parisian parties under the “three Henries” (1580), the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Savonarola’s Florence, and above all the insurgent faction in Rome under Pope Eugene IV. The suppression of the Nika Rebellion by Justinian in 532 was thus also the foundation of State absolutism vis-à-vis the Estates. [Return]

³³ This contrast gives rise to a corresponding contrast in idea of colonization. Whereas, e.g., the Prussian sovereigns invited settlers to their land (Salzburg Protestants, French Huguenots), Gelon forcibly transferred the populations of whole cities into Syracuse, which thus became the first megalopolis of the Classical world (c. 480). [Return]

³⁴ The Greek lecythi found in graves on the Esquiline date form this period. [Return]

³⁵ Wissowa, Religion der Römer, p. 242. [Return]

³⁶ W. Schulze, Zur Geschichte lateinischen Eigennamen, pp. 379, et. seq., 580, et seq. [Return]

³⁷ This is seen also in the relation of the Pontifex Maximus to the Rex Sacrorum — the latter with the three great Flamens to the kingship, the Pontifices and the Vestals to the aristocracy. [Return]

³⁸ This is clearly to be seen from Wilcken, Grundzüge der Papyruskunde (1912), pp. 1, et seq. [Return]

³⁹ Ed. Meyer, Caesars Monarchic (1918), p. 308. [Return]

⁴⁰ Plutarch and Appian describe the masses of humanity that moved in by all the roads of Italy to vote on Tiberius Gracchus’s land bills. But this in itself shows that nothing of the sort had ever happened before; and immediately after his violence upon Octavius, Tiberius Gracchus saw downfall staring him in the face because the masses had streamed off home again and were not to be assembled a second time. In Cicero’s day a Comitia often consisted only in speeches by a few politicians, without participation by others; but never did it occur to a Roman to transfer the place of voting to the residence of the individual voter — nor even to the Italians when they were fighting for citizenship in 90 B.C. So strong was the feeling of the Polis. [Return]

⁴¹ In the Western dynasty states the domestic law of each is valid for its territory and applies therefore to all persons present therein, irrespective of allegiance. In the city-state, on the contrary, the validity of its domestic law for a person arises from that person’s possession of citizenship; civitas, therefore, means infinitely more than present day nationality, for without it a man was without rights at all — as a “person,” non-existent. [Return]

⁴² Gercke-Norden, Einl. i.d. Alt.-Wiss., II, p. 202. [Return]

⁴³ Busolt, Griech Geschichte, II, pp. 346, et seq. [Return]

⁴⁴ Cf. pp. 224 et seq. Fronde and Tyrannis have as intimate a connection with Puritanism — the same epochal phase, but in the religious instead of the political world — as the Reformation with the aristocratic State, and the “Second Religiousness “ with Caesarism. [Return]

⁴⁵ G. Wissowa, Religion der Römer, pp. 297, et seq. [Return]

⁴⁶ Beloch, Griech. Geschichte, I, i, p. 354. [Return]

⁴⁷ Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., §281. [Return]

⁴⁸ Ibid., §§ 280, et seq. [Return]

⁴⁹ On the means taken to secure the succession. [Return]

⁵⁰ Ed. Meyer, op. cit., §286. [Return]

⁵¹ Ibid., §283. A. Erman, Die Mabnworte eines ägyptischen Propheten (Sitz. Preuss. Akad.), 1919, pp. 804, et seq. [Return]

⁵² S. Plath, Verfassung und Verevaltung Chinas (Abb. Munch. Ak., 1864), p. 97, O. Franke, Studien z. Gesch. d. Konfuz. Dogmas, pp. 255, et seq. [Return]

⁵³ After armed rebellion. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁴The fifty year interval of these critical points, which is seen with special distinctness in the clear historical structure of the Baroque, but is recognizable also in the sequence of the three Punic Wars, is yet another hint that the Cosmic flowings in the form of human lives upon the surface of a minor star are not self-contained and independent, but stand in deep harmony with the unending movedness of the universe. In a small but noteworthy book, R. Mewes, Die Kriegs und Geistesperioden im Völkerleben unde Verkündigung des nächsten Weltkrieges (1896), the relation of those war periods with weather periods, sunspot cycles, and certain conjunctures of the planets is established, and a great war foretold accordingly for the period 1910-20. But these and numerous similar connections that come within the reach of our senses (cf. pp. 2, et seq.) veil a secret that we have to respect and not to infringe with causal expositions or mystical brain specters. [Return]

⁵⁵ See C. von B(inder)-K(rieglstein), Geist und Stoff im Kriege (1896); F. N. Maude, War and the World’s Life (1907), and other works by the same author; also, in more summary terms, the articles “Army” and “French Revolutionary Wars” by the present translator in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁶ “Rule, Britannia” is an eighteenth century product. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁷ For this, and what follows, see my Preussentum und Sozialismus, pp. 31, et seq. [Return]

⁵⁸ Mr. Asquith (Lord Oxford) was the first British Prime Minister to be officially so styled. — Tr. [Return]

⁵⁹ “Landed” and “funded” interests (J. Hatschek, Engl. Verfassungsgeschichte, 1913, pp. 589, et seq.). Walpole, the organizer of the Whig party after 1714, used to describe himself and Townshend as “the Firm;” and this “firm” with various changes of proprietorship governed without limitation till 1760. [Return]

⁶⁰ R. von Pöhlmann, Griech. Gesch. (1914), pp. 223-45. [Return]

⁶¹ Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt. V §809. If Latin became a literary language, only very late — after Alexander — the only deduction to be made from the fact is that under the Tarquins Greek and Etruscan must have been in general use — which, after all, goes without saying for a city that was of a size and position to have relations with Carthage; that waged war in alliance with Cyme and made use of the Treasury of Massalia at Delphi; whose standard weights and measures were Dorian; whose mode of warfare was Sicilian; and whose walls contained a large foreign colony. Livy (IX, 36), following older statements, observes that about 300 the Roman boy was still brought upon Etruscan culture, as he was later on Greek. The ancient form “Ulixes” for Odysseus shows that the Homeric sagas were not only known, but popularly known here. The provisions of the Twelve Tables (c. 450) agree with the more or less contemporary law of Gortyn in Crete, not merely as to substance, but even stylistically — so exactly that the Roman patricians who drew them up must have been entirely at home with juristic Greek. [Return]

⁶² This measure — a usurpation of the administration by the “nation in arms” — corresponds to the setting up of Consular Tribunes in Rome in the military disturbances of 438. [Return]

⁶³ According to B. Niese. Modern investigators are right in the view that the Decemvirate was at first intended to be temporary; but the question is — what were the views of the party that backed them concerning the new constitutional order that was to follow. It was on that that a crisis had inevitably to come. [Return]

⁶⁴ A. Wahl, Vorgeschichte d. franz.. Revolution, II (1907); this work is the only presentation of the subject from the world historical point of view. All Frenchmen, even the most modern, such as Aulard and Sorel, see things from one or another partisan angle. It is materialistic nonsense to talk of economic causes for a Revolution like this. Even the peasantry was better off than in most other countries, and in any case it was not among them that it began. It was amongst the educated that the catastrophe started, the educated of all the classes — in the high nobility and the clergy even sooner than in the higher bourgeoisie, because the course of the first assembly of Notables (1787) had disclosed the possibility of radically reshaping the form of government according to class desires. [Return]

⁶⁵ Even the highly provincial March Revolution of 1848 in Germany was a purely urban matter; hence the vanishingly small proportion of the population involved as participants. [Return]

⁶⁶ Hence also the exclusive bourgeois character of the National Guard in France from 1815 to 1851, the period between two phases of popular Tyrannis. In the coup d’ état by which Napoleon III seized the throne, Paris was filled with regular troops, and the National Guard was forbidden to assemble on pain of death. — Tr. [Return]

⁶⁷ J. Hatschek, Engl. Verfassungsgesch., p. 588. [Return]

⁶⁸ On the other side of the Channel, it is well known that the Rothschild fortune was founded in a dramatic play upon the varying news from the front in Belgium.

