THE DECLINE
OF THE WEST
FORM AND ACTUALITY

It must be left to critics to say whether it was Destiny or Incident—using these words in the author’s sense—that Spengler’s “Untergang des Abendlandes” appeared in July, 1918, that is, at the very turning-point of the four years’ World-War. It was conceived, the author tells us, before 1914 and fully worked out by 1917. So far as he is concerned, then, the impulse to create it arose from a view of our civilization not as the late war left it, but (as he says expressly) as the coming war would find it. But inevitably the public impulse to read it arose in and from post-war conditions, and thus it happened that this severe and difficult philosophy of history found a market that has justified the printing of 90,000 copies. Its very title was so apposite to the moment as to predispose the higher intellectuals to regard it as a work of the moment—the more so as the author was a simple Oberlehrer and unknown to the world of authoritative learning.

Spengler’s was not the only, nor indeed the most “popular,” philosophical product of the German revolution. In the graver conjunctures, sound minds do not dally with the graver questions—they either face and attack them with supernormal resolution or thrust them out of sight with an equally supernormal effort to enjoy or to endure the day as it comes. Even after the return to normality, it is no longer possible for men—at any rate for Western men—not to know that these questions exist. And, if it is none too easy even for the victors of the struggle to shake off its sequelæ, to turn back to business as the normal and to give no more than amateur effort and dilettantish attention to the very deep things, for the defeated side this is impossible. It goes through a period of material difficulty (often extreme difficulty) and one in which pride of achievement and humility in the presence of unsuccess work dynamically together. So it was with sound minds in the post-Jena Germany of Jahn and Fichte, and so it was also with such minds in the Germany of 1919-1920.

To assume the rôle of critic and to compare Spengler’s with other philosophies of the present phase of Germany, as to respective intrinsic weights, is not the purpose of this note nor within the competence of its writer. On the other hand, it is unconditionally necessary for the reader to realize that the book before him has not only acquired this large following amongst thoughtful laymen, but has forced the attention and taxed the scholarship of every branch of the learned world. Theologians, historians, scientists, art critics—all saw the challenge, xand each brought his apparatus criticus to bear on that part of the Spengler theory that affected his own domain. The reader who is familiar with German may be referred to Manfred Schroeter’s “Der Streit um Spengler” for details; it will suffice here to say that Schroeter’s index of critics’ names contains some 400 entries. These critics are not only, or even principally, general reviewers, most of them being specialists of high standing. It is, to say the least, remarkable that a volcanically assertive philosophy of history, visibly popular and produced under a catchy title (Reklamtitel) should call forth, as it did, a special number of Logos in which the Olympians of scholarship passed judgment on every inaccuracy or unsupported statement that they could detect. (These were in fact numerous in the first edition and the author has corrected or modified them in detail in the new edition, from which this translation has been done. But it should be emphasized that the author has not, in this second edition, receded in any essentials from the standpoint taken up in the first.)

The conspicuous features in this first burst of criticism were, on the one hand, want of adequate critical equipment in the general critic, and, on the other, inability to see the wood for the trees in the man of learning. No one, reading Schroeter’s book (which by the way is one-third as large as Spengler’s first volume itself), can fail to agree with his judgment that notwithstanding paradoxes, overstrainings, and inaccuracies, the work towers above all its commentators. And it was doubtless a sense of this greatness that led many scholars—amongst them some of the very high—to avoid expressing opinions on it at all. It would be foolish to call their silence a “sitting on the fence”; it is a case rather of reserving judgment on a philosophy and a methodology that challenge all the canons and carry with them immense implications. For the very few who combine all the necessary depth of learning with all the necessary freedom and breadth of outlook, it will not be the accuracy or inaccuracy of details under a close magnifying-glass that will be decisive. The very idea of accuracy and inaccuracy presupposes the selection or acceptance of co-ordinates of reference, and therefore the selection or acceptance of a standpoint as “origin.” That is mere elementary science—and yet the scholar-critic would be the first to claim the merit of scientific rigour for his criticisms! It is, in history as in science, impossible to draw a curve through a mass of plotted observations when they are looked at closely and almost individually.

Criticism of quite another and a higher order may be seen in Dr. Eduard Meyer’s article on Spengler in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung, No. 25 of 1924. Here we find, in one of the great figures of modern scholarship, exactly that large-minded judgment that, while noting minor errors—and visibly attaching little importance to them—deals with the Spengler thesis fairly and squarely on the grand issues alone. Dr. Meyer differs from Spengler on many serious questions, of which perhaps the most important is that of the scope and origin of the Magian Culture. But instead of cataloguing the errors that are still to be xifound in Spengler’s vast ordered multitude of facts, Eduard Meyer honourably bears testimony to our author’s “erstaunlich umfangreiches, ihm ständig präsentes, Wissen” (a phrase as neat and as untranslatable as Goethe’s “exakte sinnliche Phantasie”). He insists upon the fruitfulness of certain of Spengler’s ideas such as that of the “Second Religiousness.” Above all, he adheres to and covers with his high authority the basic idea of the parallelism of organically-living Cultures. It is not necessarily Spengler’s structure of the Cultures that he accepts—parts of it indeed he definitely rejects as wrong or insufficiently established by evidences—but on the question of their being an organic structure of the Cultures, a morphology of History, he ranges himself frankly by the side of the younger thinker, whose work he sums up as a “bleibendez und auf lange Zeit hinaus nachhaltig wirkendes Besitz unserer Wissenschaft und Literatur.” This last phrase of Dr. Meyer’s expresses very directly and simply that which for an all-round student (as distinct from an erudite specialist) constitutes the peculiar quality of Spengler’s work. Its influence is far deeper and subtler than any to which the conventional adjective “suggestive” could be applied. It cannot in fact be described by adjectives at all, but only denoted or adumbrated by its result, which is that, after studying and mastering it, “one finds it nearly if not quite impossible to approach any culture-problem—old or new, dogmatic or artistic, political or scientific—without conceiving it primarily as ‘morphological.’”

The work comprises two volumes—under the respective sub-titles “Form and Reality” and “World-historical Perspectives”—of which the present translation covers the first only. Some day I hope to have the opportunity of completing a task which becomes—such is the nature of this book—more attractive in proportion to its difficulty. References to Volume II are, for the present, necessarily to the pages of the German original; if, as is hoped, this translation is completed later by the issue of the second volume, a list of the necessary adjustments of page references will be issued with it. The reader will notice that translator’s foot-notes are scattered fairly freely over the pages of this edition. In most cases these have no pretensions to being critical annotations. They are merely meant to help the reader to follow up in more detail the points of fact which Spengler, with his “ständig präsentes Wissen,” sweeps along in his course. This being their object, they take the form, in the majority of cases, of references to appropriate articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica, which is the only single work that both contains reasonably full information on the varied (and often abstruse) matters alluded to, and is likely to be accessible wherever this book may penetrate. Every reader no doubt will find these notes, where they appertain to his own special subject, trivial and even annoying, but it is thought that, for example, an explanation of the mathematical Limit may be helpful to a student who knows all about the Katharsis in Greek drama, and vice versa.

xiiIn 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.

At the close of an undertaking which, from the first brief sketch to the final shaping of a complete work of quite unforeseen dimensions, has spread itself over ten years, it will not be out of place to glance back at what I intended and what I have achieved, my standpoint then and my standpoint to-day.

In the Introduction to the 1918 edition—inwardly and outwardly a fragment—I stated my conviction that an idea had now been irrefutably formulated which no one would oppose, once the idea had been put into words. I ought to have said: once that idea had been understood. And for that we must look—as I more and more realize—not only in this instance but in the whole history of thought—to the new generation that is born with the ability to do it.

I added that this must be considered as a first attempt, loaded with all the customary faults, incomplete and not without inward opposition. The remark was not taken anything like as seriously as it was intended. Those who have looked searchingly into the hypotheses of living thought will know that it is not given to us to gain insight into the fundamental principles of existence without conflicting emotions. A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to think. Truth in the long run is to him the picture of the world which was born at his birth. It is that which he does not invent but rather discovers within himself. It is himself over again: his being expressed in words; the meaning of his personality formed into a doctrine which so far as concerns his life is unalterable, because truth and his life are identical. This symbolism is the one essential, the vessel and the expression of human history. The learned philosophical works that arise out of it are superfluous and only serve to swell the bulk of a professional literature.

I can then call the essence of what I have discovered “true”—that is, true for me, and as I believe, true for the leading minds of the coming time; not true in itself as dissociated from the conditions imposed by blood and by history, for that is impossible. But what I wrote in the storm and stress of those years was, it must be admitted, a very imperfect statement of what stood clearly before me, and it remained to devote the years that followed to the task of correlating facts and finding means of expression which should enable me to present my idea in the most forcible form.

To perfect that form would be impossible—life itself is only fulfilled in death. But I have once more made the attempt to bring up even the earliest xivportions of the work to the level of definiteness with which I now feel able to speak; and with that I take leave of this book with its hopes and disappointments, its merits and its faults.

The result has in the meantime justified itself as far as I myself am concerned and—judging by the effect that it is slowly beginning to exercise upon extensive fields of learning—as far as others are concerned also. Let no one expect to find everything set forth here. It is but one side of what I see before me, a new outlook on history and the philosophy of destiny—the first indeed of its kind. It is intuitive and depictive through and through, written in a language which seeks to present objects and relations illustratively instead of offering an army of ranked concepts. It addresses itself solely to readers who are capable of living themselves into the word-sounds and pictures as they read. Difficult this undoubtedly is, particularly as our awe in face of mystery—the respect that Goethe felt—denies us the satisfaction of thinking that dissections are the same as penetrations.

Of course, the cry of “pessimism” was raised at once by those who live eternally in yesterday (Ewiggestrigen) and greet every idea that is intended for the pathfinder of to-morrow only. But I have not written for people who imagine that delving for the springs of action is the same as action itself; those who make definitions do not know destiny.

By understanding the world I mean being equal to the world. It is the hard reality of living that is the essential, not the concept of life, that the ostrich-philosophy of idealism propounds. Those who refuse to be bluffed by enunciations will not regard this as pessimism; and the rest do not matter. For the benefit of serious readers who are seeking a glimpse at life and not a definition, I have—in view of the far too great concentration of the text—mentioned in my notes a number of works which will carry that glance into more distant realms of knowledge.

And now, finally, I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty—and if I were asked to find a formula for my relation to the latter I should say that I had made of his “outlook” (Ausblick) an “overlook” (Überblick). But Goethe was, without knowing it, a disciple of Leibniz in his whole mode of thought. And, therefore, that which has at last (and to my own astonishment) taken shape in my hands I am able to regard and, despite the misery and disgust of these years, proud to call a German philosophy.

The complete manuscript of this book—the outcome of three years’ work—was ready when the Great War broke out. By the spring of 1917 it had been worked over again and—in certain details—supplemented and cleared up, but its appearance in print was still delayed by the conditions then prevailing.

Although a philosophy of history is its scope and subject, it possesses also a certain deeper significance as a commentary on the great epochal moment of which the portents were visible when the leading ideas were being formed.

The title, which had been decided upon in 1912, expresses quite literally the intention of the book, which was to describe, in the light of the decline of the Classical age, one world-historical phase of several centuries upon which we ourselves are now entering.

Events have justified much and refuted nothing. It became clear that these ideas must necessarily be brought forward at just this moment and in Germany, and, more, that the war itself was an element in the premisses from which the new world-picture could be made precise.

For I am convinced that it is not merely a question of writing one out of several possible and merely logically justifiable philosophies, but of writing the philosophy of our time, one that is to some extent a natural philosophy and is dimly presaged by all. This may be said without presumption; for an idea that is historically essential—that does not occur within an epoch but itself makes that epoch—is only in a limited sense the property of him to whose lot it falls to parent it. It belongs to our time as a whole and influences all thinkers, without their knowing it; it is but the accidental, private attitude towards it (without which no philosophy can exist) that—with its faults and its merits—is the destiny and the happiness of the individual.

In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment—the West-European-American.

Hitherto the possibility of solving a problem so far-reaching has evidently never been envisaged, and even if it had been so, the means of dealing with it were either altogether unsuspected or, at best, inadequately used.

Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms—social, spiritual and political—which we see so clearly? Are not these actualities indeed secondary or derived from that something? Does world-history present to the seeing eye certain grand traits, again and again, with sufficient constancy to justify certain conclusions? And if so, what are the limits to which reasoning from such premisses may be pushed?

Is it possible to find in life itself—for human history is the sum of mighty life-courses which already have had to be endowed with ego and personality, in customary thought and expression, by predicating entities of a higher order like “the Classical” or “the Chinese Culture,” “Modern Civilization”—a series of stages which must be traversed, and traversed moreover in an ordered and obligatory sequence? For everything organic the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime are fundamentals—may not these notions, in this sphere also, possess a rigorous meaning which no one has as yet extracted? In short, is all history founded upon general biographic archetypes?

The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of Being.

If therefore we are to discover in what form the destiny of the Western Culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to what culture is, what its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul, to nature, to intellect, what the forms of its manifestation are and how far these forms—peoples, tongues 4and epochs, battles and ideas, states and gods, arts and craft-works, sciences, laws, economic types and world-ideas, great men and great events—may be accepted and pointed to as symbols.

The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.

It is, and has always been, a matter of knowledge that the expression-forms of world-history are limited in number, and that eras, epochs, situations, persons are ever repeating themselves true to type. Napoleon has hardly ever been discussed without a side-glance at Cæsar and Alexander—analogies of which, as we shall see, the first is morphologically quite inacceptable and the second is correct—while Napoleon himself conceived of his situation as akin to Charlemagne’s. The French Revolutionary Convention spoke of Carthage when it meant England, and the Jacobins styled themselves Romans. Other such comparisons, of all degrees of soundness and unsoundness, are those of Florence with Athens, Buddha with Christ, primitive Christianity with modern Socialism, the Roman financial magnate of Cæsar’s time with the Yankee. Petrarch, the first passionate archæologist (and is not archæology itself an expression of the sense that history is repetition?) related himself mentally to Cicero, and but lately Cecil Rhodes, the organizer of British South Africa, who had in his library specially prepared translations of the classical lives of the Cæsars, felt himself akin to the Emperor Hadrian. The fated Charles XII of Sweden used to carry Quintus Curtius’s life of Alexander in his pocket, and to copy that conqueror was his deliberate purpose.

Frederick the Great, in his political writings—such as his Considérations, 1738—moves among analogies with perfect assurance. Thus he compares the French to the Macedonians under Philip and the Germans to the Greeks. “Even now,” he says, “the Thermopylæ of Germany, Alsace and Lorraine, are in the hands of Philip,” therein exactly characterizing the policy of Cardinal Fleury. We find him drawing parallels also between the policies of the Houses of Habsburg and Bourbon and the proscriptions of Antony and of Octavius.

Still, all this was only fragmentary and arbitrary, and usually implied rather a momentary inclination to poetical or ingenious expressions than a really deep sense of historical forms.

Thus in the case of Ranke, a master of artistic analogy, we find that his parallels of Cyaxares and Henry the Fowler, of the inroads of the Cimmerians and those of the Hungarians, possess morphologically no significance, and his oft-quoted analogy between the Hellenic city-states and the Renaissance republics very little, while the deeper truth in his comparison of Alcibiades 5and Napoleon is accidental. Unlike the strict mathematician, who finds inner relationships between two groups of differential equations where the layman sees nothing but dissimilarities of outward form, Ranke and others draw their historical analogies with a Plutarchian, popular-romantic, touch, and aim merely at presenting comparable scenes on the world-stage.

It is easy to see that, at bottom, it is neither a principle nor a sense of historic necessity, but simple inclination, that governs the choice of the tableaux. From any technique of analogies we are far distant. They throng up (to-day more than ever) without scheme or unities, and if they do hit upon something which is true—in the essential sense of the word that remains to be determined—it is thanks to luck, more rarely to instinct, never to a principle. In this region no one hitherto has set himself to work out a method, nor has had the slightest inkling that there is here a root, in fact the only root, from which can come a broad solution of the problems of History.

Analogies, in so far as they laid bare the organic structure of history, might be a blessing to historical thought. Their technique, developing under the influence of a comprehensive idea, would surely eventuate in inevitable conclusions and logical mastery. But as hitherto understood and practised they have been a curse, for they have enabled the historians to follow their own tastes, instead of soberly realizing that their first and hardest task was concerned with the symbolism of history and its analogies, and, in consequence, the problem has till now not even been comprehended, let alone solved. Superficial in many cases (as for instance in designating Cæsar as the creator of the official newspaper), these analogies are worse than superficial in others (as when phenomena of the Classical Age that are not only extremely complex but utterly alien to us are labelled with modern catchwords like Socialism, Impressionism, Capitalism, Clericalism), while occasionally they are bizarre to the point of perversity—witness the Jacobin clubs with their cult of Brutus, that millionaire-extortioner Brutus who, in the name of oligarchical doctrine and with the approval of the patrician senate, murdered the Man of the Democracy.

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 6inclusive of everything known, but in a picture of life, and presents them not as things-become, but as things-becoming.

The world-as-history, conceived, viewed and given form from out of its opposite the world-as-nature—here is a new aspect of human existence on this earth. As yet, in spite of its immense significance, both practical and theoretical, this aspect has not been realized, still less presented. Some obscure inkling of it there may have been, a distant momentary glimpse there has often been, but no one has deliberately faced it and taken it in with all its implications. We have before us two possible ways in which man may inwardly possess and experience the world around him. With all rigour I distinguish (as to form, not substance) the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content of images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and the system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible, the intents and purposes of imagination ordering according to plan from the intents and purposes of experience dissecting according to scheme; and—to mention even thus early an opposition that has never yet been noted, in spite of its significance—the domain of chronological from that of mathematical number.^[1]

Consequently, in a research such as that lying before us, there can be no question of taking spiritual-political events, as they become visible day by day on the surface, at their face value, and arranging them on a scheme of “causes” or “effects” and following them up in the obvious and intellectually easy directions. Such a “pragmatic” handling of history would be nothing but a piece of “natural science” in disguise, and for their part, the supporters of the materialistic idea of history make no secret about it—it is their adversaries who largely fail to see the similarity of the two methods. What concerns us is not what the historical facts which appear at this or that time are, per se, but what they signify, what they point to, by appearing. Present-day historians think they are doing a work of supererogation in bringing in religious and social, or still more art-history, details to “illustrate” the political sense of an epoch. But the decisive factor—decisive, that is, in so far as visible history is the expression, sign and embodiment of soul—they forget. I have not hitherto found one who has carefully considered the morphological relationship that inwardly binds together the expression-forms of all branches of a Culture, who has gone beyond politics to grasp the ultimate and fundamental ideas of Greeks, Arabians, Indians and Westerners in mathematics, the meaning of their 7early ornamentation, the basic forms of their architecture, philosophies, dramas and lyrics, their choice and development of great arts, the detail of their craftsmanship and choice of materials—let alone appreciated the decisive importance of these matters for the form-problems of history. Who amongst them realizes that between the Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in the age of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean geometry, between the space-perspective of Western oil-painting and the conquest of space by railroad, telephone and long-range weapon, between contrapuntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities? Yet, viewed from this morphological standpoint, even the humdrum facts of politics assume a symbolic and even a metaphysical character, and—what has perhaps been impossible hitherto—things such as the Egyptian administrative system, the Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the cheque, the Suez Canal, the book-printing of the Chinese, the Prussian Army, and the Roman road-engineering can, as symbols, be made uniformly understandable and appreciable.

But at once the fact presents itself that as yet there exists no theory-enlightened art of historical treatment. What passes as such draws its methods almost exclusively from the domain of that science which alone has completely disciplined the methods of cognition, viz., physics, and thus we imagine ourselves to be carrying on historical research when we are really following out objective connexions of cause and effect. It is a remarkable fact that the old-fashioned philosophy never imagined even the possibility of there being any other relation than this between the conscious human understanding and the world outside. Kant, who in his main work established the formal rules of cognition, took nature only as the object of reason’s activity, and neither he himself, nor anyone after him, noted the reservation. Knowledge, for Kant, is mathematical knowledge. He deals with innate intuition-forms and categories of the reason, but he never thinks of the wholly different mechanism by which historical impressions are apprehended. And Schopenhauer, who, significantly enough, retains but one of the Kantian categories, viz., causality, speaks contemptuously of history.^[2] That there is, besides a necessity of cause and effect—which I may call the logic of space—another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny—the logic of time—is a fact of the deepest inward certainty, a fact which suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic thought and constitutes the essence and kernel of all history (in contradistinction to nature) but is unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the “Critique of Pure Reason” investigates. This fact still awaits its theoretical formulation. As Galileo says in a famous passage of his Saggiatore, philosophy, 8as Nature’s great book, is written “in mathematical language.” We await, to-day, the philosopher who will tell us in what language history is written and how it is to be read.

Mathematics and the principle of Causality lead to a naturalistic,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.

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 certainlycertainly no world-history, no world-as-history. But how if the self-consciousness of a whole nation, how if a whole Culture rests on this ahistoric spirit? How must actuality appear to it? The world? Life? Consider the Classical Culture. In the world-consciousness of the Hellenes all experience, not merely the personal but the common past, was immediately transmuted into a timeless, immobile, mythically-fashioned background for the particular momentary present; thus the history of Alexander the Great began even before his death to be merged by Classical sentiment in the Dionysus legend, and to Cæsar there seemed at the least nothing preposterous in claiming descent from Venus.

Such a spiritual condition it is practically impossible for us men of the West, with a sense of time-distances so strong that we habitually and unquestioningly speak of so many years before or after Christ, to reproduce in ourselves. But we are not on that account entitled, in dealing with the problems of History, simply to ignore the fact.

9What diaries and autobiographies yield in respect of an individual, that historical research in the widest and most inclusive sense—that is, every kind of psychological comparison and analysis of alien peoples, times and customs—yields as to the soul of a Culture as a whole. But the Classical culture possessed no memory, no organ of history in this special sense. The memory of the Classical man—so to call it, though it is somewhat arbitrary to apply to alien souls a notion derived from our own—is something different, since past and future, as arraying perspectives in the working consciousness, are absent and the “pure Present,” which so often roused Goethe’s admiration in every product of the Classical life and in sculpture particularly, fills that life with an intensity that to us is perfectly unknown.

This pure Present, whose greatest symbol is the Doric column, in itself predicates the negation of time (of direction). For Herodotus and Sophocles, as for Themistocles or a Roman consul, the past is subtilized instantly into an impression that is timeless and changeless, polar and not periodic in structure—in the last analysis, of such stuff as myths are made of—whereas for our world-sense and our inner eye the past is a definitely periodic and purposeful organism of centuries or millennia.

But it is just this background which gives the life, whether it be the Classical or the Western life, its special colouring. What the Greek called Kosmos was the image of a world that is not continuous but complete. Inevitably, then, the Greek man himself was not a series but a term.^[3]

For this reason, although Classical man was well acquainted with the strict chronology and almanac-reckoning of the Babylonians and especially the Egyptians, and therefore with that eternity-sense and disregard of the present-as-such which revealed itself in their broadly-conceived operations of astronomy and their exact measurements of big time-intervals, none of this ever became intimately a part of him. What his philosophers occasionally told him on the subject they had heard, not experienced, and what a few brilliant minds in the Asiatic-Greek cities (such as Hipparchus and Aristarchus) discovered was rejected alike by the Stoic and by the Aristotelian, and outside a small professional circle not even noticed. Neither Plato nor Aristotle had an observatory. In the last years of Pericles, the Athenian people passed a decree by which all who propagated astronomical theories were made liable to impeachment (εἰσαγγελία). This last was an act of the deepest symbolic significance, expressive of the determination of the Classical soul to banish distance, in every aspect, from its world-consciousness.

As regards Classical history-writing, take Thucydides. The mastery of this man lies in his truly Classical power of making alive and self-explanatory the events of the present, and also in his possession of the magnificently practical 10outlook of the born statesman who has himself been both general and administrator. In virtue of this quality of experience (which we unfortunately confuse with the historical sense proper), his work confronts the merely learned and professional historian as an inimitable model, and quite rightly so. But what is absolutely hidden from Thucydides is perspective, the power of surveying the history of centuries, that which for us is implicit in the very conception of a historian. The fine pieces of Classical history-writing are invariably those which set forth matters within the political present of the writer, whereas for us it is the direct opposite, our historical masterpieces without exception being those which deal with a distant past. Thucydides would have broken down in handling even the Persian Wars, let alone the general history of Greece, while that of Egypt would have been utterly out of his reach. He, as well as Polybius and Tacitus (who like him were practical politicians), loses his sureness of eye from the moment when, in looking backwards, he encounters motive forces in any form that is unknown in his practical experience. For Polybius even the First Punic War, for Tacitus even the reign of Augustus, are inexplicable. As for Thucydides, his lack of historical feeling—in our sense of the phrase—is conclusively demonstrated on the very first page of his book by the astounding statement that before his time (about 400 B.C.) no events of importance had occurred (oὐ μεγάλα γενέσθαι) in the world!^[4]

Consequently, Classical history down to the Persian Wars and for that matter the structure built up on traditions at much later periods, are the product of an essentially mythological thinking. The constitutional history of 11Sparta is a poem of the Hellenistic period, and Lycurgus, on whom it centres and whose “biography” we are given in full detail, was probably in the beginning an unimportant local god of Mount Taygetus. The invention of pre-Hannibalian Roman history was still going on even in Cæsar’s time. The story of the expulsion of the Tarquins by Brutus is built round some contemporary of the Censor Appius Claudius (310 B.C.). The names of the Roman kings were at that period made up from the names of certain plebeian families which had become wealthy (K. J. Neumann). In the sphere of constitutional history, setting aside altogether the “constitution” of Servius Tullius, we find that even the famous land law of Licinius (367 B.C.) was not in existence at the time of the Second Punic War (B. Niese). When Epaminondas gave freedom and statehood to the Messenians and the Arcadians, these peoples promptly provided themselves with an early history. But the astounding thing is not that history of this sort was produced, but that there was practically none of any other sort; and the opposition between the Classical and the modern outlook is sufficiently illustrated by saying that Roman history before 250 B.C., as known in Cæsar’s time, was substantially a forgery, and that the little that we know has been established by ourselves and was entirely unknown to the later Romans. In what sense the Classical world understood the word “history” we can see from the fact that the Alexandrine romance-literature exercised the strongest influence upon serious political and religious history, even as regards its matter. It never entered the Classical head to draw any distinction of principle between history as a story and history as documents. When, towards the end of the Roman republic, Varro set out to stabilize the religion that was fast vanishing from the people’s consciousness, he classified the deities whose cult was exactly and minutely observed by the State, into “certain” and “uncertain” gods, i.e., into gods of whom something was still known and gods that, in spite of the unbroken continuity of official worship, had survived in name only. In actual fact, the religion of Roman society in Varro’s time, the poet’s religion which Goethe and even Nietzsche reproduced in all innocence, was mainly a product of Hellenistic literature and had almost no relation to the ancient practices, which no one any longer understood.

Mommsen clearly defined the West-European attitude towards this history when he said that “the Roman historians,” meaning especially Tacitus, “were men who said what it would have been meritorious to omit, and omitted what it was essential to say.”

In the Indian Culture we have the perfectly ahistoric soul. Its decisive expression is the Brahman Nirvana. There is no pure Indian astronomy, no calendar, and therefore no history so far as history is the track of a conscious spiritual evolution. Of the visible course of their Culture, which as regards its organic phase came to an end with the rise of Buddhism, we know even less than we do of Classical history, rich though it must have been in great events 12between the 12th and 8th centuries. And this is not surprising, since it was in dream-shapes and mythological figures that both came to be fixed. It is a full millennium after Buddha, about 500 A.D., when Ceylon first produces something remotely resembling historical work, the “Mahavansa.”

The world-consciousness of Indian man was so ahistorically built that it could not even treat the appearance of a book written by a single author as an event determinate in time. Instead of an organic series of writings by specific persons, there came into being gradually a vague mass of texts into which everyone inserted what he pleased, and notions such as those of intellectual individualism, intellectual evolution, intellectual epochs, played no part in the matter. It is in this anonymous form that we possess the Indian philosophy—which is at the same time all the Indian history that we have—and it is instructive to compare with it the philosophy-history of the West, which is a perfectly definite structure made up of individual books and personalities.

Indian man forgot everything, but Egyptian man forgot nothing. Hence, while the art of portraiture—which is biography in the kernel—was unknown in India, in Egypt it was practically the artist’s only theme.

The Egyptian soul, conspicuously historical in its texture and impelled with primitive passion towards the infinite, perceived past and future as its whole world, and the present (which is identical with waking consciousness) appeared to him simply as the narrow common frontier of two immeasurable stretches. The Egyptian Culture is an embodiment of care—which is the spiritual counterpoise of distance—care for the future expressed in the choice of granite or basalt as the craftsman’s materials,^[5] in the chiselled archives, in the elaborate administrative system, in the net of irrigation works,^[6] and, necessarily bound up therewith, care for the past. The Egyptian mummy is a symbol of the first importance. The body of the dead man was made everlasting, just as his personality, his “Ka,” was immortalized through the portrait-statuettes, 13which were often made in many copies and to which it was conceived to be attached by a transcendental likeness.

There is a deep relation between the attitude that is taken towards the historic past and the conception that is formed of death, and this relation is expressed in the disposal of the dead. The Egyptian denied mortality, the Classical man affirmed it in the whole symbolism of his Culture. The Egyptians embalmed even their history in chronological dates and figures. From pre-Solonian Greece nothing has been handed down, not a year-date, not a true name, not a tangible event—with the consequence that the later history, (which alone we know) assumes undue importance—but for Egypt we possess, from the 3rd millennium and even earlier, the names and even the exact reign-dates of many of the kings, and the New Empire must have had a complete knowledge of them. To-day, pathetic symbols of the will to endure, the bodies of the great Pharaohs lie in our museums, their faces still recognizable. On the shining, polished-granite peak of the pyramid of Amenemhet III we can read to-day the words “Amenemhet looks upon the beauty of the Sun” and, on the other side, “Higher is the soul of Amenemhet than the height of Orion, and it is united with the underworld.” Here indeed is victory over Mortality and the mere present; it is to the last degree un-Classical.

In opposition to this mighty group of Egyptian life-symbols, we meet at the threshold of the Classical Culture the custom, typifying the ease with which it could forget every piece of its inward and outward past, of burning the dead. To the Mycenæan age the elevation into a ritual of this particular funerary method amongst all those practised in turn by stone-age peoples, was essentially alien; indeed its Royal tombs suggest that earth-burial was regarded as peculiarly honourable. But in Homeric Greece, as in Vedic India, we find a change, so sudden that its origins must necessarily be psychological, from burial to that burning which (the Iliad gives us the full pathos of the symbolic act) was the ceremonial completion of death and the denial of all historical duration.

From this moment the plasticity of the individual spiritual evolution was at an end. Classical drama admitted truly historical motives just as little as it allowed themes of inward evolution, and it is well known how decisively the Hellenic instinct set itself against portraiture in the arts. Right into the imperial period Classical art handled only the matter that was, so to say, natural to it, the myth.^[7] Even the “ideal” portraits of Hellenistic sculpture are 14mythical, of the same kind as the typical biographies of Plutarch’s sort. No great Greek ever wrote down any recollections that would serve to fix a phase of experience for his inner eye. Not even Socrates has told, regarding his inward life, anything important in our sense of the word. It is questionable indeed whether for a Classical mind it was even possible to react to the motive forces that are presupposed in the production of a Parzeval, a Hamlet, or a Werther. In Plato we fail to observe any conscious evolution of doctrine; his separate works are merely treatises written from very different standpoints which he took up from time to time, and it gave him no concern whether and how they hung together. On the contrary, a work of deep self-examination, the Vita Nuova of Dante, is found at the very outset of the spiritual history of the West. How little therefore of the Classical pure-present there really was in Goethe, the man who forgot nothing, the man whose works, as he avowed himself, are only fragments of a single great confession!

After the destruction of Athens by the Persians, all the older art-works were thrown on the dustheap (whence we are now extracting them), and we do not hear that anyone in Hellas ever troubled himself about the ruins of Mycenæ or Phaistos for the purpose of ascertaining historical facts. Men read Homer but never thought of excavating the hill of Troy as Schliemann did; for what they wanted was myth, not history. The works of Æschylus and those of the pre-Socratic philosophers were already partially lost in the Hellenistic period. In the West, on the contrary, the piety inherent in and peculiar to the Culture manifested itself, five centuries before Schliemann, in Petrarch—the fine collector of antiquities, coins and manuscripts, the very type of historically-sensitive man, viewing the distant past and scanning the distant prospect (was he not the first to attempt an Alpine peak?), living in his time, yet essentially not of it. The soul of the collector is intelligible only by having regard to his conception of Time. Even more passionate perhaps, though of a different colouring, is the collecting-bent of the Chinese. In China, whoever travels assiduously pursues “old traces” (Ku-tsi) and the untranslatable “Tao,” the basic principle of Chinese existence, derives all its meaning from a deep historical feeling. In the Hellenistic period, objects were indeed collected and displayed everywhere, but they were curiosities of mythological appeal (as described by Pausanias) as to which questions of date or purpose simply did not arise—and this too in the very presence of Egypt, which even by the time of the great Thuthmosis had been transformed into one vast museum of strict tradition.

Amongst the Western peoples, it was the Germans who discovered the mechanical clock, the dread symbol of the flow of time, and the chimes of countless clock towers that echo day and night over West Europe are perhaps the most wonderful expression of which a historical world-feeling is 15capable.^[8] In the timeless countrysides and cities of the Classical world, we find nothing of the sort. Till the epoch of Pericles, the time of day was estimated merely by the length of shadow, and it was only from that of Aristotle that the word ὥρα received the (Babylonian) significance of “hour”; prior to that there was no exact subdivision of the day. In Babylon and Egypt water-clocks and sun-dials were discovered in the very early stages, yet in Athens it was left to Plato to introduce a practically useful form of clepsydra, and this was merely a minor adjunct of everyday utility which could not have influenced the Classical life-feeling in the smallest degree.

It remains still to mention the corresponding difference, which is very deep and has never yet been properly appreciated, between Classical and modern mathematics. The former conceived of things as they are, as magnitudes, timeless and purely present, and so it proceeded to Euclidean geometry and mathematical statics, rounding off its intellectual system with the theory of conic sections. We conceive things as they become and behave, as function, and this brought us to dynamics, analytical geometry and thence to the Differential Calculus.^[9] The modern theory of functions is the imposing marshalling of this whole mass of thought. It is a bizarre, but nevertheless psychologically exact, fact that the physics of the Greeks—being statics and not dynamics—neither knew the use nor felt the absence of the time-element, whereas we on the other hand work in thousandths of a second. The one and only evolution-idea that is timeless, ahistoric, is Aristotle’s entelechy.

This, then, is our task. We men of the Western Culture are, with our historical sense, an exception and not a rule. World-history is our world picture and not all mankind’s. Indian and Classical man formed no image of a world in progress, and perhaps when in due course the civilization of the West is extinguished, there will never again be a Culture and a human type in which “world-history” is so potent a form of the waking consciousness.

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 16read. But, even to-day, it is only forms of it that we know and not the form of it, which is the mirror-image of our own inner life.

Everyone of course, if asked, would say that he saw the inward form of History quite clearly and definitely. The illusion subsists because no one has seriously reflected on it, still less conceived doubts as to his own knowledge, for no one has the slightest notion how wide a field for doubt there is. In fact, the lay-out of world-history is an unproved and subjective notion that has been handed down from generation to generation (not only of laymen but of professional historians) and stands badly in need of a little of that scepticism which from Galileo onward has regulated and deepened our inborn ideas of nature.

Thanks to the subdivision of history into “Ancient,” “Mediæval” and “Modern”—an incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme, which has, however, entirely dominated our historical thinking—we have failed to perceive the true position in the general history of higher mankind, of the little part-world which has developed on West-European^[10] soil from the time of the German-Roman Empire, to judge of its relative importance and above all to estimate its direction. The Cultures that are to come will find it difficult to believe that the validity of such a scheme with its simple rectilinear progression and its meaningless proportions, becoming more and more preposterous with each century, incapable of bringing into itself the new fields of history as they successively come into the light of our knowledge, was, in spite of all, never whole-heartedly attacked. The criticisms that it has long been the fashion of historical researchers to level at the scheme mean nothing; they have only obliterated the one existing plan without substituting for it any other. To toy with phrases such as “the Greek Middle Ages” or “Germanic antiquity” does not in the least help us to form a clear and inwardly-convincing picture in which China and Mexico, the empire of Axum and that of the Sassanids have their proper places. And the expedient of shifting the initial point of “modern history” 17from the Crusades to the Renaissance, or from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th Century, only goes to show that the scheme per se is regarded as unshakably sound.

It is not only that the scheme circumscribes the area of history. What is worse, it rigs the stage. The ground of West Europe is treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it—and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far-away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets! We select a single bit of ground as the natural centre of the historical system, and make it the central sun. From it all the events of history receive their real light, from it their importance is judged in perspective. But it is in our own West-European conceit alone that this phantom “world-history,” which a breath of scepticism would dissipate, is acted out.

We have to thank that conceit for the immense optical illusion (become natural from long habit) whereby distant histories of thousands of years, such as those of China and Egypt, are made to shrink to the dimensions of mere episodes while in the neighbourhood of our own position the decades since Luther, and particularly since Napoleon, loom large as Brocken-spectres. We know quite well that the slowness with which a high cloud or a railway train in the distance seems to move is only apparent, yet we believe that the tempo of all early Indian, Babylonian or Egyptian history was really slower than that of our own recent past. And we think of them as less substantial, more damped-down, more diluted, because we have not learned to make the allowance for (inward and outward) distances.

It is self-evident that for the Cultures of the West the existence of Athens, Florence or Paris is more important than that of Lo-Yang or Pataliputra. But is it permissible to found a scheme of world-history on estimates of such a sort? If so, then the Chinese historian is quite entitled to frame a world-history in which the Crusades, the Renaissance, Cæsar and Frederick the Great are passed over in silence as insignificant. How, from the morphological point of view, should our 18th Century be more important than any other of the sixty centuries that preceded it? Is it not ridiculous to oppose a “modern” history of a few centuries, and that history to all intents localized in West Europe, to an “ancient” history which covers as many millennia—incidentally dumping into that “ancient history” the whole mass of the pre-Hellenic cultures, unprobed and unordered, as mere appendix-matter? This is no exaggeration. Do we not, for the sake of keeping the hoary scheme, dispose of Egypt and Babylon—each as an individual and self-contained history quite equal in the balance to our so-called “world-history” from Charlemagne to the World-War and well beyond it—as a prelude to classical history? Do we not relegate the vast complexes of Indian and Chinese culture to foot-notes, with a gesture of embarrassment? 18As for the great American cultures, do we not, on the ground that they do not “fit in” (with what?), entirely ignore them?

The most appropriate designation for this current West-European scheme of history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow orbits round us as the presumed centre of all world-happenings, is the Ptolemaic system of history. The system that is put forward in this work in place of it I regard as the Copernican discovery in the historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico—separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power.

The scheme “ancient-mediæval-modern” in its first form was a creation of the Magian world-sense. It first appeared in the Persian and Jewish religions after Cyrus,^[11] received an apocalyptic sense in the teaching of the Book of Daniel on the four world-eras, and was developed into a world-history in the post-Christian religions of the East, notably the Gnostic systems.^[12]

This important conception, within the very narrow limits which fixed its intellectual basis, was unimpeachable. Neither Indian nor even Egyptian history was included in the scope of the proposition. For the Magian thinker the expression “world-history” meant a unique and supremely dramatic act, having as its theatre the lands between Hellas and Persia, in which the strictly dualistic world-sense of the East expressed itself not by means of polar conceptions like the “soul and spirit,” “good and evil” of contemporary metaphysics, but by the figure of a catastrophe, an epochal change of phase between world-creation and world-decay.^[13]

No elements beyond those which we find stabilized in the Classical literature, on the one hand, and the Bible (or other sacred book of the particular system), on the other, came into the picture, which presents (as “The Old” and “The New,” respectively) the easily-grasped contrasts of Gentile and Jewish, Christian and Heathen, Classical and Oriental, idol and dogma, nature and spirit with a time connotation—that is, as a drama in which the one prevails over the other. The historical change of period wears the characteristic dress of the religious “Redemption.” This “world-history” in short was a conception narrow and provincial, but within its limits logical and complete. Necessarily, therefore, it was specific to this region and this humanity, and incapable of any natural extension.

19But to these two there has been added a third epoch, the epoch that we call “modern,” on Western soil, and it is this that for the first time gives the picture of history the look of a progression. The oriental picture was at rest. It presented a self-contained antithesis, with equilibrium as its outcome and a unique divine act as its turning-point. But, adopted and assumed by a wholly new type of mankind, it was quickly transformed (without anyone’s noticing the oddity of the change) into a conception of a linear progress: from Homer or Adam—the modern can substitute for these names the Indo-German, Old Stone Man, or the Pithecanthropus—through Jerusalem, Rome, Florence and Paris according to the taste of the individual historian, thinker or artist, who has unlimited freedom in the interpretation of the three-part scheme.

This third term, “modern times,” which in form asserts that it is the last and conclusive term of the series, has in fact, ever since the Crusades, been stretched and stretched again to the elastic limit at which it will bear no more.^[14] It was at least implied if not stated in so many words, that here, beyond the ancient and the mediæval, something definitive was beginning, a Third Kingdom in which, somewhere, there was to be fulfilment and culmination, and which had an objective point.

As to what this objective point is, each thinker, from Schoolman to present-day Socialist, backs his own peculiar discovery. Such a view into the course of things may be both easy and flattering to the patentee, but in fact he has simply taken the spirit of the West, as reflected in his own brain, for the meaning of the world. So it is that great thinkers, making a metaphysical virtue of intellectual necessity, have not only accepted without serious investigation the scheme of history agreed “by common consent” but have made of it the basis of their philosophies and dragged in God as author of this or that “world-plan.” Evidently the mystic number three applied to the world-ages has something highly seductive for the metaphysician’s taste. History was described by Herder as the education of the human race, by Kant as an evolution of the idea of freedom, by Hegel as a self-expansion of the world-spirit, by others in other terms, but as regards its ground-plan everyone was quite satisfied when he had thought out some abstract meaning for the conventional threefold order.

On the very threshold of the Western Culture we meet the great Joachim of Floris (c. 1145-1202),^[15] the first thinker of the Hegelian stamp who shattered the dualistic world-form of Augustine, and with his essentially Gothic intellect stated the new Christianity of his time in the form of a third term to the religions of the Old and the New Testaments, expressing them respectively as the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son and the Age of the Holy Ghost. His 20teaching moved the best of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, Dante, Thomas Aquinas, in their inmost souls and awakened a world-outlook which slowly but surely took entire possession of the historical sense of our Culture. Lessing—who often designated his own period, with reference to the Classical as the “after-world”^[16] (Nachwelt)—took his idea of the “education of the human race” with its three stages of child, youth and man, from the teaching of the Fourteenth Century mystics. Ibsen treats it with thoroughness in his Emperor and Galilean (1873), in which he directly presents the Gnostic world-conception through the figure of the wizard Maximus, and advances not a step beyond it in his famous Stockholm address of 1887. It would appear, then, that the Western consciousness feels itself urged to predicate a sort of finality inherent in its own appearance.

But the creation of the Abbot of Floris was a mystical glance into the secrets of the divine world-order. It was bound to lose all meaning as soon as it was used in the way of reasoning and made a hypothesis of scientific thinking, as it has been—ever more and more frequently—since the 17th Century.

It is a quite indefensible method of presenting world-history to begin by giving rein to one’s own religious, political or social convictions and endowing the sacrosanct three-phase system with tendencies that will bring it exactly to one’s own standpoint. This is, in effect, making of some formula—say, the “Age of Reason,” Humanity, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, enlightenment, economic progress, national freedom, the conquest of nature, or world-peace—a criterion whereby to judge whole millennia of history. And so we judge that they were ignorant of the “true path,” or that they failed to follow it, when the fact is simply that their will and purposes were not the same as ours. Goethe’s saying, “What is important in life is life and not a result of life,” is the answer to any and every senseless attempt to solve the riddle of historical form by means of a programme.

It is the same picture that we find when we turn to the historians of each special art or science (and those of national economics and philosophy as well). We find:

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 21of separate developments, of special arts, with no bond of union save the name and some details of craft-technique.

We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form and duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well, are determined by the properties of its species. No one, looking at the oak, with its millennial life, dare say that it is at this moment, now, about to start on its true and proper course. No one as he sees a caterpillar grow day by day expects that it will go on doing so for two or three years. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified certainty, a limit, and this sense of the limit is identical with our sense of the inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the contrary, we take our ideas as to the course of the future from an unbridled optimism that sets at naught all historical, i.e., organic, experience, and everyone therefore sets himself to discover in the accidental present terms that he can expand into some striking progression-series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof but on predilection. He works upon unlimited possibilities—never a natural end—and from the momentary top-course of his bricks plans artlessly the continuation of his structure.

“Mankind,” however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids. “Mankind” is a zoological expression, or an empty word.^[17] But conjure away the phantom, break the magic circle, and at once there emerges an astonishing wealth of actual forms—the Living with all its immense fullness, depth and movement—hitherto veiled by a catchword, a dryasdust scheme, and a set of personal “ideals.” I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can only be kept up by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the stone-pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves—but there is no ageing “Mankind.” Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline. These cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton. I see world-history 22as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms. The professional historian, on the contrary, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one epoch after another.

But the series “ancient-mediæval-modern history” has at last exhausted its usefulness. Angular, narrow, shallow though it was as a scientific foundation, still we possessed no other form that was not wholly unphilosophical in which our data could be arranged, and world-history (as hitherto understood) has to thank it for filtering our classifiable solid residues. But the number of centuries that the scheme can by any stretch be made to cover has long since been exceeded, and with the rapid increase in the volume of our historical material—especially of material that cannot possibly be brought under the scheme—the picture is beginning to dissolve into a chaotic blur. Every historical student who is not quite blind knows and feels this, and it is as a drowning man that he clutches at the only scheme which he knows of. The word “Middle Age,”^[18] invented in 1667 by Professor Horn of Leyden, has to-day to cover a formless and constantly extending mass which can only be defined, negatively, as every thing not classifiable under any pretext in one of the other two (tolerably well-ordered) groups. We have an excellent example of this in our feeble treatment and hesitant judgment of modern Persian, Arabian and Russian history. But, above all, it has become impossible to conceal the fact that this so-called history of the world is a limited history, first of the Eastern Mediterranean region and then,—with an abrupt change of scene at the Migrations (an event important only to us and therefore greatly exaggerated by us, an event of purely Western and not even Arabian significance),—of West-Central Europe. When Hegel declared so naïvely that he meant to ignore those peoples which did not fit into his scheme of history, he was only making an honest avowal of methodic premisses that every historian finds necessary for his purpose and every historical work shows in its lay-out. In fact it has now become an affair of scientific tact to determine which of the historical developments shall be seriously taken into account and which not. Ranke is a good example.

To-day we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and historians who have not realized that we do so. Of what significance to us, then, are conceptions and purviews that they put before us as universally valid, when in truth their furthest horizon does not extend beyond the intellectual atmosphere of Western Man?

Examine, from this point of view, our best books. When Plato speaks of 23humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians, which is entirely consonant with the ahistoric mode of the Classical life and thought, and his premisses take him to conclusions that for Greeks were complete and significant. When, however, Kant philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in so many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that goes without saying. In his æsthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias’s art, or Rembrandt’s art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary forms of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought, though a glance at Aristotle and his essentially different conclusions should have sufficed to show that Aristotle’s intellect, not less penetrating than his own, was of different structure from it. The categories of the Westerner are just as alien to Russian thought as those of the Chinaman or the ancient Greek are to him. For us, the effective and complete comprehension of Classical root-words is just as impossible as that of Russian^[19] and Indian, and for the modern Chinese or Arab, with their utterly different intellectual constitutions, “philosophy from Bacon to Kant” has only a curiosity-value.

It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in whom we might have expected to find it—insight into the historically relative character of his data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only; knowledge of the necessary limits of their validity; the conviction that his “unshakable” truths and “eternal” views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That and nothing else will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, and only through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the symbolism of history. Here there is nothing constant, nothing universal. We must cease to speak of the forms of “Thought,” the principles of “Tragedy,” the mission of “The State.” Universal validity involves always the fallacy of arguing from particular to particular.

But something much more disquieting than a logical fallacy begins to appear when the centre of gravity of philosophy shifts from the abstract-systematic to the practical-ethical and our Western thinkers from Schopenhauer onward turn from the problem of cognition to the problem of life (the will to life, to power, to action). Here it is not the ideal abstract “man” of Kant that is subjected to examination, but actual man as he has inhabited the earth during historical time, grouped, whether primitive or advanced, by peoples; and it is more than ever futile to define the structure of his highest ideas in terms of the “ancient-mediæval-modern” scheme with its local limitations. But it is done, nevertheless.

24Consider the historical horizon of Nietzsche. His conceptions of decadence, militarism, the transvaluation of all values, the will to power, lie deep in the essence of Western civilization and are for the analysis of that civilization of decisive importance. But what, do we find, was the foundation on which he built up his creation? Romans and Greeks, Renaissance and European present, with a fleeting and uncomprehending side-glance at Indian philosophy—in short “ancient, mediæval and modern” history. Strictly speaking, he never once moved outside the scheme, not did any other thinker of his time.

What correlation, then, is there or can there be of his idea of the “Dionysian” with the inner life of a highly-civilized Chinese or an up-to-date American? What is the significance of his type of the “Superman”—for the world of Islam? Can image-forming antitheses of Nature and Intellect, Heathen and Christian, Classical and Modern, have any meaning for the soul of the Indian or the Russian? What can Tolstoi—who from the depths of his humanity rejected the whole Western world-idea as something alien and distant—do with the “Middle Ages,” with Dante, with Luther? What can a Japanese do with Parzeval and “Zarathustra,” or an Indian with Sophocles? And is the thought-range of Schopenhauer, Comte, Feuerbach, Hebbel or Strindberg any wider? Is not their whole psychology, for all its intention of world-wide validity, one of purely West-European significance?

How comic seem Ibsen’s woman-problems—which also challenge the attention of all “humanity”—when, for his famous Nora, the lady of the North-west European city with the horizon that is implied by a house-rent of £100 to £300 a year and a Protestant upbringing, we substitute Cæsar’s wife, Madame de Sévigné, a Japanese or a Turkish peasant woman! But, for that matter, Ibsen’s own circle of vision is that of the middle class in a great city of yesterday and to-day. His conflicts, which start from spiritual premisses that did not exist till about 1850 and can scarcely last beyond 1950, are neither those of the great world nor those of the lower masses, still less those of the cities inhabited by non-European populations.

All these are local and temporary values—most of them indeed limited to the momentary “intelligentsia” of cities of West-European type. World-historical or “eternal” values they emphatically are not. Whatever the substantial importance of Ibsen’s and Nietzsche’s generation may be, it infringes the very meaning of the word “world-history”—which denotes the totality and not a selected part—to subordinate, to undervalue, or to ignore the factors which lie outside “modern” interests. Yet in fact they are so undervalued or ignored to an amazing extent. What the West has said and thought, hitherto, on the problems of space, time, motion, number, will, marriage, property, tragedy, science, has remained narrow and dubious, because men were always looking for the solution of the question. It was never seen that many questioners implies many answers, that any philosophical question is really a veiled desire 25to 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.

In opposition to all these arbitraryarbitrary 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, 26the birth of the vertebrate type, the process of the geological strata—the Destiny in nature and not the Causality—so here we shall develop the form-language of human history, its periodic structure, its organic logic out of the profusion of all the challenging details.

In other aspects, mankind is habitually, and rightly, reckoned as one of the organisms of the earth’s surface. Its physical structure, its natural functions, the whole phenomenal conception of it, all belong to a more comprehensive unity. Only in this aspect is it treated otherwise, despite that deeply-felt relationship of plant destiny and human destiny which is an eternal theme of all lyrical poetry, and despite that similarity of human history to that of any other of the higher life-groups which is the refrain of endless beast-legends, sagas and fables.

But only bring analogy to bear on this aspect as on the rest, letting the world of human Cultures intimately and unreservedly work upon the imagination instead of forcing it into a ready-made scheme. Let the words youth, growth, maturity, decay—hitherto, and to-day more than ever, used to express subjective valuations and entirely personal preferences in sociology, ethics and æsthetics—be taken at last as objective descriptions of organic states. Set forth the Classical Culture as a self-contained phenomenon embodying and expressing the Classical soul, put it beside the Egyptian, the Indian, the Babylonian, the Chinese and the Western, and determine for each of these higher individuals what is typical in their surgings and what is necessary in the riot of incident. And then at last will unfold itself the picture of world-history that is natural to us, men of the West, and to us alone.

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 forfor 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 27of our own Western development, differing indeed from it in every detail of the surface but entirely similar as regards the inward power driving the great organism towards its end. We might have found the constant alter ego of our own actuality in establishing the correspondence, item by item, from the “Trojan War” and the Crusades, Homer and the Nibelungenlied, through Doric and Gothic, Dionysian movement and Renaissance, Polycletus and John Sebastian Bach, Athens and Paris, Aristotle and Kant, Alexander and Napoleon, to the world-city and the imperialism common to both Cultures.

Unfortunately, this requires an interpretation of the picture of Classical history very different from the incredibly one-sided, superficial, prejudiced, limited picture that we have in fact given to it. We have, in truth been only too conscious of our near relation to the Classical Age, and only too prone in consequence to unconsidered assertion of it. Superficial similarity is a great snare, and our entire Classical study fell a victim to it as soon as it passed from the (admittedly masterly) ordering and critique of the discoveries to the interpretation of their spiritual meaning. That close inward relation in which we conceive ourselves to stand towards the Classical, and which leads us to think that we are its pupils and successors (whereas in reality we are simply its adorers), is a venerable prejudice which ought at last to be put aside. The whole religious-philosophical, art-historical and social-critical work of the 19th Century has been necessary to enable us, not to understand Æschylus, Plato, Apollo and Dionysus, the Athenian state and Cæsarism (which we are far indeed from doing), but to begin to realize, once and for all, how immeasurably alien and distant these things are from our inner selves—more alien, maybe, than Mexican gods and Indian architecture.

