FORM AND ACTUALITY

$\mathbf{BY}$

OSWALD SPENGLER

MCMXXVII: ALFRED · A · KNOPF: NEW YORK

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Wenn im Unendlichen dasselbe Sich wiederholend ewig fliesst, Das tausendfältige Gewölbe Sich kräftig ineinander schliesst; Strömt Lebenslust aus allen Dingen, Dem kleinsten wie dem grössten Stern, Und alles Drängen, alles Ringen Ist ewige Ruh in Gott dem Herrn.

• GORTHE.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

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.

found in Spengler's vast ordered multitude of facts, Eduard Meyer honourably bears testimony to our author's "erstaunlich umfangreiches, ibm 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 wirkendez 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.

C. F. A

January, 1926.

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

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.

Blankenburg am Harz. December, 1922.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

OSWALD SPENGLER

Munich, December, 1917

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I Introduction

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

T

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.

TT

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.

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.

ш

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

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

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. 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,

ΙV

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 certaintly 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.

^<sup>1 In the original, these fundamental antitheses are expressed simply by means of werden and sein. Exact renderings are therefore impossible in English. — Tr.

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

information of their alien forerunners and then slowly forgot it

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.

v

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

From this moment the plasticity of the individual spiritual evolution was at an end. Classical drama admitted truly historical motives just as little as it allowed themes of inward evolution, and it is well known how decisively the Hellenic instinct set itself against portraiture in the arts. Right into the imperial period Classical art handled only the matter that was, so to say, natural to it, the myth. Even the "ideal" portraits of Hellenistic sculpture are

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.

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

VI

What, then, is world-history? Certainly, an ordered presentation of the past, an inner postulate, the expression of a capacity for feeling form. But a feeling for form, however definite, is not the same as form itself. No doubt we feel world-history, experience it, and believe that it is to be read just as a map is

^<sup>2 Newton's choice of the name "fluxions" for his calculus was meant to imply a standpoint towards certain metaphysical notions as to the nature of time. In Greek mathematics time figures not at all.

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-European¹ 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"

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?

3711

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 31, 275.

² Windelband, Gesch. d. Phil. (1903), pp. 275 ff.

³ In the New Testament the polar idea tends to appear in the dialectics of the Apostle Paul, while the periodic is represented by the Apocalypse.

^<sup>1 As we can see from the expression, at once desperate and ridiculous, "newest time" (neueste Zeit).

^<sup>2 K. Burdach, Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus, 1918, pp. 48 et seq. (English readers may be referred to the article Joachim of Floris by Professor Alphandery in the Encyclopædia Britannica, XI ed., Tr.)

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.

• "Painting" from the Egyptians (or the cave-men) to the Impressionists, or
• "Music" from Homer to Bayreuth and beyond, or

"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.¹ 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-

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," 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 wh

VIII

Examine, from this point of view, our best books. When Plato speaks of

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?

IX

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,

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.

X

finally, of all Classical Culture, of all reflections of the Classical soul, nothing but a bundle of social, economic, political and physiological facts, and the rest is treated as "secondary results," "reflexes," "attendant phenomena." In the books of this group we find not a hint of the mythical force of Æschylus's choruses, of the immense mother-earth struggle of the early sculpture, the Doric column, of the richness of the Apollo-cult, of the real depth of the Roman Emperor-worship. The other group, composed above all of belated romanticists — represented in recent times by the three Basel professors Bachofen, Burckhardt and Nietzsche — succumb to the usual dangers of ideology. They lose themselves in the clouds of an antiquity that is really no more than the image of their own sensibility in a philological mirror. They rest their case upon the only evidence which they consider worthy to support it, viz., the relics of the old literature, yet there never was a Culture so incompletely represented for us by its great writers. 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.

[In this English translation, it should be mentioned, the word "Classical" has almost universally been employed to translate the German antike, as, in the translator's judgment, no literal equivalent of the German word would convey the specific meaning attached to antike throughout the work, "antique," "ancient" and the like words having for us a much more general connotation. — Tr.]

there was an immanent necessity in it to determine this somehow, rather than turn their backs upon History in despair like Schopenhauer.

ΧI

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.

^<sup>1 As will be seen later, the words zivilisierte and Zivilisation possess in this work a special meaning. — Tr.

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

Not that religious and artistic phenomena are more primitive than social and economic, any more than the reverse. For the man who in these things has won his unconditional freedom of outlook, beyond all personal interests whatsoever, there is no dependence, no priority, no relation of cause and effect, no differentiation of value or importance. That which assigns relative ranks amongst the individual detail-facts is simply the greater or less purity and force of their form-language, their symbolism, beyond all questions of good and evil, high and low, useful and ideal.

XII

So, for the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as the successors of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest secrets of the late-Classical period. What, but this, can be the meaning of the fact — which can only be disputed by vain phrases — that the Romans were barbarians who did not precede but closed a great development? Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand between the Hellenic Culture and nothingness. An imagination directed purely to practical objects — they had religious laws governing godward relations as they had other laws governing human relations, but there was no specifically Roman saga of gods — was something which is not found at all in Athens. In a word, Greek soul — Roman intellect; and this antithesis is the differentia between Culture and Civilization. Nor is it only to the Classical that it applies. Again and again there appears this type of strongminded, 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.

World-city and province 1— 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,

^<sup>1 See Vol. II, pp. 117 et seq.

ance of the panem et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds — all these things betoken the definite closing-down of the Culture and the opening of a quite new phase of human existence — anti-provincial, late, futureless, but quite inevitable.

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, 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 globetrotter in the Sistine Chapel at those of Michelangelo, every removable artpiece 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.

³ See Vol. II, 577

XIII

Considered in itself, the Roman world-dominion was a negative phenomenon, being the result not of a surplus of energy on the one side — that the Romans had never had since Zama — but of a deficiency of resistance on the other. That the Romans did not conquer the world is certain; 1 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.² 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.

^<sup>2 The conquest of Gaul by Cæsar was frankly a colonial, i.e., a one-sided, war; and the fact that it is the highest achievement in the later military history of Rome only shows that the well of real achievement was rapidly drying up.

Which in the end gave its name to the Empire (Tsin = China).

⁵ See Vol. II. 521-539.

Let it be realized, then:

XIV

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

of his own life in relation to the general culture-scheme and to test his own powers and purposes. And I can only hope that men of the new generation may be moved by this book to devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of the paint-brush, and politics instead of epistemology. Better they could not do.

xv

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.

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 ¹ 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 mo

that acquisitions on the Rhine and in Belgium would not permanently better the position of France and that the neck of Suez would one day be the key of world-dominance. Doubtless the King was not equal to these deep political and strategic conceptions of the Philosopher.

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

few of the problems of metaphysics are, so to say, allocated for solution to any epoch of thought. Even thus soon, a whole world separates Nietzsche's time, in which a last trace of romanticism was still operative, from our own, which has shed every vestige of it.

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

With that, the claim of higher thought to possess general and eternal truths falls to the ground. Truths are truths only in relation to a particular mankind. Thus, my own philosophy is able to express and reflect only the Western (as distinct from the Classical, Indian, or other) soul, and that soul only in its present civilized phase by which its conception of the world, its practical range and its sphere of effect are specified.

XVI

In concluding this Introduction, I may be permitted to add a personal note. In 1911, I proposed to myself to put together some broad considerations on the political phenomena of the day and their possible developments. At that time the World-War appeared to me both as imminent and also as the inevitable outward manifestation of the historical crisis, and my 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, 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

¹ The work referred to is embodied in Vol. II (pp. 521 et seq., 562 et seq., 631 et seq.).

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

able passionate questionings and probings. In our own case there were books and ideas by the thousand; but, scattered, disconnected, limited by the horizons of specialisms as they were, they incited, depressed and confounded but could not free. Hence, though these questions are seen, their identity is missed. Consider those art-problems that (though never comprehended in their depths) were evinced in the disputes between form and content, line and space, drawing and colour, in the notion of style, in the idea of Impressionism and the music of Wagner. Consider the decline of art and the failing authority of science; the grave problems arising out of the victory of the megalopolis over the country-side, such as childlessness and land-depopulation; the place in society of a fluctuating Fourth Estate; the crisis in materialism, in Socialism, in parliamentary government; the position of the individual vis-à-vis the State; the problem of private property with its pendant the problem of marriage. Consider at the same time one fact taken from what is apparently an entirely different field, the voluminous work that was being done in the domain of folk-psychology on the origins of myths, arts, religions and thought — and done, moreover, no longer from an ideal but from a strictly morphological standpoint. In its 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.

¹ At the end of the volume

CHAPTER II

THE MEANING OF NUMBERS

I

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

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 1) 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.

¹ Weltanschauung im wörtlichen Sinne: Anschauung der Welt.

^<sup>2 The case of mankind in the historyless state is discussed in Vol. II, pp. 58 et seq

TT

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

With, moreover, a "biological horizon." See Vol. II, p. 34.

^<sup>2 See Vol. II, pp. 327 et seq

^<sup>1 Dynasties I-VIII, or, effectively, I-VI. The Pyramid period coincides with Dynasties IV-VI. Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus belong to the IV dynasty, under which also great water-control works were carried out between Abydos and the Fayum. — Tr.

TTI

ΙV

The relationship between the form-language of a mathematic and that of the cognate major arts, 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 c

As also those of law and of money. See Vol. II, pp. 68 et seq., pp. 616 et seq.

V

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

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

which for us are filled with the impressive symbol of the Universe of Space, are for them the nonent $(\tau \delta \mu \dot{\eta} \delta \nu)$ .

quite undistinguished part in the midst of complex, hypercomplex, non-Archimedean and other number-systems.

tary reaction against the non-Classical mathematic, the Infinitesimal Calculus which underlay the natural philosophy of his time.

Western mathematics as early as Oresme (14th Century), would have been to them utter nonsense. Euclid calls the factors of a product its sides πλευραί and fractions (finite of course) were treated as whole-number relationships between two lines. Clearly, out of this no conception of zero as a number could possibly come, for from the point of view of a draughtsman it is meaningless. We, having minds differently constituted, must not argue from our habits to theirs and treat their mathematic as a "first stage" in the development of "Mathematics." Within and for the purposes of the world that Classical man evolved for himself, the Classical mathematic was a complete thing — it is merely not so for us. Babylonian and Indian mathematics had long contained, as essential elements of their number-worlds, things which the Classical numberfeeling regarded as nonsense — and not from ignorance either, since many a Greek thinker was acquainted with them. It must be repeated, "Mathematics" is an illusion. A mathematical, and, generally, a scientific way of thinking is right, convincing, a "necessity of thought," when it completely expresses the life-feeling proper to it. Otherwise it is either impossible, futile and senseless, or else, as we in the arrogance of our historical soul like to say, "primitive." The modern mathematic, though "true" only for the Western spirit, is undeniably a master-work of that spirit; and yet to Plato it would have seemed a ridiculous and painful aberration from the path leading to the "true"—to wit, the Classical — mathematic. And so with ourselves. Plainly, we have almost no notion of the multitude of great ideas belonging to other Cultures that we have suffered to lapse because our thought with its limitations has not permitted us to assimilate them, or (which comes to the same thing) has led us to reject them as false, superfluous, and nonsensical.

VI

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 11 et seq.

only in agreement with the phenomenal world approximately and within very narrow limits — in fact, the limits of a drawing-board. Extend these limits, and what becomes, for instance, of Euclidean parallels? They meet at the line of the horizon — a simple fact upon which all our art-perspective is grounded.

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.¹ Rediscovered by Copernicus, it was to shake the metaphysical passions of the West to their foundations—witness Giordano Bruno²—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 bollow 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 stars³ is not inconsistent in itself with either the Ptolemaic or

^<sup>2 Giordano Bruno (born 1548, burned for heresy 1600). His whole life might be expressed as a crusade on behalf of God and the Copernican universe against a degenerated orthodoxy and an Aristotelian world-idea long coagulated in death. — Tr.

B F. Strunz, Gesch. d. Naturwiss. im Mittelalter (1910), p. 90.

In the cubic style of their early architecture the Egyptians, so to say, con-

"The realms of Image unconfined.
... Formation, transformation,
Eternal play of the eternal mind
With semblances of all things in creation
For ever and for ever sweeping round." 1

^<sup>1 Dr. Anster's translation. — Tr.

VII

The Classical arithmetic, we are always told, was first liberated from its sense-bondage, widened and extended by Diophantus, who did not indeed create algebra (the science of undefined magnitudes) but brought it to expression within the framework of the Classical mathematic that we know — and so suddenly that we have to assume that there was a pre-existent stock of ideas which he worked out. But this amounts, not to an enrichment of, but a complete victory over, the Classical world-feeling, and the mere fact should have sufficed in itself to show that, inwardly, Diophantus does not belong to the Classical Culture at all. What is active in him is a new number-feeling, or let us say a new limit-feeling with respect to the actual and become, and no longer that Hellenic feeling of sensuously-present limits which had produced the Euclidean geometry, the nude statue and the coin. Details of the formation of this new mathematic we do not know — Diophantus stands so completely by himself in the history of so-called late-Classical mathematics that an Indian influence has been presumed. But here also the influence it must really have been that of those early-Arabian schools whose studies (apart from the dogmatic) have hitherto been so imperfectly investigated. In Diophantus, unconscious though he may be of his own essential antagonism to the Classical foundations on which he attempted to build, there emerges from under the surface of Euclidean intention the new limit-feeling which I designate the "Magian." He did not widen the idea of number as magnitude, but (unwitingly) 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

¹ See Vol. II, Chapter III,

^<sup>1 Oresme was, equally, prelate, church reformer, scholar, scientist and economist — the very type of the philosopher-leader. — Tr.

^<sup>3 Alexandria ceased to be a world-city in the second century A.D. and became a collection of houses left over from the Classical civilization which harboured a primitive population of quite different spiritual constitution. See Vol. II, pp. 122 et seq.

VIII

^<sup>1 Born 1601, died 1665. See Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article Fermat, and references therein. — Tr.

TY

Think, for instance, of expressions like $e^{-x}$ , $\sqrt[\pi]{x}$ , $a^{\frac{1}{6}}$ .

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

x

One result of this Classicizing tendency has been to prevent us from finding the new notation proper to our Western number as such. The present-day signlanguage 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?

Greek mathematician would have found it quite impossible to understand the purport of an operation like this, which was not meant to be "worked out."

The brilliant period of the Baroque mathematic — the counterpart of the

ΧI

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

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," 2 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

^<sup>2 See Vol. II, pp. 137 et seq.

XII

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

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 methematicians ever use the word $\sigma \hat{\omega} \mu a$ for their entities, just as the Greek lawyers used it for persons as distinct from things ( $\sigma \omega \mu a \tau a \kappa a \ell \pi \rho a \ell \mu a \tau a$ ).

Classical number, integral and corporeal, therefore inevitably seeks to relate itself with the birth of bodily man, the $\sigma \hat{\omega} \mu a$ . The number r is hardly yet conceived of as actual number but rather as $\hat{a}\rho \chi \dot{\eta}$ , 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 motherwomb, 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

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. 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, 2 the doubtfulness of which soon aroused oppo-

^<sup>2 That only one parallel to a given straight line is possible through a given point — a proposi-

sition yet could not in any way be elucidated, brought it very close indeed to the decisive discovery. The Classical mind as unquestioningly devoted and limited itself to the study of the small and the near as ours has to that of the infinite and ultra-visual. All the mathematical ideas that the West found for itself or borrowed from others were automatically subjected to the form-language of the Infinitesimal — and that long before the actual Differential Calculus was discovered. Arabian algebra, Indian trigonometry, Classical mechanics were incorporated as a matter of course in analysis. Even the most "self-evident" propositions of elementary arithmetic such as $2 \times 2 = 4$ 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. $^1$

XIII

All proportion assumes the constancy, all transformation the variability of the constituents. Compare, for instance, the congruence theorems of Euclid,

¹ It is impossible to say, with certainty, how much of the Indian mathematics that we possess is old, i.e., before Buddha.

XIV

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

XV

Thus, finally, the whole content of Western number-thought centres itself upon the historic limit-problem of the Faustian mathematic, the key which opens the way to the Infinite, that Faustian infinite which is so different from the infinity of Arabian and Indian world-ideas. Whatever the guise — infinite series, curves or functions — in which number appears in the particular case, the essence of it is the theory of the limit.¹ 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 bistorical is the constitution of the Western soul.²

XVI

^<sup>2 "Function, rightly understood, is existence considered as an activity" (Goethe). Cf. Vol. II p. 618, for functional money.

XVII

Built for August II, in 1711, as barbican or fore-building for a projected palace. — Tr.

it was quite incapable. But whereas number, as conceived by a Pythagorean, exhibited the essence of individual and discrete data in "Nature" Descartes and his successors looked upon number as something to be conquered, to be wrung out, an abstract relation royally indifferent to all phenomenal support and capable of holding its own against "Nature" on all occasions. The will-to-power (to use Nietzsche's great formula) that from the earliest Gothic of the Eddas, the Cathedrals and Crusades, and even from the old conquering Goths and Vikings, has distinguished the attitude of the Northern soul to its world, appears also in the sense-transcending energy, the dynamic of Western number. In the Apollinian mathematic the intellect is the servant of the eye, in the Faustian its master. Mathematical, "absolute" space, we see then, is utterly un-Classical, and from the first, although mathematicians with their reverence for the Hellenic tradition did not dare to observe the fact, it was something different from the indefinite spaciousness of daily experience and customary painting, the a priori space of Kant which seemed so unambiguous and sure a concept. It is a pure abstract, an ideal and unfulfillable postulate of a soul which is ever less and less satisfied with sensuous means of expression and in the end passionately brushes them aside. The inner eye has awakened.

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 numbergroup 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. 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 $\infty$ 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.

YVIII

A historical paradigm will make this clearer.

Classical

T. Conception of a new number

About 540 B.C.
Number as magnitude
(Pythagoreans)

(About 470, sculpture prevails over fresco

2. Zenith of systematic development

3. Inward completion and conclusion of the figure-world

Euclid, Apollonius, Archimedes
(Lysippus, Leochares)

Western

About 1630 A.D.

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

(About 1670, music prevails over oil

1750–1800 Euler, Lagrange, Laplace (Gluck, Haydn, Mozart)

After 1800 Gauss, Cauchy, Riemann (Beethoven)

CHAPTER III

I PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC

1

Cultures, one's own included, as one regards the range of mountain peaks along a horizon.

п

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.

TTT

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, and the exact killing procedure of modern physics. But whatever the process, a remainder consisting of so much of the alien element as is present is always found. In strict natural sciences this remainder takes the form of the inevitable theories and hypotheses which are imposed on, and leaven, the stiff mass of number and formula. In historical research, it appears as chronology, the number-structure of dates and statistics which, alien though number is to the essence of becoming, is so thoroughly woven around and into the world of historical forms that it is never felt to be intrusive. For it is devoid of mathematical import. Chronological number distinguishes uniquely-occurring actualities, mathematical number constant possibilities. The one sharpens the images and works up the outlines of epoch and fact for the understanding eye.

But the other is itself the law which it seeks to establish, the end and aim of research. Chronological number is a scientific means of pioneering borrowed from the science of sciences, mathematics, and used as such without regard to its specific properties. Compare, for instance, the meaning of the two symbols $12 \times 8 = 96$ , and 18 October, 1813. 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.² 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.

^<sup>1 The date of Napoleon's defeat, and the liberation of Germany, on the field of Leipzig. — Tr.

Tendencies towards a mechanistic idea of the world proceeding wholly from mathematical delimitation and logical differentiation, from law and causality, appear quite early. They are found in the first centuries of all Cultures, still weak, scattered and lost in the full tide of the religious world-conception. The name to be recalled here is that of Roger Bacon. But soon these tendencies acquire a sterner character: like everything that is wrung out of the soul and has to defend itself against human nature, they are not wanting in arrogance and exclusiveness. Quietly the spatial and comprehensible (comprehension is in its essence number, in its structure quantitative) becomes prepotent throughout the outer world of the individual and, aiding and aided by the simple impressions of sensuous-life, effects a mechanical synthesis of the causal and legal sort, so that at long last the sharp consciousness of the megalopolitan—be he of Thebes, Babylon, Benares, Alexandria or a West European cosmopolis—is subjected to so consistent a pressure of natural-law notions that, when scientific and philosophical prejudice (it is no more than that) dictates the proposition that this condition of the soul is the soul and the mechanical world-picture is the world, the assertion is scarcely challenged. It has been made predominant by logicians like Aristotle and Kant. But Plato and Goethe have rejected it and refuted it.

IV

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

every land show us — the distance-impressions made by deep landscapes, clouds, horizon and setting sun attach themselves without an effort to the sense of a future. The Greek poet denies the future, and consequently he neither sees not sings of the things of the future; he cleaves to the near, as he belongs to the present, entirely.

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

v

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

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

^{1 &}quot;All we see before us passing
Sign and symbol is alone."

From the final stanza of Faust II (Anster's translation) — 7

VI

But of the whole picture of world-becoming, of that cumulus of grand planes that the Faust-eye ¹ 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.

^<sup>1 Cf. Vol. II, p. 33 et seg.

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 plantorganism, 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.

VII

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the protospirituality (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.²

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 41 et seq.

² See Vol. II, pp. 227 et seo

^<sup>2 St. Bernward was Bishop of Hildesheim from 993 to 1022, and himself architect and metal-worker. Three other churches besides the cathedral survive in the city from his time or that of his immediate successors, and Hildesheim of all North German cities is richest in monuments of the Romanesque. — Tr.

^<sup>4 Vases from the cemetery adjoining the Dipylon Gate of Athens, the most representative relic that we possess of the Doric or primitive age of the Hellenic Culture (about 900 to 600 B.c.). — Tr.

VIII

The term "habit" (Habitus) is used of a plant to signify the special way, proper to itself, in which it manifests itself, i.e., the character, course and duration of its appearance in the light-world where we can see it. By its habit each kind is distinguished, in respect of each part and each phase of its existence, from all examples of other species. We may apply this useful notion of "habit" in our physiognomic of the grand organisms and speak of the habit of the Indian, Egyptian or Classical Culture, history or spirituality. Some vague inkling of it has always, for that matter, underlain the notion of style, and we shall not be forcing but merely clearing and deepening that word if we speak of the religious, intellectual, political, social or economic style 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

^<sup>1 See Vol. II, pp. 382 et seg.

^<sup>2 In English the word "cast" will evidently satisfy the sense better on occasion. The word "stil" will therefore not necessarily be always rendered "style." — Tr.

from that of all great men of the Arabian or the Western groups. Compare even Goethe and Raphael with Classical men, and Heraclitus, Sophocles, Plato, Alcibiades, Themistocles, Horace and Tiberius rank themselves together instantly as members of one family. Every Classical cosmopolis — from Hiero's Syracuse to Imperial Rome the embodiment and sense-picture of one and the same life-feeling — differs radically in lay-out and street-plan, in the language of its public and private architecture, in the type of its squares, alleys, courts, façades, in its colour, noises, street-life and night-life, from the group of Indian or that of Arabian or that of Western world-cities. Baghdad and Cairo could be felt in Granada long after the conquest; even Philip II's Madrid had all the physiognomic hall-marks of modern London and Paris. There is a high symbolism in every dissimilarity of this sort. Contrast the Western tendency to straight-lined perspectives and street-alignments (such as the grand tract of the Champs-Elysées from the Louvre, or the Piazza before St. Peter's) with the almost deliberate complexity and narrowness of the Via Sacra, the Forum Romanum and the Acropolis, whose parts are arranged without symmetry and with no perspective. Even the town-planning — whether darkly as in the Gothic or consciously as in the ages of Alexander and Napoleon — reflects the same principle as the mathematic — in the one case the Leibnizian mathematic of infinite space, in the other the Euclidean mathematic of separate bodies. 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.

duration, always the same, always recurring with the emphasis of a symbol. In the present work we cannot attempt to open up this world of most mysterious connexions, but the facts that will emerge again and again as we go on will tell us of themselves how much lies hidden here. What is the meaning of that striking fifty-year period, the rhythm of the political, intellectual and artistic "becoming" of all Cultures? 1 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.

^<sup>3 The first draft of Foust I, discovered only comparatively recently. — Tr.

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. 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 fruit-

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

CHAPTER IV THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY

II

THE IDEA OF DESTINY AND THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSALITY

CHAPTER IV

THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY

T

THE IDEA OF DESTINY AND THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSALITY

Ι

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."

becoming. The stiff mask of causality is lifted by mere ceasing to think. Suddenly, Time is no more a riddle, a notion, a "form" or "dimension" but becomes an inner certainty, destiny itself; and in its directedness, its irreversibility, its livingness, is disclosed the very meaning of the historical world-picture. Destiny and Causality are related as Time and Space.

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

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

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

II

The way to the problem of Time, then, begins in the primitive wistfulness and passes through its clearer issue the Destiny-idea. We have now to try to outline, briefly, the content of that problem, so far as it affects the subject of this book.

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

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

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

tude, as deceptive as it is current. But, if the characteristics, or rather the characteristic, of extension—limit and causality—is really wizard's gear wherewith our proper soul attempts to conjure and bind alien powers—Goethe speaks somewhere of the "principle of reasonable order that we bear within ourselves and could impress as the seal of our power upon everything that we touch"—if all law is a fetter which our world-dread hurries to fix upon the incrowding sensuous, a deep necessity of self-preservation, so also the invention of a time that is knowable and spatially representable within causality is a later act of this same self-preservation, an attempt to bind by the force of notion the tormenting inward riddle that is doubly tormenting to the intellect that has attained power only to find itself defied. Always a subtle hatred underlies the intellectual process by which anything is forced into the domain and formworld 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 1 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.²

¹ Le., the translated Bible - Te

^<sup>2 See Vol. II, pp. 19 et seq.

See p. 80 of this volume, and Vol. II, pp. 166, 328.

⁴ See Vol. II. p. 127.

^<sup>5 The nearest English equivalent is perhaps the word "fear." "Fearful" would correspond exactly but for the fact that in the second sense the word is objective instead of subjective. The word "shy" itself bears the second meaning in such trivial words as gun-shy, work-shy. — Tr.

When philosophers of the present-day West "hedge" — as they all do —

finished figure); but the one belongs to the domain of Life and Time, the other to that of Extension and Causality. That I calculate is the business of organic, what I calculate the business of inorganic, logic. Mathematics as a whole—in common language, arithmetic and geometry—answers the How? and the What?—that is, the problem of the Natural order of things. In opposition to this problem stands that of the When? of things, the specifically historical problem of destiny, future and past; and all these things are comprised in the word Chronology, which simple mankind understands fully and unequivocally.

ш

^<sup>2 The "inverse circular functions" of English text-books. — Tr.

^<sup>1 See Vol. II, pp. 13, 19.

² See Vol. II p. 16

³ The original reads: "(So ist jede Art von Verstehen . . . nur dadurch möglich . . .) dass ein Begriffspaar von innerem Gegensatz gewissermassen durch Auseinandertreten erst Wirklichkeit erhält." — Tr.

At this point the German text repeats the paragraph which in this edition begins at "But inquiry" (p. 121) and ends at the close of section I (p. 121). — Tr.

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 137, 159

^<sup>2 Here the author presumably means history in the ordinary acceptation of the word. — Tr.

IV

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

The Classical form of the Destiny-idea I shall venture to call Euclidean. Thus it is the sense-actual person of Œdipus, his "empirical ego," nay, his $\sigma \hat{\omega} \mu a$ that is hunted and thrown by Destiny. Œdipus complains that Creon has misused his "body" and that the oracle applied to his body. Askeylus, again, speaks of Agamemnon as the "royal body, leader of fleets." It is this same word $\sigma \hat{\omega} \mu a$ 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 father-hood 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

^<sup>1 Œ.J. Rex., 642. κακῶς ἐίληφα τὸυμὸν σῶμα συν τέχνη κακῆ. (Cf. Rudolf Hirsch, Die Person (1914), p. 9.)

Œd. Col., 355. μαντεῖα... ἄ τοῦδ' ἐχρήσθη σώματο
Choēthora, 710. ἐπὶ νανάρχω σύματω... τῶ βασιλείω.

2 Who was criticized as "no god-maker but a man-maker" and as one who spoilt the beauty of his work by aiming at likeness.

² The writers immediately succeeding Aristophanes. — Tr.

v

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 360 et seq.

1 Diels, Antike Technik (1920), p. 159.

^<sup>2 About 400 B.C. savants began to construct crude sun-dials in Africa and Ionia, and from Plato's time still more primitive clepsydræ came into use; but in both forms, the Greek clock was a mere imitation of the far superior models of the older East, and it had not the slightest connexion with the Greek life-feeling. See Diels, op. cit., pp. 160 et seq.

⁵ See op. 9. et seg.

ഛ൶ The Indian Gazetteer, "Vol. II. — Tr.

^<sup>2 See Vol. II. pp. 482, 521 et seg.

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 tombtemples, 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 hereand-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

⁽The Mexican Culture developed the most intricate of all known systems of indicating year and day. See British Museum "Handbook of May on Antiquities. — Tr.)

⁸ Let the reader try to imagine what a Greek would feel when suddenly made acquainted with this custom of ours.

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

³ For English readers, the most conspicuous case of historic doubt is the Shakespeare-Bacon matter. But even here, it is only the work of Shakespeare that is in question, not his existence and

one property that the Classical soul would have respected — and ipso facto dissolving it into our unending and unresting Time? Consider what it was that the Hellenes named Movoelov; 1 how deep a significance lies in the change of sense!

VI

It is the primitive feeling of Care ² 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.³ In the one case as in the other, man feels himself as nature, as a plant, as a will-less and care-less element of becoming (dem Sinn des Werdens willenlos und sorglos hingegeben). The domestic religion of Rome 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.⁴ 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.⁵ This conception is

See "Imperial Gazetteer of India," Vol. I, pp. 421 et seq., and Ency. Brit., XI Edition, article Hinduism. — Tr.

⁴ British Museum. — Tr.

⁵ Dresden. — Tr.

not one belonging to Christianity generally. On the contrary, Magian Christianity had elevated Mary as Theotokos, "she who gave birth to God" into a symbol felt quite otherwise than by us. The lulling Mother is as alien to Early-Christian-Byzantine art as she is to the Hellenic (though for other reasons) and most certainly Faust's Gretchen, with the deep spell of unconscious motherhood on her, is nearer to the Gothic Madonna than all the Marys of Byzantine and Ravennate mosaics. Indeed, the presumption of a spiritual relation between them breaks down completely before the fact that the Madonna with the Child answers exactly to the Egyptian Isis with Horus—both are caring, nursing mothers—and that nevertheless this symbol had vanished for a thousand years and more (for the whole duration of the Classical and the Arabian Cultures) before it was reawakened by the Faustian soul.²

¹ See Vol. II, p. 316.

⁸ Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq

⁴ See, further, the last two sections of Vol. II (Der Staat and Wirtschaftsleben). — Tr.

Different in themselves as are Stoicism and Buddhism (the old-age dispositions of these two worlds), they are at one in their negation of the historical feeling of care, their contempt of zeal, of organizing power, and of the duty-sense; and therefore neither in Indian courts nor in Classical market-places was there a thought for the morrow, personal or collective. The carpe diem of Apollinian man applies also to the Apollinian state.

VII

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 cease-lessly 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

^<sup>1 Sesenheim is the home of Friederike, and a student's holiday took him thither: Weimar, of course, is the centre from which all the activity of his long life was to radiate. — Tr.

smoke"—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 Hohenstausen 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."

¹ Sprüche in Reimen. 2 See Vol. II, pp. 294 et seq., 359 et seq.

³ The path from Calvin to Darwin is easily seen in English philosophy.

VIII

We can proceed to the further elucidation of the incidental (or casual) without running the risk of considering it as an exception or a breach in the

¹ This is one of the eternal points of dispute in Western art-theory. The Classical, ahistorical, Euclidean soul has no "evolution"; the Western, on the contrary, extends itself in evolving like the convergent function that it is. The one is, the other becomes. And thus all Classical tragedy assumes the constancy of the personality, and all Western its ovariability, which essentially constitutes a "character" in our sense, viz., a picture of being that consistility, continuous qualitative movement and an endless wealth of relationships. In Sophocles the grand gesture ennobles the suffering, in Shakespeare the grand idea (Gesinnung) ennobles the doing. As our asthetic took its examples from both Cultures, it was bound to go wrong in the very enunciation of its problem.

causal continuity of "Nature," for Nature is not the world-picture in which Destiny is operative. Wherever the sight emancipates itself from the sensible-become, spiritualizes itself into Vision, penetrates through the enveloping world and lets prime phenomena instead of mere objects work upon it, we have the grand bistorical, 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.

.It is this insight that constitutes the singularity and the power of Shake

^<sup>2 See Vol. II, pp. 20 et seq

scene to come on and prove itself. It is entirely appropriate that the anecdotal foreground of history should be the arena of all the scientific causality-hunters and all the novelists and sketch-writers of the common stamp. How many wars have been begun when they were because some jealous courtier wished to remove some general from the proximity of his wife! How many battles have been won and lost through ridiculous incidents! Only think how Roman history was written in the 18th Century and how Chinese history is written even to-day! Think of the Dey smacking the Consul with his fly-flap 1 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) 2 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.

$^{^{1}}$ The incident which is said to have precipitated the French war on Algiers (1827). — Tr.

the person of Bismarck, that of the Wars of Freedom through broad and almost nameless events; but either theme, to use the language of music, could have been "worked out" in other ways. Bismarck might have been dismissed early, the battle of Leipzig might have been lost, and for the group of wars 1864–1866–1870 there might have been substituted (as "modulations") diplomatic, dynastic, revolutionary or economic facts — though it must not be forgotten that Western bistory, 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; 1 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. 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, how-

^<sup>1 In the general upheaval of 1848 a German national parliament was assembled at Frankfurt, of a strongly democratic colour, and it chose Frederick William IV of Prussia as hereditary emperor. Frederick William, however, refused to "pick up a crown out of the gutter." For the history of this momentous episode, the English reader may be referred to the Cambridge Modern History or to the article Germany (History) in the Ency. Brit., XI Edition. — Tr.

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 — notwith-standing the episode of Alexander's expedition 1 — 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, 2 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.

^<sup>2 Helios is only a poetical figure; he had neither temples nor cult. Even less was Selene a moongoddess.

IX

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

We can, further, distinguish between impersonal or anonymous and personal

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

^<sup>1 The original is somewhat obscure. It reads: "Welche Form die Wahrscheinlichkeit für sich hat, ist bereits eine Frage des historischen — und also des tragischen — Stils." — Tr.

^<sup>2 The words of Canning at the beginning of the XIXth century may be recalled. "South America free! and if possible English!" The expansion idea has never been expressed in greater purity than this.

^<sup>1 The Western Culture of maturity was through-and-through a French outgrowth of the Spanish, beginning with Louis XIV. But even by Louis XVI's time the English park had defeated the French, sensibility had ousted wit, London costume and manners had overcome Versailles, and Hogarth, Chippendale and Wedgwood had prevailed over Watteau, Boulle and Sèvres.

At one time it falls to the Spanish spirit to outline, at another to the British or the French to remould, the world-embracing colonial system. A "United States of Europe," actualized through Napoleon as founder of a romantic and popular military monarchy, is the analogue of the Realm of the Diadochi; actualized as a 21st-Century economic organism by a matter-of-tact 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.(^1) 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.

x

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.

tory, which ascertains that which has been. For the historical outlook itself the data are always symbols. Scientific research, on the contrary, is science and only science. In virtue of its technical origin and purpose it sets out to find data and laws of the causal sort and nothing else, and from the moment that it turns its glance upon something else it becomes Metaphysics, something trans-scientific. And just because this is so, historical and natural-science data are different. The latter consistently repeat themselves, the former never. The latter are traths, 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 formulæ, 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.

ΥI

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

^<sup>2 There is no difference essentially between these representations and the switchboard wiring diagram.

History carries the mark of the singular-factual, Nature that of the continuously possible. So long as I scrutinize the image of the world-around in order to see by what laws it must actualize itself, irrespective of whether it does happen or merely might happen — irrespective, that is, of time — then I am working in a genuine science. For the necessity of a nature-law (and there are no other laws) it is utterly immaterial whether it becomes phenomenal infinitely often or never. That is, it is independent of Destiny. There are thousands of chemical combinations that never are and never will be produced, but they are demonstrably possible and therefore they exist — for the fixed System of Nature though not for the Physiognomy of the whirling universe. A system consists of truths, a history rests on facts. Facts follow one another, truths follow from one another, and this is the difference between "when" and "how." That there has been a flash of lightning is a fact and can be indicated, without a word, by the pointing of a finger. "When there is lightning there is thunder," on the contrary, is something that must be communicated by a proposition or sentence. Experience-lived may be quite wordless, while systematic knowing can only be through words. "Only that which has no history is capable of being defined," says Nietzsche somewhere. But History is present becoming that tends into the future and looks back on the past. Nature stands beyond all time, its mark is extension, and it is without directional quality. Hence, for the one, the necessity of the mathematical, and for the other the necessity of the tragic.

XII

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.

CHAPTER V MAKROKOSMOS

I
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND THE
SPACE-PROBLEM

CHAPTER V

MAKROKOSMOS

T

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND THE SPACE-PROBLEM

1

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 onceliving 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

There are therefore as many worlds as there are waking beings and likeliving, 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.

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 $\hat{a}\rho\chi\eta$ , 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.

11

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

¹ See page 123.

the most powerful symbols of Classical being, had nevertheless, as a form, only a duration of some centuries. But the primitive phenomenon of the great Culture will itself have disappeared some day, and with it the drama of world-history; aye, and man himself, and beyond man the phenomenon of plant and animal existence on the earth's surface, the earth, the sun, the whole world of sun-systems. All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but the arts themselves. One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a coloured canvas and a sheet of notes may remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone. Every thought, faith and science dies as soon as the spirits in whose worlds their "eternal truths" were true and necessary are extinguished. Dead, even, are the star-worlds which "appeared," a proper world to the proper eye, to the astronomers of the Nile and the Euphrates, for our eye is different from theirs; and our eye in its turn is mortal. All this we know. The beast does not know, and what he does not know does not exist in his experienced world-around. But if the image of the past vanishes, the longing to give a deeper meaning to the passing vanishes also. And so it is with reference to the purely human macrocosm that we apply the oft-quoted line, which shall serve as motto for all that follows: Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.

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

This discrimination between the "third" and the other two dimensions, so called, which needless to say is wholly alien to mathematics, is inherent also in the opposition of the notions of sensation and contemplation. Extension into depth converts the former into the latter; in fact, depth is the first

III

sensuous self-extension stiffen into rational tridimensionality. And it is only the city-man of matured Cultures that really lives in this glaring wakefulness, and only for his thought that there is a Space wholly divorced from sensuous life, "absolute," dead and alien to Time; and it exists not as a form of the intuitively-perceived but as a form of the rationally-comprehended. There is no manner of doubt that the "space" which Kant saw all around him with such unconditional certainty when he was thinking out his theory, did not exist in anything like so rigorous a form for his Carolingian ancestors. Kant's greatness consists in his having created the idea of a "form a priori," but not in the application that he gave it. We have already seen that Time is not a "form of perception" nor for that matter a form at all—forms exist only in the extended—and that there is no possibility of defining it except as a counterconcept 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 bis notion of Space in principle embraced both.

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

¹ His idea that the a priori-ness of space was proved by and through the unconditional validity of simple geometrical facts rests, as we have already remarked, on the all-too-popular notion that mathematics are either geometry or arithmetic. Now, even in Kant's time the mathematic of the West had got far beyond this naïve scheme, which was a mere imitation of the Classical. Modern geometry bases itself not on space but on multiply-infinite number-manifolds — amongst which the three-dimensional is simply the undistinguished special case — and within these groups investigates functional formations with reference to their structure; that is, there is no longer any contact or even possibility of contact between any possible kind of sense-perception and mathematical facts in the domain of such extensions as these, and yet the demonstrability of the latter is in no wise impaired thereby. Mathematics, then, are independent of the perceived, and the question now is, how much of this famous demonstrability of the forms of perception is left when the artificiality of juxtaposing both in a supposedly single process of experience has been recognized.

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. 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.

of light-resistances, since vision depends on the presence of radiated or reflected light. The Greeks took their stand on this and stayed there. It is the Western world-feeling that has produced the idea of a limitless universe of space — a space of infinite star-systems and distances that far transcends all optical possibilities — and this was a creation of the inner vision, incapable of all actualization through the eye, and, even as an idea, alien to and unachievable by the men of a differently-disposed Culture.

IV

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

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

^<sup>1 It may not be out of place here to refer to the enormous importance attached in savage society to initiation-rites at adolescence. — Tr.

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 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 starsystems lost in it? Could a "world" of this sense have been made even comprehensible to a Classical thinker? In short, we suddenly discover that the "eternal problem" that Kant, in the name of humanity, tackled with a passion

that itself is symbolic, is a purely Western problem that simply does not arise in the intellects of other Cultures.

What then was it that Classical man, whose insight into his own world-around was certainly not less piercing than ours, regarded as the prime problem of all being? It was the problem of $d\rho\chi\dot{\eta}$ , 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.¹ 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, $\tau\dot{o}$ $\mu\dot{\eta}$ $\delta\nu$ , 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 view-

v

Each of the great Cultures, then, has arrived at a secret language of world-feeling that is only fully comprehensible by him whose soul belongs to that Culture. We must not deceive ourselves. Perhaps we can read a little way into the Classical soul, because its form-language is almost the exact inversion of the Western; how far we have succeeded or can ever succeed is a question which necessarily forms the starting-point of all criticism of the Renaissance, and it is a very difficult one. But when we are told that probably (it is at best a doubtful venture to meditate upon so alien an expression of Being) the Indians conceived numbers which according to our ideas possessed neither value nor magnitude nor relativity, and which only became positive and negative, great or small units in virtue of position, we have to admit that it is impossible for us exactly to re-experience what spiritually underlies this kind of number. For us, 3 is always something, be it positive or negative; for the Greeks it was unconditionally a positive magnitude, +3; but for the Indian it indicates a possibility without existence, to which the word "something" is not yet applicable, outside both existence and non-existence which are properties to be introduced into it. +3, -3, \frac{1}{3}, are thus emanating actualities of subordinate rank which reside in the mysterious substance (3) in some way that is entirely hidden from us. It takes a Brahmanic soul to perceive these numbers as self-evident, as ideal emblems of a self-complete world-form; to us they are as unintelligible as is the Brahman Nirvana, for which, as lying beyond life and death, sleep and waking, passion, compassion and dispassion and yet somehow actual, words entirely fail us. Only this spirituality could originate the grand conception of nothingness as a true number, zero, and even then this zero is the Indian zero for which existent and non-existent are equally external designations.

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 $\delta\rho\chi\eta$ , $\delta\lambda\eta$ , $\mu\rho\rho\dot{\phi}\dot{\eta}$ , 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 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.

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 worldhistory:

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.

II Apollinian. Faustian and Magian Soul

CHAPTER VI

MAKROKOSMOS

II

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN AND MAGIAN SOUL

1

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.

^<sup>2 Strzygowski's Ursprung der Christlichen Kirchenkunst (1920), p. 80

⁸ See Vol. II, p. 101 et seq.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 18

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 345 et seq.

⁵ Cf. my introduction to Ernst Droem's Gesange, p. ix.

^<sup>6 The oldest and most mystical of the poems of the "Elder Edda." — Tr

come and break all resistances of the visible. No rhythm ever imagined radiates immensities of space and distance as the old Northern does:

Zum Unheil werden — noch allzulange Männer und Weiber — zur Welt geboren Aber wir beide — bleiben zusammen Ich und Sigurd.

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

"A longing pure and not to be described drove me to wander over woods and fields, and in a mist of hot abundant tears I felt a world arise and live for me."

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 18

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,² supported though it was by the whole weight of Church authority, and even the Devil — the great adversary in the Gothic world-drama ³ — 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 enignatic 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

^<sup>1 See Vol. II, p. 358 et seq.

⁸ See Vol. II, p. 354.

TT

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL I

plane. 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.² 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." 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. 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

^{1 &}quot;Relief en creux"; compare H. Schäfer, Von agyptischer Kunst (1919), I, p. 41.

See Vol. II, pp. 350 et seq.

^<sup>8 O. Fischer, Chinesische Landmalerei (1921), p. 24. What makes Chinese — as also Indian — art so difficult a study for us is the fact that all works of the early periods (namely, those of the Hwangho region from 1300 to 800 B.c. and of pre-Buddhist India) have vanished without a trace. But that which we now call "Chinese art" corresponds, say, to the art of Egypt from the Twentieth Dynasty onward, and the great schools of painting find their parallel in the sculpture schools of the Saïte and Ptolemaic periods, in which an antiquarian preciosity takes the place of the living inward development that is no longer there. Thus from the examples of Egypt we are able to tell how far it is permissible to argue backwards to conclusions about the art of Chou and Vedic times.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 191

picture is not to be taken at once. Sequence in time presupposes a sequence of space-elements through which the eye is to wander from one to the next." ¹ Whereas the Egyptian architecture dominates the landscape, the Chinese espouses it. But in both cases it is direction in depth that maintains the becoming of space as a continuously-present experience.