In the second phase of the Franco-German War of 1870-71 the bankers of Frankfurt took up holdings in the loans floated by the French Government of National Defense. — Tr. [Return]

⁶⁹ But even during the Reign of Terror in the middle of Paris, there flourished the establishment of Dr. Belhomme, in which members of the highest aristocracy ate and drank and danced out of all danger for so long as they could pay (G. Lenôtre, Das revolutionäre Paris, p. 409). [Return]

⁷⁰ The great movement which makes use of the catchwords of Marx has not delivered the entrepreneur into the power of the worker, but both into that of the Bourse. [Return]

⁷¹ Both the old parties possessed clear lines of tradition back to 1680. [Return]

⁷² The moral and political “Enlightenment” movement was in England also a product of the Third Estate (Priestley and Paley, Paine, Godwin), and for that reason was unable to grasp things with the fine discrimination of a Shaftesbury. [Return]

⁷³ Pelham, the successor of Walpole, paid to members of the Commons, through his secretary, £500 to £800 at the end of each session according to the value of the services rendered by each recipient to the Government — i.e., the Whig party. The party agent Dodington described his parliamentary activities in these words: “I never attended a debate if I could help it, and I never missed a division that I could possibly take part in. I heard many arguments that convinced me, but never one that influenced my vote.” [Return]

⁷⁴ Here it was actually the interest of bourgeois and “enlightenment” ideals that the personal regime of dictatorship was thought to favor, for the opposition to these ideas lay in the strict state ideal of the polis, which according to Isocrates was marked with the curse of inability to die. [Return]

⁷⁵ Diodorus XIV, 7. The drama was repeated in 317, when Agathocles the ex-potter let loose his mercenary bands and the mob upon the new upper classes. After the massacre the “people” of the “purified city” assembled and conferred the dictature upon the “saviour of true and genuine freedom” (Diodorus XIX, 6, et seq.). On the whole movement see Busolt, Griech. Staatskunde, pp. 396, et seq., and Pöhlmann, Gesch. d. soz. Frage, I, pp. 416, et seq. [Return]

⁷⁶ Already that part of the Prussian army which had been in Russia had declared against Napoleon — and that, though its general, Yorck, was no liberal, but the old strict type of the Frederician officer. — Tr. [Return]

⁷⁷ Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., IV, §§626, 630. [Return]

⁷⁸ H. Delbrück, Gesch. d. Kriegskunst (1908), I, p. 142. [Return]

⁷⁹ Three to six “tribuni militares consulari potestate” instead of the Consuls. Just at this juncture, as the result of the introduction of pay and longer duration of service with the colors, there must have come into being a nucleus of true professional soldiers, who would have the election of centurions in their own hands and by whom the spirit of the army was determined. It is entirely erroneous to speak of a peasant levy at this stage, quite apart from the fact that the four great city tribes contributed a considerable part of the rank and file and a part, too, whose influence was even greater than its numerical strength. Even in the “good old days” picture presented to us by Livy and others we can clearly perceive the influence exerted by the standing formations upon the contests of parties. [Return]

⁸⁰ It is perhaps not a mere coincidence that 367 is the year of Dionysius’s death. [Return]

⁸¹ According to K.J. Neumann, this goes back to the great Censor. [Return]

⁸² According to Roman law, the freed slave at once acquired citizenship, with some few limitations. As the slave material came from all over the Mediterranean region and most of all from the East, it was a vast rootless mass that collected in the four urban tribes, alien from all the tendencies of the old Roman blood; and it quickly destroyed these when, after the Gracchan movement, it had succeeded in bringing its weight of numbers to bear with effect. [Return]

⁸³ From the end of the fourth century the nobility developed into a closed circle of families that had, or claimed to have, consuls among their ancestors. The more strictly this condition was enforced, the more frequent were the falsifications of the old consul lists in order to “legitimize” rising families of strong race and talent. The first (and truly revolutionary) outburst of forgery occurs in the epoch of Appius Claudius the Censor, when the curule aedile C. Flavius, the son of a slave, put the list in order — that was the time when even royal cognomina were discovered amongst plebeian families. The second was in the days of the battle of Pydna (168), when the dominance of the nobility began to assume Caesarian forms (E. Kornemann, Der Priesterkodex in der Regia, 1912, pp. 56, et seq.). Of the 200 Consulates between 232 and 133, 159 fell to 26 families, and thereafter — blood quality being exhausted, but the form as such being all the more studiously preserved in consequence — the rise of novi homines like Cato and Cicero became a rare phenomenon. [Return]

⁸⁴ Another instance, among many, is its role in preparing the German crash of 1918. [Return]

⁸⁵ And even in France, where the judicial class in the parlements openly scorned the Government, and with impunity tore down royal proclamations from the walls and put up their own arrêts instead (R. Holtzmann, Francos. Verfassungsgesch. (1910), p. 353); where “orders were given, but not obeyed, laws enacted, but not executed” (A. Wahl, Vorgesch. d. franz. Revolution, l, 29 and passim); where high finance could overthrow Turgot and anyone else whose reform schemes disquieted it; where the whole educated world, headed by princes and nobles, prelates and generals, was Anglomaniac and applauded opposition in any shape or form — even there nothing would have happened but for the sudden concurrence of a set of incidents — the fashion which set in amongst French officers of aiding the American republicans in their struggle with the English King; the diplomatic reverse in Holland (27 Oct. 1787) in the middle of the reforming activity of the Government; and the perpetual change of ministers under pressure from irresponsible quarters. In the British Empire, the falling away of the Colonies was the result of attempts of high Tory circles (in collusion with George III, but in reality of course in their own interests) to strengthen the Royal power. This party possessed in the Colonies a strong contingent of royalists, notably in the South: these elements, fighting on the British side, decided the battle of Camden, and after the final victory of the rebels mostly emigrated to Canada, which had remained loyal. [Return]

⁸⁶ In 1793 there were 306 members of the House of Commons who were elected by 160 persons in all. Old Sarum, the constituency of the elder Pitt, consisted of one tenement, returning two members. [Return]

⁸⁷ Afterwards — from 1832. — the English nobility itself, through a series of prudent measures, drew the bourgeoisie into cooperationwith it, but under its continued guidance and, above all, in the framework of tradition, within which consequently the young talent grew up. Democracy thus actualized itself here so that the Government remained strictly “in form” — the old aristocratic form — while the individual was free to practice politics according to his bent. This transition, in a peasantless society dominated by business interests, was the most remarkable achievement of inner politics in the nineteenth century. [Return]