Our views of the Græco-Roman Culture have always swung between two extremes, and our standpoints have invariably been defined for us by the “ancient-mediæval-modern” scheme. One group, public men before all else—economists, politicians, jurists—opine that “present-day mankind” is making excellent progress, assess it and its performances at the very highest value and measure everything earlier by its standards. There is no modern party that has not weighed up Cleon, Marius, Themistocles, Catiline, the Gracchi, according to its own principles. On the other hand we have the group of artists, poets, philologists and philosophers. These feel themselves to be out of their element in the aforesaid present, and in consequence choose for themselves in this or that past epoch a standpoint that is in its way just as absolute and dogmatic from which to condemn “to-day.” The one group looks upon Greece as a “not yet,” the other upon modernity as a “nevermore.” Both labour under the obsession of a scheme of history which treats the two epochs as part of the same straight line.

In this opposition it is the two souls of Faust that express themselves. The danger of the one group lies in a clever superficiality. In its hands there remains 28finally, of all Classical Culture, of all reflections of the Classical soul, nothing but a bundle of social, economic, political and physiological facts, and the rest is treated as “secondary results,” “reflexes,” “attendant phenomena.” In the books of this group we find not a hint of the mythical force of Æschylus’s choruses, of the immense mother-earth struggle of the early sculpture, the Doric column, of the richness of the Apollo-cult, of the real depth of the Roman Emperor-worship. The other group, composed above all of belated romanticists—represented in recent times by the three Basel professors Bachofen, Burckhardt and Nietzsche—succumb to the usual dangers of ideology. They lose themselves in the clouds of an antiquity that is really no more than the image of their own sensibility in a philological mirror. They rest their case upon the only evidence which they consider worthy to support it, viz., the relics of the old literature, yet there never was a Culture so incompletely represented for us by its great writers.^[20] The first group, on the other hand, supports itself principally upon the humdrum material of law-sources, inscriptions and coins (which Burckhardt and Nietzsche, very much to their own loss, despised) and subordinates thereto, often with little or no sense of truth and fact, the surviving literature. Consequently, even in point of critical foundations, neither group takes the other seriously. I have never heard that Nietzsche and Mommsen had the smallest respect for each other.

But neither group has attained to that higher method of treatment which reduces this opposition of criteria to ashes, although it was within their power to do so. In their self-limitation they paid the penalty for taking over the causality-principle from natural science. Unconsciously they arrived at a pragmatism that sketchily copied the world-picture drawn by physics and, instead of revealing, obscured and confused the quite other-natured forms of history. They had no better expedient for subjecting the mass of historical material to critical and normative examination than to consider one complex of phenomena as being primary and causative and the rest as being secondary, as being consequences or effects. And it was not only the matter-of-fact school that resorted to this method. The romanticists did likewise, for History had not revealed even to their dreaming gaze its specific logic; and yet they felt that 29there was an immanent necessity in it to determine this somehow, rather than turn their backs upon History in despair like Schopenhauer.

Briefly, then, there are two ways of regarding the Classical—the materialistic and the ideological. By the former, it is asserted that the sinking of one scale-pan has its cause in the rising of the other, and it is shown that this occurs invariably (truly a striking theorem); and in this juxtaposing of cause and effect we naturally find the social and sexual, at all events the purely political, facts classed as causes and the religious, intellectual and (so far as the materialist tolerates them as facts at all) the artistic as effects. On the other hand, the ideologues show that the rising of one scale-pan follows from the sinking of the other, which they are able to prove of course with equal exactitude; this done, they lose themselves in cults, mysteries, customs, in the secrets of the strophe and the line, throwing scarcely a side-glance at the commonplace daily life—for them an unpleasant consequence of earthly imperfection. Each side, with its gaze fixed on causality, demonstrates that the other side either cannot or will not understand the true linkages of things and each ends by calling the other blind, superficial, stupid, absurd or frivolous, oddities or Philistines. It shocks the ideologue if anyone deals with Hellenic finance-problems and instead of, for example, telling us the deep meanings of the Delphic oracle, describes the far-reaching money operations which the Oracle priests undertook with their accumulated treasures. The politician, on the other hand, has a superior smile for those who waste their enthusiasm on ritual formulæ and the dress of Attic youths, instead of writing a book adorned with up-to-date catchwords about antique class-struggles.

The one type is foreshadowed from the very outset in Petrarch; it created Florence and Weimar and the Western classicism. The other type appears in the middle of the 18th Century, along with the rise of civilized,^[21] economic-megalopolitan^[22] politics, and England is therefore its birthplace (Grote). At bottom, the opposition is between the conceptions of culture-man and those of civilization-man, and it is too deep, too essentially human, to allow the weaknesses of both standpoints alike to be seen or overcome.

The materialist himself is on this point an idealist. He too, without wishing or desiring it, has made his views dependent upon his wishes. In fact all our finest minds without exception have bowed down reverently before the picture of the Classical, abdicating in this one instance alone their function of unrestricted criticism. The freedom and power of Classical research are always 30hindered, and its data obscured, by a certain almost religious awe. In all history there is no analogous case of one Culture making a passionate cult of the memory of another. Our devotion is evidenced yet again in the fact that since the Renaissance, a thousand years of history have been undervalued so that an ideal “Middle” Age may serve as a link between ourselves and antiquity. We Westerners have sacrificed on the Classical altar the purity and independence of our art, for we have not dared to create without a side-glance at the “sublime exemplar.” We have projected our own deepest spiritual needs and feelings on to the Classical picture. Some day a gifted psychologist will deal with this most fateful illusion and tell us the story of the “Classical” that we have so consistently reverenced since the days of Gothic. Few theses would be more helpful for the understanding of the Western soul from Otto III, the first victim of the South, to Nietzsche, the last.

Goethe on his Italian tour speaks with enthusiasm of the buildings of Palladio, whose frigid and academic work we to-day regard very sceptically: but when he goes on to Pompeii he does not conceal his dissatisfaction in experiencing “a strange, half-unpleasant impression,” and what he has to say on the temples of Pæstum and Segesta—masterpieces of Hellenic art—is embarrassed and trivial. Palpably, when Classical antiquity in its full force met him face to face, he did not recognize it. It is the same with all others. Much that was Classical they chose not to see, and so they saved their inward image of the Classical—which was in reality the background of a life-ideal that they themselves had created and nourished with their heart’s blood, a vessel filled with their own world-feeling, a phantom, an idol. The audacious descriptions of Aristophanes, Juvenal or Petronius of life in the Classical cities—the southern dirt and riff-raff, terrors and brutalities, pleasure-boys and Phrynes, phallus worship and imperial orgies—excite the enthusiasm of the student and the dilettante, who find the same realities in the world-cities of to-day too lamentable and repulsive to face. “In the cities life is bad; there are too many of the lustful.”—also sprach Zarathustra. They commend the state-sense of the Romans, but despise the man of to-day who permits himself any contact with public affairs. There is a type of scholar whose clarity of vision comes under some irresistible spell when it turns from a frock-coat to a toga, from a British football-ground to a Byzantine circus, from a transcontinental railway to a Roman road in the Alps, from a thirty-knot destroyer to a trireme, from Prussian bayonets to Roman spears—nowadays, even, from a modern engineer’s Suez Canal to that of a Pharaoh. He would admit a steam-engine as a symbol of human passion and an expression of intellectual force if it were Hero of Alexandria who invented it, not otherwise. To such it seems blasphemous to talk of Roman central-heating or book-keeping in preference to the worship of the Great Mother of the Gods.

But the other school sees nothing but these things. It thinks it exhausts the 31essence 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.

Looked at in this way, the “Decline of the West” comprises nothing less than the problem of Civilization. We have before us one of the fundamental questions of all higher history. What is Civilization, understood as the organic-logical sequel, fulfilment and finale of a culture?

For every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or less ethical, distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic succession. The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again.

32So, for the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as the successors of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest secrets of the late-Classical period. What, but this, can be the meaning of the fact—which can only be disputed by vain phrases—that the Romans were barbarians who did not precede but closed a great development? Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand between the Hellenic Culture and nothingness. An imagination directed purely to practical objects—they had religious laws governing godward relations as they had other laws governing human relations, but there was no specifically Roman saga of gods—was something which is not found at all in Athens. In a word, Greek soul—Roman intellect; and this antithesis is the differentia between Culture and Civilization. Nor is it only to the Classical that it applies. Again and again there appears this type of strong-minded, completely non-metaphysical man, and in the hands of this type lies the intellectual and material destiny of each and every “late” period. Such are the men who carried through the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the Chinese, the Roman Civilizations, and in such periods do Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism ripen into definitive world-conceptions which enable a moribund humanity to be attacked and re-formed in its intimate structure. Pure Civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive taking-down of forms that have become inorganic or dead.

The transition from Culture to Civilization was accomplished for the Classical world in the 4th, for the Western in the 19th Century. From these periods onward the great intellectual decisions take place, not as in the days of the Orpheus-movement or the Reformation in the “whole world” where not a hamlet is too small to be unimportant, but in three or four world-cities that have absorbed into themselves the whole content of History, while the old wide landscape of the Culture, become merely provincial, serves only to feed the cities with what remains of its higher mankind.

World-city and province^[23]—the two basic ideas of every civilization—bring up a wholly new form-problem of History, the very problem that we are living through to-day with hardly the remotest conception of its immensity. In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. This is a very great stride towards the inorganic, towards the end—what does it signify? France and England have already taken the step and Germany is beginning to do so. After Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome. After Madrid, 33Paris, London come Berlin and New York. It is the destiny of whole regions that lie outside the radiation-circle of one of these cities—of old Crete and Macedon and to-day the Scandinavian North^[24]—to become “provinces.”

Of old, the field on which the opposed conception of an epoch came to battle was some world-problem of a metaphysical, religious or dogmatic kind, and the battle was between the soil-genius of the countryman (noble, priest) and the “worldly” patrician genius of the famous old small towns of Doric or Gothic springtime. Of such a character were the conflicts over the Dionysus religion—as in the tyranny of Kleisthenes of Sikyon^[25]—and those of the Reformation in the German free cities and the Huguenot wars. But just as these cities overcame the country-side (already it is a purely civic world-outlook that appears in even Parmenides and Descartes), so in turn the world-city overcame them. It is the common intellectual process of later periods such as the Ionic and the Baroque, and to-day—as in the Hellenistic age which at its outset saw the foundation of artificial, land-alien Alexandria—Culture-cities like Florence, Nürnberg, Salamanca, Bruges and Prag, have become provincial towns and fight inwardly a lost battle against the world-cities. The world-city means cosmopolitanism in place of “home,”^[26] cold matter-of-fact in place of reverence for tradition and age, scientific irreligion as a fossil representative of the older religion of the heart, “society” in place of the state, natural instead of hard-earned rights. It was in the conception of money as an inorganic and abstract magnitude, entirely disconnected from the notion of the fruitful earth and the primitive values, that the Romans had the advantage of the Greeks. Thenceforward any high ideal of life becomes largely a question of money. Unlike the Greek stoicism of Chrysippus, the Roman stoicism of Cato and Seneca presupposes a private income;^[27] and, unlike that of the 18th Century, the social-ethical sentiment of the 20th, if it is to be realized at a higher level than that of professional (and lucrative) agitation, is a matter for millionaires. To the world-city belongs not a folk but a mass. Its uncomprehending hostility to all the traditions representative of the Culture (nobility, church, privileges, dynasties, convention in art and limits of knowledge in science), the keen and cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom of the peasant, the new-fashioned naturalism that in relation to all matters of sex and society goes back far beyond Rousseau and Socrates to quite primitive instincts and conditions, the reappearance 34of the panem et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds—all these things betoken the definite closing-down of the Culture and the opening of a quite new phase of human existence—anti-provincial, late, futureless, but quite inevitable.

This is what has to be viewed, and viewed not with the eyes of the partisan, the ideologue, the up-to-date novelist, not from this or that “standpoint,” but in a high, time-free perspective embracing whole millenniums of historical world-forms, if we are really to comprehend the great crisis of the present.

To me it is a symbol of the first importance that in the Rome of Crassus—triumvir and all-powerful building-site speculator—the Roman people with its proud inscriptions, the people before whom Gauls, Greeks, Parthians, Syrians afar trembled, lived in appalling misery in the many-storied lodging-houses of dark suburbs,^[28] accepting with indifference or even with a sort of sporting interest the consequences of the military expansion: that many famous old-noble families, descendants of the men who defeated the Celts and the Samnites, lost their ancestral homes through standing apart from the wild rush of speculation and were reduced to renting wretched apartments; that, while along the Appian Way there arose the splendid and still wonderful tombs of the financial magnates, the corpses of the people were thrown along with animal carcases and town refuse into a monstrous common grave—till in Augustus’s time it was banked over for the avoidance of pestilence and so became the site of Mæcenas’s renowned park; that in depopulated Athens, which lived on visitors and on the bounty of rich foreigners, the mob of parvenu tourists from Rome gaped at the works of the Periclean age with as little understanding as the American globe-trotter in the Sistine Chapel at those of Michelangelo, every removable art-piece having ere this been taken away or bought at fancy prices to be replaced by the Roman buildings which grew up, colossal and arrogant, by the side of the low and modest structures of the old time. In such things—which it is the historian’s business not to praise or to blame but to consider morphologically—there lies, plain and immediate enough for one who has learnt to see, an idea.

For it will become manifest that, from this moment on, all great conflicts of world-outlook, of politics, of art, of science, of feeling will be under the influence of this one opposition. What is the hall-mark of a politic of Civilization to-day, in contrast to a politic of Culture yesterday? It is, for the Classical rhetoric, and for the Western journalism, both serving that abstract which represents the power of Civilization—money.^[29] It is the money-spirit which 35penetrates unremarked the historical forms of the people’s existence, often without destroying or even in the least disturbing these forms—the form of the Roman state, for instance, underwent very much less alteration between the elder Scipio and Augustus than is usually imagined. Though forms subsist, the great political parties nevertheless cease to be more than reputed centres of decision. The decisions in fact lie elsewhere. A small number of superior heads, whose names are very likely not the best-known, settle everything, while below them are the great mass of second-rate politicians—rhetors, tribunes, deputies, journalists—selected through a provincially-conceived franchise to keep alive the illusion of popular self-determination. And art? Philosophy? The ideals of a Platonic or those of a Kantian age had for the higher mankind concerned a general validity. But those of a Hellenistic age, or those of our own, are valid exclusively for the brain of the Megalopolitan. For the villager’s or, generally, the nature-man’s world-feeling our Socialism—like its near relation Darwinism (how utterly un-Goethian are the formulæ of “struggle for existence” and “natural selection”!), like its other relative the woman-and-marriage problem of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw, like the impressionistic tendencies of anarchic sensuousness and the whole bundle of modern longings, temptations and pains expressed in Baudelaire’s verse and Wagner’s music—are simply non-existent. The smaller the town, the more unmeaning it becomes to busy oneself with painting or with music of these kinds. To the Culture belong gymnastics, the tournament, the agon, and to the Civilization belongs Sport. This is the true distinction between the Hellenic palæstra and the Roman circus.^[30] Art itself becomes a sport (hence the phrase “art for art’s sake”) to be played before a highly-intelligent audience of connoisseurs and buyers, whether the feat consist in mastering absurd instrumental tone-masses and taking harmonic fences, or in some tour de force of colouring. Then a new fact-philosophy appears, which can only spare a smile for metaphysical speculation, and a new literature that is a necessity of life for the megalopolitan palate and nerves and both unintelligible and ugly to the provincials. Neither Alexandrine poetry nor plein-air painting is anything to the “people.” And, then as now, the phase of transition is marked by a series of scandals only to be found at such moments. The anger evoked in the Athenian populace by Euripides and by the “Revolutionary” painting of Apollodorus, for example, is repeated in the opposition to Wagner, Manet, Ibsen, and Nietzsche.

It is possible to understand the Greeks without mentioning their economic relations; the Romans, on the other hand, can only be understood through these. Chæronea and Leipzig were the last battles fought about an idea. In the First Punic War and in 1870 economic motives are no longer to be overlooked. Not 36till the Romans came with their practical energy was slave-holding given that big collective character which many students regard as the die-stamp of Classical economics, legislation and way of life, and which in any event vastly lowered both the value and the inner worthiness of such free labour as continued to exist side by side with gang-labour. And it was not the Latin, but the Germanic peoples of the West and America who developed out of the steam-engine a big industry that transformed the face of the land. The relation of these phenomena to Stoicism and to Socialism is unmistakable. Not till the Roman Cæsarism—foreshadowed by C. Flaminius, shaped first by Marius, handled by strong-minded, large-scale men of fact—did the Classical World learn the pre-eminence of money. Without this fact neither Cæsar, nor “Rome” generally, is understandable. In every Greek is a Don Quixote, in every Roman a Sancho Panza factor, and these factors are dominants.

Considered in itself, the Roman world-dominion was a negative phenomenon, being the result not of a surplus of energy on the one side—that the Romans had never had since Zama—but of a deficiency of resistance on the other. That the Romans did not conquer the world is certain;^[31] they merely took possession of a booty that lay open to everyone. The Imperium Romanum came into existence not as the result of such an extremity of military and financial effort as had characterized the Punic Wars, but because the old East forwent all external self-determinations. We must not be deluded by the appearance of brilliant military successes. With a few ill-trained, ill-led, and sullen legions, Lucullus and Pompey conquered whole realms—a phenomenon that in the period of the battle of Ipsus would have been unthinkable. The Mithradatic danger, serious enough for a system of material force which had never been put to any real test, would have been nothing to the conquerors of Hannibal. After Zama, the Romans never again either waged or were capable of waging a war against a great military Power.^[32] Their classic wars were those against the Samnites, Pyrrhus and Carthage. Their grand hour was Cannæ. To maintain the heroic posture for centuries on end is beyond the power of any people. The Prussian-German people have had three great moments (1813, 1870 and 1914), and that is more than others have had.

Here, then, I lay it down that Imperialism, of which petrifacts such as the Egyptian empire, the Roman, the Chinese, the Indian may continue to exist for hundreds or thousands of years—dead bodies, amorphous and dispirited masses of men, scrap-material from a great history—is to be taken as the typical symbol of the passing away. Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated. 37In this phenomenal form the destiny of the West is now irrevocably set. The energy of culture-man is directed inwards, that of civilization-man outwards. And thus I see in Cecil Rhodes the first man of a new age. He stands for the political style of a far-ranging, Western, Teutonic and especially German future, and his phrase “expansion is everything” is the Napoleonic reassertion of the indwelling tendency of every Civilization that has fully ripened—Roman, Arab or Chinese. It is not a matter of choice—it is not the conscious will of individuals, or even that of whole classes or peoples that decides. The expansive tendency is a doom, something daemonic and immense, which grips, forces into service, and uses up the late mankind of the world-city stage, willy-nilly, aware or unaware.^[33] Life is the process of effecting possibilities, and for the brain-man there are only extensive possibilities.^[34] Hard as the half-developed Socialism of to-day is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-expansionist with all the vehemence of destiny. Here the form-language of politics, as the direct intellectual expression of a certain type of humanity, touches on a deep metaphysical problem—on the fact, affirmed in the grant of unconditional validity to the causality-principle, that the soul is the complement of its extension.

When, between 480 and 230,^[35] the Chinese group of states was tending towards imperialism, it was entirely futile to combat the principle of Imperialism (Lien-heng), practised in particular by the “Roman” state of Tsin^[36] and theoreticallytheoretically represented by the philosopher Dschang Yi, by ideas of a League of Nations (Hoh-tsung) largely derived from Wang Hü, a profound sceptic who had no illusions as to the men or the political possibilities of this “late” period. Both sides opposed the anti-political idealism of Lao-tse, but as between themselves it was Lien-heng and not Hoh-tsung which swam with the natural current of expansive Civilization.^[37]

Rhodes is to be regarded as the first precursor of a Western type of Cæsars, whose day is to come though yet distant. He stands midway between Napoleon and the force-men of the next centuries, just as Flaminius, who from 232 B.C. onward pressed the Romans to undertake the subjugation of Cisalpine Gaul and so initiated the policy of colonial expansion, stands between Alexander and Cæsar. Strictly speaking, Flaminius was a private person—for his real power was of a kind not embodied in any constitutional office—who exercised a dominant influence in the state at a time when the state-idea was giving way to the pressure of economic factors. So far as Rome is concerned, he was the archetype 38of opposition Cæsarism; with him there came to an end the idea of state-service and there began the “will to power” which ignored traditions and reckoned only with forces. Alexander and Napoleon were romantics; though they stood on the threshold of Civilization and in its cold clear air, the one fancied himself an Achilles and the other read Werther. Cæsar, on the contrary, was a pure man of fact gifted with immense understanding.

But even for Rhodes political success means territorial and financial success, and only that. Of this Roman-ness within himself he was fully aware. But Western Civilization has not yet taken shape in such strength and purity as this. It was only before his maps that he could fall into a sort of poetic trance, this son of the parsonage who, sent out to South Africa without means, made a gigantic fortune and employed it as the engine of political aims. His idea of a trans-African railway from the Cape to Cairo, his project of a South African empire, his intellectual hold on the hard metal souls of the mining magnates whose wealth he forced into the service of his schemes, his capital Bulawayo, royally planned as a future Residence by a statesman who was all-powerful yet stood in no definite relation to the State, his wars, his diplomatic deals, his road-systems, his syndicates, his armies, his conception of the “great duty to civilization” of the man of brain—all this, broad and imposing, is the prelude of a future which is still in store for us and with which the history of West-European mankind will be definitely closed.

He who does not understand that this outcome is obligatory and insusceptible of modification, that our choice is between willing this and willing nothing at all, between cleaving to this destiny or despairing of the future and of life itself; he who cannot feel that there is grandeur also in the realizations of powerful intelligences, in the energy and discipline of metal-hard natures, in battles fought with the coldest and most abstract means; he who is obsessed with the idealism of a provincial and would pursue the ways of life of past ages—must forgo all desire to comprehend history, to live through history or to make history.

Thus regarded, the Imperium Romanum appears no longer as an isolated phenomenon, but as the normal product of a strict and energetic, megalopolitan, predominantly practical spirituality, as typical of a final and irreversible condition which has occurred often enough though it has only been identified as such in this instance.

Let it be realized, then:

That the secret of historical form does not lie on the surface, that it cannot be grasped by means of similarities of costume and setting, and that in the history of men as in that of animals and plants there occur phenomena showing deceptive similarity but inwardly without any connexion—e.g., Charlemagne and Haroun-al-Raschid, Alexander and Cæsar, the German wars upon Rome and the Mongol onslaughts upon West Europe—and other phenomena of 39extreme 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.

This high plane of contemplation once attained, the rest is easy. To this single idea one can refer, and by it one can solve, without straining or forcing, all those separate problems of religion, art-history, epistemology, ethics, politics, economics with which the modern intellect has so passionately—and so vainly—busied itself for decades.

This idea is one of those truths that have only to be expressed with full clarity to become indisputable. It is one of the inward necessities of the Western Culture and of its world-feeling. It is capable of entirely transforming the world-outlook of one who fully understands it, i.e., makes it intimately his own. It immensely deepens the world-picture natural and necessary to us in that, already trained to regard world-historical evolution as an organic unit seen backwards from our standpoint in the present, we are enabled by its aid to follow the broad lines into the future—a privilege of dream-calculation till now permitted only to the physicist. It is, I repeat, in effect the substitution of a Copernican for a Ptolemaic aspect of history, that is, an immeasurable widening of horizon.

Up to now everyone has been at liberty to hope what he pleased about the future. Where there are no facts, sentiment rules. But henceforward it will be every man’s business to inform himself of what can happen and therefore of what with the unalterable necessity of destiny and irrespective of personal ideals, hopes or desires, will happen. When we use the risky word “freedom” we shall mean freedom to do, not this or that, but the necessary or nothing. The feeling that this is “just as it should be” is the hall-mark of the man of 40fact. To lament it and blame it is not to alter it. To birth belongs death, to youth age, to life generally its form and its allotted span. The present is a civilized, emphatically not a cultured time, and ipso facto a great number of life-capacities fall out as impossible. This may be deplorable, and may be and will be deplored in pessimist philosophy and poetry, but it is not in our power to make otherwise. It will not be—already it is not—permissible to defy clear historical experience and to expect, merely because we hope, that this will spring or that will flourish.

It will no doubt be objected that such a world-outlook, which in giving this certainty as to the outlines and tendency of the future cuts off all far-reaching hopes, would be unhealthy for all and fatal for many, once it ceased to be a mere theory and was adopted as a practical scheme of life by the group of personalities effectively moulding the future.

Such is not my opinion. We are civilized, not Gothic or Rococo, people; we have to reckon with the hard cold facts of a late life, to which the parallel is to be found not in Pericles’s Athens but in Cæsar’s Rome. Of great painting or great music there can no longer be, for Western people, any question. Their architectural possibilities have been exhausted these hundred years. Only extensive possibilities are left to them. Yet, for a sound and vigorous generation that is filled with unlimited hopes, I fail to see that it is any disadvantage to discover betimes that some of these hopes must come to nothing. And if the hopes thus doomed should be those most dear, well, a man who is worth anything will not be dismayed. It is true that the issue may be a tragic one for some individuals who in their decisive years are overpowered by the conviction that in the spheres of architecture, drama, painting, there is nothing left for them to conquer. What matter if they do go under! It has been the convention hitherto to admit no limits of any sort in these matters, and to believe that each period had its own task to do in each sphere. Tasks therefore were found by hook or by crook, leaving it to be settled posthumously whether or not the artist’s faith was justified and his life-work necessary. Now, nobody but a pure romantic would take this way out. Such a pride is not the pride of a Roman. What are we to think of the individual who, standing before an exhausted quarry, would rather be told that a new vein will be struck to-morrow—the bait offered by the radically false and mannerized art of the moment—than be shown a rich and virgin clay-bed near by? The lesson, I think, would be of benefit to the coming generations, as showing them what is possible—and therefore necessary—and what is excluded from the inward potentialities of their time. Hitherto an incredible total of intellect and power has been squandered in false directions. The West-European, however historically he may think and feel, is at a certain stage of life invariably uncertain of his own direction; he gropes and feels his way and, if unlucky in environment, he loses it. But now at last the work of centuries enables him to view the disposition 41of 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.

It still remains to consider the relation of a morphology of world-history to Philosophy. All genuine historical work is philosophy, unless it is mere ant-industry. But the operations of the systematic philosopher are subject to constant and serious error through his assuming the permanence of his results. He overlooks the fact that every thought lives in a historical world and is therefore involved in the common destiny of mortality. He supposes that higher thought possesses an everlasting and unalterable objectiveness (Gegenstand), that the great questions of all epochs are identical, and that therefore they are capable in the last analysis of unique answers.

But question and answer are here one, and the great questions are made great by the very fact that unequivocal answers to them are so passionately demanded, so that it is as life-symbols only that they possess significance. There are no eternal truths. Every philosophy is the expression of its own and only its own time, and—if by philosophy we mean effective philosophy and not academic triflings about judgment-forms, sense-categories and the like—no two ages possess the same philosophic intentions. The difference is not between perishable and imperishable doctrines but between doctrines which live their day and doctrines which never live at all. The immortality of thoughts-become is an illusion—the essential is, what kind of man comes to expression in them. The greater the man, the truer the philosophy, with the inward truth that in a great work of art transcends all proof of its several elements or even of their compatibility with one another. At highest, the philosophy may absorb the entire content of an epoch, realize it within itself and then, embodying it in some grand form or personality, pass it on to be developed further and further. The scientific dress or the mark of learning adopted by a philosophy is here unimportant. Nothing is simpler than to make good poverty of ideas by founding a system, and even a good idea has little value when enunciated by a solemn ass. Only its necessity to life decides the eminence of a doctrine.

For me, therefore, the test of value to be applied to a thinker is his eye for the great facts of his own time. Only this can settle whether he is merely a clever architect of systems and principles, versed in definitions and analyses, or whether it is the very soul of his time that speaks in his works and his intuitions. A philosopher who cannot grasp and command actuality as well will never be of the first rank. The Pre-Socratics were merchants and politicians 42en grand. The desire to put his political ideas into practice in Syracuse nearly cost Plato his life, and it was the same Plato who discovered the set of geometrical theorems that enabled Euclid to build up the Classical system of mathematics. Pascal—whom Nietzsche knows only as the “broken Christian”—Descartes, Leibniz were the first mathematicians and technicians of their time.

The great “Pre-Socratics” of China from Kwan-tsi (about 670) to Confucius (550-478) were statesmen, regents, lawgivers like Pythagoras and Parmenides, like Hobbes and Leibniz. With Lao-tsze—the opponent of all state authority and high politics and the enthusiast of small peaceful communities—unworldliness and deed-shyness first appear, heralds of lecture-room and study philosophy. But Lao-tsze was in his time, the ancien régime of China, an exception in the midst of sturdy philosophers for whom epistemology meant the knowledge of the important relations of actual life.

And herein, I think, all the philosophers of the newest age are open to a serious criticism. What they do not possess is real standing in actual life. Not one of them has intervened effectively, either in higher politics, in the development of modern technics, in matters of communication, in economics, or in any other big actuality, with a single act or a single compelling idea. Not one of them counts in mathematics, in physics, in the science of government, even to the extent that Kant counted. Let us glance at other times. Confucius was several times a minister. Pythagoras was the organizer of an important political movement^[38] akin to the Cromwellian, the significance of which is even now far underestimated by Classical researchers. Goethe, besides being a model executive minister—though lacking, alas! the operative sphere of a great state—was interested in the Suez and Panama canals (the dates of which he foresaw with accuracy) and their effects on the economy of the world, and he busied himself again and again with the question of American economic life and its reactions on the Old World, and with that of the dawning era of machine-industry. Hobbes was one of the originators of the great plan of winning South America for England, and although in execution the plan went no further than the occupation of Jamaica, he has the glory of being one of the founders of the British Colonial Empire. Leibniz, without doubt the greatest intellect in Western philosophy, the founder of the differential calculus and the analysis situs, conceived or co-operated in a number of major political schemes, one of which was to relieve Germany by drawing the attention of Louis XIV to the importance of Egypt as a factor in French world-policy. The ideas of the memorandum on this subject that he drew up for the Grand Monarch were so far in advance of their time (1672) that it has been thought that Napoleon made use of them for his Eastern venture. Even thus early, Leibniz laid down the principle that Napoleon grasped more and more clearly after Wagram, viz., 43that acquisitions on the Rhine and in Belgium would not permanently better the position of France and that the neck of Suez would one day be the key of world-dominance. Doubtless the King was not equal to these deep political and strategic conceptions of the Philosopher.

Turning from men of this mould to the “philosophers” of to-day, one is dismayed and shamed. How poor their personalities, how commonplace their political and practical outlook! Why is it that the mere idea of calling upon one of them to prove his intellectual eminence in government, diplomacy, large-scale organization, or direction of any big colonial, commercial or transport concern is enough to evoke our pity? And this insufficiency indicates, not that they possess inwardness, but simply that they lack weight. I look round in vain for an instance in which a modern “philosopher” has made a name by even one deep or far-seeing pronouncement on an important question of the day. I see nothing but provincial opinions of the same kind as anyone else’s. Whenever I take up a work by a modern thinker, I find myself asking: has he any idea whatever of the actualities of world-politics, world-city problems, capitalism, the future of the state, the relation of technics to the course of civilization, Russia, Science? Goethe would have understood all this and revelled in it, but there is not one living philosopher capable of taking it in. This sense of actualities is of course not the same thing as the content of a philosophy but, I repeat, it is an infallible symptom of its inward necessity, its fruitfulness and its symbolic importance.

We must allow ourselves no illusions as to the gravity of this negative result. It is palpable that we have lost sight of the final significance of effective philosophy. We confuse philosophy with preaching, with agitation, with novel-writing, with lecture-room jargon. We have descended from the perspective of the bird to that of the frog. It has come to this, that the very possibility of a real philosophy of to-day and to-morrow is in question. If not, it were far better to become a colonist or an engineer, to do something, no matter what, that is true and real, than to chew over once more the old dried-up themes under cover of an alleged “new wave of philosophic thought”—far better to construct an aero-engine than a new theory of apperception that is not wanted. Truly it is a poor life’s work to restate once more, in slightly different terms, views of a hundred predecessors on the Will or on psycho-physical parallelism. This may be a profession, but a philosophy it emphatically is not. A doctrine that does not attack and affect the life of the period in its inmost depths is no doctrine and had better not be taught. And what was possible even yesterday is, to-day, at least not indispensable.

To me, the depths and refinement of mathematical and physical theories are a joy; by comparison, the æsthete and the physiologist are fumblers. I would sooner have the fine mind-begotten forms of a fast steamer, a steel structure, a precision-lathe, the subtlety and elegance of many chemical and optical processes, 44than all the pickings and stealings of present-day “arts and crafts,” architecture and painting included. I prefer one Roman aqueduct to all Roman temples and statues. I love the Colosseum and the giant vault of the Palatine, for they display for me to-day in the brown massiveness of their brick construction the real Rome and the grand practical sense of her engineers, but it is a matter of indifference to me whether the empty and pretentious marblery of the Cæsars—their rows of statuary, their friezes, their overloaded architraves—is preserved or not. Glance at some reconstruction of the Imperial Fora—do we not find them the true counterpart of a modern International Exhibition, obtrusive, bulky, empty, a boasting in materials and dimensions wholly alien to Periclean Greece and the Rococo alike, but exactly paralleled in the Egyptian modernism that is displayed in the ruins of Rameses II (1300 B.C.) at Luxor and Karnak? It was not for nothing that the genuine Roman despised the Græculus histrio, the kind of “artist” and the kind of “philosopher” to be found on the soil of Roman Civilization. The time for art and philosophy had passed; they were exhausted, used up, superfluous, and his instinct for the realities of life told him so. One Roman law weighed more than all the lyrics and school-metaphysics of the time together. And I maintain that to-day many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practise the dull craft of experimental psychology. This is a situation which regularly repeats itself at a certain historical level. It would have been absurd in a Roman of intellectual eminence, who might as Consul or Prætor lead armies, organize provinces, build cities and roads, or even be the Princeps in Rome, to want to hatch out some new variant of post-Platonic school philosophy at Athens or Rhodes. Consequently no one did so. It was not in harmony with the tendency of the age, and therefore it only attracted third-class men of the kind that always advances as far as the Zeitgeist of the day before yesterday. It is a very grave question whether this stage has or has not set in for us already.

A century of purely extensive effectiveness, excluding big artistic and metaphysical production—let us say frankly an irreligious time which coincides exactly with the idea of the world-city—is a time of decline. True. But we have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.

Therefore, in approaching a problem of the present, one must begin by asking one’s self—a question answered in advance by instinct in the case of the genuine adept—what to-day is possible and what he must forbid himself. Only a very 45few of the problems of metaphysics are, so to say, allocated for solution to any epoch of thought. Even thus soon, a whole world separates Nietzsche’s time, in which a last trace of romanticism was still operative, from our own, which has shed every vestige of it.

Systematic philosophy closes with the end of the 18th Century. Kant put its utmost possibilities in forms both grand in themselves and—as a rule—final for the Western soul. He is followed, as Plato and Aristotle were followed, by a specifically megalopolitan philosophy that was not speculative but practical, irreligious, social-ethical. This philosophy—paralleled in the Chinese civilization by the schools of the “Epicurean” Yang-chu, the “Socialist” Mo-ti, the “Pessimist” Chuang-tsü, the “Positivist” Mencius, and in the Classical by the Cynics, the Cyrenaics, the Stoics and the Epicureans—begins in the West with Schopenhauer, who is the first to make the Will to life (“creative life-force”) the centre of gravity of his thought, although the deeper tendency of his doctrine is obscured by his having, under the influence of a great tradition, maintained the obsolete distinctions of phenomena and things-in-themselves and suchlike. It is the same creative will-to-life that was Schopenhauer-wise denied in “Tristan” and Darwin-wise asserted in “Siegfried”; that was brilliantly and theatrically formulated by Nietzsche in “Zarathustra”; that led the Hegelian Marx to an economic and the Malthusian Darwin to a biological hypothesis which together have subtly transformed the world-outlook of the Western megalopolis; and that produced a homogeneous series of tragedy-conceptions extending from Hebbel’s “Judith” to Ibsen’s “Epilogue.” It has embraced, therefore, all the possibilities of a true philosophy—and at the same time it has exhausted them.

Systematic philosophy, then, lies immensely far behind us, and ethical has been wound up. But a third possibility, corresponding to the Classical Scepticism, still remains to the soul-world of the present-day West, and it can be brought to light by the hitherto unknown methods of historical morphology. That which is a possibility is a necessity. The Classical scepticism is ahistoric, it doubts by denying outright. But that of the West, if it is an inward necessity, a symbol of the autumn of our spirituality, is obliged to be historical through and through. Its solutions are got by treating everything as relative, as a historical phenomenon, and its procedure is psychological. Whereas the Sceptic philosophy arose within Hellenism as the negation of philosophy—declaring philosophy to be purposeless—we, on the contrary, regard the history of philosophy as, in the last resort, philosophy’s gravest theme. This is “skepsis,” in the true sense, for whereas the Greek is led to renounce absolute standpoints by contempt for the intellectual past, we are led to do so by comprehension of that past as an organism.

In this work it will be our task to sketch out this unphilosophical philosophy—the last that West Europe will know. Scepticism is the expression of 46a 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.

In concluding this Introduction, I may be permitted to add a personal note. In 1911, I proposed to myself to put together some broad considerations on the political phenomena of the day and their possible developments. At that time the World-War appeared to me both as imminent and also as the inevitable outward manifestation of the historical crisis, and my endeavour was to comprehend it from an examination of the spirit of the preceding centuries—not years. In the course of this originally small task,^[39] the conviction forced itself on me that for an effective understanding of the epoch the area to be taken into the foundation-plan must be very greatly enlarged, and that in an investigation of this sort, if the results were to be fundamentally conclusive and necessary results, it was impossible to restrict one’s self to a single epoch and its political actualities, or to confine one’s self to a pragmatical framework, or even to do without purely metaphysical and highly transcendental methods of treatment. It became evident that a political problem could not be comprehended by means of politics themselves and that, frequently, important factors at work in the depths could only be grasped through their artistic manifestations or even distantly seen in the form of scientific or purely philosophical ideas. Even the politico-social analysis of the last decades of the 19th century—a period of tense quiet between two immense and outstanding events: the one which, expressed in the Revolution and Napoleon, had fixed the picture of West-European actuality for a century and another of at least equal significance that was 47visibly and ever more rapidly approaching—was found in the last resort to be impossible without bringing in all the great problems of Being in all their aspects. For, in the historical as in the natural world-picture, there is found nothing, however small, that does not embody in itself the entire sum of fundamental tendencies. And thus the original theme came to be immensely widened. A vast number of unexpected (and in the main entirely novel) questions and interrelations presented themselves. And finally it became perfectly clear that no single fragment of history could be thoroughly illuminated unless and until the secret of world-history itself, to wit the story of higher mankind as an organism of regular structure, had been cleared up. And hitherto this has not been done, even in the least degree.

From this moment on, relations and connexions—previously often suspected, sometimes touched on but never comprehended—presented themselves in ever-increasing volume. The forms of the arts linked themselves to the forms of war and state-policy. Deep relations were revealed between political and mathematical aspects of the same Culture, between religious and technical conceptions, between mathematics, music and sculpture, between economics and cognition-forms. Clearly and unmistakably there appeared the fundamental dependence of the most modern physical and chemical theories on the mythological concepts of our Germanic ancestors, the style-congruence of tragedy and power-technics and up-to-date finance, and the fact (bizarre at first but soon self-evident) that oil-painting perspective, printing, the credit system, longrange weapons, and contrapuntal music in one case, and the nude statue, the city-state and coin-currency (discovered by the Greeks) in another were identical expressions of one and the same spiritual principle. And, beyond and above all, there stood out the fact that these great groups of morphological relations, each one of which symbolically represents a particular sort of mankind in the whole picture of world-history, are strictly symmetrical in structure. It is this perspective that first opens out for us the true style of history. Belonging itself as symbol and expression to one time and therefore inwardly possible and necessary only for present-day Western man, it can but be compared—distantly—to certain ideas of ultra-modern mathematics in the domain of the Theory of Groups. These were thoughts that had occupied me for many years, though dark and undefined until enabled by this method to emerge in tangible form.

Thereafter I saw the present—the approaching World-War—in a quite other light. It was no longer a momentary constellation of casual facts due to national sentiments, personal influences, or economic tendencies endowed with an appearance of unity and necessity by some historian’s scheme of political or social cause-and-effect, but the type of a historical change of phase occurring within a great historical organism of definable compass at the point preordained for it hundreds of years ago. The mark of the great crisis is its innumerable 48passionate questionings and probings. In our own case there were books and ideas by the thousand; but, scattered, disconnected, limited by the horizons of specialisms as they were, they incited, depressed and confounded but could not free. Hence, though these questions are seen, their identity is missed. Consider those art-problems that (though never comprehended in their depths) were evinced in the disputes between form and content, line and space, drawing and colour, in the notion of style, in the idea of Impressionism and the music of Wagner. Consider the decline of art and the failing authority of science; the grave problems arising out of the victory of the megalopolis over the country-side, such as childlessness and land-depopulation; the place in society of a fluctuating Fourth Estate; the crisis in materialism, in Socialism, in parliamentary government; the position of the individual vis-à-vis the State; the problem of private property with its pendant the problem of marriage. Consider at the same time one fact taken from what is apparently an entirely different field, the voluminous work that was being done in the domain of folk-psychology on the origins of myths, arts, religions and thought—and done, moreover, no longer from an ideal but from a strictly morphological standpoint. It is my belief that every one of these questions was really aimed in the same direction as every other, viz., towards that one Riddle of History that had never yet emerged with sufficient distinctness in the human consciousness. The tasks before men were not, as supposed, infinitely numerous—they were one and the same task. Everyone had an inkling that this was so, but no one from his own narrow standpoint had seen the single and comprehensive solution. And yet it had been in the air since Nietzsche, and Nietzsche himself had gripped all the decisive problems although, being a romantic, he had not dared to look strict reality in the face.

But herein precisely lies the inward necessity of the stock-taking doctrine, so to call it. It had to come, and it could only come at this time. Our scepticism is not an attack upon, but rather the verification of, our stock of thoughts and works. It confirms all that has been sought and achieved for generations past, in that it integrates all the truly living tendencies which it finds in the special spheres, no matter what their aim may be.

Above all, there discovered itself the opposition of History and Nature through which alone it is possible to grasp the essence of the former. As I have already said, man as an element and representative of the World is a member, not only of nature, but also of history—which is a second Cosmos different in structure and complexion, entirely neglected by Metaphysics in favour of the first. I was originally brought to reflect on this fundamental question of our world-consciousness through noticing how present-day historians as they fumble round tangible events, things-become, believe themselves to have already grasped History, the happening, the becoming itself. This is a prejudice common to all who proceed by reason and cognition, as against intuitive perception.^[40] 49And 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 50outlines, possessed of full inward necessity, a solution derived from one single principle that though discoverable had never been discovered, that from my youth had haunted and attracted me, tormenting me with the sense that it was there and must be attacked and yet defying me to seize it. Thus, from an almost accidental occasion of beginning, there has arisen the present work, which is put forward as the provisional expression of a new world-picture. The book is laden, as I know, with all the defects of a first attempt, incomplete, and certainly not free from inconsistencies. Nevertheless I am convinced that it contains the incontrovertible formulation of an idea which, once enunciated clearly, will (I repeat) be accepted without dispute.

If, then, the narrower theme is an analysis of the Decline of that West-European Culture which is now spread over the entire globe, yet the object in view is the development of a philosophy and of the operative method peculiar to it, which is now to be tried, viz., the method of comparative morphology in world-history. The work falls naturally into two parts. The first, “Form and Actuality,” starts from the form-language of the great Cultures, attempts to penetrate to the deepest roots of their origin and so provides itself with the basis for a science of Symbolic. The second part, “World-historical Perspectives,” starts from the facts of actual life, and from the historical practice of higher mankind seeks to obtain a quintessence of historical experience that we can set to work upon the formation of our own future.

The accompanying tables^[41] present a general view of what has resulted from the investigation. They may at the same time give some notion both of the fruitfulness and of the scope of the new methods.

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.

54I distinguish, again, “soul” and “world.” The existence of this opposition is identical with the fact of purely human waking consciousness (Wachsein). There are degrees of clearness and sharpness in the opposition and therefore grades of the consciousness, of the spirituality, of life. These grades range from the feeling-knowledge that, unalert yet sometimes suffused through and through by an inward light, is characteristic of the primitive and of the child (and also of those moments of religious and artistic inspiration that occur ever less and less often as a Culture grows older) right to the extremity of waking and reasoning sharpness that we find, for instance, in the thought of Kant and Napoleon, for whom soul and world have become subject and object. This elementary structure of consciousness, as a fact of immediate inner knowledge, is not susceptible of conceptual subdivision. Nor, indeed, are the two factors distinguishable at all except verbally and more or less artificially, since they are always associated, always intertwined, and present themselves as a unit, a totality. The epistemological starting-point of the born idealist and the born realist alike, the assumption that soul is to world (or world to soul, as the case may be) as foundation is to building, as primary to derivative, as “cause” to “effect,” has no basis whatever in the pure fact of consciousness, and when a philosophic system lays stress on the one or the other, it only thereby informs us as to the personality of the philosopher, a fact of purely biographical significance.

Thus, by regarding waking-consciousness structurally as a tension of contraries, and applying to it the notions of “becoming” and “the thing-become,” we find for the word Life a perfectly definite meaning that is closely allied to that of “becoming.” We may describe becomings and the things-become as the form in which respectively the facts and the results of life exist in the waking consciousness. To man in the waking state his proper life, progressive and constantly self-fulfilling, is presented through the element of Becoming in his consciousness—this fact we call “the present”—and it possesses that mysterious property of Direction which in all the higher languages men have sought to impound and—vainly—to rationalize by means of the enigmatic word time. It follows necessarily from the above that there is a fundamental connexion between the become (the hard-set) and Death.

If, now, we designate the Soul—that is, the Soul as it is felt, not as it is reasonably pictured—as the possible and the World on the other hand as the actual (the meaning of these expressions is unmistakable to man’s inner sense), we see life as the form in which the actualizing of the possible is accomplished. With respect to the property of Direction, the possible is called the Future and the actualized the Past. The actualizing itself, the centre-of-gravity and the centre-of-meaning of life, we call the Present. “Soul” is the still-to-be-accomplished, “World” the accomplished, “life” the accomplishing. In this way we are enabled to assign to expressions like moment, duration, development, life-content, vocation, scope, aim, fullness and emptiness of life, the definite meanings 55which we shall need for all that follows and especially for the understanding of historical phenomena.

Lastly, the words History and Nature are here employed, as the reader will have observed already, in a quite definite and hitherto unusual sense. These words comprise possible modes of understanding, of comprehending the totality of knowledge—becoming as well as things-become, life as well as things-lived—as a homogeneous, spiritualized, well-ordered world-picture fashioned out of an indivisible mass-impression in this way or in that according as the becoming or the become, direction (“time”) or extension (“space”) is the dominant factor. And it is not a question of one factor being alternative to the other. The possibilities that we have of possessing an “outer world” that reflects and attests our proper existence are infinitely numerous and exceedingly heterogeneous, and the purely organic and the purely mechanical world-view (in the precise literal sense of that familiar term^[42]) are only the extreme members of the series. Primitive man (so far as we can imagine his waking-consciousness) and the child (as we can remember) cannot fully see or grasp these possibilities. One condition of this higher world-consciousness is the possession of language, meaning thereby not mere human utterance but a culture-language, and such is non-existent for primitive man and existent but not accessible in the case of the child. In other words, neither possesses any clear and distinct notion of the world. They have an inkling but no real knowledge of history and nature, being too intimately incorporated with the ensemble of these. They have no Culture.

And therewith that important word is given a positive meaning of the highest significance which henceforward will be assumed in using it. In the same way as we have elected to distinguish the Soul as the possible and the World as the actual, we can now differentiate between possible and actual culture, i.e., culture as an idea in the (general or individual) existence and culture as the body of that idea, as the total of its visible, tangible and comprehensible expressions—acts and opinions, religion and state, arts and sciences, peoples and cities, economic and social forms, speech, laws, customs, characters, facial lines and costumes. Higher history, intimately related to life and to becoming, is the actualizing of possible Culture.^[43]

We must not omit to add that these basic determinations of meaning are largely incommunicable by specification, definition or proof, and in their deeper import must be reached by feeling, experience and intuition. There is a distinction, rarely appreciated as it should be, between experience as lived and experience as learned (zwischen Erleben und Erkennen), between the immediate certainty given by the various kinds of intuition—such as illumination, inspiration, artistic flair, experience of life, the power of “sizing men up” 56(Goethe’s “exact percipient fancy”)—and the product of rational procedure and technical experiment.

The first are imparted by means of analogy, picture, symbol, the second by formula, law, scheme. The become is experienced by learning—indeed, as we shall see, the having-become is for the human mind identical with the completed act of cognition. A becoming, on the other hand, can only be experienced by living, felt with a deep wordless understanding. It is on this that what we call “knowledge of men” is based; in fact the understanding of history implies a superlative knowledge of men. The eye which can see into the depths of an alien soul—owes nothing to the cognition-methods investigated in the “Critique of Pure Reason,” yet the purer the historical picture is, the less accessible it becomes to any other eye. The mechanism of a pure nature-picture, such as the world of Newton and Kant, is cognized, grasped, dissected in laws and equations and finally reduced to system: the organism of a pure history-picture, like the world of Plotinus, Dante and Giordano Bruno, is intuitively seen, inwardly experienced, grasped as a form or symbol and finally rendered in poetical and artistic conceptions. Goethe’s “living nature” is a historical world-picture.^[44]

In order to exemplify the way in which a soul seeks to actualize itself in the picture of its outer world—to show, that is, in how far Culture in the “become” state can express or portray an idea of human existence—I have chosen number, the primary element on which all mathematics rests. I have done so because mathematics, accessible in its full depth only to the very few, holds a quite peculiar position amongst the creations of the mind. It is a science of the most rigorous kind, like logic but more comprehensive and very much fuller; it is a true art, along with sculpture and music, as needing the guidance of inspiration and as developing under great conventions of form; it is, lastly, a metaphysic of the highest rank, as Plato and above all Leibniz show us. Every philosophy has hitherto grown up in conjunction with a mathematic belonging to it. Number is the symbol of causal necessity. Like the conception of God, it contains the ultimate meaning of the world-as-nature. The existence of numbers may therefore be called a mystery, and the religious thought of every Culture has felt their impress.^[45]

Just as all becoming possesses the original property of direction (irreversibility), all things-become possess the property of extension. But these two words seem unsatisfactory in that only an artificial distinction can be made between them. The real secret of all things-become, which are ipso facto things extended (spatially and materially), is embodied in mathematical number as contrasted with chronological number. Mathematical number contains in its 57very essence the notion of a mechanical demarcation, number being in that respect akin to word, which, in the very fact of its comprising and denoting, fences off world-impressions. The deepest depths, it is true, are here both incomprehensible and inexpressible. But the actual number with which the mathematician works, the figure, formula, sign, diagram, in short the number-sign which he thinks, speaks or writes exactly, is (like the exactly-used word) from the first a symbol of these depths, something imaginable, communicable, comprehensible to the inner and the outer eye, which can be accepted as representing the demarcation. The origin of numbers resembles that of the myth. Primitive man elevates indefinable nature-impressions (the “alien,” in our terminology) into deities, numina, at the same time capturing and impounding them by a name which limits them. So also numbers are something that marks off and captures nature-impressions, and it is by means of names and numbers that the human understanding obtains power over the world. In the last analysis, the number-language of a mathematic and the grammar of a tongue are structurally alike. Logic is always a kind of mathematic and vice versa. Consequently, in all acts of the intellect germane to mathematical number—measuring, counting, drawing, weighing, arranging and dividing^[46]—men strive to delimit the extended in words as well, i.e., to set it forth in the form of proofs, conclusions, theorems and systems; and it is only through acts of this kind (which may be more or less unintentioned) that waking man begins to be able to use numbers, normatively, to specify objects and properties, relations and differentiæ, unities and pluralities—briefly, that structure of the world-picture which he feels as necessary and unshakable, calls “Nature” and “cognizes.” Nature is the numerable, while History, on the other hand, is the aggregate of that which has no relation to mathematics—hence the mathematical certainty of the laws of Nature, the astounding rightness of Galileo’s saying that Nature is “written in mathematical language,” and the fact, emphasized by Kant, that exact natural science reaches just as far as the possibilities of applied mathematics allow it to reach. In number, then, as the sign of completed demarcation, lies the essence of everything actual, which is cognized, is delimited, and has become all at once—as Pythagoras and certain others have been able to see with complete inward certitude by a mighty and truly religious intuition. Nevertheless, mathematics—meaning thereby the capacity to think practically in figures—must not be confused with the far narrower scientific mathematics, that is, the theory of numbers as developed in lecture and treatise. The mathematical vision and thought that a Culture possesses within itself is as inadequately represented by its written mathematic as its philosophical vision and thought by its philosophical treatises. Number springs from a source that has also quite other outlets. Thus at the beginning of every Culture we find an archaic style, which might fairly have been called geometrical in other cases as well as the 58Early Hellenic. There is a common factor which is expressly mathematical in this early Classical style of the 10th Century B.C., in the temple style of the Egyptian Fourth Dynasty with its absolutism of straight line and right angle, in the Early Christian sarcophagus-relief, and in Romanesque construction and ornament. Here every line, every deliberately non-imitative figure of man and beast, reveals a mystic number-thought in direct connexion with the mystery of death (the hard-set).

Gothic cathedrals and Doric temples are mathematics in stone. Doubtless Pythagoras was the first in the Classical Culture to conceive number scientifically as the principle of a world-order of comprehensible things—as standard and as magnitude—but even before him it had found expression, as a noble arraying of sensuous-material units, in the strict canon of the statue and the Doric order of columns. The great arts are, one and all, modes of interpretation by means of limits based on number (consider, for example, the problem of space-representation in oil painting). A high mathematical endowment may, without any mathematical science whatsoever, come to fruition and full self-knowledge in technical spheres.