III

Glaser, op. cit., p. 43.

2 See Vol. II, pp. 135 et seq.

Only the living can be imitated, and it can be imitated only in movements,

^<sup>1 See Vol. II, pp. 138 et seq., and Worringer, Abstraktion und Einführung, pp. 66 et seq

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL I

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 ² 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 ³), 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 ⁴ 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. ⁵ 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 bate and love, out of which arises the opposi-

² For the workshop of Thothmes at Tell-el-Amarna, see Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesell-

^<sup>3 K. Burdach, Deutsche Renaissance, p. 11. The pictorial art of the Gothic period also has its strict typism and symbolism.

^<sup>4 E. Norden, Antike Kunst-prosa, pp. 8 et seq.

^<sup>5 See Vol. II, p. 323

tion of ugly and beautiful. This is in relation only with the living, of which the inner rhythm repels us or draws us into phase with it, whether it be that of the sunset-cloud or that of the tense breath of the machine. An imitation is beautiful, an ornament significant, and therein lies the difference between direction and extension, organic and inorganic logic, life and death. That which we think beautiful is "worth copying." Easily it swings with us and draws us on to imitate, to join in the singing, to repeat. Our hearts beat higher, our limbs twitch, and we are stirred till our spirits overflow. But as it belongs to Time, it "has its time." A symbol endures, but everything beautiful vanishes with the life-pulsation of the man, the class, the people or the race that feels it as a specific beauty in the general cosmic rhythm. 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.

¹ The translation is so far a paraphrase here that it is desirable to reproduce the German original: "Alles Schöne vergeht mit dem Lebenspulsschlag (dessen) der es aus dem kosmischen Takt heraus als solches empfindet."

² Hence the ornamental character of script.

^<sup>8 See p. 188. ⁴ See Vol. II, p. 104

^<sup>6 See Vol. II, p. 109.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 199

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.

^<sup>1 Sec p. 167.

^<sup>2 See Vol. II, pp. 142 et seq.

⁸ See p. 128.

⁴ See p. 62.

IV

In every springtime, consequently, there are two definitely ornamental and non-imitative arts, that of building and that of decoration. In the longing and pregnant centuries before it, elemental expression belongs exclusively to Ornamentation in the narrow sense. The Carolingian period is represented only by its ornament, as its architecture, for want of the Idea, stands between the styles. And similarly, as a matter of art-history, it is immaterial that no buildings of the Mycenæan age have survived. 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.

^<sup>2 The combination of scrolls and "Greek keys" with the Dragon or other emblem of storm-power. — Tr.

^<sup>3 Dvorák, Idealismus und Naturalismus in der got. Skulptur u. Malerei (Hist. Zeitschrift, 1918, pp. 44 et seq.).

all-ruling architectural idea.¹ 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.² 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.

V

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

^<sup>1 Certainly the Greeks at the time when they advanced from the Antæ to the Peripteros were under the mighty influence of the Egyptian series-columns — it was at this time that their sculpture in the round, indisputably following Egyptian models, freed itself from the relief manner which still clings to the Apollo figures. But this does not alter the fact that the motive of the Classical column and the Classical application of the rank-principle were wholly and peculiarly Classical.

^<sup>4 For descriptions and illustrations of types of Doming and Vaulting, see the article Vault in Ency. Brit., XI Ed. — Tr.

but as free in space as organ notes, and shapes poised in the infinite. Compare with the Faustian spirit of these churches — almost wall-less, loftily vaulted, irradiated with many-coloured light, aspiring from nave to choir — the Arabian (that is, the Early-Christian Byzantine) cupola-church. The pendentive cupola, that seems to float on high above the basilica or the octagon, was indeed also a victory over the principle of natural gravity which the Classical expressed in architrave and column; it, too, was a defiance of architectural body, of "exterior." But the very absence of an exterior emphasizes the more the unbroken coherence of the wall that shuts in the Cavern and allows no look and no hope to emerge from it. An ingeniously confusing interpenetration of spherical and polygonal forms; a load so placed upon a stone drum that it seems to hover weightless on high, yet closing the interior without outlet; all structural lines concealed; vague light admitted, through a small opening in the heart of the dome but only the more inexorably to emphasize the walling-in — such are the characters that we see in the masterpieces of this art, S. Vitale in Ravenna, Hagia S Sophia in Constantinople, and the Dome of the Rock ¹ 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.

VI

The organic history of a style comprises a "pre —," a "non —" and a "post —." The bull tablet of the First Dynasty of Egypt 2 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

^"Mosque of Omar." — Tr.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 2

surely and builds surely, but does not feel surely." ¹ 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,² finds no sure expression either in religion or in architecture. The church roof emerges, hill-ockwise, 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 ⁸ and which sit on the roof-plane. It is not yet a style, only the promise of a style that will awaken when the real Russian religion awakens.

Frankl, Baukunst des Mittelalters (1918), pp. 16 et seq.

The cemetery church of Kishi has 22.

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.

Chosroes-Nushirvan, Arabesque dissolved all the forms of architecture, painting and sculpture into style-impressions that nowadays we should consider as craft-art. But in Egypt the sovereignty of architecture remained unchallenged; it merely softened its language a little. In the chambers of the pyramid-temple of the Fourth Dynasty (Pyramid of Chephren) there are unadorned angular pillars. In the buildings of the Fifth (Pyramid of Sahu-rê) the plant-column makes its appearance. Lotus and papyrus branches turned into stone arise gigantic out of a pavement of transparent alabaster that represents water, enclosed by purple walls. The ceiling is adorned with birds and stars. The sacred way from the gate-buildings to the tomb-chamber, the picture of life, is a stream — it is the Nile itself become one with the prime-symbol of direction. The spirit of the mother-landscape unites with the soul that has sprung from it.

VII

The Egyptian style is the expression of a brave soul. The rigour and force of it Egyptian man himself never felt and never asserted. He dared all, but said nothing. In Gothic and Baroque, on the contrary, the triumph over heaviness became a perfectly conscious motive of the form-language. The drama of Shakespeare deals openly with the desperate conflict of will and world. Classical man, again, was weak in the face of the "powers." The κάθαρσις of fear and pity, the relief and recovery of the Apollinian soul in the moment of the περιπέτεια was, according to Aristotle, the effect deliberately aimed at in Attic tragedy. As the Greek spectator watched someone whom he knew (for everyone knew the myth and its heroes and lived in them) senselessly maltreated by fortune, without any conceivable possibility of resistance to the Powers, and saw him go under with splendid mien, defiant, heroic, his own Euclidean soul experienced a marvellous uplifting. If life was worthless, at any rate the grand gesture in losing it was not so. The Greek willed nothing and dared nothing, but he found a stirring beauty in enduring. Even the earlier figures of Odysseus the patient, and, above all, Achilles the archetype of Greek manhood, have this characteristic quality. The morale of the Cynics, that of the Stoics, that of Epicurus, the common Greek ideals of σωφροσύνη and ἀταραξία, Diogenes

¹ That which differentiates the Japanese harakiri from this suicide is its intensely purposeful and (so to put it) active and demonstrative character.—Tr.

2 See Vol. II, p. 626.

VIII

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 land-scape 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.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 207

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

τx

the picture of a general history of "Art," and its organic connectedness has been imperceptible under the erroneous conventions thereof.

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.

^<sup>1 See Vol. II, Chapter III. ² See Vol. II, pp. 240 et seq.

^* Stilfagen, Grunalage zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (1893). Spatromische Kunstinaustrie (1901)

* Amida (1910). Die bildende Kunst des Ostens (1916), Altai-Iran (1917). Die Baukunst des Armenier und Europa (1918).

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," be the Pauline Christianity that conquered in the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, Western Judaism and the cults of Syncretism. The architectural type of the Pseudomorphosis, both for Jew and Gentile, is the Basilica. 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

² See Vol. II, pp. 304 et seq.

4 The oldest Christian designs in the Empire of Axum undoubtedly agree with the pagan work the Sabæans.

⁶ See Vol. II, pp. 243 et seq.

^<sup>7 Kohl & Watzinger, Antike Synagogen in Galiläa (1916). The Baal-shrines in Palmyra, Baalbek and many other localities are basilicas: some of them are older than Christianity and many of them were later taken over into Christian use.

different, but not — at first — the means of expressing it. In the pagan religious architecture of the Imperial Age there is a perceptible — though never yet perceived — movement from the wholly corporeal Augustan temple, in which the cella is the architectural expression of nothingness, to one in which the interior only possesses meaning. Finally the external picture of the Peripteros of the Doric is transferred to the four inside walls. Columns ranked in front of a windowless wall are a denial of space beyond — that is, for the Classical beholder, of space within, and for the Magian, of space without. It is therefore a question of minor importance whether the entire space is covered in as in the Basilica proper, or only the sanctuary as in the Sun-temple of Baalbek with the great forecourt, which later becomes a standing element of the mosque and is probably of South Arabian origin. 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.

² Diez, Die Kunst der islamischen Völker, pp. 8 et seq. In old Sabæan temples the altar-court (mahdar) is in front of the oracle chapel (makanat).

8 Wulff. Altchristliche und byzantinische Kunst, p. 227.

⁴ Pliny records that this region was rich in temples. It is probable that the type of the transept-basilica — i.e., with the entrance in one of the long sides — which is found in Hauran and is distinctly marked in the tranverse direction of the altar space of St. Paul Without at Rome, is derived from a South Arabian archetype. (For the Hauran type of church see Ency. Brit., XI Ed., Vol. II, p. 390; and for St. Paul Without, Vol. III, p. 474. — Tr.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 21

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 Manichæans 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.² 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

¹ Neither technically nor in point of space-feeling has this piece of purely interior architecture any connexion whatever with Etruscan round-buildings. (Altmann, Die ital. Rundbauten, 1906.) With the curpolas of Hadrian's Villa at Tibur (Tivoli) on the contrary, its affinity is evident.

one of the motives that the Renaissance thought were Classical — e.g., the court surrounded by halls and the union of column and arch — really originated thus.

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 and many parts of the Baths and the Imperial Fora that are still very Classical in conception.

Generally called the "Basilica of Constantine." — Tr.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 2

But the Magian soul of the Pseudomorphosis had not the courage to appropriate alien means without yielding to them. And this is why the physiognomic of the Magian soul has still so much to disclose to the quester.

X

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 21

Take, further, the history of the Acanthus motive.¹ 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 bizarreria 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. The craft-art of Byzantine-Islamic style (hitherto called Lombard, Frankish, Celtic or Old-Nordic) which invaded the whole youthful

A. Riegl, Stilfragen (1893), pp. 248 et seq., 272 et seq.

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 ² 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.

^* Wulff, Altchristl.-byzant. Kunst, pp. 153 et seq.

See Vol. II, p. 315, Geffcken, Der Ausgang des griech-röm. Heidentums (1920), p. 113.

CHAPTER VII MUSIC AND PLASTIC

I The arts of form

CHAPTER VII

MUSIC AND PLASTIC

Ι

Classical relation between art-work and sense-organ — of which we so often and so erroneously remind ourselves here — is something quite different from, something far simpler and more material than ours. We read "Othello" and "Faust" and we study orchestral scores — that is, we change one sense-agency for another in order to let the undiluted spirit of these works take effect upon us. Here there is always an appeal from the outer senses to the "inner," to the truly Faustian and wholly un-Classical power of imagination. Only thus can we understand Shakespeare's ceaseless change of scene as against the Classical unity of place. In extreme cases indeed, for instance in that of "Faust" itself, no representation of the work (that is, of its full content) is physically possible. But in music too — in the unaccompanied "A capella" of the Palestrina style as well as a fortiori in the Passions of Heinrich Schütz, in the fugues of Bach, in the last quartets of Beethoven, and in "Tristan" — we livingly experience behind the sensuous impressions a whole world of others. And it is only through these latter that all the fullness and depth of the work begins to be present to us, and it is only mediately — through the images of blond, brown, dusky and golden colours, of sunsets and distant ranked mountainesummits, 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.

H

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. 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

ш

as the vessel of the pure real present. The temple of the naked body was to it what the cathedral of voices was to the Faustian from earliest counterpoint to the orchestral writing of the 18th Century. We have failed hitherto to understand the emotional force of this secular tendency of the Apollinian, because we have not felt how the purely material, soulless body (for the Temple of the Body, too, has no "interior "!) is the object which archaic relief, Corinthian painting on clay, and Attic fresco were all striving to obtain until Polycletus and Phidias showed how to achieve it in full. We have, with a wonderful blindness, assumed this kind of sculpture as both authoritative and universally possible, as in fact, "the art of sculpture." We have written its history as one concerned with all peoples and periods, and even to-day our sculptors, under the influence of unproved Renaissance doctrines, speak of the naked human body as the noblest and most genuine object of "the" art of sculpture. Yet in reality this statue-art, the art of the naked body standing free upon its footing and appreciable from all sides alike, existed in the Classical and the Classical only, for it was that Culture alone which quite decisively refused to transcend sense-limits in favour of space. The Egyptian statue is always meant to be seen from the front — it is a variant of plane-relief. And the seemingly Classically-conceived statues of the Renaissance (we are astounded, as soon as it occurs to us to count them, to find how few of them there are 1) are nothing but a semi-Gothic reminiscence.

^<sup>1 Ghiberti has not outgrown the Gothic, nor has even Donatello; and already in Michelangelo the feeling is Baroque, i.e., musical.

^<sup>2 The struggle to fix the problem is visible in the series of "Apollo-figures." See Déonna, Les Apollons archaïques (1909).

^• Miletus was in a particular relation with Egypt through Naucratis. — Tr.

plane. In the end, the figure is treated as a self-contained body apart from the mass of the building, but it remains essentially a silhouette in front of a wall.¹ 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.² 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 frescocharacter 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 3— 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.

ΙV

^<sup>2 V. Salis, Kunst der Griechen (1919), pp. 47, 98 et seg.

⁸ The decisive preference of the white stone is itself significant of the opposition of Renaissance to Classical feeling.

• ¹ In the same way the whole of Russian music appears to us infinitely mournful, but real Russians assure us that it is not at all so for themselves
  • 2 See articles under these headings in Grove's "Dictionary of Music" Te

8 See Vol. II, p. 238.

• ⁵ For all that survives performance is the notes, and these speak only to one who still knows and can manage the tone and technique of the expression-means appropriate to them.

^<sup>2 Note that Oresme was a contemporary of Machault and Philippe de Vitry, in whose generation the rules and prohibitions of strict counterpoint were definitively established.

^<sup>8 See p. 19 and Vol. II, p. 357.

⁴ Even the first great troubadour, Guilhem of Poitiers, though a reigning sovereign, made it his ambition to be regarded as a "professional," as we should say. — Tr.

See also Vol. II, p. 365.

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.¹ 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—

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 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 sonatamovement "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, 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 govern-

^<sup>2 Einstein, Gesch, der Musik, p. 67.

V

^<sup>2 See Vol. II, pp. 357 et seq., 365 et seq.

² Renaissance ornament is merely embellishment and self-conscious "art"-inventiveness. It is only with the frank and outspoken Baroque that we return to the necessities of high symbolism.

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,¹ 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

^<sup>1 Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien. (An English translation was published in 1878. — Tr.)

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.

The high period of the Renaissance is a moment of apparent expulsion of music from Faustian art. And in fact, for a few decades, in the only area where Classical and Western landscapes touched, Florence did uphold — with one

grand effort that was essentially metaphysical and essentially defensive — an image of the Classical so convincing that, although its deeper characters were without exception mere anti-Gothic, it lasted beyond Goethe and, if not for our criticism, yet for our feelings, is valid to this day. The Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici and the Rome of Leo the Tenth — that is what for us the Classical is, an eternal goal of most secret longing, the only deliverance from our heavy hearts and limit upon our horizon. And it is this because, and only because, it is anti-Gothic. So clean-cut is the opposition of Apollinian and Faustian spirituality.

^<sup>1 The colossal statue of Bartolommeo Collegne at Venice — Te

VI

It was at the same time that along with oil-painting and counterpoint the art of gardens ripened. Here, expressed on the canvas of Nature itself by extended pools, brick walls, avenues, vistas and galleries, is the same tendency that is represented in painting by the effort towards the linear perspective that the early Flemish artists felt to be the basic problem of their art and Brunellesco, Alberti and Piero della Francesca formulated. We may take it that it was not entirely a coincidence that this formulation of perspective, this mathematical consecration of the picture (whether landscape or interior) as a field limited at the sides but immensely increased in depth, was propounded just at this particular moment. It was the proclamation of the Prime-Symbol. The point at which the perspective lines coalesce is at infinity. It was just because it avoided infinity and rejected distance that Classical painting possessed no perspective. Consequently the Park, the deliberate manipulation of Nature so as to obtain space and distance effects, is an impossibility in Classical art. Neither in Athens nor in Rome proper was there a garden-art: it was only the Imperial Age that gratified its taste with ground-schemes of Eastern origin, and a glance at any of the plans of those "gardens" that have been preserved 1 is enough to show the shortness of their range and the emphasis of their bounds. And yet the first garden-theorist of the West, L. B. Alberti, was laying down the relation of the surroundings to the house (that is, to the spectators in it) as early as 1450, and from his projects to the parks of the Ludovisi and Albani villas, 2 we can see the importance of the perspective view into distance becoming ever greater and greater. In France, after Francis I (Fontainebleau) the long narrow lake is an additional feature having the same meaning.

^<sup>2 Environs of Rome. They date from the late 17th and the mid-18th centuries respectively; the gardens of the V. Ludovisi were laid out by Le Nôtre. — Tr.

But the feeling for long range is at the same time one for history. At a distance, space becomes time and the horizon signifies the future. The Baroque park is the park of the Late season, of the approaching end, of the falling leaf. A Renaissance park is meant for the summer and the noonday. It is timeless, and nothing in its form-language reminds us of mortality. It is perspective that begins to awaken a premonition of something passing, fugitive and final. The very words of distance possess, in the lyric poetry of all Western languages, a plaintive autumnal accent that one looks for in vain in the Greek and Latin. It is there in Macpherson's "Ossian" and Hölderlin, and in Nietzsche's Dionysus-Dithyrambs, and lastly in Baudelaire, Verlaine, George and Droem. The Late poetry of the withering garden avenues, the unending lines in the streets of a megalopolis, the ranks of pillars in a cathedral, the peak in a distant mountain chain — all tell us that the depth-experience which constitutes our spaceworld for us is in the last analysis our inward certainty of a Destiny, of a prescribed direction, of time, of the irrevocable. Here, in the experience of horizon as future, we become directly and surely conscious of the identity of Time with the "third dimension" of that experienced space which is living self-extension. And in these last days we are imprinting upon the plan of our megalopolitan streets the same directional-destiny character that the 17th Century imprinted upon the Park of Versailles. We lay our streets as long arrow-flights into remote distance, regardless even of preserving old and historic parts of our towns (for the symbolism of these is not now prepotent in us), whereas a megalopolis of the Classical world studiously maintained in its extension that tangle of crooked lanes that enabled Apollinian man to feel himself a body in the midst of bodies. Herein, as always,

^<sup>1 That is, the expression for the sum of a convergent series beyond any specified term. — $T_r$

² See Vol. II, pp. 117 et seq.

practical requirements, so called, are merely the mask of a profound inward compulsion.

The case of Baroque painting is further complicated by the fact that it involves an opposition of ordinary popular feeling and the finer sensibility. Everything Euclidean and tangible is also popular, and the genuinely popular art is therefore the Classical. It is very largely the feeling of this popular char-

acter in it that constitutes its indescribable charm for the Faustian intellects that have to fight for self-expression, to win their world by hard wrestling. For us, the contemplation of Classical art and its intention is pure refreshment: here nothing needs to be struggled for, everything offers itself freely. And something of the same sort was achieved by the anti-Gothic tendency of Florence. Raphael is, in many sides of his creativeness, distinctly popular. But Rembrandt is not, cannot be, so. From Titian painting becomes more and more esoteric. So, too, poetry. So, too, music. And the Gothic per se had been esoteric from its very beginnings — witness Dante and Wolfram. The masses of Okeghem and Palestrina, or of Bach for that matter, were never intelligible to the average member of the congregation. Ordinary people are bored by Mozart and Beethoven, and regard music generally as something for which one is or is not in the mood. A certain degree of interest in these matters has been induced by concert room and gallery since the age of enlightenment invented the phrase "art for all." But Faustian art is not, and by very essence cannot be, "for all." If modern painting has ceased to appeal to any but a small (and ever decreasing) circle of connoisseurs, it is because it has turned away from the painting of things that the man in the street can understand. It has transferred the property of actuality from contents to space — the space through which alone, according to Kant, things are. And with that a difficult metaphysical element has entered into painting, and this element does not give itself away to the layman. For Phidias, on the contrary, the word "lay" would have had no meaning. His sculpture appealed entirely to the bodily and not to the spiritual eye. An art without space is a priori unphilosophical.

VII

And now from the end of the Renaissance in Orlando Lasso and Palestrina right up to Wagner, from Titian right up to Manet and Marées and Leibl, great musicians and great painters followed close upon one another while the plastic art sank into entire insignificance. Oil-painting and instrumental music evolve organically towards aims that were comprehended in the Gothic and achieved in the Baroque. Both arts — Faustian in the highest sense — are within those limits prime phenomena. They have a soul, a physiognomy and therefore a history. And in this they are alone. All that sculpture could thenceforward achieve was a few beautiful incidental pieces in the shadow of painting, gardenart, or architecture. The art of the West had no real need of them. There was no longer a style of plastic in the sense that there were styles of painting or music. No consistent tradition or necessary unity links the works of Maderna, Goujon, Puget and Schlüter. Even Leonardo begins to despise the chisel outright: at most he will admit the bronze cast, and that on account of its pictorial advantages. Therein he differs from Michelangelo, for whom the marble block was still the true element. And yet even Michelangelo in his old age could no longer succeed with the plastic, and none of the later sculptors are great in the sense that Rembrandt and Bach are great. There were clever and tasteful performances no doubt, but not one single work of the same order as the "Night Watch" or the "Matthew Passion," nothing that expresses, as these express, the whole depth of a whole mankind. This art had fallen out of the destiny of the Culture. Its speech meant nothing now. What there is in a Rembrandt portrait simply cannot be rendered in a bust. Now and then a sculptor of power arises, like Bernini or the masters of the contemporary Spanish school, or Pigalle or Rodin (none of whom, naturally, transcended the decorative and attained the level of grand symbolism), but such an artist is always

VIII

Blue and green are transcendent, spiritual, non-sensuous colours. They are missing in the strict Attic fresco and therefore dominant in oil-painting. Yellow and red, the Classical colours, are the colours of the material, the near, the full-blooded. Red is the characteristic colour of sexuality — hence it is the only colour that works upon the beasts. It matches best the Phallus-symbol — and therefore the statue and the Doric column — but it is pure blue that etherealizes the Madonna's mantle. This relation of the colours has established itself in every great school as a deep-felt necessity. Violet, a red succumbing to blue, is the colour of women no longer fruitful and of priests living in celibacy.

Yellow and red are the popular colours, the colours of the crowd, of children, of women, and of savages. Amongst the Venetians and the Spaniards high personages affected a splendid black or blue, with an unconscious sense of the aloofness inherent in these colours. For red and yellow, the Apollinian, Euclidean-polytheistic colours, belong to the foreground even in respect of social life; they are meet for the noisy hearty market-days and holidays, the naïve immediateness of a life subject to the blind chances of the Classical Fatum, the point-existence. But blue and green — the Faustian, monotheistic colours — are those of loneliness, of care, of a present that is related to a past and a future, of destiny as the dispensation governing the universe from within.

bluish-green, the colour in which the interior of a great cathedral is so often clothed, is the specifically Catholic colour?—it being understood that we mean by "Catholic" strictly the Faustian Christianity (with the Eucharist as its centre) that was founded in the Lateran Council of 1215 and fulfilled in the Council of Trent. This colour with its silent grandeur is as remote from the resplendent gold-ground of Early Christian-Byzantine pictures as it is from the gay, loquacious "pagan" colours of the painted Hellenic temples and statues. It is to be noted that the effect of this colour, entirely unlike that of yellow and red, depends upon work being exhibited indoors. Classical painting is emphatically a public art, Western just as emphatically a studio-art. The whole of our great oil-painting, from Leonardo to the end of the 18th Century, is not meant for the bright light of day. Here once more we meet the same opposition as that between chamber-music and the free-standing statue. The climatic explanation of the difference is merely superficial; the example of Egyptian painting would suffice to disprove it if disproof were necessary at all. Infinite space meant for Classical feeling complete nothingness, and the use of blue and green, with their powers of dissolving the near and creating the far, would have been a challenge to the absolutism of the foreground and its unit-bodies, and therefore to the very meaning and intent of Apollinian art. To the Apollinian eye, pictures in the colours of Watteau would have been destitute of all essence, things of almost inexpressible emptiness and untruth. By these colours the visually-perceived light-reflecting surface of the picture is made effectively to render, not circumscribed things, but circumambient space. And that is why they are missing in Greece and dominant in the West.

IX

^<sup>1 The brilliant polish of the stone in Egyptian art has a deep symbolic significance of much the same kind. Its effect is to dematerialize the statue by causing the eye to glide along its exterior. Hellas on the contrary manifests, by its progress from "Poros" stone, through Naxian, to the translucent Parian and Pentelic marbles, how determined it is that the look shall sink right into the material essence of the body.

^<sup>2 See Vol. II, pp. 314 et seq.

The Christianity of the West is related to that of the East as the symbol of perspective to the symbol of gold-ground — and the final schism took place almost at the same moment in Church and in Art. The landscape-background of the depicted scene and the dynamic infiniteness of God were comprehended at the same moment; and, simultaneously with the gold ground of the sacred picture, there vanished from the Councils of the West that Magian, ontological problem of Godhead which had so passionately agitated Nicæa, Ephesus, Chalcedon and all the Councils of the East.

X

The Venetians discovered, and introduced into oil-painting as a space-forming and quasi-musical motive, the handwriting of the visible brush-stroke. The Florentine masters had never at any time challenged the fashion — would-be Classical and yet in Gothic employ — of smoothing out all turns of the brush so as to produce pure, cleanly-outlined and even colour-surfaces. In consequence, their pictures have a certain air of being, something felt, unmistakably, as the opposite of the inherent motion-quality of the Gothic expression-means that were storming in from over the Alps. The 15th-Century manner of applying colour is a denial of past and future. It is only in the brushwork, which remains permanently visible and, in a way, perennially fresh, that the bistorical feeling comes out. Our desire is to see in the work of the painter not merely something that has become but something that is becoming. And this is precisely what the Renaissance wanted to avoid. A piece of Perugino drapery tells us nothing of its artistic origin; it is ready-made, given, simply present. But the individual brush-strokes — first met with as a complete new form-language in the later work of Titian — are accents of a personal temperament, characteristic in the orchestra-colours of Monteverde, melodically-flowing as a contemporary Venetian madrigal: streaks and dabs, immediately juxtaposed, cross one another, cover one another, entangle one another, and bring unending movement into the plain element of colour. Just so the geometrical Analysis of the time made its objects become instead of being. Every painting has in its execution a history and does not disguise it; and a Faustian who stands before it feels that he too has a spiritual evolution. Before any great landscape by a Baroque master, the one word "historical" is enough to make us feel that there is a meaning in it wholly alien to the meaning of an Attic statue. As other melody, so also this of the universe of eternal Becoming, directional Time, and Destiny. The opposition of painti

^<sup>1 The life and teaching of St. Francis were, morally and æsthetically alike, the centres of inspiration for Cimabue, Giotto and the Italian Gothic generally. — Tr.

At the same time with this, there appeared in Western painting another symbol of highest significance, which subdued more and more the actuality of all colour — the "studio-brown" (atelierbraun). This was unknown to the early Florentines and the older Flemish and Rhenish masters alike. Pacher, Dürer, Holbein, passionately strong as their tendency towards spatial depth seems, are quite without it, and its reign begins only with the last years of the 16th Century. This brown does not repudiate its descent from the "infinitesimal" greens of Leonardo's, Schöngauer's and Grünewald's backgrounds, but it possesses a mightier power over things than they, and it carries the battle of Space against Matter to a decisive close. It even prevails over the more primitive linear perspective, which is unable to shake off its Renaissance association with architectural motives. Between it and the Impressionist technique of the visible brush-stroke there is an enduring and deeply suggestive connexion. Both in the end dissolve the tangible existences of the sense-world — the world of moments and foregrounds — into atmospheric semblances. Line disappears from the tone-picture. The Magian gold-ground had only dreamed of a mystic power that controlled and at will could thrust aside the laws governing corporeal existence within the world-cavern. But the brown of these pictures opened a prospect into an infinity of pure forms. And therefore its discovery marks for the Western style a culmination in the process of its becoming. As contrasted with the preceding green, this colour has something Protestant in it. It anticipates the hyperbolic ¹ Northern pantheism of the 18th Century which the Archangels voice in the Prologue of Goethe's "Faust." ² The atmosphere of Lear and the atmosphere of Macbeth are akin to it. The contemporary striving

^<sup>2 On the following page is a translation of this chorus. — Tr

From now onward, the old foreground-colours yellow and red—the Classical tones—are employed more and more rarely and always as deliberate contrasts to the distances and depths that they are meant to set off and emphasize (Vermeer in particular, besides of course Rembrandt). This atmospheric brown, which was entirely alien to the Renaissance, is the unrealest colour that there is. It is the one major colour that does not exist in the rainbow. There is white light, and yellow and green, and red and other light of the most entire purity. But a pure brown light is outside the possibilities of the Nature that we know. All the greenish-brown, silvery, moist brown, and deep gold tones that appear in their splendid variety with Giorgione, grow bolder and bolder in the great Dutch painters and lose themselves towards the end of the 18th Century, have the common quality that they strip nature of her tangible actuality. They contain, therefore, what is almost a religious profession of faith; we feel that here we are not very far from Port Royal, from Leibniz. With Constable on the other hand—who is the founder of the painting of Civilization—it is a different will that seeks expression; and the very brown that he had learnt from the Dutch meant to him not what it had meant to them—Destiny, God, the meaning of life—but simply romance, sensibility, yearning for something that was gone, memorial of the great past of the dying art. In the last German masters too

The Three. 'Tis from thy face the angels gain their strength, but scan it no one may, Beyond all thought thy Works remain subline as on Creation-Day.

and the vermilion of Vermeer intrude with the spatial almost as though from another world and with an emphasis that is truly metaphysical, and the yellow-green and blood-red lights of Rembrandt seem at most to play with the symbolism of space. In Rubens, on the contrary — brilliant performer but no thinker — the brown is almost destitute of idea, a shadow-colour. (In him and in Watteau, the "Catholic" blue-green disputes precedence with the brown.) All this shows how any particular means may, in the hands of men of inward depth, become a symbol for the evocation of such high transcendence as that of the Rembrandt landscape, while for other great masters it may be merely a serviceable technical expedient — or in other words that (as we have already seen) technical "form," in the theoretical sense of something opposed to "content," has nothing whatever to do with the real and true form of a great work.

I have called brown a historical colour. By this is meant that it makes the atmosphere of the pictured space signify directedness and future, and overpowers the assertiveness of any instantaneous element that may be represented. The other colours of distance have also this significance, and they lead to an important, considerable and distinctly bizarre extension of the Western symbolism. The Hellenes had in the end come to prefer bronze and even giltbronze to the painted marble, the better to express (by the radiance of this phenomenon against a deep blue sky) the idea of the individualness of any and every corporeal thing. Now, when the Renaissance dug these statues up, it found them black and green with the patina of many centuries. The historic spirit, with its piety and longing, fastened on to this — and from that time forth our form-feeling has canonized this black and green of distance. To-day our eye finds it indispensable to the enjoyment of a bronze — an ironical illustration of the fact that this whole species of art is something that no longer concerns us as such. What does a cathedral dome or a bronze figure mean to us without the patina which transmutes the short-range brilliance into the tone of remoteness of time and place? Have we not got to the point of artificially producing this patina? ²

^<sup>1 The use of gold in this way, viz., to add brilliancy to bodies standing freely in the open, has nothing in common with its employment in Magian art to provide glittering backgrounds for figures seen in dim interiors.

^<sup>2 The Chinese also attach enormous importance to the patinas of their old bronzes, which, owing to the different alloys used and the strong chemical characters of the soil, are of infinite variety and natural intricacy. They too, in later phases, have come to the production of artificial patina. — Tr.

Pausanias, it should be observed, was neither by date nor by origin a Greek. — $T_{\rm c}$

II ACT AND PORTRAIT

CHAPTER VIII

MUSIC AND PLASTIC

II ACT AND PORTRAIT

1

If the environment of a man (whatever else it may be) is with respect to him a macrocosm with respect to a microcosm, an immense aggregate of symbols, then the man himself, in so far as he belongs to the fabric of actuality, in so far as he is phenomenal, must be comprised in the general symbolism. But, in the impress of him made upon men like himself, what is it that possesses the force of Symbol, viz., the capacity of summing within itself and intelligibly presenting the essence of that man and the signification of his being? Art gives the answer.

1 One need only contrast the Greek artist with Rubens and Rabelais.

² Of whom one of his mistresses remarked that he "smelt like a carcass" (qu'il puait comme une charogne). Note also how the musician generally has a reputation for uncleanliness.

like the peripteros, no interior, that is, no "soul." The significance of the muscle-relief, carried out absolutely in the round, is the same as that of the self-closing array of the columns; both contain the whole of the form-language of the work.

the great exceptional case; in this and in this only has it led to an art of the high order.¹

Act and Portrait have never hitherto been felt as constituting an opposition, and consequently the full significance of their appearances in art-history has never been appreciated. And yet it is in the conflict of these two form-ideals that the contrast of two worlds is first manifested in full. There, on the one hand, an existence is made to show itself in the composition of the exterior structure; here, on the other hand, the human interior, the Soul, is made to speak of itself, as the interior of a church speaks to us through its façade or face. A mosque had no face, and consequently the Iconoclastic movement of the Moslems and the Paulicians — which under Leo III spread to Byzantium and beyond — necessarily drove the portrait-element quite out of the arts of form, so that thenceforward they possessed only a fixed stock of human arabesques. In Egypt the face of the statue was equivalent to the pylon, the face of the temple-plan; it was a mighty emergence out of the stone-mass of the body, as we see in the "Hyksos Sphinx" of Tanis and the portrait of Amenemhet III. In China the face is like a landscape, full of wrinkles and little signs that mean something. But, for us, the portrait is musical. The look, the play of the mouth, the pose of head and hands — these things are a fugue of the subtlest meaning, a composition of many voices that sounds to the understanding beholder.

^<sup>2 Kluge, Deutsche Sprachgesch. (1920), pp. 202 et seq.

The depth-experience is a becoming and effects a become, signifies time and evokes space, is at once cosmic and historical. Living direction marches to the horizon as to the future. As early as 1230 the Madonna of the St. Anne entrance of Notre-Dame dreams of this future: so, later, the Cologne "Madonna with the Bean-blossom" of Meister Wilhelm. Long before the Moses of Michelangelo, the Moses of Klaus Suter's well in the Chartreuse of Dijon meditates on destiny, and even the Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel are forestalled by those of Giovanni Pisano in Sant' Andrea at Pistoia (1300). And, lastly, there are the figures on the Gothic tombs — how they rest from the long journey of Destiny and how completely they contrast with the timeless grave and gay that is represented on the stelæ of Attic cemeteries. The Western portraiture is endless in every sense, for it begins to wake out of the stone from about 1200 and it has become completely music in the 17th Century. It takes its man not as a mere centre of the World-as-Nature which as phenomenon receives shape and significance from his being, but, above all, as a centre of the World-as-History. The Classical statue is a piece of present "Nature" and nothing besides. The Classical poetry is statuary in verse. Herein is the root of our feeling that ascribes to the Greek an unreserved devotion to Nature. We shall never en-

^<sup>1 A. Conze, Die Attischen Grabreliefs (1893 etc.).

tirely shake off the idea that the Gothic style as compared with the Greek is "unnatural." Of course it is, for it is more than Nature; only we are unnecessarily loath to realize that it is a deficiency in the Greek that our feeling has detected. The Western form-language is richer — portraiture belongs to Nature and to history. A tomb by one of those great Netherlanders who worked on the Royal graves of St. Denis from 1260, a portrait by Holbein or Titian or Rembrandt or Goya, is a biography, and a self-portrait is a historical confession. To make one's confession is not to avow an act but to lay before the Judge the inner history of that act. The act is patent, its roots the personal secret. When the Protestant or the Freethinker opposes auricular confession, it never occurs to him that he is rejecting merely the outward form of the idea and not the idea itself. He declines to confess to the priest, but he confesses to himself, to a friend, or to all and sundry. The whole of Northern poetry is one outspoken confession. So are the portraits of Rembrandt and the music of Beethoven. What Raphael and Calderon and Haydn told to the priests, these men put into the language of their works. One who is forced to be silent because the greatness of form that can take in even the ultimate things has been denied him . . . goes under like Hölderlin. Western man lives in the consciousness of his becoming and his eyes are constantly upon past and future. The Greek lives pointwise, ahistorically, somatically. No Greek would have been capable of a genuine self-criticism. As the phenomenon of the nude statue is the completely ahistoric copy of a man, so the Western self-portrait is the exact equivalent of the "Werther" or "Tasso" autobiography. To the Classical both are equally and wholly alien. There is nothing so impersonal as Greek art; that Scopas or Polycletus should make an image of himself is something quite inconceivable.

^<sup>1 Louvre. Replicas of the pair in the Vict. and Alb. Museum, London. — Tr.

^<sup>2 Olympia — the only unquestioned original that we have from the "great age." Reference would be superfluous, for few, if any, Classical works are better or more widely known. — Tr.

Discobolus,¹ on the other hand, renders the exterior form purely as itself, without relation of any sort to the inner organs, let alone to any "soul." One has only to take the best work of this period and compare it with the old Egyptian statues, say the "Village Sheikh" or King Phiops (Pepi), or again with Donatello's "David," to understand at once what it means to recognize a body purely with reference to its material boundaries. Everything in a head that might allow something intimate or spiritual to become phenomenal the Greeks (and markedly this same Myron) most carefully avoid. Once this characteristic has struck us, the best heads of the great age sooner or later begin to pall. Seen in the perspective of our world-feeling, they are stupid and dull, wanting in the biographical element, devoid of any destiny. It was not out of caprice that that age objected so strongly to votive images. The statues of Olympian victors are representatives of a fighting attitude. Right down to Lysippus there is not one single character-head, but only masks. Again, considering the figure as a whole, with what skill the Greeks avoid giving any impression that the head is the favoured part of the body! That is why these heads are so small, so un-significant in their pose, so un-thoroughly modelled. Always they are formed as a part of the body like arms and legs, never as the seat and symbol of an "I."

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1 In his portrait of Frau Gedon, already alluded to, p. 252

Endless Becoming is comprehended in the idea of Motherhood, Woman as Mother is Time and is Destiny. Just as the mysterious act of depth-experience fashions, out of sensation, extension and world, so through motherhood the bodily man is made an individual member of this world, in which thereupon he has a Destiny. All symbols of Time and Distance are also symbols of maternity. Care is the root-feeling of future, and all care is motherly. It expresses itself in the formation and the idea of Family and State and in the principle of Inheritance which underlies both. Care may be either affirmed or denied—one can live care-filled or care-free. Similarly, Time may be looked at in the light of eternity or in the light of the instant, and the drama of begetting and bearing or the drama of the nursing mother with her child may be chosen as the symbol of Life to be made apprehensible by all the means of art. India and the Classical took the first alternative, Egypt and the West the second. There is something of pure unrelated present in the Phallus and the Lingam, and in the phenomenon of the Doric column and the Attic statue as well. But the nursing Mother points into the future, and she is just the figure that is entirely missing in the Classical art. She could not possibly be rendered in the style of Phidias. One feels that this form is opposed to the sense of the phenomenon.

^<sup>1 See p. 136 and also Vol. II, p. 354.

As against these types, the imagination of the Greeks conceived goddesses who are either Amazons like Athene or hetæræ like Aphrodite. In the root-feeling which produced the Classical type of womanhood, fruitfulness has a vegetal character — in this connexion as in others the word $\sigma \hat{\omega} \mu \alpha$ exhaustively expresses the meaning of the phenomenon. Think of the masterpieces of this art, the three mighty female bodies of the East Pediment of the Parthenon, and compare with them that noblest image of a mother, Raphael's Sistine Madonna. In the latter, all bodiliness has disappeared. She is all distance and space. The Helen of the 'Iliad,' compared with Kriemhild, the motherly comrade of Siegfried, is a courtesan, while Antigone and Clytæmnestra are Amazons. How strangely even Æschylus passes over in silence the mother-tragic in Clytæmnestra! The figure of Medea is nothing less than the mythic inverse of the Faustian 'Mater Dolorosa'; her tragic is not one of future or children, it is with her lover, the symbol of wholly-present life, that her universe collapses. Kriemhild revenges her unborn children — it is this future that has been murdered in her — but Medea revenges only a past happiness. When the Classical sculpture, late art that it is, arrives at secularizing the pictures of the god, it creates the antique ideal of female form in a Cnidian Aphrodite — merely a very beautiful object, not a character or an ego but a piece of Nature. And in the end Praxiteles finds the hardihood to represent a goddess entirely naked. This innovation met with severe criticism, for it was felt to be a sign of the decline of the Classical world-feeling; suitable as it was to erotic symbolism, it

² The Orphic springtime contemplates the Gods and does not see them. See Vol. II, p. 345

^<sup>1 Harmodius and Aristogiton. At Naples. Illustrated in Ency. Brit. XI ed., article Greek Artifig. 50. Cast in British Museum. — Tr.

^<sup>2 The famous statue now in the Lateran Museum, Rome. — Tr.

See foot-note, p. 130. An antique copy is in the British Museum. — Tr.

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In the Vatican Museum. — Tr.

^<sup>2 Even the landscape of the Baroque develops from composed backgrounds to portraits of definite localities, representations of the soul of these localities which are thus endowed with faces.

At the same time, the Greek form-ideal—the self-contained unit of being expressed in sculpture—has equally to be distinguished from that of the merely beautiful bodies on which painters from Giorgione to Boucher were always exercising their cleverness, which are fleshly still-life, genre-work expressing merely a certain gay sensuousness (e.g., "Rubens's wife in a fur cloak." and in contrast with the high ethical significance of the Classical Act have almost no symbolic force. Magnificent as these men's painting is, therefore, they have not succeeded in reaching the highest levels either of portraiture or of space-representation in landscape. Their brown and their green and their perspective lack "religiousness," future, Destiny. They are masters only in the domain of elementary form, and when it has actualized this their art is exhausted. It is they who constitute the substance-element in the development-history of a great art. But when a great artist pressed on beyond them to a form that was to be capable of embracing the whole meaning of the world, he had necessarily to push to perfection the treatment of the nude body if his world was the Classical, and not to do so if it was our North. Rembrandt never once painted an Act, in this foreground sense, and if Leonardo, Titian, Velasquez (and, among moderns, Menzel, Leibl, Marées and Manet) did so at all, it was very rarely; and even then, so to say, they painted bodies as landscapes. The portrait is ever the touchstone.

^<sup>1 British Museum. — Tr. ² Pinakon

Art Gallery Vienna - Te

ance of Western art sings the middle of

² National Gallery London - Te

³ Museo Nazionale, Florence. — Tr.

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So it was in the cases of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, the only really great men of Italy after Dante. Is it not curious that between the masters of the Gothic — who were nothing but silent workers in their art and yet achieved the very highest that could be achieved within its convention and its field — and the Venetians and Dutch of 1600 — who again were purely workers — there should be these three men who were not "sculptors" or "painters" but thinkers, and thinkers who of necessity busied themselves not merely with all the available means of artistic expression but with a thousand other things besides, ever restless and dissatisfied, in their effort to get at the real essence and aim of their being? Does it not mean — that in the Renaissance they could not "find themselves"? Each in his own fashion, each under his own tragic illusion, these three giants strove to be "Classical" in the Medicean sense; and yet it was they themselves who in one and another way — Raphael in respect of the line, Leonardo in respect of the surface, Michelangelo in respect of the body — shattered the dream. In them the misguided soul is finding its way back to its Faustian starting-points. What they intended was to substitute proportion for relation, drawing for light-and-air effect, Euclidean body for purespace. But neither they nor others of their time produced a Euclidean-static sculpture — for that was possible once only, in Athens. In all their work one feels a secret music, in all their forms the movement-quality and the tending into distances and depths. They are on the way, not to Phidias but to Palestrina, and they have come thither not from Roman ruins but from the still music of the cathedral. Raphael thawed the Florentine fresco, and Michelangelo the statue, and Leonardo dreamed already of Rembrandt and Bach. The higher and more conscientious the effort to actualize the ideas of the age, the more intangible it became.

¹ It is the same "noble simplicity and quiet greatness"— to speak in the language of the German Classicists— that produces such an impression of the antique in the Romanesque of Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella and Hersfeld. The ruined cloisters of Paulinzella, in fact, have much of what Brunellesco so many centuries later strove to obtain in his palace-courts. But the basic feeling that underlies these creations is not something which we got from the Classical, but something that we projected on to our own notion of Classical being. And our own notion of peace is one of an infinite peace. We feel the "Rest in God" to be an expanse of quietude. All Florentine work, in so far as sureness does not turn into the Gothic challenge of Verrocchio, is characterized by this feeling, with which Attic σωφροσύνη has nothing whatever in common.