⁸⁸ Early, that is, in the post revolutionary era here considered. — Tr. [Return]

⁸⁹ The reassertion of this tradition after the emergency army of the Wars of Liberation (1812-15) had dispersed into the body of the community is a remarkable story, in which military and political standpoints cannot be separated. See Vidal de la Blache, La Régéneration de l’Armée Prusse (1910), Ch. vi. — Tr. [Return]

⁹⁰ See Preussentum und Sozialismus, pp. 40, et seq. [Return]

⁹¹ The genesis of the Roman Tribunate was a blind incident, the happy consequences of which no one really foresaw. Western Constitutions, on the contrary, have been thoroughly thought out and their effects precisely calculated — whether the calculation proved to be correct or incorrect, the care is undeniable. [Return]

⁹² From the few European works that concern themselves with questions of ancient Chinese history, it emerges that Chinese literature contains a very great amount of material bearing on this period, which corresponds in innumerable parallels to our own present time. But there is a total lack of any political treatment of it that can be taken seriously. References: Hübotter, Aus den Plänen der Kämpfenden Reiche (1912); Piton, “The Six Great Chancellors of Tsin,” China Review, XIII, 202, 255, 365, XIV, 3; Ed. Chavannes, Mém. hist, de Se-ma-tsien (1895 and following); Pfizmair, Sitz. Wien Akad., XLIII (1863) (“Tsin”), XLIV (“Tsu”); A. Tschepe, Histoire du royaume de Ou(1896), and de Tchou (1903). [Return]

⁹³ Corresponding more or less to the province of Shen-si. [Return]

⁹⁴ On the middle Yang-tse-kiang. [Return]

⁹⁵ Biography 13 of Sze-ma-tsien. So far as the translated evidences allow us to judge, the preparation and dispositions of these campaigns, the boldness of the operations by which he drove the enemy on to ground where he could beat him, and the novel tactical execution of the separate battles, stamp Pe-Ki as one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, a figure worthy indeed of adequate treatment by a military expert. It is from this period that we have the authoritative work of Sun-tse on War: Giles, Sun-Tse on the Art of War (1910). [Or Capt. E. R. Calthrop, The Book of War — Sun and Wu (1908). — Tr.] [Return]

⁹⁶ Now approximately Shan-tung and Pe-chi-li. [Return]

⁹⁷ Piton “Lu-puh-Weih,” China Rev. XIII. pp. 365 et seq. [Return]

⁹⁸ Even if the Chinese authors themselves misunderstood the expression in the same, or anything like the same, way as their Western translators, the fact would only prove that the appreciation of political problems vanished as rapidly in the Chinese Imperial Age as in fact it did in the Roman — because they were no longer personally and livingly experienced. The much admired Sze-ma-tsien is after all a compiler of the same rank as Plutarch (with whom he corresponds in date also). The high point of historical comprehension, which presumes an equivalent experience in life, must for China have lain in the period of the Contending States, as it lies for us in the nineteenth century and after. [Return]

⁹⁹ Both, like most of the leading statesmen of the time, were pupils of Kwei-ku-tse, whose knowledge of men, deep sense of the historically possible, and command of the diplomatic technique of the age (the “Art of the vertical and the horizontal”) must have made him one of the most influential personalities of the period. Another figure of the same sort of weight after him was the thinker and war theorist above alluded to, Sun-tse, who amongst others was the tutor of the Chancellor Lui-Si.

[Sun-Tse’s book of war, as presented in Calthrop’s translation, is comparable to nothing in Western military literature short of Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege. Clausewitz was a contemporary and product of the Napoleonic epoch, and the glow of Romanticism has not yet passed from him; Sun, on the other hand, came “later,” and his atmosphere is the shrewd factual atmosphere of pre-Caesarism. — Tr.] [Return]

¹⁰⁰ A story is told of Sun, that when for a jest (or a demonstration of tactics) opposed forces were made up from the court ladies, one of the commanders, the sovereign’s favorite wife, was executed by Sun’s command for disobeying an order. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁰¹ Frederick’s “conscripts” (Landeskinder) were a long service element, small in proportion to the population, and of serf status. Only the relative poverty of Prussia compelled this much of departure from the then normal procedure of recruiting volunteers, to which the Prussian army reverted as soon as its treasury could afford to do so. Maurice de Saxe is the one outstanding soldier of the period who advocated universal citizen service. But the famous “Rêveries” were written (“in thirteen sleepless nights “) in 1732, before he had held high command. The military works of Leibniz touch upon the subject, but he was a practical man as well as a philosopher, and his detailed proposals are in the spirit of the time. On the contrary, the pure philosopher Spinoza definitely advocated universal service. —Tr. [Return]

¹⁰² Large, that is, relatively to the general development of Classical technics in other fields, which was of the slightest — not in any way outstanding if judged by, say, Assyrian or Egyptian standards. [Return]

¹⁰³ The book of the Socialist Moh-ti, of this period, treats of universal love of mankind in its first part, of fortress artillery in its second — a singular example of contraposition of truths and facts. Forke in Ostasiat. Ztschr., VIII (Hirth number). [Return]

¹⁰⁴ A whole literature exists for Napoleon’s “case shot attack,” which was closely studied in the years before 1914 with the definite aim of finding a key to victories that the mechanical developments in the defensive rifle had made doubtful. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁰⁵ On the side of the North, more than 1.5 million men out of barely 20 million inhabitants. [Return]

[The total of men of military age in the North was 4,600,000, of whom 2,780,000 actually en listed. The figure of 1,700,000 is a reduction to a three year level — i.e., men who served through out the war counting as 1 1/3 each and men who served for one year as 1/3 each. The Southern states put into the field, on the same three years’ basis, 900,000 out of 1,065,000 men of military age. (Dodge, Birds Eye View of our Civil War.) — Tr.] [Return]

¹⁰⁶ To which should be added, though on a small scale, the first serious attempts at submarines, machine guns, and magazine rifles. — Tr. [Return]

¹⁰⁷ Amongst the wholly new problems was that of rapidly restoring railways and bridges; the bridge at Chattanooga, for the heaviest military trains, 240 meters long and 30 meters high, was built in 4.5 days. [Return]

¹⁰⁸ Modern Japan belongs to the Western Civilization no less than “modern” Carthage of the third century to the Classical. [Return]

¹⁰⁹ For the politico-social history of the Arabian World there is the same lack of deep and penetrating research as for the Chinese. Only the political evolution of the Western margin up to Diocletian, regarded hitherto as within the Classical pale, is an exception. [Return]

¹¹⁰ It was a few thousands only that accompanied the first conquerors and spread themselves from Tunis to Turkestan, and these everywhere constituted themselves a self-contained and close Estate in the entourage of the new potentates. An “Arabian Völkerwanderung” is out of the question. [Return]

¹¹¹ J. Wellhausen, Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz. (1902), pp. 309, et seq. [Return]

¹¹² Compare the inner divisions of the English Parliamentary army in and after the Civil Wars. — TV. [Return]

¹¹³ K. Dieterich, Byz. Charakterköpfe, p. 54: “Since thou wilt have an answer from us, receive it then! Paul has said some in the Church are ordained by God to be Apostles, some prophets, but he said nothing about Emperors — we will not follow though it were an angel that bade us; how much less if thou!” [Return]