In the presence of so powerful a number-sense as that evidenced, even in the Old Kingdom,^[47] in the dimensioning of pyramid temples and in the technique of building, water-control and public administration (not to mention the calendar), no one surely would maintain that the valueless arithmetic of Ahmes belonging to the New Empire represents the level of Egyptian mathematics. The Australian natives, who rank intellectually as thorough primitives, possess a mathematical instinct (or, what comes to the same thing, a power of thinking in numbers which is not yet communicable by signs or words) that as regards the interpretation of pure space is far superior to that of the Greeks. Their discovery of the boomerang can only be attributed to their having a sure feeling for numbers of a class that we should refer to the higher geometry. Accordingly—we shall justify the adverb later—they possess an extraordinarily complicated ceremonial and, for expressing degrees of affinity, such fine shades of language as not even the higher Cultures themselves can show.

There is analogy, again, between the Euclidean mathematic and the absence, in the Greek of the mature Periclean age, of any feeling either for ceremonial public life or for loneliness, while the Baroque, differing sharply from the Classical, presents us with a mathematic of spatial analysis, a court of Versailles and a state system resting on dynastic relations.

It is the style of a Soul that comes out in the world of numbers, and the world of numbers includes something more than the science thereof.

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 60feeling to abstract form. But, quite apart from the fact (amply evidenced in modern mathematics and mechanics) that there is no such sharp distinction between the two as is originally and unconditionally implied in the principle, the a priori itself, though certainly one of the most inspired conceptions of philosophy, is a notion that seems to involve enormous difficulties. With it Kant postulates—without attempting to prove what is quite incapable of proof—both unalterableness of form in all intellectual activity and identity of form for all men in the same. And, in consequence, a factor of incalculable importance is—thanks to the intellectual prepossessions of his period, not to mention his own—simply ignored. This factor is the varying degree of this alleged “universal validity.” There are doubtless certain characters of very wide-ranging validity which are (seemingly at any rate) independent of the Culture and century to which the cognizing individual may belong, but along with these there is a quite particular necessity of form which underlies all his thought as axiomatic and to which he is subject by virtue of belonging to his own Culture and no other. Here, then, we have two very different kinds of a priori thought-content, and the definition of a frontier between them, or even the demonstration that such exists, is a problem that lies beyond all possibilities of knowing and will never be solved. So far, no one has dared to assume that the supposed constant structure of the intellect is an illusion and that the history spread out before us contains more than one style of knowing. But we must not forget that unanimity about things that have not yet become problems may just as well imply universal error as universal truth. True, there has always been a certain sense of doubt and obscurity—so much so, that the correct guess might have been made from that non-agreement of the philosophers which every glance at the history of philosophy shows us. But that this non-agreement is not due to imperfections of the human intellect or present gaps in a perfectible knowledge, in a word, is not due to defect, but to destiny and historical necessity—this is a discovery. Conclusions on the deep and final things are to be reached not by predicating constants but by studying differentiæ and developing the organic logic of differences. The comparative morphology of knowledge forms is a domain which Western thought has still to attack.

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 61actualizing of a single invariable ideal—is in fact, below the deceptive surface of history, a complex of self-contained and independent developments, an ever-repeated process of bringing to birth new form-worlds and appropriating, transforming and sloughing alien form-worlds, a purely organic story of blossoming, ripening, wilting and dying within the set period. The student must not let himself be deceived. The mathematic of the Classical soul sprouted almost out of nothingness, the historically-constituted Western soul, already possessing the Classical science (not inwardly, but outwardly as a thing learnt), had to win its own by apparently altering and perfecting, but in reality destroying the essentially alien Euclidean system. In the first case, the agent was Pythagoras, in the second Descartes. In both cases the act is, at bottom, the same.

The relationship between the form-language of a mathematic and that of the cognate major arts,^[48] is in this way put beyond doubt. The temperament of the thinker and that of the artist differ widely indeed, but the expression-methods of the waking consciousness are inwardly the same for each. The sense of form of the sculptor, the painter, the composer is essentially mathematical in its nature. The same inspired ordering of an infinite world which manifested itself in the geometrical analysis and projective geometry of the 17th Century, could vivify, energize, and suffuse contemporary music with the harmony that it developed out of the art of thoroughbass, (which is the geometry of the sound-world) and contemporary painting with the principle of perspective (the felt geometry of the space-world that only the West knows). This inspired ordering is that which Goethe called “The Idea, of which the form is immediately apprehended in the domain of intuition, whereas pure science does not apprehend but observes and dissects.” The Mathematic goes beyond observation and dissection, and in its highest moments finds the way by vision, not abstraction. To Goethe again we owe the profound saying: “the mathematician is only complete in so far as he feels within himself the beauty of the true.” Here we feel how nearly the secret of number is related to the secret of artistic creation. And so the born mathematician takes his place by the side of the great masters of the fugue, the chisel and the brush; he and they alike strive, and must strive, to actualize the grand order of all things by clothing it in symbol and so to communicate it to the plain fellow-man who hears that order within himself but cannot effectively possess it; the domain of number, like the domains of tone, line and colour, becomes an image of the world-form. For this reason the word “creative” means more in the mathematical sphere than it does in the pure sciences—Newton, Gauss, and Riemann were artist-natures, and we know with what suddenness their great conceptions came upon them.^[49] “A 62mathematician,” said old Weierstrass “who is not at the same time a bit of a poet will never be a full mathematician.”

The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style-periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes from epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics. In the very deep relation between changes of musical theory and the analysis of the infinite, the details have never yet been investigated, although æsthetics might have learned a great deal more from these than from all so-called “psychology.” Still more revealing would be a history of musical instruments written, not (as it always is) from the technical standpoint of tone-production, but as a study of the deep spiritual bases of the tone-colours and tone-effects aimed at. For it was the wish, intensified to the point of a longing, to fill a spatial infinity with sound which produced—in contrast to the Classical lyre and reed (lyra, kithara; aulos, syrinx) and the Arabian lute—the two great families of keyboard instruments (organ, pianoforte, etc.) and bow instruments, and that as early as the Gothic time. The development of both these families belongs spiritually (and possibly also in point of technical origin) to the Celtic-Germanic North lying between Ireland, the Weser and the Seine. The organ and clavichord belong certainly to England, the bow instruments reached their definite forms in Upper Italy between 1480 and 1530, while it was principally in Germany that the organ was developed into the space-commanding giant that we know, an instrument the like of which does not exist in all musical history. The free organ-playing of Bach and his time was nothing if it was not analysis—analysis of a strange and vast tone-world. And, similarly, it is in conformity with the Western number-thinking, and in opposition to the Classical, that our string and wind instruments have been developed not singly but in great groups (strings, woodwind, brass), ordered within themselves according to the compass of the four human voices; the history of the modern orchestra, with all its discoveries of new and modification of old instruments, is in reality the self-contained history of one tone-world—a world, moreover, that is quite capable of being expressed in the forms of the higher analysis.

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 63mathematic of the Egyptians had been, and the algebra-astronomy of the Babylonian Culture with its ecliptic co-ordinate system—and new—for these older mathematics had long been extinguished and the Egyptian was never written down. Fulfilled by the 2nd century A.D., the Classical mathematic vanished in its turn (for though it seemingly exists even to-day, it is only as a convenience of notation that it does so), and gave place to the Arabian. From what we know of the Alexandrian mathematic, it is a necessary presumption that there was a great movement within the Middle East, of which the centre of gravity must have lain in the Persian-Babylonian schools (such as Edessa, Gundisapora and Ctesiphon) and of which only details found their way into the regions of Classical speech. In spite of their Greek names, the Alexandrian mathematicians—Zenodorus who dealt with figures of equal perimeter, Serenus who worked on the properties of a harmonic pencil in space, Hypsicles who introduced the Chaldean circle-division, Diophantus above all—were all without doubt Aramæans, and their works only a small part of a literature which was written principally in Syriac. This mathematic found its completion in the investigations of the Arabian-Islamic thinkers, and after these there was again a long interval. And then a perfectly new mathematic was born, the Western, our own, which in our infatuation we regard as “Mathematics,” as the culmination and the implicit purpose of two thousand years’ evolution, though in reality its centuries are (strictly) numbered and to-day almost spent.

The most valuable thing in the Classical mathematic is its proposition that number is the essence of all things perceptible to the senses. Defining number as a measure, it contains the whole world-feeling of a soul passionately devoted to the “here” and the “now.” Measurement in this sense means the measurement of something near and corporeal. Consider the content of the Classical art-work, say the free-standing statue of a naked man; here every essential and important element of Being, its whole rhythm, is exhaustively rendered by surfaces, dimensions and the sensuous relations of the parts. The Pythagorean notion of the harmony of numbers, although it was probably deduced from music—a music, be it noted, that knew not polyphony or harmony, and formed its instruments to render single plump, almost fleshy, tones—seems to be the very mould for a sculpture that has this ideal. The worked stone is only a something in so far as it has considered limits and measured form; what it is is what it has become under the sculptor’s chisel. Apart from this it is a chaos, something not yet actualized, in fact for the time being a null. The same feeling transferred to the grander stage produces, as an opposite to the state of chaos, that of cosmos, which for the Classical soul implies a cleared-up situation of the external world, a harmonic order which includes each separate thing as a well-defined, comprehensible and present entity. The sum of such things constitutes neither more nor less than the whole world, and the interspaces between them, 64which for us are filled with the impressive symbol of the Universe of Space, are for them the nonent (τὸ μὴ ὅν).

Extension means, for Classical mankind body, and for us space, and it is as a function of space that, to us, things “appear.” And, looking backward from this standpoint, we may perhaps see into the deepest concept of the Classical metaphysics, Anaximander’s ἄπειρον—a word that is quite untranslatable into any Western tongue. It is that which possesses no “number” in the Pythagorean sense of the word, no measurable dimensions or definable limits, and therefore no being; the measureless, the negation of form, the statue not yet carved out of the block; the ἀρχὴ optically boundless and formless, which only becomes a something (namely, the world) after being split up by the senses. It is the underlying form a priori of Classical cognition, bodiliness as such, which is replaced exactly in the Kantian world-picture by that Space out of which Kant maintained that all things could be “thought forth.”

We can now understand what it is that divides one mathematic from another, and in particular the Classical from the Western. The whole world-feeling of the matured Classical world led it to see mathematics only as the theory of relations of magnitude, dimension and form between bodies. When, from out of this feeling, Pythagoras evolved and expressed the decisive formula, number had come, for him, to be an optical symbol—not a measure of form generally, an abstract relation, but a frontier-post of the domain of the Become, or rather of that part of it which the senses were able to split up and pass under review. By the whole Classical world without exception numbers are conceived as units of measure, as magnitude, lengths, or surfaces, and for it no other sort of extension is imaginable. The whole Classical mathematic is at bottom Stereometry (solid geometry). To Euclid, who rounded off its system in the third century, the triangle is of deep necessity the bounding surface of a body, never a system of three intersecting straight lines or a group of three points in three-dimensional space. He defines a line as “length without breadth” (μῆκος ἀπλατές). In our mouths such a definition would be pitiful—in the Classical mathematic it was brilliant.

The Western number, too, is not, as Kant and even Helmholtz thought, something proceeding out of Time as an a priori form of conception, but is something specifically spatial, in that it is an order (or ordering) of like units. Actual time (as we shall see more and more clearly in the sequel) has not the slightest relation with mathematical things. Numbers belong exclusively to the domain of extension. But there are precisely as many possibilities—and therefore necessities—of ordered presentation of the extended as there are Cultures. Classical number is a thought-process dealing not with spatial relations but with visibly limitable and tangible units, and it follows naturally and necessarily that the Classical knows only the “natural” (positive and whole) numbers, which on the contrary play in our Western mathematics a 65quite undistinguished part in the midst of complex, hypercomplex, non-Archimedean and other number-systems.

On this account, the idea of irrational numbers—the unending decimal fractions of our notation—was unrealizable within the Greek spirit. Euclid says—and he ought to have been better understood—that incommensurable lines are “not related to one another like numbers.” In fact, it is the idea of irrational number that, once achieved, separates the notion of number from that of magnitude, for the magnitude of such a number (π, for example) can never be defined or exactly represented by any straight line. Moreover, it follows from this that in considering the relation, say, between diagonal and side in a square the Greek would be brought up suddenly against a quite other sort of number, which was fundamentally alien to the Classical soul, and was consequently feared as a secret of its proper existence too dangerous to be unveiled. There is a singular and significant late-Greek legend, according to which the man who first published the hidden mystery of the irrational perished by shipwreck, “for the unspeakable and the formless must be left hidden for ever.”^[50]

The fear that underlies this legend is the selfsame notion that prevented even the ripest Greeks from extending their tiny city-states so as to organize the country-side politically, from laying out their streets to end in prospects and their alleys to give vistas, that made them recoil time and again from the Babylonian astronomy with its penetration of endless starry space,^[51] and refuse to venture out of the Mediterranean along sea-paths long before dared by the Phœnicians and the Egyptians. It is the deep metaphysical fear that the sense-comprehensible and present in which the Classical existence had entrenched itself would collapse and precipitate its cosmos (largely created and sustained by art) into unknown primitive abysses. And to understand this fear is to understand the final significance of Classical number—that is, measure in contrast to the immeasurable—and to grasp the high ethical significance of its limitation. Goethe too, as a nature-student, felt it—hence his almost terrified aversion to mathematics, which as we can now see was really an involuntary 66reaction against the non-Classical mathematic, the Infinitesimal Calculus which underlay the natural philosophy of his time.

Religious feeling in Classical man focused itself ever more and more intensely upon physically present, localized cults which alone expressed a college of Euclidean deities. Abstractions, dogmas floating homeless in the space of thought, were ever alien to it. A cult of this kind has as much in common with a Roman Catholic dogma as the statue has with the cathedral organ. There is no doubt that something of cult was comprised in the Euclidean mathematic—consider, for instance, the secret doctrines of the Pythagoreans and the Theorems of regular polyhedrons with their esoteric significance in the circle of Plato. Just so, there is a deep relation between Descartes’ analysis of the infinite and contemporary dogmatic theology as it progressed from the final decisions of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation to entirely desensualized deism. Descartes and Pascal were mathematicians and Jansenists, Leibniz a mathematician and pietist. Voltaire, Lagrange and D’Alembert were contemporaries. Now, the Classical soul felt the principle of the irrational, which overturned the statuesquely-ordered array of whole numbers and the complete and self-sufficing world-order for which these stood, as an impiety against the Divine itself. In Plato’s “Timæus” this feeling is unmistakable. For the transformation of a series of discrete numbers into a continuum challenged not merely the Classical notion of number but the Classical world-idea itself, and so it is understandable that even negative numbers, which to us offer no conceptual difficulty, were impossible in the Classical mathematic, let alone zero as a number, that refined creation of a wonderful abstractive power which, for the Indian soul that conceived it as base for a positional numeration, was nothing more nor less than the key to the meaning of existence. Negative magnitudes have no existence. The expression -2×-3=+6 is neither something perceivable nor a representation of magnitude. The series of magnitudes ends with +1, and in graphic representation of negative numbers

we have suddenly, from zero onwards, positive symbols of something negative; they mean something, but they no longer are. But the fulfilment of this act did not lie within the direction of Classical number-thinking.

Every product of the waking consciousness of the Classical world, then, is elevated to the rank of actuality by way of sculptural definition. That which cannot be drawn is not “number.” Archytas and Eudoxus use the terms surface- and volume-numbers to mean what we call second and third powers, and it is easy to understand that the notion of higher integral powers did not exist for them, for a fourth power would predicate at once, for the mind based on the plastic feeling, an extension in four dimensions, and four material dimensions into the bargain, “which is absurd.” Expressions like ε^ix which we constantly use, or even the fractional index (e.g., 5^½) which is employed in the 67Western mathematics as early as Oresme (14th Century), would have been to them utter nonsense. Euclid calls the factors of a product its sides πλευραί and fractions (finite of course) were treated as whole-number relationships between two lines. Clearly, out of this no conception of zero as a number could possibly come, for from the point of view of a draughtsman it is meaningless. We, having minds differently constituted, must not argue from our habits to theirs and treat their mathematic as a “first stage” in the development of “Mathematics.” Within and for the purposes of the world that Classical man evolved for himself, the Classical mathematic was a complete thing—it is merely not so for us. Babylonian and Indian mathematics had long contained, as essential elements of their number-worlds, things which the Classical number-feeling regarded as nonsense—and not from ignorance either, since many a Greek thinker was acquainted with them. It must be repeated, “Mathematics” is an illusion. A mathematical, and, generally, a scientific way of thinking is right, convincing, a “necessity of thought,” when it completely expresses the life-feeling proper to it. Otherwise it is either impossible, futile and senseless, or else, as we in the arrogance of our historical soul like to say, “primitive.” The modern mathematic, though “true” only for the Western spirit, is undeniably a master-work of that spirit; and yet to Plato it would have seemed a ridiculous and painful aberration from the path leading to the “true”—to wit, the Classical—mathematic. And so with ourselves. Plainly, we have almost no notion of the multitude of great ideas belonging to other Cultures that we have suffered to lapse because our thought with its limitations has not permitted us to assimilate them, or (which comes to the same thing) has led us to reject them as false, superfluous, and nonsensical.

The Greek mathematic, as a science of perceivable magnitudes, deliberately confines itself to facts of the comprehensibly present, and limits its researches and their validity to the near and the small. As compared with this impeccable consistency, the position of the Western mathematic is seen to be, practically, somewhat illogical, though it is only since the discovery of Non-Euclidean Geometry that the fact has been really recognized. Numbers are images of the perfectly desensualized understanding, of pure thought, and contain their abstract validity within themselves.^[52] Their exact application to the actuality of conscious experience is therefore a problem in itself—a problem which is always being posed anew and never solved—and the congruence of mathematical system with empirical observation is at present anything but self-evident. Although the lay idea—as found in Schopenhauer—is that mathematics rest upon the direct evidences of the senses, Euclidean geometry, superficially identical though it is with the popular geometry of all ages, is 68only in agreement with the phenomenal world approximately and within very narrow limits—in fact, the limits of a drawing-board. Extend these limits, and what becomes, for instance, of Euclidean parallels? They meet at the line of the horizon—a simple fact upon which all our art-perspective is grounded.

Now, it is unpardonable that Kant, a Western thinker, should have evaded the mathematic of distance, and appealed to a set of figure-examples that their mere pettiness excludes from treatment by the specifically Western infinitesimal methods. But Euclid, as a thinker of the Classical age, was entirely consistent with its spirit when he refrained from proving the phenomenal truth of his axioms by referring to, say, the triangle formed by an observer and two infinitely distant fixed stars. For these can neither be drawn nor “intuitively apprehended” and his feeling was precisely the feeling which shrank from the irrationals, which did not dare to give nothingness a value as zero (i.e., a number) and even in the contemplation of cosmic relations shut its eyes to the Infinite and held to its symbol of Proportion.

Aristarchus of Samos, who in 288-277 belonged to a circle of astronomers at Alexandria that doubtless had relations with Chaldaeo-Persian schools, projected the elements of a heliocentric world-system.^[53] Rediscovered by Copernicus, it was to shake the metaphysical passions of the West to their foundations—witness Giordano Bruno^[54]—to become the fulfilment of mighty premonitions, and to justify that Faustian, Gothic world-feeling which had already professed its faith in infinity through the forms of its cathedrals. But the world of Aristarchus received his work with entire indifference and in a brief space of time it was forgotten—designedly, we may surmise. His few followers were nearly all natives of Asia Minor, his most prominent supporter Seleucus (about 150) being from the Persian Seleucia on Tigris. In fact, the Aristarchian system had no spiritual appeal to the Classical Culture and might indeed have become dangerous to it. And yet it was differentiated from the Copernican (a point always missed) by something which made it perfectly conformable to the Classical world-feeling, viz., the assumption that the cosmos is contained in a materially finite and optically appreciable hollow sphere, in the middle of which the planetary system, arranged as such on Copernican lines, moved. In the Classical astronomy, the earth and the heavenly bodies are consistently regarded as entities of two different kinds, however variously their movements in detail might be interpreted. Equally, the opposite idea that the earth is only a star among stars^[55] is not inconsistent in itself with either the Ptolemaic or 69the Copernican systems and in fact was pioneered by Nicolaus Cusanus and Leonardo da Vinci. But by this device of a celestial sphere the principle of infinity which would have endangered the sensuous-Classical notion of bounds was smothered. One would have supposed that the infinity-conception was inevitably implied by the system of Aristarchus—long before his time, the Babylonian thinkers had reached it. But no such thought emerges. On the contrary, in the famous treatise on the grains of sand^[56] Archimedes proves that the filling of this stereometric body (for that is what Aristarchus’s Cosmos is, after all) with atoms of sand leads to very high, but not to infinite, figure-results. This proposition, quoted though it may be, time and again, as being a first step towards the Integral Calculus, amounts to a denial (implicit indeed in the very title) of everything that we mean by the word analysis. Whereas in our physics, the constantly-surging hypotheses of a material (i.e., directly cognizable) æther, break themselves one after the other against our refusal to acknowledge material limitations of any kind, Eudoxus, Apollonius and Archimedes, certainly the keenest and boldest of the Classical mathematicians, completely worked out, in the main with rule and compass, a purely optical analysis of things-become on the basis of sculptural-Classical bounds. They used deeply-thought-out (and for us hardly understandable) methods of integration, but these possess only a superficial resemblance even to Leibniz’s definite-integral method. They employed geometrical loci and co-ordinates, but these are always specified lengths and units of measurement and never, as in Fermat and above all in Descartes, unspecified spatial relations, values of points in terms of their positions in space. With these methods also should be classed the exhaustion-method of Archimedes,^[57] given by him in his recently discovered letter to Eratosthenes on such subjects as the quadrature of the parabola section by means of inscribed rectangles (instead of through similar polygons). But the very subtlety and extreme complication of his methods, which are grounded in certain of Plato’s geometrical ideas, make us realize, in spite of superficial analogies, what an enormous difference separates him from Pascal. Apart altogether from the idea of Riemann’s integral, what sharper contrast could there be to these ideas than the so-called quadratures of to-day? The name itself is now no more than an unfortunate survival, the “surface” is indicated by a bounding function, and the drawing as such, has vanished. Nowhere else did the two mathematical minds approach each other more closely than in this instance, and nowhere is it more evident that the gulf between the two souls thus expressing themselves is impassable.

In the cubic style of their early architecture the Egyptians, so to say, concealed 70pure numbers, fearful of stumbling upon their secret, and for the Hellenes too they were the key to the meaning of the become, the stiffened, the mortal. The stone statue and the scientific system deny life. Mathematical number, the formal principle of an extension-world of which the phenomenal existence is only the derivative and servant of waking human consciousness, bears the hall-mark of causal necessity and so is linked with death as chronological number is with becoming, with life, with the necessity of destiny. This connexion of strict mathematical form with the end of organic being, with the phenomenon of its organic remainder the corpse, we shall see more and more clearly to be the origin of all great art. We have already noticed the development of early ornament on funerary equipments and receptacles. Numbers are symbols of the mortal. Stiff forms are the negation of life, formulas and laws spread rigidity over the face of nature, numbers make dead—and the “Mothers” of Faust II sit enthroned, majestic and withdrawn, in

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 71symbolism 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.

The Classical arithmetic, we are always told, was first liberated from its sense-bondage, widened and extended by Diophantus, who did not indeed create algebra (the science of undefined magnitudes) but brought it to expression within the framework of the Classical mathematic that we know—and so suddenly that we have to assume that there was a pre-existent stock of ideas which he worked out. But this amounts, not to an enrichment of, but a complete victory over, the Classical world-feeling, and the mere fact should have sufficed in itself to show that, inwardly, Diophantus does not belong to the Classical Culture at all. What is active in him is a new number-feeling, or let us say a new limit-feeling with respect to the actual and become, and no longer that Hellenic feeling of sensuously-present limits which had produced the Euclidean geometry, the nude statue and the coin. Details of the formation of this new mathematic we do not know—Diophantus stands so completely by himself in the history of so-called late-Classical mathematics that an Indian influence has been presumed. But here also the influence it must really have been that of those early-Arabian schools whose studies (apart from the dogmatic) have hitherto been so imperfectly investigated. In Diophantus, unconscious though he may be of his own essential antagonism to the Classical foundations on which he attempted to build, there emerges from under the surface of Euclidean intention the new limit-feeling which I designate the “Magian.” He did not widen the idea of number as magnitude, but (unwittingly) eliminated it. No Greek could have stated anything about an undefined number a or an undenominated number 3—which are neither magnitudes nor lines—whereas the new limit-feeling sensibly expressed by numbers of this sort at least underlay, if it did not constitute, Diophantine treatment; and the letter-notation which we employ to clothe our own (again transvalued) algebra was first introduced by Vieta in 1591, an unmistakable, if unintended, protest against the classicizing tendency of Renaissance mathematics.

Diophantus lived about 250 A.D., that is, in the third century of that Arabian Culture whose organic history, till now smothered under the surface-forms of the Roman Empire and the “Middle Ages,”^[59] comprises everything that happened after the beginning of our era in the region that was later to be Islam’s. It was precisely in the time of Diophantus that the last shadow of the Attic statuary art paled before the new space-sense of cupola, mosaic and sarcophagus-relief that we have in the Early-Christian-Syrian style. In that time there was once 72more archaic art and strictly geometrical ornament; and at that time too Diocletian completed the transformation of the now merely sham Empire into a Caliphate. The four centuries that separate Euclid and Diophantus, separate also Plato and Plotinus—the last and conclusive thinker, the Kant, of a fulfilled Culture and the first schoolman, the Duns Scotus, of a Culture just awakened.

It is here that we are made aware for the first time of the existence of those higher individualities whose coming, growth and decay constitute the real substance of history underlying the myriad colours and changes of the surface. The Classical spirituality, which reached its final phase in the cold intelligence of the Romans and of which the whole Classical Culture with all its works, thoughts, deeds and ruins forms the “body,” had been born about 1100 B.C. in the country about the Ægean Sea. The Arabian Culture, which, under cover of the Classical Civilization, had been germinating in the East since Augustus, came wholly out of the region between Armenia and Southern Arabia, Alexandria and Ctesiphon, and we have to consider as expressions of this new soul almost the whole “late-Classical” art of the Empire, all the young ardent religions of the East—Mandæanism, Manichæism, Christianity, Neo-Platonism, and in Rome itself, as well as the Imperial Fora, that Pantheon which is the first of all mosques.

That Alexandria and Antioch still wrote in Greek and imagined that they were thinking in Greek is a fact of no more importance than the facts that Latin was the scientific language of the West right up to the time of Kant and that Charlemagne “renewed” the Roman Empire.

In Diophantus, number has ceased to be the measure and essence of plastic things. In the Ravennate mosaics man has ceased to be a body. Unnoticed, Greek designations have lost their original connotations. We have left the realm of Attic καλοκάγαθία the Stoic ἀταραξία and γαλήνη. Diophantus does not yet know zero and negative numbers, it is true, but he has ceased to know Pythagorean numbers. And this Arabian indeterminateness of number is, in its turn, something quite different from the controlled variability of the later Western mathematics, the variability of the function.

The Magian mathematic—we can see the outline, though we are ignorant of the details—advanced through Diophantus (who is obviously not a starting-point) boldly and logically to a culmination in the Abbassid period (9th century) that we can appreciate in Al-Khwarizmi and Alsidzshi. And as Euclidean geometry is to Attic statuary (the same expression-form in a different medium) and the analysis of space to polyphonic music, so this algebra is to the Magian art with its mosaic, its arabesque (which the Sassanid Empire and later Byzantium produced with an ever-increasing profusion and luxury of tangible-intangible organic motives) and its Constantinian high-relief in which uncertain deep-darks divide the freely-handled figures of the foreground. As algebra is to 73Classical arithmetic and Western analysis, so is the cupola-church to the Doric temple and the Gothic cathedral. It is not as though Diophantus were one of the great mathematicians. On the contrary, much of what we have been accustomed to associate with his name is not his work alone. His accidental importance lies in the fact that, so far as our knowledge goes, he was the first mathematician in whom the new number-feeling is unmistakably present. In comparison with the masters who conclude the development of a mathematic—with Apollonius and Archimedes, with Gauss, Cauchy, Riemann—Diophantus has, in his form-language especially, something primitive. This something, which till now we have been pleased to refer to “late-Classical” decadence, we shall presently learn to understand and value, just as we are revising our ideas as to the despised “late-Classical” art and beginning to see in it the tentative expression of the nascent Early Arabian Culture. Similarly archaic, primitive, and groping was the mathematic of Nicolas Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux (1323-1382),^[60] who was the first Western who used co-ordinates so to say elastically^[61] and, more important still, to employ fractional powers—both of which presuppose a number-feeling, obscure it may be but quite unmistakable, which is completely non-Classical and also non-Arabic. But if, further, we think of Diophantus together with the early-Christian sarcophagi of the Roman collections, and of Oresme together with the Gothic wall-statuary of the German cathedrals, we see that the mathematicians as well as the artists have something in common, which is, that they stand in their respective Cultures at the same (viz., the primitive) level of abstract understanding. In the world and age of Diophantus the stereometric sense of bounds, which had long ago reached in Archimedes the last stages of refinement and elegance proper to the megalopolitan intelligence, had passed away. Throughout that world men were unclear, longing, mystic, and no longer bright and free in the Attic way; they were men rooted in the earth of a young country-side, not megalopolitans like Euclid and D’Alembert.^[62] They no longer understood the deep and complicated forms of the Classical thought, and their own were confused and new, far as yet from urban clarity and tidiness. Their Culture was in the Gothic condition, as all Cultures have been in their youth—as even the Classical was in the early Doric period which is known to us now only by its Dipylon pottery. Only in Baghdad and in the 9th and 10th Centuries were the young ideas of the age of Diophantus carried through to completion by ripe masters of the calibre of Plato and Gauss.

The decisive act of Descartes, whose geometry appeared in 1637, consisted not in the introduction of a new method or idea in the domain of traditional geometry (as we are so frequently told), but in the definitive conception of a new number-idea, which conception was expressed in the emancipation of geometry from servitude to optically-realizable constructions and to measured and measurable lines generally. With that, the analysis of the infinite became a fact. The rigid, so-called Cartesian, system of co-ordinates—a semi-Euclidean method of ideally representing measurable magnitudes—had long been known (witness Oresme) and regarded as of high importance, and when we get to the bottom of Descartes’ thought we find that what he did was not to round off the system but to overcome it. Its last historic representative was Descartes’ contemporary Fermat.^[63]

In place of the sensuous element of concrete lines and planes—the specific character of the Classical feeling of bounds—there emerged the abstract, spatial, un-Classical element of the point which from then on was regarded as a group of co-ordered pure numbers. The idea of magnitude and of perceivable dimension derived from Classical texts and Arabian traditions was destroyed and replaced by that of variable relation-values between positions in space. It is not in general realized that this amounted to the supersession of geometry, which thenceforward enjoyed only a fictitious existence behind a façade of Classical tradition. The word “geometry” has an inextensible Apollinian meaning, and from the time of Descartes what is called the “new geometry” is made up in part of synthetic work upon the position of points in a space which is no longer necessarily three-dimensional (a “manifold of points”), and in part of analysis, in which numbers are defined through point-positions in space. And this replacement of lengths by positions carries with it a purely spatial, and no longer a material, conception of extension.

The clearest example of this destruction of the inherited optical-finite geometry seems to me to be the conversion of angular functions—which in the Indian mathematic had been numbers (in a sense of the word that is hardly accessible to our minds)—into periodic functions, and their passage thence into an infinite number-realm, in which they become series and not the smallest trace remains of the Euclidean figure. In all parts of that realm the circle-number π, like the Napierian base ε, generates relations of all sorts which obliterate all the old distinctions of geometry, trigonometry and algebra, which are neither arithmetical nor geometrical in their nature, and in which no one any longer dreams of actually drawing circles or working out powers.

At the moment exactly corresponding to that at which (c. 540) the Classical Soul in the person of Pythagoras discovered its own proper Apollinian number, the measurable magnitude, the Western soul in the persons of Descartes and his generation (Pascal, Fermat, Desargues) discovered a notion of number that was the child of a passionate Faustian tendency towards the infinite. Number as pure magnitude inherent in the material presentness of things is paralleled by numbers as pure relation,^[64] and if we may characterize the Classical “world,” the cosmos, as being based on a deep need of visible limits and composed accordingly as a sum of material things, so we may say that our world-picture is an actualizing of an infinite space in which things visible appear very nearly as realities of a lower order, limited in the presence of the illimitable. The symbol of the West is an idea of which no other Culture gives even a hint, the idea of Function. The function is anything rather than an expansion of, it is complete emancipation from, any pre-existent idea of number. With the function, not only the Euclidean geometry (and with it the common human geometry of children and laymen, based on everyday experience) but also the Archimedean arithmetic, ceased to have any value for the really significant mathematic of Western Europe. Henceforward, this consisted solely in abstract analysis. For Classical man geometry and arithmetic were self-contained and complete sciences of the highest rank, both phenomenal and both concerned with magnitudes that could be drawn or numbered. For us, on the contrary, those things are only practical auxiliaries of daily life. Addition and multiplication, the two Classical methods of reckoning magnitudes, have, like their sister geometrical-drawing, utterly vanished in the infinity of functional processes. Even the power, which in the beginning denotes numerically a set of multiplications (products of equal magnitudes), is, through the exponential idea (logarithm) and its employment in complex, negative and fractional forms, dissociated from all connexion with magnitude and transferred to a transcendent relational world which the Greeks, knowing only the two positive whole-number powers that represent areas and volumes, were unable to approach. Think, for instance, of expressions like ε^-x, ^π√x, α^1⁄i.

Every one of the significant creations which succeeded one another so rapidly from the Renaissance onward—imaginary and complex numbers, introduced by Cardanus as early as 1550; infinite series, established theoretically by Newton’s great discovery of the binomial theorem in 1666; the differential geometry, the definite integral of Leibniz; the aggregate as a new number-unit, hinted at even by Descartes; new processes like those of general integrals; the expansion of functions into series and even into infinite series of other functions—is 76a victory over the popular and sensuous number-feeling in us, a victory which the new mathematic had to win in order to make the new world-feeling actual.

In all history, so far, there is no second example of one Culture paying to another Culture long extinguished such reverence and submission in matters of science as ours has paid to the Classical. It was very long before we found courage to think our proper thought. But though the wish to emulate the Classical was constantly present, every step of the attempt took us in reality further away from the imagined ideal. The history of Western knowledge is thus one of progressive emancipation from Classical thought, an emancipation never willed but enforced in the depths of the unconscious. And so the development of the new mathematic consists of a long, secret and finally victorious battle against the notion of magnitude.^[65]

One result of this Classicizing tendency has been to prevent us from finding the new notation proper to our Western number as such. The present-day sign-language of mathematics perverts its real content. It is principally owing to that tendency that the belief in numbers as magnitudes still rules to-day even amongst mathematicians, for is it not the base of all our written notation?

But it is not the separate signs (e.g., χ, π, ς) serving to express the functions but the function itself as unit, as element, the variable relation no longer capable of being optically defined, that constitutes the new number; and this new number should have demanded a new notation built up with entire disregard of Classical influences. Consider the difference between two equations (if the same word can be used of two such dissimilar things) such as 3^x + 4^x = 5^x and 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 connexion between definite and tangible magnitudes, but in the second it states that within a domain of variable images there exists a relation such that from certain alterations certain other alterations necessarily follow. The first equation has as its aim the specification by measurement of a concrete magnitude, viz., a “result,” while the second has, in general, no result but is simply the picture and sign of a relation which for n>2 (this is the famous Fermat problem^[66]) can probably be shown to exclude integers. A 77Greek mathematician would have found it quite impossible to understand the purport of an operation like this, which was not meant to be “worked out.”

As applied to the letters in Fermat’s equation, the notion of the unknown is completely misleading. In the first equation x is a magnitude, defined and measurable, which it is our business to compute. In the second, the word “defined” has no meaning at all for x, y, z, n, and consequently we do not attempt to compute their “values.” Hence they are not numbers at all in the plastic sense but signs representing a connexion that is destitute of the hallmarks of magnitude, shape and unique meaning, an infinity of possible positions of like character, an ensemble unified and so attaining existence as a number. The whole equation, though written in our unfortunate notation as a plurality of terms, is actually one single number, x, y, z being no more numbers than + and = are.

In fact, directly the essentially anti-Hellenic idea of the irrationals is introduced, the foundations of the idea of number as concrete and definite collapse. Thenceforward, the series of such numbers is no longer a visible row of increasing, discrete, numbers capable of plastic embodiment but a unidimensional continuum in which each “cut” (in Dedekind’s sense) represents a number. Such a number is already difficult to reconcile with Classical number, for the Classical mathematic knows only one number between 1 and 3, whereas for the Western the totality of such numbers is an infinite aggregate. But when we introduce further the imaginary (√-1 or i) and finally the complex numbers (general form a + bi), the linear continuum is broadened into the highly transcendent form of a number-body, i.e., the content of an aggregate of homogeneous elements in which a “cut” now stands for a number-surface containing an infinite aggregate of numbers of a lower “potency” (for instance, all the real numbers), and there remains not a trace of number in the Classical and popular sense. These number-surfaces, which since Cauchy and Riemann have played an important part in the theory of functions, are pure thought-pictures. Even positive irrational number (e.g., √2) could be conceived in a sort of negative fashion by Classical minds; they had, in fact, enough idea of it to ban it as ἄῤῥητος and ἄλογος. But expressions of the form x + yi lie beyond every possibility of comprehension by Classical thought, whereas it is on the extension of the mathematical laws over the whole region of the complex numbers, within which these laws remain operative, that we have built up the function theory which has at last exhibited the Western mathematic in all purity and unity. Not until that point was reached could this mathematic be unreservedly brought to bear in the parallel sphere of our dynamic Western physics; for the Classical mathematic was fitted precisely to its own stereometric world of individual objects and to static mechanics as developed from Leucippus to Archimedes.

The brilliant period of the Baroque mathematic—the counterpart of the 78Ionian—lies substantially in the 18th Century and extends from the decisive discoveries of Newton and Leibniz through Euler, Lagrange, Laplace and D’Alembert to Gauss. Once this immense creation found wings, its rise was miraculous. Men hardly dared believe their senses. The age of refined scepticism witnessed the emergence of one seemingly impossible truth after another.^[67] Regarding the theory of the differential coefficient, D’Alembert had to say: “Go forward, and faith will come to you.” Logic itself seemed to raise objections and to prove foundations fallacious. But the goal was reached.

This century was a very carnival of abstract and immaterial thinking, in which the great masters of analysis and, with them, Bach, Gluck, Haydn and Mozart—a small group of rare and deep intellects—revelled in the most refined discoveries and speculations, from which Goethe and Kant remained aloof; and in point of content it is exactly paralleled by the ripest century of the Ionic, the century of Eudoxus and Archytas (440-350) and, we may add, of Phidias, Polycletus, Alcamenes and the Acropolis buildings—in which the form-world of Classical mathematic and sculpture displayed the whole fullness of its possibilities, and so ended.

And now for the first time it is possible to comprehend in full the elemental opposition of the Classical and the Western souls. In the whole panorama of history, innumerable and intense as historical relations are, we find no two things so fundamentally alien to one another as these. And it is because extremes meet—because it may be there is some deep common origin behind their divergence—that we find in the Western Faustian soul this yearning effort towards the Apollinian ideal, the only alien ideal which we have loved and, for its power of intensely living in the pure sensuous present, have envied.

We have already observed that, like a child, a primitive mankind acquires (as part of the inward experience that is the birth of the ego) an understanding of number and ipso facto possession of an external world referred to the ego. As soon as the primitive’s astonished eye perceives the dawning world of ordered extension, and the significant emerges in great outlines from the welter of mere impressions, and the irrevocable parting of the outer world from his proper, his inner, world gives form and direction to his waking life, there arises in the soul—instantly conscious of its loneliness—the root-feeling of longing (Sehnsucht). It is this that urges “becoming” towards its goal, that motives the fulfilment and actualizing of every inward possibility, that unfolds the idea of individual being. It is the child’s longing, which will presently come into the consciousness more and more clearly as a feeling of constant direction and 79finally stand before the mature spirit as the enigma of Time—queer, tempting, insoluble. Suddenly, the words “past” and “future” have acquired a fateful meaning.

But this longing which wells out of the bliss of the inner life is also, in the intimate essence of every soul, a dread as well. As all becoming moves towards a having-become wherein it ends, so the prime feeling of becoming—the longing—touches the prime feeling of having-become, the dread. In the present we feel a trickling-away, the past implies a passing. Here is the root of our eternal dread of the irrevocable, the attained, the final—our dread of mortality, of the world itself as a thing-become, where death is set as a frontier like birth—our dread in the moment when the possible is actualized, the life is inwardly fulfilled and consciousness stands at its goal. It is the deep world-fear of the child—which never leaves the higher man, the believer, the poet, the artist—that makes him so infinitely lonely in the presence of the alien powers that loom, threatening in the dawn, behind the screen of sense-phenomena. The element of direction, too, which is inherent in all “becoming,” is felt owing to its inexorable irreversibility to be something alien and hostile, and the human will-to-understanding ever seeks to bind the inscrutable by the spell of a name. It is something beyond comprehension, this transformation of future into past, and thus time, in its contrast with space, has always a queer, baffling, oppressive ambiguity from which no serious man can wholly protect himself.

This world-fear is assuredly the most creative of all prime feelings. Man owes to it the ripest and deepest forms and images, not only of his conscious inward life, but also of the infinitely-varied external culture which reflects this life. Like a secret melody that not every ear can perceive, it runs through the form-language of every true art-work, every inward philosophy, every important deed, and, although those who can perceive it in that domain are the very few, it lies at the root of the great problems of mathematics. Only the spiritually dead man of the autumnal cities—Hammurabi’s Babylon, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Islamic Baghdad, Paris and Berlin to-day—only the pure intellectual, the sophist, the sensualist, the Darwinian, loses it or is able to evade it by setting up a secretless “scientific world-view” between himself and the alien. As the longing attaches itself to that impalpable something whose thousand-formed elusive manifestations are comprised in, rather than denoted by, the word “time,” so the other prime feeling, dread, finds its expression in the intellectual, understandable, outlinable symbols of extension; and thus we find that every Culture is aware (each in its own special way) of an opposition of time and space, of direction and extension, the former underlying the latter as becoming precedes having-become. It is the longing that underlies the dread, becomes the dread, and not vice versa. The one is not subject to the intellect, the other is its servant. The rôle of the one is purely to experience, that of the 80other purely to know (erleben, erkennen). In the Christian language, the opposition of the two world-feelings is expressed by: “Fear God and love Him.”

In the soul of all primitive mankind, just as in that of earliest childhood, there is something which impels it to find means of dealing with the alien powers of the extension-world that assert themselves, inexorable, in and through space. To bind, to bridle, to placate, to “know” are all, in the last analysis, the same thing. In the mysticism of all primitive periods, to know God means to conjure him, to make him favourable, to appropriate him inwardly. This is achieved, principally, by means of a word, the Name—the “nomen” which designates and calls up the “numen”—and also by ritual practices of secret potency; and the subtlest, as well as the most powerful, form of this defence is causal and systematic knowledge, delimitation by label and number. In this respect man only becomes wholly man when he has acquired language. When cognition has ripened to the point of words, the original chaos of impressions necessarily transforms itself into a “Nature” that has laws and must obey them, and the world-in-itself becomes a world-for-us.^[68]

The world-fear is stilled when an intellectual form-language hammers out brazen vessels in which the mysterious is captured and made comprehensible. This is the idea of “taboo,”^[69] which plays a decisive part in the spiritual life of all primitive men, though the original content of the word lies so far from us that it is incapable of translation into any ripe culture-language. Blind terror, religious awe, deep loneliness, melancholy, hate, obscure impulses to draw near, to be merged, to escape—all those formed feelings of mature souls are in the childish condition blurred in a monotonous indecision. The two senses of the word “conjure” (verschwören), meaning to bind and to implore at once, may serve to make clear the sense of the mystical process by which for primitive man the formidable alien becomes “taboo.” Reverent awe before that which is independent of one’s self, things ordained and fixed by law, the alien powers of the world, is the source from which the elementary formative acts, one and all, spring. In early times this feeling is actualized in ornament, in laborious ceremonies and rites, and the rigid laws of primitive intercourse. At the zeniths of the great Cultures those formations, though retaining inwardly the mark of their origin, the characteristic of binding and conjuring, have become the complete form-worlds of the various arts and of religious, scientific and, above all, mathematical thought. The method common to all—the only way of actualizing itself that the soul knows—is the symbolizing of extension, of space or of things; and we find it alike in the conceptions of absolute space that pervade Newtonian physics, Gothic cathedral-interiors and Moorish mosques, and 81the atmospheric infinity of Rembrandt’s paintings and again the dark tone-worlds of Beethoven’s quartets; in the regular polyhedrons of Euclid, the Parthenon sculptures and the pyramids of Old Egypt, the Nirvana of Buddha, the aloofness of court-customs under Sesostris, Justinian I and Louis XIV, in the God-idea of an Æschylus, a Plotinus, a Dante; and in the world-embracing spatial energy of modern technics.

To return to mathematics. In the Classical world the starting-point of every formative act was, as we have seen, the ordering of the “become,” in so far as this was present, visible, measurable and numerable. The Western, Gothic, form-feeling on the contrary is that of an unrestrained, strong-willed far-ranging soul, and its chosen badge is pure, imperceptible, unlimited space. But we must not be led into regarding such symbols as unconditional. On the contrary, they are strictly conditional, though apt to be taken as having identical essence and validity. Our universe of infinite space, whose existence, for us, goes without saying, simply does not exist for Classical man. It is not even capable of being presented to him. On the other hand, the Hellenic cosmos, which is (as we might have discovered long ago) entirely foreign to our way of thinking, was for the Hellene something self-evident. The fact is that the infinite space of our physics is a form of very numerous and extremely complicated elements tacitly assumed, which have come into being only as the copy and expression of our soul, and are actual, necessary and natural only for our type of waking life. The simple notions are always the most difficult. They are simple, in that they comprise a vast deal that not only is incapable of being exhibited in words but does not even need to be stated, because for men of the particular group it is anchored in the intuition; and they are difficult because for all alien men their real content is ipso facto quite inaccessible. Such a notion, at once simple and difficult, is our specifically Western meaning of the word “space.” The whole of our mathematic from Descartes onward is devoted to the theoretical interpretation of this great and wholly religious symbol. The aim of all our physics since Galileo is identical; but in the Classical mathematics and physics the content of this word is simply not known.

Here, too, Classical names, inherited from the literature of Greece and retained in use, have veiled the realities. Geometry means the art of measuring, arithmetic the art of numbering. The mathematic of the West has long ceased to have anything to do with both these forms of defining, but it has not managed to find new names for its own elements—for the word “analysis” is hopelessly inadequate.

The beginning and end of the Classical mathematic is consideration of the properties of individual bodies and their boundary-surfaces; thus indirectly taking in conic sections and higher curves. We, on the other hand, at bottom 82know only the abstract space-element of the point, which can neither be seen, nor measured, nor yet named, but represents simply a centre of reference. The straight line, for the Greeks a measurable edge, is for us an infinite continuum of points. Leibniz illustrates his infinitesimal principle by presenting the straight line as one limiting case and the point as the other limiting case of a circle having infinitely great or infinitely little radius. But for the Greek the circle is a plane and the problem that interested him was that of bringing it into a commensurable condition. Thus the squaring of the circle became for the Classical intellect the supreme problem of the finite. The deepest problem of world-form seemed to it to be to alter surfaces bounded by curved lines, without change of magnitude, into rectangles and so to render them measureable. For us, on the other hand, it has become the usual, and not specially significant, practice to represent the number π by algebraic means, regardless of any geometrical image.

The Classical mathematician knows only what he sees and grasps. Where definite and defining visibility—the domain of his thought—ceases, his science comes to an end. The Western mathematician, as soon as he has quite shaken off the trammels of Classical prejudice, goes off into a wholly abstract region of infinitely numerous “manifolds” of n (no longer 3) dimensions, in which his so-called geometry always can and generally must do without every commonplace aid. When Classical man turns to artistic expressions of his form-feeling, he tries with marble and bronze to give the dancing or the wrestling human form that pose and attitude in which surfaces and contours have all attainable proportion and meaning. But the true artist of the West shuts his eyes and loses himself in the realm of bodiless music, in which harmony and polyphony bring him to images of utter “beyondness” that transcend all possibilities of visual definition. One need only think of the meanings of the word “figure” as used respectively by the Greek sculptor and the Northern contrapuntist, and the opposition of the two worlds, the two mathematics, is immediately presented. The Greek mathematiciansmathematicians ever use the word σῶμα for their entities, just as the Greek lawyers used it for persons as distinct from things (σώματα καὶ πράγματα: personæ et res).

Classical number, integral and corporeal, therefore inevitably seeks to relate itself with the birth of bodily man, the σῶμα. The number 1 is hardly yet conceived of as actual number but rather as ἀρχή, the prime stuff of the number-series, the origin of all true numbers and therefore all magnitudes, measures and materiality (Dinglichkeit). In the group of the Pythagoreans (the date does not matter) its figured-sign was also the symbol of the mother-womb, the origin of all life. The digit 2, the first true number, which doubles the 1, was therefore correlated with the male principle and given the sign of the phallus. And, finally, 3, the “holy number” of the Pythagoreans, denoted the act of union between man and woman, the act of propagation—the erotic 83suggestion in adding and multiplying (the only two processes of increasing, of propagating, magnitude useful to Classical man) is easily seen—and its sign was the combination of the two first. Now, all this throws quite a new light upon the legends previously alluded to, concerning the sacrilege of disclosing the irrational. The irrational—in our language the employment of unending decimal fractions—implied the destruction of an organic and corporeal and reproductive order that the gods had laid down. There is no doubt that the Pythagorean reforms of the Classical religion were themselves based upon the immemorial Demeter-cult. Demeter, Gæa, is akin to Mother Earth. There is a deep relation between the honour paid to her and this exalted conception of the numbers.

Thus, inevitably, the Classical became by degrees the Culture of the small. The Apollinian soul had tried to tie down the meaning of things-become by means of the principle of visible limits; its taboo was focused upon the immediately-present and proximate alien. What was far away, invisible, was ipso facto “not there.” The Greek and the Roman alike sacrificed to the gods of the place in which he happened to stay or reside; all other deities were outside the range of vision. Just as the Greek tongue—again and again we shall note the mighty symbolism of such language-phenomena—possessed no word for space, so the Greek himself was destitute of our feeling of landscape, horizons, outlooks, distances, clouds, and of the idea of the far-spread fatherland embracing the great nation. Home, for Classical man, is what he can see from the citadel of his native town and no more. All that lay beyond the visual range of this political atom was alien, and hostile to boot; beyond that narrow range, fear set in at once, and hence the appalling bitterness with which these petty towns strove to destroy one another. The Polis is the smallest of all conceivable state-forms, and its policy is frankly short-range, therein differing in the extreme from our own cabinet-diplomacy which is the policy of the unlimited. Similarly, the Classical temple, which can be taken in in one glance, is the smallest of all first-rate architectural forms. Classical geometry from Archytas to Euclid—like the school geometry of to-day which is still dominated by it—concerned itself with small, manageable figures and bodies, and therefore remained unaware of the difficulties that arise in establishing figures of astronomical dimensions, which in many cases are not amenable to Euclidean geometry.^[70] Otherwise the subtle Attic spirit would almost surely have arrived at some notion of the problems of non-Euclidean geometry, for its criticism of the well-known “parallel” axiom,^[71] the doubtfulness of which soon aroused opposition 84yet could not in any way be elucidated, brought it very close indeed to the decisive discovery. The Classical mind as unquestioningly devoted and limited itself to the study of the small and the near as ours has to that of the infinite and ultra-visual. All the mathematical ideas that the West found for itself or borrowed from others were automatically subjected to the form-language of the Infinitesimal—and that long before the actual Differential Calculus was discovered. Arabian algebra, Indian trigonometry, Classical mechanics were incorporated as a matter of course in analysis. Even the most “self-evident” propositions of elementary arithmetic such as 2 × 2 = 4 become, when considered analytically, problems, and the solution of these problems was only made possible by deductions from the Theory of Aggregates, and is in many points still unaccomplished. Plato and his age would have looked upon this sort of thing not only as a hallucination but also as evidence of an utterly nonmathematical mind. In a certain measure, geometry may be treated algebraically and algebra geometrically, that is, the eye may be switched off or it may be allowed to govern. We take the first alternative, the Greeks the second. Archimedes, in his beautiful management of spirals, touches upon certain general facts that are also fundamentals in Leibniz’s method of the definite integral; but his processes, for all their superficial appearance of modernity, are subordinated to stereometric principles; in like case, an Indian mathematician would naturally have found some trigonometrical formulation.^[72]

From this fundamental opposition of Classical and Western numbers there arises an equally radical difference in the relationship of element to element in each of these number-worlds. The nexus of magnitudes is called proportion, that of relations is comprised in the notion of function. The significance of these two words is not confined to mathematics proper; they are of high importance also in the allied arts of sculpture and music. Quite apart from the rôle of proportion in ordering the parts of the individual statue, the typically Classical artforms of the statue, the relief, and the fresco, admit enlargements and reductions of scale—words that in music have no meaning at all—as we see in the art of the gems, in which the subjects are essentially reductions from life-sized originals. In the domain of Function, on the contrary, it is the idea of transformation of groups that is of decisive importance, and the musician will readily agree that similar ideas play an essential part in modern composition-theory. I need only allude to one of the most elegant orchestral forms of the 18th Century, the Tema con Variazioni.

All proportion assumes the constancy, all transformation the variability of the constituents. Compare, for instance, the congruence theorems of Euclid, 85the proof of which depends in fact on the assumed ratio 1 : 1, with the modern deduction of the same by means of angular functions.

The Alpha and Omega of the Classical mathematic is construction (which in the broad sense includes elementary arithmetic), that is, the production of a single visually-present figure. The chisel, in this second sculptural art, is the compass. On the other hand, in function-research, where the object is not a result of the magnitude sort but a discussion of general formal possibilities, the way of working is best described as a sort of composition-procedure closely analogous to the musical; and in fact, a great number of the ideas met with in the theory of music (key, phrasing, chromatics, for instance) can be directly employed in physics, and it is at least arguable that many relations would be clarified by so doing.