— was here for the last time strained to the utmost to liberate the paganism, the high-Renaissance paganism, that was in him. But his second soul, the soul of Gothic-Christian Dante and of the music of great expanses, is pulling in the opposite sense; his scheme for the ensemble is manifestly metaphysical in spirit.

His was the last effort, repeated again and again, to put the entirety of the artist-personality into the language of stone. But the Euclidean material failed him. His attitude to it was not that of the Greek. In the very character of its being the chiselled statue contradicts the world-feeling that tries to find something by, and not to possess something in, its art-works. For Phidias, marble is the cosmic stuff that is crying for form. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea expresses the very essence of that art. But for Michelangelo marble was the foe to be subdued, the prison out of which he must deliver his idea as Siegfried delivered Brunhilde. Everyone knows his way of setting to work. He did not approach the rough block coolly from every aspect of the intended form, but attacked it with a passionate frontal attack, hewing into it as though into space, cutting away the material layer by layer and driving deeper and deeper until his form emerged, while the members slowly developed themselves out of the quarry. Never perhaps has there been a more open expression of world-dread in the presence of the become — Death — of the will to overpower and capture it in vibrant form. There is no other artist of the West whose relation to the stone has been that of Michelangelo — at once so intimate and so violently masterful. It is his symbol of Death. In it dwells the hostile principle that his daemonic nature is always striving to overpower, whether he is cutting statues or piling great buildings out of it. He is the one sculptor of his age who dealt only with marble. Bronze, as cast, allows the modeller to compromise with pictorial tendencies, and it appealed therefore to other Renaissance artists and to the softer Greeks. The Giant stood aloof from it.

⁽E. T. A. Hoffmann, the strange many-sided genius who was at once musician, caricaturist, novelist, critic, wit, able public official and winebibber, at one time in his career wrote in the character of "Johannes Kreisler." See his Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier and Der Kater Murr, also Thomas Carlyle's "Miscellanies" and the biographical sketches of Hoffmann in Grove's Dictionary of Music and the Ency. Brit. — Tr.)

love, in which Faustian man discovers, not primarily the act of union between man and woman, but the great love of Dante and beyond that the caring Mother. Michelangelo's erotic — which is that of Beethoven also — is as un-Classical as it is possible to be. It stands sub specie aternitatis and not under that of sense and the moment. He produced acts — a sacrifice to the Hellenic idol — but the soul in them denies or overmasters the visible form. He wills infinity as the Greek willed proportion and rule, he embraces past and future as the Greek embraced present. The Classical eye absorbs plastic form into itself, but Michelangelo saw with the spiritual eye and broke through the foreground-language of immediate sensuousness. And inevitably, in the long run, he destroyed the conditions for this art. Marble became too trivial for his will-to-form. He ceased to be sculptor and turned architect. In full old age, when he was producing only wild fragments like the Rondanini Madonna and hardly cutting his figures out of the rough at all, the musical tendency of his artistry broke through. In the end the impulse towards contrapuntal form was no longer to be repressed and, dissatisfied through and through with the art upon which he had spent his life, yet dominated still by the unquenchable will to self-expression, he shattereed the canon of Renaissance architecture and created the Roman Baroque. For relations of material and form he substituted the contest of force and mass. He grouped the columns in sheaves or else pushed them away into niches. He broke up the storeys with huge pilasters and gave the façade a sort of surging and thrusting quality. Measure yielded to melody, the static to the dynamic. And thus Faustian music enlisted in its service the chief of all the other arts.

Leonardo discovered the circulation of the blood. It was no Renaissance spirit that brought him to that — on the contrary, the whole course of his thought took him right outside the conceptions of his age. Neither Michelangelo nor Raphael could have done it, for their painter's anatomy looks only at the form and position, not the function, of the parts. In mathematical language, it is stereometry as against analysis. Did not the Renaissance find it quite sufficient preparation for great painted scenes to study corpses, suppressing the becoming in favour of the become and calling on the dead to make Classical arapaçia accessible to Northern creative energy? But Leonardo investigated the life in the body as Rubens did, and not the body-in-itself as Signorelli did. His discovery was contemporary with that of Columbus, and the two have a deep affinity, for they signify the victory of the infinite over the material limitedness of the tangibly present. Would a Greek ever have concerned himself with questions like theirs? The Greeks inquired as little into the interior of their own organization as they sought for the sources of the Nile; these were problems that might have jeopardized the Euclidean constitution of their being. The Baroque, on the other hand, is truly the period of the great discoveries. The very word "discovery" has something bluntly un-Classical in it. Classical man took good care not to take the cover, the material wrapping, off anything cosmic, but to do just this is the most characteristic impulse of a Faustian nature. The discoveries of the New World, the circulation of the blood, and the Copernican universe were achieved almost simultaneously and, at bottom, are completely equivalent; and the discovery of gunpowder (that is, the long-range weapon 1) and of printing (the long-range script) were little earlier.

Leonardo was a discoverer through-and-through, and discovery was the sum in one word of his whole nature. Brush, chisel, dissecting-knife, pencil for calculating and compasses for drawing — all were for him of equal importance. They were for him what the Mariner's Compass was for Columbus. When Raphael completes with colour the sharp-drawn outline he asserts the

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The transformation of Renaissance fresco-painting into Venetian oil-painting is a matter of spiritual bistory. We have to appreciate very delicate and subtle traits to discern the process of change. In almost every picture from Masaccio's "Peter and the Tribute Money" in the Brancacci Chapel, through the soaring background that Piero della Francesca gave to the figures of Federigo and Battista of Urbino,¹ to Perugino's "Christ Giving the Keys,"² the fresco manner is contending with the invasive new form, though Raphael's artistic development in the course of his work on the Vatican "stanze" is almost the only case in which we can see comprehensively the change that is going on. The Florentine fresco aims at actuality in individual things and produces a sum of such things in an architectonic setting. Oil-painting, on the other hand, sees and handles with ever-growing sureness extension as a whole, and treats all objects only as representatives thereof. The Faustian world-feeling created the new technique that it wanted. It rejected the drawing style, as, from Oresme's time, co-ordinate geometry rejected it. It transformed the linear perspective associated with the architectural motive into a purely aerial perspective rendered by imponderable gradations of tone. But the condition of Renaissance art generally—its inability either to understand its own deeper tendencies or to make good its anti-Gothic principle—made the transition an obscure and difficult process. Each artist followed the trend in a way of his own. One painted in oils on the bare wall, and thereby condemned his work to perish (Leonardo's "Last Supper"). Another painted pictures as if they were wall-frescoes (Michelangelo). Some ventured, some guessed, some fell by the way, some shied. It was, as always, the struggle between hand and soul, between eye and instrument, between the form willed by the artist and the form willed by time—the struggle between Plastic and Music.

Uffizi, Florence, — Tr.

^<sup>2 Sistine Chapel, Rome. — Tr

In the Sistine Madonna, which is the very summation of the Renaissance, Raphael causes the outline to draw into itself the entire content of the work. It is the last grand line of Western art. Already (and it is this that makes Raphael the least intelligible of Renaissance artists) convention is strained almost to breaking-point by the intensity of inward feeling. He did not indeed wrestle with problems. He had not even an inkling of them. But he brought art to the brink where it could no longer shirk the plunge, and he lived to achieve the utmost possibilities within its form-world. The ordinary person who thinks him flat simply fails to realize what is going on in his scheme. Look again, reader, at the hackneyed Madonna. Have you ever noticed the little dawn-cloudlets, transforming themselves into baby heads, that surround the soaring central figure?—these are the multitudes of the unborn that the Madonna is drawing into Life. We meet these light clouds again, with the same meaning, in the wondrous finale of Faust II. It is just that which does not charm in Raphael, his sublime unpopularity, that betrays the inner victory over the Renaissance-feeling in him. We do understand Perugino at a glance, we merely think we understand Raphael. His very line—that drawing-character that at first sight seems so Classical—is something that floats in space, supernal, Beethoven-like. In this work Raphael is the least obvious of all artists, less obvious even than Michelangelo, whose intention is manifest through all the fragmentariness of his works. In Fra Bartolommeo the material bounding-line is still entirely dominant. It is all foreground, and the whole sense of the work is exhaustively rendered by the definition of bodies. But in Raphael line has become silent, expectant, veiled, waiting in an extremity of tension for dissolution into the infinite, into space and music.

For this reason, too, Leonardo (after innumerable attempts) decided to leave the Christ-head in the "Last Supper" unfinished. The men of his time were not even ripe for portraiture as Rembrandt understood the word, the magistral building-up of a soul-history out of dynamic brush-strokes and lights and tones. But only Leonardo was great enough to experience this limitation as a Destiny. Others merely set themselves to paint heads (in the modes prescribed by their respective schools) but Leonardo — the first, here, to make the hands also speak, and that with a physiognomic maestria — had an infinitely wider purpose. His soul was lost afar in the future, though his mortal part, his eye and hand, obeyed the spirit of the age. Assuredly he was the freest of the three great ones. From much of that which Michelangelo's powerful nature vainly wrestled with, he was already remote. Problems of chemistry, geometrical analysis, physiology (Goethe's "living Nature" was also Leonardo's), the technique of fire-arms — all were familiar to him. Deeper than Dürer, bolder than Titian, more comprehensive than any single man of his time, he was essentially the artist of torsos.(^1) Michelangelo the belated sculptor was so, too, but in another sense, while in Goethe's day that which had been unattainable for the painter of the Last Supper had already been reached and overpassed. Michelangelo strove to force life once more into a dead form-world, Leonardo felt a new form-world in the future, Goethe divined that there could be no new form-worlds more. Between the first and the last of these men lie the ripe centuries of the Faustian Culture.

VΤ

known, what the form-language of its arts has to mean. From being a philosophical religion, art has to be a religious philosophy. Great masters come forward in the place of anonymous schools. At the culmination of every Culture we have the spectacle of a splendid group of great arts, well-ordered and linked as a unit by the unity of the prime symbol underlying them all. The Apollinian group, to which belong vase-painting, fresco relief, the architecture of ranked columns, the Attic drama and the dance, centres upon the naked statue. The Faustian group forms itself round the ideal of pure spatial infinity and its centre of gravity is instrumental music. From this centre, fine threads radiate out into all spiritual form-languages and weave our infinitesimal mathematic, our dynamic physics, the propaganda of Jesuits and the power of our famous slogan of "progress," the modern machine-technique, credit economics and the dynastic-diplomatic State — all into one immense totality of spiritual expression. Beginning with the inward rhythm of the cathedral and ending with Wagner's "Tristan" and "Parsifal," the artistic conquest of endless space deploys its full forces from about 1550. Plastic is dying with Michelangelo in Rome just when planimetry, dominant hitherto, is becoming the least important branch of our mathematic. At the same time, Venice is producing Zarlino's theories of harmony and counterpoint (1558) and the practical method of the basso continuo — a perspective and an analysis of the world of sound — and this music's sister, the Northern mathematic of the Calculus, is beginning to mount.

Oil-painting and instrumental music, the arts of space, are now entering into their kingdom. So also — consequently, we say — the two essentially material and Euclidean arts of the Classical Culture, viz., the all-round statue and the strictly planar fresco, attain to their primacy at the corresponding date of c. 600 B.C. And further, in the one and in the other case, it is the painting that ripens first. For in either kind painting on the plane is a less ambitious and more accessible art than modelling in solid or composing in immaterial extension. The period 1550–1650 belongs as completely to oil-painting as fresco and vase-painting belong to the 6th Century B.C. The symbolism of space and of body, expressed in the one case by perspective and in the other by proportion, are only indicated and not immediately displayed by pictorial arts. These arts, which can only in each case produce their respective prime-symbols (i.e., their possibilities in the extended) as illusions on a painted surface, are capable indeed of denoting and evoking the ideal — Classical or Western, as the case may be — but they are not capable of fulfilling it; they appear therefore in the path of the "late" Culture as the ledges before the last summit. The nearer the grand style comes to its point of fulfilment, the more decisive the tendency to an ornamental language of inexorable clarity of symbolism. The group of great arts is further simplified. About 1670, just when Newton and Leibniz were discovering the Differential Calculus, oil-painting had reached the limit of its

possibilities. Its last great masters were dead or dying — Velasquez 1660, Poussin 1665, Franz Hals 1666, Rembrandt 1669, Vermeer 1675, Murillo, Ruysdael and Claude Lorrain 1682 — and one has only to name the few successors of any importance (Watteau, Hogarth, Tiepolo) to feel at once the descent, the end, of an art. In this time also, the great forms of pictorial music expired. Heinrich Schütz died in 1672, Carissimi in 1674, and Purcell in 1695 — the last great masters of the Cantata, who had played around image-themes with infinite variety of vocal and instrumental colour and had painted veritable pictures of fine landscape and grand legend-scene. With Lully (1687) the heart of the heroic Baroque opera of Monteverde ceased to beat. It was the same with the old "classical" sonata for orchestra, organ and string trio, which was a development of image-themes in the fugal style. Thereafter, the forms become those of final maturity, the concerto grosso, the suite, and the three-part sonata for solo instruments. Music frees itself from the relics of bodiliness inherent in the human voice and becomes absolute. The theme is no longer an image but a pregnant function, existent only in and by its own evolution, for the fugal style as Bach practised it can only be regarded as a ceaseless process of differentiation and integration. The victory of pure music over painting stands recorded in the Passions which Heinrich Schütz composed in his old age — the visible dawn of the new formlanguage — in the sonatas of Dall'Abaco and Corelli, the oratorios of Händel and the Baroque polyphony of Bach. Henceforth this music is the Faustian art, and Watteau may fairly be described as a painter-Couperin, Tiepolo as a painter-Händel.

In the Classical world the corresponding change occurred about 460, when Polygnotus, the last of the great fresco-painters, ceded the inheritance of the grand style to Polycletus and free sculpture in the round. Till then — as late even as Polygnotus's contemporaries Myron and the masters of the Olympia pediment — the form-language of a purely planar art had dominated that of statuary also; for, just as painting had developed its form more and more towards the ideal of the silhouette of colour with internal drawing superposed — to such an extent that at last there was almost no difference between the painted relief and the flat picture — so also the sculptor had regarded the frontal outline as it presented itself to the beholder as the true symbol of the Ethos, the cultural type, that he meant his figure to represent. The field of the temple-pediment constitutes a picture; seen from the proper distance, it makes exactly the same impression as its contemporary the red-figure vase-painting. In Polycletus's generation the monumental wall-painting gives place to the board-picture, the "picture" proper, in tempera or wax —a clear indication that the great style has gone to reside elsewhere. The ambition of Apollodorus's shadow painting was not in any sense what we call chiaroscuro and atmosphere, but sheer modelling in the round in the sculptor's sense; and of Zeuxis

And with this full plastic and this full music the two Cultures reach their respective ends. A pure symbolism of mathematical rigour had become possible. Polycletus could produce his "canon" of the proportions of the human body, and his contemporary Bach the "Kunst der Fuge" and "Wohltemperiertes Klavier." In the two arts that ensued, we have the last perfection of achievement that pure form saturated with meaning can give. Compare the tone-body of Faustian instrumental music, and within that system again the body of the strings (in Bach, too, the virtual unity of the winds), with the bodies of Attic statuary. Compare the meaning of the word "figure" to Haydn with its meaning to Praxiteles. In the one case it is the figure of a rhythmic motive in a web of voices, in the other the figure of an athlete. But in both cases the notion comes from mathematics and it is made plain that the aim thus finally attained is a union of the artistic and the mathematical spirit, for analysis like music, and Euclidean geometry like plastic, have both come to full comprehension of their tasks and the ultimate meaning of their respective number-languages. The mathematics of beauty and the beauty of mathematics are henceforth inseparable. The unending space of tone and the all-round body of marble or bronze are immediate interpretations of the extended. They belong to number-as-relation and to number-as-measure. In fresco and in oil-painting, in the laws of proportion and those of perspective, the mathematical is only indicated, but the two final arts are mathematics, and on these peaks Apollinian art and Faustian art are seen entire.

ture of Music that suffused all Life. Its type was Hoffmann's Kapellmeister Kreisler. To-day it is hardly even a memory.

VII

There is a word, "Impressionism," which only came into general use in Manet's time (and then, originally, as a word of contempt like Baroque and Rococo) but very happily summarizes the special quality of the Faustian way of art that has evolved from oil-painting. But, as we ordinarily speak of it, the idea has neither the width nor the depth of meaning that it ought to have: we regard it as a sequel to or derivative of the old age of an art which, in fact, belongs to it entirely and from first to last. What is the imitation of an "impression"? Something purely Western, something related to the idea of Baroque and even to the unconscious purposes of Gothic architecture and diametrically opposed to the deliberate aims of the Renaissance. Does it not signify the tendency — the deeply-necessary tendency of a waking consciousness to feel pure endless space as the supreme and unqualified actuality, and all sense-images as secondary and conditioned actualities "within it"? A tendency that can manifest itself in artistic creations, but has a thousand other outlets besides. Does not Kant's formula "space as a priori form of perception" sound like a slogan for the whole movement that began with Leonardo? Impressionism is the inverse of the Euclidean world-feeling. It tries to get as far as possible from the language of plastic and as near as possible to that of music. The effect that is made upon us by things that receive and reflect light is made not because

Be the artist painter or musician, his art consists in creating with a few strokes or spots or tones an image of inexhaustible content, a microcosm meet for the eyes or ears of Faustian man; that is, in laying the actuality of infinite space under enchantment by fleeting and incorporeal indications of something objective which, so to say, forces that actuality to become phenomenal. The daring of these arts of moving the immobile has no parallel. Right from the later work of Titian to Corot and Menzel, matter quivers and flows like a solution under the mysterious pressure of brush-stroke and broken colours and lights. It was in pursuit of the same object that Baroque music became "thematic" instead of melodic and — reinforcing the "theme" with every expedient of harmonic charm, instrumental colour, rhythm, and tempo — developed the tone-picture from the imitative piece of Titian's day to the leitmotiv-fabric of Wagner, and captured a whole new world of feeling and experience. When German music was at its culmination, this art penetrated also into lyric poetry (German lyric, that is, for in French it is impossible) and gave rise to a whole series of tiny masterpieces, from Goethe's "Urfaust" to Hölderlin's last poems — passages of a few lines apiece, which have never yet been noticed, let alone collected, but include nevertheless whole worlds of experience and feeling. On a small scale, it continually repeats the achievements of Copernicus and Columbus. No other Culture possesses an ornament-language of such dynamical impressiveness relatively to the means it employs. Every point or stroke of colour,

VIII

¹ Hence the impossibility of achieving a genuinely religious painting on plein-air principles. The world-feeling that underlies it is so throughly irreligious, so worthless for any but a "religion of reason" so-called, that every one of its efforts in that direction, even with the noblest intentions (Uhde, Puvis de Chavannes), strikes us as hollow and false. One instant of plein-air treatment suffices to secularize the interior of a church and degrade it into a showroom.

to Nature" fulfils itself in this dying art — the senile, too, return to Nature day by day. The modern artist is a workman, not a creator. He sets unbroken spectrum-colours side by side. The subtle script, the dance of brush-strokes, give way to crude commonplaces, pilings and mixings and daubings of points, squares, broad inorganic masses. The whitewasher's brush and the trowel appear in the painter's equipment; the oil-priming of the canvas is brought into the scheme of execution and in places left bare. It is a risky art, meticulous, cold, diseased — an art for over-developed nerves, but scientific to the last degree, energetic in everything that relates to the conquest of technical obstacles, acutely assertive of programme. It is the "satyric pendant" of the great age of oil-painting that stretches from Leonardo to Rembrandt; it could only be at home in the Paris of Baudelaire. Corot's silvern landscapes, with their grey-greens and browns, dream still of the spiritual of the Old Masters; but Courbet and Manet conquer bare physical space, "factual" space. The meditative discoverer represented by Leonardo gives way to the painting experimentalist. Corot, the eternal child, French but not Parisian, finds his transcendent landscapes anywhere and everywhere; Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, portray over and over again, painfully, laboriously, soullessly, the Forest of Fontainebleau, the bank of the Seine at Argenteuil, or that remarkable valley near Arles. Rembrandt's mighty landscapes lie essentially in the universe, Manet's near a railway station. The plein-air painters, true megalopolitans, obtain as it were specimens of the music of space from the least agitated sources of Spain and Holland — from Velasquez, Goya, Hobbema, Franz Hals — in order (with the aid of English landscapists and, later, the Japanese, "highbrows" all) to restate it in empirical and scientific terms. It is natural science as opposed to nature experience, head against heart, knowledge in contrast to faith.

ΤX

The symptom of decline in creative power is the fact that to produce something round and complete the artist now requires to be emancipated from form and proportion. Its most obvious, though not its most significant, manifestation is the taste for the gigantic. Here size is not, as in the Gothic and the Pyramid styles, the expression of inward greatness, but the dissimulation of its absence. This swaggering in specious dimensions is common to all nascent Civilizations — we find it in the Zeus altar of Pergamum, the Helios of Chares called the "Colossus of Rhodes," the architecture of the Roman Imperial Age, the New Empire work in Egypt, the American skyscraper of to-day. But what is far more indicative is the arbitrariness and immoderateness that tramples on and shatters the conventions of centuries. In Bayreuth and in Pergamum, it was the superpersonal Rule, the absolute mathematic of Form, the Destiny immanent in the quietly-matured language of a great art, that was found to be intolerable. The way from Polycletus to Lysippus and from Lysippus to the sculptors of the groups of Gauls 2 is paralleled by the way from Bach, by Beethoven, to Wagner. The earlier artists felt themselves masters, the later uneasy slaves, of the great form. While even Praxiteles and Haydn were able to speak freely and gaily within the limits of the strictest canon, Lysippus and Beethoven could only produce by straining their voices. The sign of all living art,

^<sup>1 State Museum, Berlin. — Tr.

the pure harmony of "will," "must" and "can," the self-evidence of the aim, the un-self-consciousness of the execution, the unity of the art and the Culture—all that is past and gone. In Corot and Tiepolo, Mozart and Cimarosa, there is still a real mastery of the mother-tongue. After them, the process of mutilation begins, but no one is conscious of it because no one now can speak it fluently. Once upon a time, Freedom and Necessity were identical; but now what is understood by freedom is in fact indiscipline. In the time of Rembrandt or Bach the "failures" that we know only too well were quite unthinkable. The Destiny of the form lay in the race or the school, not in the private tendencies of the individual. Under the spell of a great tradition full achievement is possible even to a minor artist, because the living art brings him in touch with his task and the task with him. To-day, these artists can no longer perform what they intend, for intellectual operations are a poor substitute for the trained instinct that has died out. All of them have experienced this. Marées was unable to complete any of his great schemes. Leibl could not bring himself to let his late pictures go, and worked over them again and again to such an extent that they became cold and hard. Cézanne and Renoir left work of the best quality unfinished because, strive as they would, they could do no more. Manet was exhausted after he had painted thirty pictures, and his "Shooting of the Emperor Maximilian," in spite of the immense care that is visible in every item of the picture and the studies for it, hardly achieved as much as Goya managed without effort in its prototype the "shootings of the 3rd of May." Bach, Haydn, Mozart and a thousand obscure musicians of the 18th Century could rapidly turn out the most finished work as a matter of routine, but Wagner knew full well that he could only reach the heights by concentrating all his energy upon "getting the last ounce" out of the best moments of his artistic endowment.

All that Nietzsche says of Wagner is applicable, also, to Manet. Ostensibly a return to the elemental, to Nature, as against contemplation-painting (Inhaltsmalerei) and abstract music, their art really signifies a concession to the barbarism of the Megalopolis, the beginning of dissolution sensibly manifested in a mixture of brutality and refinement. As a step, it is necessarily the last step. An artificial art has no further organic future, it is the mark of the end.

What is practised as art to-day — be it music after Wagner or painting after Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel — is impotence and falsehood. Look where one will, can one find the great personalities that would justify the claim that there is still an art of determinate necessity? Look where one will, can one find the self-evidently necessary task that awaits such an artist? We go through all the exhibitions, the concerts, the theatres, and find only industrious cobblers and noisy fools, who delight to produce something for the market, something that will "catch on" with a public for whom art and music and drama have long ceased to be spiritual necessities. At what a level of inward and outward dignity stand to-day that which is called art and those who are called artists! In the shareholders' meeting of any limited company, or in the technical staff of any first-rate engineering works there is more intelligence, taste, character and capacity than in the whole music and painting of present-day Europe. There have always been, for one great artist, a hundred superfluities who practised art, but so long as a great tradition (and therefore great art) endured even these achieved something worthy. We can forgive this hundred for existing, for in the ensemble of the tradition they were the footing for the individual great man. But to-day we have only these superfluities, and ten thousand of them, working art "for a living" (as if that were a justification!). One thing is quite certain, that to-day every single art-school could be shut down without

art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200. There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style," of "unsuspected possibilities," theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells — the "Literary Man" in the Poet's place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism which the artificate has organized as a "phase of art-history," thinking and feeling and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. What do we possess to-day as "art" A faked music, filled with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a faked painting, full of idiotic, exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of the form-wealth of millennia some new "style" which is in fact no style at all since everyone does as he pleases; a lying plastic that steals from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently. Yet this and only this, the taste of the "man of the world," can be accepted as the expression and sign of the age; everything else, everything that "sticks to" old ideals, is for provincial consumption.

^<sup>1 See Vol. II, pp. 138 et seq.

were understood and appreciated in the least, but because no one was any longer capable of producing originals. It must not be forgotten that these copyists were the artists of their time; their work therefore (done in one style or another according to the moment's fashion) represent the maximum of creative power then available. All the Roman portrait statues, male and female, go back for posture and mien to a very few Hellenic types; these, copied more or less true to style, served for torsos, while the heads were executed as "Likenesses" by simple craftsmen who possessed the knack. The famous statue of Augustus in armour, for example, is based on the Spearman of Polycletus, just as — to name the first harbingers of the same phase in our own world — Lenbach rests upon Rembrandt and Makart upon Rubens. For 1500 years (Amasis I to Cleopatra) Egypticism piled portrait on portrait in the same way. Instead of the steady development that the great age had pursued through the Old and Middle Kingdoms, we find fashions that change according to the taste of this or that dynasty. Amongst the discoveries at Turfan are relics of Indian dramas, contemporary with the birth of Christ, which are similar in all respects to the Kalidasa of a later century. Chinese painting as we know it shows not an evolution but an up-and-down of fashions for more than a thousand years on end; and this unsteadiness must have set in as early as the Han period. The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see to-day in Indian, Chinese, and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions — all is patternwork.¹ We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation. So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures.

^<sup>1 See pp. 197 et seq

CHAPTER IX SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

CHAPTER IX

SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

T

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL

1

Every professed philospher is forced to believe, without serious examination, in the existence of a Something that in his opinion is capable of being handled by the reason, for his whole spiritual existence depends on the possibility of such a Something. For every logician and psychologist, therefore, however sceptical he may be, there is a point at which criticism falls silent and faith begins, a point at which even the strictest analytical thinker must cease to employ his method — the point, namely, at which analysis is confronted with itself and with the question of whether its problem is soluble or even exists at all. The proposition "it is possible by thought to establish the forms of thought" was not doubted by Kant, dubious as it may appear to the unphilosophical. The proposition "there is a soul, the structure of which is scientifically accessible; and that which I determine, by critical dissection of conscious existence-acts into the form of psychic elements, functions, and complexes, is my soul" is a proposition that no psychologist has doubted hitherto. And yet it is just here that his strongest doubts should have arisen. Is an abstract science of the spiritual possible at all? Is that which one finds on this path identical with that which one is seeking? Why has psychology — meaning thereby not knowledge of men and experience of life but scientific psychology — always been the shallowest and most worthless of the disciplines of philosophy, a field so empty that it has been left entirely to mediocre minds and barren systematists? The reason is not far to seek. It is the misfortune of "experimental" psychology that it does not even possess an object as the word is understood in any and every scientific technique. Its searches and solutions are fights with shadows and ghosts. What is it — the Soul? If the mere reason could give an answer to that question, the science would be ab initio unnecessary.

We are dealing here with something eternally inaccessible to learned investigation. It is not for nothing that every language presents a baffling complexity of labels for the spiritual, warning us thereby that it is something not susceptible of theoretical synthesis or systematic ordering. Here there is nothing for us to order. Critical (i.e., literally, separating) methods apply only to the world-as-Nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting-knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought. Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither aims nor ways in common. The primitive man experiences "soul," first in other men and then in himself, as a Numen, just as he knows numina of the outer world, and develops his impressions in mythological form. His words for these things are symbols, sounds, not descriptive of the indescribable but indicative of it for him who hath ears to hear. They evoke images, likenesses (in the sense of Faust II) — the only language of spiritual intercourse that man has discovered to this day. Rembrandt can reveal something of his soul, to those who are in inward kinship with him, by way of a self-portrait or a landscape, and to Goethe "a god gave it to say what he suffered." Certain ineffable stirrings of soul can be imparted by one man to the sensibility of another man through a look, two bars of a melody, an almost imperceptible movement. That is the real language of souls, and it remains incomprehensible to the outsider. The word as utterance, as poetic element, may establish the link, but the word as notion, as element of scientific prose, never.

^<sup>1 See pp. 55 et seq.

To attempt to get an "exact" science out of the ever-mysterious soul is futile. But the late-period City must needs have abstract thinking and it forces the "physicist of the inner world" to elucidate a fictitious world by ever more fictions, notions by more notions. He transmutes the non-extended into the extended, builds up a system as "cause" for something that is only manifested physiognomically, and comes to believe that in this system he has the structure of "the" soul before his eyes. But the very words that he selects, in all the Cultures, to notify to others the results of his intellectual labours betray him. He talks of functions, feeling-complexes, mainsprings, thresholds of consciousness; course, breadth, intensity and parallelism in spiritual processes. All these are words proper to the mode of representation that Natural Science employs. "The Will is related to objects" is a spatial image pure and simple. "Conscious" and "unconscious" are only too obviously derivatives of "above-ground" and "below-ground." In modern theories of the Will we meet with all the vocabulary of electro-dynamics. Will-functions and thought-functions are spoken of in just the same way as the function of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative under imaginary co-ordinates in an imaginary space. The "pure" psych

ference whether I define some psychic capacity conceptually or the corresponding brain-region graphically. Scientific psychology has worked out for itself a complete system of images, in which it moves with entire conviction. Every individual pronouncement of every individual psychologist proves on examination to be merely a variation of this system conformable to the style of outerworld science of the day.

TT

^<sup>2 See p. 262.

A soul-image is never anything but the image of one quite definite soul. No observer can ever step outside the conditions and the limitations of his time and circle, and whatever it may be that he "knows" or "cognizes," the very cognition itself involves in all cases choice, direction and inner form, and is therefore ab initio an expression of his proper soul. The primitive himself appropriates a soul-image out of facts of his own life as subjected to the formative working of the basic experiences of waking consciousness (distinction of ego and world, of ego and tu) and those of being (distinction of body and soul, sense-life and reflection, sex-life and sentiment). And as it is thoughtful men who think upon these matters, an inner numen (Spirit, Logos, Ka, Ruach) always arises as an opposite to the rest. But the dispositions and relations of this numen in the individual case, and the conception that is formed of the spiritual elements — layers of forces or substances, unity or polarity or plurality—mark the thinker from the outset as a part of his own specific Culture. When, therefore, one convinces one's self that one knows the soul of an alien Culture from its workings in actuality, the soul-image underlying the knowledge is really one's own soul-image. In this wise new experiences are readily assimilated into the system that is already there, and it is not surprising

Classical man, too, had his inward Eleatic difficulty, and the inability of the Schoolmen to agree as to the primacy of Will or Reason foreshadows the dangerous flaw in Baroque physics — its inability to reach an unchallengeable statement of the relation between force and movement. Directional energy, denied in the Classical and also in the Indian soul-image (where all is settled and rounded), is emphatically affirmed in the Faustian and in the Egyptian (wherein all is systems and centres of forces); and yet, precisely because this affirmation cannot but involve the element of time, thought, which is alien to Time, finds itself committed to self-contradictions.

See Vol. II, pp. 296 et seq.

² De Boer, Gesch, d. Philos, im Islam (1901), pp. 93, 108

Scholastic and Mystic philosophy, no less than Gothic art, drew upon Moorish Spain, Sicily and the East for many of its forms. It must not be forgotten that the Arabian Culture is the culture of the established revelation-religions, all of which assume a dualistic soul-image. The Kabbala ¹ and the part played by Jewish philosophers in the so-called mediæval philosophy — i.e., late-Arabian followed by early-Gothic — is well known. But I will only refer here to the remarkable and little-appreciated Spinoza. ² Child of the Ghetto, he is, with his contemporary Schirazi, the last belated representative of the Magian, a stranger in the form-world of the Faustian feeling. As a prudent pupil of the Baroque he contrived to clothe his system in the colours of Western thought, but at bottom he stands entirely under the aspect of the Arabian dualism of two soul-substances. And this is the true and inward reason why he lacked the force-concept of Galileo and Descartes. This concept is the centre of gravity of a dynamic universe and ipso facto is alien to the Magian world-feeling. There is no link between the idea of the Philosopher's Stone (which is implicit in Spinoza's idea of Deity as "causa sui") and the causal necessity of our Nature-picture Consequently, his determinism is precisely that which the orthodox wisdom of Baghdad had maintained — "Kismet." It was there that the home of the more geometrico ³ method was to be looked for — it is common to the Talmud, the Zend Avesta and the Arabian Kalaam; ⁴ but its appearance in Spinoza's "Ethics" is a grotesque freak in our philosophy.

^<sup>1 A detailed summary will be found in Ency. Brit., XI ed., article Kabbalah, by Dr. Ginsburg and Dr. Cook. — Tr.

^<sup>2 See Windelband, Gesch. d. neueren Philosophie (1919), I, 208; also Hinnebert, Kultur der Gegenwart
I. V (1912). D. 484.

⁴ See Vol. II, p. 296.

m

The separation of its ultimate elements is a task that the Gothic world-outlook and its philosophy leaves to the courage of the future. Just as the ornamentation of the cathedral and the primitive contemporary painting still shirk the decision between gold and wide atmosphere in backgrounds — between the Magian and the Faustian aspects of God in Nature — so this early, timid, immature soul-image as it presents itself in this philosophy mingles characters derived from the Christian-Arabian metaphysic and its dualism of Spirit and Soul with Northern inklings of functional soul-forces not yet avowed. This is the discrepance that underlies the conflict concerning the primacy of will or reason, the basic problem of the Gothic philosophy, which men tried to solve now in the old Arabian, now in the new Western sense. It is this myth of the mind — which under ever-changing guises accompanies our philosophy throughout its course — that distinguishes it so sharply from every other. The rationalism of late Baroque, in all the pride of the self-assured city-spirit, decided in favour of the greater power of the Goddess Reason (Kant, the Jacobins); but almost immediately thereafter the 19th Century (Nietzsche above all) went back to the stronger formula Voluntas superior intellectu, and this indeed is in the blood of all of us. Schopenhauer, the last of the great systematists, has brought it down to the formula "World as Will and Idea," and it is only his ethic and not his metaphysic that decides against the Will.

To call the Faustian Culture a Will-Culture is only another way of expressing

Now this, precisely this, the genuine Russian regards as contemptible vainglory. The Russian soul, will-less, having the limitless plane as its prime-symbol, seeks to grow up—serving, anonymous, self-oblivious—in the brother-world of the plane. To take "I" as the starting-point of relations with the neighbour, to elevate "I" morally through "I's" love of near and dear, to repent for "I's" own sake, are to him traits of Western vanity as presumptuous as is the upthrusting challenge to heaven of our cathedrals that he compares with his plane church-roof and its sprinkling of cupolas. Tolstoi's hero Nechludov looks after his moral "I" as he does after his finger-nails; this is just what betrays Tolstoi as belonging to the pseudomorphosis of Petrinism. But Raskolnikov is only something in a "we." His fault is the fault of all, and even to regard his sin as special to himself is pride and vanity. Something of the kind underlies the Magian soul-image also. "If any man come to me," says Jesus (Luke xiv, 26), "and hate not his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, yea, and his own life (την ξαυτοῦ ψυχήν) also, he cannot be my disciple"; and it is the same feeling that makes him call himself by the title that we mistranslate "Son of Man." The Consensus of the Orthodox too is impersonal and condemns "I" as a sin. So too with the—truly Russian—conception of truth as the anonymous agreement of the elect.

^<sup>1 See p. 201.

^<sup>3 In the German, "Vor allem aber sein eignes Ich." (But in Luther's Bible, characteristically, "Auch dazu sein eigen Leben.") — Tr.

^<sup>4 Barnasha. The underlying idea is not the filial relation, but an impersonal coming-up in the field of mankind.

wholly somatic and wholly destitute of conscious direction and drive towards an end.

The actual designation of the Faustian principle, which belongs to us and to us alone, is a matter of indifference. A name is in itself mere sound. Space, too, is a word that is capable of being employed with a thousand nuances — by mathematicians and philosophers, poets and painters — to express one and the same indescribable; a word that is ostensibly common to all mankind and yet, carrying a metaphysical under-meaning that we gave it and could not but give it, is in that sense valid only for our Culture. It is not the notion of "Will," but the circumstance that we possess it while the Greeks were entirely ignorant of it, that gives it high symbolic import. At the very bottom, there is no distinction between space-as-depth and will. For the one, and therefore for the other also, the Classical languages had no expression. The pure space of the Faustian world-picture is not mere extension, but efficient extension into the distance, as an overcoming of the merely sensuous, as a strain and tendency, as a spiritual will-to-power. I am fully aware how inadequate these periphrases are. It is entirely impossible to indicate in exact terms the difference between what we and what the men of the Indian or the Arabian Culture call space, or feel or imagine in the word. But that there is some radical distinction is proved by the very different fundamentals of the respective mathematics, arts of form, and, above all, immediate utterances of life. We shall see how the identity of space and will comes to expression in the acts of Copernicus and Columbus — as well as in those of the Hohenstaufen and Napoleon — but it underlies also, in another way, the physical notions of fields of force and potential, ideas that it would be impossible to convey to the comprehension of any Greek. "Space as a priori form of perception," the formula in which Kant finally enunciated that for which Baroque philosophy had so long and tire-lessly striven, implies an assertion of supremacy of soul over the alien; the ego, through the form, is to rul

¹ ἐθέλω and βόυλομαι imply, to have the intention, or wish, or inclination (βουλή means counsel, council, plan, and ἐθελω has no equivalent noun). Voluntas is not a psychological concept but, like potestas and virtus, a thoroughly Roman and matter-of-fact designation for a practical, visible and outward asset — substantially, the mass of an individual's being. In like case, we use the word energy. The "will" of Napoleon is something very different from the energy of Napoleon, being, as it were, lift in contrast to weight. We must not confuse the outward-directed intelligence, which distinguishes the Romans as civilized men from the Greeks as cultured men, with "will" as understood here. Cæsar is not a man of will in the Napoleonic sense. The idioms of Roman law, which represent the root-feeling of the Roman soul far better than those of poetry, are significant in this regard. Intention in the legal sense is animus (animus occidendi); the wish, directed to some criminal end, is dolus as distinct from the unintended wrongdoing (culpa). Voluntas is nowhere used as a technical term.

This is brought to expression in the depth-perspective of oil-painting which makes the space-field of the picture, conceived as infinite, dependent on the observer, who in choosing his distance asserts his dominion. It is this attraction of distance that produces the type of the heroic and historically-felt land-scape that we have alike in the picture and the park of the Baroque period, and that is expressed also in the mathematico-physical concept of the vector. For centuries painting fought passionately to reach this symbol, which contains all that the words space, will and force are capable of indicating. And correspondingly we find in our metaphysic the steady tendency to formulate pairs of concepts (such as phenomena and things-in-themselves, will and idea, ego and non-ego) all of the same purely dynamic content, and — in utter contrast to Protagoras's conception of man as the measure, not the creator, of things — to establish a functional dependence of things upon spirit. The Classical metaphysic regarded man as a body among bodies, and knowledge as a sort of contact, passing from the known to the knower and not vice versa. The optical theories of Anaxagoras and Democritus were far from admitting any active participation of the percipient in sense-perception. Plato never felt, as Kant was driven to feel, the ego as centre of a transcendent sphere of effect. The captives in his celebrated cave are really captives, the slaves and not the masters of outer impressions — recipients of light from the common sun and not themselves suns which irradiate the universe.

The relation of our will to our imaginary space is evidenced again in the physical concept of space-energy — that utterly un-Classical idea in which even spatial interval figures as a form, and indeed as prime form thereof, for the notions of "capacity" and "intensity" rest upon it. We feel will and space, the dynamic world-picture of Galileo and Newton and the dynamic soul-picture which has will as its centre of gravity and centre of reference, as of identical significance. Both are Baroque ideas, symbols of the fully-ripened Faustian Culture.

that has no relation to the act at all, a will that is simply the parent of a willing, they are obviously working in deeper connotations of the Arabic word and on the basis of a soul-image that in structure differs entirely from the Faustian.

The enigmatic Something in the soul-image that is called "will," the passion of the third dimension, is therefore quite specially a creation of the Baroque, like the perspective of oil-painting and the force-idea of modern physics and the tone-world of instrumental music. In every case the Gothic had foreshadowed what these intellectualizing centuries brought to fullness. Here, where we are trying to take in the cast of Faustian life in contradiction to that of all other lives, what we have to do is to keep a firm hold on the fact that the primary words will, space, force, God, upborne by and permeated with connotations of Faustian feeling, are emblems, are the effective framework that sustains the great and kindred form-worlds in which this being expresses itself. It has been believed, hitherto, that in these matters one was holding in one's grip a body of eternal facts, of facts-in-themselves, which sooner or later would be successfully treated, "known," and proved by the methods of critical research. This illusion of natural science was shared by psychology also. But the view that these "universally-valid" fundamentals belong merely to the Baroque style of apprehension and comprehension, that as expression-forms they are only of transitory significance, and that they are only "true" for the Western type of intellect, alters the whole meaning of those sciences and leads us to look upon them not only as subjects of systematic cognition but also, and in a far higher degree, as objects of physiognomic study.

Lines 525-534: ΧΟ. τούτων ἄρα Ζεύς έστιν άσθενέστερος; ΠΡ. ούκουν άνεκφύγοι γε τὴν πεπρωμένην, etc. — Τε

^<sup>2 Iliad, XXII, 208-215. — Tr.

ĮΥ

The question is now: How far is the man of this Culture himself fulfilling what the soul-image that he has created requires of him? If we can, to-day, state the theme of Western physics quite generally to be efficient space, we have ipso facto defined also the kind of existence, the content of existence as lived by contemporary man. We, as Faustian natures, are accustomed to take note of the individual according to his effective and not according to his plastic-static appearance in the field of our life-experience. We measure what a man is by his activity, which may be directed inwardly or outwardly, and we judge all intentions, reasons, powers, convictions and habits entirely by this directedness. The word with which we sum up this aspect is character. We habitually speak of the "character" of heads and landscapes; of ornaments, brush-strokes and scripts; of whole arts and ages and Cultures. The art of the characteristic is, above all, Baroque music — alike in respect of its melody and its instrumentation. Here again is a word indicating an indescribable, a something that emphasizes, among all the Cultures, the Faustian in particular. And the deep relation between this word "character" and the word "will" is unmistakable; what will is in the soul-image, character is in the picture of life as we see it, the Western life that is self-evident to Western men. It is the fundamental postulate of all our ethical systems, differ otherwise as they may in their metaphysical or practical precepts, that man has character. Character, which forms itself in the stream of the world — the personality, the relation of living to doing — is a Faustian impression of the man made by the man; and, significantly enough, just as in the physical world-picture it has proved impossible (in spite of the most rigorous theoretical examination) to separate the vectorial idea

Hitherto the pretension of each and every morale to universal validity has obscured the fact that every Culture, as a homogeneous being of higher order, possesses a moral constitution proper to itself. There are as many morales as there are Cultures. Nietzsche was the first to have an inkling of this; but he never came anywhere near to a really objective morphology of morale "beyond good" (all good) "and evil" (all evil). He evaluated Classical, Indian, Christian and Renaissance morale by his own criteria instead of understanding the style of them as a symbol. And yet if anything could detect the prime-phenomenon of Morale as such, it should have been the historical insight of a Westerner. However, it appears that we are only now ripe enough for such a study. The conception of mankind as an active, fighting, progressing whole is (and has been since Joachim of Floris and the Crusades) so necessary an idea for us that we find it hard indeed to realize that it is an exclusively Western hypothesis, living and valid only for a season. To the Classical spirit mankind appears as a stationary mass, and correspondingly there is that quite dissimilar morale that we can trace from the Homeric dawn to the time of the Roman Empire. And, more generally, we shall find that the immense activity of the Faustian life-feeling is most nearly matched in the Chinese and the Egyptian, and the rigorous passivity of the Classical in the Indian.