¹¹⁴ Huart, Gesch. d. Araber (1914), I, p. 299. [Return]

¹¹⁵ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., art. “Carmathians.” — Tr. [Return]

¹¹⁶ Krumbacher, Byz. Lit.-Gesch., p. 969. [Return]

¹¹⁷ For all this see Krumbacher, op. cit., pp. 969-90; C. Neumann, Die Weltstellung des Byz. Reiches vor den Kreuzzügen (1894), pp. 21, et seq. [Return]

¹¹⁸ Krumbacher, op. cit., 993. [Return]

¹¹⁹ And perhaps not in Baghdad alone, for the gifted Maniakes, who was hailed by the army in Sicily as Emperor and fell in 1043 in his march on Byzantium, must have been a Turk. [Return]

¹²⁰ 1785-1580. See, for the following, Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt. §§198, et seq.; Weill, La Fin du moyen empire égyptien (1918). That Ed. Meyer’s assignment is correct as compared with the 1670 years of Petrie has long been proved by the thickness of the strata in which objects have been found and the tempo of the style evolution (Minoan included). Here it is demonstrated afresh by comparison with corresponding sections in the other Cultures. [Return]

¹²¹ Erman, “Mahnworte eines äegypt. Propheten” (Sitz. Preuss. Akad., 1919, pp. 804, et seq.): “The higher officials are displaced, the land robbed of its royalty by a few madmen, and the counselors of the old state pay their court to upstarts; administration has ceased, documents are destroyed, all social differences abolished, the courts fallen into the hands of the mob. The noble classes go hungry and in rags, their children are battered on the wall, and their mummies torn from the grave. Mean fellows become rich and swagger in the palaces on the strength of the herds and ships that they have taken from their rightful owners. Former slave girls become insolent and aliens lord it. Robbery and murder rule, cities are laid waste, public buildings burned down. The harvest diminishes, no one thinks now of cleanliness, births are few — and oh, that mankind might cease!” Here is the very picture of the megalopolitan and Late revolution, as it was enacted in the Hellenistic and in 1789 and 1871 in Paris. It is the world city masses, will-less tools of the ambition of leaders who demolish every remnant of order, who desire to see in the outer world the same chaos as reigns within their own selves. Whether these cynical and hopeless attempts start from alien intruders like the Hyksos or the Turks, or from slaves as in the case of Spartacus and Ail; whether the division of property is shouted for as at Syracuse or has a book for banner like Marxism — all this is superficial. It is wholly immaterial what slogans scream to the wind while the gates and the skulls are being beaten in. Destruction is the true and only impulse, and Caesarism the only issue. The world city, the land devouring demon, has set its rootless and futureless men in motion; and in destroying they die. [Return]

¹²² The Papyrus says: “ the archer folk from without” — that is, the barbarian mercenary troops. To these the native youth attached itself. [Return]

¹²³ Glance also at the Negro state in Iraq and the “contemporary” attempts of Spartacus, Sertorius, and Sextus Pompey, and we get a fair idea of the variety of the possibilities. Weill assumes, 1785-1765, the collapse of the Kingdom, a usurper (a general); 1765-1675, numerous small potentates, in the Delta wholly independent; 1675-1633, struggle for unity, especially the rulers of Thebes, with an ever increasing retinue of dependent rulers, including the Hyksos; 1633, victory of the Hyksos and defeat of the Thebans; 1591-1571, final triumph of the Thebans. [Return]

¹²⁴ As an inspiriting idea it may be retained; translated into actuality it will never be again. [Return]

¹²⁵ Piton, op. cit., p. 521. [Return]

¹²⁶ Hist., III,1. [Return]

¹²⁷ Including the constitution of the United States of America. Only thus can we account for the reverence that the American cherishes for it, even where he clearly sees its insufficiency. [Return]

¹²⁸ Caesar recognized this clearly. “Nihil esse rem publicam, appellationem modo sine corpore ac specie” (Suetonius, Caesar, 77). [Return]

¹²⁹ Cicero, in his Pro Sestio, draws attention to the fact that five people for each tribe attended plebiscites, and these really belonged to tribes other than that which they were representing. But these five were present only in order to have themselves bought by the possessors of the real power. Yet it was hardly fifty years since the Italians had died in masses for this franchise. [Return]

¹³⁰ And, strangely, Ed. Meyer also, in his masterpiece Caesars Monarchie, the one work of statesman like quality yet written about this epoch — and previously in his essay on Augustus (Kleine Schriften, pp. 441, et seq.). [Return]

¹³¹ De Republica, 54 B.C., a monograph intended for Pompey. [Return]

¹³² In Somnium Scipionis, VI, 26, he is a god who so rules the State quam hunc mundum ille princeps deus. [Return]

¹³³ It was with every justification that, in the presence of the corpse, Brutus called out the name of Cicero, while Antony, on his side, denounced him as the intellectual author of the deed. But this “freedom” meant nothing but the oligarchy of a few families, for the masses had long ago become tired of their rights. Nor is it in the least surprising that Money was behind Intellect in the murder, for the great fortunes of Rome saw in Caesarism the beginning of the end of their power. [Return]

¹³⁴ Taoism, on the other hand, was supported, as preaching the entire renunciation of politics. Said Shakespeare’s Caesar: 

“Let me have men about me that are fat, 

Sleek headed men and such as sleep o’nights.” [Return]

¹³⁵ Tacitus, even, failed to understand. He hated these first Caesars, because they defended themselves by every imaginable means against a stealthy opposition — in his own circles — an opposition that from Trajan’s time no longer existed. (Yet a little longer, and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius could himself be a Stoic. — Tr.) [Return]

Chapter 12

¹ “Empires perish, but a good verse stands,” said W. von Humboldt on the field of Waterloo. But, all the same, the personality of Napoleon preformed the history of the next century. Good verses! — he should have questioned a peasant by the wayside. They “stand” — for literary teaching. Plato is eternal — for philologists. But Napoleon inwardly rules us, all of us, our states and our armies, our public opinion, the whole of our political outlook, and the more effectually the less we are conscious of it. [Return]

² This is what is expressed in the English proverb: “Men, not measures,” which is the very key to the secrets of all political achievement. [Return]

³ The same, too, holds good of the Churches, which are different in kind from the Religion — namely, elements of the world of facts and, therefore, political and not religious in the type of their leadership. It was not the Christian evangel, but the Christian martyr, who conquered the world, and that which gave him his strength was not the doctrine, but the example, of the Man on the Cross. [Return]

⁴ It should scarcely need to be emphasized that this is the basic principle, not of an aristocratic regime, but of government itself. Cleon, Robespierre, Lenin, every gifted mass-leader, has treated his office thus. Anyone who genuinely felt himself as the delegate of the multitude, instead of as the regent of such as do not know what they want, would not remain master of his house for one day. The only question is whether the great popular leaders apply their powers for their own benefit or for that of others; and on that much might be said. [Return]

⁵ Originally an assembly of nineteen princes and free cities (1529). [Return]

⁶ Hence it is that on the soil of burgher equality the possession of money immediately takes the place of genealogical rank. [Return]

⁷ Compare also Wellhausen, Die relig.-polit. Oppositionsparteien im alten Islam (1901). [Return]