Every construction affirms, and every operation denies appearances, in that the one works out that which is optically given and the other dissolves it. And so we meet with yet another contrast between the two kinds of mathematic; the Classical mathematic of small things deals with the concrete individual instance and produces a once-for-all construction, while the mathematic of the infinite handles whole classes of formal possibilities, groups of functions, operations, equations, curves, and does so with an eye, not to any result they may have, but to their course. And so for the last two centuries—though present-day mathematicians hardly realize the fact—there has been growing up the idea of a general morphology of mathematical operations, which we are justified in regarding as the real meaning of modern mathematics as a whole. All this, as we shall perceive more and more clearly, is one of the manifestations of a general tendency inherent in the Western intellect, proper to the Faustian spirit and Culture and found in no other. The great majority of the problems which occupy our mathematic, and are regarded as “our” problems in the same sense as the squaring of the circle was the Greeks’,—e.g., the investigation of convergence in infinite series (Cauchy) and the transformation of elliptic and algebraic integrals into multiply-periodic functions (Abel, Gauss)—would probably have seemed to the Ancients, who strove for simple and definite quantitative results, to be an exhibition of rather abstruse virtuosity. And so indeed the popular mind regards them even to-day. There is nothing less “popular” than the modern mathematic, and it too contains its symbolism of the infinitely far, of distance. All the great works of the West, from the “Divina Commedia” to “Parsifal,” are unpopular, whereas everything Classical from Homer to the Altar of Pergamum was popular in the highest degree.

Thus, finally, the whole content of Western number-thought centres itself upon the historic limit-problem of the Faustian mathematic, the key which opens the way to the Infinite, that Faustian infinite which is so different from the infinity of Arabian and Indian world-ideas. Whatever the guise—infinite series, curves or functions—in which number appears in the particular case, the essence of it is the theory of the limit.^[73] This limit is the absolute opposite of the limit which (without being so called) figures in the Classical problem of the quadrature of the circle. Right into the 18th Century, Euclidean popular prepossessions obscured the real meaning of the differential principle. The idea of infinitely small quantities lay, so to say, ready to hand, and however skilfully they were handled, there was bound to remain a trace of the Classical constancy, the semblance of magnitude, about them, though Euclid would never have known them or admitted them as such. Thus, zero is a constant, a whole number in the linear continuum between +1 and -1; and it was a great hindrance to Euler in his analytical researches that, like many after him, he treated the differentials as zero. Only in the 19th Century was this relic of Classical number-feeling finally removed and the Infinitesimal Calculus made logically secure by Cauchy’s definitive elucidation of the limit-idea; only the intellectual step from the “infinitely small quantity” to the “lower limit of every possible finite magnitude” brought out the conception of a variable number which oscillates beneath any assignable number that is not zero. A number of this sort has ceased to possess any character of magnitude whatever: the limit, as thus finally presented by theory, is no longer that which is approximated to, but the approximation, the process, the operation itself. It is not a state, but a relation. And so in this decisive problem of our mathematic, we are suddenly made to see how historical is the constitution of the Western soul.^[74]

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 87grand course of Western number-thought. The constant number of the Classical mathematic was dissolved into the variable. Geometry became analytical and dissolved all concrete forms, replacing the mathematical bodies from which the rigid geometrical values had been obtained, by abstract spatial relations which in the end ceased to have any application at all to sense-present phenomena. It began by substituting for Euclid’s optical figures geometrical loci referred to a co-ordinate system of arbitrarily chosen “origin,” and reducing the postulated objectiveness of existence of the geometrical object to the one condition that during the operation (which itself was one of equating and not of measurement) the selected co-ordinate system should not be changed. But these co-ordinates immediately came to be regarded as values pure and simple, serving not so much to determine as to represent and replace the position of points as space-elements. Number, the boundary of things-become, was represented, not as before pictorially by a figure, but symbolically by an equation. “Geometry” altered its meaning; the co-ordinate system as a picturing disappeared and the point became an entirely abstract number-group. In architecture, we find this inward transformation of Renaissance into Baroque through the innovations of Michael Angelo and Vignola. Visually pure lines became, in palace and church façades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In place of the clear co-ordinates that we have in Romano-Florentine colonnading and storeying, the “infinitesimal” appears in the graceful flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The constructive dissolves in the wealth of the decorative—in mathematical language, the functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups and clusters, break up the façades, gather and disperse again restlessly. The flat surfaces of wall, roof, storey melt into a wealth of stucco work and ornaments, vanish and break into a play of light and shade. The light itself, as it is made to play upon the form-world of mature Baroque—viz., the period from Bernini (1650) to the Rococo of Dresden, Vienna and Paris—has become an essentially musical element. The Dresden Zwinger^[75] is a sinfonia. Along with 18th Century mathematics, 18th Century architecture develops into a form-world of musical characters.

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 88it 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 89from 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 co-ordinate lines, was defined as a group of three independent numbers, there was no longer any inherent objection to replacing the number 3 by the general number n. The notion of dimension was radically changed. It was no longer a matter of treating the properties of a point metrically with reference to its position in a visible system, but of representing the entirely abstract properties of a number-group by means of any dimensions that we please. The number-group—consisting of n independent ordered elements—is an image of the point and it is called a point. Similarly, an equation logically arrived therefrom is called a plane and is the image of a plane. And the aggregate of all points of n dimensions is called an n-dimensional space.^[76] In these transcendent space-worlds, which are remote from every sort of sensualism, lie the relations which it is the business of analysis to investigate and which are found to be consistently in agreement with the data of experimental physics. This space of higher degree is a symbol which is through-and-through the peculiar property of the Western mind. That mind alone has attempted, and successfully too, to capture the “become” and the extended in these forms, to conjure and bind—to “know”—the alien by this kind of appropriation or taboo. Not until such spheres of number-thought are reached, and not for any men but the few who have reached them, do such imaginings as systems of hypercomplex numbers (e.g., the quaternions of the calculus of vectors) and apparently quite meaningless symbols like ∞ⁿ acquire the character of something actual. And here if anywhere it must be understood that actuality is not only sensual actuality. The spiritual is in no wise limited to perception-forms for the actualizing of its idea.

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 90type—which in structure and ordering are analogous to the Dedekind number-bodies. Here are worlds, we feel, of perfectly new numbers, which are nevertheless not utterly sense-transcendent for the inner eye of the adept; and the problem now is to discover in those vast abstract form-systems certain elements which, relatively to a particular group of operations (viz., of transformations of the system), remain unaffected thereby, that is, possess invariance. In mathematical language, the problem, as stated generally by Klein, is—given an n-dimensional manifold (“space”) and a group of transformations, it is required to examine the forms belonging to the manifold in respect of such properties as are not altered by transformation of the group.

And with this culmination our Western mathematic, having exhausted every inward possibility and fulfilled its destiny as the copy and purest expression of the idea of the Faustian soul, closes its development in the same way as the mathematic of the Classical Culture concluded in the third century. Both those sciences (the only ones of which the organic structure can even to-day be examined historically) arose out of a wholly new idea of number, in the one case Pythagoras’s, in the other Descartes’. Both, expanding in all beauty, reached their maturity one hundred years later; and both, after flourishing for three centuries, completed the structure of their ideas at the same moment as the Cultures to which they respectively belonged passed over into the phase of megalopolitan Civilization. The deep significance of this interdependence will be made clear in due course. It is enough for the moment that for us the time of the great mathematicians is past. Our tasks to-day are those of preserving, rounding off, refining, selection—in place of big dynamic creation, the same clever detail-work which characterized the Alexandrian mathematic of late Hellenism.

A historical paradigm will make this clearer.

Now, at last, it is possible to take the decisive step of sketching an image of history that is independent of the accident of standpoint, of the period in which this or that observer lives—independent too of the personality of the observer himself, who as an interested member of his own Culture is tempted, by its religious, intellectual, political and social tendencies, to order the material of history according to a perspective that is limited as to both space and time, and to fashion arbitrary forms into which the superficies of history can be forced but which are entirely alien to its inner content.

What has been missing, till now, is detachment from the objects considered (die Distanz vom Gegenstande). In respect of Nature, this detachment has long ago been attained, though of course it was relatively easy of attainment, since the physicist can obviously systematize the mechanical-causal picture of his world as impersonally as though he himself did not exist in it.

It is quite possible, however, to do the same as regards the form-world of History. We have merely been unaware of the possibility. The modern historian, in the very act of priding himself on his “objectivity,” naïvely and unconsciously reveals his prepossessions. For this reason it is quite legitimate to say—and it will infallibly be said some day—that so far a genuinely Faustian treatment of history has been entirely lacking. By such a treatment is meant one that has enough detachment to admit that any “present” is only such with reference to a particular generation of men; that the number of generations is infinite, and that the proper present must therefore be regarded just as something infinitely distant and alien is regarded, and treated as an interval of time neither more nor less significant in the whole picture of History than others. Such a treatment will employ no distorting modulus of personal ideals, set no personal origin of co-ordinates, be influenced by none of the personal hopes and fears and other inward impulses which count for so much in practical life; and such a detachment will—to use the words of Nietzsche (who, be it said, was far from possessing enough of it himself)—enable one to view the whole fact of Man from an immense distance, to regard the individual 94Cultures, one’s own included, as one regards the range of mountain peaks along a horizon.

Once again, therefore, there was an act like the act of Copernicus to be accomplished, an act of emancipation from the evident present in the name of infinity. This the Western soul achieved in the domain of Nature long ago, when it passed from the Ptolemaic world-system to that which is alone valid for it to-day, and treats the position of the observer on one particular planet as accidental instead of normative.

A similar emancipation of world-history from the accidental standpoint, the perpetually re-defined “modern period,” is both possible and necessary. It is true that the 19th Century A.D. seems to us infinitely fuller and more important than, say, the 19th Century B.C.; but the moon, too, seems to us bigger than Jupiter or Saturn. The physicist has long ago freed himself from prepossessions as to relative distance, the historian not so. We permit ourselves to consider the Culture of the Greeks as an “ancient” related to our own “modern.” Were they in their turn “modern” in relation to the finished and historically mature Egyptians of the court of the great Thuthmosis who lived a millennium before Homer? For us, the events which took place between 1500 and 1800 on the soil of Western Europe constitute the most important third of "world"-history; for the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks back on and judges by 4000 years of Chinese history, those centuries generally are a brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less significant than the centuries of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), which in his "world"-history are epoch-making.

To liberate History, then, from that thraldom to the observers’ prejudices which in our own case has made of it nothing more than a record of a partial past leading up to an accidental present, with the ideals and interests of that present as criteria of the achievement and possibility, is the object of all that follows.

Nature and History^[77] are the opposite extreme terms of man’s range of possibilities, whereby he is enabled to order the actualities about him as a picture of the world. An actuality is Nature in so far as it assigns things-becoming their place as things-become, and History in so far as it orders things-become with reference to their becoming. An actuality as an evocation of mind is contemplated, and as an assurance of the senses is critically comprehended, the first being exemplified in the worlds of Plato, Rembrandt, Goethe and Beethoven, the second in the worlds of Parmenides, Descartes, Kant and Newton. Cognition in the strict sense of the word is that act of experience of which the completed issue is called “Nature.” The cognized and “Nature” are one and the 95same. The symbol of mathematical number has shown us that the aggregate of things cognized is the same as the world of things mechanically defined, things correct once and for all, things brought under law. Nature is the sum of the law-imposed necessities. There are only laws of Nature. No physicist who understands his duty would wish to transcend these limits. His task is to establish an ordered code which not only includes all the laws that he can find in the picture of Nature that is proper to himself but, further, represents that picture exhaustively and without remainder.

Contemplation or vision (Anschauen), on the other hand—I may recall Goethe’s words: “vision is to be carefully distinguished from seeing”—, is that act of experience which is itself history because it is itself a fulfilling. That which has been lived is that which has happened, and it is history. (Erlebtes ist Geschehenes, ist Geschichte.)

Every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated. It carries the hall-mark of Direction (“Time”), of irreversibility. That which has happened is thenceforth counted with the become and not with the becoming, with the stiffened and not the living, and belongs beyond recall to the past. Our feeling of world-fear has its sources here. Everything cognized, on the contrary, is timeless, neither past nor future but simply “there,” and consequently permanently valid, as indeed the very constitution of natural law requires that it should be. Law and the domain of law are anti-historical. They exclude incident and casuality. The laws of nature are forms of rigorous and therefore inorganic necessity. It becomes easy to see why mathematics, as the ordering of things-become by number, is always and exclusively associated with laws and causality.

Becoming has no number. We can count, measure, dissect only the lifeless and so much of the living as can be dissociated from livingness. Pure becoming, pure life, is in this sense incapable of being bounded. It lies beyond the domain of cause and effect, law and measure. No deep and pure historical research seeks for conformities with causal laws—or, if it does so, it does not understand its own essence.

At the same time, history as positively treated is not pure becoming: it is an image, a world-form radiated from the waking consciousness of the historian, in which the becoming dominates the become. The possibility of extracting results of any sort by scientific methods depends upon the proportion of things-become present in the subject treated, and by hypothesis there is in this case a defect of them; the higher the proportion is, the more mechanical, reasonable, causal, history is made to appear. Even Goethe’s “living nature,” utterly unmathematical world-picture as it was, contained enough of the dead and stiffened to allow him to treat at least his foreground scientifically. But when this content of things-become dwindles to very little, then history becomes approximately pure becoming, and contemplation and vision become an experience 96which can only be rendered in forms of art. That which Dante saw before his spiritual eyes as the destiny of the world, he could not possibly have arrived at by ways of science, any more than Goethe could have attained by these ways to what he saw in the great moments of his “Faust” studies, any more than Plotinus and Giordano Bruno could have distilled their visions from researches. This contrast lies at the root of all dispute regarding the inner form of history. In the presence of the same object or corpus of facts, every observer according to his own disposition has a different impression of the whole, and this impression, intangible and incommunicable, underlies his judgment and gives it its personal colour. The degree in which things-become are taken in differs from man to man, which is quite enough in itself to show that they can never agree as to task or method. Each accuses the other of a deficiency of “clear thinking,” and yet the something that is expressed by this phrase is something not built with hands, not implying superiority or a priority of degree but necessary difference of kind. The same applies to all natural sciences.

Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the fact that at bottom the wish to write history scientifically involves a contradiction. True science reaches just as far as the notions of truth and falsity have validity: this applies to mathematics and it applies also to the science of historical spade-work, viz., the collection, ordering and sifting of material. But real historical vision (which only begins at this point) belongs to the domain of significances, in which the crucial words are not “correct” and “erroneous,” but “deep” and “shallow.” The true physicist is not deep, but keen: it is only when he leaves the domain of working hypotheses and brushes against the final things that he can be deep, but at this stage he is already a metaphysician. Nature is to be handled scientifically, History poetically. Old Leopold von Ranke is credited with the remark that, after all, Scott’s “Quentin Durward” was the true history-writing. And so it is: the advantage of a good history book is that it enables the reader to be his own Scott.

On the other hand, within the very realm of numbers and exact knowledge there is that which Goethe called “living Nature,” an immediate vision of pure becoming and self-shaping, in fact, history as above defined. Goethe’s world was, in the first instance, an organism, an existence, and it is easy therefore to see why his researches, even when superficially of a physical kind, do not make numbers, or laws, or causality captured in formulæ, or dissection of any sort their object, but are morphology in the highest sense of the word; and why his work neither uses nor needs to use the specifically Western and un-Classical means of causal treatment, metrical experiment. His treatment of the Earth’s crust is invariably geology, and never mineralogy, which he called the science of something dead.

Let it be said, once more, that there are no exact boundaries set between the two kinds of world-notion. However great the contrast between becoming and 97the become, the fact remains that they are jointly present in every kind of understanding. He who looks at the becoming and fulfilling in them, experiences History; he who dissects them as become and fulfilled cognizes Nature.

In every man, in every Culture, in every culture-phase, there is found an inherent disposition, an inherent inclination and vocation to prefer one of the two forms as an ideal of understanding the world. Western man is in a high degree historically disposed,^[78] Classical man far from being so. We follow up what is given us with an eye to past and future, whereas Classical man knew only the point-present and an ambiance of myth. We have before us a symbol of becoming in every bar of our music from Palestrina to Wagner, and the Greeks a symbol of the pure present in every one of their statues. The rhythm of a body is based upon a simultaneous relation of the parts, that of a fugue in the succession of elements in time.

There emerge, then, as the two basic elements of all world-picturing, the principle of Form (Gestalt) and the principle of Law (Gesetz). The more decidedly a particular world-picture shows the traits of “Nature,” the more unconditionally law and number prevail in it; and the more purely intuitive the picture of the world as eternally becoming, the more alien to numbers its manifold and intangible elements. “Form is something mobile, something becoming, something passing. The doctrine of formation is the doctrine of transformation. Metamorphosis is the key to the whole alphabet of Nature,” so runs a note of Goethe’s, marking already the methodic difference between his famous “exact percipient fancy” which quietly lets itself be worked upon by the living,^[79] and the exact killing procedure of modern physics. But whatever the process, a remainder consisting of so much of the alien element as is present is always found. In strict natural sciences this remainder takes the form of the inevitable theories and hypotheses which are imposed on, and leaven, the stiff mass of number and formula. In historical research, it appears as chronology, the number-structure of dates and statistics which, alien though number is to the essence of becoming, is so thoroughly woven around and into the world of historical forms that it is never felt to be intrusive. For it is devoid of mathematical import. Chronological number distinguishes uniquely-occurring actualities, mathematical number constant possibilities. The one sharpens the images and works up the outlines of epoch and fact for the understanding eye. 98But the other is itself the law which it seeks to establish, the end and aim of research. Chronological number is a scientific means of pioneering borrowed from the science of sciences, mathematics, and used as such without regard to its specific properties. Compare, for instance, the meaning of the two symbols 12 × 8 = 96, and 18 October, 1813.^[80] It is the same difference, in the use of figures, that prose and poetry present in the use of words.

One other point remains to be noted.^[81] As a becoming always lies at the base of the become, and as the world-picture representative of becoming is that which history gives us, therefore history is the original world-form, and Nature—the fully elaborated world-mechanism—is the late world-form that only the men of a mature Culture can completely actualize. In fact, the darkness encompassing the simple soul of primitive mankinds, which we can realize even to-day from their religious customs and myths—that entirely organic world of pure wilfulness, of hostile demons and kindly powers—was through-and-through a living and swaying whole, ununderstandable, indefinable, incalculable. We may call this Nature if we like, but it is not what we mean by “nature,” i.e., the strict image projected by a knowing intellect. Only the souls of children and of great artists can now hear the echoes of this long-forgotten world of nascent humanity, but it echoes still, and not rarely, even in the inelastic "nature"-medium that the city-spirit of the mature Culture is remorselessly building up round the individual. Hence that acute antagonism between the scientific (“modern”) and the artistic (“unpractical”) world-idea which every Late period knows; the man of fact and the poet do not and cannot understand one another. Hence comes, too, that tendency of historical study, which must inevitably contain an element of the childish, the dreamy, the Goethian, to dress up as a science, to be (using its own naïve word) “materialistic,” at the imminent risk of becoming a mere physics of public life.

“Nature,” in the exact sense, is a way of possessing actuality which is special to the few, restricted to the megalopolitans of the late periods of great Cultures, masculine, perhaps even senatorial; while History is the naïve, youthful, more or less instinctive way that is proper to all men alike. At least, that is the position of the number-based, unmystical, dissectable and dissected “Nature” of Aristotle and Kant, the Sophists and the Darwinians, modern physics and chemistry, vis-à-vis the lived, felt and unconfined “Nature” of Homer and the Eddas, of Doric and Gothic man. To overlook this is to miss the whole essence of historical treatment. It is history that is the truly natural, and the exact mechanically-correct “Nature” of the scientist that is the artificial conception of world by soul. Hence the paradox that modern man finds "nature"-study easy and historical study hard.

99Tendencies 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.

The task of world-knowing—for the man of the higher Cultures a need, seen as a duty, of expressing his own essence—is certainly in every case the same, though its process may be called science or philosophy, and though its affinity to artistic creation and to faith-intuition may for one be something felt and for another something questionable. It is to present, without accretions, that form of the world-picture which to the individual in each case is proper and significant, and for him (so long as he does not compare) is in fact “the” world.

The task is necessarily a double one, in view of the distinction between “Nature” and “History.” Each speaks its own form-language which differs utterly from that of the other, and however the two may overlap and confuse one another in an unsifted and ambiguous world-picture such as that of everyday life, they are incapable of any inner unity.

Direction and Extension are the outstanding characters which differentiate the historical and the scientific (naturhaft) kind of impressibility, and it is totally impossible for a man to have both working creatively within him at the same time. The double meaning of the German word “Ferne” (distance, farness) is illuminating. In the one order of ideas it implies futurity, in the other a spatial interval of standing apart, and the reader will not fail to remark that the historical materialist almost necessarily conceives time as a mathematical dimension, while for the born artist, on the contrary,—as the lyrics of 100every land show us—the distance-impressions made by deep landscapes, clouds, horizon and setting sun attach themselves without an effort to the sense of a future. The Greek poet denies the future, and consequently he neither sees nor sings of the things of the future; he cleaves to the near, as he belongs to the present, entirely.

The natural-science investigator, the productive reasoner in the full sense of the word, whether he be an experimenter like Faraday, a theorist like Galileo, a calculator like Newton, finds in his world only directionless quantities which he measures, tests and arranges. It is only the quantitative that is capable of being grasped through figures, of being causally defined, of being captured in a law or formula, and when it has achieved this, pure nature-knowledge has shot its bolt. All its laws are quantitative connexions, or as the physicist puts it, all physical processes run a course in space, an expression which a Greek physicist would have corrected—without altering the fact—into “all physical processes occur between bodies” conformably to the space-denying feeling of the Classical soul.

The historical kind of impression-process is alien to everything quantitative, and affects a different organ. To World-as-Nature certain modes of apprehension, as to World-as-History certain other modes, are proper. We know them and use them every day, without (as yet) having become aware of their opposition. There is nature-knowledge and there is man-knowledge; there is scientific experience and there is vital experience. Let the reader track down this contrast into his own inmost being, and he will understand what I mean.

All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis, be described as Morphology. The Morphology of the mechanical and the extended, a science which discovers and orders nature-laws and causal relations, is called Systematic. The Morphology of the organic, of history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and destiny, is called Physiognomic.

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 101expression. 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 102research reaches up to a final or superlative truth—Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.^[82]

The nature-researcher can be educated, but the man who knows history is born. He seizes and pierces men and facts with one blow, guided by a feeling which cannot be acquired by learning or affected by persuasion, but which only too rarely manifests itself in full intensity. Direction, fixing, ordering, defining by cause and effect, are things that one can do if one likes. These things are work, but the other is creation. Form and law, portrayal and comprehension, symbol and formula, have different organs, and their opposition is that in which life stands to death, production to destruction. Reason, system and comprehension kill as they “cognize.” That which is cognized becomes a rigid object, capable of measurement and subdivision. Intuitive vision, on the other hand, vivifies and incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity. Poetry and historical study are kin. Calculation and cognition also are kin. But, as Hebbel says somewhere, systems are not dreamed, and art-works are not calculated or (what is the same thing) thought out. The artist or the real historian sees the becoming of a thing (schaut, wie etwas wird), and he can re-enact its becoming from its lineaments, whereas the systematist, whether he be physicist, logician, evolutionist or pragmatical historian, learns the thing that has become. The artist’s soul, like the soul of a Culture, is something potential that may actualize itself, something complete and perfect—in the language of an older philosophy, a microcosm. The systematic spirit, narrow and withdrawn “abs-tract”) from the sensual, is an autumnal and passing phenomenon belonging to the ripest conditions of a Culture. Linked with the city, into which its life is more and more herded, it comes and goes with the city. In the Classical world, there is science only from the 6th-century Ionians to the Roman period, but there was art in the Classical world for just as long as there was existence.

Once more, a paradigm may help in elucidation.

103Seeking thus to obtain a clear idea of the unifying principle out of which each of these two worlds is conceived, we find that mathematically-controlled cognition relates always (and the purer it is, the more directly) to a continuous present. The picture of nature dealt with by the physicist is that which is deployed before his senses at the given moment. It is one of the tacit, but none the less firm, presuppositions of nature-research that “Nature” (die Natur) is the same for every consciousness and for all times. An experiment is decisive for good and all; time being, not precisely denied, but eliminated from the field of investigation. Real history rests on an equally certain sense of the contrary; what it presupposes as its origin is a nearly indescribable sensitive faculty within, which is continuously labile under continuous impressions, and is incapable therefore of possessing what may be called a centre of time.^[83] (We shall consider later what the physicist means by “time.”) The picture of history—be it the history of mankind, of the world of organisms, of the earth or of the stellar systems—is a memory-picture. “Memory,” in this connexion, is conceived as a higher state (certainly not proper to every consciousness and vouchsafed to many in only a low degree), a perfectly definite kind of imagining power, which enables experience to traverse each particular moment sub specie æternitatis as one point in an integral made up of all the past and all the future, and it forms the necessary basis of all looking-backward, all self-knowledge and all self-confession. In this sense, Classical man has no memory and therefore no history, either in or around himself. “No man can judge history but one who has himself experienced history,” says Goethe. In the Classical world-consciousness all Past was absorbed in the instant Present. Compare the entirely historical heads of the Nürnberg Cathedral sculptures, of Dürer, of Rembrandt, with those of Hellenistic sculpture, for instance the famous Sophocles statue. The former tell the whole history of a soul, whereas the latter rigidly confines itself to expressing the traits of a momentary being, and tells nothing of how this being is the issue of a course of life—if indeed we can speak of “course of life” at all in connexion with a purely Classical man, who is always complete and never becoming.

And now it is possible to discover the ultimate elements of the historical form-world.

Countless shapes that emerge and vanish, pile up and melt again, a thousand-hued glittering tumult, it seems, of perfectly wilful chance—such is the picture of world-history when first it deploys before our inner eye. But through this seeming anarchy, the keener glance can detect those pure forms which underlie all human becoming, penetrate their cloud-mantle, and bring them unwillingly to unveil.

104But of the whole picture of world-becoming, of that cumulus of grand planes that the Faust-eye^[84] sees piled one beyond another—the becoming of the heavens, of the earth’s crust, of life, of man—we shall deal here only with that very small morphological unit that we are accustomed to call “world-history,” that history which Goethe ended by despising, the history of higher mankind during 6000 years or so, without going into the deep problem of the inward homogeneity of all these aspects. What gives this fleeting form-world meaning and substance, and what has hitherto lain buried deep under a mass of tangible “facts” and “dates” that has hardly yet been bored through, is the phenomenon of the Great Cultures. Only after these prime forms shall have been seen and felt and worked out in respect of their physiognomic meaning will it be possible to say that the essence and inner form of human History as opposed to the essence of Nature are understood—or rather, that we understand them. Only after this inlook and this outlook will a serious philosophy of history become feasible. Only then will it be possible to see each fact in the historical picture—each idea, art, war, personality, epoch—according to its symbolic content, and to regard history not as a mere sum of past things without intrinsic order or inner necessity, but as an organism of rigorous structure and significant articulation, an organism that does not suddenly dissolve into a formless and ambiguous future when it reaches the accidental present of the observer.

Cultures are organisms, and world-history is their collective biography. Morphologically, the immense history of the Chinese or of the Classical Culture is the exact equivalent of the petty history of the individual man, or of the animal, or the tree, or the flower. For the Faustian vision, this is not a postulate but an experience; if we want to learn to recognize inward forms that constantly and everywhere repeat themselves, the comparative morphology^[85] of plants and animals has long ago given us the methods. In the destinies of the several Cultures that follow upon one another, grow up with one another, touch, overshadow, and suppress one another, is compressed the whole content of human history. And if we set free their shapes, till now hidden all too deep under the surface of a trite “history of human progress,” and let them march past us in the spirit, it cannot but be that we shall succeed in distinguishing, amidst all that is special or unessential, the primitive culture-form, the Culture that underlies as ideal all the individual Cultures.

I distinguish the idea of a Culture, which is the sum total of its inner possibilities, from its sensible phenomenon or appearance upon the canvas of history as a fulfilled actuality. It is the relation of the soul to the living body, to its expression in the light-world perceptible to our eyes. This history of a Culture 105is the progressive actualizing of its possible, and the fulfilment is equivalent to the end. In this way the Apollinian soul, which some of us can perhaps understand and share in, is related to its unfolding in the realm of actuality, to the “Classical” or “antique” as we call it, of which the tangible and understandable relics are investigated by the archæologist, the philologist, the æsthetic and the historian.

Culture is the prime phenomenon of all past and future world-history. The deep, and scarcely appreciated, idea of Goethe, which he discovered in his “living nature” and always made the basis of his morphological researches, we shall here apply—in its most precise sense—to all the formations of man’s history, whether fully matured, cut off in the prime, half opened or stifled in the seed. It is the method of living into (erfühlen) the object, as opposed to dissecting it. “The highest to which man can attain, is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.” The prime phenomenon is that in which the idea of becoming is presented net. To the spiritual eye of Goethe the idea of the prime plant was clearly visible in the form of every individual plant that happened to come up, or even that could possibly come up. In his investigation of the “os intermaxillare” his starting-point was the prime phenomenon of the vertebrate type; and in other fields it was geological stratification, or the leaf as the prime form of the plant-organism, or the metamorphosis of the plants as the prime form of all organic becoming. “The same law will apply to everything else that lives,” he wrote, in announcing his discovery to Herder. It was a look into the heart of things that Leibniz would have understood, but the century of Darwin is as remote from such a vision as it is possible to be.

At present, however, we look in vain for any treatment of history that is entirely free from the methods of Darwinism—that is, of systematic natural science based on causality. A physiognomic that is precise, clear and sure of itself and its limits has never yet arisen, and it can only arise through the discoveries of method that we have yet to make. Herein lies the great problem set for the 20th Century to solve—to explore carefully the inner structure of the organic units through and in which world-history fulfils itself, to separate the morphologically necessary from the accidental, and, by seizing the purport of events, to ascertain the languages in which they speak.

A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; up-stream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally-unsolvable riddle; down-stream, a future even so dark and timeless—such is the groundwork of the Faustian picture of human history.

106Over the expanse of the water passes the endless uniform wave-train of the generations. Here and there bright shafts of light broaden out, everywhere dancing flashes confuse and disturb the clear mirror, changing, sparkling, vanishing. These are what we call the clans, tribes, peoples, races which unify a series of generations within this or that limited area of the historical surface. As widely as these differ in creative power, so widely do the images that they create vary in duration and plasticity, and when the creative power dies out, the physiognomic, linguistic and spiritual identification-marks vanish also and the phenomenon subsides again into the ruck of the generations. Aryans, Mongols, Germans, Kelts, Parthians, Franks, Carthaginians, Berbers, Bantus are names by which we specify some very heterogeneous images of this order.

But over this surface, too, the great Cultures^[86] accomplish their majestic wave-cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, flatten again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste.

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality (dem urseelenhaften Zustande) of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that sequence of great epochs which define and display the stages of fulfilment, is an inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and the stifling of the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply-symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such they may, like a worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust their decaying branches towards the sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic world. It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose gigantic, in the Imperial age, with a false semblance of youth and strength and fullness, and robbed the young Arabian Culture of the East of light and air.^[87]

This—the inward and outward fulfilment, the finality, that awaits every living Culture—is the purport of all the historic “declines,” amongst them that decline of the Classical which we know so well and fully, and another 107decline, entirely comparable to it in course and duration, which will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium but is heralded already and sensible in and around us to-day—the decline of the West.^[88] Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age. It is a young and trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, that reveals itself in the morning of Romanesque and Gothic. It fills the Faustian landscape from the Provence of the troubadours to the Hildesheim cathedral of Bishop Bernward.^[89] The spring wind blows over it. “In the works of the old-German architecture,” says Goethe, “one sees the blossoming of an extraordinary state. Anyone immediately confronted with such a blossoming can do no more than wonder; but one who can see into the secret inner life of the plant and its rain of forces, who can observe how the bud expands, little by little, sees the thing with quite other eyes and knows what he is seeing.” Childhood speaks to us also—and in the same tones—out of early-Homeric Doric, out of early-Christian (which is really early-Arabian) art and out of the works of the Old Kingdom in Egypt that began with the Fourth Dynasty. There a mythic world-consciousness is fighting like a harassed debtor against all the dark and daemonic in itself and in Nature, while slowly ripening itself for the pure, day-bright expression of the existence that it will at last achieve and know. The more nearly a Culture approaches the noon culmination of its being, the more virile, austere, controlled, intense the form-language it has secured for itself, the more assured its sense of its own power, the clearer its lineaments. In the spring all this had still been dim and confused, tentative, filled with childish yearning and fears—witness the ornament of Romanesque-Gothic church porches of Saxony^[90] and southern France, the early-Christian catacombs, the Dipylon^[91] vases. But there is now the full consciousness of ripened creative power that we see in the time of the early Middle Kingdom of Egypt, in the Athens of the Pisistratidæ, in the age of Justinian, in that of the Counter-Reformation, and we find every individual trait of expression deliberate, strict, measured, marvellous in its ease and self-confidence. And we find, too, that everywhere, at moments, the coming fulfilment suggested 108itself; in such moments were created the head of Amenemhet III (the so-called “Hyksos Sphinx” of Tanis), the domes of Hagia Sophia, the paintings of Titian. Still later, tender to the point of fragility, fragrant with the sweetness of late October days, come the Cnidian Aphrodite and the Hall of the Maidens in the Erechtheum, the arabesques on Saracen horseshoe-arches, the Zwinger of Dresden, Watteau, Mozart. At last, in the grey dawn of Civilization, the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism, in the womb of the mother, in the grave. The spell of a “second religiousness”^[92] comes upon it, and Late-Classical man turns to the practice of the cults of Mithras, of Isis, of the Sun—those very cults into which a soul just born in the East has been pouring a new wine of dreams and fears and loneliness.

The term “habit” (Habitus) is used of a plant to signify the special way, proper to itself, in which it manifests itself, i.e., the character, course and duration of its appearance in the light-world where we can see it. By its habit each kind is distinguished, in respect of each part and each phase of its existence, from all examples of other species. We may apply this useful notion of “habit” in our physiognomic of the grand organisms and speak of the habit of the Indian, Egyptian or Classical Culture, history or spirituality. Some vague inkling of it has always, for that matter, underlain the notion of style, and we shall not be forcing but merely clearing and deepening that word if we speak of the religious, intellectual, political, social or economic style^[93] of a Culture. This “habit” of existence in space, which covers in the case of the individual man action and thought and conduct and disposition, embraces in the case or the existence of whole Cultures the totality of life-expressions of the higher order. The choice of particular branches of art (e.g., the round and fresco by the Hellenes, counterpoint and oil-painting by the West) and the out-and-out rejection of others (e.g., of plastic by the Arabs); inclination to the esoteric (India) or the popular (Greece and Rome); preference for oratory (Classical) or for writing (China, the West) as the form of spiritual communication, are all style-manifestations, and so also are the various types of costume, of administration, of transport, of social courtesies. All great personalities of the Classical world form a self-contained group, whose spiritual habit is definitely different 109from that of all great men of the Arabian or the Western groups. Compare even Goethe and Raphael with Classical men, and Heraclitus, Sophocles, Plato, Alcibiades, Themistocles, Horace and Tiberius rank themselves together instantly as members of one family. Every Classical Cosmopolis—from Hiero’s Syracuse to Imperial Rome the embodiment and sense-picture of one and the same life-feeling—differs radically in lay-out and street-plan, in the language of its public and private architecture, in the type of its squares, alleys, courts, façades, in its colour, noises, street-life and night-life, from the group of Indian or that of Arabian or that of Western world-cities. Baghdad and Cairo could be felt in Granada long after the conquest; even Philip II’s Madrid had all the physiognomic hall-marks of modern London and Paris. There is a high symbolism in every dissimilarity of this sort. Contrast the Western tendency to straight-lined perspectives and street-alignments (such as the grand tract of the Champs-Elysées from the Louvre, or the Piazza before St. Peter’s) with the almost deliberate complexity and narrowness of the Via Sacra, the Forum Romanum and the Acropolis, whose parts are arranged without symmetry and with no perspective. Even the town-planning—whether darkly as in the Gothic or consciously as in the ages of Alexander and Napoleon—reflects the same principle as the mathematic—in the one case the Leibnizian mathematic of infinite space, in the other the Euclidean mathematic of separate bodies.^[94] But to the “habit” of a group belong, further, its definite life-duration and its definite tempo of development. Both of these are properties which we must not fail to take into account in a historical theory of structure. The rhythm (Takt) of Classical existence was different from that of Egyptian or Arabian; and we can fairly speak of the andante of Greece and Rome and the allegro con brio of the Faustian spirit.

The notion of life-duration as applied to a man, a butterfly, an oak, a blade of grass, comprises a specific time-value, which is quite independent of all the accidents of the individual case. Ten years are a slice of life which is approximately equivalent for all men, and the metamorphosis of insects is associated with a number of days exactly known and predictable in individual cases. For the Romans the notions of pueritia, adolescentia, iuventus, virilitas, senectus possessed an almost mathematically precise meaning. Without doubt the biology of the future will—in opposition to Darwinism and to the exclusion in principle of causal fitness-motives for the origins of species—take these pre-ordained life durations as the starting-point for a new enunciation of its problem.^[95] The duration of a generation—whatever may be its nature—is a fact of almost mystical significance.

Now, such relations are valid also, and to an extent never hitherto imagined, for all the higher Cultures. Every Culture, every adolescence and maturing and decay of a Culture, every one of its intrinsically necessary stages and periods, has a definite 110duration, always the same, always recurring with the emphasis of a symbol. In the present work we cannot attempt to open up this world of most mysterious connexions, but the facts that will emerge again and again as we go on will tell us of themselves how much lies hidden here. What is the meaning of that striking fifty-year period, the rhythm of the political, intellectual and artistic “becoming” of all Cultures?^[96] Of the 300-year period of the Baroque, of the Ionic, of the great mathematics, of Attic sculpture, of mosaic painting, of counterpoint, of Galileian mechanics? What does the ideal life of one millennium for each Culture mean in comparison with the individual man’s "three-score years and ten"? As the plant’s being is brought to expression in form, dress and carriage by leaves, blossoms, twigs and fruit, so also is the being of a Culture manifested by its religious, intellectual, political and economic formations. Just as, say, Goethe’s individuality discourses of itself in such widely-different forms as the Faust, the Farbenlehre, the Reineke Fuchs, Tasso, Werther, the journey to Italy and the Friederike love, the Westöstliche Diwan and the Römische Elegien; so the individuality of the Classical world displays itself in the Persian wars, the Attic drama, the City-State, the Dionysia and not less in the Tyrannis, the Ionic column, the geometry of Euclid, the Roman legion, and the gladiatorial contests and “panem et circenses” of the Imperial age.

In this sense, too, every individual being that has any sort of importance recapitulates,^[97] of intrinsic necessity, all the epochs of the Culture to which it belongs. In each one of us, at that decisive moment when he begins to know that he is an ego, the inner life wakens just where and just how that of the Culture wakened long ago. Each of us men of the West, in his child’s day-dreams and child’s play, lives again its Gothic—the cathedrals, the castles, the hero-sagas, the crusader’s “Dieu le veult,” the soul’s oath of young Parzival. Every young Greek had his Homeric age and his Marathon. In Goethe’s Werther, the image of a tropic youth that every Faustian (but no Classical) man knows, the springtime of Petrarch and the Minnesänger reappears. When Goethe blocked out the Urfaust,^[98] he was Parzival; when he finished Faust I, he was Hamlet, and only with Faust II did he become the world-man of the 19th Century whom Byron could understand. Even the senility of the Classical—the faddy and unfruitful centuries of very late Hellenism, the second-childhood 111of a weary and blasé intelligence—can be studied in more than one of its grand old men. Thus, much of Euripides’ Bacchæ anticipates the life-outlook, and much of Plato’s Timæus the religious syncretism of the Imperial age; and Goethe’s Faust II and Wagner’s Parsifal disclose to us in advance the shape that our spirituality will assume in our next (in point of creative power our last) centuries.

Biology employs the term homology of organs to signify morphological equivalence in contradistinction to the term analogy which relates to functional equivalence. This important, and in the sequel most fruitful, notion was conceived by Goethe (who was led thereby to the discovery of the “os intermaxillare” in man) and put into strict scientific shape by Owen;^[99] this notion also we shall incorporate in our historical method.

It is known that for every part of the bone-structure of the human head an exactly corresponding part is found in all vertebrated animals right down to the fish, and that the pectoral fins of fish and the feet, wings and hands of terrestrial vertebrates are homologous organs, even though they have lost every trace of similarity. The lungs of terrestrial, and the swim-bladders of aquatic animals are homologous, while lungs and gills on the other hand are analogous—that is, similar in point of use.^[100] And the trained and deepened morphological insight that is required to establish such distinctions is an utterly different thing from the present method of historical research, with its shallow comparisons of Christ and Buddha, Archimedes and Galileo, Cæsar and Wallenstein, parcelled Germany and parcelled Greece. More and more clearly as we go on, we shall realize what immense views will offer themselves to the historical eye as soon as the rigorous morphological method has been understood and cultivated. To name but a few examples, homologous forms are: Classical sculpture and West European orchestration, the Fourth Dynasty pyramids and the Gothic cathedrals, Indian Buddhism and Roman Stoicism (Buddhism and Christianity are not even analogous); the periods of “the Contending States” in China, the Hyksos in Egypt and the Punic Wars; the age of Pericles and the age of the Ommayads; the epochs of the Rigveda, of Plotinus and of Dante. The Dionysiac movement is homologous with the Renaissance, analogous to the Reformation. For us, "Wagner is the résumé of modernity," as Nietzsche rightly saw; and the equivalent that logically must exist in the Classical modernity we find in Pergamene art. (Some preliminary notion of the fruitfulness 112of this way of regarding history, may be gathered from studying the tables included in this volume.)

The application of the “homology” principle to historical phenomena brings with it an entirely new connotation for the word “contemporary.” I designate as contemporary two historical facts that occur in exactly the same—relative—positions in their respective Cultures, and therefore possess exactly equivalent importance. It has already been shown how the development of the Classical and that of the Western mathematic proceeded in complete congruence, and we might have ventured to describe Pythagoras as the contemporary of Descartes, Archytas of Laplace, Archimedes of Gauss. The Ionic and the Baroque, again, ran their course contemporaneously. Polygnotus pairs in time with Rembrandt, Polycletus with Bach. The Reformation, Puritanism and, above all, the turn to Civilization appear simultaneously in all Cultures; in the Classical this last epoch bears the names of Philip and Alexander, in our West those of the Revolution and Napoleon. Contemporary, too, are the building of Alexandria, of Baghdad, and of Washington; Classical coinage and our double-entry book-keeping; the first Tyrannis and the Fronde; Augustus and Shih-huang-ti;^[101] Hannibal and the World War.

I hope to show that without exception all great creations and forms in religion, art, politics, social life, economy and science appear, fulfil themselves and die down contemporaneously in all the Cultures; that the inner structure of one corresponds strictly with that of all the others; that there is not a single phenomenon of deep physiognomic importance in the record of one for which we could not find a counterpart in the record of every other; and that this counterpart is to be found under a characteristic form and in a perfectly definite chronological position. At the same time, if we are to grasp such homologies of facts, we shall need to have a far deeper insight and a far more critical attitude towards the visible foreground of things than historians have hitherto been wont to display; who amongst them, for instance, would have allowed himself to dream that the counterpart of Protestantism was to be found in the Dionysiac movement, and that English Puritanism was for the West what Islam was for the Arabian world?

Seen from this angle, history offers possibilities far beyond the ambitions of all previous research, which has contented itself in the main with arranging the facts of the past so far as these were known (and that according to a one-line scheme)—the possibilities, namely, of

Overpassing the present as a research-limit, and predetermining the spiritual form, duration, rhythm, meaning and product of the still unaccomplished stages of our western history; and

113Reconstructing long-vanished and unknown epochs, even whole Cultures of the past, by means of morphological connexions, in much the same way as modern palæontology deduces far-reaching and trustworthy conclusions as to skeletal structure and species from a single unearthed skull-fragment.

It is possible, given the physiognomic rhythm, to recover from scattered details of ornament, building, script, or from odd political, economic and religious data, the organic characters of whole centuries of history, and from known elements on the scale of art-expression, to find corresponding elements on the scale of political forms, or from that of mathematical forms to read that of economic. This is a truly Goethian method—rooted in fact in Goethe’s conception of the prime phenomenon—which is already to a limited extent current in comparative zoology, but can be extended, to a degree hitherto undreamed of, over the whole field of history.

Following out this train of thought to the end, we come into the presence of an opposition in which we perceive the key—the only key—wherewith to approach, and (so far as the word has any meaning at all) to solve, one of the oldest and gravest of man’s riddles. This is the opposition of the Destiny Idea and the Causality Principle—an opposition which, it is safe to say, has never hitherto been recognized for what it is, the necessary foundation of world-building.

Anyone who understands at all what is meant by saying that the soul is the idea of an existence, will also divine a near relationship between it and the sure sense of a destiny and must regard Life itself (our name for the form in which the actualizing of the possible is accomplished) as directed, irrevocable in every line, fate-laden. Primitive man feels this dimly and anxiously, while for the man of a higher Culture it is definite enough to become his vision of the world—though this vision is communicable only through religion and art, never through notions and proofs.

Every higher language possesses a number of words such as luck, doom, conjuncture, vocation, about which there is, as it were, a veil. No hypothesis, no science, can ever get into touch with that which we feel when we let ourselves sink into the meaning and sound of these words. They are symbols, not notions. In them is the centre of gravity of that world-picture that I have called the World-as-history as opposed to the World-as-nature. The Destiny-idea demands life-experience and not scientific experience, the power of seeing and not that of calculating, depth and not intellect. There is an organic logic, an instinctive, dream-sure logic of all existence as opposed to the logic of the inorganic, the logic of understanding and of things understood—a logic of direction as against a logic of extension—and no systematist, no Aristotle or Kant, has known how to deal with it. They are on their own ground when they tell us about “judgment,” “perception,” “awareness,” and “recollection,” but as to what is in the words “hope,” “happiness,” “despair,” “repentance,” 118“devotion,” and “consolation” they are silent. He who expects here, in the domain of the living, to find reasons and consequences, or imagines that an inward certainty as to the meaning of life is the same thing as “Fatalism” or “Predestination,” simply knows nothing of the matters in question, confusing experience lived with experience acquired or acquirable. Causality is the reasonable, the law-bound, the describable, the badge of our whole waking and reasoning existence. But destiny is the word for an inner certainty that is not describable. We bring out that which is in the causal by means of a physical or an epistemological system, through numbers, by reasoned classification; but the idea of destiny can be imparted only by the artist working through media like portraiture, tragedy and music. The one requires us to distinguish and in distinguishing to dissect and destroy, whereas the other is creative through and through, and thus destiny is related to life and causality to death.

In the Destiny-idea the soul reveals its world-longing, its desire to rise into the light, to accomplish and actualize its vocation. To no man is it entirely alien, and not before one has become the unanchored “late” man of the megalopolis is original vision quite overpowered by matter-of-fact feeling and mechanizing thought. Even then, in some intense hour, the lost vision comes back to one with terrible clearness, shattering in a moment all the causality of the world’s surface. For the world as a system of causal connexions is not only a “late” but also a highly rarefied conception and only the energetic intellects of high Cultures are capable of possessing it—or perhaps we should say, devising it—with conviction. The notion of causality is coterminous with the notion of law: the only laws that are, are causal laws. But just as there lies in the causal, according to Kant, a necessity of the thinking consciousness and the basic form of its relation to the essence of things, so also, designated by the words destiny, dispensation, vocation, there is a something that is an inevitable necessity of life. Real history is heavy with fate but free of laws. One can divine the future (there is, indeed, a certain insight that can penetrate its secrets deeply) but one cannot reckon it. The physiognomic flair which enables one to read a whole life in a face or to sum up whole peoples from the picture of an epoch—and to do so without deliberate effort or “system”—is utterly remote from all “cause and effect.”

He who comprehends the light-world that is before his eyes not physiognomically but systematically, and makes it intellectually his own by the methods of causal experience, must necessarily in the end come to believe that every living thing can be understood by reference to cause and effect—that there is no secret and no inner directedness. He, on the other hand, who as Goethe did—and for that matter as everyone does in nine out of ten of his waking moments—lets the impressions of the world about him work merely upon his senses, absorbs these impressions as a whole, feels the become in its 119becoming. The stiff mask of causality is lifted by mere ceasing to think. Suddenly, Time is no more a riddle, a notion, a “form” or “dimension” but becomes an inner certainty, destiny itself; and in its directedness, its irreversibility, its livingness, is disclosed the very meaning of the historical world-picture. Destiny and Causality are related as Time and Space.

In the two possible world-forms then—History and Nature, the physiognomy of all becoming and the system of all things become—destiny or causality prevails. Between them there is all the difference between a feeling of life and a method of knowledge. Each of them is the starting-point of a complete and self-contained, but not of a unique world. Yet, after all, just as the become is founded upon a becoming, so the knowledge of cause and effect is founded upon the sure feeling of a destiny. Causality is—so to say—destiny become, destiny made inorganic and modelled in reason-forms. Destiny itself (passed over in silence by Kant and every other builder of rational world-systems because with their armoury of abstractions they could not touch life) stands beyond and outside all comprehended Nature. Nevertheless, being itself the original, it alone gives the stiff dead principle of cause-and-effect the opportunity to figure in the later scenes of a culture-drama, alive and historical, as the incarnation of a tyrannical thinking. The existence of the Classical soul is the condition for the appearance of Democritus’s method, the existence of the Faustian soul for that of Newton’s. We may well imagine that either of these Cultures might have failed to produce a natural science of its own, but we cannot imagine the systems without their cultural foundations.

Here again we see how becoming and the become, direction and extension, include one another and are subordinated each to the other, according as we are in the historical or in the “natural” focus. If history is that kind of world-order in which all the become is fitted to the becoming, then the products of scientific work must inter alia be so handled; and, in fact, for the historical eye there is only a history of physics. It was Destiny that the discoveries of oxygen, Neptune, gravitation and spectrum analysis happened as and when they did. It was Destiny that the phlogiston theory, the undulatory theory of light, the kinetic theory of gases could arise at all, seeing that they were elucidations of results and, as such, highly personal to their respective authors, and that other theories (“correct” or “erroneous”) might equally well have been developed instead. And it is again Destiny and the result of strong personality when one theory vanishes and another becomes the lodestar of the physicist’s world. Even the born physicist speaks of the “fate” of a problem or the “history” of a discovery.

Conversely, if “Nature” is that constitution of things in which the becoming should logically be incorporated in the thing-become, and living direction in rigid extension, history may best be treated as a chapter of epistemology; and so indeed Kant would have treated it if he had remembered to include it 120at all in his system of knowledge. Significantly enough, he did not; for him as for every born systematist Nature is The World, and when he discusses time without noticing that it has direction and is irreversible, we see that he is dealing with the Nature-world and has no inkling of the possibility of another, the history-world. Perhaps, for Kant, this other world was actually impossible.

Now, Causality has nothing whatever to do with Time. To the world of to-day, made up of Kantians who know not how Kantian they are, this must seem an outrageous paradox. And yet every formula of Western physics exhibits the “how” and the “how long” as distinct in essence. As soon as the question is pressed home, causality restricts its answer rigidly to the statement that something happens—and not when it happens. The “effect” must of necessity be put with the “cause.” The distance between them belongs to a different order, it lies within the act of understanding itself (which is an element of life) and not within the thing or things understood. It is of the essence of the extended that it overcomes directedness, and of Space that it contradicts Time, and yet the latter, as the more fundamental, precedes and underlies the former. Destiny claims the same precedence; we begin with the idea of Destiny, and only later, when our waking-consciousness looks fearfully for a spell that will bind in the sense-world and overcome the death that cannot be evaded, do we conceive causality as an anti-Fate, and make it create another world to protect us from and console us for this. And as the web of cause and effect gradually spreads over the visible surfaces there is formed a convincing picture of timeless duration—essentially, Being, but Being endowed with attributes by the sheer force of pure thought. This tendency underlies the feeling, well known in all mature Cultures, that “Knowledge is Power,” the power that is meant being power over Destiny. The abstract savant, the natural-science researcher, the thinker in systems, whose whole intellectual existence bases itself on the causality principle, are “late” manifestations of an unconscious hatred of the powers of incomprehensible Destiny. “Pure Reason” denies all possibilities that are outside itself. Here strict thought and great art are eternally in conflict. The one keeps its feet, and the other lets itself go. A man like Kant must always feel himself as superior to a Beethoven as the adult is to the child, but this will not prevent a Beethoven from regarding the “Critique of Pure Reason” as a pitiable sort of philosophy. Teleology, that nonsense of all nonsenses within science, is a misdirected attempt to deal mechanically with the living content of scientific knowledge (for knowledge implies someone to know, and though the substance of thought may be “Nature” the act of thought is history), and so with life itself as an inverted causality. Teleology is a caricature of the Destiny-idea which transforms the vocation of Dante into the aim of the savant. It is the deepest and most characteristic tendency both of Darwinism—the megalopolitan-intellectual product of the most abstract of all Civilizations—and 121of the materialist conception of history which springs from the same root as Darwinism and, like it, kills all that is organic and fateful. Thus the morphological element of the Causal is a Principle, and the morphological element of Destiny is an Idea, an idea that is incapable of being “cognized,” described or defined, and can only be felt and inwardly lived. This idea is something of which one is either entirely ignorant or else—like the man of the spring and every truly significant man of the late seasons, believer, lover, artist, poet—entirely certain.

Thus Destiny is seen to be the true existence-mode of the prime phenomenon, that in which the living idea of becoming unfolds itself immediately to the intuitive vision. And therefore the Destiny-idea dominates the whole world-picture of history, while causality, which is the existence-mode of objects and stamps out of the world of sensations a set of well-distinguished and well-defined things, properties and relations, dominates and penetrates, as the form of the understanding, the Nature-world that is the understanding’s “alter ego.”