As all the forms of Dynamic (whether pictorial, musical, physical, social or political) are concerned with the working-out of infinite relations and deal, not with the individual case and the sum of individual cases as the Classical physics had done, but with the typical course or process and its functional rule, "character" must be understood as that which remains in principle constant in the working-out of life; where there is no such constant we speak of "lack of character." It is character—the form in virtue of which a moving existence can combine the highest constancy in the essential with the maximum variability in the details—that makes telling biography (such as Goethe's "Wahrheit und Dichtung"), possible at all. Plutarch's truly Classical biographies are by comparison mere collections of anecdotes strung together chronologically and not ordered pictures of historical development, and it will hardly be disputed that only this second kind of biography is imaginable in connexion with Alcibiades or Pericles or, for that matter, any purely Apollinian figure. Their experiences lack, not mass, but relation; there is something atomic about them. Similarly in the field of Science the Greek did not merely forget to look for general laws in the sum of his experiential data; in his cosmos they were simply not there to be found.

man is tantamount to the essence and kernel of him. An orator was described as speaking in the προσῶπον — not the character or the vein as we should say — of a priest or a soldier. The slave was ἀπρόσωπος — that is, he had no attitude or figure in the public life — but not ἀσώματος — that is, he did have a soul. The idea that Destiny had assigned the rôle of king or general to a man was expressed by Romans in the words persona regis, imperatoris.¹ The Apollinian cast of life is manifest enough here. What is indicated is not the personality (that is, an unfolding of inward possibilities in active striving) but a permanent and self-contained posture strictly adapted to a so-to-say plastic ideal of being. It is only in the Classical ethic that Beauty plays a distinct rôle. However labelled — as σωφροσύνη, καλοκάγαθία or ἀταραξία — it always amounts to the well-ordered group of tangible and publicly evident traits, defined for other men rather than specific to one's self. A man was the object and not the subject of outward life. The pure present, the moment, the foreground were not conquered but worked up. The notion of an inward life is impossible in this connexion. The significance of Aristotle's phrase ζῶον πολιτίκον — quite untranslatable and habitually translated with a Western connotation — is that it refers to men who are nothing when single and lonely (what could be more preposterous than an Athenian Robinson Crusoe!) and only count for anything when in a plurality, in agora or forum, where each reflects his neighbour and thus, only thus, acquires a genuine reality. It is all implicit in the phrase σώματα πόλεως, used for the burghers of the city. And thus we see that the Portrait, the centre of Baroque art, is identical with the representation of a man to the extent that he possesses character, and that in the best age of Attic the representation of the nude statue.

v

It is not enough to distinguish Classical and Western tragedy merely as action-drama and event-drama. Faustian tragedy is biographical, Classical anecdotal; that is, the one deals with the sense of a whole life and the other with the content of the single moment.² What relation, for instance, has the entire

^<sup>1 See p. 265.

^<sup>1 See pp. 143 et seq.

^<sup>2 The Fates of the Greeks are represented as spinning, measuring out and cutting the thread of a man's destiny, but not as weaving it into the web of his life. It is a mere dimension. — Tr.

^<sup>1 See p. 129

The Eleusinian mysteries contained no secrets at all. Everyone knew what went on. But upon the believers they exercised a strange and overpowering effect, and the "betrayal" consisted it profaning them by imitating their holy forms outside the temple-precinct. See, further, A. Dieterich Kleine Schriften (1911), pp. 414 et seq.

4 See Vol. II, pp. 345 et seq.

^<sup>5 The dancers were goats, Silenus as leader of the dance wore a horsetail, but Aristophanes's "Birds," "Frogs" and "Wasps" suggest that there were still other animal disguises.

^<sup>1 See pp. 283 et seq

VI

This Chorus as crowd (the ideal opposite to the lonely or inward man and the monologue of the West), this Chorus which is always there, the witness of every "soliloquy," this Chorus by which, in the stage-life as in the real life, fear before the boundless and the void is banished, is truly Apollinian. Self-review as a public action, pompous public mourning in lieu of the solitary anguish of the bedchamber, the tears and lamentations that fill a whole series of dramas like the "Philoctetes" and the "Trachiniæ," the impossibility of being alone, the feeling of the Polis, all the feminine of this Culture that we see idealized in the Belvedere Apollo, betrays itself in this symbol of the Chorus. In comparison with this kind of drama, Shakespeare's is a single monologue. Even in the conversations, even in the group-scenes we are sensible of the immense inner distance between the persons, each of whom at bottom is only talking with himself. Nothing can overcome this spiritual remoteness. It is felt in Hamlet as in "Tasso" and in Don Quixote as in Werther, but even Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzeval is filled with and stamped by the sense of infinity. The distinction holds for all Western poetry against all Classical. All our lyric verse from Walther von der Vogelweide to Goethe and from Goethe to the poems of our dying world-cities is monologue, while the Classical lyric is a choral lyric, a singing before witnesses. The one is received inwardly, in word-less reading, as soundless music, and the other is publicly recited. The one belongs to the still chamber and is spread by means of the book, the other belongs to the place where it is voiced.

(Contrast with this Dante's exact and careful specification of the time-of-day in every episode of the Purzatorio and the Paradiso, sublimely imaginative as these poems are. — Tr.)

the world, dramatic infinity, the passionate overthrow of all static limitations, attained the maximum. His woods, seas, alleys, gardens, battlefields lie in the afar, the unbounded. Years fly past in the space of minutes. The mad Lear between fool and reckless outcast on the heath, in the night and the storm, the unutterably lonely ego lost in space — here is the Faustian life-feeling! From such a scene as this it is but a step to the inwardly seen and inwardly felt land-scapes of the almost contemporary Venetian music; for on the Elizabethan stage the whole thing was merely indicated, and it was the inner eye that out of a few hints fashioned for itself an image of the world in which the scenes — far-fetched always — played themselves out. Such scenes the Greek stage could not have handled at all. The Greek scene is never a landscape; in general, it is nothing, and at best it may be described as a basis for movable statues. The figures are everything, in drama, as in fresco. It is sometimes said that Classical man lacked the feeling for Nature. Insensitive to Faustian Nature, that of space and of landscape, Classical man certainly was. His Nature was the body, and if once we have let the sentiment of this sink into us, we suddenly comprehend the eye with which the Greek would follow the mobile muscle-relief of the nude body. This, and not clouds and stars and horizon, was his "Living Nature."

VII

Now, whatever is sensuously-near is understandable for all, and therefore of all the Cultures that have been, the Classical is the most popular, and the Faustian the least popular, in its expressions of life-feeling. A creation is "popular" that gives itself with all its secrets to the first comer at the first glance, that incorporates its meaning in its exterior and surface. In any Culture, that element is "popular" which has come down unaltered from primitive states and imaginings, which a man understands from childhood without having to master by effort any really novel method or standpoint—and, generally, that which is immediately and frankly evident to the senses, as against that which is merely hinted at and has to be discovered—by the few, and sometimes the very, very few. There are popular ideas, works, men and landscapes. Every Culture has its own quite definite sort of esoteric or popular character that is immanent in all its doings, so far as these have symbolic importance. The commonplace eliminates differences of spiritual breadth as well as depth between man and man, while the esoteric emphasizes and strengthens them. Lastly, considered in relation to the primary depth-experience of this and that kind of awakening man—that is, in relation to the prime-symbol of his existence and the cast of his world-around—the purely "popular" and naïve associates itself with the symbol of the bodily, while to the symbol of endless Space belongs a frankly un-popular relation between the creations and the men of the Culture.

majesty that is Homer's is simply not to be found in any Western language? The Nibelungenlied is a hard, reserved utterance, and as for Dante, in Germany at any rate the pretension to understand him is seldom more than a literary pose. We find everywhere in the Western what we find nowhere in the Classical — the exclusive form. Whole periods — for instance, the Provençal Culture and the Rococo — are in the highest degree select and uninviting, their ideas and forms having no existence except for a small class of higher men. Even the Renaissance is no exception, for though it purports to be the rebirth of that Antique which is so utterly non-exclusive and caters so frankly for all, it is in fact, through-and-through, the creation of a circle or of individual chosen souls, a taste that rejects popularity from the outset — and how deep this sense of detachment goes we can tell from the case of Florence, where the generality of the people viewed the works of the elect with indifference, or with open mouths, or with dislike, and sometimes, as in the case of Savonarola, turned and rent them. On the contrary, every Attic burgher belonged to the Attic Culture, which excluded nobody; and consequently, the distinctions of deeps and shallows, which are so decisively important for us, did not exist at all for it. For us, popular and shallow are synonymous — in art as in science — but for Classical man it was not so.

Consider our sciences too. Every one of them, without exception, has besides its elementary groundwork certain "higher" regions that are inaccessible to the layman — symbols, these also, of our will-to-infinity and directional energy. The public for whom the last chapters of up-to-date physics have been written numbers at the utmost a thousand persons, and certain problems of modern mathematics are accessible only to a much smaller circle still — for our "popular" science is without value, détraquée, and falsified. We have not only an art for artists, but also a mathematic for mathematicians, a politic for politicians (of which the profanum vulgus of newspaper-readers has not the smallest inkling, whereas Classical politics never got beyond the horizon of the Agora), a religion for the "religious genius" and a poetry for philosophers. Indeed, we may take the craving for wide effect as a sufficient index by itself of the commencing and already perceptible decline of Western science. That the severe esoteric of the Baroque Age is felt now as a burden, is a symptom of sinking strength and of the dulling of that distance-sense which confessed the limitation with humility. The few sciences that have kept the old fineness, depth, and energy of conclusion and deduction and have not been tainted with journalism — and few indeed they are, for theoretical physics, mathematics, Catholic dogma, and perhaps jurisprudence exhaust the list — address themselves to a very narrow and chosen band of experts. And it is this expert, and his opposite the layman, that are totally lacking in the Classical life, wherein everyone

^<sup>1 The great mass of Socialists would cease to be Socialists if they could understand the Socialism of the nine or ten men who to-day grasp it with the full historical consequences that it involves.

VIII

Consider, now, Western painting as it was after Leonardo, fully conscious of its mission. How does it deal with infinite space as something singular which comprehends both picture and spectator as mere centres of gravity of a spatial dynamic? The full Faustian life-feeling, the passion of the third dimension, takes hold of the form of the picture, the painted plane, and transforms it in an unheard-of way. The picture no longer stands for itself, nor looks at the

Our denial of the "vault" of heaven, then, is a resolve and not a sense-experience. The modern ideas as to the nature of starry space — or, to speak

The strong upspringing of the Copernican world-idea — which belongs exclusively to our Culture and (to risk an assertion that even now may seem paradoxical) would be and will be deliberately forced into oblivion whenever the soul of a coming Culture shall feel itself endangered by it 1 — was founded on the certainty that the corporeal-static, the imagined preponderance of the plastic earth, was henceforth eliminated from the Cosmos. Till then, the heavens which were thought of, or at any rate felt, as a substantial quantity, like the earth, had been regarded as being in polar equilibrium with it. But now it was Space that ruled the universe. "World" signifies space, and the stars are hardly more than mathematical points, tiny balls in the immense, that as material no longer affect the world-feeling. While Democritus, who tried (as on behalf of the Apollinian Culture he was bound to try) to settle some limit of a bodily kind to it all, imagined a layer of hook-shaped atoms as a skin over the Cosmos, an insatiable hunger drives as ever further and further into the remote. The solar system of Copernicus, already expanded by Giordano Bruno to a thousand such systems, grew immeasurably wider in the Baroque Age; and to-day we "know" that the sum of all the solar systems, about 35,000,000, constitutes a closed (and demonstrably finite 2) stellar system which forms an ellipsoid of rotation and has its equator approximately along the band of the Milky Way. Swarms of solar systems traverse this space, like flights of migrant birds, with the same velocity and direction. One such group, with an apex in the constellation of Hercules, is formed by our sun together with the bright stars Capella, Vega, Altair and Betelgeuse. The axis of this immense system, which has its mid-point not far from the present position of

^<sup>1 See Vol. II, p. 363, note.

^<sup>2 As we increase the powers of the telescope we find that the number of newly appearing stars falls off rapidly towards the edges of the field.

our sun, is taken as 470,000,000 times as long as the distance from the earth to the sun. Any night, the starry heavens give us at the same moment impressions that originated 3,700 years apart in time, for that is the distance in light-years from the extreme outer limit to the earth. In the picture of history as it unfolds before us here, this period corresponds to a duration covering the whole Classical and Magian ages and going back to the zenith of the Egyptian Culture in the XIIth Dynasty. This aspect — an image, I repeat, and not a matter of experimental knowledge — is for the Faustian a high and noble aspect, but for the Apollinian it would have been woeful and terrible, an annihilation of the most profound conditions of his being. And he would have felt it as sheer salvation when after all a limit, however remote, had been found. But we, driven by the deep necessity that is in us, must simply ask ourselves the new question: Is there anything outside this system? Are there aggregates of such systems, at such distances that even the dimensions established by our astronomy ² are small by comparison? As far as sense-observations are concerned, it seems that an absolute limit has been reached; neither light nor gravitation can give a sign of existence through this outer space, void of mass. But for us it is a simple necessity of thought. Our spiritual passion, our unresting need to actualize our existence-idea in symbols, suffers under this limitation of our sense-perceptions.

τx

(Our very notation of number is ceasing to rest on sense-standards. Science has carried number, as ordinarily written, so high and so low that it now uses a movable base for its numerical statements. For example, a number in astronomy is written, not as 3,450,000,000 but as $3.45 \times 10^9$ , one relating to ordinary experience as 3.45 (i.e., $3.45 \times 10^9$ ) and one in electromagnetic theory, not as 0.0000345 but as $3.45 \times 10^{-8}$ . Under this system the conceptual unit may be as large or as small, compared with the unit of daily experience, as the region of thought in which the calculation is taking place requires. And different conceptual worlds can be connected as to number [say, a number of kilometres brought into an order of thought that deals with millimetres] by simply changing the ten-power. — $T_r$ .)

only profited by it as a labour-saving device. They sailed, as they had done before in their oared ships, along the coast to Punt and Syria, but the idea of the high-seas voyage — what it meant as a liberation, a symbol — was not in them. Sailing, real sailing, is a triumph over Euclidean land. At the beginning of our 14th Century, almost coincident with each other (and with the formation-periods of oil-painting and counterpoint!) came gunpowder and the compass, that is, long-range weapons and long-range intercourse (means that the Chinese Culture¹ too had, necessarily, discovered for itself). It was the spirit of the Vikings and the Hansa, as of those dim peoples, so unlike the Hellenes with their domestic funerary urns, who heaped up great barrows as memorials of the lonely soul on the wide plains. It was the spirit of those who sent their dead kings to sea in their burning ships, thrilling manifests of their dark yearning for the boundless. The spirit of the Norsemen drove their cockleboats — in the Tenth Century that heralded the Faustian birth — to the coasts of America. But to the circumnavigation of Africa, already achieved by Egyptians and Carthaginians, Classical mankind was wholly indifferent. How statuesque their existence was, even with respect to intercourse, is shown by the fact that the news of the First Punic War — one of the most intense wars of history — penetrated to Athens from Sicily merely as an indefinite report. Even the souls of the Greeks were assembled in Hades as unexcitable shadows ( $\epsilon t \delta \omega \lambda a$ ) without strength, wish or feeling. But the Northern dead gathered themselves in fierce unresting armies of the cloud and the storm.

Sunda — but Athens shut its eyes to these things just as it did to the astronomical knowledge of the old East. Even when the lands that we call Morocco and Portugal had become Roman provinces, no Atlantic voyaging ensued, and the Canaries remained forgotten. Apollinian man felt the Columbus-longing as little as he felt the Copernican. Possessed though the Greek merchants were with the desire of gain, a deep metaphysical shyness restrained them from extending the horizon, and in geography as in other matters they stuck to near things and foregrounds. The existence of the Polis, that astonishing ideal of the State as statue, was in truth nothing more nor less than a refuge from the wide world of the sea-peoples — and that though the Classical, alone of all the Cultures so far, had a ring of coasts about a sea of islands, and not a continental expanse, as its motherland. Not even Hellenism, with all its proneness to technical diversions, freed itself from the oared ship which tethered the mariner to the coasts. The naval architects of Alexandria were capable of constructing giant ships of 260-ft. length, and, for that matter, the steamship was discovered in principle. But there are some discoveries that have all the pathos of a great and necessary symbol and reveal depths within, and there are others that are merely play of intellect. The steamship is for Apollinians one of the latter and for Faustians one of the former class. It is prominence or insignificance in the Macrocosm as a whole that gives discovery and the application thereof the character of depth or shallowness.

Every Culture possesses a proper conception of home and fatherland, which is hard to comprehend, scarcely to be expressed in words, full of dark metaphysical relations, but nevertheless unmistakable in its tendency. The Classical home-feeling which tied the individual corporally and Euclidean-ly to the Polis ³ is the very antithesis of that enigmatic "Heimweh" of the Northerner which has something musical, soaring and unearthly in it. Classical man felt as "Home" just what he could see from the Acropolis of his native city. Where the horizon of Athens ended, the alien, the hostile, the "fatherland" of another began. Even the Roman of late Republican times understood by "patria" nothing but Urbs Roma, not even Latium, still less Italy. The Classical world,

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 626 et seg.

^<sup>8 See Vol. II, pp. 207 et seq., and Chapter IV B.

¹ See Vol. II. p. 80.

² I.e., adherents of the various syncretic cults. See Vol. II, pp. 212 et seq.

nomenal" world to the asserted domination of the cognizing ego, and every leader from Otto the Great to Napoleon did it. The genuine object of their ambitions was the boundless, alike for the great Franks and Hohenstaufen with their world-monarchies, for Gregory VII and Innocent III, for the Spanish Habsburgs "on whose empire the sun never set," and for the Imperialism of to-day on behalf of which the World-War was fought and will continue to be fought for many a long day. Classical man, for inward reasons, could not be a conqueror, notwithstanding Alexander's romantic expedition — for we can discern enough of the inner hesitations and unwillingnesses of his companions not to need to explain it as an "exception proving the rule." The never-stilled desire to be liberated from the binding element, to range far and free, which is the essence of the fancy-creatures of the North — the dwarfs, elves and imps — is utterly unknown to the Dryads and Oreads of Greece. Greek daughtercities were planted by the hundred along the rim of the Mediterranean, but not one of them made the slightest real attempt to conquer and penetrate the hinterlands. To settle far from the coast would have meant to lose sight of "home," while to settle in loneliness — the ideal life of the trapper and prairie-man of America as it had been of Icelandic saga-heroes long before — was something entirely beyond the possibilities of Classical mankind. Dramas like that of the emigration to America — man by man, each on his own account, driven by deep promptings to loneliness — or the Spanish Conquest, or the Californian gold-rush, dramas of uncontrollable longings for freedom, solitude, immense independence, and of giantlike contempt of all limitations whatsoever upon the home-feeling — these dramas are Faustian and only Faustian. No other Culture, not even the Chinese, knows them.

If, in fine, we look at it all together — the expansion of the Copernican world-picture into that aspect of stellar space that we possess to-day; the development of Columbus's discovery into a worldwide command of the earth's surface by the West; the perspective of oil-painting and of tragedy-scene; the sublimed home-feeling; the passion of our Civilization for swift transit, the conquest of the air, the exploration of the Polar regions and the climbing of almost impossible mountain-peaks — we see, emerging everywhere the prime-symbol of the Faustian soul, Limitless Space. And those specially (in form, uniquely) Western creations of the soul-myth called "Will," "Force" and "Deed" must be regarded as derivatives of this prime-symbol.

II BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM

CHAPTER X

SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

TT

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM

1

¹ In this place it is exclusively with the conscious, religio-philosophical morale — the morale which can be known and taught and followed — that we are concerned, and not with the racial rhythm of Life, the habit, Sitte, ηθοs, that is unconsciously present. The morale with which we are dealing turns upon intellectual concepts of Virtue and Vice, good and bad; the other, upon ideals in the blood such as honour, loyalty, bravery, the feeling that attributes nobility and vulgarity. See Vol. II, 421 et seg.

What we have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral dynamic. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic, sense) is that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on behalf of all, then we are all without exception, willingly or no, wittingly or no, Socialists. Even Nietzsche, that most passionate opponent of "herd morale," was perfectly incapable of limiting his zeal to himself in the Classical way. He thought only of "mankind," and he attacked everyone who differed from himself. Epicurus, on the contrary, was heartily indifferent to others' opinions and acts and never wasted one thought on the "transformation" of mankind. He and his friends were content that they were as they were and not otherwise. The Classical ideal was indifference (ἀπάθεια) to the course of the world—the very thing which it is the whole business of Faustian mankind to master—and an important element both of Stoic and of Epicurean philosophy was the recognition of a category of things neither preferred nor rejected 1 (ἀδιάφορα). In Hellas there was a pantheon of morales as there was of deities, as the peaceful coexistence of Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics shows, but the Nietzschean Zarathustra—though professedly standing beyond good and evil—breathes from end to end the pain of seeing men to be other than as he would have them be, and the deep and utterly un-Classical desire to devote a life to their reformation—his own sense of the word, naturally, being the only one. It is just this, the general transvaluation, that makes ethical monotheism and — using the word in a novel and deep sense — socialism. All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.

¹ The original is here expanded a little for the sake of clarity. — Tr.

^<sup>2 After what has been said above regarding the absence of pregnant words for "will" and "space" in the Classical tongues, the reader will not be surprised to hear that neither Greek not Latin affords exact equivalents for these words action and activity.

To go back upon this basic form of his existence, let alone transform it, is entirely beyond the power of Faustian man. It is presupposed even in efforts to resist it. One fights against "advanced" ideas, but all the time he looks on his fight itself as an advance. Another agitates for a "reversal," but what he intends is in fact a continuance of development. "Immoral" is only a new kind of "moral" and sets up the same claim to primacy. The will-to-power is intolerant — all that is Faustian wills to reign alone. The Apollinian feeling, on the contrary, with its world of coexistent individual things, is tolerant as a matter of course. But, if toleration is in keeping with will-less Ataraxia, it is for the Western world with its oneness of infinite soul-space and the singleness of its fabric of tensions the sign either of self-deception or of fading-out. The Enlightenment of the 18th Century was tolerant towards — that is, careless of — differences between the various Christian creeds, but in respect of its own relation to the Church as a whole, it was anything but tolerant as soon as the power to be otherwise came to it. The Faustian instinct, active, strong-willed, as vertical in tendency as its own Gothic cathedrals, as upstanding as its own "ego habeo factum," looking into distance and Future, demands toleration — that is, room, space — for its proper activity, but only for that. Consider, for instance, how much of it the city democracy is prepared to accord to the Church in respect of the latter's management of religious powers, while claiming for itself unlimited freedom to exercise its own and adjusting the "common" law to conform thereto whenever it can. Every "movement" means to win, while every Classical "attitude" only wants to be and troubles

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 293 et seg.

^<sup>3 For the Buddhist Four Truths see Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. IV, p. 742. English translation of Kant's Kritik der praktischen Vernunft by T. K. Abbott. — Tr.

TTI

A paraphrase of the opening of "John Tanner's Revolutionist's Handbook," Ch. V. — Tr.

Socialism — in its highest and not its street-corner sense — is, like every other Faustian ideal, exclusive. It owes its popularity only to the fact that it is completely misunderstood even by its exponents, who present it as a sum of rights instead of as one of duties, an abolition instead of an intensification of the Kantian imperative, a slackening instead of a tautening of directional energy. The trivial and superficial tendency towards ideals of "welfare," "freedom," "humanity," the doctrine of the "greatest happiness of the greatest number," are mere negations of the Faustian ethic — a very different matter from the tendency of Epicureanism towards the ideal of "happiness," for the condition of happiness was the actual sum and substance of the Classical ethic. Here precisely is an instance of sentiments, to all outward appearance much the same, but meaning in the one case everything and in the other nothing. From this point of view, we might describe the content of the Classical ethic as philantbropy, a boon conferred by the individual upon himself, his soma. The view has Aristotle on its side, for it is exactly in this sense that he uses the word $\phi \lambda \lambda \alpha \rho \rho \omega \pi \sigma s$ , which the best heads of the Classicist period, above all Lessing, found so puzzling. Aristotle describes the effect of the Attic tragedy on the Attic spectator as philanthropic. Its Peripeteia relieves him from compassion with himself. A sort of theory of master-morale and slave-morale existed also in the early Hellenism, in Callicles for example — naturally, under strictly corporeal-Euclidean postulates. The ideal of the first class is Alcibiades. He did exactly what at the moment seemed to him best for his own person, and he is felt to be, and admired as, the type of Classical Kalokagathia. But Protagoras is still more distinct, with his famous proposition — essentially ethical in intention — that man (each man for himself) is the measure of things. That is master-morale in a statuesque soul.

IV

When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase "transvaluation of all values" for the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are living found at last its formula. Transvaluation of all values is the most fundamental character of every civilization. For it is the beginning of a Civilization that it remoulds all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practises them in a different way. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, and herein lies the negativeness common to all periods of this character. It assumes that the genuine act of creation has already occurred, and merely

^<sup>1 See Vol. II, pp. 116 et seq.

To Gothic and Doric men, Ionic and Baroque men, the whole vast formworld of art, religion, custom, state, knowledge, social life was easy. They could carry it and actualize it without "knowing" it. They had over the symbolism of the Culture that unstrained mastery that Mozart possessed in music. Culture is the self-evident. The feeling of strangeness in these forms, the idea that they are a burden from which creative freedom requires to be relieved, the impulse to overhaul the stock in order by the light of reason to turn it to better account, the fatal imposition of thought upon the inscrutable quality of creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is beginning to tire. Only the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a "natural law" is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men conceive of the State as an "order of society" which not only can be but must be altered 1— then it is evident that something has definitely broken down. The Cosmopolis itself, the supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in the midst of the Culture-landscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing into itself and using up.

Scientific worlds are superficial worlds, practical, soulless and purely extensive worlds. The ideas of Buddhism, of Stoicism, and of Socialism alike rest upon them.² Life is no longer to be lived as something self-evident — hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone choice — or to be accepted as Godwilled destiny, but is to be treated as a problem, presented as the intellect sees it, judged by "utilitarian" or "rational" criteria. This, at the back, is what all three mean. The brain rules, because the soul abdicates. Culture-men live unconsciously, Civilization-men consciously. The Megalopolis — sceptical,

^<sup>1 Rousseau's Contrat Social is paralleled by exactly equivalent productions of Aristotle's time.

V

So long as the man of a Culture that is approaching its fulfilment still continues to live straight before him naturally and unquestioningly, his life has a settled conduct. This is the instinctive morale, which may disguise itself in a thousand controversial forms but which he himself does not controvert, because he has it. As soon as Life is fatigued, as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities — which are intellectual worlds to themselves — and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a problem. Culture-morale is that which a man has, Civilization-morale that which he looks for. The one is too deep to be exhaustible by logical means, the other is a function of logic. As late as Plato and as late as Kant ethics are still mere dialectics, a game with concepts, or the rounding-off of a metaphysical system, something that at bottom would not be thought really necessary. The Categorical Imperative is merely an abstract statement of what, for Kant, was not in question at all. But with Zeno and with Schopenhauer this is no longer so. It had become necessary to discover, to invent or to squeeze into form, as a rule of being, that which was no longer anchored in instinct; and at this point therefore begin the civilized ethics that are no longer the reflection of Life but the reflection of Knowledge upon Life. One feels that there is something artificial, soulless, half-true in all these considered systems that fill the first centuries of all the Civilizations. They are not those profound and almost unearthly creations that are worthy to rank with the great arts. All metaphysic of the high style, all pure intuition, vanishes before the one need that has suddenly made itself felt, the need of a practical morale for the

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 441 et seg

V

For even Buddhism is such. Hitherto the deeper meaning of it has always been misunderstood. It was not a Puritan movement like, for instance, Islamism and Jansenism, not a Reformation as the Dionysiac wave was for the Apollinian world, and, quite generally, not a religion like the religions of the Vedas or the religion of the Apostle Paul, but a final and purely practical world-sentiment of tired megalopolitans who had a closed-off Culture behind them and no future before them. It was the basic feeling of the Indian Civilization and as such both equivalent to and "contemporary" with Stoicism and Socialism. The quintessence of this thoroughly worldly and unmetaphysical thought is to be found in the famous sermon near Benares, the Four Noble Truths that won the prince-philosopher his first adherents. Its roots lay in the rationalistatheistic Sankhya philosophy, the world-view of which it tacitly accepts, just as the social ethic of the 19th Century comes from the Sensualism and Materialism of the 18th and the Stoa (in spite of its superficial exploitation of Heraclitus) is derived from Protagoras and the Sophists. In each case it is the all-power of Reason that is the starting-point from which to discuss morale, and religion (in the sense of belief in anything metaphysical) does not enter into the matter. Nothing could be more irreligious than these systems in their original forms — and it is these, and not derivatives of them belonging to later stages of the Civilizations, that concern us here.

^<sup>3 See "The Ouestions of King Milinda," ed. Rhys Davids. — Tr.

⁴ Of course, each Culture naturally has its own kind of materialism, conditioned in every detail by its general world-feeling.

a particular symbolism. And just because of all this individualness of the Being which, working in the unconscious, fashions the last-phase creations on the historical surface, relationship of the instances to one another in point of historical position becomes decisively important. What they bring to expression is different in each case, but the fact that they bring it to expression so marks them as "contemporary" with one another. The Buddhistic abnegation of full resolute life has a Stoic flavour, the Stoic abnegation of the same a Buddhistic flavour. Allusion has already been made to the affinity between the Katharsis of the Attic drama and the Nirvana-idea. One's feeling is that ethical Socialism, although a century has already been given to its development, has not yet reached the clear hard resigned form of its own that it will finally possess. Probably the next decades will impart to it the ripe formulation that Chrysippus imparted to the Stoa. But even now there is a look of the Stoa in Socialism, when it is that of the higher order and the narrower appeal, when its tendency is the Roman-Prussian and entirely unpopular tendency to self-discipline and self-renunciation from sense of great duty; and a look of Buddhism in its contempt for momentary ease and carpe diem. And, on the other hand, it has unmistakably the Epicurean look in that mode of it which alone makes it effective downward and outward as a popular ideal, in which it is a hedonism (not indeed of each-for-himself, but) of individuals in the name of all.

Every soul has religion, which is only another word for its existence. All living forms in which it expresses itself — all arts, doctrines, customs, all metaphysical and mathematical form-worlds, all ornament, every column and verse and idea — are ultimately religious, and must be so. But from the settingin of Civilization they cannot be so any longer. As the essence of every Culture is religion, so — and consequently — the essence of every Civilization is irreligion — the two words are synonymous. He who cannot feel this in the creativeness of Manet as against Velasquez, of Wagner as against Haydn, of Lysippus as against Phidias, of Theocritus as against Pindar, knows not what the best means in art. Even Rococo in its worldliest creations is still religious. But the buildings of Rome, even when they are temples, are irreligious; the one touch of religious architecture that there was in old Rome was the intrusive Magian-souled Pantheon, first of the mosques. The megalopolis itself, as against the old Culture-towns — Alexandria as against Athens, Paris as against Bruges, Berlin as against Nürnberg — is irreligious 1 down to the last detail, down to the look of the streets, the dry intelligence of the faces. 2 And, correspondingly, the ethical sentiments belonging to the form-language of the megalopolis are irreligious and soulless also. Socialism is the Faustian world-

VII

Correspondingly, there is a characteristic form of public effect, the Diatribe.³ First observed as a Hellenistic phenomenon, it is an efficient form in all Civilizations. Dialectical, practical and plebeian through and through, it re-

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 122 et seq.

^<sup>3 See P. Wendland, Die hellenist.-röm. Kultur (1912), pp. 75 et seq.

^<sup>1 See Vol. II, pp. 318 et seq.

^<sup>2 See Vol. II, pp. 269 et seq

VIII

Let us, once more, review Socialism (independently of the economic movement of the same name) as the Faustian example of Civilization-ethics. Its friends regard it as the form of the future, its enemies as a sign of downfall, and both are equally right. We are all Socialists, wittingly or unwittingly, willingly or unwillingly. Even resistance to it wears its form.

Similarly, and equally necessarily, all Classical men of the Late period were Stoics unawares. The whole Roman people, as a body, has a Stoic soul. The genuine Roman, the very man who fought Stoicism hardest, was a Stoic of a stricter sort than ever a Greek was. The Latin language of the last centuries before Christ was the mightiest of Stoic creations.

compassion, humanity, peace and kindly care, but one of will-to-power. Any other reading of it is illusory. The aim is through and through imperialist; welfare, but welfare in the expansive sense, the welfare not of the diseased but of the energetic man who ought to be given and must be given freedom to do, regardless of obstacles of wealth, birth and tradition. Amongst us, sentimental morale, morale directed to happiness and usefulness, is never the final instinct, however we may persuade ourselves otherwise. The head and front of moral modernity must ever be Kant, who (in this respect Rousseau's pupil) excludes from his ethics the motive of Compassion and lays down the formula "Act, so that . . ." All ethic in this style expresses and is meant to express the will-to-infinity, and this will demands conquest of the moment, the present, and the foreground of life. In place of the Socratic formula "Knowledge is Virtue" we have, even in Bacon, the formula "Knowledge is Power." The Stoic takes the world as he finds it, but the Socialist wants to organize and recast it in form and substance, to fill it with his own spirit. The Stoic adapts himself, the Socialist commands. He would have the whole world bear the form of his view, thus transferring the idea of the "Critique of Pure Reason" into the ethical field. This is the ultimate meaning of the Categorical Imperative, which he brings to bear in political, social and economic matters alike — act as though the maxims that you practise were to become by your will the law for all. And this tyrannical tendency is not absent from even the shallowest phenomena of the time.

It is not attitude and mien, but activity that is to be given form. As in China and in Egypt, life only counts in so far as it is deed. And it is the mechanicalizing of the organic concept of Deed that leads to the concept of work as commonly understood, the civilized form of Faustian effecting. This morale, the insistent tendency to give to Life the most active forms imaginable, is stronger than reason, whose moral programs — be they never so reverenced, inwardly believed or ardently championed — are only effective in so far as they either lie, or are mistakenly supposed to lie, in the direction of this force. Otherwise they remain mere words. We have to distinguish, in all modernism, between the popular side with its dolce far niente, its solicitude for health, happiness, freedom from care, and universal peace — in a word, its supposedly Christian ideals — and the higher Ethos which values deeds only, which (like everything else that is Faustian) is neither understood nor desired by the masses, which grandly idealizes the Aim and therefore Work. If we would set against the Roman "panem et circenses" (the final life-symbol of Epicurean-Stoic existence, and, at bottom, of Indian existence also) some corresponding symbol of the North (and of Old China and Egypt) it would be the "Right to Work." This was the basis of Fichte's thoroughly Prussian (and now European) conception of State-Socialism, and in the last terrible stages of evolution it will sulminate in the Duty to Work

IX

isms is the same. At the beginning of every springtime period, philosophy, intimately related to great architecture and religion, is the intellectual echo of a mighty metaphysical living, and its task is to establish critically the sacred causality in the world-image seen with the eye of faith. The basic distinctions, not only of science but also of philosophy, are dependent on, not divorced from, the elements of the corresponding religion. In this springtime, thinkers are, not merely in spirit but actually in status, priests. Such were the Schoolmen and the Mystics of the Gothic and the Vedic as of the Homeric 2 and the Early-Arabian 3 centuries. With the setting-in of the Late period, and not earlier, philosophy becomes urban and worldly, frees itself from subservience to religion and even dares to make that religion itself the object of epistemological criticism. The great theme of Brahman, Ionic and Baroque philosophies is the problem of knowing. The urban spirit turns to look at itself, in order to establish the proposition that there is no higher judgment-seat of knowing beyond itself, and with that thought draws nearer to higher mathematics and instead of priests we have men of the world, statesmen and merchants and discoverers, tested in high places and by high tasks, whose ideas about thought rest upon deep experience of life. Of such are the series of great thinkers from Thales to Protagoras and from Bacon to Hume, and the series of pre-Confucian and pre-Buddha thinkers of whom we hardly know more than the fact that they existed.

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 324 et seq., 368 et seq.

8 See Vol. II, p. 307.

its deepest characters contemplated in the first instance and only afterwards logically and systematically formulated and ordered.

We see this evidenced in Kant's attitude to mathematics. No one is a genuine metaphysician who has not penetrated into the form-world of numbers, who has not lived them into himself as a symbolism. And in fact it was the great thinkers of the Baroque who created the analytical mathematic, and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the great pre-Socratics and Plato: Descartes and Leibniz stand beside Newton and Gauss, Pythagoras and Plato by Archytas and Archimedes, at the summits of mathematical development. But already in Kant the philosopher has become, as mathematician, negligible. Kant no more penetrated to the last subtleties of the Calculus as it stood in his own day than he absorbed the axiomatic of Leibniz. The same may be said of Aristotle. And thenceforward there is no philosopher who is counted as a mathematician. Fichte, Hegel and the Romantics were entirely unmathematical, and so were Zeno 1 and Epicurus. Schopenhauer in this field is weak to the point of crudity, and of Nietzsche the less said the better. When the form-world of numbers passed out of its ken, philosophy lost a great convention, and since then it has lacked not only structural strength but also what may be called the grand style of thinking. Schopenhauer himself admitted that he was a hand-to-mouth thinker (Gelegenheitsdenker).

^<sup>1 Zeno the Stoic, not to be confused with Zeno of Elea, whose mathematical fineness has already been alluded to. — Tr.

^<sup>2 Neue Paralipomena, § 656.

The attention that the Stoic gave to his own body, the Westerner devotes to the body social. It is not chance that Hegelian philosophy has given rise to Socialism (Marx, Engels), to Anarchism (Stirner) and to the problem-posing social drama (Hebbel). Socialism is political economy converted into the ethical and, moreover, the imperative mood. So long as a metaphysic existed (that is, till Kant) political economy remained a science. But as soon as "philosophy" became synonymous with practical ethics, it replaced mathematics as the basis of thought about the world — hence the importance of Cousin, Bentham, Comte, Mill and Spencer.

brain, and that again (with its dependent nerves and spinal cord) is a mere fruit, a product, nay, even a parasite of the rest of the organism, inasmuch as it does not intervene directly in the latter's activities but only serves a purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the outer world." Here we have exactly the fundamental position of the flattest materialism. It was not for nothing that Schopenhauer, like Rousseau before him, studied the English sensualists. From them he learned to misread Kant in the spirit of megalopolitan utilitarian modernity. The intellect as instrument of the will-to-life,¹ as weapon in the struggle for existence, the ideas brought to grotesque expression by Shaw in "Man and Superman" — it was because this was his view of the world that Schopenhauer became the fashionable philosopher when Darwin's main work was published in 1859. In contrast to Schelling, Hegel and Fichte, he was a philosopher, and the only philosopher, whose metaphysical propositions could be absorbed with ease by intellectual mediocrity. The clarity of which he was so proud threatened at every moment to reveal itself as triviality. While retaining enough of formula to produce an atmosphere of profundity and exclusiveness, he presented the civilized view of the world complete and assimilable. His system is anticipated Darwinism, and the speech of Kant and the concepts of the Indians are simply clothing. In his book "Ueber den Willen in der Natur" (1835) we find already the struggle for self-preservation in Nature, the human intellect as master-weapon in that struggle and sexual love as unconscious selection according to biological interest.²

^<sup>1 Even the modern idea that unconscious and impulsive acts of life are completely efficient, while intellect can only bungle, is to be found in Schopenhauer (Vol. II, cap. 30).

^<sup>8 See Vol. II, pp. 36 et seq.

The drama, in this epoch, is no longer poetry in the old sense of the Culture days, but a form of agitation, debate and demonstration. The stage has become a moralizing institution. Nietzsche himself often thought of putting his ideas in the dramatic form. Wagner's Nibelung poetry, more especially the first draft of it (1850), expresses his social-revolutionary ideas, and even when, after a circuitous course under influences artistic and non-artistic, he has completed the "Ring," his Siegfried is still a symbol of the Fourth Estate, his Brünhilde still the "free woman." The sexual selection of which the "Origin of Species" enunciated the theory in 1859, was finding its musical expression at the very same time in the third act of "Siegfried" and in "Tristan." It is no accident that Wagner, Hebbel and Ibsen, all practically simultaneously, set to work to dramatize the Nibelung material. Hebbel, making the acquaintance in Paris of Engels's writings, expresses (in a letter of April 2, 1844) his surprise at finding that his own conceptions of the social principle of his age, which he was then intending to exemplify in a drama Zu irgend einer Zeit, coincided precisely with those of the future "Communist Manifesto." And, upon first making the acquaintance of Schopenhauer (letter of March 29, 1857), he is equally surprised by the affinity that he finds between the Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and tendencies upon which he had based his Holofernes and his Herodes und Mariamne. Hebbel's diaries, of which the most important portion belongs to the years 1835–1845, were (though he did not know it) one of the deepest philosophical efforts of the century. It would be no surprise to find whole sentences of it in Nietzsche, who never knew him and did not always come up to his level.

⁾ This began to appear in 1867. But the preliminary work Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie came out in the same year as Darwin's masterpiece.

• 1836. Schopenhauer, Ueber den Willen in der Natur. Anticipation of Darwinism, but in metaphysical disguise.
• 1840. Proud'hon, Qu'est-ce que la Propriété, basis of Anarchism. Comte, Cours de philosophie positive; the formula "order and progress."
• 1844. Engels, Umriss einer Kritik des Nationalökonomie, foundation of the materialistic conception of history. Hebbel, Maria Magdalena, the first social drama.
• 1847. Marx, Misère de la Philosophie (synthesis of Hegel and Malthus). These are the epochal years in which economics begins to dominate social ethic and biology.
• • 1850. Wagner's Kunst und Klima; the sexual problem.
  • 1850-1858. Wagner's, Hebbel's and Ibsen's Nibelung poetry.
• 1859 (year of symbolic coincidences). Darwin, "Origin of Species" (application of economics to biology). Wagner's "Tristan." Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie.
• 1865. Dühring, Wert des Lebens a work which is rarely heard of, but which exercised the greatest influence upon the succeeding generation.
        • 1867. Ibsen, "Brand." Marx, Das Kapital
• 1878. Wagner "Parsifal." First dissolution of materialism into mysticism.
        • 1879. Ibsen ''Nora.''
• 1881. Nietzsche, Morgenröthe; transition from Schopenhauer to Darwin, morale as biological phenomenon.
• 1883. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra; the Will-to-Power, but in Romantic disguise.
        • 1886. Ibsen, "Rosmersholm." Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse.

1887-8. Strindberg, "Fadren" and "Fröken Julie."

1903. Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter; the only serious attempt to revive Kant within this epoch, by referring him to Wagner and Ibsen.

CHAPTER XI

FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-KNOWLEDGE

1

The answer may be anticipated. Modern physics, as a science, is an immense system of indices in the form of names and numbers whereby we are enabled to work with Nature as with a machine. As such, it may have an exactly-definable end. But as a piece of bistory, all made up of destinies and incidents in the lives of the men who have worked in it and in the course of research itself, physics is, in point of object, methods and results alike an expression and actualization of a Culture, an organic and evolving element in the essence of that Culture, and every one of its results is a symbol. That which physics — which exists only in the waking-consciousness of the Culture-man — thinks it finds in its methods and in its results was already there, underlying and implicit in, the choice and manner of its search. Its discoveries, in virtue of their imagined content (as distinguished from their printable formulæ), have been of a purely mythic nature, even in minds so prudent as those of J. B. Mayer, Faraday and Hertz. In every Nature-law, physically exact as it may be, we are called upon to distinguish between the nameless number and the naming of it, between the plain fixation of limits 2 and their theoretical interpretation. The formulæ represent general logical values, pure numbers — that is to say, objective space — and boundary-elements. But formulæ are dumb. The expression $s = \frac{1}{2}gt^2$ means nothing at all unless one is able mentally to connect the letters with particular words and their symbolism. But the moment we clothe the dead signs in such words, give them flesh, body and life, and, in sum, a perceptible significance in the world, we have overstepped the limits of a mere order. $\theta \omega \rho la$ means image, vision, and it is this that makes a Nature-law out of a figure-and-letter formula. Everything exact is in itself meaningless, and every physical observation is so constituted that it proves the basis of a certain number of imaged presuppositions; and the effect of its successful issue is to make these pre

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 369 et seg., 624 et seg

Kant, it is true, says in a well-known passage: "I maintain that in each and every discipline of natural philosophy it is only possible to find as much of true science as is to be found of mathematics therein." What Kant has in mind here is pure delimitation in the field of the become, so far as law and formula, number and system can (at any particular stage) be seen in that field. But a law without words, a law, consisting merely of a series of figures read off an instrument, cannot even as an intellectual operation be completely effective in this pure state. Every savant's experiment, be it what it may, is at the same time an instance of the kind of symbolism that rules in the savant's ideation. All Laws formulated in words are Orders that have been activated and vitalized, filled with the very essence of the one — and only the one — Culture. As to the "necessity" which is a postulate in all exact research, here too we have to consider two kinds of necessity, viz., a necessity within the spiritual and living (for it is Destiny that the history of every individual research-act takes its course when, where and how it does) and a necessity within the known (for which the current Western name is Causality). If the pure numbers of a physical formula represent a causal necessity, the existence, the birth and the lifeduration of a theory are a Destiny.