⁸ It is an important factor in the democracy of England and America that in the first the yeomanry had died out and in the second has never existed. The “farmer” is spiritually a suburban and in practice carries on his farming as an industry. Instead of villages, there are only fragments of megalopolis. [Return]

⁹ And wherever, as in Egypt, India, and the West, there exists a political opposition between the two primary Estates, there is also a clerical party — the party, so to speak, of the Church as distinct from religion and of the priest as distinct from the believer. [Return]

¹⁰ And with its content of race strength it has an excellent chance of successfully doing so. [Return]

¹¹ Plebs corresponds to the “Tiers” (burghers and yeomen) of the eighteenth century, populus to the megalopolitan masses of the nineteenth. The difference manifested itself in their respective attitudes towards the freed slaves, mostly of non-Italian origin. These the Plebs, as an order, sought to thrust away into as few tribes as possible, but in the Populus as a party they very soon came to play the decisive role. [Return]

¹² Simultaneously, too, the Roman Catholic Church quietly changed the basis of its politics from a class to a party, and did so with a strategic sureness that cannot be too much admired. In the eighteenth century it had been, as regards the style of its diplomacy, the allocation of its offices and the spirit of its higher circles, aristocratic through and through. Think of the type of the abbé, and of the prince prelates who became ministers and ambassadors, like the young Cardinal Rohan. Now, in the true liberal fashion, opinions took the place of origins, working power that of taste, and the great weapons of democracy — press, elections, money — were handled with a skill that liberalism proper rarely equaled and never surpassed. [Return]

¹³ For what follows see M. Gelzer, Die Nobilität d. röm. Republik (1912), pp. 43, et seq.; A Rosenberg, Untersuchungen zur röm. Centurienverfassung (1911), pp. 62, et seq. [Return]

¹⁴ The reputation of Tammany Hall in New York is universal, but the relations approximate to this condition in all countries ruled by parties. The American Caucus, which first distributes the offices of State amongst its members and then forces their names upon the mass electorate, was introduced into England by Joseph Chamberlain in his “National Liberal Federation,” and in Germany its advances have been rapid since 1919. [Return]

¹⁵ For the story of this tragic experiment, see Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., §987, et seq. [Return]

¹⁶ The “plans of the Contending States,” the Tchun-tsiu-fan-lu, and the biographies of Sze-ma-tsien are full of examples of the pedagogic in interventions of “wisdom” into the province of politics. [Return]

¹⁷ For this “Sun state” formed of slaves and day laborers see Pauly-Wissowa, Realencycl., 2, 961. Similarly, the revolutionary King Cleomenes III of Sparta was likewise under the’ influence of a Stoic, Sphaerus. One can understand why “philosophers and rhetors” — i.e., professional politicians, fantastics and subverters — were expelled again and again by the Roman Senate. [Return]

¹⁸ The early democracy, which in our case reaches up to Lincoln, Bismarck, and Gladstone, has to learn this by experience. The later democracy, in our case mature parliamentarism, starts out from it; here truths and facts finally separate out in the form of party ideals and party funds. It is the money that gives the real parliamentarian his sense of being freed from the dependence which is implicit in the naive idea that the elector has of his delegate. [Return]

¹⁹ That the mass all the same feels itself as freed is simply another outcome of the profound incompatibility between megalopolitan spirit and mature tradition. Its acts, so far from being in dependent, are in inward relation with its subjection to money rule. [Return]

²⁰ The German Constitution of 1919 — standing by virtue of its date on the verge of the decline of democracy — most naively admits a dictature of the party machines, which have attracted all rights into themselves and are seriously responsible to no one. The notorious system of proportional election and the Reichslist [see Ency. Brit., 1922. Supplement, II, 249. — Tr.] secures their self-recruitment. In place of the “people’s” rights, which were axiomatic in the Frankfurt Constitution of 1848, there is now only the right of parties, which, harmless as it sounds, really nurses within itself a Caesarism of the organizations. It must be allowed, however, that in this respect it is the most advanced of all the constitutions. Its issue is visible already. A few quite small alterations and it confers unrestricted power upon individuals. [Return]

²¹ And legislation, too, was bound up with an office. Even when, as a formality, acceptance or rejection by an assembly was requisite, the law in question could be brought in only by an official; for example, a Tribune. The constitutional demands of the masses, therefore (which in any case were mostly instigated by the real power holders), expressed themselves in the issue of the elections to office, as the Gracchan period shows. [Return]

²² Even Caesar, at fifty years of age, was obliged to play this comedy at the Rubicon for his soldiers because they were used to it and expected it when anything was asked of them. It corresponds to the “chest tones of deep conviction” of our political assemblies. [Return]

²³ But the Cleon type must obviously have existed also in contemporary Sparta, and in Rome at the time of the Consular Tribunes. [Return]

²⁴ Gelzer, Nobilität, p. 94; along with Ed. Meyer’s Caesar this book gives the best survey of Roman democratic methods. [Return]

²⁵ “Inaurari,” to which end Cicero recommended his friend Trebatius to Caesar. [Return]

²⁶ “Tributim ad prandium vocare,” Cicero, Pro Murena, 71. [Return]

²⁷ For from that time sesterces flowed through his hands by the million. The votive treasures of the Gallic temples which he put up for sale in Italy sent down the value of gold with a rush. From King Ptolemy he and Pompey extorted 144,000,000 (and Gabinius another 240,000,000) as the price of recognition. The Consul Aemilius Paullus (50) was bought for 36,000,000, Curio for 60,000,000. We can guess from such figures how enviable was the position of his closer associates. At the triumph of 46 every soldier in an army of well over 100,000 men received 24,000 sesterces, officers and other leaders much more. Yet at his death the state treasury was still full enough to secure Antony’s position. [Return]

²⁸ Gelzer, op. cit., p. 68. [Return]

²⁹ Extortion and corruption were the usual charges. As in those days these things were identical with politics, and the judges and plaintiffs had acted precisely in the same way as the defendants, the art consisted in using the forms of a well acted ethical passion to cover a party speech, of which the real import was only comprehensible to the initiated. This corresponds entirely with the modern parliamentary usage. The “people” would be very much astonished to see party opponents, after delivering wild speeches in the chamber (for the reporters) chatting together in the lobbies, or to be told how a party passionately champions a proposal after it has made certain by agreement with the other side that it will not be passed. In Rome, too, the judgment was not the important thing in these “trials”; it was enough if a defendant voluntarily left the city and so retired from the occupancy of, or candidature for, office. [Return]

³⁰ See Pöhlmann, Griech. Gesch. (1914), pp. 236, et seq. [Cf. Aristophanes, Wasps. — Tr.] [Return]

³¹ Thus it was possible for Rutilius Rufus to be condemned in the notorious case of 93, because as proconsul he had in accordance with his duty proceeded against the extortions of the concessionaire associations. [Return]

³² Radio broadcasting has now emerged to enable the leader to make personal conquests of the million, and no one can foretell the changes in political tactic that may ensue therefrom. — Tr. [Return]