But inquiry into the degree of validity of causal connexions within a presentation of nature, or (what is henceforth the same thing for us) into the destinies involved in that presentation, becomes far more difficult still when we come to realize that for primitive man or for the child no comprehensive causally-ordered world exists at all as yet and that we ourselves, though “late” men with a consciousness disciplined by powerful speech-sharpened thought, can do no more, even in moments of the most strained attention (the only ones, really, in which we are exactly in the physical focus), than assert that the causal order which we see in such a moment is continuously present in the actuality around us. Even waking, we take in the actual, “the living garment of the Deity,” physiognomically, and we do so involuntarily and by virtue of a power of experience that is rooted in the deep sources of life.

A systematic delineation, on the contrary, is the expression of an understanding emancipated from perception, and by means of it we bring the mental picture of all times and all men into conformity with the moment’s picture of Nature as ordered by ourselves. But the mode of this ordering, which has a history that we cannot interfere with in the smallest degree, is not the working of a cause, but a destiny.

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 122and within the crowding impressions of the sense-life. “The Proper,” “Destiny” and “Time” are interchangeable words.

The problem of Time, like that of Destiny, has been completely misunderstood by all thinkers who have confined themselves to the systematic of the Become. In Kant’s celebrated theory there is not one word about its character of directedness. Not only so, but the omission has never even been noticed. But what is time as a length, time without direction? Everything living, we can only repeat, has “life,” direction, impulse, will, a movement-quality (Bewegtheit) that is most intimately allied to yearning and has not the smallest element in common with the “motion” (Bewegung) of the physicists. The living is indivisible and irreversible, once and uniquely occurring, and its course is entirely indeterminable by mechanics. For all such qualities belong to the essence of Destiny, and “Time”—that which we actually feel at the sound of the word, which is clearer in music than in language, and in poetry than in prose—has this organic essence, while Space has not. Hence, Kant and the rest notwithstanding, it is impossible to bring Time with Space under one general Critique. Space is a conception, but time is a word to indicate something inconceivable, a sound-symbol, and to use it as a notion, scientifically, is utterly to misconceive its nature. Even the word direction—which unfortunately cannot be replaced by another—is liable to mislead owing to its visual content. The vector-notion in physics is a case in point.

For primitive man the word “time” can have no meaning. He simply lives, without any necessity of specifying an opposition to something else. He has time, but he knows nothing of it. All of us are conscious, as being aware, of space only, and not of time. Space “is,” (i.e. exists, in and with our sense-world)—as a self-extension while we are living the ordinary life of dream, impulse, intuition and conduct, and as space in the strict sense in the moments of strained attention. “Time,” on the contrary, is a discovery, which is only made by thinking. We create it as an idea or notion and do not begin till much later to suspect that we ourselves are Time, inasmuch as we live.^[102] And only the higher Cultures, whose world-conceptions have reached the mechanical-Nature stage, are capable of deriving from their consciousness of a well-ordered measurable and comprehensible Spatial, the projected image of time, the phantom time,^[103] which satisfies their need of comprehending, measuring and causally ordering all. And this impulse—a sign of the sophistication of existence that makes its appearance quite early in every Culture—fashions, outside and beyond the real life-feeling, that which is called time in all higher languages and has become for the town-intellect a completely inorganic magnitude, 123as deceptive as it is current. But, if the characteristics, or rather the characteristic, of extension—limit and causality—is really wizard’s gear wherewith our proper soul attempts to conjure and bind alien powers—Goethe speaks somewhere of the “principle of reasonable order that we bear within ourselves and could impress as the seal of our power upon everything that we touch”—if all law is a fetter which our world-dread hurries to fix upon the incrowding sensuous, a deep necessity of self-preservation, so also the invention of a time that is knowable and spatially representable within causality is a later act of this same self-preservation, an attempt to bind by the force of notion the tormenting inward riddle that is doubly tormenting to the intellect that has attained power only to find itself defied. Always a subtle hatred underlies the intellectual process by which anything is forced into the domain and form-world of measure and law. The living is killed by being introduced into space, for space is dead and makes dead. With birth is given death, with the fulfilment the end. Something dies within the woman when she conceives—hence comes that eternal hatred of the sexes, child of world-fear. The man destroys, in a very deep sense, when he begets—by bodily act in the sensuous world, by “knowing” in the intellectual. Even in Luther^[104] the word “know” has the secondary genital sense. And with the “knowledge” of life—which remains alien to the lower animals—the knowledge of death has gained that power which dominates man’s whole waking consciousness. By a picture of time the actual is changed into the transitory.^[105]

The mere creation of the name Time was an unparalleled deliverance. To name anything by a name is to win power over it. This is the essence of primitive man’s art of magic—the evil powers are constrained by naming them, and the enemy is weakened or killed by coupling certain magic procedures with his name.^[106]

And there is something of this primitive expression of world-fear in the way in which all systematic philosophies use mere names as a last resort for getting rid of the Incomprehensible, the Almighty that is all too mighty for the intellect. We name something or other the “Absolute,” and we feel ourselves at once its superior. Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible. What is named, comprehended, measured is ipso facto overpowered, made inert and taboo.^[107] Once more, “knowledge is power.” Herein lies one root of the difference between the idealist’s and the realist’s attitude towards the Unapproachable; it is expressed by the two meanings of the German word Scheu—respect and abhorrence.^[108] The idealist contemplates, 124the realist would subject, mechanize, render innocuous. Plato and Goethe accept the secret in humility, Aristotle and Kant would open it up and destroy it. The most deeply significant example of this realism is in its treatment of the Time problem. The dread mystery of Time, life itself, must be spellbound and, by the magic of comprehensibility, neutralized.

All that has been said about time in “scientific” philosophy, psychology and physics—the supposed answer to a question that had better never have been asked, namely what is time?—touches, not at any point the secret itself, but only a spatially-formed representative phantom. The livingness and directedness and fated course of real Time is replaced by a figure which, be it never so intimately absorbed, is only a line, measurable, divisible, reversible, and not a portrait of that which is incapable of being portrayed; by a “time” that can be mathematically expressed in such forms as √t, t², -t, from which the assumption of a time of zero magnitude or of negative times is, to say the least, not excluded.^[109] Obviously this is something quite outside the domain of Life, Destiny, and living historical Time; it is a purely conceptual time-system that is remote even from the sensuous life. One has only to substitute, in any philosophical or physical treatise that one pleases, this word “Destiny” for the word “time” and one will instantly see how understanding loses its way when language has emancipated it from sensation, and how impossible the group “time and space” is. What is not experienced and felt, what is merely thought, necessarily takes a spatial form, and this explains why no systematic philosopher has been able to make anything out of the mystery-clouded, far-echoing sound symbols “Past” and “Future.” In Kant’s utterances concerning time they do not even occur, and in fact one cannot see any relation which could connect them with what is said there. But only this spatial form enables time and space to be brought into functional interdependence as magnitudes of the same order, as four-dimensional vector analysis^[110] conspicuously shows. As early as 1813 Lagrange frankly described mechanics as a four-dimensional geometry, and even Newton’s cautious conception of “tempus absolutum sive duratio” is not exempt from this intellectually inevitable transformation of the living into mere extension. In the older philosophy I have found one, and only one, profound and reverent presentation of Time; it is in Augustine—“If no one questions me, I know: if I would explain to a questioner, I know not.”^[111]

When philosophers of the present-day West “hedge”—as they all do—by 125saying that things are in time as in space and that “outside” them nothing is “conceivable,” they are merely putting another kind of space (Räumlichkeit) beside the ordinary one, just as one might, if one chose, call hope and electricity the two forces of the universe. It ought not, surely, to have escaped Kant when he spoke of the “two forms” of perception, that whereas it is easy enough to come to a scientific understanding about space (though not to “explain” it, in the ordinary sense of the word, for that is beyond human powers), treatment of time on the same lines breaks down utterly. The reader of the “Critique of Pure Reason” and the “Prolegomena” will observe that Kant gives a well-considered proof for the connexion of space and geometry but carefully avoids doing the same for time and arithmetic. There he did not go beyond enunciation, and constant reassertion of analogy between the two conceptions lured him over a gap that would have been fatal to his system. Vis-à-vis the Where and the How, the When forms a world of its own as distinct as is metaphysics from physics. Space, object, number, notion, causality are so intimately akin that it is impossible—as countless mistaken systems prove—to treat the one independently of the other. Mechanics is a copy of the logic of its day and vice versa. The picture of thought as psychology builds it up and the picture of the space-world as contemporary physics describes it are reflections of one another. Conceptions and things, reasons and causes, conclusions and processes coincide so nicely, as received by the consciousness, that the abstract thinker himself has again and again succumbed to the temptation of setting forth the thought-“process” graphically and schematically—witness Aristotle’s and Kant’s tabulated categories. “Where there is no scheme, there is no philosophy” is the objection of principle—unacknowledged though it may be—that all professional philosophers have against the “intuitives,” to whom inwardly they feel themselves far superior. That is why Kant crossly describes the Platonic style of thinking “as the art of spending good words in babble” (die Kunst, wortreich zu schwatzen), and why even to-day the lecture-room philosopher has not a word to say about Goethe’s philosophy. Every logical operation is capable of being drawn, every system a geometrical method of handling thoughts. And therefore Time either finds no place in the system at all, or is made its victim.

This is the refutation of that widely-spread misunderstanding which connects time with arithmetic and space with geometry by superficial analogies, an error to which Kant ought never to have succumbed—though it is hardly surprising that Schopenhauer, with his incapacity for understanding mathematics, did so. Because the living act of numbering is somehow or other related to time, number and time are constantly confused. But numbering is not number, any more than drawing is a drawing. Numbering and drawing are a becoming, numbers and figures are things become. Kant and the rest have in mind now the living act (numbering) and now the result thereof (the relations of the 126finished figure); but the one belongs to the domain of Life and Time, the other to that of Extension and Causality. That I calculate is the business of organic, what I calculate the business of inorganic, logic. Mathematics as a whole—in common language, arithmetic and geometry—answers the How? and the What?—that is, the problem of the Natural order of things. In opposition to this problem stands that of the When? of things, the specifically historical problem of destiny, future and past; and all these things are comprised in the word Chronology, which simple mankind understands fully and unequivocally.

Between arithmetic and geometry there is no opposition.^[112] Every kind of number, as has been sufficiently shown in an earlier chapter, belongs entirely to the realm of the extended and the become, whether as a Euclidean magnitude or as an analytical function; and to which heading should we have to assign the cyclometric^[113] functions, the Binomial Theorem, the Riemann surfaces, the Theory of Groups? Kant’s scheme was refuted by Euler and d’Alembert before he even set it up, and only the unfamiliarity of his successors with the mathematics of their time—what a contrast to Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz, who evolved the mathematics of their time from the depths of their own philosophy!—made it possible for mathematical notions of a relation between time and arithmetic to be passed on like an heirloom, almost uncriticized.

But between Becoming and any part whatsoever of mathematics there is not the slightest contact. Newton indeed was profoundly convinced (and he was no mean philosopher) that in the principles of his Calculus of Fluxions^[114] he had grasped the problem of Becoming, and therefore of Time—in a far subtler form, by the way, than Kant’s. But even Newton’s view could not be upheld, even though it may find advocates to this day. Since Weierstrass proved that continuous functions exist which either cannot be differentiated at all or are capable only of partial differentiation, this most deep-searching of all efforts to close with the Time-problem mathematically has been abandoned.

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 127in opposition to death.^[115] This is implicit in the very essence of all awareness. Just as any sense-impression is only remarked when it detaches itself from another, so any kind of understanding that is genuine critical activity^[116] is only made possible through the setting-up of a new concept as anti-pole to one already present, or through the divorce (if we may call it so) of a pair of inwardly-polar concepts which as long as they are mere constituents, possess no actuality.^[117] It has long been presumed—and rightly, beyond a doubt—that all root-words, whether they express things or properties, have come into being by pairs; but even later, even to-day, the connotation that every new word receives is a reflection of some other. And so, guided by language, the understanding, incapable of fitting a sure inward subjective certainty of Destiny into its form-world, created “time” out of space as its opposite. But for this we should possess neither the word nor its connotation. And so far is this process of word-formation carried that the particular style of extension possessed by the Classical world led to a specifically Classical notion of time, differing from the time-notions of India, China and the West exactly as Classical space differs from the space of these Cultures.^[118]

For this reason, the notion of an art-form—which again is a “counter-concept”—has only arisen when men became aware that their art-creations had a connotation (Gehalt) at all, that is, when the expression-language of the art, along with its effects, had ceased to be something perfectly natural and taken-for-granted, as it still was in the time of the Pyramid-Builders, in that of the Mycenæan strongholds and in that of the early Gothic cathedrals. Men become suddenly aware of the existence of “works,” and then for the first time the understanding eye is able to distinguish a causal side and a destiny side in every living art.

In every work that displays the whole man and the whole meaning of the existence, fear and longing lie close together, but they are and they remain different. To the fear, to the Causal, belongs the whole “taboo” side of art—its stock of motives, developed in strict schools and long craft-training, carefully protected and piously transmitted; all of it that is comprehensible, learnable, numerical; all the logic of colour, line, structure, order, which constitutes the mother-tongue of every worthy artist and every great epoch. But the other side, opposed to the “taboo” as the directed is to the extended and as the development-destiny within a form-language to its syllogisms, comes out in genius (namely, in that which is wholly personal to the individual artists, their 128imaginative powers, creative passion, depth and richness, as against all mere mastery of form) and, beyond even genius, in that superabundance of creativeness in the race which conditions the rise and fall of whole arts. This is the “totem” side, and owing to it—notwithstanding all the æsthetics ever penned—there is no timeless and solely-true way of art, but only a history of art, marked like everything that lives with the sign of irreversibility.^[119]

And this is why architecture of the grand style—which is the only one of the arts that handles the alien and fear-instilling itself, the immediate Extended, the stone—is naturally the early art in all Cultures, and only step by step yields its primacy to the special arts of the city with their more mundane forms—the statue, the picture, the musical composition. Of all the great artists of the West, it was probably Michelangelo who suffered most acutely under the constant nightmare of world-fear, and it was he also who, alone among the Renaissance masters, never freed himself from the architectural. He even painted as though his surfaces were stone, become, stiff, hateful. His work was a bitter wrestle with the powers of the cosmos which faced him and challenged him in the form of material, whereas in the yearning Leonardo’s colour we see, as it were, a glad materialization of the spiritualspiritual. But in every large architectural problem an implacable causal logic, not to say mathematic, comes to expression—in the Classical orders of columns a Euclidean relation of beam and load, in the “analytically” disposed thrust-system of Gothic vaulting the dynamic relation of force and mass. Cottage-building traditions—which are to be traced in the one and in the other, which are the necessary background even of Egyptian architecture, which in fact develop in every early period and are regularly lost in every later—contain the whole sum of this logic of the extended. But the symbolism of direction and destiny is beyond all the “technique” of the great arts and hardly approachable by way of æsthetics. It lies—to take some instances—in the contrast that is always felt (but never, either by Lessing or by Hebbel, elucidated) between Classical and Western tragedy; in the succession of scenes of old Egyptian relief and generally in the serial arrangement of Egyptian statues, sphinxes, temple-halls; in the choice, as distinct from the treatment, of materials (hardest diorite to affirm, and softest wood to deny, the future); in the occurrence, and not in the grammar, of the individual arts, e.g., the victory of arabesque over the Early Christian picture, the retreat of oil-painting before chamber music in the Baroque; in the utter diversity of intention in Egyptian, Chinese and Classical statuary. All these are not matters of “can” but of “must,” and therefore it is not mathematics and abstract thought, but the great arts in their kinship with the contemporary religions, that give the key to the problem of Time, a problem that can hardly be solved within the domain of history^[120] alone.

It follows from the meaning that we have attached to the Culture as a prime phenomenon and to destiny as the organic logic of existence, that each Culture must necessarily possess its own destiny-idea. Indeed, this conclusion is implicit from the first in the feeling that every great Culture is nothing but the actualizing and form of a single, singularly-constituted (einzigartig) soul. And what cannot be felt by one sort of men exactly as it is felt by another (since the life of each is the expression of the idea proper to himself) and still less transcribed, what is named by us “conjuncture,” “accident,” “Providence” or “Fate,” by Classical man “Nemesis,” “Ananke,” “Tyche” or “Fatum,” by the Arab “Kismet,” by everyone in some way of his own, is just that of which each unique and unreproduceable soul-constitution, quite clear to those who share in it, is a rendering.

The Classical form of the Destiny-idea I shall venture to call Euclidean. Thus it is the sense-actual person of Œdipus, his “empirical ego,” nay, his σῶμα that is hunted and thrown by Destiny. Œdipus complains that Creon has misused his “body”^[121] and that the oracle applied to his “body.”^[122] Æschylus, again, speaks of Agamemnon as the “royal body, leader of fleets.”^[123] It is this same word σῶμα that the mathematicians employ more than once for the “bodies” with which they deal. But the destiny of King Lear is of the “analytical” type—to use here also the term suggested by the corresponding number-world—and consists in dark inner relationships. The idea of fatherhood emerges; spiritual threads weave themselves into the action, incorporeal and transcendental, and are weirdly illuminated by the counterpoint of the secondary tragedy of Gloster’s house. Lear is at the last a mere name, the axis of something unbounded. This conception of destiny is the “infinitesimal” conception. It stretches out into infinite time and infinite space. It touches the bodily, Euclidean existence not at all, but affects only the Soul. Consider the mad King between the fool and the outcast in the storm on the heath, and then look at the Laocoön group; the first is the Faustian, the other the Apollinian way of suffering. Sophocles, too, wrote a Laocoön drama; and we may be certain that there was nothing of pure soul-agony in it. Antigone goes below ground in the body, because she has buried her brother’s body. Think of Ajax and Philoctetes, and then of the Prince of Homburg and Goethe’s Tasso—is not the difference between magnitude and relation traceable right into the depths of artistic creation?

This brings us to another connexion of high symbolic significance. The drama of the West is ordinarily designated Character-Drama. That of the 130Greeks, on the other hand, is best described as Situation-Drama, and in the antithesis we can perceive what it is that Western, and what it is that Classical, man respectively feel as the basic life-form that is imperilled by the onsets of tragedy and fate. If in lieu of “direction” we say “irreversibility,” if we let ourselves sink into the terrible meaning of those words “too late” wherewith we resign a fleeting bit of the present to the eternal past, we find the deep foundation of every tragic crisis. It is Time that is the tragic, and it is by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to Time that one Culture is differentiated from another; and consequently “tragedy” of the grand order has only developed in the Culture which has most passionately affirmed, and in that which has most passionately denied, Time. The sentiment of the ahistoric soul gives us a Classical tragedy of the moment, and that of the ultrahistorical soul puts before us Western tragedy that deals with the development of a whole life. Our tragedy arises from the feeling of an inexorable Logic of becoming, while the Greek feels the illogical, blind Casual of the moment—the life of Lear matures inwardly towards a catastrophe, and that of Œdipus stumbles without warning upon a situation. And now one may perceive how it is that synchronously with Western drama there rose and fell a mighty portrait-art (culminating in Rembrandt), a kind of historical and biographical art which (because it was so) was sternly discountenanced in Classical Greece at the apogee of Attic drama. Consider the veto on likeness-statuary in votive offerings^[124] and note how—from Demetrius of Alopeke (about 400)^[125]—a timid art of “ideal” portraiture began to venture forth when, and only when, grand tragedy had been thrown into the background by the light society-pieces of the “Middle Comedy.”^[126] Fundamentally all Greek statues were standard masks, like the actors in the theatre of Dionysus; all bring to expression, in significantly strict form, somatic attitudes and positions. Physiognomically they are dumb, corporeal and of necessity nude—character-heads of definite individuals came only with the Hellenistic age. Once more we are reminded of the contrast between the Greek number-world, with its computations of tangible results, and the other, our own, in which the relations between groups of functions or equations or, generally, 131formula-elements of the same order are investigated morphologically, and the character of these relations fixed as such in express laws.

In the capacity of experientially living history and the way in which history, particularly the history of personal becoming, is lived, one man differs very greatly from another.

Every Culture possesses a wholly individual way of looking at and comprehending the world-as-Nature; or (what comes to the same thing) it has its own peculiar “Nature” which no other sort of man can possess in exactly the same form. But in a far greater degree still, every Culture—including the individuals comprising it (who are separated only by minor distinctions)—possesses a specific and peculiar sort of history—and it is in the picture of this and the style of this that the general and the personal, the inner and the outer, the world-historical and the biographical becoming, are immediately perceived, felt and lived. Thus the autobiographical tendency of Western man—revealed even in Gothic times in the symbol of auricular confession^[127]—is utterly alien to Classical man; while his intense historical awareness is in complete contrast to the almost dreamy unconsciousness of the Indian. And when Magian man—primitive Christian or ripe scholar of Islam—uses the words “world-history,” what is it that he sees before him?

But it is difficult enough to form an exact idea even of the “Nature” proper to another kind of man, although in this domain things specifically cognizable are causally ordered and unified in a communicable system. And it is quite impossible for us to penetrate completely a historical world-aspect of “becoming” formed by a soul that is quite differently constituted from our own. Here there must always be an intractable residue, greater or smaller in proportion to our historical instinct, physiognomic tact and knowledge of men. All the same, the solution of this very problem is the condition-precedent of all really deep understanding of the world. The historical environment of another is a part of his essence, and no such other can be understood without the knowledge of his time-sense, his destiny-idea and the style and degree of acuity of his inner life. In so far therefore as these things are not directly confessed, we have to extract them from the symbolism of the alien Culture. And as it is thus and only thus that we can approach the incomprehensible, the style of an alien Culture, and the great time-symbols belonging thereto acquire an immeasurable importance.

As an example of these hitherto almost uncomprehended signs we may take the clock, a creation of highly developed Cultures that becomes more and more mysterious as one examines it. Classical man managed to do without the clock, and his abstention was more or less deliberate. To the Augustan period, and 132far beyond it, the time of day was estimated by the length of one’s shadow,^[128] although sun-dials and water-clocks, designed in conformity with a strict time-reckoning and imposed by a deep sense of past and future, had been in regular use in both the older Cultures of Egypt and Babylonia.^[129] Classical man’s existence—Euclidean, relationless, point-formed—was wholly contained in the instant. Nothing must remind him of past or future. For the true Classical, archæology did not exist, nor did its spiritual inversion, astrology. The Oracle and the Sibyl, like the Etruscan-Roman “haruspices” and “augurs,” did not foretell any distant future but merely gave indications on particular questions of immediate bearing. No time-reckoning entered intimately into everyday life (for the Olympiad sequence was a mere literary expedient) and what really matters is not the goodness or badness of a calendar but the questions: “who uses it?” and “does the life of the nation run by it?” In Classical cities nothing suggested duration, or old times or times to come—there was no pious preservation of ruins, no work conceived for the benefit of future generations; in them we do not find that durable^[130] material was deliberately chosen. The Dorian Greek ignored the Mycenæan stone-technique and built in wood or clay, though Mycenæan and Egyptian work was before him and the country produced first-class building-stone. The Doric style is a timber style—even in Pausanias’s day some wooden columns still lingered in the Heræum of Olympia. The real organ of history is “memory” in the sense which is always postulated in this book, viz., that which preserves as a constant present the image of one’s personal past and of a national and a world-historical past^[131] as well, and is conscious of the course both of personal and of super-personal becoming. That organ was not present in the make-up of a Classical soul. There was no “Time” in it. Immediately behind his proper present, the Classical historian sees a background that is already destitute of temporal and therefore of inward order. For Thucydides the Persian Wars, for Tacitus the agitation of the Gracchi, were already in this vague background;^[132] and the great families of Rome had traditions that were pure romance—witness 133Cæsar’s slayer, Brutus, with his firm belief in his reputed tyrannicide ancestor. Cæsar’s reform of the calendar may almost be regarded as a deed of emancipation from the Classical life-feeling. But it must not be forgotten that Cæsar also imagined a renunciation of Rome and a transformation of the City-State into an empire which was to be dynastic—marked with the badge of duration—and to have its centre of gravity in Alexandria, which in fact is the birthplace of his calendar. His assassination seems to us a last outburst of the antiduration feeling that was incarnate in the Polis and the Urbs Roma.

Even then Classical mankind was still living every hour and every day for itself; and this is equally true whether we take the individual Greek or Roman, or the city, or the nation, or the whole Culture. The hot-blooded pageantry, palace-orgies, circus-battles of Nero or Caligula—Tacitus is a true Roman in describing only these and ignoring the smooth progress of life in the distant provinces—are final and flamboyant expressions of the Euclidean world-feeling that deified the body and the present.

The Indians also have no sort of time-reckoning (the absence of it in their case expressing their Nirvana) and no clocks, and therefore no history, no life memories, no care. What the conspicuously historical West calls “Indian history” achieved itself without the smallest consciousness of what it was doing.^[133] The millennium of the Indian Culture between the Vedas and Buddha seems like the stirrings of a sleeper; here life was actually a dream. From all this our Western Culture is unimaginably remote. And, indeed, man has never—not even in the “contemporary” China of the Chóu period with its highly-developed sense of eras and epochs^[134]—been so awake and aware, so deeply sensible of time and conscious of direction and fate and movement as he has been in the West. Western history was willed and Indian history happened. In Classical existence years, in Indian centuries scarcely counted, but here the hour, the minute, yea the second, is of importance. Of the tragic tension of a historical crisis like that of August, 1914, when even moments seem overpowering, neither a Greek nor an Indian could have had any idea.^[135] Such crises, too, a deep-feeling man of the West can experience within himself, as a true Greek could 134never do. Over our country-side, day and night from thousands of belfries, ring the bells^[136] that join future to past and fuse the point-moments of the Classical present into a grand relation. The epoch which marks the birth of our Culture—the time of the Saxon Emperors—marks also the discovery of the wheel-clock.^[137] Without exact time-measurement, without a chronology of becoming to correspond with his imperative need of archæology (the preservation, excavation and collection of things-become), Western man is unthinkable. The Baroque age intensified the Gothic symbol of the belfry to the point of grotesqueness, and produced the pocket watch that constantly accompanies the individual.^[138]

Another symbol, as deeply significant and as little understood as the symbol of the clock, is that of the funeral customs which all great Cultures have consecrated by ritual and by art. The grand style in India begins with tomb-temples, in the Classical world with funerary urns, in Egypt with pyramids, in early Christianity with catacombs and sarcophagi. In the dawn, innumerable equally-possible forms still cross one another chaotically and obscurely, dependent on clan-custom and external necessities and conveniences. But every Culture promptly elevates one or another of them to the highest degree of symbolism. Classical man, obedient to his deep unconscious life-feeling, picked upon burning, an act of annihilation in which the Euclidean, the here-and-now, type of existence was powerfully expressed. He willed to have no history, no duration, neither past nor future, neither preservation nor dissolution, and therefore he destroyed that which no longer possessed a present, the body of a Pericles, a Cæsar, a Sophocles, a Phidias. And the soul passed to join the vague crowd to which the living members of the clan paid (but soon ceased to pay) the homage of ancestor-worship and soul-feast, and which in its formlessness presents an utter contrast to the ancestor-series, the genealogical tree, that is eternalized with all the marks of historical order in the family-vault of the West. In this (with one striking exception, the Vedic dawn in India) no 135other Culture parallels the Classical.^[139] And be it noted that the Doric-Homeric spring, and above all the “Iliad,” invested this act of burning with all the vivid feeling of a new-born symbol; for those very warriors whose deeds probably formed the nucleus of the epic were in fact buried almost in the Egyptian manner in the graves of Mycenæ, Tiryns, Orchomenos and other places. And when in Imperial times the sarcophagus or “flesh-consumer”^[140] began to supersede the vase of ashes, it was again, as in the time when the Homeric urn superseded the shaft-grave of Mycenæ, a changed sense of Time that underlay the change of rite.

The Egyptians, who preserved their past in memorials of stone and hieroglyph so purposefully that we, four thousand years after them, can determine the order of their kings’ reigns, so thoroughly eternalized their bodies that today the great Pharaohs lie in our museums, recognizable in every lineament, a symbol of grim triumph—while of Dorian kings not even the names have survived. For our own part, we know the exact birthdays and deathdays of almost every great man since Dante, and, moreover, we see nothing strange in the fact. Yet in the time of Aristotle, the very zenith of Classical education, it was no longer known with certainty if Leucippus, the founder of Atomism and a contemporary of Pericles—i.e., hardly a century before—had ever existed at all; much as though for us the existence of Giordano Bruno was a matter of doubt^[141] and the Renaissance had become pure saga.

And these museums themselves, in which we assemble everything that is left of the corporeally-sensible past! Are not they a symbol of the highest rank? Are they not intended to conserve in mummy the entire “body” of cultural development?

As we collect countless data in milliards of printed books, do we not also collect all the works of all the dead Cultures in these myriad halls of West-European cities, in the mass of the collection depriving each individual piece of that instant of actualized purpose that is its own—the 136one property that the Classical soul would have respected—and ipso facto dissolving it into our unending and unresting Time? Consider what it was that the Hellenes named Μουσεῖον;^[142] how deep a significance lies in the change of sense!

It is the primitive feeling of Care^[143] which dominates the physiognomy of Western, as also that of Egyptian and that of Chinese history, and it creates, further, the symbolism of the erotic which represents the flowing on of endless life in the form of the familial series of individual existences. The point-formed Euclidean existence of Classical man, in this matter as in others, conceived only the here-and-now definitive act of begetting or of bearing, and thus it comes about that we find the birth-pangs of the mother made the centre of Demeter-worship and the Dionysiac symbol of the phallus (the sign of a sexuality wholly concentrated on the moment and losing past and future in it) more or less everywhere in the Classical. In the Indian world we find, correspondingly, the sign of the Lingam and the sect of worshippers of Paewati.^[144] In the one case as in the other, man feels himself as nature, as a plant, as a willless and care-less element of becoming (dem Sinn des Werdens willenlos und sorglos hingegeben). The domestic religion of Rome centred on the genius, i.e., the creative power of the head of the family. To all this, the deep and thoughtful care of the Western soul has opposed the sign of mother-love, a symbol which in the Classical Culture only appeared above the horizon to the extent that we see it in, say, the mourning for Persephone or (though this is only Hellenistic) the seated statue of Demeter of Knidos.^[145] The Mother with the Child—the future—at her breast, the Mary-cult in the new Faustian form, began to flourish only in the centuries of the Gothic and found its highest expression in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna.^[146] This conception is 137not one belonging to Christianity generally. On the contrary, Magian Christianity had elevated Mary as Theotokos, “she who gave birth to God”^[147] into a symbol felt quite otherwise than by us. The lulling Mother is as alien to Early-Christian-Byzantine art as she is to the Hellenic (though for other reasons) and most certainly Faust’s Gretchen, with the deep spell of unconscious motherhood on her, is nearer to the Gothic Madonna than all the Marys of Byzantine and Ravennate mosaics. Indeed, the presumption of a spiritual relation between them breaks down completely before the fact that the Madonna with the Child answers exactly to the Egyptian Isis with Horus—both are caring, nursing mothers—and that nevertheless this symbol had vanished for a thousand years and more (for the whole duration of the Classical and the Arabian Cultures) before it was reawakened by the Faustian soul.^[148]

From the maternal care the way leads to the paternal, and there we meet with the highest of all the time-symbols that have come into existence within a Culture, the State. The meaning of the child to the mother is the future, the continuation, namely, of her own life, and mother-love is, as it were, a welding of two discontinuous individual existences; likewise, the meaning of the state to the man is comradeship in arms for the protection of hearth and home, wife and child, and for the insurance for the whole people of its future and its efficacy. The state is the inward form of a nation, its “form” in the athletic sense, and history, in the high meaning, is the State conceived as kinesis and not as kinema (nicht als Bewegtes sondern als Bewegung gedacht). The Woman as Mother is, and the Man as Warrior and Politician makes, History.^[149]

And here again the history of higher Cultures shows us three examples of state-formations in which the element of care is conspicuous: the Egyptian administration even of the Old Kingdom (from 3000 B.C.); the Chinese state of the Chóu dynasty (1169-256 B.C.), of the organization of which the Chóu Li gives such a picture that, later on, no one dared to believe in the authenticity of the book; and the states of the West, behind whose characteristic eye-to-the-future there is an unsurpassably intense Will to the future.^[150] And on the other hand we have in two examples—the Classical and the Indian world—a picture of utterly care-less submission to the moment and its incidents. 138Different in themselves as are Stoicism and Buddhism (the old-age dispositions of these two worlds), they are at one in their negation of the historical feeling of care, their contempt of zeal, of organizing power, and of the duty-sense; and therefore neither in Indian courts nor in Classical market-places was there a thought for the morrow, personal or collective. The carpe diem of Apollinian man applies also to the Apollinian state.

As with the political, so with the other side of historical existence, the economic. The hand-to-mouth life corresponds to the love that begins and ends in the satisfaction of the moment. There was an economic organization on the grand scale in Egypt, where it fills the whole culture-picture, telling us in a thousand paintings the story of its industry and orderliness; in China, whose mythology of gods and legend-emperors turns entirely upon the holy tasks of cultivation; and in Western Europe, where, beginning with the model agriculture of the Orders, it rose to the height of a special science, “national economy,” which was in very principle a working hypothesis, purporting to show not what happens but what shall happen. In the Classical world, on the other hand—to say nothing of India—men managed from day to day, in spite of the example of Egypt; the earth was robbed not only of its wealth but of its capacities, and the casual surpluses were instantly squandered on the city mob. Consider critically any great statesman of the Classical—Pericles and Cæsar, Alexander and Scipio, and even revolutionaries like Cleon and Tiberius Gracchus. Not one of them, economically, looked far ahead. No city ever made it its business to drain or to afforest a district, or to introduce advanced cultivation methods or new kinds of live stock or new plants. To attach a Western meaning to the “agrarian reform” of the Gracchi is to misunderstand its purport entirely. Their aim was to make their supporters possessors of land. Of educating these into managers of land, or of raising the standard of Italian husbandry in general, there was not the remotest idea—one let the future come, one did not attempt to work upon it. Of this economic Stoicism of the Classical world the exact antithesis is Socialism, meaning thereby not Marx’s theory but Frederick William I’s Prussian practice which long preceded Marx and will yet displace him—the socialism, inwardly akin to the system of Old Egypt, that comprehends and cares for permanent economic relations, trains the individual in his duty to the whole, and glorifies hard work as an affirmation of Time and Future.

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 139of the history-stirred surface a deep logic of becoming. This logic, manifesting itself in the idea of Destiny, leads him to regard the less significant collocations of the day and the surface as mere incidents.

At first sight, however, there seems to be only a difference of degree in the connotations of “destiny” and “incident.” One feels that it is more or less of an incident when Goethe goes to Sesenheim, but destiny when he goes to Weimar;^[151] one regards the former as an episode and the latter as an epoch. But we can see at once that the distinction depends on the inward quality of the man who is impressed. To the mass, the whole life of Goethe may appear as a sequence of anecdotal incidents, while a very few will become conscious, with astonishment, of a symbolic necessity inherent even in its most trivial occurrences. Perhaps, then, the discovery of the heliocentric system by Aristarchus was an unmeaning incident for the Classical Culture, but its supposed^[152] rediscovery by Copernicus a destiny for the Faustian? Was it a destiny that Luther was not a great organizer and Calvin was? And if so, for whom was it a destiny—for Protestantism as a living unit, for the Germans, or for Western mankind generally? Were Tiberius Gracchus and Sulla incidents and Cæsar a destiny?

Questions like these far transcend the domain of the understanding that operates through concepts (der begriffliche Verständigung). What is destiny, what incident, the spiritual experiences of the individual soul—and of the Culture-soul—decide. Acquired knowledge, scientific insight, definition, are all powerless. Nay more, the very attempt to grasp them epistemologically defeats its own object. For without the inward certainty that destiny is something entirely intractable to critical thought, we cannot perceive the world of becoming at all. Cognition, judgment, and the establishment of causal connexions within the known (i.e., between things, properties, and positions that have been distinguished) are one and the same, and he who approaches history in the spirit of judgment will only find “data.” But that—be it Providence or Fate—which moves in the depths of present happening or of represented past happening is lived, and only lived, and lived with that same overwhelming and unspeakable certainty that genuine Tragedy awakens in the uncritical spectator. Destiny and incident form an opposition in which the soul is ceaselessly trying to clothe something which consists only of feeling and living and intuition, and can only be made plain in the most subjective religious and artistic creations of those men who are called to divination. To evoke this root-feeling of living existence which endows the picture of history with its meaning and content, I know of no better way—for “name is mere noise and 140smoke”—than to quote again those stanzas of Goethe which I have placed at the head of this book to mark its fundamental intention.

On the surface of history it is the unforeseen that reigns. Every individual event, decision and personality is stamped with its hall-mark. No one foreknew the storm of Islam at the coming of Mohammed, nor foresaw Napoleon in the fall of Robespierre. The coming of great men, their doings, their fortune, are all incalculables. No one knows whether a development that is setting in powerfully will accomplish its course in a straight line like that of the Roman patrician order or will go down in doom like that of the Hohenstaufen or the Maya Culture. And—science notwithstanding—it is just the same with the destinies of every single species of beast and plant within earth-history and beyond even this, with the destiny of the earth itself and all the solar systems and Milky Ways. The insignificant Augustus made an epoch, and the great Tiberius passed away ineffective. Thus, too, with the fortunes of artists, artworks and art-forms, dogmas and cults, theories and discoveries. That, in the whirl of becoming, one element merely succumbed to destiny when another became (and often enough has continued and will continue to be) a destiny itself—that one vanishes with the wave-train of the surface while the other makes this, is something that is not to be explained by any why-and-wherefore and yet is of inward necessity. And thus the phrase that Augustine in a deep moment used of Time is valid also of destiny—“if no one questions me, I know: if I would explain to a questioner, I know not.”

So, also, the supreme ethical expression of Incident and Destiny is found in the Western Christian’s idea of Grace—the grace, obtained through the sacrificial death of Jesus, of being made free to will.^[154] The polarity of Disposition (original sin) and Grace—a polarity which must ever be a projection of feeling, of the emotional life, and not a precision of learned reasoning—embraces the existence of every truly significant man of this Culture. It is, even for Protestants, even for atheists, hidden though it may be behind a scientific notion of “evolution” (which in reality is its direct descendant^[155]), the foundation of every confession and every autobiography; and it is just its absence from the constitution of Classical man that makes confession, by word or thought, impossible to him. It is the final meaning of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and of 141music from Bach to Beethoven. We may choose to call that something which correlates the life-courses of all Western men disposition, Providence or “inner evolution”^[156] but it remains inaccessible to thought. “Free will” is an inward certitude. But whatever one may will or do, that which actually ensues upon and issues from the resolution—abrupt, surprising, unforeseeable—subserves a deeper necessity and, for the eye that sweeps over the picture of the distant past, visibly conforms to a major order. And when the Destiny of that which was willed has been Fulfilment we are fain to call the inscrutable “Grace.” What did Innocent III, Luther, Loyola, Calvin, Jansen, Rousseau and Marx will, and what came of the things that they willed in the stream of Western history? Was it Grace or Fate? Here all rationalistic dissection ends in nonsense. The Predestination doctrine of Calvin and Pascal—who, both of them more upright than Luther and Thomas Aquinas, dared to draw the causal conclusion from Augustinian dialectic—is the necessary absurdity to which the pursuit of these secrets by the reason leads. They lost the destiny-logic of the world-becoming and found themselves in the causal logic of notion and law; they left the realm of direct intuitive vision for that of a mechanical system of objects. The fearful soul-conflicts of Pascal were the strivings of a man, at once intensely spiritual and a born mathematician, who was determined to subject the last and gravest problems of the soul both to the intuitions of a grand instinctive faith and to the abstract precision of a no less grand mathematical plan. In this wise the Destiny-idea—in the language of religion, God’s Providence—is brought within the schematic form of the Causality Principle, i.e., the Kantian form of mind activity (productive imagination); for that is what Predestination signifies, notwithstanding that thereby Grace—the causation-free, living Grace which can only be experienced as an inward certainty—is made to appear as a nature-force that is bound by irrevocable law and to turn the religious world-picture into a rigid and gloomy system of machinery. And yet was it not a Destiny again—for the world as well as for themselves—that the English Puritans, who were filled with this conviction, were ruined not through any passive self-surrender but through their hearty and vigorous certainty that their will was the will of God?

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 142causal continuity of “Nature,” for Nature is not the world-picture in which Destiny is operative. Wherever the sight emancipates itself from the sensible-become, spiritualizes itself into Vision, penetrates through the enveloping world and lets prime phenomena instead of mere objects work upon it, we have the grand historical, trans-natural, super-natural outlook, the outlook of Dante and Wolfram and also the outlook of Goethe in old age that is most clearly manifested in the finale of Faust II. If we linger in contemplation in this world of Destiny and Incident, it will very likely seem to us incidental that the episode of “world-history” should have played itself out in this or that phase of one particular star amongst the millions of solar systems; incidental that it should be men, peculiar animal-like creatures inhabiting the crust of this star, that present the spectacle of “knowledge” and, moreover, present it in just this form or in just that form, according to the very different versions of Aristotle, Kant and others; incidental that as the counter-pole of this “knowing” there should have arisen just these codes of “natural law,” each supposedly eternal and universally-valid and each evoking a supposedly general and common picture of “Nature.” Physics—quite rightly—banishes incidentals from its field of view, but it is incidental, again, that physics itself should occur in the alluvial period of the earth’s crust, uniquely, as a particular kind of intellectual composition.

The world of incident is the world of once-actual facts that longingly or anxiously we live forward to (entgegenleben) as Future, that raise or depress us as the living Present, and that we contemplate with joy or with grief as Past. The world of causes and effects is the world of the constantly-possible, of the timeless truths which we know by dissection and distinction.

The latter only are scientifically attainable—they are indeed identical with science. He who is blind to this other, to the world as Divina Commedia or drama for a god, can only find a senseless turmoil of incidents,^[157] and here we use the word in its most trivial sense. So it has been with Kant and most other systematists of thought. But the professional and inartistic sort of historical research too, with its collecting and arranging of mere data, amounts for all its ingenuity to little more than the giving of a cachet to the banal-incidental. Only the insight that can penetrate into the metaphysical is capable of experiencing in data symbols of that which happened, and so of elevating an Incident into a Destiny. And he who is to himself a Destiny (like Napoleon) does not need this insight, since between himself as a fact and the other facts there is a harmony of metaphysical rhythm which gives his decisions their dreamlike certainty.^[158]

It is this insight that constitutes the singularity and the power of Shakespeare. 143Hitherto, neither our research nor our speculation has hit upon this in him—that he is the Dramatist of the Incidental. And yet this Incidental is the very heart of Western tragedy, which is a true copy of the Western history idea and with it gives the clue to that which we understand in the world—so misconstrued by Kant—“Time.” It is incidental that the political situation of “Hamlet,” the murder of the King and the succession question impinge upon just that character that Hamlet is. Or, take Othello—it is incidental that the man at whom Iago, the commonplace rogue that one could pick up in any street, aims his blow is one whose person possesses just this wholly special physiognomy. And Lear! Could anything be more incidental (and therefore more “natural”) than the conjunction of this commanding dignity with these fateful passions and the inheritance of them by the daughters? No one has even to-day realized all the significance of the fact that Shakespeare took his stories as he found them and in the very finding of them filled them with the force of inward necessity, and never more sublimely so than in the case of the Roman dramas. For the will to understand him has squandered itself in desperate efforts to bring in a moral causality, a “therefore,” a connexion of “guilt” and “expiation.” But all this is neither correct nor incorrect—these are words that belong to the World-as-Nature and imply that something causal is being judged—but superficial, shallow, that is, in contrast to the poet’s deep subjectivizing of the mere fact-anecdote. Only one who feels this is able to admire the grand naïveté of the entrances of Lear and Macbeth. Now, Hebbel is the exact opposite, he destroys the depth of the anecdote by a system of cause and effect. The arbitrary and abstract character of his plots, which everyone feels instinctively, comes from the fact that the causal scheme of his spiritual conflicts is in contradiction with the historically-motived world-feeling and the quite other logic proper to that feeling. These people do not live, they prove something by coming on. One feels the presence of a great understanding, not that of a deep life. Instead of the Incident we get a Problem.

Further, this Western species of the Incidental is entirely alien to the Classical world-feeling and therefore to its drama. Antigone has no incidental character to affect her fortunes in any way. What happened to Œdipus—unlike the fate of Lear—might just as well have happened to anyone else. This is the Classical “Destiny,” the Fatum which is common to all mankind, which affects the “body” and in no wise depends upon incidents of personality.

The kind of history that is commonly written must, even if it does not lose itself in compilation of data, come to a halt before the superficially incidental—that is the ... destiny of its authors, who, spiritually, remain more or less in the ruck. In their eyes nature and history mingle in a cheap unity, and incident or accident, “sa sacrée majesté le Hazard,” is for the man of the ruck the easiest thing in the world to understand. For him the secret logic of history ‘which he does not feel’ is replaced by a causal that is only waiting behind the 144scene to come on and prove itself. It is entirely appropriate that the anecdotal foreground of history should be the arena of all the scientific causality-hunters and all the novelists and sketch-writers of the common stamp. How many wars have been begun when they were because some jealous courtier wished to remove some general from the proximity of his wife! How many battles have been won and lost through ridiculous incidents! Only think how Roman history was written in the 18th Century and how Chinese history is written even to-day! Think of the Dey smacking the Consul with his fly-flap^[159] and other such incidents that enliven the historical scene with comic-opera motives! Do not the deaths of Gustavus Adolphus and of Alexander seem like expedients of a nonplussed playwright; Hannibal a simple intermezzo, a surprise intrusion in Classical history; or Napoleon’s “transit” more or less of a melodrama? Anyone who looks for the inner form of history in any causal succession of its visible detail-events must always, if he is honest, find a comedy of burlesque inconsequence, and I can well imagine that the dance-scene of the drunken Triumvirs in “Antony and Cleopatra” (almost overlooked, but one of the most powerful in that immensely deep work)^[160] grew up out of the contempt of the prince of historical tragedy for the pragmatic aspect of history. For this is the aspect of it that has always dominated “the world,” and has encouraged ambitious little men to interfere in it. It was because their eyes were set on this, and its rationalistic structure, that Rousseau and Marx could persuade themselves that they could alter the “course of the world” by a theory. And even the social or economic interpretation of political developments, to which present-day historical work is trying to rise as to a peak-ideal (though its biological cast constantly leads us to suspect foundations of the causal kind), is still exceedingly shallow and trivial.

Napoleon had in his graver moments a strong feeling for the deep logic of world-becoming, and in such moments could divine to what extent he was, and to what extent he had, a destiny. “I feel myself driven towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me,” he said at the beginning of the Russian campaign. Here, certainly, is not the thought of a pragmatist. In this moment he divined how little the logic of Destiny needs particular instances, better men or situations. Supposing that he himself, as “empirical person,” had fallen at Marengo—then that which he signified would have been actualized in some other form. A melody, in the hands of a great musician, is capable of a wealth of variations; it can be entirely transformed so far as the simple listener is concerned without altering itself—which is quite another matter—fundamentally. The epoch of German national union accomplished itself through 145the person of Bismarck, that of the Wars of Freedom through broad and almost nameless events; but either theme, to use the language of music, could have been “worked out” in other ways. Bismarck might have been dismissed early, the battle of Leipzig might have been lost, and for the group of wars 1864—1866—1870 there might have been substituted (as “modulations”) diplomatic, dynastic, revolutionary or economic facts—though it must not be forgotten that Western history, under the pressure of its own physiognomic abundance (as distinct from physiognomic style, for even Indian history has that) demands, so to say, contrapuntally strong accents—wars or big personalities—at the decisive points. Bismarck himself points out in his reminiscences that in the spring of 1848 national unity could have been achieved on a broader base than in 1870 but for the policy (more accurately, the personal taste) of the King of Prussia;^[161] and yet, again, according to Bismarck, this would have been so tame a working-out that a coda of one sort or another (da capo e poi la coda) would have been imperatively necessary. Withal, the Theme—the meaning of the epoch—would have been entirely unaltered by the facts assuming this or that shape. Goethe might—possibly—have died young, but not his “idea.” Faust and Tasso would not have been written, but they would have “been” in a deeply mysterious sense, even though they lacked the poet’s elucidation.

For if it is incidental that the history of higher mankind fulfils itself in the form of great Cultures, and that one of these Cultures awoke in West Europe about the year 1000; yet from the moment of awakening it is bound by its charter. Within every epoch there is unlimited abundance of surprising and unforeseeable possibilities of self-actualizing in detail-facts, but the epoch itself is necessary, for the life-unity is in it. That its inner form is precisely what it is, constitutes its specific determination (Bestimmung). Fresh incidentals can affect the shape of its development, can make this grandiose or puny, prosperous or sorrowful, but alter it they cannot. An irrevocable fact is not merely a special case but a special type; thus in the history of the Universe we have the type of the “solar system” of sun and circling planets; in the history of our planet we have the type “life” with its youth, age, duration and reproduction; in the history of “life” the type “humanity,” and in the world-historical stage of that humanity the type of the great individual Culture.^[162] And these Cultures are essentially related to the plants, in that they are bound for the whole duration of their life to the soil from which they sprang. Typical, lastly, is the manner in which the men of a Culture understand and experience Destiny, however 146differently the picture may be coloured for this individual and that; what I say here about it is not “true,” but inwardly necessary for this Culture and this time-phase of it, and if it convinces you, it is not because there is only one “truth” but because you and I belong to the same epoch.

For this reason, the Euclidean soul of the Classical Culture could only experience its existence, bound as this was to present foregrounds, in the form of incidents of the Classical style. If in respect of the Western soul we can regard incident as a minor order of Destiny, in respect of the Classical soul it is just the reverse. Destiny is incident become immense—that is the very signification of Ananke, Heimarmene, Fatum. As the Classical soul did not genuinely live through history, it possessed no genuine feeling for a logic of Destiny. We must not be misled by words. The most popular goddess of Hellenism was Tyche, whom the Greeks were practically unable to distinguish from Ananke. But Incident and Destiny are felt by us with all the intensity of an opposition, and on the issue of this opposition we feel that everything fundamental in our existence depends. Our history is that of great connexions, Classical history—its full actuality, that is, and not merely the image of it that we get in the historian (e.g., Herodotus)—is that of anecdotes, of a series of plastic details. The style of the Classical life generally, the style of every individual life within it, is anecdotal, using the word with all seriousness. The sense-perceivable side of events condenses on anti-historical, daemonic, absurd incidents; it is the denial and disavowal of all logic of happening. The stories of the Classical master-tragedies one and all exhaust themselves in incidents that mock at any meaning of the world; they are the exact denotation of what is connoted by the word εἱμαρμένη^[163] in contrast to the Shakesperian logic of incident. Consider Œdipus once more: that which happened to him was wholly extrinsic, was neither brought about nor conditioned by anything subjective to himself, and could just as well have happened to anyone else. This is the very form of the Classical myth. Compare with it the necessity—inherent in and governed by the man’s whole existence and the relation of that existence to Time—that resides in the destiny of Othello, of Don Quixote, of Werther. It is, as we have said before, the difference of situation-tragedy and character-tragedy. And this opposition repeats itself in history proper—every epoch of the West has character, while each epoch of the Classical only presents a situation. While the life of Goethe was one of fate-filled logic, that of Cæsar was one of mythical indidentalness, and it was left to Shakespeare to introduce logic into it. Napoleon is a tragic character, Alcibiades fell into tragic situations. Astrology, in the form in which from Gothic to Baroque the Western soul knew it—was dominated by it even in denying it—was the attempt to master one’s whole future life-course; the Faustian horoscope, of which the best-known example 147is perhaps that drawn out for Wallenstein by Kepler, presupposes a steady and purposeful direction in the existence that has yet to be accomplished. But the Classical oracle, always consulted for the individual case, is the genuine symbol of the meaningless incident and the moment; it accepts the point-formed and the discontinuous as the elements of the world’s course, and oracle-utterances were therefore entirely in place in that which was written and experienced as history at Athens. Was there one single Greek who possessed the notion of a historical evolution towards this or that or any aim? And we—should we have been able to reflect upon history or to make it if we had not possessed it? If we compare the destinies of Athens and of France at corresponding times after Themistocles and Louis XIV, we cannot but feel that the style of the historical feeling and the style of its actualization are always one. In France logic à outrance, in Athens un-logic.

The ultimate meaning of this significant fact can now be understood. History is the actualizing of a soul, and the same style governs the history one makes as governs the history one contemplates. The Classical mathematic excludes the symbol of infinite space, and therefore the Classical history does so too. It is not for nothing that the scene of Classical existence is the smallest of any, the individual Polis, that it lacks horizon and perspective—notwithstanding the episode of Alexander’s expedition^[164]—just as the Attic stage cuts them off with its flat back-wall, in obvious contrast to the long-range efficacy of Western Cabinet diplomacy and the Western capital city. And just as the Greeks and the Romans neither knew nor (with their fundamental abhorrence of the Chaldean astronomy) would admit as actual any cosmos but that of the foreground; just as at bottom their deities are house-gods, city-gods, field-gods but never star-gods,^[165] so also what they depicted was only foregrounds. Never in Corinth or Athens or Sicyon do we find a landscape with mountain horizon and driving clouds and distant towns; every vase-painting has the same constituents, figures of Euclidean separateness and artistic self-sufficiency. Every pediment or frieze group is serially and not contrapuntally built up. But then, life-experience itself was one strictly of foregrounds. Destiny was not the “course of life” but something upon which one suddenly stumbles. And this is how Athens produced, with Polygnotus’s fresco and Plato’s geometry, a fate-tragedy in which fate is precisely the fate that we discredit in Schiller’s “Bride of Messina.” The complete unmeaning of blind doom that is embodied, for instance, in the curse of the House of Atreus, served to reveal to the ahistorical Classical soul the full meaning of its own world.