There is no justification for assigning to this intellectual form-world the primacy over others. Every critical science, like every myth and every religious belief, rests upon an inner certitude. Various as the creatures of this certitude may be, both in structure and in sound, they are not different in basic principle. Any reproach, therefore, levelled by Natural science at Religion is a boomerang. We are presumptuous and no less in supposing that we can ever set up "The Truth" in the place of "anthropomorphic" conceptions, for no other conceptions but these exist at all. Every idea that is possible at all is a mirror of the being of its author. The statement that "man created God in his own image," valid for every historical religion, is not less valid for every physical theory, however firm its reputed basis of fact. Classical scientists conceived of light as consisting in corporeal particles proceeding from the source of light to the eye of the beholder. For the Arabian thought, even at the stage of the Jewish-Persian academies of Edessa, Resaïna and Pombaditha (and for Porphyry too), the colours and forms of things were evidenced without the intervention of a medium, being brought in a magic and "spiritual" way to the seeing-power which was conceived as substantial and resident in the eyeball. This was the doctrine a taught by Ibn-al-Haitan, by Avicenna and by the "Brothers of Sincerity." And the idea of light as a force, an impetus, was current even from about 1300 amongst the Paris Occamists who centred on Albert of Saxony, Buridan and Oresme the discoverer of co-ordinate geometry. Each Culture has made its own set of images of processes, which are true only for itself and only

^<sup>1 See Vol. II, p. 369.

^<sup>2 See Vol. II, pp. 382 et seq.

^<sup>8 E. Wiedermann, Die Naturwissensch. bei den Arabern (1890). F. Struntz, Gesch. d. Naturwissensch. im Mittelalter (1910), p. 58.

⁴ An order of encyclopædists and philosophers; see Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. II, p. 278a. — Tr.

alive while it is itself alive and actualizing its possibilities. When a Culture is at its end and the creative element — the imaginative power, the symbolism — is extinct, there are left "empty" formulæ, skeletons of dead systems, which men of another Culture read literally, feel to be without meaning or value and either mechanically store up or else despise and forget. Numbers, formulæ, laws mean nothing and are nothing. They must have a body, and only a living mankind — projecting its livingness into them and through them, expressing itself by them, inwardly making them its own — can endow them with that. And thus there is no absolute science of physics, but only individual sciences that come, flourish and go within the individual Cultures.

As with the formulation of problems and the methods of dealing with them

Struntz, Gesch. d. Naturwissensch. im Mittelalter (1910), pp. 73 et seg.

¹ See Vol. II. pp. 214 et seg.

^<sup>2 See the article under this heading, and also that under Alchemy, Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

emancipation of the Western mathematic by Newton and Leibniz that the Western chemistry 1 was freed from Arabic form by Stahl (1660–1734) and his Phlogiston theory. Chemistry and mathematic alike became pure analysis. Already Paracelsus (1493–1541) had transformed the Magian effort to make gold into a pharmaceutical science — a transformation in which one cannot but surmise an altered world-feeling. Then Robert Boyle (1626–1691) devised the analytical method and with it the Western conception of the Element. But the ensuing changes must not be misinterpreted. That which is called the founding of modern chemistry and has Stahl and Lavoisier at its turning-points is anything but a building-up of "chemical" ideas, in so far as chemistry implies the alchemistic outlook on Nature. It is in fact the end of genuine chemistry, its dissolution into the comprehensive system of pure dynamic, its assimilation into the mechanical outlook which the Baroque age had established through Galileo and Newton. The elements of Empedocles designate states of bodiliness (bezeichnen ein körperliches Sichverhalten) but the elements of Lavoisier, whose combustion-theory followed promptly upon the isolation of oxygen in 1771, designate energy-systems accessible to human will, "rigid" and "fluid" becoming mere terms to describe tension-relations between molecules. By our analysis and synthesis, Nature is not merely asked or persuaded but forced. The modern chemistry is a chapter of the modern physics of Deed.

Ш

and the Apollinian sciences well enough to observe, here too, a deeply symbolical opposition.

The Classical atoms are miniature forms, the Western minimal quanta, and quanta, too, of energy. On the one hand perceptibility, sensuous nearness, and on the other, abstractness are the basic conditions of the idea. The atomistic notions of modern physics — which include not only the Daltonian or "chemical" atom but also the electrons 1 and the quanta of thermodynamics — make more and more demands upon that truly Faustian power of inner vision which many branches of higher mathematics (such as the Non-Euclidean geometries and the Theory of Groups) postulate, and which is not at the disposal of laymen. A quantum of action is an extension-element conceived without regard to sensible quality of any kind, which eludes all relation with sight and touch, for which the expression "shape" has no meaning whatever — something therefore which would be utterly inconceivable to a Classical researcher. Such, already, were Leibniz's "Monads" 2 and such, superlatively, are the constituents of Rutherford's picture of the atom as positively-charged nucleus with planetary negative electrons, and of the picture that Niels Bohr has imagined by working these in with the "quanta" of Planck. The atoms of Leucippus and Democritus were different in form and magnitude, that is to say, they were purely plastic units, "indivisible," as their name asserts, but only plastically indivisible. The atoms of Western physics, for which "indivisibility" has quite another meaning, resemble the figures and themes of music; their being or essence consisting in vibration and radiation, and their relation to the processes of Nature being that of the "motive" to the "movement." Classical physics examines the aspect, Western the working, of these ultimate elements in the picture of the Become; in the one, the basic notions are notions of stuff and form, in the other they are notions of capacity and intensity.

^† For even Helmholtz had sought to account for the phenomena of electrolysis by the assumption of an atomic structure of electricity.

⁴ See p. 231.

by the blind chance that he as well as Sophocles called $\delta\nu\delta\gamma\kappa\eta$ , hunted like Edipus. On the other hand — systems of abstract force-points working in unison, aggressive, energetically dominating space (as "field"), overcoming resistances like Macbeth. The opposition of basic feelings makes that of the mechanical Nature-pictures. According to Leucippus the atoms fly about in the void "of themselves"; Democritus merely regards shock and countershock as a form of change of place. Aristotle explains individual movements as accidental, Empedocles speaks of love and hate, Anaxagoras of meetings and partings. All these are elements also of Classical tragedy; the figures on the Attic stage are related to one another just so. Further, and logically, they are the elements of Classical politics. There we have minute cities, political atoms ranged along coasts and on islands, each jealously standing for itself, yet ever needing support, shut-in and shy to the point of absurdity, buffeted hither and thither by the planless orderless happenings of Classical history, rising to-day and ruined to-morrow. And in contrast — the dynastic states of our 17th and 18th Centuries, political fields of force, with cabinets and great diplomats as effective centres of purposeful direction and comprehensive vision. The spirit of Classical history and the spirit of Western history can only be really understood by considering the two souls as an opposition. And we can say the same of the atom-idea, regarded as the basis of the respective physics. Galileo who created the concept of force and the Milesians who created that of $\delta\rho\chi\dot{\eta}$ , Democritus and Leibniz, Archimedes and Helmholtz, are "contemporaries," members of the same intellectual phases of quite different Cultures.

But the inner relationship between atom-theory and ethic goes further. It has been shown how the Faustian soul — whose being consists in the overcoming of presence, whose feeling is loneliness and whose yearning is infinity — puts its need of solitude, distance and abstraction into all its actualities, into its public life, its spiritual and its artistic form-worlds alike. This pathos of distance (to use Nietzsche's expression) is peculiarly alien to the Classical, in which everything human demanded nearness, support and community. It is this that distinguishes the spirit of the Baroque from that of the Ionic, the culture of the Ancien Régime from that of Periclean Athens. And this pathos, which distinguishes the heroic doer from the heroic sufferer, appears also in the picture of Western physics as tension. It is tension that is missing in the science of Democritus; for in the principle of shock and countershock it is denied by implication that there is a force commanding space and identical with space. And, correspondingly, the element of Will is absent from the Classical soulimage. Between Classical men, or states, or views of the world, there was — for all the quarrelling and envy and hatred — no inner tension, no deep and urging need of distance, solitude, ascendancy; and consequently there was none between the atoms of the Cosmos either. The principle of tension (developed in the potential theory), which is wholly untranslatable into Classical tongues

τv

Every atomic theory, therefore, is a myth and not an experience. In it the Culture, through the contemplative-creative power of its great physicists, reveals its inmost essence and very self. It is only a preconceived idea of criticism that extension exists in itself and independently of the form-feeling and world-feeling of the knower. The thinker, in imagining that he can cut out the factor of Life, forgets that knowing is related to the known as direction is to extension and that it is only through the living quality of direction that what is felt extends into distance and depth and becomes space. The cognized structure of the extended is a projection of the cognizing being.

We have already 1 shown the decisive importance of the depth-experience, which is identical with the awakening of a soul and therefore with the creation of the outer world belonging to that soul. The mere sense-impression contains only length and breadth, and it is the living and necessary act of interpretation — which, like everything else living, possesses direction, motion and irreversibility (the qualities that our consciousness synthesizes in the word Time) — that adds depth and thereby fashions actuality and world. Life itself enters into the experiences as third dimension. The double meaning of the word "far," which refers both to future and to horizon, betrays the deeper meaning of this dimension, through which extension as such is evoked. The Becoming stiffens and passes and is at once the Become; Life stiffens and passes and is at once the three-dimensional Space of the known. It is common ground for Descartes and Parmenides that thinking and being, i.e., imagined and extended, are identical. "Cogito, ergo sum" is simply the formulation of the depth-experience — I cognize, and therefore I am in space. But in the style of this cognizing, and therefore of the cognition-product, the prime-symbol of the particular Culture comes into play. The perfected extension of the Classical consciousness is one of sensuous and bodily presence. The Western consciousness achieves extension, after its own fashion, as transcendental space, and as it thinks its space more and more transcendentally it develops by degrees the abstract polarity of Capacity and Intensity that so completely contrasts with the Classical visual polarity of Matter and Form.

And here, for the second time, Natural science becomes dogmatic and mythological. The words Time and Destiny, for anyone who uses them instinctively, touch Life itself in its deepest depths — life as a whole, which is not to be separated from lived-experience. Physics, on the other hand — i.e., the observing Reason — must separate them. The livingly-experienced "in-itself," mentally emancipated from the act of the observer and become object, dead, inorganic, rigid, is now "Nature," something open to exhaustive mathematical treatment. In this sense the knowledge of Nature is an activity of measurement. All the same, we live even when we are observing and therefore the thing we are observing lives with us. The element in the Nature-picture in virtue of which it not merely from moment to moment is, but in a continuous flow with and around us becomes, is the copula of the waking-consciousness and its world. This element is called movement, and it contradicts Nature as a picture, but it represents the bistory of this picture. And therefore, as precisely as Understanding is abstracted (by means of words) from feeling and mathematical space from light-resistances ("things" 1), so also physical "time" is abstracted from the impression of motion.

^<sup>1 See p. 121 and Vol. II, pp. 11 et seq.

If, then, Nature-knowledge is a subtle kind of self-knowledge — Nature understood as picture, as mirror of man — the attempt to solve the motion-problem is an attempt of knowledge to get on the track of its own secret, its own Destiny.

v

It is this that led Goethe, who was a poet and not a computer, to observe that "Nature has no system. It has Life, it is Life and succession from an unknown centre to an unknowable bourne." For one who does not live it but knows it, Nature has a system. But it is only a system and nothing more, and motion is a contradiction in it. The contradiction may be covered up by adroit formulation, but it lives on in the fundamental concepts. The shock and countershock of Democritus, the entelechy of Aristotle, the notions of force from the "impetus" of 14th-Century Occamists to the quantum-theory of radiation, all contain it. Let the reader conceive of the motion within a physical system as the ageing of that system (as in fact it is, as lived-experience of the observer), and he will feel at once and distinctly the fatefulness immanent in, the unconquerably organic content of, the word "motion" and all its derivative ideas. But Mechanics, having nothing to do with ageing, should have nothing to do with motion either, and consequently, since no scientific system is conceivable without a motion-problem in it, a complete and self-contained mechanics is an impossibility. Somewhere or other there is always an organic starting-point in the system where immediate Life enters it — an umbilical cord that connects the mind-child with the life-mother, the thought with the thinker.

^<sup>1 See p. 169.

^<sup>2 See p. 166 and Vol. II, p. 18

History is eternal becoming and therefore eternal future; Nature is become and therefore eternally past. And here a strange inversion seems to have taken place — the Becoming has lost its priority over the Become. When the intellect looks back from its sphere, the Become, the aspect of life is reversed, the idea of Destiny which carries aim and future in it having turned into the mechanical principle of cause-and-effect of which the centre of gravity lies in the past. The spatially-experienced is promoted to rank above the temporal living, and time is replaced by a length in a spatial world-system. And, since in the creative experience extension follows from direction, the spatial from life, the human understanding imports life as a process into the inorganic space of its imagination. While life looks on space as something functionally belonging to itself, intellect looks upon life as something in space. Destiny asks: "Whither?", Causality asks: "Whence?" To establish scientifically means, starting from the become and actualized, to search for "causes" by going back along a mechanically-conceived course, that is to say, by treating becoming as a length. But it is not possible to live backwards, only to think backwards. Not Time and Destiny are reversible, but only that which the physicist calls "time" and admits into his formulæ as divisible, and preferably as negative or imaginary quantities.

Without discovering the true source of all perplexities (no physicist as yet has done that), Hertz tried to eliminate the notion of force entirely — rightly feeling that error in all mechanical systems has to be looked for in one or another of the basic concepts — and to build up the whole picture of physics on the quantities of time, space and mass. But he did not observe that it is Time itself (which as direction-factor is present in the force-concept) that is the organic element without which a dynamic theory cannot be expressed and with which a clean solution cannot be got. Moreover, quite apart from this, the concepts force, mass and motion constitute a dogmatic unit. They so condition one another that the application of one of them tacitly involves both the others from the outset. The whole Apollinian conception of the motion-problem is implicit in the root-word $d\rho\chi\dot{\eta}$ , the whole Western conception of it in the force-idea. The notion of mass is only the complement of that of force. Newton, a deeply religious nature, was only bringing the Faustian world-feeling to expression when, to elucidate the words "force" and "motion," he said that masses are points of attack for force and carriers for motion. So the 13th-Century Mystics had conceived of God and his relation to world. Newton no doubt rejected the metaphysical element in his famous saying "hypotheses non fingo," but all the same he was metaphysical through and through in the founding of his mechanics. Force is the mechanical Nature-picture of western man; what Will is to his soul-picture and infinite Godhead in his world-picture. The primary ideas of this physics stood firm long before the first physicist was born, for they lay in the earliest religious world-consciousness of our Culture.

VI

^<sup>2 See Vol. II, pp. 369 et seq

^<sup>1 J. Goldziher, Die islam. und jüd. Philosophie ("Kultur der Gegenwart," I, V, 1913), pp. 306 et seq.

VII

the second; and to the third belongs scientific physics, inasmuch as behind its formulæ there are images.

Not only primitive man and the child, but also the higher animals spontaneously evolve from the small everyday experiences an image of Nature which contains the sum of technical indications observed as recurrent. The eagle "knows" the moment at which to swoop down on the prey; the singing-bird sitting on the eggs "knows" the approach of the marten; the deer "finds" the place where there is food. In man, this experience of all the senses has narrowed and deepened itself into experience of the eye. But, as the habit of verbal speech has now been superadded, understanding comes to be abstracted from seeing, and thenceforward develops independently as reasoning; to the instantly-comprehending technique is added the reflective theory. Technique applies itself to visible near things and plain needs, theory to the distance and the terrors of the invisible. By the side of the petty knowledge of everyday life it sets up belief. And still they evolve, there is a new knowledge and a new and higher technique, and to the myth there is added the cult. The one teaches how to know the "numina," the other how to conquer them. For theory in the eminent sense is religious through and through. It is only in quite late states that scientific theory evolves out of religious, through men having become aware of methods. Apart from this there is little alteration. The image-world of physics remains mythic, its procedure remains a cult of conjuring the powers in things, and the images that it forms and the methods that it uses remain generically dependent upon those of the appropriate religion.

From the later days of the Renaissance onward, the notion of God has steadily approximated, in the spirit of every man of high significance, to the idea of pure endless Space. The God of Ignatius Loyola's exercitia spiritualis is the God also of Luther's "ein' feste Burg," of the Improperia of Palestrina and the Cantatas of Bach. He is no longer the Father of St. Francis of Assisi and the high-vaulted cathedrals, the personally-present, caring and mild God felt by Gothic painters like Giotto and Stephen Lochner, but an impersonal principle; unimaginable, intangible, working mysteriously in the Infinite. Every relic of personality dissolves into insensible abstraction, such a divinity as only instrumental music of the grand style is capable of representing, a divinity before which painting breaks down and drops into the background. This God-feeling it was that formed the scientific world-image of the West, its "Nature," its "experience" and therefore its theories and its methods, in direct contradiction to those of the Classical. The force which moves the mass — that is what Michelangelo painted in the Sistine Chapel; that is what we feel growing more and more intense from the archetype of Il Gesù to the climax in the cathedral façades of Della Porta and Maderna, and from Heinrich Schütz to the transcendent tone-worlds of 18th-Century church music; that is what in Shakespear-

The word "God" rings otherwise under the vaulting of Gothic cathedrals or in the cloisters of Maulbronn and St. Gallen than in the basilicas of Syria and the temples of Republican Rome. The character of the Faustian cathedral is that of the forest. The mighty elevation of the nave above the flanking aisles, in contrast to the flat roof of the basilica; the transformation of the columns, which with base and capital had been set as self-contained individuals in space, into pillars and clustered-pillars that grow up out of the earth and spread on high into an infinite subdivision and interlacing of lines and branches; the giant windows by which the wall is dissolved and the interior filled with mysterious light — these are the architectural actualizing of a world-feeling that had found the first of all its symbols in the high forest of the Northern plains, the deciduous forest with its mysterious tracery, its whispering of ever-mobile foliage over men's heads, its branches straining through the trunks to be free of earth. Think of Romanesque ornamentation and its deep affinity to the sense of the woods. The endless, lonely, twilight wood became and remained the secret wistfulness in all Western building-forms, so that when the form-energy of the style died down — in late Gothic as in closing Baroque — the controlled abstract line-language resolved itself immediately into naturalistic branches, shoots, twigs and leaves.

Cypresses and pines, with their corporeal and Euclidean effect, could never have become symbols of unending space. But the oaks, beeches and lindens with the fitful light-flecks playing in their shadow-filled volume are felt as bodiless, boundless, spiritual. The stem of the cypress finds conclusive fulfilment of its vertical tendency in the defined columniation of its cone-masses, but that of an oak seems, ever restless and unsatisfied, to strain beyond its summit. In the ash, the victory of the upstriving branches over the unity of the crown seems actually to be won. Its aspect is of something dissolving, something expanding into space, and it was for this probably that the World-Ash Ygg-drasil became a symbol in the Northern mythology. The rustle of the woods, a charm that no Classical poet ever felt — for it lies beyond the possibilities of Apollinian Nature-feeling — stands with its secret questions "whence? whither?" its merging of presence into eternity, in a deep relation with Destiny, with the feeling of History and Duration, with the quality of Direction that impels the anxious, caring, Faustian soul towards infinitely-distant Future. And for that reason the organ, that roars deep and high through our churches in tones which, compared with the plain solid notes of aulos and cithara, seem to know neither limit nor restraint, is the instrument of instruments in Western devotions. Cathedral and organ form a symbolic unity like temple and statue. The history of organ-building, one of the most profound and moving chapters of our musical history, is a history of a longing for the forest, a longing to speak

^<sup>1 And it may be asserted that the downright faith that Haeckel, for example, pins to the names atom, matter, energy, is not essentially different from the fetishism of Neanderthal Man.

^<sup>l See p. 126.

VIII

¹ Compare Vol. II, pp. 38 et seg.

See Vol. II, pp. 343 et seq., and p. 346.

^<sup>2 E. Mogk, Germ. Mythol., Grundr. d. Germ. Philos., III (1900), p. 340

realized, and yet Siegfried, Baldur, Roland, Christ the King in the "Heliand," are different names for one and the same figure. Valhalla and Avalon, the Round Table and the communion of the Grail-templars, Mary, Frigga and Frau Holle mean the same. On the other hand, the external provenance of the material motives and elements, on which mythological research has wasted an excessive zeal, is a matter of which the importance does not go deeper than the surface. As to the meaning of a myth, its provenance proves nothing. The "numen" itself, the primary form of the world-feeling, is a pure, necessary and unconscious creation, and it is not transferable. What one people takes over from another — in "conversion" or in admiring imitation — is a name, dress and mask for its own feeling, never the feeling of that other. The old Celtic and old Germanic myth-motives have to be treated, like the repertory of Classical forms possessed by the learned monk, and like the entire body of Christian-Eastern faith taken over by the Western Church, simply as the material out of which the Faustian soul in these centuries created a mythic architecture of its own. It mattered little whether the persons through whose minds and mouths the myth came to life were individual skalds, missionaries, priests or "the people," nor did the circumstance that the Christian ideas dictated its forms affect the inward independence of that which had come to life.

¹ See Vol. II, p. 241 et seq., 306 et seq.

IX

Nature, as Classical man felt and knew it about him, viz., a sum of well-formed bodily things, could not be deified in any other form but this. The Roman felt that the claim of Yahweh to be recognized as sole God had something atheistic in it. One God, for him, was no God, and to this may be ascribed the strong dislike of popular feeling, both Greek and Roman, for the philosophers in so far as they were pantheists and godless. Gods are bodies, σώματα of the perfectest kind, and plurality was an attribute of bodies alike for mathematicians, lawyers and poets. The concept of ζῷον πολιτικόν was valid for gods as well as for men; nothing was more alien to them than oneness, solitariness and self-adequacy; and no existence therefore was possible to them save under the aspect of eternal propinquity. It is a deeply significant fact that in Hellas of all countries star-gods, the numina of the Far, are wanting. Helios was worshipped only in half-Oriental Rhodes and Selene had no cult at all. Both are merely artistic modes of expression (it is as such only that they figure in the courtly epos of Homer), elements that Varro would class in the genus mythicum and not in the genus civile. The old Roman religion, in which the Classical world-feeling was expressed with special purity, knew neither sun nor moon, neither storm nor cloud as deities. The forest stirrings and the forest solitude, the tempest and the surf, which completely dominated the Nature of Faustian man (even that of pre-Faustian Celts and Teutons) and imparted to their mythology its peculiar character, left Classical man unmoved. Only concretes—hearth and door, the coppice and the plot-field, this particular river and that particular hill — condensed into Being for him. We observe that everything that has farness, everything that contains a suggestion of unbounded and unbodied in it and might thereby bring space as Ent and divine into the felt Nature,

^<sup>1 See p. 268.

The ever-increasing emphasis with which Classical polytheism somatically individualized its deities is peculiarly evident in its attitude to "strange gods." For Classical man the gods of the Egyptians, the Phœnicians and the Germans, in so far as they could be imagined as figures, were as real as his own gods. Within his world-feeling the statement that such other gods "do not exist" would have no meaning. When he came into contact with the countries of these deities he did them reverence. The gods were, like a statue or a polis, Euclidean bodies having locality. They were beings of the near and not the general space. If a man were sojourning in Babylon, for instance, and Zeus and Apollo were far away, all the more reason for particularly honouring the local gods. This is the meaning of the altars dedicated "to the unknown gods," such as that which Paul so significantly misunderstood in a Magian monotheistic sense at Athens.¹ These were gods not known by name to the Greek but worshipped by the foreigners of the great seaports (Piræus, Corinth or other) and therefore entitled to their due of respect from him. Rome expressed this with Classical clearness in her religious law and in carefully-preserved formulæ like, for example, the generalis invocatio.² As the universe is the sum of things, and as gods are things, recognition had to be accorded even to those gods with whom the Roman had not yet practically and historically come into relations. He did not know them, or he knew them as the gods of his enemies, but they

^<sup>1 Few passages in the Acts of the Apostles have obtained a stronger hold on our imagination than Paul's meeting with the altar of "the Unknown God" at Phalerum (Acts XVII, 23). And yet we have perfectly definite evidence, later than Paul's time, of the plurality of the gods to whom this altar was dedicated. Pausanias in his guide-book (I, 24) says: "here there are . . . altars of the gods styled Unknowns, of heroes, etc." (βωμοί δε θεῶν τε ὁνομαζομένων 'Αγνώστων καὶ ἡρώων . . . κ.τ.λ.). Such, however, is the force of our fixed idea that even Sir J. G. Frazer, in his "Pausanias and Other Studies," speaks of "The Altar to the Unknown God which St. Paul, and Pausanias after him, saw." More, he follows this up with a description of a dialogue "attributed to Lucian" (2nd Cent. a.d.) in which the Unknown God of Athens figures in a Christian discussion; but this dialogue (the Philopatris) is almost universally regarded as a much later work, dating at earliest from Julian's time (mid-4th Cent.) and probably from that of Nicephorus Phocas (10th Cent.). — Tr.

^<sup>2 Wissowa, Keligion und Kultus der Kömer (1912), p. 38.

were gods, for it was impossible for him to conceive the opposite. This is the meaning of the sacral phrase in Livy, VIII, 9, 6: "di quibus est potestas nostrorum hostiumque." The Roman people admits that the circle of its own gods is only momentarily bounded, and after reciting these by name it ends the prayer thus so as not to infringe the rights of others. According to its sacral law, the annexation of foreign territory involves the transfer to Urbs Roma of all the religious obligations pertaining to this territory and its gods — which of course logically follows from the additive god-feeling of the Classical. Recognition of a deity was very far from being the same as acceptance of the forms of its cult; thus in the Second Punic War the Great Mother of Pessinus 1 was received in Rome as the Sibyl commanded, but the priests who had come in with her cult, which was of a highly un-Classical complexion, practised under strict police supervision, and not only Roman citizens but even their slaves were forbidden under penalty to enter this priesthood. The reception of the goddess gave satisfaction to the Classical world-feeling, but the personal performance of her despised ritual would have infringed it. The attitude of the Senate in such cases is unmistakable, though the people, with its ever-increasing admixture of Eastern elements, had a liking for these cults and in Imperial times the army became in virtue of its composition a vehicle (and even the chief vehicle) of the Magian world-feeling.

This makes it the easier to understand how the cult of deified men could become a necessary element in this religious form-world. But here it is necessary to distinguish sharply between Classical phenomena and Oriental phenomena that have a superficial similarity thereto. Roman emperor-worship — i.e., the reverence of the "genius" of the living Princes and that of the dead predecessors as "Divi"—has hitherto been confused with the ceremonial reverence of the Ruler which was customary in Asia Minor (and, above all, in Persia,)² and also with the later and quite differently meant Caliph-deification which is seen in full process of formation in Diocletian and Constantine. Actually, these are all very unlike things. However intimately these symbolic forms were interfused in the East of the Empire, in Rome itself the Classical type was actualized unequivocally and without adulteration. Long before this certain Greeks (e.g., Sophocles, Lysander and, above all, Alexander) had been not merely hailed as gods by their flatterers but felt as gods in a perfectly definite sense by the people. It is only a step, after all, from the deification of a thing — such as a copse or a well or, in the limit, a statue which represented a god — to the deification of an outstanding man who became first hero and then god. In this case as in the rest, what was reverenced was the perfect shape in which the world-stuff, the un-divine, had actualized itself. In Rome the consul on the day

See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article Great Mother of the Gods. — Tr.

x

This Magian monotheism reveals itself in all the religious creations that flooded the Empire from the East — the Alexandrian Isis, the Sun-god favoured by Aurelian (the Baal of Palmyra), the Mithras protected by Diocletian (whose Persian form had been completely recast in Syria), the Baalath of Carthage (Tanit, Dea Cælestis ⁵) honoured by Septimius Severus. The importation of these figures no longer increases as in Classical times the number of concrete

¹ See Vol. II, pp. 241 et seq.

³ The Erechtheum, similarly, was a group of cult-sites, each refraining from interference with

Sol Invictus is the Roman official form of Mithras. Troop-movements and trade spread his worship, like that of Juppiter Dolichenus, over the Empire. — Tr.

⁵ To whom the inhabitants of "Roman" Carthage managed to attach even Dido. — Tr

² Significantly enough, the formula of the oath sworn by this stone was not "per Jovis lapidem" out "per Jovem lapidem." — Tr.

^<sup>1 Wissowa, Kult. und Relig. d. Kömer (1912), pp. 98 et seq.

^<sup>2 Wissowa, Relig. u. Kult. der Römer (1912), p. 355.

(such as Isis-Magna Mater-Juno-Astarte-Bellona, or Mithras-Sol Invictus-Helios) come to signify titles of one sole existent Godhead.1

Χī

It is not in dispute (the word itself shows it in all languages) that atheism is essentially a negation, that it signifies the foregoing of a spiritual idea and therefore the precedence of such an idea, and that it is not the creative act of an unimpaired formative power. But what is it that it denies? In what way? And who is the denier?

challenging his convictions. We can understand this if we can see what it was that made the devout Haydn call Beethoven an atheist after he had heard some of his music. Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture but with the dawn of the Civilization. It belongs to the great city, to the "educated man" of the great city who acquires mechanistically what his forefathers the creators of the Culture had lived organically. In respect of the Classical feeling of God, Aristotle is an atheist unawares. The Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism is atheistic like the Socialism of Western and the Buddhism of Indian modernity, reverently though they may and do use the word "God."

But, if this late form of world-feeling and world-image which preludes our "second religiousness" is universally a negation of the religious in us, the structure of it is different in each of the Civilizations. There is no religiousness that is without an atheistic opposition belonging uniquely to itself and directed uniquely against itself. Men continue to experience the outer world that extends around them as a cosmos of well-ordered bodies or a world-cavern or efficient space, as the case may be, but they no longer livingly experience the sacred causality in it. They only learn to know it in a profane causality that is, or is desired to be, inclusively mechanical.¹ There are atheisms of Classical, Arabian and Western kinds and these differ from one another in meaning and in matter. Nietzsche formulated the dynamic atheism on the basis that "God is dead," and a Classical philosopher would have expressed the static and Euclidean by saying that the "gods who dwell in the holy places are dead," the one indicating that boundless space has, the other that countless bodies have, become godless. But dead space and dead things are the "facts" of physics. The atheist is unable to experience any difference between the Nature-picture of physics and that of religion. Language, with a fine feeling, distinguishes wisdom and intelligence — the early and the late, the rural and the megalopolitan conditions of the soul. Intelligence even sounds atheistic. No one would describe Heraclitus or Meister Eckart as an intelligence, but Socrates and Rousseau were intelligent and not "wise" men. There is something root-less in the word. It is only from the standpoint of the Stoic and of the Socialist, of the typical irreligious man, that want of intelligence is a matter for contempt.

rests upon self-deception. The degree of piety of which a period is capable is revealed in its attitude torwards toleration. One tolerates, either because the form-language appears to be expressing something of that which in one's own lived experience is felt as divine, or else because that experience no longer contains anything so felt.

XII

If we turn back from Nature-feeling become form to Nature-knowledge become system, we know God or the gods as the origin of the images by which the intellect seeks to make the world-around comprehensible to itself. Goethe

"Force" is a mythical quantity, which does not arise out of scientific experimentation but, on the contrary, defines the structure thereof a priori. It is only the Faustian conception of Nature that instead of a magnet thinks

This being the provenance of the force-concept, it follows that we can no more define it than we can define those other un-Classical words Will and Space. There remains always a felt and intuitively-perceived remainder which makes every personal definition an almost religious creed of its author. Every Baroque scientist in this matter has his personal inner experience which he is trying to clothe in words. Goethe, for instance, could never have defined his idea of a world-force, but to himself it was a certainty. Kant called force the phenomenon of an ent-in-itself: "we know substance in space, the body, only through forces." Laplace called it an unknown of which the workings are all that we know, and Newton imagined immaterial forces at a distance. Leibniz spoke of Vis viva as a quantum which together with matter formed the unit that he called the monad, and Descartes, with certain thinkers of the 18th Century, was equally unwilling to draw fundamental distinctions between motion and the moved. Beside potentia, virtus, impetus we find even in Gothic times peri-phrases such as conatus and nisus, in which the force and the releasing cause are obviously not separated. We can, indeed, quite well differentiate between Catholic, Protestant and Atheistic notions of force. But Spinoza, a Jew and therefore, spiritually, a member of the Magian Culture, could not

^<sup>2 The law of the equivalence of heat and work. — Tr.

¹ See p. 307.

^<sup>1 See foot-note, p. 314. — Tr.

This symbolic difficulty of modern mechanics is in no way removed by the potential theory that was founded by Faraday when the centre of gravity of physical thought had passed from the dynamics of matter to the electrodynamics of the æther. The famous experimenter, who was a visionary through and through — alone amongst the modern masters of physics he was not a mathematician — observed in 1846: "I assume nothing to be true in any part of space (whether this be empty as is commonly said, or filled with matter) except forces and the lines in which they are exercised." Here, plain enough, is the directional tendency with its intimately organic and historic content, the tendency in the knower to live the process of his knowing. Here Faraday is metaphysically at one with Newton, whose forces-at-a-distance point to a mythic background that the devout physicist declined to examine. The possible alternative way of reaching an unequivocal definition of force — viz., that which starts from World and not God, from the object and not the subject of natural motion-state — was leading at the very same time to the formulation of the concept of Energy. Now, this concept represents, as distinct from that of force, a quantum of directedness and not a direction, and is in so far akin to Leibniz's conception of "living force" unalterable in quantity. It will not escape notice that essential features of the mass-concept have been taken over here; indeed, even the bizarre notion of an atomic structure of energy has been seriously discussed.

XIII

^<sup>1 See p. 355.

that it is happening at all — but from an inherent historic necessity. Just so, at the same relative stage, the Classical science inwardly fulfilled itself about 200 B.C. Analysis reached its goal with Gauss, Cauchy and Riemann, and to-day it is only filling up the gaps in its structure.

If we make it clear to ourselves that the atomic ideas of Rutherford and Bohr 2 signify nothing but this, that the numerical results of observations have suddenly been provided with a picture of a planetary world within the atom, instead of that of atom-swarms hitherto favoured; if we observe how

^<sup>2 Which in many cases have led to the supposition that the "actual existence" of atoms has now at last been proved — a singular throw-back to the materialism of the preceding generation.

XIV

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is something which is absorbed by, rather than specified for,

Directional feeling, a relation of past and future, is implicit already in the mythic concept of force on which the whole of this dogmatic form-world

^<sup>1 The application of the idea of "lifetime" to elements has in fact produced the conception of "half-transformation times" [such as 3.85 days for Radium Emanation. — Tr.].

XV

But before the curtain falls, there is one more task for the historical Faustian spirit, a task not yet specified, hitherto not even imagined as possible. There has still to be written a morphology of the exact sciences, which shall discover how all laws, concepts and theories inwardly hang together as forms and what they have meant as such in the life-course of the Faustian Culture. The re-treatment of theoretical physics, of chemistry, of mathematics as a sum of symbols — this will be the definitive conquest of the mechanical world-aspect by an intuitive, once more religious, world-outlook, a last master-effort of physiognomic to break down even systematic and to absorb it, as expression and symbol, into its own domain. One day we shall no longer ask, as the 19th Century asked, what are the valid laws underlying chemical affinity or diamagnetism — rather, we shall be amazed indeed that minds of the first order could ever have been completely preoccupied by questions such as these. We shall inquire whence came these forms that were prescribed for the Faustian spirit, why they had to come to our kind of humanity particularly and exclusively, and what deep meaning there is in the fact that the numbers that we have won became phenomenal in just this picture-like disguise. And, be it said, we have to-day hardly yet an inkling of how much in our reputedly objective values and experiences is only disguise, only image and expression.

The aim to which all this is striving, and which in particular every Nature-researcher feels in himself as an impulse, is the achievement of a pure numerical transcendence, the complete and inclusive conquest of the visibly apparent and its replacement by a language of imagery unintelligible to the layman and impossible of sensuous realization — but a language that the great Faustian symbol of Infinite space endows with the dignity of inward necessity. The deep scepticism of these final judgments links the soul anew to the forms of early Gothic religiousness. The inorganic, known and dissected world-around, the World as Nature and System, has deepened itself until it is a pure sphere of functional numbers. But, as we have seen, number is one of the most primary symbols in every Culture; and consequently the way to pure number is the return of the waking consciousness to its own secret, the revelation of its own formal necessity. The goal reached, the vast and ever more meaningless and threadbare fabric woven around natural science falls apart. It was, after all, nothing but the inner structure of the "Reason," the grammar by which it believed it could overcome the Visible and extract therefrom the True. But what appears under the fabric is once again the earliest and deepest, the Myth, the immediate Becoming, Life itself. The less anthropomorphic science believes itself to be, the more anthropomorphic it is. One by one it gets rid of the separate human traits in the Nature-picture, only to find at the end that the supposed pure Nature which it holds in its hand is — humanity itself, pure and complete. Out of the Gothic soul grew up, till it overshadowed the religious world-picture, the spirit of the City, the alter ego of irreligious Nature-science. But now, in the sunset of the scientific epoch and the rise of victorious Skepsis, the clouds dissolve and the quiet landscape of the morning reappears in all distinctness.

One and the same world-feeling speaks in all of them. They were born with, and they aged with, the Faustian Culture, and they present that Culture in the world of day and space as a historical drama. The uniting of the several scientific aspects into one will bear all the marks of the great art of counterpoint. An infinitesimal music of the boundless world-space — that is the deep unresting longing of this soul, as the orderly statuesque and Euclidean Cosmos was the satisfaction of the Classical. That—formulated by a logical necessity of Faustian reason as a dynamic-imperative causality, then developed into a dictatorial, hard-working, world-transforming science — is the grand legacy of the Faustian soul to the souls of Cultures yet to be, a bequest of immensely transcendent forms that the heirs will possibly ignore. And then, weary after its striving, the Western science returns to its spiritual home.

INDEX

Yahweh, 312, 402 Yang-chu, 45 Yoga, 355

Zama, 36 Zanzibar, 333 Zarathustra, 342, 363, 370, 371 Zarlino, 230, 282 Zeno of Elea, 305, 347, 354, 357

[DER UNTERGANG DES ABENDLANDES]

OSWALD SPENGLER

PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY

$\mathbf{BY}$

VOLUME TWO

MCMXXVIII: ALFRED · A · KNOPF: NEW YORK

Originally published as

Der Untergang des Abendlandes Welthistorische Perstektiven

Copyright 1922 by C. H. Becksche, Verlagsbuchhandlung, München

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

London, July 1928

CFA

TABLE OF GERMAN AND ENGLISH PAGES

CONTENTS OF VOLUME II

CHAPTER VIII. PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE. (B) THE MAGIAN SOUL 231

Chapter X. The State. (A) The Problem of the Estates: Nobility and Priesthood 325

359

CHAPTER XII. THE STATE. (C) PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS

437

CHAPTER XIII. THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE. (A) MONEY 467

Spirit of technics, p. 499. Primitive technics and style of the high Cultures, p. 500. Classical technics, p. 501. The will-to-power over nature, the inventor, p. 501. Intoxication of modern discovery, p. 502. The man as slave of the machine, p. 504. Entrepreneurs, workers, engineers, p. 504. Struggle between money and industry, p. 505. Last battle of money and politics, victory of the blood, p. 507.

INDEX

(A)

THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM

CHAPTER 1

ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(A)

THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM

11

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

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

^<sup>1 For instance, Vol. I, p. 154. — Tr.

To these cosmic organs the microcosm as such adds (in the degree to which it possesses freedom of movement vis-à-vis the macrocosm) the organ "sense,"

above the earth, and that light-horizon of the individual life which stretches so far beyond the environs of the body.

Ц

This impoverishment of the sensual implies, however, an immeasurable deepening. Human waking-consciousness is no longer a mere tension between body and environment. It is now life in a self-contained light-world. The body moves in the space that is seen. The depth-experience ² is a mighty out-thrust into the visible distance from a light-centre ³—the point which we call "I." "I" is a light-concept. From this point onward the life of an "I" becomes essentially a life in the sun, and night is akin to death. And out of it, too, there arises a new feeling of fear which absorbs all others within itself—fear before the invisible, fear of that which one hears or feels, suspects, or observes in its effects without seeing. Animals indeed experience fear in other forms, but man finds these forms puzzling, and even uneasiness in the presence of stillness to which primitive men and children are subject (and which they seek to dispel by noise and loud talking) is disappearing in the higher types of mankind. It is fear of the invisible that is the essence and hall-mark of human religiousness. Gods are surmised, imagined, envisaged light-actualities, and the idea of an "invisible" god is the highest expression of human transcendence. Where the bounds of the light-world are, there lies the beyond, and salvation is emancipation from the spell of the light-world and its facts.

^<sup>1 Even scientific astronomy, when applied to everyday work, states the movements of the heavenly bodies in terms referred to our perception of them. — Tr.

^<sup>2 See Vol. 1, p. 172. — Tr.

⁸ A very similar notion of the light-world diffused from the light-centre forms the cardinal point of the philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (1175-1173). — Tr.

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

^<sup>2 The original reads: "An Stelle des völlig einheitlichen verstehenden Empfindens erscheint oft und öfter ein Verstehen der Bedeutung von kaum noch heachteten Sinneseindrücken." — Tr.

^<sup>1 Hence we call that which we observe in the faces of men who have not the habit of thought "animal" — admiringly or contemptuously as the case may be.

TTT

¹ See Vol. 1. p. 126. — Tr.

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

See Vol. I, p. 94. — Tr.

IV

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

^<sup>1 See Vol. 1, pp. 53, et seq. — 17

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

That we do not merely live but know about "living" is a consequence of our bodily existence in the light. But the beast knows only life, not death. Were we pure plantlike beings, we should die unconscious of dying, for to feel death and to die would be identical. But animals, even though they hear the death-cry, see the dead body, and scent putrefaction, behold death with-

¹ Original: "aus dem Erlebnis." - Tr.

v

Destiny has made the man so or so — subtle and fact-shy, or active and contemptuous of thought. But the man of the active category is a whole man, whereas in the contemplative a single organ can operate without (and even against) the body. All the worse, then, when this organ tries to master actuality as well as its own world, for then we get all those ethicopolitico-social reform-projects which demonstrate, unanswerably, how things ought to be and how to set about making them so — theories that without exception rest upon the hypothesis that all men are as rich in ideas and as poor in motives as the author is (or thinks he is). Such theories, even when

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

Under all the plurality of microcosmic beings, we are perpetually meeting with the formation of inspired mass-units, beings of a higher order, which, whether they develop slowly or come into existence in a moment, contain all the feelings and passions of the individual, enigmatic in their inward character and inaccessible to reasoning — though the connoisseur can see into and reckon upon their reactions well enough. Here too we distinguish the generic animal unities which are sensed, the unities profoundly dependent upon Being and Destiny — like the way of an eagle in the air or the way of the stormers on the breach — from the purely human associations which depend upon the understanding and cohere on the basis of like opinions, like purposes, or like knowledge. Unity of cosmic pulse one has without willing to have it; unity of common ground is acquired at will. One can join or resign from an intellectual association as one pleases, for only one's waking-consciousness is involved. But to a cosmic unity one is committed, and committed with one's entire being. Crowds of this order of unity are seized by storms of enthusiasm or, as readily, of panic. They are noisy and ecstatic at Eleusis or Lourdes, or heroically firm like the Spartans of Thermopylæ and the last Goths in the battle of Vesuvius.¹ They form themselves to the music of chorales, marches, and dances, and are sensitive like human and animal thoroughbreds to the effects of bright colours, decoration, costume, and uniform.

These souls have their special psychology,² and the knowledge of this psychology is for the public man an essential. A single soul is the mark of every genuine order or class, be it the chivalry and military orders of the Crusades, the Roman Senate or the Jacobin club, polite society under Louis XIV or the Prussian country "Adel," peasantry or guilds, the masses of the big city or the folk of the secluded valley, the peoples and tribes of the migrations or the adherents of Mohammed and, generally, of any new-founded religion or sect, the French of the Revolution or the Germans of the Wars of Libera-

¹ A.D. 553 (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xliii). - Tr.

^<sup>2 G. Le Bon's Psychologis des Foules (which has been translated into English under the title The Crowd) is the pioneer work on this subject, and though unduly coloured perhaps by the author's personal prepossessions, still retains its interest and value. — Tr.

^<sup>1 See Vol. I., pp. 139, et seq. — Tr.