³³ The most striking example of this for future generations will be the “War guilt” question, which is the question — who possesses the power, through control of press and cable in all parts of the world, to establish in world opinion that truth which he needs for his political ends and to maintain it for so long as he needs it? An altogether different question (which only in Germany is confused with the first) is the purely scientific one — to whose interest was it that an event about which there was already a whole literature should occur in the summer of 1914 in particular? [Return]

³⁴ In preparation for the World War the press of whole countries was brought financially under the command of London and Paris, and the peoples belonging to them reduced to an unqualified intellectual slavery. The more democratic the inner form of a nation is, the more readily and completely it succumbs to this danger. This is the style of the twentieth century. Today a democrat of the old school would demand, not freedom for the press, but freedom from the press; but meantime the leaders have changed themselves into parvenus who have to secure their position vis-à-vis the masses. [Return]

³⁵ The great Burning of the Books in China was innocuous by comparison. [Return]

³⁶ Herein lies the secret of why all radical (i.e., poor) parties necessarily become the tools of the money powers, the Equites, the Bourse. Theoretically their enemy is capital, but practically they attack, not the Bourse, but Tradition on behalf of the Bourse. This is as true of today as it was for the Gracchan age, and in all countries. Fifty percent of mass leaders are procurable by money, office, or opportunities to “come in on the ground floor,” and with them they bring their whole party. [Return]

³⁷ See Preussentum und Sozialismus, p. 41, et seq. [Return]

Chapter 13

¹ Political Discourses, 1752. [Return]

² The celebrated Wealth of Nations, 1776. [Return]

³ It was the opinion of the expert, almost everywhere, that the economic consequences of general mobilization would compel the breaking up of hostilities within a few weeks. [Return]

⁴ “Negotium” (by which is meant every form of gainful activity; business is commercium) “negat otium neque quaerit veram quietem qua est deus,” are the words of the Decretum Gratiani (cf. p. 77). [Return]

⁵ Pilate’s question settles also the relation of economy to science. The religious man will always try in vain, catechism in hand, to improve the instincts of his political environment. But it goes on its way undisturbed and leaves him to his thoughts. The saint can only choose between adapting himself to this environment — and then he becomes a Church politician and conscienceless — and fleeing from it into a hermitage or even into the Beyond. But the same happens also — and here not without a comic side to it — in the intellectualism of the city. The philosopher who has built up an ethical-social system that is replete with virtue and (of course) the only true one, may enlighten the economic life as to how it should behave and at what it should aim. It is even the same spectacle, whether labeled liberal, anarchistic, or socialistic, or derived from Plato, Proudhon, or Marx. Here, too, economy carries on undisturbed and leaves the thinker to choose between withdrawing to pour out on paper his lamentations of this world, and entering it as an economic politician, in which case he either makes himself ridiculous, or else promptly throws his theory to the devil and starts to win himself a leading place. [Return]

⁶ Exactly the same is true of wandering bands of hunters and pastorals. But the economic foundation of the great Culture is always a mankind that adheres fast to the soil, and nourishes and supports the higher economic forms. [Return]

⁷ Undershaft in Shaw’s Major Barbara is a true ruler figure of this realm. [Return]

⁸ As a means for governments it is called finance economy (financial policy). Here the whole nation is the object of a levy of tribute, in the forms of taxes and customs, of which the purpose is not to make, so to say, the upkeep of its life more comfortable, but to secure its historical position and to enhance its power. [Return]

⁹ Using the phrase widely, as including, for instance, the rise of workmen, journalists, and men of learning to positions of leadership. [Return]

¹⁰ Including the medical profession, which indeed is indistinguishable in primitive times from the priests and magicians. [Return]

¹¹ Herdsmen, fishermen, and hunters included. There is, moreover, a strange and very profound relation between peasant and miner, evidenced in ancient sagas and rites. The metals are coaxed out of the shaft as the corn out of the earth, and the game out of the thicket. And for the real miner even metal is something that lives and grows. [Return]

¹² This is true from the earliest sea voyaging to the Bourse of the world city, and all traffic, whether by river, road, or rail belongs with it. [Return]

¹³ With this belong the machine industry, with its purely Western type of the inventor and engineer, and practically, also, a great part of the modern agronomy, as, for instance, in America. [Return]

¹⁴ Even today the mining and metal industries are felt to be somehow nobler than, for example, the chemical and electrical. They possess the most ancient patent of nobility in the technical world, and a relic of cult mystery lies over them. [Return]

¹⁵ That is, up to the limit of servage and slavery, although very often — as in the present day East and as in Rome in the case of “vernae” — slavery itself may be nothing but a form of compulsory labor contract and, apart from that, hardly sensible. The free employee often lives in far stricter subjection and enjoys far less respect, and his formal right to “give notice” is in many cases practically valueless to him. 

[British readers will recall in this connection the “Chinese slavery “ controversy in South Africa in 1904, and the questions of indentured labor that come to the surface not infrequently in Australian politics. And in an older generation defenders of slavery as practiced in the sugar islands of the West Indies are still to be found — not to mention the survivors and tradition bearers of the “Old South” in the United States. — Tr.] [Return]

¹⁶ We know this accurately for the Egyptian and the Gothic beginnings, and in general terms for the Chinese and the Classical; as for the economic pseudomorphosis of the Arabian it may be summarized, after Hadrian, as a process of disintegration of the highly civilized Classical money economy culminating in the appearance, under Diocletian, of a Springtime barter economy with, in the East, the true Magian element of bargaining visibly superposed. [Return]

¹⁷ Neither the copper pieces of the Italian Villanova graves of early Homeric times (Willers, Gesch. d. röm. Kupferprägung, p. 18) nor the early Chinese bronze coins in the form of women’s drapery (pu), bells, rings, or knives (tsien, Conrady, China, p. 504) are described as money, but quite distinctly symbols of goods. And the coins struck by the governments of early Gothic times (in imitation of the Classical) as signs of sovereignty figured in economic life only as wares; a piece of gold is worth as much as a cow, but not vice versa. [Return]

¹⁸ Hence it is that so often he is not an outcome of the fixed and self-contained life of the country side, but an alien appearing in it, an alien having neither importance nor antecedents. This is the role of the Phoenicians in the earliest period of the Classical; of the Romans in the East in Mithradates’s time; of the Jews, and with them Byzantines, Persians, and Armenians, in the Gothic West; of the Arabs in the Sudan; of the Indians in East Africa; and of the West Europeans in present day Russia. [Return]

¹⁹ And, consequently, on a very small scale. As foreign trade was in those days highly ad venturous and appealed to the imagination, it was as a rule immensely exaggerated. The “great” merchants of Venice and the Hansa about 1300 were hardly the equals of the more distinguished craftsmen. The turnover of even the Medici or the Fugger about 1400 was equivalent to that of a shop business in a small town today. The largest merchant vessels, in which usually several traders held part shares, were much smaller than modern German river barges, and made only one consider able voyage each year. The celebrated wool export of England, a main element of Hanseatic trade, amounted about 1270 to hardly as much as the contents of two modern goods trains (Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, (I, pp. 280, et seq.). [Return]

²⁰ Cf. Vol. I, Ch. II. [Return]

²¹ Marks and dollars are no more “money” than meters and grammes are “forces.” Pieces of money are real values. It is only our ignorance of Classical physics that has saved us from confusing gravitation with a pound weight — in our mathematics, with its Classical basis, we still mix number with magnitude, and our imitation of Classical coinage has brought about the same confusion between money and pieces of money. [Return]