We may now point our moral with a few examples, which, though hazardous, ought not at this stage to be open to misunderstanding. Imagine Columbus supported by France instead of by Spain, as was in fact highly probable at one time. Had Francis I been the master of America, without doubt he and not the Spaniard Charles V would have obtained the imperial crown. The early Baroque period from the Sack of Rome to the Peace of Westphalia, which was actually the Spanish century in religion, intellect, art, politics and manners, would have been shaped from Paris and not from Madrid. Instead of the names of Philip, Alva, Cervantes, Calderon, Velasquez we should be talking to-day of great Frenchmen who in fact—if we may thus roundly express a very difficult idea—remained unborn. The style of the Church which was definitively fixed in this epoch by the Spaniard Loyola and the Council of Trent which he spiritually dominated; the style of politics to which the war-technique of Spanish captains, the diplomacy of Spanish cardinals and the courtly spirit of the Escorial gave a stamp that lasted till the Congress of Vienna and in essential points till beyond Bismarck; the architecture of the Baroque; the great age of Painting; ceremonial and the polite society of the great cities—all these would have been represented by other profound heads, noble and clerical, by wars other than Philip II’s wars, by another architect than Vignola, by another Court. The Incidental chose the Spanish gesture for the late period of the West. But the inward logic of that age, which was bound to find its fulfilment in the great Revolution (or some event of the same connotation), remained intact.

This French revolution might have been represented by some other event of different form and occurring elsewhere, say in England or Germany. But its “idea,”—which (as we shall see later) was the transition from Culture to Civilization, the victory of the inorganic megalopolis over the organic countryside which was henceforward to become spiritually “the provinces,”—was necessary, and the moment of its occurrence was also necessary. To describe such a moment we shall use the term (long blurred, or misused as a synonym for period) epoch. When we say an event is epoch-making we mean that it marks in the course of a Culture a necessary and fateful turning-point. The merely incidental event, a crystallization-form of the historical surface, may be represented by other appropriate incidents, but the epoch is necessary and predeterminate. And it is evident that the question of whether, in respect of a particular Culture and its course, an event ranks as an epoch or as an episode is connected with its ideas of Destiny and Incidents, and therefore also with its idea of the Tragic as “epochal” (as in the West) or as “episodic” (as in the Classical world).

We can, further, distinguish between impersonal or anonymous and personal 149epochs, according to their physiognomic type in the picture of history. Amongst “incidents” of the first rank we include those great persons who are endowed with such formative force that the destiny of thousands, of whole peoples, and of ages, are incorporated in their private destinies; but at the same time we can distinguish the adventurer or successful man who is destitute of inward greatness (like Danton or Robespierre) from the Hero of history by the fact that his personal destiny displays only the traits of the common destiny. Certain names may ring, but “the Jacobins” collectively and not individuals amongst them were the type that dominated the time. The first part of this epoch of the Revolution is therefore thoroughly anonymous, just as the second or Napoleonic is in the highest degree personal. In a few years the immense force of these phenomena accomplished what the corresponding epoch of the Classical (c. 386-322), fluid and unsure of itself, required decades of undermining-work to achieve. It is of the essence of all Culture that at the outset of each stage the same potentiality is present, and that necessity fulfils itself thereafter either in the form of a great individual person (Alexander, Diocletian, Mohammed, Luther, Napoleon) or in that of an almost anonymous happening of powerful inward constitution (Peloponnesian War, Thirty Years’ War, Spanish Succession War) or else in a feeble and indistinct evolution (periods of the Diadochi and of the Hyksos, the Interregnum in Germany). And the question which of these forms is the more likely to occur in any given instance, is one that is influenced in advance by the historical and therefore also the tragic style of the Culture concerned.^[166]

The tragic in Napoleon’s life—which still awaits discovery by a poet great enough to comprehend it and shape it—was that he, who rose into effective being by fighting British policy and the British spirit which that policy so eminently represented, completed by that very fighting the continental victory of this spirit, which thereupon became strong enough, in the guise of “liberated nations” to overpower him and to send him to St. Helena to die. It was not Napoleon who originated the expansion principle. That had arisen out of the Puritanism of Cromwell’s milieu which called into life the British Colonial Empire.^[167] Transmitted through the English-schooled intellects of Rousseau and Mirabeau to the Revolutionary armies, of which English philosophical ideas were essentially the driving force, it became their tendency even from that day of Valmy which Goethe alone read aright. It was not Napoleon who formed the idea, but the idea that formed Napoleon, and when he came to the throne he was obliged to pursue it further against the only power, England namely, whose purpose was the same as his own. His Empire was a creation of 150French blood but of English style. It was in London, again, that Locke, Shaftesbury, Samuel Clarke and, above all, Bentham built up the theory of “European Civilization”—the Western Hellenism—which Bayle, Voltaire and Rousseau carried to Paris. Thus it was in the name of this England of Parliamentarianism, business morality and journalism that Valmy, Marengo, Jena, Smolensk and Leipzig were fought, and in all these battles it was the English spirit that defeated the French Culture of the West.^[168] The First Consul had no intention of incorporating West Europe in France; his primary object was—note the Alexander-idea on the threshold of every Civilization!—to replace the British Colonial Empire by a French one. Thereby, French preponderance in the Western culture-region would have been placed on a practically unassailable foundation; it would have been the Empire of Charles V on which the sun never set, but managed from Paris after all, in spite of Columbus and Philip, and organized as an economic-military instead of as an ecclesiastical-chivalric unit. So far-reaching, probably, was the destiny that was in Napoleon. But the Peace of Paris in 1763 had already decided the question against France, and Napoleon’s great plans time and again came to grief in petty incidents. At Acre a few guns were landed in the nick of time from the British warships: there was a moment, again, just before the signature of the Peace of Amiens, when the whole Mississippi basin was still amongst his assets and he was in close touch with the Maratha powers that were resisting British progress in India; but again a minor naval incident^[169] obliged him to abandon the whole of a carefully-prepared enterprise: and, lastly, when by the occupation of Dalmatia, Corfu and all Italy he had made the Adriatic a French lake, with a view to another expedition to the East, and was negotiating with the Shah of Persia for action against India, he was defeated by the whims of the Tsar Alexander, who at times was undoubtedly willing to support a march on India and whose aid would infallibly have secured its success. It was only after the failure of all extra-European combinations that he chose, as his ultima ratio in the battle against England, the incorporation of Germany and Spain, and so, raising against himself his own English-Revolutionary ideas, the very ideas of which he had been the vehicle,^[170] he took the step that made him “no longer necessary.”

151At one time it falls to the Spanish spirit to outline, at another to the British or the French to remould, the world-embracing colonial system. A “United States of Europe,” actualized through Napoleon as founder of a romantic and popular military monarchy, is the analogue of the Realm of the Diadochi; actualized as a 21st-Century economic organism by a matter-of-fact Cæsar, it is the counterpart of the imperium Romanum. These are incidentals, but they are in the picture of history. But Napoleon’s victories and defeats (which always hide a victory of England and Civilization over Culture), his Imperial dignity, his fall, the Grande Nation, the episodic liberation of Italy (in 1796, as in 1859, essentially no more than a change of political costume for a people long since become insignificant), the destruction of the Gothic ruin of the Roman-German Empire, are mere surface phenomena, behind which is marching the great logic of genuine and invisible History, and it was in the sense of this logic that the West, having fulfilled its French-formed Culture in the ancien régime, closed it off with the English Civilization. As symbols of “contemporary” epochal moments, then, the storming of the Bastille, Valmy, Austerlitz, Waterloo and the rise of Prussia correspond to the Classical-history facts of Chæronea, Gaugamela (Arbela), Alexander’s Indian expedition and the Roman victory of Sentinum.^[171] And we begin to understand that in wars and political catastrophies—the chief material of our historical writings—victory is not the essence of the fight nor peace the aim of a revolution.

Anyone who has absorbed these ideas will have no difficulty in understanding how the causality principle is bound to have a fatal effect upon the capacity for genuinely experiencing History when, at last, it attains its rigid form in that “late” condition of a Culture to which it is proper and in which it is able to tyrannize over the world-picture. Kant, very wisely, established causality as a necessary form of knowledge, and it cannot be too often emphasized that this was meant to refer exclusively to the understanding of man’s environment by the way of reason. But while the word “necessary” was accepted readily enough, it has been overlooked that this limitation of the principle to a single domain of knowledge is just what forbids its application to the contemplation and experiencing of living history. Man-knowing and Nature-knowing are in essence entirely incapable of being compared, but nevertheless the whole Nineteenth Century was at great pains to abolish the frontier between Nature and History in favour of the former. The more historically men tried to think, the more they forgot that in this domain they ought not to think. In forcing the rigid scheme of a spatial and anti-temporal relation of cause and effect upon something alive, they disfigured the visible face of becoming with the 152construction-lines of a physical nature-picture, and, habituated to their own late, megalopolitan and causally-thinking milieu, they were unconscious of the fundamental absurdity of a science that sought to understand an organic becoming by methodically misunderstanding it as the machinery of the thing-become. Day is not the cause of night, nor youth of age, nor blossom of fruit. Everything that we grasp intellectually has a cause, everything that we live organically with inward certitude has a past. The one recognizes the case, that which is generally possible and has a fixed inner form which is the same whenever and wherever and however often it occurs, the other recognizes the event which once was and will never recur. And, according as we grasp something in our envelope-world critically and consciously or physiognomically and involuntarily, we draw our conclusion from technical or from living experience, and we relate it to a timeless cause in space or to a direction which leads from yesterday to to-day and to-morrow.

But the spirit of our great cities refuses to be involuntary. Surrounded by a machine-technique that it has itself created in surprising Nature’s most dangerous secret, the “law,” it seeks to conquer history also technically, “theoretically and practically.” “Usefulness,” suitableness to purpose (Zweckmässigkeit), is the great word which assimilates the one to the other. A materialist conception of history, ruled by laws of causal Nature, leads to the setting up of usefulness-ideals such as “enlightenment,” “humanity,” “world-peace,” as aims of world-history, to be reached by the “march of progress.” But in these schemes of old age the feeling of Destiny has died, and with it the young reckless courage that, self-forgetful and big with a future, presses on to meet a dark decision.

For only youth has a future, and is Future, that enigmatic synonym of directional Time and of Destiny. Destiny is always young. He who replaces it by a mere chain of causes and effects, sees even in the not-yet-actualized something, as it were, old and past—direction is wanting. But he who lives towards a something in the superabundant flow of things need not concern himself with aims and abilities, for he feels that he himself is the meaning of what is to happen. This was the faith in the Star that never left Cæsar nor Napoleon nor the great doers of another kind; and this it is that lies deepest of all—youthful melancholy notwithstanding—in every childhood and in every young clan, people, Culture, that extends forward over all their history for men of act and of vision, who are young however white their hair, younger even than the most juvenile of those who look to a timeless utilitarianism. The feeling of a significance in the momentarily present world-around discloses itself in the earliest days of childhood, when it is still only the persons and things of the nearest environment that essentially exist, and develops through silent and unconscious experience into a comprehensive picture. This picture constitutes the general expression of the whole Culture as it is at the particular stage, and it is only the fine judge of life and the deep searcher of history who can interpret it.

153At this point a distinction presents itself between the immediate impression of the present and the image of the past that is only presented in the spirit, in other words between the world as happening and the world as history. The eye of the man of action (statesman and general) appreciates the first, that of the man of contemplation (historian and poet) the second. Into the first one plunges practically to do or to suffer; chronology,^[172] that great symbol of irrevocable past, claims the second. We look backwards, and we live forward towards the unforeseen, but even in childhood our technical experience soon introduces into the image of the singular occurrence elements of the foreseeable, that is, an image of regulated Nature which is subject not to physiognomic fact but to calculation. We apprehend a “head of game” as a living entity and immediately afterwards as food; we see a flash of lightning as a peril and then as an electrical discharge. And this second, later, petrifying projection of the world more and more tends to overpower the first in the Megalopolis; the image of the past is mechanized and materialized and from it is deduced a set of causal rules for present and future. We come to believe in historical laws and in a rational understanding of them.

Nevertheless science is always natural science. Causal knowledge and technical experience refer only to the become, the extended, the comprehended. As life is to history, so is knowledge (Wissen) to Nature, viz., to the sensible world apprehended as an element, treated as in space and subjected to the law of cause and effect. Is there, then, a science of History at all? To answer this question, let us remember that in every personal world-picture, which only approximates more or less to the ideal picture, there is both something of Nature and something of History. No Nature is without living, and no History without causal, harmonies. For within the sphere of Nature, although two like experiments, conformably to law, have the like result, yet each of these experiments is a historical event possessing a date and not recurring. And within that of History, the dates or data of the past (chronologies, statistics, names, forms^[173]) form a rigid web. “Facts are facts” even if we are unaware of them, and all else is image, Theoria, both in the one domain and in the other. But history is itself the condition of being “in the focus” and the material is only an aid to this condition, whereas in Nature the real aim is the winning of the material, and theory is only the servant of this purpose.

There is, therefore, not a science of history but an ancillary science for history, 154which 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:

Is it permissible to fix upon one, any one, group of social, religious, physiological or ethical facts as the “cause” of another? “Certainly,” the rationalistic school of history, and still more the up-to-date sociology, would reply. That, they would say, is what is meant by our comprehending history and deepening our knowledge of it. But in reality, with “civilized” man there is always the implicit postulate of an underlying rational purpose—without which indeed his world would be meaningless. And there is something rather comic in the most unscientific freedom that he allows himself in his choice of his fundamental causes. One man selects this, another that, group as prima causa—an inexhaustible source of polemics—and all fill their works with pretended elucidations of the “course of history” on natural-science lines. Schiller has given us the classical expression of this method in one of his immortal banalities, the verse in which the “Weltgetriebe” is stat “durch Hunger und durch Liebe”; and the Nineteenth Century, progressing from Rationalism to Materialism, has made this opinion canonical. The cult of the useful was set up on high. To it Darwin, in the name of his century, sacrificed Goethe’s Nature-theory. The organic logic of the facts of life was supplanted by a mechanics in physiological garb. Heredity, adaptation, natural selection, are utility-causes of purely mechanical connotation. The historical dispensations were superseded by a naturalistic movement “in space.” (But are there historical or spiritual “processes,” or life-“processes” of any sort whatever? Have historical “movements” such as, for example, the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment anything whatever to do with the scientific notion of movement?) The word “process” eliminated Destiny and unveiled the secret of becoming, and lo! there was no longer a tragic but only an exact mathematical structure of world-happening. And thereupon the “exact” historian enunciated the proposition that in the history-picture we had before us a sequence of “states” of mechanical type which were amenable to rational analysis like a physical experiment or a chemical reaction, and that therefore causes, means, methods and objects were capable of being grouped together as a comprehensible system on the visible surface. It all becomes astonishingly simple. And one is bound to admit that given a sufficiently shallow observer, the hypothesis (so far as concerns his personality and its world-picture) comes off.

Hunger and Love^[174] thus become mechanical causes of mechanical processes in the “life of peoples.” Social problems and sexual problems (both belonging to a “physics” or “chemistry” of public—all-too-public—existence) become the obvious themes of utilitarian history and therefore of the corresponding tragedy. For the social drama necessarily accompanies the materialist treatment of history, and that which in Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften” was destiny 156in the highest sense has become in Ibsen’s “Lady from the Sea” nothing but a sexual problem. Ibsen and all the reason-poets of our great cities build—build from their very first causes to their very last effect—but they do not sing. As artist, Hebbel fought hard to overcome this merely prosaic element in his more critical than intuitive temperament, to be a poet quand même, hence his desperate and wholly un-Goethean effort to motive his events. In Hebbel, as in Ibsen, motiving means trying to shape tragedy causally, and he dissected and re-dissected and transformed and retransformed his Anecdote until he had made it into a system that proved a case. Consider his treatment of the Judith story—Shakespeare would have taken it as it was, and scented a world-secret in the physiognomic charm of the pure adventure. But Goethe’s warning: “Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson (sie selbst sind die Lehre)” had become incomprehensible to the century of Marx and Darwin. The idea of trying to read a destiny in the physiognomy of the past and that of trying to represent unadulterated Destiny as a tragedy were equally remote from them. In both domains, the cult of the useful had set before itself an entirely different aim. Shapes were called into being, not to be, but to prove something. “Questions” of the day were “treated,” social problems suitably “solved,” and the stage, like the history-book, became a means to that end. Darwinism, however unconscious of what it was doing, has made biology politically effective. Somehow or other, democratic stirrings happened in the protoplasm, and the struggle for existence of the rain-worms is a useful lesson for the bipeds who have scraped through.

With all this, the historians have failed to learn the lesson that our ripest and strictest science, Physics, would have taught them, the lesson of prudence. Even if we concede them their causal method, the superficiality with which they apply it is an outrage. There is neither the intellectual discipline nor the keen sight, let alone the scepticism that is inherent in our handling of physical hypotheses.^[175] For the attitude of the physicist to his atoms, electrons, currents, and fields of force, to æther and mass, is very far removed from the naïve faith of the layman and the Monist in these things. They are images which he subjects to the abstract relationships of his differential equations, in which he clothes trans-phenomenal numbers, and if he allows himself a certain freedom to choose amongst several theories, it is because he does not try to find in them any actuality but that of the “conventional sign.”^[176] He knows, too, that over 157and above an experimental acquaintance with the technical structure of the world-around, all that it is possible to achieve by this process (which is the only one open to natural science) is a symbolic interpretation of it, no more—certainly not “Knowledge” in the sanguine popular sense. For, the image of Nature being a creation and copy of the Intellect, its “alter ego” in the domain of the extended, to know Nature means to know oneself.

If Physics is the maturest of our sciences, Biology, whose business is to explore the picture of organic life, is in point both of content and of methods the weakest. What historical investigation really is, namely pure Physiognomic, cannot be better illustrated than by the course of Goethe’s nature-studies. He works upon mineralogy, and at once his views fit themselves together into a conspectus of an earth-history in which his beloved granite signifies nearly the same as that which I call the proto-human signifies in man’s history. He investigates well-known plants, and the prime phenomenon of metamorphosis, the original form of the history of all plant existence, reveals itself; proceeding further, he reaches those extraordinarily deep ideas of vertical and spiral tendencies in vegetation which have not been fully grasped even yet. His studies of ossature, based entirely on the contemplation of life, lead him to the discovery of the “os intermaxillare” in man and to the view that the skull-structure of the vertebrates developed out of six vertebræ. Never is there a word of causality. He feels the necessity of Destiny just as he himself expressed it in his Orphische Urworte:

The mere chemistry of the stars, the mathematical side of physical observations, and physiology proper interested him, the great historian of Nature very little, because they belonged to Systematic and were concerned with experiential learning of the become, the dead, and the rigid. This is what underlies his anti-Newton polemic—a case in which, it must be added, both sides were in the right, for the one had “knowledge” of the regulated nature-process in the dead colour^[177] while the experiencing of the other, the artist, was intuitive-sensuous “feeling.” Here we have the two worlds in plain opposition; and now therefore the essentials of their opposition must be stated with all strictness.

158History 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 159and gestures—in which Nature-laws are operative. Primitive life is submissive before the daemonic unity of the fateful; in the consciousness of the mature Culture this “early” world-image is incessantly in conflict with the other, “late,” world-image; and in the civilized man the tragic world-feeling succumbs to the mechanizing intellect. History and nature within ourselves stand opposed to one another as life is to death, as ever-becoming time to ever-become space. In the waking consciousness, becoming and become struggle for control of the world-picture, and the highest and maturest forms of both sorts (possible only for the great Cultures) are seen, in the case of the Classical soul, in the opposition of Plato and Aristotle, and, in the case of our Western, in that of Goethe and Kant—the pure physiognomy of the world contemplated by the soul of an eternal child, and its pure system comprehended by the reason of an eternal greybeard.

Herein, then, I see the last great task of Western philosophy, the only one which still remains in store for the aged wisdom of the Faustian Culture, the preordained issue, it seems, of our centuries of spiritual evolution. No Culture is at liberty to choose the path and conduct of its thought, but here for the first time a Culture can foresee the way that destiny has chosen for it.

Before my eyes there seems to emerge, as a vision, a hitherto unimagined mode of superlative historical research that is truly Western, necessarily alien to the Classical and to every other soul but ours—a comprehensive Physiognomic of all existence, a morphology of becoming for all humanity that drives onward to the highest and last ideas; a duty of penetrating the world-feeling not only of our proper soul but of all souls whatsoever that have contained grand possibilities and have expressed them in the field of actuality as grand Cultures. This philosophic view—to which we and we alone are entitled in virtue of our analytical mathematic, our contrapuntal music and our perspective painting—in that its scope far transcends the scheme of the systematist, presupposes the eye of an artist, and of an artist who can feel the whole sensible and apprehensible environment dissolve into a deep infinity of mysterious relationships. So Dante felt, and so Goethe felt. To bring up, out of the web of world-happening, a millennium of organic culture-history as an entity and person, and to grasp the conditions of its inmost spirituality—such is the aim. Just as one penetrates the lineaments of a Rembrandt portrait or a Cæsar-bust, so the new art will contemplate and understand the grand, fateful lines in the visage of a Culture as a superlative human individuality.

To attempt the interpretation of a poet or a prophet, a thinker or a conqueror, is of course nothing new, but to enter a culture-soul—Classical, Egyptian or Arabian—so intimately as to absorb into one’s self, to make part of one’s own life, the totality expressed by typical men and situations, by religion and polity, by style and tendency, by thought and customs, is quite a new manner 160of 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.

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 164and 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 165causal laws and number that overlies and binds them. And even in the domain of pure number the symbolical is not lacking, for we find that refined thought puts inexpressible meanings into signs like the triangle, the circle and the numbers 7 and 12.

This is the idea of the Macrocosm, actuality as the sum total of all symbols in relation to one soul. From this property of being significant nothing is exempt. All that is, symbolizes. From the corporeal phenomena like visage, shape, mien (of individuals and classes and peoples alike), which have always been known to possess meaning, to the supposedly eternal and universally-valid forms of knowledge, mathematics and physics, everything speaks out of the essence of one and only one soul.

At the same time these individuals’ worlds as lived and experienced by men of one Culture or spiritual community are interrelated, and on the greater or less degree of this interrelation depends the greater or less communicability of intuitions, sensations and thoughts from one to another—that is, the possibility of making intelligible what one has created in the style of one’s own being, through expression-media such as language or art or religion, by means of word-sounds or formulæ or signs that are themselves also symbols. The degree of interrelation between one’s world and another’s fixes the limit at which understanding becomes self-deception. Certainly it is only very imperfectly that we can understand the Indian or the Egyptian soul, as manifested in the men, customs, deities, root-words, ideas, buildings and acts of it. The Greeks, ahistoric as they were, could not even guess at the essence of alien spiritualities—witness the naïveté with which they were wont to rediscover their own gods and Culture in those of alien peoples. But in our own case too, the current translations of the ἀρχή, or Atman, or Tao of alien philosophers presuppose our proper world-feeling, which is that from which our “equivalents” claim their significance, as the basis of an alien soul-expression. And similarly we elucidate the characters of early Egyptian and Chinese portraits with reference to our own life-experience. In both cases we deceive ourselves. That the artistic masterpieces of all Cultures are still living for us—“immortal” as we say—is another such fancy, kept alive by the unanimity with which we understand the alien work in the proper sense. Of this tendency of ours the effect of the Laocoön group on Renaissance sculpture and that of Seneca on the Classicist drama of the French are examples.

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, 166as we shall see. But extension is the hall-mark of the fact “waking consciousness,” and this constitutes only one side of the individual existence and is intimately bound up with that existence’s destinies. Consequently, every trait of the actual waking-consciousness, whether it be feeling or understanding, is in the moment of our becoming aware of it, already past. We can only reflect upon impressions, “think them over” as our happy phrase goes, but that which for the sensuous life of the animals is past, is for the grammatical (wortgebundene) understanding of man passing, transient. That which happens is, of course, transient, for a happening is irrevocable, but every kind of significance is also transient. Follow out the destiny of the Column, from the Egyptian tomb-temple in which columns are ranked to mark the path for the traveller, through the Doric peripteros in which they are held together by the body of the building, and the Early-Arabian basilica where they support the interior, to the façades of the Renaissance in which they provide the upward-striving element. As we see, an old significance never returns; that which has entered the domain of extension has begun and ended at once. A deep relation, and one which is early felt, exists between space and death. Man is the only being that knows death; all others become old, but with a consciousness wholly limited to the moment which must seem to them eternal. They live, but like children in those first years in which Christianity regards them as still “innocent,” they know nothing of life, and they die and they see death without knowing anything about it. Only fully-awakened man, man proper, whose understanding has been emancipated by the habit of language from dependence on sight, comes to possess (besides sensibility) the notion of transience, that is, a memory of the past as past and an experiential conviction of irrevocability. We are Time,^[178] but we possess also an image of history and in this image death, and with death birth, appear as the two riddles. For all other beings life pursues its course without suspecting its limits, i.e., without conscious knowledge of task, meaning, duration and object. It is because there is this deep and significant identity that we so often find the awakening of the inner life in a child associated with the death of some relation. The child suddenly grasps the lifeless corpse for what it is, something that has become wholly matter, wholly space, and at the same moment it feels itself as an individual being in an alien extended world. “From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance,” said Tolstoi once. Here, in the decisive moments of existence, when man first becomes man and realizes his immense loneliness in the universal, the world-fear reveals itself for the first time as the essentially human fear in the presence of death, the limit of the light-world, rigid space. Here, too, the higher thought originates as meditation upon death. Every religion, every scientific investigation, every philosophy proceeds from it. Every great symbolism attaches its form-language 167to the cult of the dead, the forms of disposal of the dead, the adornment of the graves of the dead. The Egyptian style begins with the tomb-temples of the Pharaohs, the Classical with the geometrical decoration of the funerary urns, the Arabian with catacomb and sarcophagus, the Western with the cathedral wherein the sacrificial death of Jesus is re-enacted daily under the hands of the priest. From this primitive fear springs, too, historical sensitiveness in all its modes, the Classical with its cleaving to the life-abundant present, the Arabian with its baptismal rite that wins new life and overcomes death, the Faustian with its contrition that makes worthy to receive the Body of Jesus and therewith immortality. Till we have the constantly-wakeful concern for the life that is not yet past, there is no concern for that which is past. The beast has only the future, but man knows also the past. And thus every new Culture is awakened in and with a new view of the world, that is, a sudden glimpse of death as the secret of the perceivable world. It was when the idea of the impending end of the world spread over Western Europe (about the year 1000) that the Faustian soul of this religion was born.

Primitive man, in his deep amazement before death, sought with all the forces of his spirit to penetrate and to spellbind this world of the extended with the inexorable and always present limits of its causality, this world filled with dark almightiness that continuously threatened to make an end of him. This energetic defensive lies deep in unconscious existence, but, as being the first impulse that genuinely projects soul and world as parted and opposed, it marks the threshold of personal conduct of life. Ego-feeling and world-feeling begin to work, and all culture, inner or outer, bearing or performance, is as a whole only the intensification of this being-human. Henceforward all that resists our sensations is not mere resistance or thing or impression, as it is for animals and for children also, but an expression as well. Not merely are things actually contained in the world-around but also they possess meaning, as phenomena in the world-view. Originally they possessed only a relationship to men, but now there is also a relationship of men to them. They have become emblems of his existence. And thus the essence of every genuine—unconscious and inwardly necessary—symbolism proceeds from the knowledge of death in which the secret of space reveals itself. All symbolism implies a defensive; it is the expression of a deep Scheu in the old double sense of the word,^[179] and its form-language tells at once of hostility and of reverence.

Every thing-become is mortal. Not only peoples, languages, races and Cultures are transient. In a few centuries from now there will no more be a Western Culture, no more be German, English or French than there were Romans in the time of Justinian. Not that the sequence of human generations failed; it was the inner form of a people, which had put together a number of these generations as a single gesture, that was no longer there. The Civis Romanus, one of 168the most powerful symbols of Classical being, had nevertheless, as a form, only a duration of some centuries. But the primitive phenomenon of the great Culture will itself have disappeared some day, and with it the drama of world-history; aye, and man himself, and beyond man the phenomenon of plant and animal existence on the earth’s surface, the earth, the sun, the whole world of sun-systems. All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but the arts themselves. One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—though possibly a coloured canvas and a sheet of notes may remain—because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone. Every thought, faith and science dies as soon as the spirits in whose worlds their “eternal truths” were true and necessary are extinguished. Dead, even, are the star-worlds which “appeared,” a proper world to the proper eye, to the astronomers of the Nile and the Euphrates, for our eye is different from theirs; and our eye in its turn is mortal. All this we know. The beast does not know, and what he does not know does not exist in his experienced world-around. But if the image of the past vanishes, the longing to give a deeper meaning to the passing vanishes also. And so it is with reference to the purely human macrocosm that we apply the oft-quoted line, which shall serve as motto for all that follows: Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.

From this we are led, without our noticing it, back to the space-problem, though now it takes on a fresh and surprising form. Indeed, it is as a corollary to these ideas that it appears for the first time as capable of solution—or, to speak more modestly, of enunciation—just as the time-problem was made more comprehensible by way of the Destiny-idea. From the moment of our awakening, the fateful and directed life appears in the phenomenal life as an experienced depth. Everything extends itself, but it is not yet “space,” not something established in itself but a self-extension continued from the moving here to the moving there. World-experience is bound up with the essence of depth (i.e., far-ness or distance). In the abstract system of mathematics, “depth” is taken along with “length” and “breadth” as a “third” dimension; but this trinity of elements of like order is misleading from the outset, for in our impression of the spatial world these elements are unquestionably not equivalents, let alone homogeneous. Length and breadth are no doubt, experientially, a unit and not a mere sum, but they are (the phrase is used deliberately) simply a form of reception; they represent the purely sensuous impression. But depth is a representation of expression, of Nature, and with it begins the “world.”

This discrimination between the “third” and the other two dimensions, so called, which needless to say is wholly alien to mathematics, is inherent also in the opposition of the notions of sensation and contemplation. Extension into depth converts the former into the latter; in fact, depth is the first 169and genuine dimension in the literal sense of the word.^[180] In it the waking consciousness is active, whereas in the others it is strictly passive. It is the symbolic content of a particular order as understood by one particular Culture that is expressed by this original fundamental and unanalysable element. The experiencing of depth (this is a premiss upon which all that follows is dependent) is an act, as entirely involuntary and necessary as it is creative, whereby the ego keeps its world, so to say, in subordination (zudiktiert erhält). Out of the rain of impressions the ego fashions a formal unit, a cinematic picture, which as soon as it is mastered by the understanding is subjected to law and the causality principle; and therefore, as the projection of an individual spirit it is transient and mortal.

There is no doubt, however reason may contest it, that this extension is capable of infinite variety, and that it operates differently not merely as between child and man, or nature-man and townsman, or Chinese and Romans, but as between individual and individual according as they experience their worlds contemplatively or alertly, actively or placidly. Every artist has rendered “Nature” by line and by tone, every physicist—Greek, Arabian or German—has dissected “Nature” into ultimate elements, and how is it that they have not all discovered the same? Because every one of them has had his own Nature, though—with a naïveté that was really the salvation of his world-idea and of his own self—every one believed that he had it in common with all the rest. Nature is a possession which is saturated through and through with the most personal connotations. Nature is a function of the particular Culture.

Kant believed that he had decided the great question of whether this a priori element was pre-existent or obtained by experience, by his celebrated formula that Space is the form of perception which underlies all world impressions. But the “world” of the careless child and the dreamer undeniably possess this form in an insecure and hesitant way,^[181] and it is only the tense, practical, technical treatment of the world-around—imposed on the free-moving being which, unlike the lilies of the fields, must care for its life—that lets 170sensuous self-extension stiffen into rational tridimensionality. And it is only the city-man of matured Cultures that really lives in this glaring wakefulness, and only for his thought that there is a Space wholly divorced from sensuous life, “absolute,” dead and alien to Time; and it exists not as a form of the intuitively-perceived but as a form of the rationally-comprehended. There is no manner of doubt that the “space” which Kant saw all around him with such unconditional certainty when he was thinking out his theory, did not exist in anything like so rigorous a form for his Carolingian ancestors. Kant’s greatness consists in his having created the idea of a "form a priori," but not in the application that he gave it. We have already seen that Time is not a “form of perception” nor for that matter a form at all—forms exist only in the extended—and that there is no possibility of defining it except as a counter-concept to Space. But there is the further question—does this word “space” exactly cover the formal content of the intuitively-perceived? And beyond all this there is the plain fact that the “form of perception” alters with distance. Every distant mountain range is “perceived” as a scenic plane. No one will pretend that he sees the moon as a body; for the eye it is a pure plane and it is only by the aid of the telescope—i.e. when the distance is artificially reduced—that it progressively obtains a spatial form. Obviously, then, the “form of perception” is a function of distance. Moreover, when we reflect upon anything, we do not exactly remember the impressions that we received at the time, but “represent to ourselves” the picture of a space abstracted from them. But this representation may and does deceive us regarding the living actuality. Kant let himself be misled; he should certainly not have permitted himself to distinguish between forms of perception and forms of ratiocination, for his notion of Space in principle embraced both.^[182]

Just as Kant marred the Time-problem by bringing it into relation with an essentially misunderstood arithmetic and—on that basis—dealing with a phantom sort of time that lacks the life-quality of direction and is therefore a mere spatial scheme, so also he marred the Space-problem by relating it to a common-place geometry.

It befell that a few years after the completion of Kant’s main work Gauss discovered the first of the Non-Euclidean geometries. These, irreproachably 171demonstrated as regards their own internal validity, enable it to be proved that there are several strictly mathematical kinds of three-dimensional extension, all of which are a priori certain, and none of which can be singled out to rank as the genuine “form of perception.”

It was a grave, and in a contemporary of Euler and Lagrange an unpardonable, error to postulate that the Classical school-geometry (for it was that which Kant always had in mind) was to be found reproduced in the forms of Nature around us. In moments of attentive observation at very short range, and in cases in which the relations considered are sufficiently small, the living impressions and the rules of customary geometry are certainly in approximate agreement. But the exact conformity asserted by philosophy can be demonstrated neither by the eye nor by measuring-instruments. Both these must always stop short at a certain limit of accuracy which is very far indeed below that which would be necessary, say, for determining which of the Non-Euclidean geometries is the geometry of “empirical” Space.^[183] On the large scales and for great distances, where the experience of depth completely dominates the perception-picture (for example, looking on a broad landscape as against a drawing) the form of perception is in fundamental contradiction with mathematics. A glance down any avenue shows us that parallels meet at the horizon. Western perspective and the otherwise quite different perspective of Chinese painting are both alike based on this fact, and the connexion of these perspectives with the root-problems of their respective mathematics is unmistakable.

Experiential Depth, in the infinite variety of its modes, eludes every sort of numerical definition. The whole of lyric poetry and music, the entire painting of Egypt, China and the West by hypothesis deny any strictly mathematical structure in space as felt and seen, and it is only because all modern philosophers have been destitute of the smallest understanding of painting that they have failed to note the contradiction. The “horizon” in and by which every visual image gradually passes into a definitive plane, is incapable of any mathematical treatment. Every stroke of a landscape painter’s brush refutes the assertions of conventional epistemology.

As mathematical magnitudes abstract from life, the “three dimensions” have no natural limits. But when this proposition becomes entangled with the surface-and-depth of experienced impression, the original epistemological error leads to another, viz., that apprehended extension is also without limits, although in fact our vision only comprises the illuminated portion of space and stops at the light-limit of the particular moment, which may be the star-heavens or merely the bright atmosphere. The “visual” world is the totality 172of 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.

The outcome, then, of Gauss’s discovery, which completely altered the course of modern mathematics,^[184] was the statement that there are severally equally valid structures of three-dimensional extension. That it should even be asked which of them corresponds to actual perception shows that the problem was not in the least comprehended. Mathematics, whether or not it employs visible images and representations as working conveniences, concerns itself with systems that are entirely emancipated from life, time and distance, with form-worlds of pure numbers whose validity—not fact-foundation—is timeless and like everything else that is “known” is known by causal logic and not experienced.

With this, the difference between the living intuition-way and the mathematical form-language became manifest and the secret of spatial becoming opened out.

As becoming is the foundation of the become, continuous living history that of fulfilled dead nature, the organic that of the mechanical, destiny that of causal law and the causally-settled, so too direction is the origin of extension. The secret of Life accomplishing itself which is touched upon by the word Time forms the foundation of that which, as accomplished, is understood by (or rather indicated to an inner feeling in us by) the word Space. Every extension that is actual has first been accomplished in and with an experience of depth, and what is primarily indicated by the word Time is just this process of extending, first sensuously (in the main, visually) and only later intellectually, into depth and distance, i.e., the step from the planar semi-impression to the macrocosmically ordered world-picture with its mysterious-manifest kinesis. We feel—and the feeling is what constitutes the state of all-round awareness in us—that we are in an extension that encircles us; and it is only necessary to follow out this original impression that we have of the worldly to see that in reality there is only one true “dimension” of space, which is direction from one’s self outwards into the distance, the “there” and the future, and that the abstract system of three dimensions is a mechanical representation and not a fact of life. By the depth-experience sensation is expanded into the world. We have seen already that the directedness that 173is in life wears the badge of irreversibility, and there is something of this same hall-mark of Time in our instinctive tendency to feel the depth that is in the world uni-directionally also—viz., from ourselves outwards, and never from the horizon inwards. The bodily mobility of man and beast is disposed in this sense. We move forward—towards the Future, nearing with every step not merely our aim but our old age—and we feel every backward look as a glance at something that is past, that has already become history.^[185]

If we can describe the basic form of the understood, viz., causality, as destiny become rigid, we may similarly speak of spatial depth as a time become rigid. That which not only man but even the beast feels operative around him as destiny, he perceives by touching, looking, listening, scenting as movement, and under his intense scrutiny it stiffens and becomes causal. We feel that it is drawing towards spring and we feel in advance how the spring landscape expands around us; but we know that the earth as it moves in space revolves and that the duration of spring consists of ninety such revolutions of the earth, or days. Time gives birth to Space, but Space gives death to Time.

Had Kant been more precise, he would, instead of speaking of the “two forms of perception,” have called time the form of perception and space the form of the perceived, and then the connexion of the two would probably have revealed itself to him. The logician, mathematician, or scientist in his moments of intense thought, knows only the Become—which has been detached from the singular event by the very act of meditating upon it—and true systematic space—in which everything possesses the property of a mathematically-expressible “duration.” But it is just this that indicates to us how space is continuously “becoming.” While we gaze into the distance with our senses, it floats around us, but when we are startled, the alert eye sees a tense and rigid space. This space is; the principle of its existing at all is that it is, outside time and detached from it and from life. In it duration, a piece of perished time, resides as a known property of things. And, as we know ourselves too as being in this space, we know that we also have a duration and a limit, of which the moving finger of our clock ceaselessly warns us. But the rigid Space itself is transient too—at the first relaxation of our intellectual tension it vanishes from the many-coloured spread of our world-around—and so it is a sign and symbol of the most elemental and powerful symbol, of life itself.

For the involuntary and unqualified realization of depth, which dominates the consciousness with the force of an elemental event (simultaneously with the awakening of the inner life), marks the frontier between child and ... Man. The symbolic experience of depth is what is lacking in the child, who grasps at the moon and knows as yet no meaning in the outer world but, like the soul of primitive man, dawns in a dreamlike continuum of sensations (in traumhafter 174Verbundenheit mit allem Empfindungshaften hindämmert). Of course the child is not without experience of the extended, of a very simple kind, but there is no world-perception; distance is felt, but it does not yet speak to the soul. And with the soul’s awakening, direction, too, first reaches living expression—Classical expression in steady adherence to the near-present and exclusion of the distant and future; Faustian in direction-energy which has an eye only for the most distant horizons; Chinese, in free hither-and-thither wandering that nevertheless goes to the goal; Egyptian in resolute march down the path once entered. Thus the Destiny-idea manifests itself in every line of a life. With it alone do we become members of a particular Culture, whose members are connected by a common world-feeling and a common world-form derived from it. A deep identity unites the awakening of the soul, its birth into clear existence in the name of a Culture, with the sudden realization of distance and time, the birth of its outer world through the symbol of extension; and thenceforth this symbol is and remains the prime symbol of that life, imparting to it its specific style and the historical form in which it progressively actualizes its inward possibilities. From the specific directedness is derived the specific prime-symbol of extension, namely, for the Classical world-view the near, strictly limited, self-contained Body, for the Western infinitely wide and infinitely profound three-dimensional Space, for the Arabian the world as a Cavern. And therewith an old philosophical problem dissolves into nothing: this prime form of the world is innate in so far as it is an original possession of the soul of that Culture which is expressed by our life as a whole, and acquired in so far that every individual soul re-enacts for itself that creative act and unfolds in early childhood the symbol of depth to which its existence is predestined, as the emerging butterfly unfolds its wings. The first comprehension of depth is an act of birth—the spiritual complement of the bodily.^[186] In it the Culture is born out of its mother-landscape, and the act is repeated by every one of its individual souls throughout its life-course. This is what Plato—connecting it with an early Hellenic belief—called anamnesis. The definiteness of the world-form, which for each dawning soul suddenly is, derives meaning from Becoming. Kant the systematic, however, with his conception of the form a priori, would approach the interpretation of this very riddle from a dead result instead of along a living way.

From now on, we shall consider the kind of extension as the prime symbol of a Culture. From it we are to deduce the entire form-language of its actuality, its physiognomy as contrasted with the physiognomy of every other Culture and still more with the almost entire lack of physiognomy in primitive man’s world-around. For now the interpretation of depth rises to acts, to formative expression in works, to the trans-forming of actuality, not now merely in order 175to subserve necessities of life (as in the case of the animals) but above all to create a picture out of extensional elements of all sorts (material, line, colour, tone, motion)—a picture, often, that re-emerges with power to charm after lost centuries in the world-picture of another Culture and tells new men of the way in which its authors understood the world.

But the prime symbol does not actualize itself; it is operative through the form-sense of every man, every community, age and epoch and dictates the style of every life-expression. It is inherent in the form of the state, the religious myths and cults, the ethical ideals, the forms of painting and music and poetry, the fundamental notions of each science—but it is not presented by these. Consequently, it is not presentable by words, for language and words are themselves derived symbols. Every individual symbol tells of it, but only to the inner feelings, not to the understanding. And when we say, as henceforth we shall say, that the prime-symbol of the Classical soul is the material and individual body, that of the Western pure infinite space, it must always be with the reservation that concepts cannot represent the inconceivable, and thus at the most a significative feeling may be evoked by the sound of words.

Infinite space is the ideal that the Western soul has always striven to find, and to see immediately actualized, in its world-around; and hence it is that the countless space-theories of the last centuries possess—over and above all ostensible “results”—a deep import as symptoms of a world-feeling. In how far does unlimited extension underlie all objective things? There is hardly a single problem that has been more earnestly pondered than this; it would almost seem as if every other world-question was dependent upon the one problem of the nature of space. And is it not in fact so—for us? And how, then, has it escaped notice that the whole Classical world never expended one word on it, and indeed did not even possess a word^[187] by which the problem could be exactly outlined? Why had the great pre-Socratics nothing to say on it? Did they overlook in their world just that which appears to us the problem of all problems? Ought we not, in fact, to have seen long ago that the answer is in the very fact of their silence? How is it that according to our deepest feeling the “world” is nothing but that world-of-space which is the true offspring of our depth-experience, and whose grand emptiness is corroborated by the star-systems lost in it? Could a “world” of this sense have been made even comprehensible to a Classical thinker? In short, we suddenly discover that the “eternal problem” that Kant, in the name of humanity, tackled with a passion 176that itself is symbolic, is a purely Western problem that simply does not arise in the intellects of other Cultures.

What then was it that Classical man, whose insight into his own world-around was certainly not less piercing than ours, regarded as the prime problem of all being? It was the problem of ἀρχή, the material origin and foundation of all sensuously-perceptible things. If we grasp this we shall get close to the significance of the fact—not the fact of space, but the fact that made it a necessity of destiny for the space-problem to become the problem of the Western, and only the Western, soul.^[188] This very spatiality (Räumlichkeit) that is the truest and sublimest element in the aspect of our universe, that absorbs into itself and begets out of itself the substantiality of all things, Classical humanity (which knows no word for, and therefore has no idea of, space) with one accord cuts out as the nonent, τὸ μὴ ὄν, that which is not. The pathos of this denial can scarcely be exaggerated. The whole passion of the Classical soul is in this act of excluding by symbolic negation that which it would not feel as actual, that in which its own existence could not be expressed. A world of other colour suddenly confronts us here. The Classical statue in its splendid bodiliness—all structure and expressive surfaces and no incorporeal arrière-pensée whatsoever—contains without remainder all that Actuality is for the Classical eye. The material, the optically definite, the comprehensible, the immediately present—this list exhausts the characteristics of this kind of extension. The Classical universe, the Cosmos or well-ordered aggregate of all near and completely viewable 177things, is concluded by the corporeal vault of heaven. More there is not. The need that is in us to think of “space” as being behind as well as before this shell was wholly absent from the Classical world-feeling. The Stoics went so far as to treat even properties and relations of things as “bodies.” For Chrysippus, the Divine Pneuma is a “body,” for Democritus seeing consists in our being penetrated by material particles of the things seen. The State is a body which is made up of all the bodies of its citizens, the law knows only corporeal persons and material things. And the feeling finds its last and noblest expression in the stone body of the Classical temple. The windowless interior is carefully concealed by the array of columns; but outside there is not one truly straight line to be found. Every flight of steps has a slight sweep outward, every step relatively to the next. The pediment, the roof-ridge, the sides are all curved. Every column has a slight swell and none stand truly vertical or truly equidistant from one another. But swell and inclination and distance vary from the corners to the centres of the sides in a carefully toned-off ratio, and so the whole corpus is given a something that swings mysterious about a centre. The curvatures are so fine that to a certain extent they are invisible to the eye and only to be “sensed.” But it is just by these means that direction in depth is eliminated. While the Gothic style soars, the Ionic swings. The interior of the cathedral pulls up with primeval force, but the temple is laid down in majestic rest. All this is equally true as relating to the Faustian and Apollinian Deity, and likewise of the fundamental ideas of the respective physics. To the principles of position, material and form we have opposed those of straining movement, force and mass, and we have defined the last-named as a constant ratio between force and acceleration, nay, finally volatilized both in the purely spatial elements of capacity and intensity. It was an obligatory consequence also of this way of conceiving actuality that the instrumental music of the great 18th-Century masters should emerge as a master-art—for it is the only one of the arts whose form-world is inwardly related to the contemplative vision of pure space. In it, as opposed to the statues of Classical temple and forum, we have bodiless realms of tone, tone-intervals, tone-seas. The orchestra swells, breaks, and ebbs, it depicts distances, lights, shadows, storms, driving clouds, lightning flashes, colours etherealized and transcendent—think of the instrumentation of Gluck and Beethoven. “Contemporary,” in our sense, with the Canon of Polycletus, the treatise in which the great sculptor laid down the strict rules of human body-build which remained authoritative till beyond Lysippus, we find the strict canon (completed by Stamitz about 1740) of the sonata-movement of four elements which begins to relax in late-Beethoven quartets and symphonies and, finally, in the lonely, utterly infinitesimal tone-world of the “Tristan” music, frees itself from all earthly comprehensibleness. This prime feeling of a loosing, Erlösung, solution, of the Soul in the Infinite, of a liberation from all material heaviness which the 178highest 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.

Each of the great Cultures, then, has arrived at a secret language of world-feeling that is only fully comprehensible by him whose soul belongs to that Culture. We must not deceive ourselves. Perhaps we can read a little way into the Classical soul, because its form-language is almost the exact inversion of the Western; how far we have succeeded or can ever succeed is a question which necessarily forms the starting-point of all criticism of the Renaissance, and it is a very difficult one. But when we are told that probably (it is at best a doubtful venture to meditate upon so alien an expression of Being) the Indians conceived numbers which according to our ideas possessed neither value nor magnitude nor relativity, and which only became positive and negative, great or small units in virtue of position, we have to admit that it is impossible for us exactly to re-experience what spiritually underlies this kind of number. For us, 3 is always something, be it positive or negative; for the Greeks it was unconditionally a positive magnitude, +3; but for the Indian it indicates a possibility without existence, to which the word “something” is not yet applicable, outside both existence and non-existence which are properties to be introduced into it. +3, -3, ⅓, are thus emanating actualities of subordinate rank which reside in the mysterious substance (3) in some way that is entirely hidden from us. It takes a Brahmanic soul to perceive these numbers as self-evident, as ideal emblems of a self-complete world-form; to us they are as unintelligible as is the Brahman Nirvana, for which, as lying beyond life and death, sleep and waking, passion, compassion and dispassion and yet somehow actual, words entirely fail us. Only this spirituality could originate the grand conception of nothingness as a true number, zero, and even then this zero is the Indian zero for which existent and non-existent are equally external designations.^[189]

Arabian thinkers of the ripest period—and they included minds of the very first order like Alfarabi and Alkabi—in controverting the ontology of Aristotle, proved that the body as such did not necessarily assume space for existence, and deduced the essence of this space—the Arabian kind of extension, that is—from the characteristic of “one’s being in a position.”

179But this does not prove that as against Aristotle and Kant they were in error or that their thinking was muddled (as we so readily say of what our own brains cannot take in). It shows that the Arabian spirit possessed other world-categories than our own. They could have rebutted Kant, or Kant them, with the same subtlety of proof—and both disputants would have remained convinced of the correctness of their respective standpoints.

When we talk of space to-day, we are all thinking more or less in the same style, just as we are all using the same languages and word-signs, whether we are considering mathematical space or physical space or the space of painting or that of actuality, although all philosophizing that insists (as it must) upon putting an identity of understanding in the place of such kinship of significance-feeling must remain somewhat questionable. But no Hellene or Egyptian or Chinaman could re-experience any part of those feelings of ours, and no artwork or thought-system could possibly convey to him unequivocally what “space” means for us. Again, the prime conceptions originated in the quite differently constituted soul of the Greek, like ἀρχή, ὕλη, μορφἠ, comprise the whole content of his world. But this world is differently constituted from ours. It is, for us, alien and remote. We may take these words of Greek and translate them by words of our own like “origin,” “matter” and “form,” but it is mere imitation, a feeble effort to penetrate into a world of feeling in which the finest and deepest elements, in spite of all we can do, remain dumb; it is as though one tried to set the Parthenon sculptures for a string quartet, or cast Voltaire’s God in bronze. The master-traits of thought, life and world-consciousness are as manifold and different as the features of individual men; in those respects as in others there are distinctions of “races” and “peoples,” and men are as unconscious of these distinctions as they are ignorant of whether “red” and “yellow” do or do not mean the same for others as for themselves. It is particularly the common symbolic of language that nourishes the illusion of a homogeneous constitution of human inner-life and an identical world-form; in this respect the great thinkers of one and another Culture resemble the colour-blind in that each is unaware of his own condition and smiles at the errors of the rest.

And now I draw the conclusions. There is a plurality of prime symbols. It is the depth-experience through which the world becomes, through which perception extends itself to world. Its signification is for the soul to which it belongs and only for that soul, and it is different in waking and dreaming, acceptance and scrutiny, as between young and old, townsmen and peasant, man and woman. It actualizes for every high Culture the possibility of form upon which that Culture’s existence rests and it does so of deep necessity. All fundamentals words like our mass, substance, material, thing, body, extension (and multitudes of words of the like order in other culture-tongues) are emblems, obligatory and determined by destiny, that out of the infinite abundance 180of world-possibilities evoke in the name of the individual Culture those possibilities that alone are significant and therefore necessary for it. None of them is exactly transferable just as it is into the experiential living and knowing of another Culture. And none of these prime words ever recurs. The choice of prime symbol in the moment of the Culture-soul’s awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil—a moment that for one who can read world-history thus contains something catastrophic—decides all.

Culture, as the soul’s total expression “become” and perceptible in gestures and works, as its mortal transient body, obnoxious to law, number and causality:

As the historical drama, a picture in the whole picture of world-history:

As the sum of grand emblems of life, feeling and understanding:

—this is the language through which alone a soul can tell of what it undergoes.

The macrocosm, too, is a property of the individual soul; we can never know how it stands with the soul of another. That which is implied by “infinite space,” the space that “passeth all understanding,” which is the creative interpretation of depth-experience proper and peculiar to us men of the West—the kind of extension that is nothingness to the Greeks, the Universe to us—dyes our world in a colour that the Classical, the Indian and the Egyptian souls had not on their palettes. One soul listens to the world-experience in A flat major, another in F minor; one apprehends it in the Euclidean spirit, another in the contrapuntal, a third in the Magian spirit. From the purest analytical Space and from Nirvana to the most somatic reality of Athens, there is a series of prime symbols each of which is capable of forming a complete world out of itself. And, as the idea of the Babylonian or that of the Indian world was remote, strange and elusive for the men of the five or six Cultures that followed, so also the Western world will be incomprehensible to the men of Cultures yet unborn.

Henceforth we shall designate the soul of the Classical Culture, which chose the sensuously-present individual body as the ideal type of the extended, by the name (familiarized by Nietzsche) of the Apollinian. In opposition to it we have the Faustian soul, whose prime-symbol is pure and limitless space, and whose “body” is the Western Culture that blossomed forth with the birth of the Romanesque style in the 10th century in the Northern plain between the Elbe and the Tagus. The nude statue is Apollinian, the art of the fugue Faustian. Apollinian are: mechanical statics, the sensuous cult of the Olympian gods, the politically individual city-states of Greece, the doom of Œdipus and the phallus-symbol. Faustian are: Galileian dynamics, Catholic and Protestant dogmatics, the great dynasties of the Baroque with their cabinet diplomacy, the destiny of Lear and the Madonna-ideal from Dante’s Beatrice to the last line of Faust II. The painting that defines the individual body by contours is Apollinian, that which forms space by means of light and shade is Faustian—this is the difference between the fresco of Polygnotus and the oil painting of Rembrandt. The Apollinian existence is that of the Greek who describes his ego as soma and who lacks all idea of an inner development and therefore all real history, inward and outward; the Faustian is an existence which is led with a deep consciousness and introspection of the ego, and a resolutely personal culture evidenced in memoirs, reflections, retrospects and prospects and conscience. And in the time of Augustus, in the countries between Nile and Tigris, Black Sea and South Arabia, there appears—aloof but able to speak to us through forms borrowed, adopted and inherited—the Magian soul of the Arabian Culture with its algebra, astrology and alchemy, its mosaics and arabesques, its caliphates and mosques, and the sacraments and scriptures of the Persian, Jewish, Christian, “post-Classical” and Manichæan religions.