CHAPTER II ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(B)

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES

CHAPTER II

ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(B)

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES

I

The process of bistorical self-adjustment begins for everyone with the earliest impressions of childhood. Children's eyes are keen, and the facts of the nearest environment, the life of the family and the house and the street, are sensed and felt right down to the core, long before the city and its population come into their visual field, and while the words "people," "country," "state," are still quite destitute of tangible meaning to them. Just so, and so thoroughly, primitive man knows all that is presented to his narrow field of view as history, as living — and above all Life itself, the drama of birth and death, sickness and eld; the history of passionate war and passionate love, as experienced in himself or observed in others; the fate of relatives, of the clan, of the village, their actions and their motives; tales of long enmity, of fights, victory, and revenge. The life-horizon widens, and shows not lives, but Life coming and going. The pageant is not now of villages and clans, but of remote races and countries; not of years, but of centuries. The history that is actually lived with and participated in never reaches over more than a grandfather's span — neither for ancient Germans and present-day Negroes, nor for Pericles and Wallenstein. Here the horizon of living ends, and a new plane begins wherein the picture is based upon hearsay and historical tradition, a plane in which direct sympathies are adapted to a mind-picture that is both distinct and, from long use, stable. The picture so developed shows very different amplitudes for the men of the different Cultures. For us Westerners it is with this secondary picture that genuine history begins, for we live under the aspect of eternity, whereas for the Greeks and Romans it is just then that history ceases. For Thucydides¹ the events of the Persian Wars, for Cæsar those of the Punic Wars, were already devoid of living import.

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

Every group of scientifically established elements, therefore, has a dual tendency, inherent and unchanged since primitive ages. The one tendency urges forwards the completest possible system of technical knowledge, for the service of practical, economical, and warlike ends, which many kinds of animals have developed to a high degree of perfection, and which from them leads, through primitive man and his acquaintance with fire and metals, directly to the machine-technics of our Faustian Culture. The other tendency took shape only with the separation of strictly human thought from physical vision by means of language, and the aim of its effort has been an equally complete theoretical knowledge, which we call in the earlier phases of the Culture religious, and in the later scientific. Fire is for the warrior a weapon, for the craftsman part of his equipment, for the priest a sign from God, and for the scientist a problem. But in all these aspects alike it is proper to the "natural," the

11

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

^<sup>1 Original: "Alles Bedeutende, nämlich das Einmalige der Geschichte." — Tr.

^<sup>2 I suppose the meaning of these words to be that generalization and flair are not really op posed, but interdependent. — Tr.

Original: ("So geschieht dies stets . . .) im Hinblick auf das im Augenblick geforderte Bild als der beständigen Funktion der Zeit und des Menschen." — Tr.

See Chapter VIII below. — Tr.

The Faustian picture of world-history, again, prepared in advance by the existence of a Christian chronology,¹ came into being suddenly, with an immense extension and deepening of the Magian picture which the Western Church had taken over, an extension and deepening that was to give Joachim of Floris ² in the high Gothic the basis of his wonderful interpretation of all world-destinies as a sequence of three æons under the aspects of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Parallel with this there was an immense widening of the geographical horizon, which even in Gothic times (thanks to Vikings and Crusaders) came to extend from Iceland to the remotest ends of Asia; ³ and from 1500 onwards, the developed man of the Baroque is able to do what none of his peers in the other Cultures could do and — for the first time in human history — to regard the whole surface of the planet as its field. Thanks to compass and telescope, the savant of that mature age could for the first time not merely posit the sphericity of the earth as a matter of theory, but actually feel that he was living upon a sphere in space. The land-horizon is no more. So, too, time-horizons melt in the double endlessness of the calendar before and after Christ. And to-day, under the influence of this picture, which comprises the whole planet and will eventually embrace all the high Cultures, the old Gothic division of history into "ancient," "mediæval," and modern, long become trite and empty, is visibly dissolving.⁴

⁾ Introduced in Rome in 522 during the Ostrogoth domination, not until Charlemagne's times did it make headway in the Germanic lands. Then, however, its spread was rapid.

^<sup>2 See Vol. I, p. 19. — Tr.

On the other hand — and very significantly — the field of the history-picture livingly experienced in the consciousness of the sincere Renaissance classicist markedly contracted.

^* See Vol. I, p. 16. — Tr.

^<sup>1 The Emperor Henry VI reigned 1190-7. — Tr.

TTT

the form. The two concepts, Goethe's form-fulfilment and Darwin's evolution, are in as complete opposition as destiny to causality, and (be it added) as German to English thought, and German to English history.

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

ΙV

² It is perhaps not unnecessary to remark that the word "epoch" is used throughout this book in its proper sense of "turning point" or "moment of change" and not in the loose sense of "period"

which it has acquired. — 17.

^<sup>3 Und Afrika Sprach (1912); Paideuma, Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlebre (1920). Frobenius distinguishes three ages.

Then, out of this general primitive Culture of a humanity linked by inter-

In all primitive existence the "it," the Cosmic, is at work with such immediacy of force that all microcosmic utterances, whether in myth, custom, technique, or ornament, obey only the pressures of the very instant. For us, there are no ascertainable rules for the duration, tempo, and course of development of these utterances. We observe, say, an ornamental form-language—not to be called a style ²—ruling over the population of a wide area, spreading, changing, and at last dying out. Alongside this, and perhaps with quite different fields of extension, we may find modes of fashioning and using weapons, tribal organizations, religious practices, each developing in a special way of its own, with epochal points of its own, beginnings and ends of its own, completely influenced by other form-domains. When in some prehistoric stratum we have identified an accurately known type of pottery, we cannot safely argue from it to the customs and religion of the population to which it belonged. And if by chance the same area does hold for a particular form of marriage and, say, a certain type of tattooing, this never signifies a common basic idea such as is indicated, for example, by the discovery of gunpowder and that of perspective in painting. No necessary connexions come to light between ornament and organization by age-classes, or between the cult of a god and the kind of agriculture practised. Development in these cases means always some development of one or another individual aspect or trait of the primitive Culture, never of that Culture itself. This, as I have said before, is essentially chaotic; the primitive Culture is neither an organism nor a sum of organisms.

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

My kind of thought and observation is limited to the physiognomy of the actual. At the point when the experience of the "judge of men" vis-à-vis his environment, and that of the "man of action" vis-à-vis his facts, become ineffective, there also this insight finds its limit. The existence of these two ages is a fact of historical experience; more, our experiencing of the primitive Culture consists not only in surveying, in its relics, a self-contained and closed-off thing, but also in reacting to its deeper meaning by virtue of an inward relation to it which persists in us. But the second age opens to us another and quite different kind of experience. It was an incident, the sense of which cannot now be scrutinized, that the type of the higher Culture appeared suddenly in the field of human history. Quite possibly, indeed, it was some sudden event in the domain of earth-history that brought forth a new and different form into phenomenal existence. But the fact that we have before us eight such Cultures, all of the same build, the same development, and the same duration, justifies us in looking at them comparatively, and obtaining from our study a knowledge which we can extend backwards over lost periods and forwards over the future — provided always that a Destiny of a different order does not replace this form-world, suddenly and basically, by another. Our licence to proceed thus comes from general experience of organic being. As in the history of the Raptores or the Coniferæ we cannot prophesy whether and when a new species will arise, so in that of Cultural history we cannot say whether and when a new Culture shall be. But from the moment when a

Historical thought, therefore, has the double task of dealing comparatively with the individual life-courses of the Cultures, and of examining the incidental and irregular relations of the Cultures amongst themselves in respect of their meaning. The necessity of the first of these tasks, obvious enough, has yet been overlooked hitherto. The second has been handled, but only by the lazy and shallow method of imposing causality over the whole tangle and laying it out tidily along the "course" of a hypothetical "world"-history, thereby making it impossible to discover either the psychology of these difficult, but richly suggestive, relations or to discover that of the inner life of any particular Culture. In truth, the condition for solving the first problem is that the second has been solved already. The relations are very different, even under the simple aspect of time and space. The Crusades brought a Springtime face to face with an old and ripe Civilization; in the Cretan-Mycenæan world seed-time and golden autumn are seen together. A Civilization may stream over from immense remoteness, as the Indian streamed into the Arabian from the East, or lie senile and stifling over an infancy, as the Classical lay upon its other side. But there are differences, too, of kind and strength; the Western Culture seeks out relations, the Egyptian tries to avoid them; the former is beaten by them

v

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

About 3000 ² after a long "Merovingian" period, which is still distinctly perceptible in Egypt, the two oldest Cultures began, in exceedingly limited areas on the lower Nile and the lower Euphrates. In these cases the distinctions between early and late periods have long ago been labelled as Old and Middle Kingdom, Sumer and Akkad. The outcome of the Egyptian feudal period marked by the establishment of a hereditary nobility and the decline (from Dynasty VI) of the older Kingship, presents so astounding a similarity with the course of events in the Chinese springtime from I-Wang (934–909) and that in the Western from the Emperor Henry IV (1056–1106) that a unified comparative study of all three might well be risked. At the beginning of the Babylonian "Baroque" we see the figure of the great Sargon (2500), who pushed out to the Mediterranean coast, conquered Cyprus, and styled himself, like Justinian I and Charles V, "lord of the four parts of the earth." And in due course, about 1800 on the Nile and rather earlier in Sumer-Akkad, we perceive the beginnings of the first Civilizations. Of these the Asiatic displayed immense expansive power. The "achievements of the Babylonian Civilization" (as the books say), many things and notions connected with measuring, numbering, and accounting, travelled probably as far as the North and the Yellow Seas. Many a Babylonian trademark upon a tool may have come to be

The period 480-230 is called by the Chinese historians the "Period of the Contending States"; it culminated in a century of unbroken warfare between

^[H. Delbrück, in his well-known Gesch. der Kriegskunst (1908), Vol. I, Part I, chapter i, and elsewhere, deals in considerable detail with the strengths of ancient armies. — Tr.]

^<sup>2 A.D. 378. See C. W. C. Oman, History of the Art of War: Middle Ages (1898), ch. i; H. Delbrück, Gesch. der Kriegskunst, Vol. II, book I, ch. x, and book II. — Tr.

mass-armies with frightful social upheavals, and out of it came the "Roman" state of Tsin as founder of a Chinese Imperium. This phase Egypt experienced between 1780 and 1580, of which the last century was the "Hyksos" time. The Classical experienced it from Chæronea (338), and, at the high pitch of horror, from the Gracchi (133) to Actium (31 B.C.). And it is the destiny of the West-European-American world for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As on the other side of the globe there arose the principes of the Julian-Claudian house, so here in China there arose the mighty figure of Wang-Cheng, who led Tsin through the decisive struggle to sole supremacy and in 221 assumed the title of Shi (literally equivalent to "Augustus") and the Cæsarname Hwang-ti. He founded the "Pax Serica," as we may call it, carried out a grand social reform in the exhausted Empire, and — as promptly as Rome 1—began to build his "Limes," the famous Great Wall, for which in 214 he annexed a part of Mongolia. He was the first, too, to subdue the barbarians south of the Yang-tse, in a series of large-scale campaigns followed and confirmed by military roads, castles, and colonies. But "Roman," too, was his family history — a Tacitean drama with Lui-Shi (Chancellor and stepfather of the Emperor) and Li-Szu, the great statesman (the Agrippa of his day, and unifier of the Chinese script), playing parts, and one that quickly closed in Neronic horrors. Followed then the two Han dynasties (Western, 206 B.C.—A.D. 23; Eastern, A.D. 25–220), under which the frontiers extended more and more, while in the capital eunuch-ministers, generals, and soldiery made and unmade the rulers at their pleasure. At certain rare moments, as under Wu-ti (140–86) and Ming-ti (58–76), the Chinese-Confucian, the Indian-Buddhist, and the Classical-Stoic world-forces approached one another so closely in the region of the Caspian that they might easily have come into actual touch.²

^<sup>1 In the case of Rome, the idea of a fixed frontier against the barbarian emerged soon after the defeat of Varus, and the fortifications of the Limes were laid down before the close of the first century of our era. — Tr.

¹ Chapters vii-ix below.

^<sup>2 On the history of the Avesta see Ency. Brit., XI ed., articles "Zend-Avesta" and "Zoroaster." — Tr.

and Persian diplomacy poking the fire. In the extreme north was Byzantium, that strange mixture of sere, civilized, Classical, with vernal and chevaleresque which is manifested above all in the bewildering history of the Byzantine army system. Into this world Islam at last — and far too late — brought a consciousness of unity, and this accounts for the self-evident character of its victorious progress and the almost unresisting adhesion of Christians, Jews, and Persians alike. Out of Islam in due course arose the Arabian Civilization which was at the peak of its intellectual completeness when the barbarians from the West broke in for a moment, marching on Jerusalem. How, we may ask ourselves, did this inroad appear in the eyes of cultivated Arabians of the time? Somewhat like Bolshevism, perhaps? For the statecraft of the Arabian World the political relations of "Frankistan" were something on a lower plane. Even in our Thirty Years' War — from that point of view a drama of the "Far West" — when an English envoy 1 strove to stir up the Porte against the house of Habsburg, the statesman who handled policy over a field stretching from Morocco to India, evidently judged that the little predatory states on the horizon were of no real interest. And even when Napoleon landed in Egypt, there were still many without an inkling of the future.

For, as it happens, this is the one example of a Culture ended by violent death. It was not starved, suppressed, or thwarted, but murdered in the full glory of its unfolding, destroyed like a sunflower whose head is struck off by one passing. All these states — including a world-power and more than one federation — with an extent and resources far superior to those of the Greek and Roman states of Hannibal's day; with a comprehensive policy, a carefully ordered financial system, and a highly developed legislation; with administrative ideas and economic tradition such as the ministers of Charles V could never have imagined; with a wealth of literature in several languages, an intellectually brilliant and polite society in great cities to which the West could not show one single parallel — all this was not broken down in some desperate war, but washed out by a handful of bandits in a few years, and so

The most appalling feature of the tragedy was that it was not in the least a necessity of the Western Culture that it should happen. It was a private affair of adventurers, and at the time no one in Germany, France, or England had any idea of what was taking place. This instance shows, as no other shows, that the history of humanity has no meaning whatever and that deep significances reside only in the life-courses of the separate Cultures. Their inter-relations are unimportant and accidental. In this case the accident was so cruelly banal, so supremely absurd, that it would not be tolerated in the wildest farce. A few cannon and handguns began and ended the drama.²

¹ Mexico City, or, better, the agglomeration of towns and villages in the valley of Mexico. — Tr.

^<sup>2 According to Prescott, Cortez's force on landing had thirteen hand firearms and fourteen cannon, great and small, altogether. The whole of these were lost in the first defeat at Mexico. Later a pure accident gave Cortez the contents of a supply-ship from Europe. In a military sense horses contributed to the Spanish victories nearly if not quite as much as firearms, but these, too, were in small numbers, sixteen at the outset. — $T_c$

These are the names of near-by villages serving as labels; the true names are lost

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

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

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

VΙ

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

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

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

^{1 &}quot;Zur Theorie und Methodik der Geschichte" (Kleine Schriften, 1910), which is by far the best piece of historical philosophy ever written by an opponent of all philosophy.

notwithstanding all the cleverness of the religious, philosophical and, especially, political forms in which it is wrapped — just the old zoölogical upand-down of the primitive age again. Whether the lords sitting in Babylon were wild war-hordes like the Kassites or refined inheritors like the Persians, when, for how long, and with what success they kept their seats, signified nothing from the standpoint of Babylon. The comfort of the population was affected by such things, naturally, but they made no difference either way to the fact that the soul of this world was extinct and its events, therefore, void of any deep meaning. A new dynasty, native or foreign, in Egypt, a revolution or a conquest in China, a new Germanic people in the Roman Empire, were elements in the history of the landscape like a change in the fauna or the migration of a flock of birds.

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

days when notions having genuine symbolic force had ceased to be, and the only question was who should have the plain material power. The struggle for the Cæsar-title became steadily more and more negroid, and might have gone on century after century in increasingly primitive and, therefore, "eternal" forms.

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

CHAPTER III ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(C)

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES

CHAPTER III

Origin and Landscape

(C)

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES

1

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

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

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

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

Because that which one (here, the Renaissance artist) wills to express is in him a priori. Of the stock of dead forms that he had in front of him, he really saw only the few that he wanted to see, and saw them as he wanted them — namely, in line with his own intention and not with the intention of the original creator, for no living art ever seriously considers that. Try to follow, element by element, the "influence" of Egyptian plastic upon early Greek, and you will find in the end that there is none at all, but that the Greek will-to-form took out of the older art-stock some few characteristics that it would in any case have discovered in some shape for itself. All round the Classical landscape there were working, or had worked, Egyptians, Cretans, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, and Phœnicians, and the works of these peoples — their buildings, ornaments, art-works, cults, state-forms, scripts, and sciences — were known to the Greeks in profusion. But how much out of all this mass did the Classical soul extract as its own means of expression? I repeat, it is only the relations that are accepted that we observe. But what of those that were not accepted? Why, for example, do we fail to find in the former category the pyramid, pylon, and obelisk of Egypt, or hieroglyphic, or cuneiform? What of the stock of Byzantium and of the Moorish East was not accepted by Gothic art and thought in Spain and Sicily? It is impossible to overpraise the wisdom (quite unconscious) that governed the choice and the unhesitating transvaluation of what was chosen. Every relation that was accepted was not only an exception, but also a misunderstanding, and the inner force of a Being is never so clearly evidenced as it is in this art of deliberate misunderstanding. The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in

See Ch. VIII below. — Tr.

11

As Classical religion was State religion through and through, there is no distinction made as to the fount of law; real law and divine law were made, like personallaw, by the citizen, and the relations of things and of gods to persons were precise and definite. Now, it was a fact of decisive significance

^<sup>1 See R. Hirzel, Die Person (1914), p. 7-

It would give an incorrect idea to oppose Greek and Roman law to one another as quantities of the same order. Roman law in its whole development is an individual city law, one amongst hundreds of such, and Greek law as a unity never existed at all. Although Greek-speaking cities very often had similar laws, this did not alter the fact that the law of each was its own and no other's. Never did the idea of a general Doric, still less a general Hellenic, legislation arise. Such notions were wholly alien to Classical thought. The jus civile applied only to Quirites — foreigners, slaves and the whole world outside the city 2 simply did not count in the eyes of the law, whereas even the Sachsenspiegel 3 evidences already our own deep-felt idea that there can only really be one law. Until far into Imperial times the strict distinction was maintained between the jus civile of citizens and the jus gentium for "other people" who came within the cognizance of Rome's jurisdiction as sojourners. (It need hardly be added that this "law of nations" has no sort of resemblance to that which we call by the same name.) It was only because Rome as a unit-city attained — as under other conditions Alexandria might have attained — to "Imperium" over the Classical world that Roman law became pre-eminent, not because of its intrinsic superiority, but firstly through Rome's political success and afterwards because of Rome's monopoly of practical experience on the large scale. The formation of a general Classical jurisprudence of Hellenistic cast — if we are entitled to call by that name an affinity of spirit in a large number of separate legal systems — falls in a period when Rome was still politically a third-rate power. And when Roman law began to assume bigger forms, this was only one

^<sup>3 A thirteenth-century collection by Eike von Repgow of German customs and customary law (ed. K. G. Homever, 1861). — Tr.

^<sup>4 And were judged by a different authority, the peregrin prætor. — Tr.

TTT

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

In the West it is conspicuously the other way about. The tendency is from the first to bring the entire living body of law into a general code, ordered for ever and exhaustively complete, containing in advance the decision of every conceivable future problem.² All Western law bears the stamp of the future all Classical the stamp of the moment.

^<sup>1 See Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XII, p. 502. Fragments of the older collection referred to were found in the vicinity. — Tr.

TV

^<sup>1 See Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol XXVI, p. 315. — Tr.

^<sup>2 See Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, I, 1, p. 350.

^<sup>3 The background of this is Etruscan law, the primitive form of the Roman. Rome was at Etruscan city.

⁴ Busolt, Griechische Staatskunde, p. 528.

ances. - Tr.

^<sup>2 Cf. Ch. IV below.

^<sup>2 Sohm, Institutionen (14) p. 101. [This is the edict of "Julian" (Salvius Julianus, urban prætor). Romanists are not agreed as to how far, if at all, it included material derived from the decisions of the peregrin prætor. See Professor Goudy's article "Roman Law," Ency. Brit., XI ed., p. 563. — Tr.]

^<sup>8 Lenel, Das Edictum perpetuum (1907); L. Wenger, p. 168.

Even the multiplication table of the children assumes the elements of dynamics in counting

V. Mayr II, 1, p. 85; Sohm, p. 105.

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

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

Classical law is a law of bodies. In the general stock composing the world it distinguishes bodily Persons and bodily Things and, like a sort of Euclidean mathematic of public life, establishes ratios between them. The affinity between mathematical and legal thought is very close. The intention, in both, is to take the prima facie data, to separate out the sensuous-incidental, and to find the intellectually basic principle — the pure form of the object, the pure type of the situation, the pure connexity of cause and effect. Life, in the Classical, presents itself to the critical waking-consciousness of the Classical man in a form penetrated with Euclidean character, and the image that is generated in the legal mind is one of bodies, of positional relations between bodies, and of reciprocal effects of bodies by contact and reaction — just as with Democritus's atoms. It is juristic statics.²

V

^<sup>1 Enzyklopädie der Rechtswissensch., I, 357.

⁸ Sohm, p. 220.

² For Islam as a "juristic person" see M. Horten, Die religiose Gedankenwelt des Volkes im beutigem clam (1917), p. xxiv.

Acts XV. Herein lies the germ of the idea of a Church law.

³ See Ch. VII below. We can venture to make the label so positive because the adherents of all the Late Classical cults were bound together in devout consensus, just as the primitive Christian communities were.

^<sup>1 In the Twelve Tables connubium was disallowed even between the patrician and plebian citizens of Rome itself. [The hold of the patricians on this privilege, however, was already exceedingly precarious, and it vanished a few years later in the lex Canuleia. — Tr.]

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

^<sup>l Lenel, I, 380.

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

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

^<sup>2 Coupled with the destruction of all other documents.

It was not long before it became the habit, not to apply the old laws of the city of Rome to the fact-material of the given case, but to quote the jurists' texts like the Bible.³ What does this signify? For our Romanists it is a sign of decadence, but looked at from the view-point of the Arabian world, it is just the reverse — a proof that Arabian man did eventually succeed in making an alien and imposed literature inwardly his own, in the form admissible for his own world-feeling. With this the completeness of the opposition between the Classical and the Arabian world-feeling becomes manifest.

VI

Whereas the Classical law was made by burghers on the basis of practical experience, the Arabian came from God, who manifested it through the intellect of chosen and enlightened men. The Roman distinction between just and fas (such as it was, for the content even of fas had proceeded from human reflection) became meaningless. The law, of whatever kind, spiritual or secular, came into being, as stated in the first words of Justinian's Digests, Deo auctore. The authoritativeness of Classical laws rests upon their success, that of the Arabian on the majesty of the name that they bear. But it matters very considerably indeed in a man's feelings whether he regards law as an expression of some fellow man's will or as an element of the divine dispensation. In the one case he either sees for himself that the law is right or else yields to force, but in the other he devoutly acknowledges ("Islam" = to commit, devote). The Oriental does not ask to see either the practical object of the law that is applied to him or the logical grounds of its judgments. The relation of the cadi to the people, therefore, has nothing in common with that of the prætor to the citizens. The latter bases his decisions upon an insight trained and tested in high positions, the former upon a spirit that is effective and immanent in him

Mayr, IV, pp. 45, et seq.

^<sup>1 Mitteis (Röm. Privatrecht bis auf die Zeit Dioklezians (1908), preface) remarks how, "while the ancient law-forms were retained, the law itself nevertheless became something quite different."

^<sup>2 Head of the exilic Iews under Persian overlordship. — Tr.

and speaks through his mouth. But it follows from this that their respective relations to written law — the prætor's to his edict, the cadi's to the jurists' texts — must be entirely different. It is a quintessence of concentrated experience that the prætor makes his own, but the texts are a sort of oracle that the cadi esoterically questions. It does not matter in the least to the cadi what a passage originally meant or why it was framed. He consults the words — even the letters — and he does so not at all for their everyday meanings, but for the magic relations in which they must stand towards the case before him. We know this relation of the "spirit" to the "letter" from the Gnosis, from the early-Christian, Jewish, and Persian apocalyptic and mystical literature, from the Neopythagorean philosophy, from the Kabbalah; and there is not the slightest doubt that the Latin codices were used in exactly the same way in the minor judicial practice of the Aramæan world. The conviction that the letters contain secret meanings, penetrated with the Spirit of God, finds imaginative expression in the fact (mentioned above) that all religions of the Arabian world formed scripts of their own, in which the holy books had to be written and which maintained themselves with astounding tenacity as badges of the respective "nations" even after changes of language.¹

^<sup>2 M. Horten, D. rel. Gedankenwelt d. Volkes im beut, Islam, p. xvi. Cf. Chapter VII below,

^<sup>3 Mayr, IV, 45, et seq. [Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XXIII, p. 570. — Tr.]

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

^471. See Ency. Bris., XI ed., article "Chalcedon, Council of," and references therein. — Tr.

VII

Wenger, p. 180.

³ Sachau, Syrische Rechtsbücher, Vol. III.

Bertholet, Kulturgeschichte Israels, pp. 200, et seg.

^<sup>2 Krumbacher, Byzantinische Literatur-Geschichte, p. 606.

^<sup>1 See Professor Maitland's article "English Law" in Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. IX. — Tr.

^<sup>2 Sohm, Inst., p. 156.

^<sup>3 See J. Janssen, Hist. German People at the End of the Middle Ages, English translation, Book IV, Ch. I-II. — Tr.

What, in fact, was it that under the high-sounding name passed into the intellectual keeping of a handful of Gothic men? About 1100, at the University of Bologna, a German, Irnerius, had made that unique manuscript of the Pandects the object of a veritable Scholasticism. He transferred the Lombard method to the new text, "the truth of which, as a ratio scripta, was believed in as implicitly as the Bible and Aristotle." Truth! — but the Gothic understanding, tied to the Gothic life-content, was incapable even of distantly guessing at the spirit of these texts, for the principles fixed in them were the principles of a civilized and megalopolitan life. This school of the glossators, like Scholasticism in general, stood under the spell of concept-realism; as they held the genuine real, the substance of the world, to be not in things, but in universal concepts, so they maintained that the law was to be found not in custom and usage as displayed in the despised 2 Lombarda, but in the manipulation of abstract notions. Their interest in the book was purely dialectical — never was it in their minds to apply their work to life. It was only after 1300, and then slowly, that their anti-Lombard glosses and summæ made their way into the cities of the Renaissance. The jurists of the Late Gothic, above all Bartolus, had fused canon and Germanic law into one whole with a definitely practical intention, and into it they brought ideas of actuality — here, as in Dracon's code and the Imperial Edicts from Theodosius to Justinian, the actuality of a Culture that is on the threshold of its "Late" stage. It was the creation of Bartolus that became effective in Spain and Germany as "Roman law"; only in France did the jurists of the Baroque, after Cujacius and Donellus, get back from the Scholastic to the Byzantine text.

The punning contrast of Lombard faex (excrement) and Roman lex is Huguccio's (1200)

W. Goetz, Arch. für Kulturgeschichte, 10, 28, et seq.

^<sup>4 See the article "Canon Law" in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

^<sup>5 See Sohm's last work. Das althatholische Kirchenrecht und das Dekret Gratians (1918)

⁶ See Ch. VII below.

law called "Roman" which presently, after Bartolus, was infused into all study of the texts of Justinian themselves. And it shows us, in the domain of jurisprudence as elsewhere, that great dissidence, inherent in the Faustian, which produced the gigantic conflict between the Papacy and the Empire. The destruction between fas and jus, impossible in the Arabian world, was inevitable in the Western. They are two expressions of a will-to-power over the infinite, but the will behind "temporal" legislation is rooted in custom and lays hands on the generations of the future, while that of "spiritual" originates in mystical certainty and pronounces a timeless and eternal law. This battle between equally matched opponents has never yet been ended, and it is visible even to-day in our law of marriage, with its opposition of the ecclesiastical and the civil wedding.

VIII

What has "Roman" law been for us hitherto? What has it spoilt? What can it be for us in the future?

All through our legal history runs, as basic motive, the conflict between

And consequently we possess a private law that rests on the shadowy foundations of the Late Classical economy. The intense embitterment which, in these beginnings of our Civilization's economy, opposes the name of Capitalism to the name of Socialism comes very largely from the fact that scholarly jurisprudence, and under its influence educated thought generally, have tied

^<sup>1 The permanently valid element in English law is the constant form of an incessant development by the courts.

^<sup>2 If the higher courts alone are meant, the number is well below fifty for England and Wales. Scots law is independent of English and has its own jurisprudence. — Tr.

^<sup>3 Inst., p. 170.

How was it that in 1900 the theft of electric power — after grotesque discussions as to whether the matter in dispute was a corporeal thing 1 — had to be dealt with under an ad hoc statute? Why was it impossible to work the substance of patent law into the ensemble of the law about things? Why was copyright law unable conceptually to differentiate the intellectual creation, its communicable form the manuscript, and the objective product in print? Why, in contradiction with the law of things, had the artistic and the material property in a picture to be distinguished by separating acquisition of the original from acquisition of the right to reproduce it? Why is the misappropriation of a business idea or a scheme of organization unpunishable, and theft of the piece of paper on which it is set forth punishable? Because even to-day we are dominated by the Classical idea of the material thing. We live otherwise. Our instinctive experience is subject to functional concepts, such as working power, inventiveness, enterprise, such as intellectual and bodily, artistic and organizing, energies and capacities and talents. In our physics (of which the theory, advanced though it is, is but a copy of our present mode of life) the old idea of a body has in principle ceased to exist — as in this very instance of electrical power. Why is our law conceptually helpless in the presence of the great facts of modern economics? Because persons, too, are known to it only as hadies 3

¹ Similar problems are now (1027) arising in connexion with radio broadcasting - Ten

^<sup>8 As evidenced in terms of French law like "Société anonyme," "raison sociale," "personne juridique." — Tr.

ideas. No laws in the world make this last and deepest element explicit, because — just because — it is self-evident. In all of them the essential is tacitly presupposed; in application it is not only the formula but also, and primarily, the inexpressible element beneath it that the people inwardly understands and can practise. Every law is, to the extent that it would be impossible to exaggerate, customary law. Let the statute define the words; it is life that explains them.

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

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

^<sup>1 Note, in this connexion, the remarkable development in modern American industry of a professional managerial class, distinct from the capitalist, the technician, and the "worker." — Tr.

• 1. An immediate, extended, and practical experience in the economic life of the present.
• 2. An exact knowledge of the legal history of the West, with constant comparison of German, English, and "Roman" development.

CHAPTER IV CITIES AND PEOPLES

(A)

THE SOUL OF THE CITY

CHAPTER IV

CITIES AND PEOPLES

(A) HE SOUL OF THE CITY

¹ Published 1857. English translation, 1872. — Tr.

That which stands on the hills of Tiryns and Mycenæ is Pfalz and Burg of root-Germanic type. The palaces of Crete — which are not kings' castles, but huge cult-buildings for a crowd of priests and priestesses — are equipped with megalopolitan — nay, Late-Roman — luxury. At the foot of those hills were crowded the huts of yeoman and vassals, but in Crete (Gournia, Hagia Triada) the excavation of towns and villas has shown that the requirements were those of high civilization, and the building-technique that of a long experience, accustomed to catering for the most pampered taste in furniture and wall-decoration, and familiar with lighting, water-circulation, staircases, and suchlike problems.² In the one, the plan of the house is a strict life-symbol; in the other, the expression of a refined utilitarianism. Compare the Kamares vases and the frescoes of smooth stucco with everything that is genuinely Mycenæan — they are, through and through, the product of an industrial art, clever and empty, and not of any grand and deep art of heavy, clumsy, but forceful symbolism like that which in Mycenæ was ripening towards the geometric style. It is, in a word, not a style but a taste.³ In Mycenæ was housed a primitive race which chose its sites according to soil-value and facilities for defence, whereas the Minoan population settled in business foci, as may be observed very clearly in the case of Philakopi on Melos which was established for the export trade in obsidian. A Mycenæan palace is a promise, a Minoan something that is ending. But it was just the same in the West about 800 — the Frankish and Visigothic farms and manor-houses stretched from the Loire to the Ebro, while south of them lay the Moorish castles, villas, and mosques of Cordova and Granada.

It is surely no accident that the peak of this Minoan luxury coincides with the period of the great Egyptian revolution, and particularly the Hyksos time (1780–1580 B.C.). The Egyptian craftsmen may well have fled in those days to the peaceful islands and even as far as the strongholds of the mainland, as in a later instance the Byzantine scholars fled to Italy. For it is axiomatic that the Minoan Culture is a part of the Egyptian, and we should be able to realize

¹ Without Alexander, and even before him, for Alexander neither kindled nor spread that light; he did not lead, but followed its path to the East.

D. Fimmen, Die kretisch-mykenische Kultur (1921), p. 210.

11

Dieterich, Byzant. Charakterköpfe, pp. 136, et seq.

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

But the real miracle is the birth of the soul of a town. A mass-soul of a wholly new kind — whose last foundations will remain hidden from us for

Even admitting within itself the animals of its fields. — Tr.

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

Dehio, Gesch. d. deutschen Kunst (1919), pp. 13, et seq.

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

III

^<sup>1 Eduard Meyer, Gesch. d. Altertums, I, p. 188.

The English parallel is Winchester. — 1r.

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

And these stone visages that have incorporated in their light-world the humanness of the citizen himself and, like him, are all eye and intellect — how distinct the language of form that they talk, how different from the rustic drawl of the landscape! The silhouette of the great city, its roofs and chimneys, the towers and domes on the horizon! What a language is imparted to us through one look at Nürnberg or Florence, Damascus or Moscow, Peking

In the earliest time the landscape-figure alone dominates man's eyes. It gives form to his soul and vibrates in tune therewith. Feelings and woodland rustlings beat together; the meadows and the copses adapt themselves to its shape, to its course, even to its dress. The village, with its quiet hillocky roofs, its evening smoke, its wells, its hedges, and its beasts, lies completely fused and embedded in the landscape. The country town confirms the country, is an intensification of the picture of the country. It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture. The town that once upon a time humbly accommodated itself to that picture now insists that it shall be the same as itself. Extra muros, chaussées and woods and pastures become a park, mountains become tourists' view-points; and intra muros arises an imitation Nature, fountains in lieu of springs, flower-beds, formal pools, and clipped hedges in lieu of meadows and ponds and bushes. In a village the thatched roof is still hill-like and the street is of the same nature as the baulk of earth between fields. But here the picture is of deep, long gorges between high, stony houses filled with coloured dust and strange uproar, and men dwell in these houses, the like of which no nature-being has ever conceived. Costumes, even faces, are adjusted to a background of stone. By day there is a street traffic of strange colours and tones, and by night a new light that outshines the moon. And the yokel stands helpless on the pavement, understanding nothing and understood

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

IV

in the name of "the People," which henceforward means exclusively the people of the city. Democracy is the political form in which the townsman's outlook upon the world is demanded of the peasantry also. The urban intellect reforms the great religion of the springtime and sets up by the side of the old religion of noble and priest, the new religion of the Tiers État, liberal science. The city assumes the lead and control of economic history in replacing the primitive values of the land, which are for ever inseparable from the life and thought of the rustic, by the absolute idea of money as distinct from goods. The immemorial country word for exchange of goods is "barter"; even when one of the things exchanged is precious metal, the underlying idea of the process is not yet monetary — i.e., it does not involve the abstraction of value from things and its fixation in metallic or fictitious quantities intended to measure things qua "commodities." Caravan expeditions and Viking voyages in the springtime are made between land-settlements and imply barter or booty, whereas in the Late period they are made between cities and mean "money." This is the distinction between the Normans before and the Hansa and Venetians after the Crusades, and between the seafarers of Mycenæan times and those of the later colonization period in Greece. The City means not only intellect, but also money.

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

^<sup>2 See Ch. XIII below.

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

v

These final cities are wholly intellect. Their houses are no longer, as those of the Ionic and the Baroque were, derivatives of the old peasant's house,

Now the old mature cities with their Gothic nucleus of cathedral, town-halls, and high-gabled streets, with their old walls, towers, and gates, ringed about by the Baroque growth of brighter and more elegant patricians' houses, palaces, and hall-churches, begin to overflow in all directions in formless masses, to eat into the decaying country-side with their multiplied barrack-tenements and utility buildings, and to destroy the noble aspect of the old time by clearances and rebuildings. Looking down from one of the old towers upon the sea of houses, we perceive in this petrification of a historic being the exact epoch that marks the end of organic growth and the beginning of an inorganic and therefore unrestrained process of massing without limit. And now, too, appears that artificial, mathematical, utterly land-alien product of a pure intellectual satisfaction in the appropriate, the city of the city-architect. In all Civilizations alike, these cities aim at the chessboard form, which is the symbol of soullessness. Regular rectangle-blocks astounded Herodotus in Babylon and Cortez in Tenochtitlan. In the Classical world the series of "abstract" cities begins with Thurii, which was "planned" by Hippodamus of Miletus in 441. Priene, whose chessboard scheme entirely ignores the ups and downs of the site, Rhodes, and Alexandria follow, and become in turn models for innumerable provincial cities of the Imperial Age. The Islamic architects laid out Baghdad from 762, and the giant city of Samarra a century later, according to plan.(^1) In the West-European and American world the lay-out of Washington in 1791 is the first big example.(^2) There can be no doubt

Even in this final shape of his being, the Classical man's form-ideal remains the corporeal point. Whereas the giant cities of our present confess our irresistible tendency towards the infinite — our suburbs and garden cities, invading the wide country-side, our vast and comprehensive network of roads, and within the thickly built areas a controlled fast traffic on, below, and above straight, broad streets — the genuine Classical world-city ever strove, not to expand, but to thicken — the streets narrow and cramped, impossible for fast traffic (although this was fully developed on the great Roman roads), entire unwillingness to live in suburbs or even to make suburbs possible. Even at that stage the city must needs be a body, thick and round, $\sigma \omega \mu a$ in the strictest sense. The synecism that in the early Classical had gradually drawn the land-folk into the cities, and so created the type of the Polis, repeated itself at the last in absurd form; everyone wanted to live in the middle of the city, in its densest nucleus, for otherwise he could not feel himself to be the urban man that he was. All these cities are only cités, inner towns. The new synecism formed, instead of suburban zones, the world of the upper floors. In the year 74 Rome, in spite of its immense population, had the ridiculously small perimeter of nineteen and a half kilometres [twelve miles]. Consequently these city-bodies extended in general not in breadth, but more and more upward. The block-tenements of Rome such as the famous Insula Feliculæ, rose, with a street breadth of only three to five metres [ten to seventeen feet] to heights that have never been seen in Western Europe and are

In the case of Canada, not merely great regions, but the whole country has been picketed out in country for future development. — Tr.

^<sup>2 It has been left to the Western Civilization of present-day Rome to build the garden suburbs that the Classical Civilization could have built. — Tr.

⁴ The city which the Egyptian "Julian the Apostate," Amenophis IV (Akhenaton) built himself in Tell-el-Amarna had streets up to 45 m. [149 ft.] wide.

seen in only a few cities in America. Near the Capitol, the roofs already reached to the level of the hill-saddle.¹ But always the splendid mass-cities harbour lamentable poverty and degraded habits, and the attics and mansards, the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw man — in Baghdad and in Babylon, just as in Tenochtitlan and to-day in London and Berlin. Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced to living in one of these wretched upper-floor tenements of Rome.

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

^<sup>1 Pöhlmann, Aus Altertum und Gegenwart (1910), pp. 211, et seq.

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

And then, when Being is sufficiently uprooted and Waking-Being sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps forward to make an end of the drama — the sterility of civilized man. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of Causality (as modern science naturally enough has tried to grasp it); it is to be understood as an essentially metaphysical turn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live — he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it

^<sup>1 Some years ago a French peasant was brought to notice whose family had occupied its glebe since the ninth century. — Tr.

his own "companion for life," becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the "higher spiritual affinity" in which both parties are "free"—free, that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say "that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself." The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of "mutual understanding." It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady's who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne's who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine's who "belongs to herself"—they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful. The same fact, in conjunction with the same arguments, is to be found in the Alexandrian, in the Roman, and, as a matter of course, in every other civilized society—and conspicuously in that in which Buddha grew up. And in Hellenism and in the nineteenth century, as in the times of Lao-Tzu and the Charvaka doctrine, there is an ethic for childless intelligences, and a literature about the inner conflicts of Nora and Nana. The "quiverful," which was still an honourable enough spectacle in the days of Werther, becomes something rather provincial. The father of many children is for the great city a subject for caricature; Ibsen did not fail to note it, and presented it in his Love's Comedy.

¹ Shaw. The Quintessence of Ibsen.

² An ancient Hindu materialism - Tr.

^<sup>8 For what follows see Eduard Meyer, Kl. Schriften (1910), pp. 145, et seq.

¹ Hist. Nat., XVIII. 7. - Tr.

VΙ

^<sup>1 The amphitheatres of Nîmes and Arles were filled up by mean townlets that used the outer walls their fortifications. — Tr.

^<sup>2 Strabo, Pausanias, Dio Chrysostom, Avienus, etc. See E. Meyer, K. Schrifen, pp. 164, et seq. ³ The Colosseum of Rome itself in due course fell into this decay and we read in the guide-books that "its flora were once famous"—420 wild species lived in its ruins. If this could happen in Rome, we need not be surprised at the quick, almost catastrophic, conquest of the Maya cities by tropical vegetation. — Tr.

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

But while this process of extension was overpassing all frontiers, the

CHAPTER V CITIES AND PEOPLES

(B)
PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES

CHAPTER V

CITIES AND PEOPLES

(B)

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES

1

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

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

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

But Being can be thought of without waking-consciousness, whereas the reverse is not the case — i.e., there are race-beings without language, but no languages without race. All that is of race, therefore, possesses its proper expression, independent of any kind of waking-consciousness and common to plant and animal. This expression — not to be confounded with the expression-language which consists in an active alteration of the expression — is not meant for witnesses, but is simply there; it is physiognomy. Not that it stops at the plant; in every living language, too (and how significant the word "living"!) we can detect, besides the Taboo side that is learnable, an entirely untransferable quality of race that the old vessels of the language cannot pass on to alien successors; it lies in melody, rhythm, stress; in colour, ring, and tempo of the expression; in idiom, in accompanying gesture. On this account it is necessary to distinguish between language and speaking, the first being in itself a dead stock of signs, and the second the activity that operates with the signs.² When we cease to be able to hear and see directly how a language is spoken, thenceforward it is only its ossature and not its flesh that we can know. This is so with Sumerian, Gothic, Sanskrit, and all other languages that we have merely deciphered from texts and inscriptions, and we are right in calling these languages dead, for the human communities that were formed by them have vanished. We know the Egyptian tongue, but not the tongues of the Egyptians. Of Augustan Latin we know approximately the sound-values of the letters and the meaning of the words, but we do not know how the oration

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

are for ever taking over ornament-motives) in order to be used with perfect sureness as elements of their own form-language. In early times the fact that a people has shown itself the stronger, or the feeling that its language possesses superior efficacy, is enough to induce others to give up their own language and — with genuinely religious awe — to take its language to themselves. Follow out the speech-changes of the Normans, whom we find in Normandy, England, Sicily, and Constantinople with different languages in each place, and ever ready to exchange one for another. Piety towards the mother tongue — the very term testifies to deep ethical forces, and accounts for the bitterness of our ever-recurring language-battles — is a trait of the Late Western soul, almost unknowable for the men of other Cultures and entirely so for the primitive. Unfortunately, our historians not only are sensible of this, but tacitly extend it as a postulate over their entire field, which leads to a multitude of fallacious conclusions as to the bearing of linguistic discoveries upon the fortunes of "peoples" — think of the reconstruction of the "Dorian migration," argued from the distribution of later Greek dialects. It is impossible, therefore, to draw conclusions as to the fortunes of the race side of peoples from mere placenames, personal names, inscriptions, and dialects. Never do we know a priori, whether a folkname stands for a language-body, or a race-part, or both, or neither — besides which, folk-names themselves, and even land-names, have, as such, Destinies of their own.

11

^<sup>1 See p. 29 above

This significant frontier line has escaped the observation of art-research—although Dehio ¹ in one place remarks that the old German wooden house has nothing to do with the later great architecture, which arose quite independently—and the result has been a perpetual perplexity in method, of which the art-savant is sensible enough, but which he cannot understand. His science gathers, indiscriminately in all the "pre-" and "primitive" periods, all sorts of gear, arms, pottery, fabrics, funerary monuments, and houses, and considers them from the point of view of form as well as that of decoration; and, proceeding thus, it is not until he comes to the organic history of painting, sculpture, and architecture (i.e., the self-contained and differentiated arts) that he finds himself on firm ground. But, unknowing, he has stepped over a frontier between two worlds, that of soul-expression and that of visual expression-language. The house, and like it the completely unstudied basic (i.e., customary) forms of pots, weapons, clothing, and gear, belong to the Totem side. They characterize, not a taste, but a way of fighting, of dwelling, of working. Every primitive seat is the offset of a racial mode of body-posing, every jar-handle an extension of the supple arm. Domestic painting and dressmaking, the garment as ornament, the decoration of weapons and implements, belong, on the contrary, to the Taboo side of life, and indeed for primitive man the patterns and motives on these things possess even magical properties.² We all know the Germanic sword-blades of the Migrations with their Oriental ornamentation, and the Mycenæan strongholds with their Minoan artistry. It is the distinction between blood and sense, race and speech, politics and religion.