²² Conversely, therefore, we can call the metric system (cm., g.) a valuation, and in fact all money measures proceed from the weight theories of physics. [Return]

²³ Similarly all value theories, however objective they are meant to be, are developed — and inevitably so — out of a subjective principle. That of Marx, for example, defines value in the way that promotes the interest of the manual worker, the effort of the discoverer or the organizer seeming to him, therefore, valueless. But it would be wrong to describe this as “erroneous.” All these theories are “right” for their supporters and “wrong” for their opponents, and it is not reasons but life that settles whether one is a supporter or an opponent. [Return]

²⁴ The Western introduced (on a very modest scale) by the Bank of England from the end of the eighteenth century, the Chinese dating from the period of the Contending States. [Return]

²⁵ And is thought of as “amount,” whereas we speak of the “extent” of a property in goods. [Return]

²⁶ Even to the modern pirates of the money market who intervene amongst the interveners and gamble with money as “wares.” [Return]

²⁷ Preisigke, Girowesen im griechischen Aegypten (1910). These trading forms of the Ptolemaic period were already in vogue, and at the same high level, under the XVIIIth Dynasty. [Return]

²⁸ So also with the bourgeois ideal of freedom. In theory and, therefore, constitutionally, a man may be free in principle, but actually, in the economic private life of the cities, he is made free only by money. [Return]

²⁹ The name “bourse” can be applied even in other Cultures, if by that word we mean the thought organ of a developed money economy. [Return]

³⁰ Preface to Major Barbara (Constable, London 1909). [Return]

³¹ The “farmer” is the man whose connection with the piece of land is no longer anything more than practical. [Return]

³² The increasing intensity of this thinking appears in the economic picture as a growth of the available money mass, which is abstract and imagined and has nothing to do with the visible supply of gold as a ware. The “stiffening” of the money market, for example, is a purely intellectual process played out in the hands of a small handful of men. The increasing energy of money thinking consequently awakens, in every Culture, the feeling that the “value of money is going down” — enormously so, for example, in the time between Solon and Alexander — with reference, namely, to the unit of calculation. What actually happens is that the mercantile units of value have become artificial and no longer comparable with the primary and livingly experiential values of the peasant economy. In the end it ceases to matter in what figures the Attic treasure of the Delian League (454) or the sums involved in the peace treaties of 241 and 242, or the booty of Pompey in 64 are reckoned, and whether we ourselves shall pass in a few decades from the milliards — still unknown in 1850, but common place today — to the billions. There is no common standard for the value of a talent in 430 and in 30 B.C., for gold, like cattle and corn, has continually altered not only its own numeration, but its significance within an ever advancing urban economy. The only steady element is the fact that quantity of money — not to be confused with the stock of tokens and the means of payment — is an alter ego mirroring thought in money. [Return]

³³ Cf. Vol. I, Ch.II. [Return]

³⁴ Friedländer, Röm. Sittengesch., IV (1911), p. 301. [Return]

³⁵ Sallust, Catilina, 35, 3. [Return]

³⁶ How difficult it was for Classical man to figure to himself the transformation of a physically indefinable asset like land into bodily money is shown by the stone posts (ὅροι) on land in Greece, which were meant to represent the mortgages on it, and by the Roman method of sale per aes et libram, in which a clod of earth was handed over for a coin in the presence of witnesses. Consequently, trade in goods (properly so called) never existed, nor anything like, for example, a current price for arable land. A regular relation between land value and money value was as unthinkable to the Classical mind as such a relation between artistic value and money value. Intellectual — i.e., incorporeal — products like dramas and frescoes possessed economically no value at all. [Return]

³⁷ Not very much can have been left of Classical art treasures even by Augustus’s time. The refined Athenians themselves thought far too unhistorically to be moved to spare a chryselephantine statue merely because it was the work of Phidias. It is worth remembering that the gold parts of the famous Athene figure of the Parthenon cella were made removable and tested for weight from time to time. Economic use of them, therefore, was provided for from the outset. [Return]

³⁸ Ges. Schriften, IV, 200, et seq. [Return]

³⁹ The belief that slaves ever constituted, even in Athens or Aegina, as much as a third of the population is a complete delusion. On the contrary, the revolutions of the period after 400 presuppose an enormous surplus of free paupers. [Return]

⁴⁰ Herein lies the difference between this slavery and the sugar slavery of our own Baroque. The latter represents a threshold phase of our machine industry, an organization of “ living “energy, which began with man fuel, but presently passed over to coal fuel; and slavery came to be considered immoral only when coal had established itself. Looked at from this angle, the victory of the North in the American Civil War (1865) meant the economic victory of the concentrated energy of coal over the simple energy of the muscles. [Return]

⁴¹ The resemblance with the Egyptian administration under the Old Kingdom and the Chinese in the earliest Chôu period is unmistakable. [Return]

⁴² The clerici of these exchequer offices were the archetype of the modern bank clerk. [Return]

⁴³ Hampe, Deutsche Kaisergeschichte, p. 246. Leonardo Pisano, whose Liber Abaci (1202) was authoritative in accountancy till well beyond the Renaissance, and who introduced, besides the Arabian system of numerals, negative numbers to indicate debit, was promoted by the great Hohenstaufen. [Return]

⁴⁴ Sombart, Dermoderne Kaptalismus, II, p. 119. [Return]

⁴⁵ There is a close relation between our picture of the nature of electricity and the process of the “clearinghouse,” in which the positive and negative money positions of several firms (centers of tension) are equated amongst themselves by a purely mental act and the true position made present able by a booking. Cf. Vol. I, Ch. XI. [Return]

⁴⁶ Vol. I, Ch. II. [Return]

⁴⁷ In our Culture the credit of a country rests upon its economic capacity and the political organization thereof — which imparts to the operations and bookings of finance the character of real money-creations — and not on any quantity of gold that may be put into this or that. It is the Classicist superstition that raises the gold reserve to the status of an actual measure of credit — actual in that the level of credit is thereby made dependent, not upon “will,” but upon “can.” But the current coins are wares, which, relatively to national credit, possess a price — the poorer the credit, the higher the price of gold — so that thenceforth it can only be upheld against that of other wares. Thus gold is measured like other wares against the unit of book reckoning, and not vice versa as the term “gold standard” suggests. It serves also as means of payment in minor transactions, as for that matter a postage stamp does. In old Egypt (whose money thought is astoundingly like the Western) there was nothing resembling the coin even under the New Empire. The written transfer was entirely sufficient, and the Classical coins that filtered in from 650 to the founding of Alexandria and the Hellenistic regime were usually cut to pieces and reckoned by weight as a ware. [Return]

⁴⁸ That is why it does not exist for our (present) jurisprudence. [Return]

⁴⁹ All this equally holds good for the case of “workers” taking over the leadership of the works. Either they are incapable of management, and the business collapses, or they are capable of something, and then they themselves become inwardly entrepreneurs and think thenceforward only of maintaining their power. No theory can eliminate this fact from the world, for so life is. [Return]