“Space”—speaking now in the Faustian idiom—is a spiritual something, rigidly distinct from the momentary sense-present, which could not be represented in an Apollinian language, whether Greek or Latin. But the created 184expression-space of the Apollinian arts is equally alien to ours. The tiny cella of the early-Classical temple was a dumb dark nothingness, a structure (originally) of perishable material, an envelope of the moment in contrast to the eternal vaults of Magian cupolas and Gothic naves, and the closed ranks of columns were expressly meant to convey that for the eye at any rate this body possessed no Inward. In no other Culture is the firm footing, the socket, so emphasized. The Doric column bores into the ground, the vessels are always thought of from below upward (whereas those of the Renaissance float above their footing), and the sculpture-schools feel the stabilizing of their figures as their main problem. Hence in archaic works the legs are disproportionately emphasized, the foot is planted on the full sole, and if the drapery falls straight down, a part of the hem is removed to show that the foot is standing. The Classical relief is strictly stereometrically set on a plane, and there is an interspace between the figures but no depth. A landscape of Claude Lorrain, on the contrary, is nothing but space, every detail being made to subserve its illustration. All bodies in it possess an atmospheric and perspective meaning purely as carriers of light and shade. The extreme of this disembodiment of the world in the service of space is Impressionism. Given this world-feeling, the Faustian soul in the springtime necessarily arrived at an architectural problem which had its centre of gravity in the spatial vaulting-over of vast, and from porch to choir dynamically deep, cathedrals. This last expressed its depth-experience. But with it was associated, in opposition to the cavernous Magian expression-space,^[190] the element of a soaring into the broad universe. Magian roofing, whether it be cupola or barrel-vault or even the horizontal baulk of a basilica, covers in. Strzygowski^[191] has very aptly described the architectural idea of Hagia Sophia as an introverted Gothic striving under a closed outer casing. On the other hand, in the cathedral of Florence the cupola crowns the long Gothic body of 1367, and the same tendency rose in Bramante’s scheme for St. Peter’s to a veritable towering-up, a magnificent “Excelsior,” that Michelangelo carried to completion with the dome that floats high and bright over the vast vaulting. To this sense of space the Classical opposes the symbol of the Doric peripteros, wholly corporeal and comprehensible in one glance.

The Classical Culture begins, then, with a great renunciation. A rich, pictorial, almost over-ripe art lay ready to its hand. But this could not become the expression of the young soul, and so from about 1100 B.C. the harsh, narrow, and to our eyes scanty and barbaric, early-Doric geometrical style appears in opposition to the Minoan.^[192] For the three centuries which correspond to the flowering of our Gothic, there is no hint of an architecture, and it is only at about 650 B.C., “contemporarily” with Michelangelo’s transition into the Baroque, 185that the Doric and Etruscan temple-type arises. All “Early” art is religious, and this symbolic Negation is not less so than the Egyptian and the Gothic Affirmation. The idea of burning the dead accords with the cult-site but not with the cult-building; and the Early Classical religion which conceals itself from us behind the solemn names of Calchas, Tiresias, Orpheus and (probably) Numa^[193] possessed for its rites simply that which is left of an architectural idea when one has subtracted the architecture, viz., the sacred precinct. The original cult-plan is thus the Etruscan templum, a sacred area merely staked off on the ground by the augurs with an impassable boundary and a propitious entrance on the East side.^[194] A “templum” was created where a rite was to be performed or where the representative of the state authority, senate or army, happened to be. It existed only for the duration of its use, and the spell was then removed. It was probably only about 700 B.C. that the Classical soul so far mastered itself as to represent this architectural Nothing in the sensible form of a built body. In the long run the Euclidean feeling proved stronger than the mere antipathy to duration.

Faustian architecture, on the contrary, begins on the grand scale simultaneously with the first stirrings of a new piety (the Cluniac reform, c. 1000) and a new thought (the Eucharistic controversy between Berengar of Tours and Lanfranc 1050),^[195] and proceeds at once to plans of gigantic intention; often enough, as in the case of Speyer, the whole community did not suffice to fill the cathedral,^[196] and often again it proved impossible to complete the projected scheme. The passionate language of this architecture is that of the poems too.^[197] Far apart as may seem the Christian hymnology of the south and the Eddas of the still heathen north, they are alike in the implicit space-endlessness of prosody, rhythmic syntax and imagery. Read the Dies Iræ together with the Völuspá,^[198] which is little earlier; there is the same adamantine will to overcome 186and break all resistances of the visible. No rhythm ever imagined radiates immensities of space and distance as the old Northern does:

The accents of the Homeric hexameter are the soft rustle of a leaf in the midday sun, the rhythm of matter; but the “Stabreim” likes “potential energy” in the world-pictures of modern physics, creates a tense restraint in the void without limits, distant night-storms above the highest peaks. In its swaying indefiniteness all words and things dissolve themselves—it is the dynamics, not the statics, of language. The same applies to the grave rhythm of Media vita in morte sumus. Here is heralded the colour of Rembrandt and the instrumentation of Beethoven—here infinite solitude is felt as the home of the Faustian soul. What is Valhalla? Unknown to the Germans of the Migrations and even to the Merovingian Age, it was conceived by the nascent Faustian soul. It was conceived, no doubt, under Classic-pagan and Arabian-Christian impressions, for the antique and the sacred writings, the ruins and mosaics and miniatures, the cults and rites and dogmas of these past Cultures reached into the new life at all points. And yet, this Valhalla is something beyond all sensible actualities floating in remote, dim, Faustian regions. Olympus rests on the homely Greek soil, the Paradise of the Fathers is a magic garden somewhere in the Universe, but Valhalla is nowhere. Lost in the limitless, it appears with its inharmonious gods and heroes the supreme symbol of solitude. Siegfried, Parzeval, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust are the loneliest heroes in all the Cultures. Read the wondrous awakening of the inner life in Wolfram’s Parzeval. The longing for the woods, the mysterious compassion, the ineffable sense of forsakenness—it is all Faustian and only Faustian. Every one of us knows it. The motive returns with all its profundity in the Easter scene of Faust I.

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 187in separate temples, there is here the one never-ending sacrifice repeated everywhere and every day. This is the Faustian idea of the 9th-11th Centuries, the Edda time, foreshadowed by Anglo-Saxon missionaries like Winfried but only then ripened. The Cathedral, with its High Altar enclosing the accomplished miracle, is its expression in stone.^[199]

The plurality of separate bodies which represents Cosmos for the Classical soul, requires a similar pantheon—hence the antique polytheism. The single world-volume, be it conceived as cavern or as space, demands the single god of Magian or Western Christianity. Athene or Apollo might be represented by a statue, but it is and has long been evident to our feeling that the Deity of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation can only be “manifested” in the storm of an organ fugue or the solemn progress of cantata and mass. From the rich manifold of figures in the Edda and contemporary legends of saints to Goethe our myth develops itself in steady opposition to the Classical—in the one case a continuous disintegration of the divine that culminated in the early Empire in an impossible multitude of deities, in the other a process of simplification that led to the Deism of the 18th Century.

The Magian hierarchy of heaven—angels, saints, persons of the Trinity—has grown paler and paler, more and more disembodied, in the sphere of the Western pseudomorphosis,^[200] supported though it was by the whole weight of Church authority, and even the Devil—the great adversary in the Gothic world-drama^[201]—has disappeared unnoticed from among the possibilities of the Faustian world-feeling. Luther could still throw the inkpot at him, but he has been passed over in silence by perplexed Protestant theologians long ago. For the solitude of the Faustian soul agrees not at all with a duality of world powers. God himself is the All. About the end of the 17th Century this religiousness could no longer be limited to pictorial expression, and instrumental music came as its last and only form-language: we may say that the Catholic faith is to the Protestant as an altar-piece is to an oratorio. But even the Germanic gods and heroes are surrounded by this rebuffing immensity and enigmatic gloom. They are steeped in music and in night, for daylight gives visual bounds and therefore shapes bodily things. Night eliminates body, day soul. Apollo and Athene have no souls. On Olympus rests the eternal light of the transparent southern day, and Apollo’s hour is high noon, when great Pan sleeps. But Valhalla is light-less, and even in the Eddas we can trace that deep midnight of Faust’s study-broodings, the midnight that is caught by Rembrandt’s etchings and absorbs Beethoven’s tone colours. No Wotan or Baldur or Freya has “Euclidean” form. Of them, as of the Vedic gods of India, it can be said that they suffer not “any graven image or any likeness whatsoever”; and this impossibility carries an implicit recognition that eternal space, and not the corporeal copy—which levels them down, desecrates them, denies them—is 188the 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.

That which is expressed by the soul of the West in its extraordinary wealth of media—words, tones, colours, pictorial perspectives, philosophical systems, legends, the spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals and the formulæ of functions—namely its world-feeling, is expressed by the soul of Old Egypt (which was remote from all ambitions towards theory and literariness) almost exclusively by the immediate language of Stone. Instead of spinning word-subtleties around its form of extension, its “space” and its “time,” instead of forming hypotheses and number-systems and dogmas, it set up its huge symbols in the landscape of the Nile in all silence. Stone is the great emblem of the Timeless-Become; space and death seem bound up in it. “Men have built for the dead,” says Bachofen in his autobiography, “before they have built for the living, and even as a perishable wooden structure suffices for the span of time that is given to the living, so the housing of the dead for ever demands the solid stone of the earth. The oldest cult is associated with the stone that marks the place of burial, the oldest temple-building with the tomb-structure, the origins of art and decoration with the grave-ornament. Symbol has created itself in the graves. That which is thought and felt and silently prayed at the grave-side can be expressed by no word, but only hinted by the boding symbol that stands in unchanging grave repose.” The dead strive no more. They are no more Time, but only Space—something that stays (if indeed it stays at all) but does not ripen towards a Future; and hence it is stone, the abiding stone, that expresses how the dead is mirrored in the waking consciousness of the living. The Faustian soul looks for an immortality to follow the bodily end, a sort of marriage with endless space, and it disembodies the stone in its Gothic thrust-system (contemporary, we may note, with the “consecutives” in Church music^[202]) till at last nothing remained visible but the indwelling depth- and height-energy of this self-extension. The Apollinian soul would have its dead burned, would see them annihilated, and so it remained averse from stone building throughout the early period of its Culture. The Egyptian soul saw itself as moving down a narrow and inexorably-prescribed life-path to come at the end before the judges of the dead (“Book of the Dead,” cap. 125). That was 189its Destiny-idea. The Egyptian’s existence is that of the traveller who follows one unchanging direction, and the whole form-language of his Culture is a translation into the sensible of this one theme. And as we have taken endless space as the prime symbol of the North and body as that of the Classical, so we may take the word way as most intelligibly expressing that of the Egyptians. Strangely, and for Western thought almost incomprehensibly, the one element in extension that they emphasize is that of direction in depth. The tomb-temples of the Old Kingdom and especially the mighty pyramid-temples of the Fourth Dynasty represent, not a purposed organization of space such as we find in the mosque and the cathedral, but a rhythmically ordered sequence of spaces. The sacred way leads from the gate-building on the Nile through passages, halls, arcaded courts and pillared rooms that grow ever narrower and narrower, to the chamber of the dead,^[203] and similarly the Sun-temples of the Fifth Dynasty are not “buildings” but a path enclosed by mighty masonry.^[204] The reliefs and the paintings appear always as rows which with an impressive compulsion lead the beholder in a definite direction. The ram and sphinx avenues of the New Empire have the same object. For the Egyptian, the depth-experience which governed his world-form was so emphatically directional that he comprehended space more or less as a continuous process of actualization. There is nothing rigid about distance as expressed here. The man must move, and so become himself a symbol of life, in order to enter into relation with the stone part of the symbolism. “Way” signifies both Destiny and third dimension. The grand wall-surfaces, reliefs, colonnades past which he moves are “length and breadth”; that is, mere perceptions of the senses, and it is the forward-driving life that extends them into “world.” Thus the Egyptian experienced space, we may say, in and by the processional march along its distinct elements, whereas the Greek who sacrificed outside the temple did not feel it and the man of our Gothic centuries praying in the cathedral let himself be immersed in the quiet infinity of it. And consequently the art of these Egyptians must aim at plane effects and nothing else, even when it is making use of solid means. For the Egyptian, the pyramid over the king’s tomb is a triangle, a huge, powerfully expressive plane that, whatever be the direction from which one approaches, closes off the “way” and commands the landscape. For him, the columns of the inner passages and courts, with their dark backgrounds, their dense array and their profusion of adornments, appear entirely as vertical strips which rhythmically accompany the march of the priests. Relief-work is—in utter contrast to the Classical—carefully restricted in one plane; in the course of development dated by the Third to the Fifth dynasties it diminishes from the thickness of a finger to that of a sheet of paper, and finally it is sunk in the 190plane.^[205] The dominance of the horizontal, the vertical and the right angle, and the avoidance of all foreshortening support the two-dimensional principle and serve to insulate this directional depth-experience which coincides with the way and the grave at its end. It is an art that admits of no deviation for the relief of the tense soul.

Is not this an expression in the noblest language that it is possible to conceive of what all our space-theories would like to put into words? Is it not a metaphysic in stone by the side of which the written metaphysics of Kant seems but a helpless stammering?

There is, however, another Culture that, different as it most fundamentally is from the Egyptian, yet found a closely-related prime symbol. This is the Chinese, with its intensely directional principle of the Tao.^[206] But whereas the Egyptian treads to the end a way that is prescribed for him with an inexorable necessity, the Chinaman wanders through his world; consequently, he is conducted to his god or his ancestral tomb not by ravines of stone, between faultless smooth walls, but by friendly Nature herself. Nowhere else has the landscape become so genuinely the material of the architecture. “Here, on religious foundations, there has been developed a grand lawfulness and unity common to all building, which, combined with the strict maintenance of a north-south general axis, always holds together gate-buildings, side-buildings, courts and halls in the same homogeneous plan, and has led finally to so grandiose a planning and such a command over ground and space that one is quite justified in saying that the artist builds and reckons with the landscape itself.”^[207] The temple is not a self-contained building but a lay-out, in which hills, water, trees, flowers, and stones in definite forms and dispositions are just as important as gates, walls, bridges and houses. This Culture is the only one in which the art of gardening is a grand religious art. There are gardens that are reflections of particular Buddhist sects.^[208] It is the architecture of the landscape, and only that, which explains the architecture of the buildings, with their flat extension and the emphasis laid on the roof as the really expressive element. And just as the devious ways through doors, over bridges, round hills and walls lead at last to the end, so the paintings take the beholder from detail to detail whereas Egyptian relief masterfully points him in the one set direction. “The whole 191picture is not to be taken at once. Sequence in time presupposes a sequence of space-elements through which the eye is to wander from one to the next.”^[209] Whereas the Egyptian architecture dominates the landscape, the Chinese espouses it. But in both cases it is direction in depth that maintains the becoming of space as a continuously-present experience.

All art is expression-language.^[210] Moreover, in its very earliest essays—which extend far back into the animal world—it is that of one active existence speaking for itself only, and it is unconscious of witnesses even though in the absence of such the impulse to expression would not come to utterance. Even in quite “late” conditions we often see, instead of the combination of artist and spectator, a crowd of art-makers who all dance or mime or sing. The idea of the “Chorus” as sum total of persons present has never entirely vanished from art-history. It is only the higher art that becomes decisively an art “before witnesses” and especially (as Nietzsche somewhere remarks) before God as the supreme witness.^[211]

This expression is either ornament or imitation. Both are higher possibilities and their polarity to one another is hardly perceptible in the beginnings. Of the two, imitation is definitely the earlier and the closer to the producing race. Imitation is the outcome of a physiognomic idea of a second person with whom (or which) the first is involuntarily induced into resonance of vital rhythm (mitschwingen imim); 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 192and movements, wherein children in particular excel. It reaches the superlative when we “let ourselves go” in the common song or parade-march or dance that creates out of many units one unit of feeling and expression, a “we.” But a “successful” picture of a man or a landscape is also the outcome of a felt harmony of the pictorial motion with the secret swing and sway of the living opposite; and it is this actualizing of physiognomic rhythm that requires the executant to be an adept who can reveal the idea, the soul, of the alien in the play of its surface. In certain unreserved moments we are all adepts of this sort, and in such moments, as we follow in an imperceptible rhythm the music and the play of facial expression, we suddenly look over the precipice and see great secrets. The aim of all imitation is effective simulation; this means effective assimilation of ourselves into an alien something—such a transposition and transubstantiation that the One lives henceforth in the Other that it describes or depicts—and it is able to awaken an intense feeling of unison over all the range from silent absorption and acquiescence to the most abandoned laughter and down into the last depths of the erotic, a unison which is inseparable from creative activity. In this wise arose the popular circling-dances (for instance, the Bavarian Schuhplattler was originally imitated from the courtship of the woodcocks) but this too is what Vasari means when he praises Cimabue and Giotto as the first who returned to the imitation of “Nature”—the Nature, that is, of springtime men, of which Meister Eckart said: “God flows out in all creatures, and therefore all created is God.” That which in this world-around presents itself to our contemplation—and therefore contains meaning for our feelings—as movement, we render by movement. Hence all imitation is in the broadest sense dramatic; drama is presented in the movement of the brush-stroke or the chisel, the melodic curve of the song, the tone of the recitation, the line of poetry, the description, the dance. But everything that we experience with and in seeings and hearings is always an alien soul to which we are uniting ourselves. It is only at the stage of the Megalopolis that art, reasoned to pieces and de-spiritualized, goes over to naturalism as that term is understood nowadays; viz., imitation of the charm of visible appearances, of the stock of sensible characters that are capable of being scientifically fixed.

Ornament detaches itself now from Imitation as something which does not follow the stream of life but rigidly faces it. Instead of physiognomic traits overheard in the alien being, we have established motives, symbols, which are impressed upon it. The intention is no longer to pretend but to conjure. The “I” overwhelms the “Thou.” Imitation is only a speaking with means that are born of the moment and unreproduceable—but Ornament employs a language emancipated from the speaking, a stock of forms that possesses duration and is not at the mercy of the individual.^[212]

Only the living can be imitated, and it can be imitated only in movements, 193for it is through these that it reveals itself to the senses of artists and spectators. To that extent, imitation belongs to Time and Direction. All the dancing and drawing and describing and portraying for eye and ear is irrevocably “directional,” and hence the highest possibilities of Imitation lie in the copying of a destiny, be it in tones, verses, picture or stage-scene.^[213] Ornament, on the contrary, is something taken away from Time: it is pure extension, settled and stable. Whereas an imitation expresses something by accomplishing itself, ornament can only do so by presenting itself to the senses as a finished thing. It is Being as such, wholly independent of origin. Every imitation possesses beginning and end, while an ornament possesses only duration, and therefore we can only imitate the destiny of an individual (for instance, Antigone or Desdemona), while by an ornament or symbol only the generalized destiny-idea itself can be represented (as, for example, that of the Classical world by the Doric column). And the former presupposes a talent, while the latter calls for an acquirable knowledge as well.

All strict arts have their grammar and syntax of form-language, with rules and laws, inward logic and tradition. This is true not merely for the Doric cabin-temple and Gothic cottage-cathedral, for the carving-schools of Egypt^[214] and Athens and the cathedral plastic of northern France, for the painting-schools of the Classical world and those of Holland and the Rhine and Florence, but also for the fixed rules of the Skalds and Minnesänger which were learned and practised as a craft (and dealt not merely with sentence and metre but also with gesture and the choice of imagery^[215]), for the narration-technique of the Vedic, Homeric and Celto-Germanic Epos, for the composition and delivery of the Gothic sermon (both vernacular and Latin), and for the orators’ prose^[216] in the Classical, and for the rules of French drama. In the ornamentation of an art-work is reflected the inviolable causality of the macrocosm as the man of the particular kind sees and comprehends it. Both have system. Each is penetrated with the religious side of life—fear and love.^[217] A genuine symbol can instil fear or can set free from fear; the “right” emancipates and the “wrong” hurts and depresses. The imitative side of the arts, on the contrary, stands closer to the real race-feelings of hate and love, out of which arises the opposition 194of ugly and beautiful. This is in relation only with the living, of which the inner rhythm repels us or draws us into phase with it, whether it be that of the sunset-cloud or that of the tense breath of the machine. An imitation is beautiful, an ornament significant, and therein lies the difference between direction and extension, organic and inorganic logic, life and death. That which we think beautiful is “worth copying.” Easily it swings with us and draws us on to imitate, to join in the singing, to repeat. Our hearts beat higher, our limbs twitch, and we are stirred till our spirits overflow. But as it belongs to Time, it “has its time.” A symbol endures, but everything beautiful vanishes with the life-pulsation of the man, the class, the people or the race that feels it as a specific beauty in the general cosmic rhythm.^[218] The “beauty” that Classical sculpture and poetry contained for Classical eyes is something different from the beauty that they contain for ours—something extinguished irrecoverably with the Classical soul—while what we regard as beautiful in it is something that only exists for us. Not only is that which is beautiful for one kind of man neutral or ugly for another—e.g., the whole of our music for the Chinese, or Mexican sculpture for us. For one and the same life the accustomed, the habitual, owing to the very fact of its possessing duration, cannot possess beauty.

And now for the first time we can see the opposition between these two sides of every art in all its depth. Imitation spiritualizes and quickens, ornament enchants and kills. The one becomes, the other is. And therefore the one is allied to love and, above all—in songs and riot and dance—to the sexual love, which turns existence to face the future; and the other to care of the past, to recollection^[219] and to the funerary. The beautiful is longingly pursued, the significant instils dread, and there is no deeper contrast than that between the house of the living and the house of the dead.^[220] The peasant’s cottage^[221] and its derivative the country noble’s hall, the fenced town and the castle are mansions of life, unconscious expressions of circling blood, that no art produced and no art can alter. The idea of the family appears in the plan of the proto-house, the inner form of the stock in the plan of its villages—which after many a century and many a change of occupation still show what race it was that founded them^[222]—the life of a nation and its social ordering in the plan (not the elevation or silhouette) of the city.^[223] On the other hand, Ornamentation of the high order develops itself on the stiff symbols of death, 195the urn, the sarcophagus, the stele and the temple of the dead,^[224] and beyond these in gods’ temples and cathedrals which are Ornament through and through, not the expressions of a race but the language of a world-view. They are pure art through and through—just what the castle and the cottage are not.^[225]

For cottage and castle are buildings in which art, and, specifically, imitative art, is made and done, the home of Vedic, Homeric and Germanic epos, of the songs of heroes, the dance of boors and that of lords and ladies, of the minstrel’s lay. The cathedral, on the other hand, is art, and, moreover, the only art by which nothing is imitated; it alone is pure tension of persistent forms, pure three-dimensional logic that expresses itself in edges and surfaces and volumes. But the art of villages and castles is derived from the inclinations of the moment, from the laughter and high spirit of feasts and games, and to such a degree is it dependent on Time, so much is it a thing of occasion, that the troubadour obtains his very name from finding, while Improvisation—as we see in the Tzigane music to-day—is nothing but race manifesting itself to alien senses under the influence of the hour. To this free creative power all spiritual art opposes the strict school in which the individual—in the hymn as in the work of building and carving—is the servant of a logic of timeless forms, and so in all Cultures the seat of its style-history is in its early cult architecture. In the castle it is the life and not the structure that possesses style. In the town the plan is an image of the destinies of a people, whereas the silhouette of emergent spires and cupolas tells of the logic in the builders’ world-picture, of the “first and last things” of their universe.

In the architecture of the living, stone serves a worldly purpose, but in the architecture of the cult it is a symbol.^[226] Nothing has injured the history of the great architectures so much as the fact that it has been regarded as the history of architectural techniques instead of as that of architectural ideas which took their technical expression-means as and where they found them. It has been just the same with the history of musical instruments,^[227] which also were developed on a foundation of tone-language. Whether the groin and the flying buttress and the squinch-cupola were imagined specially for the great architectures or were expedients that lay more or less ready to hand and were taken into use, is for art-history a matter of as little importance as the question of whether, technically, stringed instruments originated in Arabia or in Celtic Britain. It may be that the Doric column was, as a matter of workmanship, borrowed from the Egyptian temples of the New Empire, or the late-Roman domical construction from the Etruscans, or the Florentine court from the North-African Moors. Nevertheless the Doric peripteros, the Pantheon, and 196the Palazzo Farnese belong to wholly different worlds—they subserve the artistic expression of the prime-symbol in three different Cultures.

In every springtime, consequently, there are two definitely ornamental and non-imitative arts, that of building and that of decoration. In the longing and pregnant centuries before it, elemental expression belongs exclusively to Ornamentation in the narrow sense. The Carolingian period is represented only by its ornament, as its architecture, for want of the Idea, stands between the styles. And similarly, as a matter of art-history, it is immaterial that no buildings of the Mycenæan age have survived.^[228] But with the dawn of the great Culture, architecture as ornament comes into being suddenly and with such a force of expression that for a century mere decoration-as-such shrinks away from it in awe. The spaces, surfaces and edges of stone speak alone. The tomb of Chephren is the culmination of mathematical simplicity—everywhere right angles, squares and rectangular pillars, nowhere adornment, inscription or desinence—and it is only after some generations have passed that Relief ventures to infringe the solemn magic of those spaces and the strain begins to be eased. And the noble Romanesque of Westphalia-Saxony (Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella, Paderborn), of Southern France and of the Normans (Norwich and Peterborough) managed to render the whole sense of the world with indescribable power and dignity in one line, one capital, one arch.

When the form-world of the springtime is at its highest, and not before, the ordained relation is that architecture is lord and ornament is vassal. And the word “ornament” is to be taken here in the widest possible sense. Even conventionally, it covers the Classical unit-motive with its quiet poised symmetry or meander supplement, the spun surface of arabesque and the not dissimilar surface-patterning of Mayan art, and the “Thunder-pattern”^[229] and others of the early Chóu period which prove once again the landscape basis of the old Chinese architecture without a doubt. But the warrior figures of Dipylon vases are also conceived in the spirit of ornament, and so, in a far higher degree still, are the statuary groups of Gothic cathedrals. “The figures were composed pillarwise from the spectator, the figures of the pillar being, with reference to the spectator, ranked upon one another like rhythmic figures in a symphony that soars heavenward and expands its sounds in every direction.”^[230] And besides draperies, gestures, and figure-types, even the structure of the hymn-strophe and the parallel motion of the parts in church music are ornament in the service of the 197all-ruling architectural idea.^[231] The spell of the great Ornamentation remains unbroken till in the beginning of a “late” period architecture falls into a group of civic and worldly special arts that unceasingly devote themselves to pleasing and clever imitation and become ipso facto personal. To Imitation and Ornament the same applies that has been said already of time and space. Time gives birth to space, but space gives death to time.^[232] In the beginning, rigid symbolism had petrified everything alive; the Gothic statue was not permitted to be a living body, but was simply a set of lines disposed in human form. But now Ornament loses all its sacred rigour and becomes more and more decoration for the architectural setting of a polite and mannered life. It was purely as this, namely as a beautifying element, that Renaissance taste was adopted by the courtly and patrician world of the North (and by it alone!). Ornament meant something quite different in the Egyptian Old Kingdom from what it meant in the Middle; in the geometric period from what it meant in the Hellenistic; at the end of the 12th Century from what it meant at the end of Louis XIV’s reign. And architecture too becomes pictorial and makes music, and its forms seem always to be trying to imitate something in the picture of the world-around. From the Ionic capital we proceed to the Corinthian, and from Vignola through Bernini to the Rococo.

At the last, when Civilization sets in, true ornament and, with it, great art as a whole are extinguished. The transition consists—in every Culture—in Classicism and Romanticism of one sort or another, the former being a sentimental regard for an Ornamentation (rules, laws, types) that has long been archaic and soulless, and the latter a sentimental Imitation, not of life, but of an older Imitation. In the place of architectural style we find architectural taste. Methods of painting and mannerisms of writing, old forms and new, home and foreign, come and go with the fashion. The inward necessity is no longer there, there are no longer “schools,” for everyone selects what and where it pleases him to select. Art becomes craft-art (Kunstgewerbe) in all its branches—architecture and music, poetry and drama—and in the end we have a pictorial and literary stock-in-trade which is destitute of any deeper significance and is employed according to taste. This final or industrial form of Ornament—no longer historical, no longer in the condition of “becoming”—we have before us not only in the patterns of oriental carpets, Persian and Indian metal work,` 198Chinese 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.

Now, Cathedral and Pyramid-temple are different in spite of their deep inward kinship, and it is precisely in these differences that we seize the mighty phenomenon of the Faustian soul, whose depth-impulse refuses to be bound in the prime symbol of a way, and from its earliest beginnings strives to transcend every optical limitation. Can anything be more alien to the Egyptian conception of the State—whose tendency we may describe as a noble sobriety—than the political ambitions of the great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen Emperors, who came to grief because they overleapt all political actualities and for whom the recognition of any bounds would have been a betrayal of the idea of their rulership? Here the prime symbol of infinite space, with all its indescribable power, entered the field of active political existence. Beside the figures of the Ottos, Conrad II, Henry VI and Frederick II stand the Viking-Normans, conquerors of Russia, Greenland, England, Sicily and almost of Constantinople; and the great popes, Gregory VII and Innocent III—all of whom alike aimed at making their visible spheres of influence coincident with the whole known world. This is what distinguishes the heroes of the Grail and Arthurian and Siegfried sagas, ever roaming in the infinite, from the heroes of Homer with their geographically modest horizon; and the Crusades, that took men from the Elbe and the Loire to the limits of the known world, from the historical events upon which the Classical soul built the “Iliad” and which from the style of that soul we may safely assume to have been local, bounded, and completely appreciable.

The Doric soul actualized the symbol of the corporally-present individual thing, while deliberately rejecting all big and far-reaching creations, and it is for this very good reason that the first post-Mycenæan period has bequeathed nothing to our archæologists. The expression to which this soul finally attained was the Doric temple with its purely outward effectiveness, set upon the landscape as a massive image but denying and artistically disregarding the space within as the μὴ ὄv, that which was held to be incapable of existence. The ranked columns of the Egyptians carried the roof of a hall. The Greek in borrowing the motive invested it with a meaning proper to himself—he turned 199the architectural type inside out like a glove. The outer column-sets are, in a sense, relics of a denied interior.^[233]

The Magian and the Faustian souls, on the contrary, built high. Their dream-images became concrete as vaultings above significant inner-spaces, structural anticipations respectively of the mathematic of algebra and that of analysis. In the style that radiated from Burgundy and Flanders rib-vaulting with its lunettes and flying buttresses emancipated the contained space from the sense-appreciable surface^[234] bounding it. In the Magian interior "the window is merely a negative component, a utility-form in no wise yet developed into an art-form—to put it crudely, nothing but a hole in the wall."^[235] When windows were in practice indispensable, they were for the sake of artistic impression concealed by galleries as in the Eastern basilica.^[236] The window as architecture, on the other hand, is peculiar to the Faustian soul and the most significant symbol of its depth-experience. In it can be felt the will to emerge from the interior into the boundless. The same will that is immanent in contrapuntal music was native to these vaultings. The incorporeal world of this music was and remained that of the first Gothic, and even when, much later, polyphonic music rose to such heights as those of the Matthew Passion, the Eroica, and Tristan and Parsifal, it became of inward necessity cathedral-like and returned to its home, the stone language of the Crusade-time. To get rid of every trace of Classical corporeality, there was brought to bear the full force of a deeply significant Ornamentation, which defies the delimiting power of stone with its weirdly impressive transformations of vegetal, animal and human bodies (St. Pierre in Moissac), which dissolves all its lines into melodies and variations on a theme, all its façades into many-voiced fugues, and all the bodiliness of its statuary into a music of drapery-folds. It is this spirituality that gave their deep meaning to the gigantic glass-expanses of our cathedral-windows with their polychrome, translucent and therefore wholly bodiless, painting—an art that has never and nowhere repeated itself and forms the completest contrast that can be imagined to the Classical fresco. It is perhaps in the Sainte-Chapelle at Paris that this emancipation from bodiliness is most evident. Here the stone practically vanishes in the gleam of the glass. Whereas the fresco-painting is co-material with the wall on and with which it has grown and its colour is effective as material, here we have colours dependent on no carrying surface 200but as free in space as organ notes, and shapes poised in the infinite. Compare with the Faustian spirit of these churches—almost wall-less, loftily vaulted, irradiated with many-coloured light, aspiring from nave to choir—the Arabian (that is, the Early-Christian Byzantine) cupola-church. The pendentive cupola, that seems to float on high above the basilica or the octagon, was indeed also a victory over the principle of natural gravity which the Classical expressed in architrave and column; it, too, was a defiance of architectural body, of “exterior.” But the very absence of an exterior emphasizes the more the unbroken coherence of the wall that shuts in the Cavern and allows no look and no hope to emerge from it. An ingeniously confusing interpenetration of spherical and polygonal forms; a load so placed upon a stone drum that it seems to hover weightless on high, yet closing the interior without outlet; all structural lines concealed; vague light admitted, through a small opening in the heart of the dome but only the more inexorably to emphasize the walling-in—such are the characters that we see in the masterpieces of this art, S. Vitale in Ravenna, Hagia SophiaHagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the Dome of the Rock^[237] in Jerusalem. Where the Egyptian puts reliefs that with their flat planes studiously avoid any foreshortening suggestive of lateral depth, where the Gothic architects put their pictures of glass to draw in the world of space without, the Magian clothes his walls with sparkling, predominantly golden, mosaics and arabesques and so drowns his cavern in that unreal, fairy-tale light which for Northerners is always so seductive in Moorish art.

The phenomenon of the great style, then, is an emanation from the essence of the Macrocosm, from the prime-symbol of a great culture. No one who can appreciate the connotation of the word sufficiently to see that it designates not a form-aggregate but a form-history, will try to aline the fragmentary and chaotic art-utterances of primitive mankind with the comprehensive certainty of a style that consistently develops over centuries. Only the art of great Cultures, the art that has ceased to be only art and has begun to be an effective unit of expression and significance, possesses style.

The organic history of a style comprises a "pre—," a "non—" and a "post—." The bull tablet of the First Dynasty of Egypt^[238] is not yet “Egyptian.” Not till the Third Dynasty do the works acquire a style—but then they do so suddenly and very definitely. Similarly the Carolingian period stands “between-styles.” We see different forms touched on and explored, but nothing of inwardly necessary expression. The creator of the Aachen Minster “thinks 201surely and builds surely, but does not feel surely.”^[239] The Marienkirche in the Castle of Würzburg (c. 700) has its counterpart in Salonika (St. George), and the Church of St. Germigny des Près (c. 800) with its cupolas and horseshoe niches is almost a mosque. For the whole of West Europe the period 850-950 is almost a blank. And just so to-day Russian art stands between two styles. The primitive wooden architecture with its steep eight-sided tent-roof (which extends from Norway to Manchuria) is impressed with Byzantine motives from over the Danube and Armenian-Persian from over the Caucasus. We can certainly feel an “elective affinity” between the Russian and the Magian souls, but as yet the prime symbol of Russia, the plane without limit,^[240] finds no sure expression either in religion or in architecture. The church roof emerges, hillock-wise, but little from the landscape and on it sit the tent-roofs whose points are coifed with the “kokoshniks” that suppress and would abolish the upward tendency. They neither tower up like the Gothic belfry nor enclose like the mosque-cupola, but sit, thereby emphasizing the horizontality of the building, which is meant to be regarded merely from the outside. When about 1760 the Synod forbade the tent roofs and prescribed the orthodox onion-cupolas, the heavy cupolas were set upon slender cylinders, of which there may be any number^[241] and which sit on the roof-plane.^[242] It is not yet a style, only the promise of a style that will awaken when the real Russian religion awakens.

In the Faustian West, this awakening happened shortly before A.D. 1000. In one moment, the Romanesque style was there. Instead of the fluid organization of space on an insecure ground plan, there was, suddenly, a strict dynamic of space. From the very beginning, inner and outer construction were placed in a fixed relation, the wall was penetrated by the form-language and the form worked into the wall in a way that no other Culture has ever imagined. From the very beginning the window and the belfry were invested with their meanings. The form was irrevocably assigned. Only its development remained to be worked out.

The Egyptian style began with another such creative act, just as unconscious, just as full of symbolic force. The prime symbol of the Way came into being suddenly with the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty (2930 B.C.). The world-creating depth-experience of this soul gets its substance from the direction-factor itself. Spatial depth as stiffened Time, distance, death, Destiny itself 202dominate the expression, and the merely sensuous dimensions of length and breadth become an escorting plane which restricts and prescribes the Way of destiny. The Egyptian flat-relief, which is designed to be seen at close quarters and arranged serially so as to compel the beholder to pass along the wall-planes in the prescribed direction, appears with similar suddenness about the beginning of the Fifth Dynasty.^[243] The still later avenues of sphinxes and statues and the rock- and terrace-temples constantly intensify that tendency towards the one distance that the world of Egyptian mankind knows, the grave. Observe how soon the colonnades of the early period come to be systems of huge, close-set pillars that screen off all side-view. This is something that has never reproduced itself in any other architecture.

The grandeur of this style appears to us as rigid and unchanging. And certainly it stands beyond the passion which is ever seeking and fearing and so imparts to subordinate characters a quality of restless personal movement in the flow of the centuries. But, vice versa, we cannot doubt that to an Egyptian the Faustian style (which is our style, from earliest Romanesque to Rococo and Empire) would with its unresting persistent search for a Something, appear far more uniform than we can imagine. It follows, we must not forget, from the conception of style that we are working on here, that Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo are only stages of one and the same style, in which it is naturally the variable that we and the constant that men of other eyes remark. In actual fact, the inner unity of the Northern Renaissance is shown in innumerable reconstructions of Romanesque work in Baroque and of late Gothic work in Rococo that are not in the least startling. In peasant art, Gothic and Baroque have been identical, and the streets of old towns with their pure harmony of all sorts of gables and façades (wherein definite attributions to Romanesque or Gothic Renaissance or Baroque or Rococo are often quite impossible) show that the family resemblance between the members is far greater than they themselves realize.

The Egyptian style was purely architectural, and remained so till the Egyptian soul was extinguished. It is the only one in which Ornamentation as a decorative supplement to architecture is entirely absent. It allowed of no divergence into arts of entertainment, no display-painting, no busts, no secular music. In the Ionic phase, the centre of gravity of the Classical style shifted from architecture to an independent plastic art; in that of the Baroque the style of the West passed into music, whose form-language in its turn ruled the entire building art of the 18th Century; in the Arabian world, after Justinian and 203Chosroes-Nushirvan, Arabesque dissolved all the forms of architecture, painting and sculpture into style-impressions that nowadays we should consider as craft-art. But in Egypt the sovereignty of architecture remained unchallenged; it merely softened its language a little. In the chambers of the pyramid-temple of the Fourth Dynasty (Pyramid of Chephren) there are unadorned angular pillars. In the buildings of the Fifth (Pyramid of Sahu-rê) the plant-column makes its appearance. Lotus and papyrus branches turned into stone arise gigantic out of a pavement of transparent alabaster that represents water, enclosed by purple walls. The ceiling is adorned with birds and stars. The sacred way from the gate-buildings to the tomb-chamber, the picture of life, is a stream—it is the Nile itself become one with the prime-symbol of direction. The spirit of the mother-landscape unites with the soul that has sprung from it.

In China, in lieu of the awe-inspiring pylon with its massy wall and narrow entrance, we have the “Spirit-wall” (yin-pi) that conceals the way in. The Chinaman slips into life and thereafter follows the Tao of life’s path; as the Nile valley is to the up-and-down landscape of the Hwang Ho, so is the stone-enclosed temple-way to the mazy paths of Chinese garden-architecture. And just so, in some mysterious fashion, the Euclidean existence is linked with the multitude of little islands and promontories of the Ægean, and the passionate Western, roving in the infinite, with the broad plains of Franconia and Burgundy and Saxony.

The Egyptian style is the expression of a brave soul. The rigour and force of it Egyptian man himself never felt and never asserted. He dared all, but said nothing. In Gothic and Baroque, on the contrary, the triumph over heaviness became a perfectly conscious motive of the form-language. The drama of Shakespeare deals openly with the desperate conflict of will and world. Classical man, again, was weak in the face of the “powers.” The κάθαρσις of fear and pity, the relief and recovery of the Apollinian soul in the moment of the περιπέτεια was, according to Aristotle, the effect deliberately aimed at in Attic tragedy. As the Greek spectator watched someone whom he knew (for everyone knew the myth and its heroes and lived in them) senselessly maltreated by fortune, without any conceivable possibility of resistance to the Powers, and saw him go under with splendid mien, defiant, heroic, his own Euclidean soul experienced a marvellous uplifting. If life was worthless, at any rate the grand gesture in losing it was not so. The Greek willed nothing and dared nothing, but he found a stirring beauty in enduring. Even the earlier figures of Odysseus the patient, and, above all, Achilles the archetype of Greek manhood, have this characteristic quality. The morale of the Cynics, that of the Stoics, that of Epicurus, the common Greek ideals of σωφροσύνη and ἀταραξἰα, Diogenes 204devoting himself to θεωρία in a tub—all this is masked cowardice in the face of grave matters and responsibilities, and different indeed from the pride of the Egyptian soul. Apollinian man goes below ground out of life’s way, even to the point of suicide, which in this Culture alone (if we ignore certain related Indian ideals) ranked as a high ethical act and was treated with the solemnity of a ritual symbol.^[244] The Dionysiac intoxication seems a sort of furious drowning of uneasinesses that to the Egyptian soul were utterly unknown. And consequently the Greek Culture is that of the small, the easy, the simple. Its technique is, compared with Egyptian or Babylonian, a clever nullity.^[245] No ornamentation shows such a poverty of invention as theirs, and their stock of sculptural positions and attitudes could be counted on one’s fingers. “In its poverty of forms, which is conspicuous even allowing that at the beginning of its development it may have been better off than it was later, the Doric style pivoted everything on proportions and on measure.”^[246] Yet, even so, what adroitness in avoiding! The Greek architecture with its commensuration of load and support and its peculiar smallness of scale suggests a persistent evasion of difficult architectural problems that on the Nile and, later, in the high North were literally looked for, which moreover were known and certainly not burked in the Mycenæan age. The Egyptian loved the strong stone of immense buildings; it was in keeping with his self-consciousness that he should choose only the hardest for his task. But the Greek avoided it; his architecture first set itself small tasks, then ceased altogether. If we survey it as a whole, and then compare it with the totality of Egyptian or Mexican or even, for that matter, Western architecture, we are astounded at the feeble development of the style. A few variations of the Doric temple and it was exhausted. It was already closed off about 400 when the Corinthian capital was invented, and everything subsequent to this was merely modification of what existed.

The result of this was an almost bodily standardization of form-types and style-species. One might choose between them, but never overstep their strict limits—that would have been in some sort an admission of an infinity of possibilities. There were three orders of columns and a definite disposition of the architrave corresponding to each; to deal with the difficulty (considered, as early as Vitruvius, as a conflict) which the alternation of triglyphs and metopes produced at the corners, the nearest intercolumniations were narrowed—no one thought of imagining new forms to suit the case. If greater dimensions were desired, the requirements were met by superposition, juxtaposition, etc., of additional elements. Thus the Colosseum possesses three rings, the Didymæum of Miletus three rows of columns in front, and the Frieze of the 205Giants 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.

We are now able to see the organism in a great style-course. Here, as in so many other matters, Goethe was the first to whom vision came. In his “Winckelmann” he says of Velleius Paterculus: “with his standpoint, it was not given to him to see all art as a living thing (ζῶον) that must have an inconspicuous beginning, a slow growth, a brilliant moment of fulfilment and a gradual decline like every other organic being, though it is presented in a set of individuals.” This sentence contains the entire morphology of art-history. Styles do not follow one another like waves or pulse-beats. It is not the personality or will or brain of the artist that makes the style, but the style that makes the type of the artist. The style, like the Culture, is a prime phenomenon in the strictest Goethian sense, be it the style of art or religion or thought, or the style of life itself. It is, as “Nature” is, an ever-new experience of waking man, his alter ego and mirror-image in the world-around. And therefore in the general historical picture of a Culture there can be but one style, the style of the Culture. The error has lain in treating mere style-phases—Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, Empire—as if they were styles on the same level as units of quite another order such as the Egyptian, the Chinese (or even a “prehistoric”) style. Gothic and Baroque are simply the youth and age of one and the same vessel of forms, the style of the West as ripening and ripened. What has been wanting in our art-research has been detachment, freedom from prepossessions, and the will to abstract. Saving ourselves trouble, we have classed any and every form-domain that makes a strong impression upon us as a “style,” and it need hardly be said that our insight has been led astray still further by the Ancient-Mediæval-Modern scheme. But in reality, even a masterpiece of strictest Renaissance like the court of the Palazzo Farnese is infinitely nearer to the arcade-porch of St. Patroclus in Soest, the interior of the Magdeburg cathedral, and the staircases of South-German castles of the 18th Century than it is to the Temple of Pæstum or to the Erechtheum. The same relation exists between Doric and Ionic, and hence Ionic columns can be as completely combined with Doric building forms as late Gothic is with early Baroque in St. Lorenz at Nürnberg, or late Romanesque with late Baroque in the beautiful upper part of the West choir at Mainz. And our eyes have scarcely yet learned to distinguish within the Egyptian style the Old Kingdom 206and Middle Empire elements corresponding to Doric and Gothic youth and to Ionic and Baroque maturity, because from the Twelfth Dynasty these elements interpenetrate in all harmony in the form-language of all the greater works.

The task before art-history is to write the comparative biographies of the great styles, all of which as organisms of the same genus possess structurally cognate life histories.

In the beginning there is the timid, despondent, naked expression of a newly-awakened soul which is still seeking for a relation between itself and the world that, though its proper creation, yet is presented as alien and unfriendly. There is the child’s fearfulness in Bishop Bernward’s building at Hildesheim, in the Early-Christian catacomb-painting, and in the pillar-halls of the Egyptian Fourth Dynasty. A February of art, a deep presentiment of a coming wealth of forms, an immense suppressed tension, lies over the landscape that, still wholly rustic, is adorning itself with the first strongholds and townlets. Then follows the joyous mounting into the high Gothic, into the Constantinian age with its pillared basilicas and its domical churches, into the relief-ornament of the Fifth-Dynasty temple. Being is understood, a sacred form-language has been completely mastered and radiates its glory, and the Style ripens into a majestic symbolism of directional depth and of Destiny. But fervent youth comes to an end, and contradictions arise within the soul itself. The Renaissance, the Dionysiac-musical hostility to Apollinian Doric, the Byzantine of 450 that looks to Alexandria and away from the overjoyed art of Antioch, indicate a moment of resistance, of effective or ineffective impulse to destroy what has been acquired. It is very difficult to elucidate this moment, and an attempt to do so would be out of place here.

And now it is the manhood of the style-history that comes on. The Culture is changing into the intellectuality of the great cities that will now dominate the country-side, and pari passu the style is becoming intellectualized also. The grand symbolism withers; the riot of superhuman forms dies down; milder and more worldly arts drive out the great art of developed stone. Even in Egypt sculpture and fresco are emboldened to lighter movement. The artist appears, and “plans” what formerly grew out of the soil. Once more existence becomes self-conscious and now, detached from the land and the dream and the mystery, stands questioning, and wrestles for an expression of its new duty—as at the beginning of Baroque when Michelangelo, in wild discontent and kicking against the limitations of his art, piles up the dome of St. Peter’s—in the age of Justinian I which built Hagia Sophia and the mosaic-decked domed basilicas of Ravenna—at the beginning of that Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt which the Greeks condensed under the name of Sesostris—and at the decisive epoch in Hellas (c. 600) whose architecture probably, nay certainly, expressed that which is echoed for us in its grandchild Æschylus.

207Then comes the gleaming autumn of the style. Once more the soul depicts its happiness, this time conscious of self-completion. The “return to Nature” which already thinkers and poets—Rousseau, Gorgias and their “contemporaries” in the other Cultures—begin to feel and to proclaim, reveals itself in the form-world of the arts as a sensitive longing and presentiment of the end. A perfectly clear intellect, joyous urbanity, the sorrow of a parting—these are the colours of these last Culture-decades of which Talleyrand was to remark later: “Qui n’a pas vécu avant 1789 ne connaît pas la douceur de vivre.” So it was, too, with the free, sunny and superfine art of Egypt under Sesostris III (c. 1850 B.C.) and the brief moments of satiated happiness that produced the varied splendour of Pericles’s Acropolis and the works of Zeuxis and Phidias. A thousand years later again, in the age of the Ommaiyads, we meet it in the glad fairyland of Moorish architecture with its fragile columns and horseshoe arches that seem to melt into air in an iridescence of arabesques and stalactites. A thousand years more, and we see it in the music of Haydn and Mozart, in Dresden shepherdesses, in the pictures of Watteau and Guardi, and the works of German master-builders at Dresden, Potsdam, Würzburg and Vienna.

Then the style fades out. The form-language of the Erechtheum and the Dresden Zwinger, honeycombed with intellect, fragile, ready for self-destruction, is followed by the flat and senile Classicism that we find in the Hellenistic megalopolis, the Byzantium of 900 and the “Empire” modes of the North. The end is a sunset reflected in forms revived for a moment by pedant or by eclectic—semi-earnestness and doubtful genuineness dominate the world of the arts. We to-day are in this condition—playing a tedious game with dead forms to keep up the illusion of a living art.

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 208the picture of a general history of “Art,” and its organic connectedness has been imperceptible under the erroneous conventions thereof.^[247]

Strange and—if these studies have given us the eye for things latent—moving it is to see how this young Soul, held in bondage to the intellect of the Classical and, above all, to the political omnipotence of Rome, dares not rouse itself into freedom but humbly subjects itself to obsolete value-forms and tries to be content with Greek language, Greek ideas and Greek art-elements. Devout acceptance of the powers of the strong day is present in every young Culture and is the sign of its youth—witness the humility of Gothic man in his pious high-arched spaces with their pillar-statuary and their light-filled pictures in glass, the high tension of the Egyptian soul in the midst of its world of pyramids, lotus-columns and relief-lined halls. But in this instance there is the additional element of an intellectual prostration before forms really dead but supposedly eternal. Yet in spite of all, the taking-over and continuance of these forms came to nothing. Involuntarily, unobserved, not supported by an inherent pride as Gothic was, but felt, there in Roman Syria, almost as a lamentable come-down, a whole new form-world grew up. Under a mask of Græco-Roman conventions, it filled even Rome itself. The master-masons of the Pantheon and the Imperial Fora were Syrians. In no other example is the primitive force of a young soul so manifest as here, where it has to make its own world by sheer conquest.

In this as in every other Culture, Spring seeks to express its spirituality in a new ornamentation and, above all, in religious architecture as the sublime form of that ornamentation. But of all this rich form-world the only part that (till recently) has been taken into account has been the Western edge of it, which consequently has been assumed to be the true home and habitat of Magian style-history. In reality, in matters of style as in those of religion, science and social-political life, what we find there is only an irradiation from outside the Eastern border of the Empire.^[248] Riegl^[249] and Strzygowski^[250] have discovered this, but if we are to go further and arrive at a conspectus of the development of Arabian art we have to shed many philological and religious prepossessions. The misfortune is that our art-research, although it no longer recognizes the religious frontiers, nevertheless unconsciously assumes them. For there is in reality no such thing as a Late-Classical nor an Early-Christian nor yet an Islamic art in the sense of an art proper to each of those faiths and evolved by the community of believers as such. On the contrary, the totality of these religions—from Armenia to Southern Arabia and Axum, and from Persia to Byzantium and Alexandria—possess a broad uniformity of artistic expression 209that overrides the contradictions of detail.^[251] All these religions, the Christian, the Jewish, the Persian, the Manichæan, the Syncretic,^[252] possessed cult-buildings and (at any rate in their script) an Ornamentation of the first rank; and however different the items of their dogmas, they are all pervaded by an homogeneous religiousness and express it in a homogeneous symbolism of depth-experience. There is something in the basilicas of Christianity, Hellenistic, Hebrew and Baal-cults, and in the Mithræum,^[253] the Mazdaist fire-temple and the Mosque, that tells of a like spirituality: it is the Cavern-feeling.

It becomes therefore the bounden duty of research to seek to establish the hitherto completely neglected architecture of the South-Arabian and Persian temple, the Syrian and the Mesopotamian synagogue, the cult-buildings of Eastern Asia Minor and even Abyssinia;^[254] and in respect of Christianity to investigate no longer merely the Pauline West but also the Nestorian East that stretched from the Euphrates to China, where the old records significantly call its buildings “Persian temples.” If in all this building practically nothing has, so far, forced itself specially upon our notice, it is fair to suppose that both the advance of Christianity first and that of Islam later could change the religion of a place of worship without contradicting its plan and style. We know that this is the case with Late Classical temples: but how many of the churches in Armenia may once have been fire-temples?