^<sup>8 W. Altmann, Die ital. Rundbauten (1906).

^<sup>4 A striking case in point is the Roman military camp. See Vol. I (English edition), p. 185, foot-note. — Tr.

Hellenistic city-architect tampered with the megaron form of Mycenæ and Tiryns and the old Greek peasant-house described by Galen. The Saxon and Franconian peasant-house kept its essential nucleus unimpaired right from the country farm, through the burgher-house of the old Free Cities, up to the patrician buildings of the eighteenth century, while Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Empire styles glided over it one after the other, clothing it from cellar to garret with their essences, but never perverting the Soul of the House. And the same is true of the furniture-forms, in which we have to distinguish carefully the psychological from the artistic treatment. In particular, the evolution of the Northern seat-furniture is, right up to the club arm-chair, a piece of racehistory and not of what is called style-history. Every other character can deceive us as to the fortunes of race—the Etruscan names amongst the "Seafolk" defeated by Rameses III, the enigmatic inscription of Lemnos, the wall-paintings in the tombs of Etruria, afford no sure evidences of the bodily connexion of these men. Although towards the end of the Stone Age a telling ornamentation arose and continued in the vast region east of the Carpathians, it is perfectly possible that race superseded race there. If we possessed in and Chlodwig, we should not have the least inkling of the event that we know as the "great Migrations." But the presence of an oval house in the Ægean region ¹ and of another and very striking example of it in Rhodesia, ² and the much-discussed concordance of the Saxon peasant-house with that of the Lib-yan Kabyle disclose a piece of race-history. Ornaments spread when a people incorporates them in its form-language, but a house-type is only transplanted along with its race. The disappearance of an ornament means no more than a change of language, but when a bouse-type vanishes it means that race is extinguished.

It follows that art-history, besides taking care to begin properly with the Culture, must not neglect even in its course to separate the race side carefully from the language proper. At the outset of a Culture two well-defined forms of a higher order rise up over the peasant village, as expressions of being and language of waking-being. They are the castle and the cathedral.³ In them the distinction between Totem and Taboo, longing and fear, blood and intellect, rises to a grand symbolism. The ancient Egyptian, the ancient Chinese, the Classical, the South-Arabian, and the Western castle stands, as the home of continuing generations, very near to the peasant cottage, and both, as copies of the realities of living, breeding, and dying, lie outside all art-history. The history of the German Burgen is a piece of race-history throughout. On them both, early ornament does indeed venture to spread itself, beautifying here

^<sup>2 Medieval Rhodesia (London, 1906).

⁸ Cf. Ch. X.

ш

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

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

^<sup>2 The sudden fear of some animal or object seen, believed to result in her child's bearing the mark of it. Cf. Jacob and the speckled cattle (Genesis xxx, 37). The attitude of biologists to this question is not negative, but non-committal. — Tr.

pean Jew, with his immense race-energy and his thousand years of ghetto life; and it always will forge a population into a race whenever it has stood for long together spiritually firm and united in the presence of its Destiny. Where a race-ideal exists, as it does, supremely, in the Early period of the Culture—the Vedic, the Homeric, the knightly times of the Hohenstaufen—the yearning of a ruling class towards this ideal, its will to be just so and not otherwise, operates (quite independently of the choosing of wives) towards actualizing this ideal and eventually achieves it. Further, there is a statistical aspect of the matter which has received far less attention than it should. For every human being alive to-day there were a million ancestors even in A.D. 1300 and ten million in A.D. 1000. This means that every German now living, without exception, is a blood-relative of every European of the age of the Crusades and that the relationship becomes a hundred and a thousand times more intensely close as we narrow the limits of its field, so that within twenty generations or less the population of a land grows together into one single family; and this, together with the choice and voice of the blood that courses through the generations, ever driving congeners into one another's arms, dissolving and breaking marriages, evading or forcing all obstacles of custom, leads to innumerable procreations that in utter unconsciousness fulfil the will of the race.

^<sup>1 J. Ranke, Der Mensch (1912), II, p. 205.

^<sup>1 Cf. D. Randall-MacIver. The Etruscans (1928). Ch. I. - Tr.

IV

Art is fully developed in the animals. So far as man can get at it by way of analogy, it consists for them in rhythmic movement ("dance") and sound-formation ("song"). But this is by no means the limit of artistic impression on the animal itself.

Of the extensiveness of both these speech-worlds in the waking-consciousness of man we to-day can scarcely form an idea. Expression-speech, which appears in the earliest times with all the religious seriousness of the Taboo, includes not only weighty and strict ornament — which in the beginning coincides completely with the idea of art and makes every stiff, inert thing into a vehicle of the expression — but also the solemn ceremonial — whose web of formulæ spreads over the whole of public life, and even over that of the family ¹ — and the language of costume, which is contained in clothing, tattooing, and personal adornment, all of which have a uniform significance. The investigators of the nineteenth century vainly attempted to trace the origin of clothing to the feeling of shame or to utilitarian motives. It is in fact intelligible only as the means of an expression-speech, and as such it is developed to a grandiose level in all the high Civilizations, including our own of to-day. We need only think of the dominant part played by the "mode" in our whole public life and doings, the regulation attire for important occasions, the nuances of wear for this and that social function, the wedding-dress, mourning; of the military uniform, the priest's robes, orders and decorations, mitre and tonsure, periwig and queue, powder, rings, styles of hairdressing; of all the significant displays and concealments of person, the costume of the mandarin and the senator, the odalisque and the nun; of the court-state of Nero, Saladin and Montezuma — not to mention the details of peasant costumes, the language of flowers, colours, and precious stones. As for the language of religion, it is superfluous to mention it, for all this is religion.

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

^<sup>1 Jesus says to the Seventy whom he is sending out on mission: "And salute no man on the way" (Luke x, 4). The ceremonial of greeting on the high-road is so complicated that people in a hurry have to omit it. A. Bertholet. Kulturesschichte Israels (1919), p. 162.

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

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

Romantics — by Theocritus and Brentano in lyric poetry, by Reger in music, by Kierkegaard in religion.

v

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

when the name inaugurated the transformation and spiritualization of communication-technique—the pre-eminence of the eye over the other sense-organs. Man's awakeness and awareness was in an illuminated space, his depth-experience ² was a radiation outward towards light-sources and light-resistances, and he conceived of his ego as a middle point in the light. "Visible" or "invisible" was the alternative which governed the state of understanding in which the first names arose. Were the first numina, perhaps, things of the light-world that were felt, heard, observed in their effects, but not seen? No doubt the group of names, like everything else that marks a turning-point in the course of world-happenings, must have developed both rapidly and powerfully. The entire light-world, in which everything possesses the properties of position and duration in space, was—in the midst of what tensions of cause and effect, thing and property, object and subject!— very soon listed with innumerable names, and so anchored in the memory, for what we now call "memory" is the capacity of storing for the understanding, by means of the name, the named. Over the realm of understood visuals (Sehdinge) supervenes a more intellectual realm of namings, which shares with it he logical property of being purely extensive, disposed in polarity, and ruled by the causal principle. All word-types like cases and pronouns and prepositions (which arise, of course, much later) have a causal or local meaning in respect of named units; adjectives, and verbs also, have frequently come into existence in pairs of opposites; often (as in the E'we languages of West Africa investigated by Westermann) the same word is pronounced low or high to denote for example great and small, far and near, passive and active.³ Later these relics of gesture-language pass completely into the word-form, 4 as we see clearly, for example, in the Greek μακρόs and μικρόs and the μ-sounds of Egyptian designations of

^<sup>2 See Vol. I. p. 172. — Tr.

⁴ Possibly connected with this is the emphatic antithesis characterizing many of our proverbs and everyday idioms — e.g., "up hill and down dale" ("par monts et vaux," "bergauf bergab"), meaning hardly more than "everywhere" — Te.

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

¹ Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaus, 1910.

relatively largest mechanical units employed "sentences" and the relatively smallest "words." Over this range extends the validity of grammatical laws. But as soon as we pass from theory to practice, we see that language as currently used is no longer such a mechanism; it obeys not laws, but pulse. Thus a race-character is involved, a priori, in the way in which the matter to be communicated is set in sentences. Sentences are not the same for Tacitus and Napoleon as for Cicero and Nietzsche. The Englishman orders his material syntactically in a different way from the German. Not the ideas and thoughts, but the thinking, the kind of life, the blood, determine in the primitive, Classical, Chinese, and Western speech-communities the type of the sentence-unit, and with it the mechanical relation of the word to the sentence. The boundary between grammar and syntax should be placed at the point where the mechanical of speech ceases and the organic of speaking begins — usages, custom, the physiognomy of the way that a man employs to express himself. The other boundary lies where the mechanical structure of the word passes into the organic factors of sound-formation and expression. Even the children of immigrants can often be recognized by the way in which the English "th" is pronounced — a race-trait of the land. Only that which lies between these limits is the "language," properly so called, which has system, is a technical instrument, and can be invented, improved, changed, and worn out; enunciation and expression, on the contrary, adhere to the race. We recognize a person known to us, without seeing him, by his pronunciation, and not only that, but we can recognize a member of an alien race even if he speaks perfectly correct German. The great sound-modifications, like the Old High German in Carolingian times and the Middle High German in the Late Gothic, have territorial frontiers and affect only the speaking of the language, not the inner form of sentence and word.

^<sup>1 See the article "Bantu Languages," by Sir H. H. Johnston, Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

Even calling something "invisible" is a definition of it under the light-aspect.

And in this wise, too, arises that disunity which seems to us inseparable from the essence of man, but is really only the expression of the dominance of word-language in his waking-consciousness. This instrument of communication between Ego and Tu has, by reason of its perfection, fashioned out of the animal understanding of sensation, a thinking-in-words which stands proxy for sensation. Subtle thinking—"splitting hairs," as it is called—is conversing with oneself in word-significances. It is the activity that no kind of language but the language of words can subserve, and it becomes, with the perfection of the language, distinctive of the life-habit of whole classes of human beings. The divorce of speech, rigid and devitalized, from speaking, which makes it impossible to include the whole truth in a verbal utterance, has particularly far-reaching consequences in the sign-system of words. Abstract thinking consists in the use of a finite word-framework into which it is sought to squeeze the whole infinite content of life. Concepts kill Being and falsify Waking-Being. Long ago in the springtime of language-history, while understanding had still to struggle in order to hold its own with sensation, this mechanization was without importance for life. But now, from a being who occasionally thought, man has become a thinking being, and it is the ideal of every thought-system to subject life, once and for all, to the domination of intellect. This is achieved in theory by according validity only to the known and branding the actual as a sham and a delusion. It is achieved in practice by forcing the voices of the blood to be silent in the presence of universal ethical principles.¹

VI

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

¹ See pp. 29, et seq.

^<sup>2 The English reader may refer to Karlgren's Sound and Symbol in Chinese, already mentioned, for details. — Tr.

^<sup>8 See the article "Indo-European Languages," Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

the declension of ordinary Hellenistic Greek, and the passive vanished from the conjugation entirely. The Western languages, although of the most miscellaneous provenance imaginable — the Germanic from primitive and the Romanic from highly civilized stock — modify in the same direction, the Romanic cases having become reduced to one, and the English, after the Reformation, to zero. Ordinary German definitely shed the genitive at the beginning of the nineteenth century and is now in process of abolishing the dative. Only after trying to translate a piece of difficult and pregnant prose — say of Tacitus or Mommsen — "back" into some very ancient language rich in inflexions does one realize how meantime the technique of signs has vaporized into a technique of thoughts, which now only needs to employ the signs — abbreviated, but replete with meaning — merely as the counters in a game that only the initiates of the particular speech-communion understand. This is why to a west-European, the sacred Chinese texts must always be in the fullest sense a sealed book; but the same holds good also for the primary words of every other Culture-language — the Greek $\lambda o \gamma \delta s$ and $\delta \rho \chi \dot{\eta}$ , the Sanskrit Atman and Braman — indications of the world-outlook of their respective Cultures that no one not bred in the Culture can comprehend.

See p. 140 above. — Tr.

See Ency Brit XI ed Vol XVI p asth - Te

P. Jensen, Sitz. Preuss. Akademie (1919), pp. 367, et seg.

^<sup>2 L. Hahn, Rom und Romanismus im griech-rom. Osten (1906)

^<sup>3 See the article "Book-keeping" in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

horse, at a much later date, the bearers of these names being apparently first soldiers of fortune and afterwards potentates.¹ May it be that about 1600 these land-Vikings, these first Reiter — men grown up inseparable from their horses, the terrifying originals of the Centaur-legend — established themselves more or less everywhere in the Northern plains as adventurer-chiefs, bringing with them the speech and divinities of the Indian feudal age? And the same with the Aryan aristocratic ideals of breed and conduct. According to what has been said above on race, this would explain the race-ideal of Aryan-speaking regions without any necessity for "migrations" of a "primitive" folk. After all, it was in this way that the knightly Crusaders founded their states in the East — and in exactly the same locality as the heroes with Mitanni names had done so twenty-five hundred years before.

3711

1 See below.

⁴ See Lidzbarski, Sitz. Berl. Akad. (1916), p 1218. There is plentiful material in M. Miese, Die Gesetze der Schriftgeschichte (1919).

^<sup>1 P. Kretschmer, in Gercke-Norden, Einl. i. d. Altertumswissenschaft, I, p. 551

^<sup>2 See the articles "Romance Languages" and "Latin Language," Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr

³ Cf. p. 122.

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

VIII

traces even to-day of the Thirty Years' War in its want of established norms, and early Christian dogma would have acquired a different shape if the oldest Scriptures, instead of being one and all written in Greek, and been set down in Syriac form like those of the Mandæans. But secondarily it means that world-history is dependent — to a degree that students have hitherto scarcely imagined — upon the existence of script as the essentially historical means of communication. The State (in the higher sense of the word) presupposes intercourse by writing; the style of all politics is determined absolutely by the significance that the politico-historical thought of the nation attaches in each instance to charters and archives, to signatures, to the products of the publicist; the battle of legislation is a fight for or against a written law; constitutions replace material force by the composition of paragraphs and elevate a piece of writing to the dignity of a weapon. Speech belongs with the present, and writing with duration, but equally, oral understanding pairs with practical experience, and writing with theoretical thought. The bulk of the inner political history of all Late periods can be traced back to this opposition. The ever-varying facts resist the "letter," while truths demand it — that is the world-historical opposition of two parties that in one form or another is met with in the great crises of all Cultures. The one lives in actuality, the other flourishes a text in its face; all great revolutions presuppose a literature.

plantlike separates itself from the animal, the destiny of the living from the destiny of the dead, that of the organic side from that of the mechanical side of understanding. For the Totem side affirms and the Taboo side denies, blood and Time. Everywhere we meet, and very early indeed, rigid cult-languages whose sanctity is guaranteed by their inalterability, systems long dead, or alien to life and artificially fettered, which have the strict vocabulary that the formulation of eternal truths requires. Old Vedic stiffened as a religious language, and with it Sanskrit as a savant-language. The Egyptian of the Old Kingdom was perpetuated as priests' language, so that in the New Empire sacred formulæ were no more understandable than the Carmen Saliare and the hymn of the Fratres Arvales in Augustan times. In the Arabian pre-Cultural period Babylonian, Hebrew, and Avestan simultaneously went out of use as workaday languages — probably in the second century before Christ — indeed on that very account Jews and Persians used them in their Scriptures as in opposition to Aramaic and Pehlevi. The same significance attached to Gothic Latin for the Church, Humanists' Latin for the learning of the Baroque, Church Slavonic in Russia, and no doubt Sumerian in Babylonia.

to this day the unmistakable signs of their origin in scholars' Latin — and, therefore, the starting point of all the apparatus of technical expression and logical sentence-form. This opposition between the modes of understanding of "Society" and of Science renews itself again and again till far into the Late period. The centre of gravity in the history of French was decisively on the side of race; i.e., of talk. At the Court of Versailles, in the salons of Paris, the esprit précieux of the Arthurian romances evolves into the "conversation," the classical art of talk, whose dictature the whole West acknowledges. The fact that Ionic-Attic, too, was fashioned entirely in the halls of the tyrants and in symposia created great difficulties for Greek philosophy: for later on, it was almost impossible to discuss the syllogism in the language of Alcibiades. On the other hand, German prose, in the decisive phase of Baroque, had no central point on which it could rise to excellence, and so even to-day it oscillates in point of style between French and Latin — courtly and scholarly — according as the author's intuition is to express himself well or accurately. Our Classical writers, thanks to their linguistic origin in office or study and their stay as tutors in the castles and the little courts, arrived indeed at personal styles, and others are able to imitate these styles, but a specifically German prose, standard for all, they were unable to create.

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

CHAPTER VI CITIES AND PEOPLES

(C)

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN

CHAPTER VI

CITIES AND PEOPLES

(C)

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN

1

to one.¹ And then he extends the use of this concept, which is really quite particular and derived from personal experience, to collectivities of the most varied kinds. For Cæsar the Arverni were a "civitas"; for us the Chinese are a "nation." On this basis, it was the Athenians and not the Greeks who constituted a nation, and in fact there were only a few individuals who, like Isocrates, felt themselves primarily as Hellenes. On this basis, one of two brothers may call himself a Swiss and the other, with equal right, a German. These are not philosophical concepts, but historical facts. A people is an aggregate of men which feels itself a unit. The Spartiates ² felt themselves a people in this sense; the "Dorians" of 1100, too, probably, but those of 400 certainly not. The Crusaders became genuinely a people in taking the oath of Clermont; the Mormons in their expulsion from Missouri, in 1839; ³ the Mamertines ⁴ by their need of winning for themselves a stronghold of refuge.⁵ Was the formative principle very different with the Jacobins and Hyksos? How many peoples may have originated in a chief's following or a band of fugitives? Such a group can change race, like the Osmanli, who appeared in Asia Minor as Mongols; or language, like the Sicilian Normans; or name, like Achæans and Danaoi. So long as the common feeling is there, the people as such is there.

3 E. 1 Maria Harris and Carlotte Land and Carlotte Land

^<sup>1 So much so that the workers of the great cities call themselves the People, thereby excluding the bourgeoisie, with which no community feeling conjoins them. The bourgeoisie of 1789 did exactly the same.

^<sup>3 Ed. Meyer, Ursprung und Geschichte der Mormonen (1912), pp. 128, et seq. [An extended summary of Mormon history will be found in the article "Mormons," Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.]

^<sup>4 Ex-mercenaries of Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse, who seized and settled in Messina. The questions arising out of this act precipitated the First Punic War. — Tr.

⁶ And in numerous Classical instances. — Tr.

down, it becomes practically inevitable that conclusions about the bearers of them will be wrong. The indubitably sacral names of Franks, Alemanni, and Saxons have superseded a host of names of the period of the Varus battle — but if we did not happen to know this, we should long ago have been convinced that an expulsion or annihilation of old tribes by new intruders had taken place here. The names "Romans" and "Quirites," "Spartans" and "Lacedæmonians," "Carthaginian" and "Punic" have endured side by side — here again there was a risk of supposing two peoples instead of one. In what relation the names "Pelasgi," "Achæans," "Danai," stand to one another we shall never learn, and had we nothing more than these names, the scholar would long ago have assigned to each a separate people, complete with language and racial affinities. Has it not been attempted to draw from the regional designation "Doric" conclusions as to the course of the Dorian migration? How often may a people have adopted a land-name and taken it along with them? This is the case with the modern Prussians, but also with the modern Parsees, Jews, and Turks, while the opposite is the case in Burgundy and Normandy. The name "Hellenes" arose about 650, and, therefore, cannot be connected with any movement of population. Lorraine (Lothringen) received the name of a perfectly unimportant prince, and that, in connexion with the decision of a heritage and not a folk-migration. Paris called the Germans Allemands in 1814, Prussians in 1870, Boches in 1914 — in other circumstances three distinct peoples might have been supposed to be covered by these names. The West-European is called in the East a Frank, the Jew a Spaniole — the fact is readily explained by historical circumstances, but what would a philologist have produced from the words alone?

TT

^<sup>1 See Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. IX, p. 860. — Tr.

^<sup>4 C. Mehlis, Die Berberfrage (Archiv für Anthropologie 39, pp. 249, et seq.) where relations between North German and Mauretanian ceramics, and even resemblances of toponymy (rivers, mountains) are dealt with. The old pyramid buildings of West Africa are closely related, on the one hand, to the Nordic dolmens (Hünengräher) of Holstein and, on the other, to the graves of the Old Kingdom (some illustrations in L. Frobenius, Der kleinafrikanische Grabbau, 1916).

— movements of close-pressed peoples traversing the lands in great masses, pushing and being pushed till finally they come to rest somewhere or other. It is not the alterations in themselves, but the conceptions we have formed about them, that have spoilt our outlook upon the nature of the peoples. Peoples in the modern sense of the word do not wander, and that which of old did wander needs to be very carefully examined before it is labelled, as the label will not always stand for the same thing. The motive, too, that is everlastingly assigned to these migrations is colourless and worthy of the century that invented it — material necessity. Hunger would normally lead to efforts of quite a different sort, and it has certainly been only the last of the motives that drove men of race out of their nests — although it is understandable that it would very frequently make itself felt when such bands suddenly encountered a military obstacle. It was doubtless, in this simple and strong kind of man, the primary microcosmic urgency to move in free space which sprang up out of the depths of his soul as love of adventure, daring, liking for power and booty; as a blazing desire, to us almost incomprehensible, for deeds, for joy of carnage, for the death of the hero. Often, too, no doubt, domestic strife or fear of the revenge of the stronger, was the motive, but again a strong and manly one. Motives like these are infectious — the "man who stays at home" is a coward. Was it common bodily hunger, again, that induced the Crusades, or the expeditions of Cortez and Pizarro, or in our time the ventures of "wild west" pioneers? Where, in history, we find the little handful invading wide lands, it is ever the voices of the blood, the longing for high destinies, that drive them.

Amongst the "Sea-peoples" that repeatedly attacked Egypt in the thirteenth century appear the names of Danai and Achæans — but in Homer both are almost mythical designations — the name of the Lukka — which adhered later to Lycia, though the inhabitants of that country called themselves Tramilæ — and the names of the Etruscans, the Sards, the Siculi — but this in no wise proved that these "Tursha" spoke the later Etruscan, nor that there was the slightest physical connexion with the like-named inhabitants of Italy or anything else entitling us to speak of "one and the same people." Assuming that the Lemnos inscription is Etruscan, and Etruscan an Indogermanic language, much could be deduced therefrom in the domain of linguis-

^<sup>1 Die Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt (1886).

^<sup>2 Geschichte der Krievskunst (from 1900).

^<sup>3 Rameses III, who defeated them, portrayed their expedition in the relief of Medinet Habet W. M. Müller, Asien und Europa, p. 366.

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 165

beat that produces race-hatred, which is just as strong between Germans and Frenchmen as it is between Germans and Jews, and it is resonance on this beat that makes the true love — so akin to hate — between man and wife. He who has not race knows nothing of this perilous love. If a part of the human multitude that now speaks Indogermanic languages, cherishes a certain race-ideal, what is evidenced thereby is not the existence of the prototype-people so dear to the scholar, but the metaphysical force and power of the ideal. It is highly significant that this ideal is expressed, never in the whole population, but mainly in its warrior-element and pre-eminently in its genuine nobility — that is, in men who live entirely in a world of facts, under the spell of historical becoming, destiny-men who will and dare — ard it was precisely in the early times (another significant point) that a born alien of quality and dignity could without particular difficulty gain admittance to the ruling class, and wives in particular were chosen for their "breed" and not their descent. Correspondingly, the impress of race-traits is weakest (as may be observed even to-day) in the true priestly and scholarly natures, even though these often do stand in close blood-relationship to the others. A strong spirit trains up the body into a product of art. The Romans formed, in the midst of the confused and even heteroclite tribes of Italy, a race of the firmest and strictest inward unity that was neither Etruscan nor Latin nor merely "Classical," but quite specifically Roman.² Nowhere is the force that cements a people set before us more plainly than in Roman busts of the late Republican period.

To begin with, is Persian a language of equal rank with the Indian, derived from a common ancestor, or is it merely an Indian dialect? Seven centuries of linguistic development, scriptless and therefore very rapid, lie between the Old Vedic of the Indian texts and the Behistun Inscription 3 of Darius. It is almost as great a gap as that between the Latin of Tacitus and the French of the Strassburg Oath of 842.4 Now the Tell-el-Amarna letters and the archives

^<sup>3 See articles "Persia (history: ancient)," "Behistun," "Cuneiform," in Ency. Brit., XI ed., or indeed almost any work upon Babylonian and Persian antiquities. — Tr.

^<sup>4 Sworn by Louis the German and Charles the Bald in both languages. The manuscript of the oath, however, is later — say, 950. — Tr.

^{1 &}quot;Die ältesten datierten Zeugnisse der iranischen Sprache" (Zeitschr. f. vgl. Sprachf. 42, p. 26.)

^<sup>2 See above, p. 145

Ed. Meyer, op. cit., pp. 1, et seq

Here the Persian religion emerges as a problem no less difficult than those of race and language.¹ Scholarship has associated it with these as though the association were self-evident, and has, therefore, treated it always with reference to India. But the religion of these land-Vikings was not related to, it was identical with the Vedic, as shown by the divine pairs Mitra-Varuna and Indra-Nasatya of the Boghaz Keüi texts. And within this religion which held up its head in the middle of the Babylonian world Zarathustra now appeared, from out of the lower ranks of the people, as reformer. It is known that he was not a Persian. That which he created (as I hope to show) was a transfer of Vedic religion into the forms of the Aramaan world-contemplation, in which already there were the faint beginnings of the Magian religiousness. The davas, the gods of the old Indian beliefs, grew to be the demons of the Semitic and the jinn of the Arabian. Yahweh and Beelzebub are related to one another precisely as Ahuramazda and Ahriman in this peasant-religion, which was essentially Aramæan and, therefore, founded in an ethical-dualistic world-feeling. Eduard Meyer ² has correctly established the difference between the Indian and the Iranian view of the world, but, owing to his erroneous premisses, has not recognized its origin. Zarathustra is a travelling-companion of the prophets of Israel, who like him, and at the same time, transformed the old (Mosaic-Canaanitish) beliefs of the people. It is significant that the whole eschatology is a common possession of the Persian and Jewish religions, and that the Avesta texts were originally written in Aramaic (in Parthian times) and only afterwards translated into Pehlevi.³

^<sup>1 For what follows, cf. Ch. VII — IX.

^<sup>2 Geschichte des Altertums, I, § 590, et seq.

^<sup>4 See, further, below.

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 169

TTT

With this are laid, at last, the foundations for a morphology of peoples. Directly its essence is seen, we see also an inward order in the historical stream of the peoples. They are neither linguistic nor political nor zoölogical, but spiritual, units. And this leads at once to the further distinction between peoples before, within, and after a Culture. It is a fact that has been profoundly felt in all ages that Culture-peoples are more distinct in character than the rest. Their predecessors I will call primitive peoples. These are the fugitive and heterogeneous associations that form and dissolve without ascertainable rule, till at last, in the presentiment of a still unborn Culture (as, for example, in the pre-Homeric, the pre-Christian, and the Germanic periods), phase by phase, becoming ever more definite in type, they assemble the human material of a population into groups, though all the time little or no alteration has been occurring in the stamp of man. Such a superposition of phases leads from the Cimbri and Teutones through the Marcomanni and Goths to the Franks, Lombards, and Saxons. Instances of primitive peoples are the Jews and Persians of the Seleucid age, the "Sea-peoples," the Egyptian Nomes of Menes's time.¹ And that which follows a Culture we may call — from its best-known example, the Egyptians of post-Roman times — fellah-peoples.

I regard it, therefore, as a discovery of decisive importance that the facts here set forth lead to the reverse conclusion. It will be established in all rigour

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

Further, nations are the true city-building peoples. In the strongholds they arose, with the cities they ripen to the full height of their world-consciousness, and in the world-cities they dissolve. Every town-formation that has character has also national character. The village, which is wholly a thing of race, does not yet possess it; the megalopolis possesses it no longer. Of this essential, which so characteristically colours the nation's public life that its slightest manifestation identifies it, we cannot exaggerate — we can scarcely imagine — the force, the self-sufficingness, and the loneliness. If between the souls of two Cultures the screen is impenetrable, if no Western may ever hope completely to understand the Indian or the Chinese, this is equally so, even more so, as between well-developed nations. Nations understand one another as little as individuals do so. Each understands merely a self-created picture of the other, and individuals with the insight to penetrate deeper are few and far between. Vis-à-vis the Egyptians, all the Classical peoples necessarily felt themselves as relatives in one whole, but as between themselves they never understood each other. What sharper contrast is there than that between the Athenian and the Spartan spirit? German, French, and English modes of philosophical thinking are distinct, not merely in Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz, but already in the

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

^<sup>2 Ct. p. 105.

³ Cf. Ch. X

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN

T3/

The Classical nations, in accordance with the static-Euclidean soul of their Culture, were corporeal units of the smallest imaginable size. It was not Hellenes or Ionians that were nations, but in each city the Demos, a union of adult men, legally and by the same token nationally defined between the type of the hero as upper limit and the slave as lower. Syncecism, that mysterious process of early periods in which the inhabitants of a countryside give up their villages and assemble themselves as a town, marks the moment at which, having arrived at self-consciousness, the Classical nation constitutes itself as such. We can still trace the way in which this form of the nation steadily makes good from Homeric times 2 to the epoch of the great colonizations. It responds exactly to the Classical prime-symbol: each folk was a body, visible and surveyable, a $\sigma \hat{\omega} \mu \alpha$ , the express negation of the idea of geographical space.

^<sup>1 See p. 60 above. The slave did not belong to the nation. On this account the enrolment of non-citizens in the army of a city, which on occasions of dire crisis was inevitable, was always felt as a profound blow to the national idea.

^<sup>3 And she had rarely to deal with anything more formidable than a loose partial confederacy. Often Etruscan cities were in alliance with Rome against other Etruscan cities. — Tr.

Empire otherwise than in the form of innumerable nation-points, the civitates into which, juridically as in other respects, they dissolved all the primitive peoples of their Imperium.¹ When national feeling in this shape is extinguished, there is an end to Classical history.

A nation of the Magian type is the community of co-believers, the group of all who know the right way to salvation and are inwardly linked to one another by the ijma 2 of this belief. Men belonged to a Classical nation by virtue of the possession of citizenship, but to a Magian nation by virtue of a sacramental act — circumcision for the Jews, specific forms of baptism for the Mandæans or the Christians. An unbeliever was for a Magian folk what an alien was for a Classical — no intercourse with him, no connubium — and this national separation went so far that in Palestine a Jewish-Aramaic and a Christian-Aramaic dialect formed themselves side by side. The Faustian nation, though necessarily bound up with a particular religiousness, is not so with a particular confession; the Classical nation is by type non-exclusive in its relations to different cults; but the Magian nation comprises neither more nor less than is covered by the idea of one or another of the Magian Churches. Inwardly the Classical nation is linked with the city, and the Western with a landscape, but the Arabian knows neither fatherland nor mother tongue. Outwardly its specific world-outlook is only expressed by the distinctive script which each such nation develops as soon as it is born. But for that very reason the inwardness and hidden force — the magic, in fact — of a Magian nation-feeling impresses us Faustians, who notice the absence of the home-idea, as something entirely enigmatic and uncanny. This tacit, self-secure cohesion (that of the Jews, for example, in the homes of the Western peoples) is what entered "Roman Law" (called by a Classical label but worked out by Aramæans) as the concept of the "juridical person," which is nothing but the Magian notion of a community. Post-exilic Judaism was a juridical person long before anyone had discovered the concept itself.

^<sup>2 See p. 67

^<sup>5 See foot-note, p. 197, et sea. — Tr

^<sup>2 See p. 167

^<sup>3 Aristotle says that "philosophers are called Calani among the Indians, and Jews among the Syrians." Exactly the same is stated by Megasthenes, the Seleucid ambassador at Pataliputra of Brahmins and Jews. — Tr.

^<sup>4 The district south of Lake Van, of which the capital was Arbela, the old home of the goddess Ishtar.

⁵ As evidenced by the Falasha, the black Iews of Abyssinia.

⁶ Arch. f. Anthrop., Vol. XIX.

⁷ Zeitschr. f. Ethnol. (1919).

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

^<sup>2 Geffcken, Der Ausgang des griech.-röm. Heidentum (1920), p. 57 [English readers may refer to the article "Neoplatonism" and shorter articles under the personal names, in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.]

Now, the Christians also felt themselves from the outset as a nation of the Magian cast, and, moreover, the others, Greeks ("heathen") and Jews alike, regarded them as such. Quite logically the latter considered their secession from Judaism as high treason, and the former their missionary infiltration into the Classical cities as an invasion and conquest, while the Christians, on their side, designated people of other faiths as $\tau \grave{a} \ \& \theta v \eta$ . When the Monophysites and the Nestorians separated themselves from the Orthodox, new nations came into being as well as new Churches. The Nestorians since 1450 have been governed by the Mar Shimun, who was at once prince and patriarch of his people and wis-(\frac{a}{v}vis) the Sultan, occupied exactly the same position as, long before, the Jewish Resh Galutha had occupied in the Persian Empire. This nation-consciousness, derived from particular and defined world-feeling and therefore self-evident with an a priori sureness, cannot be ignored if we are to understand the later persecutions of the Christians. The Magian State is inseparably bound up with the concept of orthodoxy. Caliphate, nation, and Church form an intimate unit. It was as states that Adiabene went over to Judaism, Osrhoene about 2000 (so soon!) from Greekdom to Christendom, Armenia in the sixth century from the Greek to the Monophysite Church. Each of these events expresses the fact that the State was identical with the orthodox community as a juridical person. If Christians lived in the Islamic State, Nestorians in the Persian, Jews in the Byzantine, they did not and could not as unbelievers belong to it, and consequently were thrown back upon their own jurisdictions. If by reason of their numbers or their missionary spirit they became a threat to the continuance

^<sup>1 See Vol. I. pp. 63, 71, — Tr.

^<sup>3 See the article "Nestorians," Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

^<sup>4 See the articles "Jews" (§ 43), "Exilarch," and "Gaon," Ency. Brit., XI. ed. In Europe, too far into the Dispersion, there are rabbis recognized by the State as governors of their communities such as the famous Rabbi Löw of Prague (1513–1609). — Tr.

^<sup>1 See Vol. I., p. 212.

^<sup>2 The author's meaning may perhaps be precised thus: so much of the old Magian nations as was not Arabized became fellah peoples, either outside the Magian sphere (as in Europe and India) or within it, under the Turkish (Mongol) domination, but even the old Arab-element itself was largely ripe for the change into the fellah condition when the Turks came. — Tr.

Still stronger is the sensitivity to distance in time. Before the fatherlandidea (which is a consequence of the existence of the nation) emerged at all, this passion evolved another idea to which the Faustian nations owe that existence—the dynastic idea. Faustian peoples are historical peoples, communities that feel themselves bound together not by place or consensus, but by history; and the eminent symbol and vessel of the common Destiny is the ruling "house." For Egyptian and for Chinese mankind the dynasty is a symbol of quite other meaning. Here what it signifies, as a will and an activity, is Time. All that we have been, all that we would be, is manifested in the being of the one generation; and our sense of this is much too profound to be upset by the worthlessness of a regent. What matters is not the person, but the idea, and it is for the sake of the idea that thousands have so often marched to their deaths with conviction in a genealogical quarrel. Classical history was for Classical eyes only a chain of incidents leading from moment to moment; Magian history was for its members the progressive actualization in and through mankind of a world-plan laid down by God and accomplished between a creation and a cataclysm; but Faustian history is in our eyes a single grand willing of conscious logic, in the accomplishment of which nations are led and represented by their rulers. It is a trait of race. Rational foundations it has not and cannot have—it has simply been felt so, and because it has been felt so, the companion-trust of the Germanic migration-time developed on into the feudal troth of the Gothic, the loyalty of the Baroque, and the merely seemingly undynastic patriotism of the nineteenth century. We must not misjudge the depth and dignity of this

All nations of the West are of dynastic origins. In the Romanesque and even in Early Gothic architecture the soul of the Carolingian primitives still quivers through. There is no French or German Gothic, but Salian, Rhenish, and Suabian, as there is Visigothic (northern Spain, southern France) and Lombard and Saxon Romanesque. But over it all there spreads soon the minority, composed of men of race, that feels membership in a nation as a great historical vocation. From it proceed the Crusades, and in them there truly were French and German chivalries. It is the hall-mark of Faustian peoples that they are conscious of the direction of their history. But this direction attaches to the sequence of the generations, and so the nature of the race-ideal is genealogical through and through — Darwinism, even, with its theories of descent and inheritance is a sort of caricature of Gothic heraldry — and the world-as-history, when every individual lives in the plane of it, contains not only the tree of the individual family, ruling or other, but also the tree of the people as the basic form of all its happenings.³ It needs very exact observation to perceive that this Faustian-genealogical principle, with its eminently historical notions of "Ebenbürtigkeit" (equivalence by virtue of birth) and of purity of blood, is just as alien to the Egyptians and Chinese, for all their historical disposition, as it is to the Roman nobility and the Byzantine Empire. On the other hand, neither our peasantry nor the patriciate of the cities is conceivable without it. The scientific conception of the people, which I have dissected above, is derived essentially from the genealogical sense of the Gothic period. The notion that the peoples have their trees has made the Italians proud to be the heirs of Rome, and the Germans proud to recall their Teuton forefathers, and that is something quite different from the Classical belief in timeless descent from heroes and gods.

¹ That the dynasts themselves have contributed heavily to the catalogue of perjury and bad faith

only reinforces the argument. — Tr.

³ In mediæval hymns the cross is symbolically regarded as a tree bearing Christ as its last and grandest fruit; it is identified, indeed, with the Tree of Knowledge. (See Yrjo Hirn, The Sacrea Chaire) — To.

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 181

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

Against the French and their German dependent allies, 1757. — Tr

The French Revolution, on the contrary, was in this regard only a victory of Rationalism. It set free not so much the nation as the concept of the nation. The dynastic has penetrated into the blood of the Western races, and on that very account it is a vexation to their intellect. For a dynasty represents history, it is the history-become-flesh of a land, and intellect is timeless and unhistorical. The ideas of the Revolution were all "eternal" and "true." Universal human rights, freedom, and equality are literature and abstraction and not facts. Call all this republican if you will, in reality it was one more case of a minority striving in the name of all to introduce the new ideal into the world of fact. It became a power, but at the cost of the ideal, and all it did was to replace the old felt adherence by the reasoned patriotism of the nineteenth century; by a civilized nationalism, only possible in our Culture, which in France itself and even to-day is unconsciously dynastic; and by the concept of the fatherland as dynastic unit which emerged first in the Spanish and Prussian uprisings against Napoleon and then in the German and Italian wars of dynastic unification. Out of the opposition of race and speech, blood and intellect, a new and specifically Western ideal arose to confront the genealogical ideal — that of the mother tongue. Enthusiasts there were in both countries who thought to replace the unifying force of the Emperor- and King-idea by the linking of republic and poetry — something of the "return to nature" in this, but a return of history to nature. In place of the wars of succession came language-struggles, in which one nation sought to force its language and therewith its nationality upon the fragments of another. But no one will fail to observe that even the rationalistic conception of a nation as a linguistic unit can at best ignore, never abolish, the dynastic feeling, any more than a Hellenistic Greek could inwardly over-

ν

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

A nation is humanity brought into living form. The practical result of world-improving theories is consistently a formless and therefore historyless mass.

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

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

(A)

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES

(A)

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES

1

This is the case of the Arabian Culture. Its pre-history lies entirely within the ambit of the ancient Babylonian Civilization, which for two thousand years had been the prey of successive conquerors. Its "Merovingian period" is marked by the dictatorship of a small Persian clan, primitive as the Ostrogoths, whose domination of two hundred years, scarcely challenged, was founded on the infinite weariness of a fellah-world. But from 300 B.C. onwards there begins and spreads a great awakening in the young Aramaic-speaking peoples between Sinai and the Zagros range. As at the epoch of the Trojan War and at that of the Saxon emperors, a new relation of man to God, a wholly new world-feeling, penetrated all the current religions, whether these bore the name of Ahuramazda, Baal, or Yahweh, impelling everywhere to a great effort of creation. But precisely at this juncture there came the Macedonians—

¹ See pp. 166, et seq., and 174, et seq.

so appositely that some inner connexion is not altogether impossible, for the Persian power had rested on spiritual postulates, and it was precisely these that had disappeared. To Babylon these Macedonians appeared as yet another swarm of adventurers like the rest. They laid down a thin sheet of Classical Civilization over the lands as far as Turkestan and India. The kingdoms of the Diadochi might indeed have become, insensibly, states of pre-Arabian spirit—the Seleucid Empire, which actually coincided geographically with the region of Aramaic speech, was in fact such a state by 200 B.C. But from the battle of Pydna ¹ onwards it was, in its western part, more and more embodied in the Classical Imperium and so subjected to the powerful workings of a spirit which had its centre of gravity in a distant region. And thus was prepared the Pseudomorphosis.

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

^<sup>1 The victory of L. Æmilius Paullus over Perseus, 168 B.C. — Tr.

^<sup>2 This has an important bearing also in the histories of the Western literatures. The German is written in part in Latin, and English in French.

TT

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

A second pseudomorphosis is presented to our eyes to-day in Russia. The Russian hero-tales of the Bylini culminated in the epic cycle of Prince Vladimir of Kiev (c. A.D. 1000), with his Round Table, and in the popular hero Ilya Muromyets.¹ The whole immense difference between the Russian and the Faustian soul is already revealed in the contrast of these with the "contemporary" Arthur, Ermanarich, and Nibelungen sagas of the Migration-period in the form of the Hildebrandslied and the Waltharilied.² The Russian "Merovingian" period begins with the overthrow of the Tatar domination by Ivan III (1480) and passes, by the last princes of the House of Rurik and the first of the Romanovs, to Peter the Great (1689–1725). It corresponds exactly to the period between Clovis (481–511) and the battle of Testry (687), which effectively gave the Carolingians their supremacy. I advise all readers to read the Frankish history of Gregory of Tours (to 591) in parallel with the corresponding parts of Karamzin's patriachal narrative, especially those dealing with Ivan the Terrible, and with Boris Godunov and Vassili Shuiski.³ There could hardly be a closer parallel. This Muscovite period of the great Boyar families and Patriarchs, in which a constant element is the resistance of an Old Russia party to the friends of Western Culture, is followed, from the founding of Petersburg in 1703, by the pseudomorphosis which forced the primitive Russian soul into the alien mould, first of full Baroque, then of the Enlightenment, and then of the nineteenth century. The fate-figure in Russian history is Peter the Great, with whom we may compare the Charlemagne who deliberately and

^<sup>1 See Wollner, Untersuchungen über die Volksepik des Grossrussen (1879). [A convenient edition of the Kiev Stories is Mary Gill, Les Légendes slaves (Paris, 1912). — Tr.]

^<sup>2 The former is dated about 800, the latter about 930. — Tr

with all his might strove to impose the very thing which Charles Martel had just prevented, the rule of the Moorish-Byzantine spirit. The possibility was there of treating the Russian world in the manner of a Carolingian or that of Seleucid — that is, of choosing between Old Russian and "Western" ways, and the Romanovs chose the latter. The Seleucids liked to see Hellenes and not Aramæans about them. The primitive tsarism of Moscow is the only form which is even to-day appropriate to the Russian world, but in Petersburg it was distorted to the dynastic form of western Europe. The pull of the sacred South — of Byzantium and Jerusalem — strong in every Orthodox soul, was twisted by the worldly diplomacy which set its face to the West. The burning of Moscow, that mighty symbolic act of a primitive people, that expression of Maccabæan hatred of the foreigner and heretic, was followed by the entry of Alexander I into Paris, the Holy Alliance, and the concert of the Great Powers of the West. And thus a nationality whose destiny should have been to live without a history for some generations still was forced into a false and artificial history that the soul of Old Russia was simply incapable of understanding. Late-period arts and sciences, enlightenment, social ethics, the materialism of world-cities, were introduced, although in this pre-cultural time religion was the only language in which man understood himself and the world. In the townless land with its primitive peasantry, cities of alien type fixed themselves like ulcers — false, unnatural, unconvincing. "Petersburg," says Dostoyevski, "is the most abstract and artificial city in the world." Born in it though he was, he had the feeling that one day it might vanish with the morning mist. Just so ghostly, so incredible, were the Hellenistic artifact-cities scattered in the Aramaic peasant-lands. Jesus in his Galilee knew this. St. Peter must have felt it when he set eyes on Imperial Rome.

go to Europe," says Ivan Karamazov to his mother, Alyosha; "I know well enough that I shall be going only to a churchyard, but I know too that that churchyard is dear, very dear to me. Beloved dead lie buried there, every stone over them tells of a life so ardently lived, so passionate a belief in its own achievements, its own truth, its own battle, its own knowledge, that I know—even now I know—I shall fall down and kiss these stones and weep over them." Tolstoi, on the contrary, is essentially a great understanding, "enlightened" and "socially minded." All that he sees about him takes the Late-period, megalopolitan, and Western form of a problem, whereas Dostoyevski does not even know what a problem is. Tolstoi is an event within and of Western Civilization. He stands midway between Peter and Bolshevism, and neither he nor these managed to get within sight of Russian earth. The thing they are fighting against reappears, recognizable, in the very form in which they fight. Their kind of opposition is not apocalyptic but intellectual. Tolstoi's hatred of property is an economist's, his hatred of society a social reformer's, his hatred of the State a political theorist's. Hence his immense effect upon the West—he belongs, in one respect as in another, to the band of Marx, Ibsen, and Zola.