⁵⁰ Thus it is only since 1770 that the banks have become centers of an economic power which made its first intervention with politics at the Congress of Vienna. Till then the banker had in the main concerned himself with bill business. The Chinese, and even the Egyptian, banks had a different significance, and the Classical banks, even in the Rome of Caesar’s day, may best be described as cash tills. They collected the yield of taxes in cash, and lent cash against replacement; thus the temples, with their stock of precious metal in the form of votive offerings, became “banks.” The temple of Delos, through several centuries, lent at ten percent. [Return]

⁵¹ The idea of the Firm took shape even in Late Gothic times as “ratio” [hence the modern French phrase “raison sociale” — Tr.] or“negotiatio.” It is impossible to render it exactly in a Classical language. Negotium meant for the Romans a concrete process, a “deal” and not a “business.” [Return]

⁵² Pöhlmann, griech. Geschichte (1914), p. 216, et seq. [Return]

⁵³ Gercke-Norden, Einl. in der Altertumswissensch. III, p. 291. [Return]

⁵⁴ Kromayer, in Hartmann’s Röm. Gesch., p. 150. [Return]

⁵⁵ The “Jews” of those times were the Romans, and the Jews themselves were peasants and artizans and small traders (Parván, Die Nationalität der Kaufleute in röm. Kaiserreich, 1909, also Mommsen, Röm. Gesch., V, p. 471); that is, they followed the very callings that in the Gothic period became the object of their merchant activity. Present day “Europe” is in exactly the same position vis-à-vis the Russians whose profoundly mystical inner life feels “thinking in money” as a sin. (The Pilgrim in Gorki’s Night asylum, and Tolstoy’s thought generally; pp. 194, 278.) Here today as in the Syria of Jesus’s time we have two economic worlds juxtaposed (pp. 192, et seq.): an upper, alien, and civilized world intruded from the West (the Bolshevism of the first years, totally Western and un-Russian, is the lees of this infiltration), and a townless barter life that goes on deep below, uncalculating and exchanging only for immediate needs. We have to think of the catchwords of the surface as a voice, in which the Russian, simple and busied wholly with his soul, hears resignedly the will of God. Marxism amongst Russians is based on an inward misunderstanding. They bore with the higher economic life of Petrinism, but they neither created it nor recognized it. The Russian does not fight Capital, but he does not comprehend it. Anyone who understands Dostoevsky will sense in these people a young humanity for which as yet no money exists, but only goods in relation to a life whose center of gravity does not lie on the economical side. The horror of values supervening from nowhere which before the war drove many to suicide is a misconstrued literary disguise of the fact that, for a townless barter thinking, money getting by means of money is an impiety, and (from the viewpoint of the coming Russian religion) a sin. Today, with the towns of Tsarism in ruin and the mankind in them living the village life under the crust (temporarily) of urban thinking Bolshevism, he has freed himself from the Western economy. His apocalyptic hatred — the same that the simple Jew of Jesus’s day bore to the Roman — is directed against Petersburg, as a city and the seat of a political power of Western stamp, but also as the center of a thinking in Western money that has poisoned and misdirected the whole life. The Russian of the deeps today is bringing into being a third kind of Christianity, still priestless, and built on the John Gospel — a Christianity that stands much nearer to the Magian than to the Faustian and, consequently, rests upon a new symbolism of baptism, and looks neither at Rome nor at Wittenberg, but past Byzantium towards Jerusalem, with premonitions of coming crusades. This is the only thing that this new Russia really cares about. And it will no doubt let itself fall once again under the economy of the West, as the primitive Christian submitted to the Romans and the Gothic Christian to the Jews. But inwardly it has no part nor lot therein. [Return]

⁵⁶ See the article “Diocletian, Edict of,” Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr. [Return]

Chapter 14

¹ And not vice versa. [Return]

² The “correctness” of physical data (i.e., their applicability never disproved up to date, and therefore ranking as an interpretation) is wholly independent of their technical value. An undoubtedly wrong, and even self-contradictory, theory may be more valuable for practical purposes than a “correct” and profound one, and physical science has long been careful to avoid applying the words “right” and “wrong” in the popular sense, and to regard their syntheses as images rather than flat formulas. [Return]

³ What Diels has managed to assemble in his work Antike Technik amounts to a comprehensive nullity. If we take away from it what belongs to the older Babylonian Civilization (such as water clocks and sun dials) and to the younger Arabian Springtime (such as chemistry or the wonder clock of Gaza), there is nothing left but devices, such as door locks of a sort, that it would be an insult to attribute to any other Culture. [Return]

⁴ The Chinese Culture, too, made almost all these European discoveries on its own account — including compass, telescope, printing, gunpowder, paper, porcelain — but the Chinese did not wrest, but wheedled, things out of Nature. No doubt he felt the advantages of his knowledge and turned it to account, but he did not hurl himself upon it to exploit it. [Return]

⁵ It is the same spirit that distinguishes the Jewish, Parsee, Armenian, Greek, and Arab ideas of business from that of the Western peoples. [Return]

⁶ Albertus Magnus lived on in legend as the great magician. Roger Bacon meditated upon steam engines, steamships, and aircraft. (F. Strunz, Gesch. d. Naturwiss. in Mittelalter, 1910, p. 88.) [Return]

⁷ According to Roger Bacon the “third role of science,” which is not relative to the other sciences, consists in the power that makes it to search the secrets of nature, to discover past and future, and to produce so many marvelous results that power is assured to those who possess it... The Church should take it into consideration in order to spare Christian blood in the struggle with the infidel and above all in preparation for the perils that will menace us in the days of Antichrist (E. Gilson, Philosophie du Moyen Age, p. 218). — Tr. [Return]

⁸ Greek fire was only to terrify and to ignite, but here the tense force of the gases of explosion are converted into energy of motion. Anyone who seriously compares the two does not understand the spirit of the Western technique. [Return]

⁹ Marx is quite right; it is one of the creations (and what is more, the proudest creation) of the bourgeoisie. But, spellbound as he is by the ancient-medieval-modera scheme, he has failed to note that it is only the bourgeoisie of this one single Culture that is master of the destiny of the Machine. So long as it dominates the earth, every non-European tries and will try to fathom the secret of this terrible weapon. Nevertheless, inwardly he abhors it, be he Indian or Japanese, Russian or Arab. It is something fundamental in the essence of the Magian soul that leads the Jew, as entrepreneur and engineer, to stand aside from the creation proper of machines and devote himself to the business side of their production. But so also the Russian looks with fear and hatred at this tyranny of wheels, cables, and rails, and if he adapts himself for today and tomorrow to the inevitable, yet there will come a time when he will blot out the whole thing from his memory and his environment, and create about himself a wholly new world, in which nothing of this Devil’s technique is left. [Return]

¹⁰ Compared with this mighty contest between the two handfuls of steel-hard men of race and of immense intellect — which the simple citizen neither observes nor comprehends — the battle of mere interests between the employing class and the workers’ Socialism sinks into insignificance when regarded from the distant world historical view-point. The working-class movement is what its leaders make of it, and hatred of the owner has long enlisted itself in the service of the bourse. Practical communism with its “class war” — today a long obsolete and adulterated phrase — is nothing but the trusty henchman of big Capital, which knows perfectly well how to make use of it. [Return]

¹¹ In this sense the interest politics of the workers’ movements also belong to it, in that their object is not to overcome the money values, but to possess them. [Return]