The artistic centre of this Culture was very definitely—as Strzygowski has observed—in the triangle of cities Edessa, Nisibis, Amida. To the westward of it is the domain of the Late-Classical “Pseudomorphosis,”^[255] the Pauline Christianity that conquered in the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon,^[256] Western Judaism and the cults of Syncretism. The architectural type of the Pseudomorphosis, both for Jew and Gentile, is the Basilica.^[257] It employs the means of the Classical to express the opposite thereof, and is unable to free itself from these means—that is the essence and the tragedy of “Pseudomorphosis.” The more “Classical” Syncretism modifies a cult that is resident in a Euclidean place into one which is professed by a community of indefinite estate, the more the interior of the temple gains in importance over the exterior without needing to change either plan or roof or columns very much. The space-feeling is 210different, but not—at first—the means of expressing it. In the pagan religious architecture of the Imperial Age there is a perceptible—though never yet perceived—movement from the wholly corporeal Augustan temple, in which the cella is the architectural expression of nothingness, to one in which the interior only possesses meaning. Finally the external picture of the Peripteros of the Doric is transferred to the four inside walls. Columns ranked in front of a windowless wall are a denial of space beyond—that is, for the Classical beholder, of space within, and for the Magian, of space without. It is therefore a question of minor importance whether the entire space is covered in as in the Basilica proper, or only the sanctuary as in the Sun-temple of Baalbek with the great forecourt,^[258] which later becomes a standing element of the mosque and is probably of South Arabian origin.^[259] That the Nave originates in a court surrounded by halls is suggested not only by the special development of the basilica-type in the East Syrian steppe (particularly Hauran) but also by the basic disposition of porch, nave and choir as stages leading to the altar—for the aisles (originally the side-halls of the court) end blind, and only the nave proper corresponds with the apse. This basic meaning is very evident in St. Paul at Rome, albeit the Pseudomorphosis (inversion of the Classical temple) dictated the technical means, viz., column and architrave. How symbolic is the Christian reconstruction of the Temple of Aphrodisias in Caria, in which the cella within the columns is abolished and replaced by a new wall outside them.^[260]

Outside the domain of the “Pseudomorphosis,” on the contrary, the cavern-feeling was free to develop its own form-language, and here therefore it is the definite roof that is emphasized (whereas in the other domain the protest against the Classical feeling led merely to the development of an interior). When and where the various possibilities of dome, cupola, barrel-vaulting, rib-vaulting, came into existence as technical methods is, as we have already said, a matter of no significance. What is of decisive importance is the fact that about the time of Christ’s birth and the rise of the new world-feeling, the new space-symbolism must have begun to make use of these forms and to develop them further in expressiveness. It will very likely come to be shown that the fire-temples and synagogues of Mesopotamia (and possibly also the temples of Athtar in Southern Arabia) were originally cupola-buildings.^[261] Certainly the 211pagan marna-temple at Gaza was so, and long before Pauline Christianity took possession of these forms under Constantine, builders of Eastern origin had introduced them, as novelties to please the taste of the Megalopolitans, into all parts of the Roman Empire. In Rome itself, Apollodorus of Damascus was employed under Trajan for the vaulting of the temple of “Venus and Rome,” and the domed chambers of the Baths of Caracalla and the so-called “Minerva Medica” of Gallienus’s time were built by Syrians. But the masterpiece, the earliest of all Mosques, is the Pantheon as rebuilt by Hadrian. Here, without a doubt, the emperor was imitating, for the satisfaction of his own taste, cult-buildings that he had seen in the East.^[262]

The architecture of the central-dome, in which the Magian world-feeling achieved its purest expression, extended beyond the limits of the Roman Empire. For the Nestorian Christianity that extended from Armenia even into China it was the only form, as it was also for the Manichæns and the Mazdaists, and it also impressed itself victoriously upon the Basilica of the West when the Pseudomorphosis began to crumble and the last cults of Syncretism to die out. In Southern France—where there were Manichæan sects even as late as the Crusades—the form of the East was domesticated. Under Justinian, the interpenetration of the two produced the domical basilica of Byzantium and Ravenna. The pure basilica was pushed into the Germanic West, there to be transformed by the energy of the Faustian depth-impulse into the cathedral. The domed basilica, again, spread from Byzantium and Armenia into Russia, where it came by slow degrees to be felt as an element of exterior architecture belonging to a symbolism concentrated in the roof. But in the Arabian world Islam, the heir of Monophysite and Nestorian Christianity and of the Jews and the Persians, carried the development through to the end. When it turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque it only resumed possession of an old property. Islamic domical building followed Mazdaist and Nestorian along the same tracks to Shan-tung and to India. Mosques grew up in the far West in Spain and Sicily, where, moreover, the style appears rather in its East-Aramæan-Persian than in its West-Aramæan-Syrian mode.^[263] And while Venice looked to Byzantium and Ravenna (St. Mark), the brilliant age of the Norman-Hohenstaufen rule in Palermo taught the cities of the Italian west coast, and even Florence, to admire and to imitate these Moorish buildings. More than 212one of the motives that the Renaissance thought were Classical—e.g., the court surrounded by halls and the union of column and arch—really originated thus.

What is true as regards architecture is even more so as regards ornamentation, which in the Arabian world very early overcame all figure-representation and swallowed it up in itself. Then, as “arabesque,” it advanced to meet, to charm and to mislead the young art-intention of the West.

The early-Christian-Late-Classical art of the Pseudomorphosis shows the same ornament-plus-figure mixture of the inherited “alien” and the inborn “proper” as does the Carolingian-Early Romanesque of (especially) Southern France and Upper Italy. In the one case Hellenistic intermingles with Early-Magian, in the other Mauro-Byzantine with Faustian. The researcher has to examine line after line and ornament after ornament to detect the form-feeling which differentiates the one stratum from the other. In every architrave, in every frieze, there is to be found a secret battle between the conscious old and the unconscious, but victorious, new motives. One is confounded by this general interpenetration of the Late-Hellenistic and the Early-Arabian form-senses, as one sees it, for example, in Roman portrait-busts (here it is often only in the treatment of the hair that the new way of expression is manifested); in the acanthus-shoots which show—often on one and the same frieze—chisel-work and drill-work side by side; in the sarcophagi of the 3rd Century in which a childlike feeling of the Giotto and Pisano character is entangled with a certain late and megalopolitan Naturalism that reminds one more or less of David or Carstens; and in buildings such as the Basilica of Maxentius^[264] and many parts of the Baths and the Imperial Fora that are still very Classical in conception.

Nevertheless, the Arabian soul was cheated of its maturity—like a young tree that is hindered and stunted in its growth by a fallen old giant of the forest. Here there was no brilliantbrilliant instant felt and experienced as such, like that of ours in which, simultaneously with the Crusades, the wooden beams of the Cathedral roof locked themselves into rib-vaulting and an interior was made to actualize and fulfil the idea of infinite space. The political creation of Diocletian was shattered in its glory upon the fact that, standing as he did on Classical ground, he had to accept the whole mass of the administrative tradition of Urbs Roma; this sufficed to reduce his work to a mere reform of obsolete conditions. And yet he was the first of the Caliphs. With him, the idea of the Arabian State emerges clearly into the light. It is Diocletian’s dispensation, together with that of the Sassanids which preceded it somewhat and served in all respects as its model, that gives us the first notion of the ideal that ought to have gone on to fulfilment here. But so it was in all things. To this very day we admire as last creations of the Classical—because we cannot or will 213not regard them otherwise—the thought of Plotinus and Marcus Aurelius, the cults of Isis, Mithras and the Sun-God, the Diophantine mathematics and, lastly, the whole of the art which streamed towards us from the Eastern marches of the Roman Empire and for which Antioch and Alexandria were merely points d’appui.

This alone is sufficient to explain the intense vehemence with which the Arabian Culture, when released at length from artistic as from other fetters, flung itself upon all the lands that had inwardly belonged to it for centuries past. It is the sign of a soul that feels itself in a hurry, that notes in fear the first symptoms of old age before it has had youth. This emancipation of Magian mankind is without a parallel. Syria is conquered, or rather delivered, in 634. Damascus falls in 637, Ctesiphon in 637. In 641 Egypt and India are reached, in 647 Carthage, in 676 Samarkand, in 710 Spain. And in 732 the Arabs stood before Paris. Into these few years was compressed the whole sum of saved-up passions, postponed hopes, reserved deeds, that in the slow maturing of other Cultures suffice to fill the history of centuries. The Crusaders before Jerusalem, the Hohenstaufen in Sicily, the Hansa in the Baltic, the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic East, the Spaniards in America, the Portuguese in the East Indies, the Empire of Charles V on which the sun never set, the beginnings of England’s colonial power under Cromwell—the equivalent of all this was shot out in one discharge that carried the Arabs to Spain and France, India and Turkestan.

True, all Cultures (the Egyptian, the Mexican and the Chinese excepted) have grown up under the tutelage of some older Culture. Each of the form-worlds shows certain alien traits. Thus, the Faustian soul of the Gothic, already predisposed to reverence by the Arabian origin of Christianity, grasped at the treasures of Late-Arabian art. An unmistakably Southern, one might even say an Arabian, Gothic wove itself over the façades of the Burgundian and Provençal cathedrals, dominated with a magic of stone the outward language of Strassburg Minster, and fought a silent battle in statues and porches, fabric-patterns, carvings and metalwork—and not less in the intricate figures of scholastic philosophy and in that intensely Western symbol, the Grail legend^[265]—with the Nordic prime-feeling of Viking Gothic that rules the interior of the Magdeburg Cathedral, the points of Freiburg Minster and the mysticism of Meister Eckart. More than once the pointed arch threatens to burst its restraining line and to transform itself into the horseshoe arch of Moorish-Norman architecture.

So also the Apollinian art of the Doric spring—whose first efforts are practically lost to us—doubtless took over Egyptian elements to a very large extent, and by and through these came to its own proper symbolism.

214But 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.

The idea of the Macrocosm, then, which presents itself in the style-problem as simplified and capable of treatment, poses a multitude of tasks for the future to tackle. To make the form-world of the arts available as a means of penetrating the spirituality of entire Cultures—by handling it in a thoroughly physiognomic and symbolic spirit—is an undertaking that has not hitherto got beyond speculations of which the inadequacy is obvious. We are hardly as yet aware that there may be a psychology of the metaphysical bases of all great architectures. We have no idea what there is to discover in the change of meaning that a form of pure extension undergoes when it is taken over into another Culture. The history of the column has never yet been written, nor have we any notion of the deeply symbolic significances that reside in the means and the instruments of art.

Consider mosaic. In Hellenic times it was made up of pieces of marble, it was opaque and corporeal-Euclidean (e.g., the famous Battle of Issus at Naples), and it adorned the floor. But with the awakening of the Arabian soul it came to be built up of pieces of glass and set in fused gold, and it simply covered the walls and roofs of the domed basilica. This Early-Arabian Mosaic-picturing corresponds exactly, as to phase, with the glass-picturing of Gothic cathedrals, both being “early” arts ancillary to religious architectures. The one by letting in the light enlarges the church-space into world-space, while the other transforms it into the magic, gold-shimmering sphere which bears men away from earthly actuality into the visions of Plotinus, Origen, the Manichæans, the Gnostics and the Fathers, and the Apocalyptic poems.

Consider, again, the beautiful notion of uniting the round arch and the column; this again is a Syrian, if not a North-Arabian, creation of the third (or “high Gothic”) century.^[266] The revolutionary importance of this motive, which is specifically Magian, has never in the least degree been recognized; on the contrary, it has always been assumed to be Classical, and for most of us indeed it is even representatively Classical. The Egyptians ignored any deep relation between the roof and the column; the latter was for them a plant-column, and represented not stoutness but growth. Classical man, in his turn, for whom the monolithic column was the mightiest symbol of Euclidean existence—all body, all unity, all steadiness—connected it, in the strictest proportions of vertical and horizontal, of strength and load, with his architrave. But here, 215in this union of arch and column which the Renaissance in its tragicomic deludedness admired as expressly Classical (though it was a notion that the Classical neither possessed nor could possess), the bodily principle of load and inertia is rejected and the arch is made to spring clear and open out of the slender column. The idea actualized here is at once a liberation from all earth-gravity and a capture of space, and between this element and that of the dome which soars free but yet encloses the great “cavern,” there is the deep relation of like meaning. The one and the other are eminently and powerfully Magian, and they come to their logical fulfilment in the “Rococo” stage of Moorish mosques and castles, wherein ethereally delicate columns—often growing out of, rather than based on, the ground—seem to be empowered by some secret magic to carry a whole world of innumerable notched arcs, gleaming ornaments, stalactites, and vaultings saturated with colours. The full importance of this basic form of Arabian architecture may be expressed by saying that the combination of column and architrave is the Classical, that of column and round arch the Arabian, and that of pillar and pointed arch the Faustian Leitmotiv.

Take, further, the history of the Acanthus motive.^[267] In the form in which it appears, for example, on the Monument of Lysicrates at Athens, it is one of the most distinctive in Classical ornamentation. It has body, it is and remains individual, and its structure is capable of being taken in at one glance. But already it appears heavier and richer in the ornament of the Imperial Fora (Nerva’s, Trajan’s) and that of the temple of Mars Ultor; the organic disposition has become so complicated that, as a rule, it requires to be studied, and the tendency to fill up the surfaces appears. In Byzantine art—of which Riegl thirty years ago noticed the “latent Saracenic character” though he had no suspicion of the connexion brought to light here—the acanthus leaf was broken up into endless tendril-work which (as in Hagia Sophia) is disposed quite inorganically over whole surfaces. To the Classical motive are added the old-Aramæan vine and palm leaves, which have already played a part in Jewish ornamentation. The interlaced borders of “Late-Roman” mosaic pavements and sarcophagus-edges, and even geometrical plane-patterns are introduced, and finally, throughout the Persian-Anatolian world, mobility and bizarrerie culminate in the Arabesque. This is the genuine Magian motive—anti-plastic to the last degree, hostile to the pictorial and to the bodily alike. Itself bodiless, it disembodies the object over which its endless richness of web is drawn. A masterpiece of this kind—a piece of architecture completely opened out into Ornamentation—is the façade of the Castle of Mashetta in Moab built by the Ghassanids.^[268] The craft-art of Byzantine-Islamic style (hitherto called Lombard, Frankish, Celtic or Old-Nordic) which invaded the whole youthful 216West and dominated the Carolingian Empire, was largely practised by Oriental craftsmen or imported as patterns for our own weavers, metal-workers and armourers.^[269] Ravenna, Lucca, Venice, Granada, Palermo were the efficient centres of this then highly-civilized form-language; in the year 1000, when in the North the forms of a new Culture were already being developed and established, Italy was still entirely dominated by it.

Take, lastly, the changed point of view towards the human body. With the victory of the Arabian world-feeling, men’s conception of it underwent a complete revolution. In almost every Roman head of the period 100-250 that the Vatican Collection contains, one may perceive the opposition of Apollinian and Magian feeling, and of muscular position and “look” as different bases of expression. Even in Rome itself, since Hadrian, the sculptor made constant use of the drill, an instrument which was wholly repugnant to the Euclidean feeling towards stone—for whereas the chisel brings out the limiting surfaces and ipso facto affirms the corporeal and material nature of the marble block, the drill, in breaking the surfaces and creating effects of light and shade, denies it; and accordingly the sculptors, be they Christian or “pagan,” lose the old feeling for the phenomenon of the naked body. One has only to look at the shallow and empty Antinous statues—and yet these were quite definitely “Classical.” Here it is only the head that is physiognomically of interest—as it never is in Attic sculpture. The drapery is given quite a new meaning, and simply dominates the whole appearance. The consul-statues in the Capitoline Museum^[270] are conspicuous examples. The pupils are bored, and the eyes look into the distance, so that the whole expression of the work lies no longer in its body but in that Magian principle of the “Pneuma” which Neo-Platonism and the decisions of the Church Councils, Mithraism and Mazdaism alike presume in man.

The pagan “Father” Iamblichus, about 300, wrote a book concerning statues of gods in which the divine is substantially present and working upon the beholder.^[271] Against this idea of the image—an idea of the Pseudomorphosis—the East and the South rose in a storm of iconoclasm; and the sources of this iconoclasm lay in a conception of artistic creation that is nearly impossible for us to understand.

The clearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of higher mankind has found for itself is (if we except the mathematical-scientific domain of presentation and the symbolism of its basic ideas) that of the arts of form,^[272] of which the number is legion. And with these arts we count music in its many and very dissimilar kinds; had these been brought within the domain of art-historical research instead of being put in a class apart from that of the pictorial-plastic arts, we should have progressed very much further in our understanding of the import of this evolution towards an end. For the formative impulse that is at work in the wordless^[273] arts can never be understood until we come to regard the distinction between optical and acoustic means as only a superficial one. To talk of the art of the eye and the art of the ear takes us no further. It is not such things that divide one art from another. Only the 19th Century could so over-estimate the influence of physiological conditions as to apply it to expression, conception or communion. A “singing” picture of Claude Lorrain or of Watteau does not really address itself to the bodily eye any more than the space-straining music since Bach addresses itself to the bodily ear. The 220Classical relation between art-work and sense-organ—of which we so often and so erroneously remind ourselves here—is something quite different from, something far simpler and more material than ours. We read “Othello” and “Faust” and we study orchestral scores—that is, we change one sense-agency for another in order to let the undiluted spirit of these works take effect upon us. Here there is always an appeal from the outer senses to the “inner,” to the truly Faustian and wholly un-Classical power of imagination. Only thus can we understand Shakespeare’s ceaseless change of scene as against the Classical unity of place. In extreme cases indeed, for instance in that of “Faust” itself, no representation of the work (that is, of its full content) is physically possible. But in music too—in the unaccompanied “A capella” of the Palestrina style as well as a fortiori in the Passions of Heinrich Schütz, in the fugues of Bach, in the last quartets of Beethoven, and in “Tristan”—we livingly experience behind the sensuous impressions a whole world of others. And it is only through these latter that all the fullness and depth of the work begins to be present to us, and it is only mediately—through the images of blond, brown, dusky and golden colours, of sunsets and distant ranked mountain-summits, of storms and spring landscapes, of foundered cities and strange faces which harmony conjures up for us—that it tells us something of itself. It is not an incident that Beethoven wrote his last works when he was deaf—deafness merely released him from the last fetters. For this music, sight and hearing equally are bridges into the soul and nothing more. To the Greek this visionary kind of artistic enjoyment was utterly alien. He felt the marble with his eye, and the thick tones of an aulos moved him almost corporally. For him, eye and ear are the receivers of the whole of the impression that he wished to receive. But for us this had ceased to be true even at the stage of Gothic.

In the actual, tones are something extended, limited and numerable just as lines and colours are; harmony, melody, rhyme and rhythm no less so than perspective, proportion, chiaroscuro and outline. The distance separating two kinds of painting can be infinitely greater than that separating the painting and the music of a period. Considered in relation to a statue of Myron, the art of a Poussin landscape is the same as that of a contemporary chamber-cantata; that of Rembrandt as that of the organ works of Buxtehude, Pachelbel and Bach; that of Guardi as that of the Mozart opera—the inner form-language is so nearly identical that the difference between optical and acoustic means is negligible.

The importance which the “science of art” has always attached to a timeless and conceptual delimitation of the individual art-spheres only proves that the fundamentals of the problem have not been attacked. Arts are living units, and the living is incapable of being dissected. The first act of the learned pedant has always been to partition the infinitely wide domain into provinces 221determined by perfectly superficial criteria of medium and technique and to endow these provinces with eternal validity and immutable (!) form-principles. Thus he separated “Music” and “Painting,” “Music” and “Drama,” “Painting” and “Sculpture.” And then he proceeded to define “the” art of Painting, “the” art of Sculpture, and so on. But in fact the technical form-language is no more than the mask of the real work. Style is not what the shallow Semper—worthy contemporary of Darwin and materialism—supposed it to be, the product of material, technique, and purpose. It is the very opposite of this, something inaccessible to art-reason, a revelation of the metaphysical order, a mysterious “must,” a Destiny. With the material boundaries of the different arts it has no concern whatever.

To classify the arts according to the character of the sense-impression, then, is to pervert the problem of form in its very enunciation. For how is it possible to predicate a genus “Sculpture” of so general a character as to admit of general laws being evolved from it? What is “Sculpture?”

Take painting again. There is no such thing as “the” art of Painting, and anyone who compares a drawing of Raphael, effected by outline, with one of Titian, effected by flecks of light and shade, without feeling that they belong to two different arts; any one who does not realize a dissimilarity of essence between the works of Giotto or Mantegna—relief, created by brushstroke—and those of Vermeer or Goya—music, created on coloured canvas—such a one will never grasp the deeper questions. As for the frescoes of Polygnotus and the mosaics of Ravenna, there is not even the similarity of technical means to bring them within the alleged genus, and what is there in common between an etching and the art of Fra Angelico, or a proto-Corinthian vase-painting and a Gothic cathedral-window, or the reliefs of Egypt and those of the Parthenon?

If an art has boundaries at all—boundaries of its soul-become-form—they are historical and not technical or physiological boundaries.^[274] An art is an organism, not a system. There is no art-genus that runs through all the centuries and all the Cultures. Even where (as in the case of the Renaissance) supposed technical traditions momentarily deceive us into a belief in the eternal validity of antique art-laws, there is at bottom entire discrepance. There is nothing in Greek and Roman art that stands in any relation whatever to the form-language of a Donatello statue or a painting of Signorelli or a façade of Michelangelo. Inwardly, the Quattrocento is related to the contemporary Gothic and to nothing else. The fact of the archaic Greek Apollo-type being “influenced” by Egyptian portraiture, or early Tuscan representation by Etruscan 222tomb-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.

With this, the notion of Form opens out immensely. Not only the technical instrument, not only the form-language, but also the choice of art-genus itself is seen to be an expression-means. What the creation of a masterpiece means for an individual artist—the “Night Watch” for Rembrandt or the “Meistersinger” for Wagner—that the creation of a species of art, comprehended as such, means for the life-history of a Culture. It is epochal. Apart from the merest externals, each such art is an individual organism without predecessor or successor. Its theory, technique and convention all belong to its character, and contain nothing of eternal or universal validity. When one of these arts is born, when it is spent, whether it dies or is transmuted into another, why this or that art is dominant in or absent from a particular Culture—all these are questions of Form in the highest sense, just as is that other question of why individual painters and musicians unconsciously avoid certain shades and harmonies or, on the contrary, show preferences so marked that authorship-attributions can be based on them.

The importance of these groups of questions has not yet been recognized by theory, even by that of the present day. And yet it is precisely from this side, the side of their physiognomic, that the arts are accessible to the understanding. Hitherto it has been supposed—without the slightest examination of the weighty questions that the supposition involves—that the several “arts” specified in the conventional classification-scheme (the validity of which is assumed) are all possible at all times and places, and the absence of one or another of them in particular cases is attributed to the accidental lack of creative personalities or impelling circumstances or discriminating patrons to guide “art” on its “way.” Here we have what I call a transference of the causality-principle from the world of the become to that of the becoming. Having no eye for the perfectly different logic and necessity of the Living, for Destiny and the inevitableness and unique occurrence of its expression-possibilities, men had recourse to tangible and obvious “causes” for the building of their art-history, which thus came to consist of a series of events of only superficial concordance.

I have already, in the earliest pages of this work, exposed the shallowness of the notion of a linear progression of “mankind” through the stages of “ancient,” “mediæval” and “modern,” a notion that has made us blind to the true history and structure of higher Cultures. The history of art is a conspicuous case in point. Having assumed as self-evident the existence of a 223number of constant and well-defined provinces of art, one proceeded to order the history of these several provinces according to the—equally self-evident—scheme of ancient-mediæval-modern, to the exclusion, of course, of Indian and East-Asiatic art, of the art of Axum and Saba, of the Sassanids and of Russia, which if not omitted altogether were at best relegated to appendices. It occurred to no one that such results argued unsoundness in the method; the scheme was there, demanded facts, and must at any price be fed with them. And so a futile up-and-down course was stolidly traced out. Static times were described as “natural pauses,” it was called “decline” when some great art in reality died, and “renaissance” where an eye really free from prepossessions would have seen another art being born in another landscape to express another humanity. Even to-day we are still taught that the Renaissance was a rebirth of the Classical. And the conclusion was drawn that it is possible and right to take up arts that are found weak or even dead (in this respect the present is a veritable battle-field) and set them going again by conscious reformation-program or forced “revival.”

And yet it is precisely in this problem of the end, the impressively sudden end, of a great art—the end of the Attic drama in Euripides, of Florentine sculpture with Michelangelo, of instrumental music in Liszt, Wagner and Bruckner—that the organic character of these arts is most evident. If we look closely enough we shall have no difficulty in convincing ourselves that no one art of any greatness has ever been “reborn.”

Of the Pyramid style nothing passed over into the Doric. Nothing connects the Classical temple with the basilica of the Middle East, for the mere taking over of the Classical column as a structural member, though to a superficial observer it seems a fact of the first importance, weighs no more in reality than Goethe’s employment of the old mythology in the “Classical Walpurgis Night” scene of “Faust.” To believe genuinely in a rebirth of Classical art, or any Classical art, in the Western 15th Century requires a rare stretch of the imagination. And that a great art may die not merely with the Culture but within it, we may see from the fate of music in the Classical world.^[275] Possibilities of great music there must have been in the Doric springtime—how otherwise can we account for the importance of old-fashioned Sparta in the eyes of such musicians as there were later (for Terpander, Thaletas and Alcman were effective there when elsewhere the statuary art was merely infantile)?—and yet the Late-Classical world refrained. In just the same fashion everything that the Magian Culture had attempted in the way of frontal portraiture, deep relief and mosaic finally succumbed before the Arabesque; and everything of the plastic that had sprung up in the shade of Gothic cathedrals at Chartres, Reims, Bamberg, Naumburg, in the Nürnberg of Peter Vischer and the Florence of 224Verrocchio, vanished before the oil-painting of Venice and the instrumental music of the Baroque.

The temple of Poseidon at Pæstum and the Minster of Ulm, works of the ripest Doric and the ripest Gothic, differ precisely as the Euclidean geometry of bodily bounding-surfaces differs from the analytical geometry of the position of points in space referred to spatial axes. All Classical building begins from the outside, all Western from the inside. The Arabian also begins with the inside, but it stays there. There is one and only one soul, the Faustian, that craves for a style which drives through walls into the limitless universe of space and makes both the exterior and the interior of the building complementary images of one and the same world-feeling. The exterior of the basilica and the domical building may be a field for ornamentation, but architecture it is not. The impression that meets the beholder as he approaches is that of something shielding, something that hides a secret. The form-language in the cavern-twilight exists for the faithful only—that is the factor common to the highest examples of the style and to the simplest Mithræa and Catacombs, the prime powerful utterance of a new soul. Now, as soon as the Germanic spirit takes possession of the basilical type, there begins a wondrous mutation of all structural parts, as to both position and significance. Here in the Faustian North the outer form of the building, be it cathedral or mere dwelling-house, begins to be brought into relation with the meaning that governs the arrangement of the interior, a meaning undisclosed in the mosque and non-existent in the temple. The Faustian building has a visage and not merely a façade (whereas the front of a peripteros is, after all, only one of four sides and the centre-domed building in principle has not even a front) and with this visage, this head, is associated an articulated trunk that draws itself out through the broad plain like the cathedral at Speyer, or erects itself to the heavens like the innumerable spires of the original design of Reims. The motive of the façade, which greets the beholder and tells him the inner meaning of the house, dominates not only individual major buildings but also the whole aspect of our streets, squares and towns with their characteristic wealth of windows.^[276]

The great architecture of the early period is ever the mother of all following arts; it determines the choice of them and the spirit of them. Accordingly, we find that the history of the Classical shaping art is one untiring effort to accomplish one single ideal, viz., the conquest of the free-standing human body 225as the vessel of the pure real present. The temple of the naked body was to it what the cathedral of voices was to the Faustian from earliest counterpoint to the orchestral writing of the 18th Century. We have failed hitherto to understand the emotional force of this secular tendency of the Apollinian, because we have not felt how the purely material, soulless body (for the Temple of the Body, too, has no "interior"!) is the object which archaic relief, Corinthian painting on clay, and Attic fresco were all striving to obtain until Polycletus and Phidias showed how to achieve it in full. We have, with a wonderful blindness, assumed this kind of sculpture as both authoritative and universally possible, as in fact, “the art of sculpture.” We have written its history as one concerned with all peoples and periods, and even to-day our sculptors, under the influence of unproved Renaissance doctrines, speak of the naked human body as the noblest and most genuine object of “the” art of sculpture. Yet in reality this statue-art, the art of the naked body standing free upon its footing and appreciable from all sides alike, existed in the Classical and the Classical only, for it was that Culture alone which quite decisively refused to transcend sense-limits in favour of space. The Egyptian statue is always meant to be seen from the front—it is a variant of plane-relief. And the seemingly Classically-conceived statues of the Renaissance (we are astounded, as soon as it occurs to us to count them, to find how few of them there are^[277]) are nothing but a semi-Gothic reminiscence.

The evolution of this rigorously non-spatial art occupies the three centuries from 650 to 350, a period extending from the completion of the Doric and the simultaneous appearance of a tendency to free the figures from the Egyptian limitation of frontalness^[278] to the coming of the Hellenistic and its illusion-painting which closed-off the grand style. This sculpture will never be rightly appreciated until it is regarded as the last and highest Classical, as springing from a plane art, first obeying and then overcoming the fresco. No doubt the technical origin can be traced to experiments in figure-wise treatment of the pristine column, or the plates that served to cover the temple wall,^[279] and no doubt there are here and there imitations of Egyptian works (seated figures of Miletus), although very few Greek artists can ever have seen one.^[280] But as a form-ideal the statue goes back through relief to the archaic clay-painting in which fresco also originated. Relief, like fresco, is tied to the bodily wall. All this sculpture right down to Myron may be considered as relief detached from the 226plane. In the end, the figure is treated as a self-contained body apart from the mass of the building, but it remains essentially a silhouette in front of a wall.^[281] Direction in depth is excluded, and the work is spread out frontally before the beholder. Even the Marsyas of Myron can be copied upon vases or coins without much trouble or appreciable foreshortenings.^[282] Consequently, of the two major “late” arts after 650, fresco definitely has the priority. The small stock of types is always to be found first in vase-figuring, which is often exactly paralleled by quite late sculptures. We know that the Centaur group of the West pediment at Olympia was worked out from a painting. On the Ægina temple, the advance from the West to the East pediment is an advance from the fresco-character to the body-character. The change is completed about 460 with Polycletus, and thenceforward plastic groups become the model for strict painting. But it is from Lysippus that the wholly cubic and “all-ways” treatment becomes thoroughly veristic and yields “fact.” Till then, even in the case of Praxiteles, we have still a lateral or planar development of the subject, with a clear outline that is only fully effective in respect of one or two standpoints. But an undeviating testimony to the picture-origin of independent sculpture is the practice of polychroming the marble—a practice unknown to the Renaissance and to Classicism, which would have felt it as barbaric^[283]—and we may say the same of the gold-and-ivory statuary and the enamel overlaying of bronze, a metal which already possesses a shining golden tone of its own.

The corresponding stage of Western art occupies the three centuries 1500-1800, between the end of late Gothic and the decay of Rococo which marks the end of the great Faustian style. In this period, conformably to the persistent growth into consciousness of the will to spatial transcendence, it is instrumental music that develops into the ruling art. At the beginning, in the 17th Century, music uses the characteristic tone-colours of the instruments, and the contrasts of strings and wind, human voices and instrumental voices, as means wherewith to paint. Its (quite unconscious) ambition is to parallel the great masters from Titian to Velasquez and Rembrandt. It makes pictures (in the sonata from Gabrieli [d. 1612.] to Corelli [d. 1713] every movement shows a theme embellished with graces and set upon the background of a basso continuo), paints heroic landscapes (in the pastoral cantata), and draws a portrait in lines of melody (in Monteverde’s “Lament of Ariadne,” 1608). With the German masters, all this goes. Painting can take music no further. Music becomes itself absolute: it is music that (quite unconsciously again) dominates 227both painting and architecture in the 18th Century. And, ever more and more decisively, sculpture fades out from among the deeper possibilities of this form-world.

What distinguishes painting as it was before, from painting as it was after, the shift from Florence to Venice—or, to put it more definitely, what separates the painting of Raphael and that of Titian as two entirely distinct arts—is that the plastic spirit of the one associates painting with relief, while the musical spirit of the other works in a technique of visible brush-strokes and atmospheric depth-effects that is akin to the chromatic of string and wind choruses. It is an opposition and not a transition that we have before us, and the recognition of the fact is vital to our understanding of the organism of these arts. Here, if anywhere, we have to guard against the abstract hypothesis of “eternal art-laws.” “Painting” is a mere word. Gothic glass-painting was an element of Gothic architecture, the servant of its strict symbolism just as the Egyptian and the Arabian and every other art in this stage was the servant of the stone-language. Draped figures were built up as cathedrals were. Their folds were an ornamentation of extreme sincerity and severe expressiveness. To criticize their “stiffness” from a naturalistic-imitative point of view is to miss the point entirely.

Similarly “music” is a mere word. Some music there has been everywhere and always, even before any genuine Culture, even among the beasts. But the serious music of the Classical was nothing but a plastic for the ear. The tetrachords, chromatic and enharmonic, have a structural and not a harmonic meaning:^[284] but this is the very difference between body and space. This music was single-voiced. The few instruments that it employed were all developed in respect of capacity for tone-plastic; and naturally therefore it rejected the Egyptian harp, an instrument that was probably akin in tone-colour to the harpsichordharpsichord. 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

228to reconsider our ideas as to the impressions purposed and achieved by the statuary and the fresco, for we do not and cannot experience the charm that these exercised upon the Greek eye.

Equally incomprehensible to us is Chinese music: in which, according to educated Chinese, we are never able to distinguish gay from grave.^[285] Vice versa, to the Chinese all the music of the West without distinction is march-music. Such is the impression that the rhythmic dynamic of our life makes upon the accentless Tao of the Chinese soul, and, indeed, the impression that our entire Culture makes upon an alien humanity—the directional energy of our church-naves and our storeyed façades, the depth-perspectives of our pictures, the march of our tragedy and narrative, not to mention our technics and the whole course of our private and public life. We ourselves have accent in our blood and therefore do not notice it. But when our rhythm is juxtaposed with that of an alien life, we find the discordance intolerable.

Arabian music, again, is quite another world. Hitherto we have only observed it through the medium of the Pseudomorphosis, as represented by Byzantine hymns and Jewish psalmody, and even these we know only in so far as they have penetrated to the churches of the far West as antiphons, responsorial psalmody and Ambrosian chants.^[286] But it is self-evident that not only the religious west of Edessa (the syncretic cults, especially Syrian sun-worship, the Gnostic and the Mandæan) but also those to the east (Mazdaists, Manichæans, Mithraists, the synagogues of Irak and in due course the Nestorian Christians) must have possessed a sacred music of the same style; that side by side with this a gay secular music developed (above all, amongst the South-Arabian and Sassanid chivalry^[287]); and that both found their culmination in the Moorish style that reigned from Spain to Persia.

Out of all this wealth, the Faustian soul borrowed only some few church-forms and, moreover, in borrowing them, it instantly transformed them root and branch (10th Century, Hucbald, Guido d’Arezzo). Melodic accent and beat produced the “march,” and polyphony (like the rime of contemporary poetry) the image of endless space. To understand this, we have to distinguish between the imitative^[288] and the ornamental sides of music, and although owing to the fleeting nature of all tone-creations^[289] our knowledge is limited to the musical history of our own West, yet this is quite sufficient to reveal that duality of development which is one of the master-keys of all art-history. 229The one is soul, landscape, feeling, the other strict form, style, school. West Europe has an ornamental music of the grand style (corresponding to the full plastic of the Classical) which is associated with the architectural history of the cathedral, which is closely akin to Scholasticism and Mysticism, and which finds its laws in the motherland of high Gothic between Seine and Scheldt. Counterpoint developed simultaneously with the flying-buttress system, and its source was the “Romanesque” style of the Fauxbourdon and the Discant with their simple parallel and contrary motion.^[290] It is an architecture of human voices and, like the statuary-group and the glass-paintings, is only conceivable in the setting of these stone vaultings. With them it is a high art of space, of that space to which Nicolas of Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux, gave mathematical meaning by the introduction of co-ordinates.^[291] This is the genuine “rinascita” and “reformatio” as Joachim of Floris saw it at the end of the 12th Century^[292]—the birth of a new soul mirrored in the form-language of a new art.

Along with this there came into being in castle and village a secular imitative music, that of troubadours, Minnesänger and minstrels. As “ars nova” this travelled from the courts of Provence to the palaces of Tuscan patricians about 1300, the time of Dante and Petrarch. It consisted of simple melodies that appealed to the heart with their major and minor, of canzoni, madrigals and caccias, and it included also a type of galante operetta (Adam de la Hale’s “Robin and Marion”). After 1400, these forms give rise to forms of collective singing—the rondeau and the ballade. All this is “art” for a public.^[293] Scenes are painted from life, scenes of love, hunting, chivalry. The point of it is in the melodic inventiveness, instead of in the symbolism of its linear progress.

Thus, musically as otherwise, the castle and the cathedral are distinct. The cathedral is music and the castle makes music. The one begins with theory, the other with impromptu: it is the distinction between waking consciousness and living existence, between the spiritual and the knightly singer. Imitation stands nearest to life and direction and therefore begins with melody, while the symbolism of counterpoint belongs to extension and through polyphony signifies infinite space. The result was, on the one side, a store of “eternal” rules and, on the other, an inexhaustible fund of folk-melodies on which even the 18th Century was still drawing. The same contrast reveals itself, artistically, in the class-opposition of Renaissance and Reformation.^[294] The courtly taste of Florence was antipathetic to the spirit of counterpoint; the evolution 230of strict musical form from the Motet to the four-voice Mass through Dunstaple, Binchois and Dufay (c. 1430) proceeded wholly within the magic circle of Gothic architecture. From Fra Angelico to Michelangelo the great Netherlanders ruled alone in ornamental music. Lorenzo de’ Medici found no one in Florence who understood the strict style, and had to send for Dufay. And while in this region Leonardo and Raphael were painting, in the north Okeghem (d. 1495) and his school and Josquin des Prés (d. 1521) brought the formal polyphony of human voices to the height of fulfilment.

The transition into the “Late” age was heralded in Rome and Venice. With Baroque the leadership in music passes to Italy. But at the same time architecture ceases to be the ruling art and there is formed a group of Faustian special-arts in which oil-painting occupies the central place. About 1560 the empire of the human voice comes to an end in the a cappella style of Palestrina and Orlando Lasso (both d. 1594). Its powers could no longer express the passionate drive into the infinite, and it made way for the chorus of instruments, wind and string. And thereupon Venice produced Titian-music, the new madrigal that in its flow and ebb follows the sense of the text. The music of the Gothic is architectural and vocal, that of the Baroque pictorial and instrumental. The one builds, the other operates by means of motives. For all the arts have become urban and therefore secular. We pass from super-personal Form to the personal expression of the Master, and shortly before 1600 Italy produces the basso continuo which requires virtuosi and not pious participants.

Thenceforward, the great task was to extend the tone-corpus into the infinity, or rather to resolve it into an infinite space of tone. Gothic had developed the instruments into families of definite timbre. But the new-born “orchestra” no longer observes limitations imposed by the human voice, but treats it as a voice to be combined with other voices—at the same moment as our mathematic proceeds from the geometrical analysis of Fermat to the purely functional analysis of Descartes.^[295] In Zarlino’s “Harmony” (1558) appears a genuine perspective of pure tonal space. We begin to distinguish between ornamental and fundamental instruments. Melody and embellishment join to produce the Motive, and this in development leads to the rebirth of counterpoint in the form of the fugal style, of which Frescobaldi was the first master and Bach the culmination. To the vocal masses and motets the Baroque opposes its grand, orchestrally-conceived forms of the oratorio (Carissimi), the cantata (Viadana) and the opera (Monteverde). Whether a bass melody be set against upper voices, or upper voices be concerted against one another upon a background of basso continuo, always sound-worlds of characteristic expression-quality work reciprocally upon one another in the infinity of tonal space, supporting, intensifying, raising, illuminating, threatening, overshadowing—a 231music all of interplay, scarcely intelligible save through ideas of contemporary Analysis.

From out of these forms of the early Baroque there proceeded, in the 17th Century, the sonata-like forms of suite, symphony and concerto grosso. The inner structure and the sequence of movements, the thematic working-out and modulation became more and more firmly established. And thus was reached the great, immensely dynamic, form in which music—now completely bodiless—was raised by Corelli and Handel and Bach to be the ruling art of the West. When Newton and Leibniz, about 1670, discovered the Infinitesimal Calculus, the fugal style was fulfilled. And when, about 1740, Euler began the definitive formulation of functional Analysis, Stamitz and his generation were discovering the last and ripest form of musical ornamentation, the four-part movement^[296] as vehicle of pure and unlimited motion. For, at that time, there was still this one step to be taken. The theme of the fugue “is,” that of the new sonata-movement “becomes,” and the issue of its working out is in the one case a picture, in the other a drama. Instead of a series of pictures we get a cyclic succession,^[297] and the real source of this tone-language was in the possibilities, realized at last, of our deepest and most intimate kind of music—the music of the strings. Certain it is that the violin is the noblest of all instruments that the Faustian soul has imagined and trained for the expression of its last secrets, and certain it is, too, that it is in string quartets and violin sonatas that it has experienced its most transcendent and most holy moments of full illumination. Here, in chamber-music, Western art as a whole reaches its highest point. Here our prime symbol of endless space is expressed as completely as the Spearman of Polycletus expresses that of intense bodiliness. When one of those ineffably yearning violin-melodies wanders through the spaces expanded around it by the orchestration of Tartini or Nardini, Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven, we know ourselves in the presence of an art beside which that of the Acropolis is alone worthy to be set.

With this, the Faustian music becomes dominant among the Faustian arts. It banishes the plastic of the statue and tolerates only the minor art—an entirely musical, refined, un-Classical and counter-Renaissance art—of porcelain, which (as a discovery of the West) is contemporary with the rise of chamber-music to full effectiveness. Whereas the statuary of Gothic is through-and-through architectural ornamentation, human espalier-work, that of the Rococo remarkably exemplifies the pseudo-plastic that results from entire subjection to the form-language of music, and shows to what a degree the technique governing 232the presented foreground can be in contradiction with the real expression-language that is hidden behind it. Compare Coysevox’s^[298] (1686) crouching Venus in the Louvre with its Classical prototype in the Vatican—in the one plastic is understudying music, in the other plastic is itself. Terms like “staccato,” “accelerando,” “andante” and “allegro” best describe the kind of movements that we have here, the flow of the lines, the fluidity in the being of the stone itself which like the porcelain has more or less lost its fine compactness. Hence our feeling that the granular marble is out of keeping. Hence, too, the wholly un-Classical tendency to work with reference to effects of light and shade. This is quite in conformity with the principles of oil-painting from Titian onwards. That which in the 18th Century is called “colour” in an etching, a drawing, or a sculpture-group really signifies music. Music dominates the painting of Watteau and Fragonard and the art of Gobelins and pastels, and since then, have we not acquired the habit of speaking of colour-tones or tone-colours? And do not the very words imply a recognition of a final homogeneity between the two arts, superficially dissimilar as they are? And are not these same words perfectly meaningless as applied to any and every Classical art? But music did not stop there; it transmuted also the architecture of Bernini’s Baroque into accord with its own spirit, and made of it Rococo, a style of transcendent ornamentation upon which lights (or rather “tones”) play to dissolve ceilings, walls and everything else constructional and actual into polyphonies and harmonies, with architectural trills and cadences and runs to complete the identification of the form-language of these halls and galleries with that of the music imagined for them. Dresden and Vienna are the homes of this late and soon-extinguished fairyland of visible chamber music, of curved furniture and mirror-halls, and shepherdesses in verse and porcelain. It is the final brilliant autumn with which the Western soul completes the expression of its high style. And in the Vienna of the Congress-time it faded and died.

The Art of the Renaissance, considered from this particular one of its many aspects,^[299] is a revolt against the spirit of the Faustian forest-music of counterpoint, which at that time was preparing to vassalize the whole form-language of the Western Culture. It was the logical consequence of the open assertion of this will in matured Gothic. It never disavowed its origin and it maintained the character of a simple counter-movement; necessarily therefore it remained dependent upon the forms of the original movement, and represented simply the effect of these upon a hesitant soul. Hence, it was without true depth, either 233ideal or phenomenal. As to the first, we have only to think of the bursting passion with which the Gothic world-feeling discharged itself upon the whole Western landscape, and we shall see at once what sort of a movement it was that the handful of select spirits—scholars, artists and humanists—initiated about 1420.^[300] In the first the issue was one of life and death for a new-born soul, in the second it was a point of—taste. The Gothic gripped life in its entirety, penetrated its most hidden corners. It created new men and a new world. From the idea of Catholicism to the state-theory of the Holy Roman Emperors, from the knightly tourney to the new city-form, from cathedral to cottage, from language-building to the village maiden’s bridal attire, from oil-painting to the Spielmann’s song, everything is hall-marked with the stamp of one and the same symbolism. But the Renaissance, when it had mastered some arts of word and picture, had shot its bolt. It altered the ways of thought and the life-feeling of West Europe not one whit. It could penetrate as far as costume and gesture, but the roots of life it could not touch—even in Italy the world-outlook of the Baroque is essentially a continuation of the Gothic.^[301] It produced no wholly great personality between Dante and Michelangelo, each of whom had one foot outside its limits. And as for the other—phenomenal or manifested depth—the Renaissance never touched the people, even in Florence itself. The man for whom they had ears was Savonarola—a phenomenon of quite another spiritual order and one which begins to be comprehensible when we discern the fact that, all the time, the deep under-currents are steadily flowing on towards the Gothic-musical Baroque. The Renaissance as an anti-Gothic movement and a reaction against the spirit of polyphonic music has its Classical equivalent in the Dionysiac movement. This was a reaction against Doric and against the sculptural-Apollinian world-feeling. It did not “originate” in the Thracian Dionysus-cult, but merely took this up as a weapon against and counter-symbol to the Olympian religion, precisely as in Florence the cult of the antique was called in for the justification and confirmation of a feeling already there. The period of the great protest was the 7th Century in Greece and (therefore) the 15th in West Europe. In both cases we have in reality an outbreak of deep-seated discordances in the Culture, which physiognomically dominates a whole epoch of its history and especially of its artistic world—in other words, a stand that the soul attempts to make against the Destiny that at last it comprehends. The inwardly recalcitrant forces—Faust’s second Soul that would separate itself from the other—are striving to deflect the 234sense of the Culture, to repudiate, to get rid of or to evade its inexorable necessity; it stands anxious in presence of the call to accomplish its historical fate in Ionic and Baroque. This anxiety fastened itself in Greece to the Dionysus-cult with its musical, dematerializing, body-squandering orgasm, and in the Renaissance to the tradition of the Antique and its cult of the bodily-plastic tradition. In each case, the alien expression-means was brought in consciously and deliberately, in order that the force of a directly-opposite form-language should provide the suppressed feelings with a weight and a pathos of their own, and so enable them to stand against the stream—in Greece the stream which flowed from Homer and the Geometrical to Phidias, in the West that which flowed from the Gothic cathedrals, through Rembrandt, to Beethoven.

It follows from the very character of a counter-movement that it is far easier for it to define what it is opposing than what it is aiming at. This is the difficulty of all Renaissance research. In the Gothic (and the Doric) it is just the opposite—men are contending for something, not against it—but Renaissance art is nothing more nor less than anti-Gothic art. Renaissance music, too, is a contradiction in itself; the music of the Medicean court was the Southern French “ars nova,” that of the Florentine Duomo was the Low-German counterpoint, both alike essentially Gothic and the property of the whole West.

The view that is customarily taken of the Renaissance is a very clear instance of how readily the proclaimed intentions of a movement may be mistaken for its deeper meaning. Since Burckhardt,^[302] criticism has controverted every individual proposition that the leading spirits of the age put forward as to their own tendencies—and yet, this done, it has continued to use the word Renaissance substantially in the former sense. Certainly, one is conscious at once in passing to the south of the Alps of a marked dissimilarity in architecture in particular and in the look of the arts in general. But the very obviousness of the conclusion that the impression prompts should have led us to distrust it and to ask ourselves, instead, whether the supposed distinction of Gothic and “antique” was not in reality merely a difference between Northern and Southern aspects of one and the same form-world. Plenty of things in Spain give the impression of being “Classical” merely because they are Southern, and if a layman were confronted with the great cloister of S. Maria Novella or the façade of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and asked to say if these were “Gothic” he would certainly guess wrong. Otherwise, the sharp change of spirit ought to have set in not beyond the Alps but only beyond the Apennines, for Tuscany is artistically an island in Italian Italy. Upper Italy belongs entirely to a Byzantine-tinted Gothic; Siena in particular is a genuine monument of the 235counter-Renaissance, and Rome is already the home of Baroque. But, in fact, it is the change of landscape that coincides with the change of feeling.

In the actual birth of the Gothic style Italy had indeed no inward share. At the epoch of 1000 the country was still absolutely under the domination of Byzantine taste in the East and Moorish taste in the South. When Gothic first took root here it was the mature Gothic, and it implanted itself with an intensity and force for which we look in vain in any of the great Renaissance creations—think of the “Stabat Mater,” the “Dies Iræ,” Catharine of Siena, Giotto and Simone Martini! At the same time, it was lighted from the South and its strangeness was, as it were, softened in acclimatization. That which it suppressed or expelled was not, as has been supposed, some lingering strains of the Classical but purely the Byzantine-cum-Saracen form-language that appealed to the senses in familiar everyday life—in the buildings of Ravenna and Venice but even more in the ornament of the fabrics, vessels and arms imported from the East.

If the Renaissance had been a “renewal” (whatever that may mean) of the Classical world-feeling, then, surely, would it not have had to replace the symbol of embraced and rhythmically-ordered space by that of closed structural body? But there was never any question of this. On the contrary, the Renaissance practised wholly and exclusively an architecture of space prescribed for it by Gothic, from which it differed only in that in lieu of the Northern “Sturm und Drang” it breathed the clear equable calm of the sunny, care-free and unquestioning South. It produced no new building-idea, and the extent of its architectural achievement might almost be reduced to façades and courtyards.

Now, this focussing of expressible effort upon the street-front of a house or the side of a cloister—many-windowed and ever significant of the spirit within—is characteristic of the Gothic (and deeply akin to its art of portraiture); and the cloistered courtyard itself is, from the Sun-temple of Baalbek to the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra, as genuinely Arabian. And in the midst of this art the Poseidon temple of Pæstum, all body, stands lonely and unrelated: no one saw it, no one attempted to copy it. Equally un-Attic is the Florentine sculpture, for Attic is free plastic, “in the round” in the full sense of the words, whereas every Florentine statue feels behind it the ghost of the niche into which the Gothic sculptor had built its real ancestors. In the relation of figure to background and in the build of the body, the masters of the “Kings’ heads” at Chartres and the masters of the “George” choir at Bamberg exhibit the same interpenetration of “Antique” and Gothic expression-means that we have, neither intensified nor contradicted, in the manner of Giovanni Pisano and Ghiberti and even Verrocchio.

If we take away from the models of the Renaissance all elements that originated later than the Roman Imperial Age—that is to say, those belonging to the Magian form-world—nothing is left. Even from Late-Roman architecture 236itself all elements derived from the great days of Hellas had one by one vanished. Most conclusive of all, though, is that motive which actually dominates the Renaissance, which because of its Southern-ness we regard as the noblest of the Renaissance characters, viz., the association of round-arch and column. This association, no doubt, is very un-Gothic, but in the Classical style it simply does not exist, and in fact it represents the leitmotif of the Magian architecture that originated in Syria.

But it was just then that the South received from the North those decisive impulses which helped it first of all to emancipate itself entirely from Byzantium and then to step from Gothic into Baroque. In the region comprised between Amsterdam, Köln and Paris^[303]—the counter-pole to Tuscany in the style-history of our culture—counterpoint and oil-painting had been created in association with the Gothic architecture. Thence Dufay in 1428 and Willaert in 1516 came to the Papal Chapel, and in 1527 the latter founded that Venetian school which was decisive of Baroque music. The successor of Willaert was de Rore of Antwerp. A Florentine commissioned Hugo van der Goes to execute the Portinari altar for Santa Maria Nuova, and Memlinc to paint a Last Judgment. And over and above this, numerous pictures (especially Low-Countries portraits) were acquired and exercised an enormous influence. In 1450 Rogier van der Weyden himself came to Florence, where his art was both admired and imitated. In 1470 Justus van Gent introduced oil-painting to Umbria, and Antonello da Messina brought what he had learned in the Netherlands to Venice. How much “Dutch” and how little “Classical” there is in the pictures of Filippino Lippi, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli and especially in the engravings of Pollaiulo! Or in Leonardo himself. Even to-day critics hardly care to admit the full extent of the influence exercised by the Gothic North upon the architecture, music, painting and plastic of the Renaissance.^[304] It was just then, too, that Nicolaus Cusanus, Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen (1401-1464), brought into mathematics the “infinitesimal” principle, that contrapuntal method of number which he reached by deduction from the idea of God as Infinite Being. It was from Nicholas of Cusa that Leibniz received the decisive impulse that led him to work out his differential calculus; and thus was forged the weapon with which dynamic, Baroque, Newtonian, physics definitely overcame the static idea characteristic of the Southern physics that reaches a hand to Archimedes and is still effective even in Galileo.

The high period of the Renaissance is a moment of apparent expulsion of music from Faustian art. And in fact, for a few decades, in the only area where Classical and Western landscapes touched, Florence did uphold—with one 237grand 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 238ideal in place of the relief-ideal into painting. The hidden dynamic is equally unmistakable in the sculpture of Florence—it would be perfectly hopeless to look for an Attic companion for Verrocchio’s equestrian statue.^[305] This art was a mask, a mode of the taste of an élite, and sometimes a comedy—though never was comedy more gallantly played out. The indescribable inward purity of Gothic form often causes us to forget what an excess of native strength and depth it possessed. Gothic, it must be repeated again, is the only foundation of the Renaissance. The Renaissance never even touched the real Classical, let alone understood it or “revived” it. The consciousness of the Florentine élite, wholly under literary influences, fashioned the deceptive name to positivize the negative element of the movement—thereby demonstrating how little such currents are aware of their own nature. There is not a single one of their great works that the contemporaries of Pericles, or even those of Cæsar, would not have rejected as utterly alien. Their palace courtyards are Moorish courtyards, and their round arches on slender pillars are of Syrian origin. Cimabue taught his century to imitate with the brush the art of Byzantine mosaic. Of the two famous domical buildings of the Renaissance, the domed cathedral of Florence is a masterpiece of late Gothic, and St. Peter’s is one of early Baroque. When Michelangelo set himself to build the latter as the “Pantheon towering over the Basilica of Maxentius,” he was naming two buildings of the purest early Arabian style. And ornament—is there indeed a genuine Renaissance ornamentation? Certainly there is nothing comparable in symbolic force with the ornamentation of Gothic. But what is the provenance of that gay and elegant embellishment which has a real inward unity of its own and has captivated all Europe? There is a great difference between the home of a “taste” and the home of the expression-means that it employs: one finds a great deal that is Northern in the early Florentine motives of Pisano, Maiano, Ghiberti and Della Quercia. We have to distinguish in all these chancels, tombs, niches and porches between the outward and transferable forms (the Ionic column itself is doubly a transfer, for it originated in Egypt) and the spirit of the form-language that uses them as means and signs. One Classical element or item is equivalent to another so long as something un-Classical is being expressed—significance lies not in the thing but in the way in which it is used. But even in Donatello such motives are far fewer than in mature Baroque. As for a strict Classical capital, no such thing is to be found.