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

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

TTT

^<sup>1 Covering, before its later extensions, Persia and Iraq to the Euphrates. — Tr.

The region south of Damascus and east of the Sea of Galilee. — $T_r$ .

^<sup>3 Saba (Sheba) is, roughly, the modern Yemen, though the centre of gravity of the Sabæan Kingdom may earlier have been in northern Arabia. See Dr. D. H. Müller's article "Sabaeans" in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

^<sup>4 Schiele, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, I, 647

side with the realm of Israel during the millennium before Christ, and its remains (which suggest comparisons with Mycenæ and Tiryns) extend deeply into Africa.¹ But now the feudal age flowered throughout Arabia and even in the mountains of Abyssinia.² In Axum there arose during early Christian times mighty castles and kings' tombs with the largest monoliths in the world.³ Behind the kings stands a feudal nobility of counts (kail) and wardens (kabir), vassals of often questionable loyalty whose great possessions more and more narrowed the power of the king and his household. The endless Christian-Jewish wars between south Arabia and the kingdom of Axum ⁴ have essentially the character of chivalry-warfare, frequently degenerating into baronial feuds based on the castles. In Saba ruled the Hamdanids — who later became Christian. Behind them stood the Christian realm of Axum, in alliance with Rome, which about A.D. 300 stretched from the White Nile to the Somali coast and the Persian Gulf, and in 525 overthrew the Jewish-Himaryites.⁵ In 542 there was a diet of princes at Marib ⁶ to which both the Roman and the Sassanid Empires sent ambassadors. Even to-day the country is full of innumerable relics of mighty castles, which in Islamic times were popularly attributed to supernatural builders. The stronghold of Gomdan is a work of twenty tiers.¹

Arabian history. Ma'in, in southern Arabia, should not be confused with the Ma'an which lies north-east of the Gulf of Akaba. — Tr.

^<sup>2 Grimme, Mohammed, pp. 26, et seq.

^<sup>8 German Axum Expedition record (1912). Vol. II.

^<sup>7 Grimme, p. 43. Illustrations of these immense ruins of Gomdan, ibid., p. 81, and reconstructions in the German Axum report.

For this young world of the first centuries of our era our antiquarians and theologians have had no eyes. Busied as they are with the state of Late Republican and Imperial Rome, the conditions of the Middle East seem to them merely primitive and void of all significance. But the Parthian bands that again and again rode at the legions of Rome were a chivalry exalted by Mazdaism; in their armies there was the spirit of crusade. So, too, might it have been with Christianity if it had not been wholly bound under the power of the pseudomorphosis. The spirit was there—Tertullian spoke of the "militia Christi," and the sacrament was the soldier's oath of fidelity. But it was only later that Christ became the hero for whom his vassals went out against the heathen; for the time being, the hither side of the Roman frontier knew not Christian lords and knights, but only Roman legates; not the castra; not tournaments, but executions. Yet in spite of all this it was not, strictly speaking, a Parthian war, but a true crusade of Jewry that blazed out in 115 when Trajan marched into the East, and it was as a reprisal for the destruction of Jerusalem that the whole infidel ("Greek") population of Cyprus—traditionally 240,000 souls—was massacred. Nisibis, defended by Jews, made an illustrious resistance. Warlike Adiabene (the upper Tigris plain) was a Jewish state. In all the Parthian and Persian wars against Rome the gentry and peasantry, the feudal levy, of Jewish Mesopotamia fought in the front line.

^<sup>1 The country of Ghassan extends east of the Jordan, parallel to and inland of Palestine and Syria, pproximately from Petra to the middle Euphrates. — Tr.

^<sup>8 Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Literatur, p. 34.

^<sup>4 The whole structure of Mithraism (so far as we know it) presents strong analogies with that of a military order. — Tr.

^<sup>5 As well as it is said 220,000 at Cyrene. At Alexandria, too, there were émeutes and counterémeutes. — Tr.

were not allowed to leave without the Emperor's permission, this nobility settled down later on its broad estates in the provinces. From the fourth century onwards this provincial nobility was de facto an 'Estate of the realm,' and in course of time it claimed a certain independence of Imperial control.' ¹

The "Roman Army" in the East, meanwhile, was transformed in less than two centuries from an army of modern type to one of the feudal order. The Roman legion disappeared in the reorganization of the age of Severus, 2 about A.D. 200. While in the West the army degenerated into hordes, in the East there arose, in the fourth century a genuine, if belated, knighthood — a fact that Mommsen long ago pointed out, without, however, seeing the significance of it. 3 The young noble received a thorough education in single combat, horsemanship, use of bow and lance. About A.D. 260 the Emperor Gallienus — the friend of Plotinus and the builder of the Porta Nigra of Trier, one of the most striking and most unfortunate figures of the period of the soldier-emperors — formed, from Germans and Moors, a new type of mounted force, the personal military suite. 4 A significant light is thrown upon the changes by the fact that the old city-gods give way, in the religion of the army, to the German gods of personal heroism, under the labels of Mars and Hercules. 5 Diocletian's palatini are not a substitute for the prætorians abolished by Septimius Severus, but a small, well-disciplined knight-army, while the comitatenses, the general levy, are organized in "numeri" or companies. The tactics are those of every Early period, with its pride of personal courage. The attack takes the Germanic form of the so-called "boar's head" — the deep mass technically called the Gevierthaufe. 6 Under Justinian we find, fully developed, a system corresponding precisely to the Landsknecht system of Charles V, in which condottieri 7 of the Frundsberg type 8 raise professional forces on a territorial basis. The expedition

1 Roth, Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des Byzantinischen Reiches, p. 15.

³ Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 532.

Domaszewski, Die Keligion der romischen Heeres, p. 49.

7 Buccellarii: see Delbrück, op. cit., II. 254.

^<sup>4 Gefolgstreuen in German. The choice of an equivalent mediæval term in English is difficult, since any one that may be selected carries with it certain implications for students of feudal origins. — Tr.

But there appeared also in these early centuries a brilliant Scholasticism and Mysticism of Magian type, domesticated in the renowned schools of the Aramæan region — the Persian schools of Ctesiphon, Resaina, Gundisapora, the Jewish of Sura, Nehardea, Kinnesrin.² These are flourishing headquarters of astronomy, philosophy, chemistry, medicine. But towards the west these grand manifestations, too, become falsified by the Pseudomorphosis. The characteristically Magian elements of this knowledge assume at Alexandria the forms of Greek philosophy and at Beyrout those of Roman jurisprudence; they are committed to writing in the Classical languages, squeezed into alien and long-petrified literary forms, and perverted by the hoary logic of a Civilization of quite other structure. It is in this, and not in the Islamic, time that Arabian science began. Yet, as our philologists only unearthed what had been put in Late Classical dress at Alexandria and Antioch, and had not an inkling either of the immense wealth of the Arabian spring or of the real pivots of its researches and ideas, there arose the preposterous notion that the Arabs were spiritual epigoni of the Classical. In reality, practically everything that was produced on the "other" side — from Edessa's point of view — of the philologist's frontier, though seeming to the Western eye an offspring of a "Late Classical" spirit, is nothing but a reflection of Early Arabian inwardness. And so we come to consider what the Pseudomorphosis did for the Arabian religion.

ΙV

^<sup>1 Gothic War, IV, 26. [The same holds good for Belisarius's armies. — Tr.]

² Schürer, Geschichte des judischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, III, 499; Wendland, Die

Carefully as Syncretism has been examined in recent years, the clue to its development — the transformation of Eastern Churches into Western cults, and then the reverse process of transformation of Western cults into Eastern Churches — has been missed.² Yet without this key it is quite impossible to understand the religious history of Early Christianity. The battle that in Rome was between Christ and Mithras as cult-deities took the form, east of Antioch, of a contest between the Persian and the Christian Churches. But the heaviest battle that Christianity had to fight, after it came itself under the influence of the Pseudomorphosis and began to develop spiritually with its face to the West, was not that against the true Classical deities. With these it was never face to face, for the public city-cults had long been inwardly dead and possessed no hold whatever on men's souls. The formidable enemy was Paganism, or Hellenism, emerging as a powerful new Church and born of the selfsame spirit as Christianity itself. In the end there were in the east of the Roman Empire not one cult-Church, but two, and if one of these comprised exclusively the followers of Christ, the other, too, was made up of communities which, under a thousand different labels, consciously worshipped one and the same divine principle.

¹ The Haoma plant symbolized the Tree of Life (Gaokerena) like the Soma plant of Brahmanism. — Tr.

^<sup>2 Hence the expression "profaning" the mysteries, which meant, not revealing them, but bringing them outside their fane. — Tr.

v

^<sup>1 I. Geffcken. Der Ausgang des griechisch-römischen Heidentums (1920), pp. 197, et seg.

^<sup>2 Geffcken, op. cit., pp. 131, et seq.

The first heralds of the new soul were the prophetic religions, with their magnificent inwardness, which began to arise about 700 B.C. and challenged the primeval practices of the people and their rulers. They, too, are an essentially Aramæan phenomenon. The more I ponder Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah on the one hand, Zarathustra on the other, the more closely related they appear to me to be. What seems to separate them is not their new beliefs, but the objects of their attack. The first battled with that savage old-Israel religion, which in fact is a whole bundle of religious elements 2— belief in holy stones and trees, innumerable place-gods (Dan, Bethel, Hebron, Shechem, Beersheba, Gilgal), a single Yahweh (or Elohim), whose name covers a multitude of most heterogeneous numina, ancestor-worship and human sacrifices, dervish-dancing and sacral prostitution— intermixed with indistinct traditions of Moses and Abraham and many customs and sagas of the Late Babylonian world, now after long establishment in Canaan degenerated and hardened into peasant forms. The second combated the old Vedic beliefs of heroes and Vikings, similarly coarsened, no doubt, and certainly needing to be recalled to actuality, time and again, by glorifications of the sacred cattle and of the care thereof. Zarathustra lived about 600 B.C., often in want, persecuted and misunderstood, and met his end as an old man in war against the unbelievers 3—a worthy contemporary of the unfortunate Jeremiah, who for his prophesying was hated by his countrymen, imprisoned by his king, and after the catastrophe carried off by the fugitives to Egypt and there put to death. And it is my belief that this great epoch brought forth yet a third prophet-religion, the Chaldean.

^<sup>1 The name Chaldean signifies, before the Persian epoch, a tribe; later, a religious society. See p. 175 above.

^<sup>3 According to Williams Jackson's Zoroaster (1901).

A Research has treated the Chaldean, like the Talmudic, as a stepchild. The investigator's whole attention has been concentrated on the religion of the Babylonian Culture, and the Chaldean

were a group of Aramaic-speaking tribes like the Israelites, and lived in the south of Sinear — the mother tongue of Jesus is still sometimes called Chaldean. In Seleucid times the name was applied to a widespread religious community, and especially to its priests. The Chaldean religion was an astral religion, which before Hammurabi the Babylonian was not. It is the deepest of all interpretations of the Magian universe, the World-Cavern 1 and Kismet working therein, and consequently it remained the fundamental of Islamic and Jewish speculation to their very latest phases. It was by it, and not by the Babylonian Culture, that after the seventh century there was formed an astronomy worthy to be called an exact science — that is, a priestly technique of observation of marvellous acuteness. It replaced the Babylonian moon-week by the planet-week. Ishtar, the most popular figure of the old religion, the goddess of life and fruitfulness, now became a planet, and Tammuz, the ever-dying and ever-revived god of vegetation, a fixed star. Finally, the henotheistic feeling announced itself; for Nebuchadnezzar the Great Marduk 3 was the one true god, the god of mercy, and Nebo, the old god of Borsippa, was his son and envoy to mankind. For a century (625–539) Chaldean kings were world-rulers, but they were also the heralds of the new religion. When temples were being built, they themselves carried bricks. The accession-prayer of Nebuchadnezzar, the contemporary of Jeremiah, to Marduk is still extant, and in depth and purity it is in nowise surpassed by the finest passages of Israelite prophecy. The Chaldean penitential psalms, closely related in rhythm and inner structure to those of the Jews, know the sin of which man is unconscious and the suffering that contrite avowal before the incensed god can avert. It is the same trust in the mercy of the Deity that finds a truly Christian expression in the inscriptions of the Bel temple of Palmyra.

The kernel of the prophetic teachings is already Magian. There is one god—be he called Yahweh, Ahuramazda or Marduk-Baal—who is the principle of good, and all other deities are either impotent or evil. To this doctrine there attached itself the hope of a Messiah, very clear in Isaiah, but also bursting out everywhere during the next centuries, under pressure of an inner necessity. It

^<sup>1 See Vol. I., p. 184. — Tr.

^<sup>4 J. Hehn, Hymnen und Gebete an Marduk (1905).

The Babylonian exile, however, did set up an important difference between the Jews and the Persians, in respect, not of the ultimate truths of conscious piety, but of all the facts of actuality and consequently men's inward attitude to these facts. It was the Yahweh believers who were permitted to go home and the adherents of Ahuramazda who allowed them to do so. Of two small tribes that two hundred years before had probably possessed equal numbers of fighting men, the one had taken possession of a world — while Darius crossed the Danube in the north, his power extended in the south through eastern Arabia to the island of Sokotra on the Somali coast ² — and the other had become an entirely unimportant pawn of alien policy.

This is what made one religion so lordly, the other so humble. Let the student read, in contrast to Jeremiah, the great Behistun inscription 3 of Darius — what a splendid pride of the King in his victorious god! And how despairing are the arguments with which the Israelite prophets sought to preserve intact

^<sup>2 Glaser, Die Abessinier in Arabien und in Afrika (1895), p. 124. Glaser is convinced that Abyssinian, Pehlevi, and Persian cunciform inscriptions of the highest importance await discovery there.

We must not, however, forget to look at the "return from captivity" also from the point of view of Babylon. The great mass, strong in race-force, was in reality far removed from these ideas, or regarded them as mere visions and dreams; and the solid peasantry, the artisans, and no doubt the nascent land-aristocracy quietly remained in its holdings under a prince of their own, the Resh Galutha, whose capital was Nehardea.² Those who returned "home" were the small minority, the stubborn, the zealots. They numbered with their wives and children forty thousand, a figure which cannot be one-tenth or even one-twentieth of the total, and anyone who confuses these settlers and their destiny with Jewry as a whole ³ must necessarily fail to read the inner meaning of all following events. The little world of Judaism lived a spiritually separate life, and the nation as a whole, while regarding this life with respect, certainly did not share in it. In the East apocalyptic literature, the heiress of prophecy, blossomed richly. It was a genuine native poetry of the people, of which we still have the masterpiece, the Book of Job — a work in character Islamic and decidedly un-Jewish ⁴ — while a multitude of its other tales and sagas, such as Judith, Tobit, Achikar, ⁵ are spread as motives over all the literatures of the "Arabian" world. In Judea only the Law flourished; the Talmudic spirit appears first in Ezekiel (chs. xl, et seq.) and after 450 is made flesh in the scribes (Sopherim) headed by Ezra. From 300 B.C. to A.D. 200 the Tannaim ("Teachers") expounded the Torah and developed the Mishnah. Neither the coming of Jesus nor the destruction of the Temple interrupted this abstract

^<sup>2 This "King of the Banishment" (Exilarch) was long a conspicuous and politically important igure in the Persian Empire. He was only removed by Islam.

Later it occurred to some Pharisee mind to Judaize it by interpolating cns. xxxii-xxxvii.

scholarship. Jerusalem became for the rigid believer a Mecca, and his Koran was a Code of laws to which was gradually added a whole primitive history compounded of Chaldeo-Persian motives reset according to Pharisaic ideas.¹ But in this atmosphere there was no room for a worldly art, poetry, or learning. All that the Talmud contains of astronomical, medical, and juristic knowledge is exclusively of Mesopotamian origin.² It is probable, too, that it was in Mesopotamia, and before the end of the Captivity, that there began that Chaldean-Persian-Jewish formation of sects which developed into the formation of great religions at the beginning of the Magian Culture, and reached its climax in the teaching of Mani. "The Law and the Prophets" — these two nouns practically define the difference between Judea and Mesopotamia. In the late Persian and in every other Magian theology both tendencies are united; it is only in the case here considered that they were separated in space. The decisions of Jerusalem were recognized everywhere, but it is a question how widely they were obeyed. Even as near as Galilee the Pharisees were the object of suspicion, while in Babylonia no Rabbi could be consecrated. For the great Gamaliel, Paul's teacher, it was a title to fame that his rulings were followed by the Jews "even abroad." How independent was the life of the Jews in Egypt is shown by the recently discovered documents of Elephantine and Assuan.³ About 170, Onias asked the King for permission to build a temple "according to the measurements of the Temple in Jerusalem," on the ground that the numerous non-conforming temples that existed were the cause of eternal bickerings amongst the communities.

But this movement came out of Mesopotamia alone, and the spirit in it was the Apocalyptic and not the Talmudic. Jerusalem was occupied in creating yet more legal barriers against the unbeliever. It was not enough even to abandon the practice of making converts. A Pharisee permitted himself to summon the universally beloved King Hyrcanus (135-106) to lay down the office of High Priest because his mother had once been in the power of the infidels.⁴ This is

^<sup>2 S. Funk, Die Entstehung des Talmuds (1919), p. 106.

B. Sachan, Aramäische Patyros und Ostraka aus Elethantine (1911)

Josephus, Antiq., 13, 10.

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

Much as, say, the destruction of the Vatican would be felt by the Catholic Church.

See p. 198. — Tr.

^<sup>8 Cf. p. 69.

The Essenes appear in Jerusalem as a monastic order like the Neopythagoreans. They possessed secret texts.⁴ In the broad sense they are representative of the Pseudomorphosis, and in consequence they disappear from Jewry completely after A.D. 70, while precisely in this period Christian literature was becoming purely Greek — not in the least of the causes of this being that the Hellenized Western Jews left Judaism to retreat into its East, and gradually adopted Christianity.

¹ Pyrrho himself had studied under Magian priests. See, for Pyrrhonism, Ency. Brit., XI ed., articles "Scepticism." "Megarian School." "Pyrrho." — Tr.

^<sup>2 Schiele (Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, III, 812) reverses the two latter names; this however, does not affect the phenomenon in any way.

^<sup>8 The Cosmogony and the Law, in the Zoroastrian Scriptures. — Tr

^<sup>4 Bousset, Rel. d. Iud., p. 532.

Baruch, Ezra IV (2 Esdras), the original text of John's Revelation.

V

^<sup>1 For instance, the Book of Naasenes (P. Wendland, Hellenistisch-römische Kultur, pp. 177, et seq.); the "Mithras Liturgy" (ed. A. Dieterich); the Hermetic Pœmander (ed. Reitzenstein), the Psalms of Solomon, the Gospels of Thomas and Peter, the Pistis-Sophia, etc. [Information as to these will be found in the articles "Ophites," "Mithras," "Hermes Trismegistus," "Apocalyptic Literature," "Apocryphal Literature," "Gnosticism," in the Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.]

² Any more than Dostovevski's "Dream of a Ridiculous Person" is so.

^<sup>2 See Reitzenstein, pp. 124, et seq., and references there quoted.

^<sup>4 According to Reitzenstein (Das Buch von Herrn der Grösse) Jesus was condemned at Jerusalem as a John-disciple. According to Lidzbarski (Mand. Lit., 1920, XVI and Zimmern (Ztschr. d. D. Morg. Gesellschaft, 1920, p. 429), the expression "Jesus the Nazarene" or "Nasorene," which was later by the Christian communities referred to Nazareth (Matthew ii, 23, with a doubtful citation),

^<sup>1 E.g., Mark vi; and then the great change, Mark viii, 27, et seq. There is no religion which has given us more honestly the tale of its birth.

^<sup>2 Similarly in Mark i, 38, et seq., when he arose in the night and sought a lonely place in order to fortify himself by prayer.

another kind of piety that his conviction was asserting against Rabbinical logic. Thus far it is only the Law versus the Prophets.

My kingdom is not of this world. This is the final word which admits of no gloss and on which each must check the course wherein birth and nature have set him. A being that makes use of a waking-consciousness, or a waking-consciousness which subjects being to itself; pulsation or tension, blood or intellect, history or nature, politics or religion — here it is one or the other, there is no honest way of compromise. A statesman can be deeply religious, a pious man can die for his country — but they must, both, know on which side they are really standing. The born politician despises the inward thought-processes of the ideologue and ethical philosopher in a world of fact — and rightly. For the believer, all ambition and succession of the historical world are sinful and without lasting value — he, too, is right. A ruler who wishes to improve religion in the direction of political, practical purposes is a fool. A sociologist-preacher who tries to bring truth, righteousness, peace, and forgiveness into the world of actuality is a fool also. No faith yet has altered the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between directional Time and timeless Eternity, between the course of history and the existence of a divine world-order, in the structure of which the word "providence" or "dispensation" denotes the form of causality. This is the final meaning of the moment in which Jesus and Pilate confronted one another. In the one world, the historical, the Roman caused the Galilean to be crucified — that was his Destiny. In the other world, Rome was cast for perdition and the Cross became the pledge of Redemption — that was the "will of God." 1

^<sup>1 The method of the present work is historical. It therefore recognizes the anti-historical as well as the historical as a fact. The religious method, on the contrary, necessarily looks upon itself as the true and the opposite as false. This difference is quite insuperable.

Religion is metaphysic and nothing else — "Credo quia absurdum" — and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic — that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is. Moralizing is nineteenth-century Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus is a blasphemy. His occasional utterances of a social kind, so far as they are authentic and not merely attributed sayings, tend merely to edification. They contain nothing whatever of new doctrine, and they include proverbs of the sort then in general currency. His teaching was the proclamation, nothing but the proclamation, of those Last Things with whose images he was constantly filled, the dawn of the New Age, the advent of heavenly envoys, the last judgment, a new heaven and a new earth.¹ Any other conception of religion was never in Jesus, nor in any truly deep-feeling period of history. Religion is, first and last, metaphysic, other-worldliness (Jenseitigkeit), awareness in a world of which the evidence of the senses merely lights the foreground. It is life in and with the supersensible. And where the capacity for this awareness, or even the capacity for believing in its existence, is wanting, real religion is at an end. "My kingdom is not of this world," and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them. It is the Late, city periods that, no longer capable of seeing into depths, have turned the remnants of religiousness upon the external world and replaced religion by humanities, and metaphysic by moralization and social ethics.

which was a strict Order and not a socialist club — rejected ownership, it was the most direct opposite of "social" sentiment that moved them. Their conviction was, not that the visible state of things was all, but that it was nothing: that it rested not on appreciation of comfort in this world, but on unreserved contempt of it. Something, it is true, must always exist to be set against and to nullify worldly fortune, and so we come back to the contrast of Tolstoi and Dostoyevski. Tolstoi, the townsman and Westerner, saw in Jesus only a social reformer, and in his metaphysical impotence — like the whole civilized West, which can only think about distributing, never renouncing — elevated primitive Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. Dostoyevski, who was poor, but in certain hours almost a saint, never thought about social ameliorations — of what profit would it have been to a man's soul to abolish property?

VII

Jesus himself was aware of this (Matt. xxiv, 5, 11)

^<sup>8 Acts xv; Gal. ii.

what it really was. It was itself already the result of a national existence in dispersion. In utter contrast to the old-Jewish texts — which were a carefully preserved treasure, and of which the right interpretation, the Halakha, was reserved by the Rabbis to themselves — the apocalyptic literature was written so that it could reach all the souls to be wakened, and interpreted so that it might strike home in everyone.

This was the question decided by Paul — the first great personality in the new movement, and the first who had the sense not only of truths, but of facts.

^<sup>1 Acts i, 14; cf. Mark vi.

Peter never. Paul was the first by whom the Resurrection-experience was seen as a problem; the ecstatic awe of the young countryman changed in his brain into a conflict of spiritual principles. For what a contrast! — the struggle of Gethsemane, and the hour of Damascus: Child and Man, soul-anguish and intellectual decision, self-devotion to death and resolve to change sides! Paul had begun by seeing in the new Jewish sect a danger to the Pharisaism of Jerusalem; now, suddenly, he comprehended that the Nazarenes "were right" — a phrase that is inconceivable on the lips of Jesus — and took up their cause against Judaism, thereby setting up as an intellectual quantity that which had previously consisted in the knowledge of an experience. An intellectual quantity — but in making his cause into this he unwittingly drove it close to the other intellectual powers, the cities of the West. In the ambiance of pure Apocalyptic there is no "intellect." For the old comrades it was simply not possible to understand him in the least — and mournfully and doubtfully they must have looked at him while he was addressing them. Their living image of Jesus (whom Paul had never seen) paled in this bright, hard light of concepts and propositions. Thenceforward the holy memory faded into a Scholastic system. But Paul had a perfectly exact feeling for the true home of his ideas. His missionary journeys were all directed westward, and the East he ignored. He never left the domain of the Classical city. Why did he go to Rome, to Corinth, and not to Edessa or Ctesiphon? And why was it that he worked only in the cities, and never from village to village?

It was a second creation, then, that came out of Paul's immediate entourage, and it was this creation that, essentially, defined the form of the new Church. The personality and the story of Jesus cried aloud to be put into poetic form, and yet it is due to one man alone, Mark, that Gospels came into existence at all.¹ What Paul and Mark had before them was a firm tradition in the community, the "Gospel," a continued and propagated hearsay, supported by formless and insignificant notes in Aramaic and Greek, but in no way set out. In any case, of course, serious documents would have come into existence some time or another, but their natural form as products of the spirit of those who had lived with Jesus (and of the spirit of the East generally) would have been a canonical collection of his sayings, amplified, conclusively defined, and provided with an exegesis by the Councils and pivoting upon the Second Advent. But any tentatives in this direction were completely broken off by the Gospel of Mark, which was written down about A.D. 65, at the same time as the last Pauline Epistles, and, like them, in Greek. The writer had no suspicion, perhaps, of the significance of his little work, but it made him one of the supremely important personalities not only of Christianity, but of the Arabian Culture generally. All older attempts vanished, leaving writings in Gospel-form as the sole sources concerning Jesus. (So much so that "Evangelium," from signifying the content of glad tidings, came to mean the form itself.) The work was the outcome of the wishes of Pauline, literate, circles that had never heard any one of Jesus's companions discourse about him. It is an apocalyptic life-picture from a distance; lived experience is replaced by narrative, and narrative so plain and straightforward that the apocalyptic tendency passes quite unperceived. And yet Apocalyptic is its condition precedent. It is not the words of Jesus, but the doctrine of Jesus in the Pauline form, that constitutes the substance of Mark. The first Chri

³ If the word "catholic" be used in its oldest sense (Ignatius ad Smyrn., 8) - namely, to signify

birth of Jesus, of which the Disciples knew nothing, grew up a story of his childhood. In the Mark Gospel it has not yet come into existence. Already in the old Persian apocalyptic, indeed, the Saoshyant as Saviour of the Last Day was said to be born of a virgin. But the new western myth was of quite other significance and had incalculable consequences. For within the Pseudomorphosis-region there arose presently beside Jesus a figure to which he was Son, which transcended his figure — that of the Mother of God. She, like her Son, was a simple human destiny of such arresting and attractive force that she towered above all the hundred and one Virgins and Mothers of Syncretism — Isis, Tanit, Cybele, Demeter — and all the mysteries of birth and pain, and finally drew them into herself. For Irenæus she is the Eve of a new mankind. Origen champions her continued virginity. By giving birth to Redeemer-God it is she really who has redeemed the world. Mary the "Theotokos" (she who bare God) was the great stumbling-block for the Christians outside the Classical frontier, and it was the doctrinal developments of this idea that led Monophysites and Nestorians to break away and re-establish the pure Jesus-religion. But the Faustian Culture, again, when it awoke and needed a symbol whereby to express its primary feeling for Infinity in time and to manifest its sense of the succession of generations, set up the "Mater Dolorosa" and not the suffering Redeemer as the pivot of the German-Catholic Christianity of the Gothic age; and for whole centuries of bright fruitful inwardness this woman-figure was the very synthesis of Faustian world-feeling and the object of all art, poetry, and piety. Even to-day in the ritual and the prayers of the Roman Catholic Church, and above all in the thoughts of its people, Jesus takes second place after the Madonna.²

the sum of the cult-communities, both the Churches were Catholic. In the East the word had no meaning. The Nestorian Church was no more a sum than was the Persian: it was a Magian unit.

^<sup>2 Ed. Meyer, Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums (1921), pp. 77, et seq

A final step in this direction was attempted by a man who was the equal of Paul in organizing talent and greatly his superior in intellectual creativeness, but who was inferior to him in the feeling for possibilities and actualities, and consequently failed to achieve his grandly conceived schemes — Marcion.¹ He saw in Paul's creation and its consequences only the basis on which to found the true religion of salvation. He was sensible of the absurdity of two religions that were unreservedly at war with one another possessing the same Holy Writ — namely, the Jewish canon. To us to-day it seems almost inconceivable that this should have been, but in fact it was so, for a century — but we have to remember what a sacred text meant in every kind of Magian religiousness. In these texts Marcion saw the real "conspiracy against the truth" and the most urgent danger for the doctrines intended by Jesus and, in his view, not yet actualized. Paul the prophet had declared the Old Testament as fulfilled and concluded — Marcion the founder pronounced it defeated and cancelled. He strove to cut out everything Jewish, down to the last detail. From end to end he was fighting nothing but Judaism. Like every true founder, like every religiously creative period, like Zarathustra, the prophets of Israel, like the Homeric Greeks, and like the Germans converted to Christianity, he transformed the old gods into defeated powers.² Jehovah as the Creator-God, the Demiurge, is the "Just" and therefore the Evil: Jesus as the incarnation of the Saviour-God in this evil creation is the "alien" — that is, the good Principle.³ The foundation of Magian, and in particular Persian, feeling is perfectly unmistakable here. Marcion came from Sinope, the old capital of that Mithra-

^<sup>2 Harnack, op. cit., pp. 136, et seq.; N. Bonwetsch, Grundr. d. Dogmengesch. (1919), p. 45, et seq.

Thus Marcion became the real creator of the New Testament. But for that reason it is impossible to ignore the mysterious personage, closely related to him, who not long before had written the Gospel "according to John." The intention of this writer was neither to amplify nor to supersede the Gospels proper; what he did — and, unlike Mark, consciously did — was to create something quite new, the first sacred book of Christianity, the Koran of the new religion. The book proves that this religion was already conceived of as something complete and enduring. The idea of the immediately impending end of the world, with which Jesus was filled through and through and which even Paul and Mark in a measure shared, lies far behind "John" and Marcion. Apocalyptic is at an end, and Mysticism is beginning. Their content is not the teaching of Jesus, nor even the Pauline teaching about Jesus, but the enigma of the universe, the World-Cavern. There is here no question of a Gospel; not the figure of the Redeemer, but the principle of the Logos, is the meaning and the means of happening. The childhood story is rejected again; a god is not "born," he is "there," and wanders in human form over the earth. And this god is a Trinity — God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. This sacred book of earliest Christianity contains, for the first time, the Magian problem of "Substance," which dominated the following centuries of the exclusion of everything else and finally led to the religion's splitting up into three churches. And — what is significant in more respects than one — the solution of that problem to which "John" stands closest is that which the Nestorian East stood for as the true one. It is, in virtue of the Logos idea (Greek though

About A.D. 150. See Harnack, op. cit., pp. 32, et seq.

the word happens to be) the "easternmost" of the Gospels, and presents Jesus, emphatically not as the bringer of the final and total revelation, but as the second envoy, who is to be followed by a third (the Comforter, Paraclete, of John xiv, 16, 26; xv, 26). This is the astounding doctrine that Jesus himself proclaims, and the decisive note of this enigmatic book. Here is unveiled, quite suddenly, the faith of the Magian East. If the Logos does not go, the Paraclete 1 cannot come (John xvi, 7), but between them lies the last Æon, the rule of Ahriman (xiv, 30). The Church of the Pseudomorphosis, ruled by Pauline intellect, fought long against the John Gospel and gave it recognition only when the offensive, darkly hinted doctrine had been covered over by a Pauline interpretation. The real state of affairs is disclosed in the Montanist movement (Asia Minor, 160) which harked back to oral tradition and proclaimed in Montanus the manifested Paraclete and the end of the world. Its popularity was immense. Tertullian went over to it at Carthage in 207. About 245 Mani, 2 who was intimately in touch with the currents of Eastern Christianity, 3 cast out the Pauline, human Jesus as a demon and confessed the Johannine Logos as the true Jesus, but announced himself as the Paraclete of the fourth Gospel. In Carthage, Augustine became a Manichæan, and it is a highly suggestive fact that both movements finally fused with Marcionism.

¹ Voly Mano, the Spirit of Truth, in the shape of the Saoshyant,

^<sup>2 See the article by Harnack and Conybeare "Manichæism," Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

^<sup>5 Harnack, pp. 181, et seq.

⁶ It had, like each of the other Magian religions, a script of its own, and this script steadily came to resemble the Manichæan more and more closely.

This development, however, took place on Classical soil, and, therefore, even the Church that arose in opposition to Marcion and his anti-Judaism was looked upon by Talmudic Jewry (whose centre of gravity lay entirely in Mesopotamia and its universities) as a mere piece of Hellenistic paganism. The destruction of Jerusalem was a conclusive event that in the world of fact no spiritual power could nullify. Such is the intimacy of inward relationship between waking-consciousness, religion, and speech that the complete severance after 70 of the Greek Pseudomorphosis and the Aramaic (that is, the truly Arabian) region was bound to result in the formation of two distinct domains of Magian religious development. On the Western margin of the young Culture the Pagan cult-Church, the Jesus-Church (removed thither by Paul), and the Greek-speaking Judaism of the Philo stamp were in point of language and literature so interlocked that the last-named fell into Christianity even in the first century, and Christianity and Hellenism combined to form a common early philosophy. In the Aramaic-speaking world from the Orontes to the Tigris, on the other hand, Judaism and Persism interacted constantly and intimately, each creating in this period its own strict theology and scholastic in the Talmud and the Avesta; and from the fourth century both these theologies exercised the most potent influence upon the Aramaic-speaking Christendom that resisted the Pseudomorphosis, so that finally it broke away in the form of the Nestorian Church.

^<sup>2 See further, below, p. 321.

As a drastic instance, Galatians iv, 24–26.

^<sup>1 The best exposition of the mass of thought common to both Churches is Windelband's Geschichte der Philosophie (1900), pp. 177, et seq.; for the dogmatic history of the Christian Chruch see Harnack, Dogmengeschichte (1914), while — unconsciously — Geffcken (Der Ausgang des griechischrömischen Heidentums, 1920) gives the corresponding "dogmatic history of the Pagan Church."

^<sup>2 Geffcken, op. cit., p. 69 [article "Neoplatonism" in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.].

³ See the following chapter.

⁴ Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, p. 165.

⁵ See Vol. I. p. 209.

CHAPTER VIII

(B)

1

^<sup>1 The expression is Leo Frobenius's (Paideuma, 1920, p. 92). [See Vol. I, p. 184. — Tr.]

But still more important than all this is the opposition of Spirit and Soul (Hebrew Ruach and nephesh, Persian ahu and urvan, Mandæan monuhmed and gyan, Greek pneuma and pryche) which first comes out in the basic feeling of the prophetic religions, then pervades the whole of Apocalyptic, and finally forms and guides the world-contemplations of the awakened Culture — Philo, Paul and Plotinus, Gnostics and Mandæans, Augustine and the Avesta, Islam and the Kabbalah. Ruach means originally "wind" and nephesh "breath." ¹ The nephesh is always in one way or another related to the bodily and earthly, to the below, the evil, the darkness. Its effort is the "upward." The ruach belongs to the divine, to the above, to the light. Its effects in man when it descends are the heroism of a Samson, the holy wrath of an Elijah, the enlightenment of the judge (the Solomon passing judgment,²) and all kinds of divination and ecstasy. It is poured out.³ From Isaiah xi, 2, the Messiah becomes the incarnation of the ruach. Philo and the Islamic theology divide mankind into born Psychics and born Pneumatics (the "elect," a concept thoroughly proper to the world-cavern and Kismet). All the sons of Jacob are pneumatics. For Paul (r Cor. xv) the meaning of the Resurrection lies in the opposition of a psychic and a pneumatic body, which alike for him and Philo and the author of the Baruch apocalypse coincides with the opposition of heaven and earth, light and darkness.⁴ For Paul, the Saviour is the heavenly Pneuma.⁵ In the John Gospel he fuses as Logos with the Light; in Neoplatonism he appears as Nus or, in the Classical terminology, the All-One opposed to Physis. Paul and Philo, with their "Classical" (that is, western) conceptual criteria, equated soul and body with good and bad respectively, Augustine, as a Manichæan with Persian-Eastern bases of distinction, lumps soul and body together as the naturally bad, in contrast to God as the sole Good, and finds in this opposition the source of his doctrine of Grace, which developed

² On this rests the whole theory and practice of Magian law (see p. 72 above)

⁸ Isaiah xxxii. 15: 4 Ezra xiv, 39; Acts ii.

^<sup>4 Reitzenstein Das iran. Erlösungsmysterium, pp. 108, et seq.

ever the same. The man possesses a soul, but he only participates in the spirit of the Light and the Good; the divine descends into him, thus binding all the individuals of the Below together with the one in the Above. This primary feeling, which dominates the beliefs and opinions of all Magian men, is something perfectly singular, and not only characterizes their world-view, but marks off the essence and kernel of their religiousness in all its forms from that of every other kind of man. This Culture, as has been shown, was characteristically the Culture of the middle. It could have borrowed forms and ideas from most of the others, and the fact that it did not do so, that in the face of all pressure and temptation it remained so profoundly mistress of its own inward form, attests an unbridgeable gulf of difference. Of all the wealth of Babylonian and Egyptian religion it admitted hardly more than a few names; the Classical and the Indian Cultures, or rather the Civilizations heir to them — Hellenism and Buddhism — distorted its expression to the point of pseudomorphosis, but its essence they never touched. All religions of the Magian Culture, from the creations of Isaiah and Zarathustra to Islam, constitute a complete inward unit of world-feeling; and, just as in the Avestan beliefs there is not to be found one trait of Brahmanism nor in early Christianity one breath of Classical feeling, but merely names and figures and outward forms, so also not a trace of this Jesus-religion could be absorbed by the Germanic-Catholic Christianity of the West, even though the stock of tenets and observances was taken over in its entirety.

Whereas the Faustian man is an "I" that in the last resort draws its own conclusions about the Infinite; whereas the Apollinian man, as one soma among many, represents only himself; the Magian man, with his spiritual kind of being, is only a part of a pneumatic "We" that, descending from above, is one and the same in all believers. As body and soul he belongs to himself alone, but something else, something alien and higher, dwells in him, making him with all his glimpses and convictions just a member of a consensus which, as the emanation of God, excludes error, but excludes also all possibility of the self-asserting Ego. Truth is for him something other than for us. All our epistemological methods, resting upon the individual judgment, are for him madness and infatuation, and its scientific results a work of the Evil One, who has confused and deceived the spirit as to its true dispositions and purposes. Herein lies the ultimate, for us unapproachable, secret of Magian thought in its cavern-world — the impossibility of a thinking, believing, and knowing Ego is the presupposition inherent in all the fundamentals of all these religions. While Classical man stood before his gods as one body before another; whereas the Faustian willing "I" in its wide world feels itself confronted by deity, also Faustian, also willing, effective everywhere; the Magian deity is the indefinite enigmatic Power on high that pours out its Wrath or its Grace, descends itself into the dark or raises the soul into the light as it sees fit. The idea of individual

The Logos-idea in its broadest sense, an abstraction of the Magian light-sensation of the Cavern, is the exact correlative of this sensation in Magian thought. It meant that from the unattainable Godhead its Spirit, its "Word," is released as carrier of the light and bringer of the good, and enters into relation with human being to uplift, pervade, and redeem it. This distinctness of three substances, which does not contradict their oneness in religious thought, was known already to the prophetic religions. Ahuramazda's light-gleaming soul is the Word (Yasht 13, 31), and in one of the earliest Gathas his Holy Spirit (spenta mainya) converses with the Evil Spirit (angra mainya, Yasna 45, 2). The same idea penetrates the whole of the old Jewish literature. The thought which the Chaldeans built up on the separation of God and His Word and the opposition of Marduk and Nabu, which breaks forth with power in the whole Aramæan Apocalyptic remained permanently active and creative; by Philo and John, Marcion and Mani, it entered into the Talmudic teachings and thence into the Kabbalistic books Yesirah and Sohar, into the Church Councils and the works of the Fathers, into the later Avesta, and finally into Islam, in which a Mohammed gradually became the Logos and, as the mystically respent, living Mohammed of the popular religion, fused into the figure of Christ. This conception is for Magian man so self-evident that it was able to break through even the strictly monotheistic structure of the original Islam and to appear with Allah as the Word of God (kalimah), the Holy Spirit (ruh), and the "light of Mohammed."

^<sup>1 M. Horten, Die religiöse Gedankenwelt der Volkes im heutigen Islam (1917), pp. 381, et seq. By the Shiites the Logos-idea was transferred to Ali.

Wolff, Muhammedanische Eschatologie, 3, 2, et seq.

^<sup>3 Usener, Vortr. u. Aufs., p. 217.

^<sup>4 The "devil-worshippers" in Armenia; M. Horten in Der neue Orient (March 1918). The name arose from the fact that they did not recognize Satan as a being, and accordingly derived the Evil

by a very complicated set of ideas, from the Logos itself. Under old Persian influences the Jews also busied themselves with the same problem — observe the difference between 2 Samuel xxiv, 1, and 1 Chron. xxi. 1.

¹ M. Horten, op. cit., p. xxi. This book is the best introduction to the actually existing popular religion of Islam, which deviates considerably from the official doctrines.

^<sup>2 Baumstark, Die christl. Literaturen des Orients, I, p. 64.

H

^<sup>1 Cf. p. 205. The Babylonian view of the heavens had not definitely distinguished between astronomical and atmospheric elements; e.g., the covering of the moon by clouds was regarded as a kind of eclipse. For this soothsaying the momentary figure of the heavens served only the same purpose as the inspection of the victim's liver. But the Chaldeans' intention was to forecast the actual course of the stars; here, therefore, astrology presupposed a genuine astronomy.

World-history is the picture of the living world into which man sees himself woven by birth, ancestry, and progeny, and which he strives to comprehend from out of his world-feeling. The historical picture of Classical man concentrates itself upon the pure Present. Its content is no true Becoming, but a foreground Being with a conclusive background of timeless myth, rationalized as "the Golden Age." This Being, however, was a variegated swarming of ups and downs, good and ill fortune, a blind "thereabouts," an eternal alteration, yet ever in its changes the same, without direction, goal, or "Time." The cavern-feeling, on the contrary, requires a surveyable history consisting in a beginning and an end to the world that is also the beginning and the end of man—acts of God of mighty magic—and between these turns, spellbound to the limits of the Cavern and the ordained period, the battle of light and darkness, of the angels and Jazatas with Ahriman, Satan, and Eblis, in which Man, his Soul, and his Spirit are involved. The present Cavern God can destroy and replace by a new creation. The Persian-Chaldean apocalyptic offers to the gaze a whole series of such zons, and Jesus, along with his time, stood in expectation of the end of the existing one.² The consequence of this is a historic outlook like that which is natural to Islam even to-day—the view over a given time. "The world-view of the people falls naturally into three major parts—world-beginning, world-development, and world-catastrophe. For the Moslem who feels so deeply ethically, the chief essentials in world-development are the salvation-story and the ethical way of life, knit into one as the "life" of man.

^" B. Cohn, "Die Anfangsepoche der jüd. Kalenders" (Sitz. Pr. Akad., 1914). The date of the first day of Creation was on this occasion fixed by calculation from a total eclipse of the sun — of course with the aid of Chaldean astronomy. [See, in general, the articles "Chronology," "Calendar," in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.]

^<sup>2 The Persian notion of total time is 12,000 years. The Parsees of to-day consider A.D. 1920 as the 11.550th.

^<sup>2 It shows a great gap in our research that although we possess a whole library of works on Classical religion and particularly its gods and cults, we have not one about Classical religiousness and its history.

that since Pelagius the Faustian Soul has tried by any and every route to circumvent this certainty — which for it constitutes an imminent danger of self-destruction — and in using Augustinian propositions to express its own proper consciousness of God has ever misunderstood and transvalued them. Actually, Augustine was the last great thinker of Early Arabian Scholasticism, anything but a Western intellect.¹ Not only was he at times a Manichæan, but he remained so even as a Christian in some important characteristics, and his closest relations are to be found amongst the Persian theologians of the later Avesta, with their doctrines of the Store of Grace of the Holy and of absolute guilt. For him grace is the substantial inflowing of something divine into the human Pneuma, itself also substantial.² The Godhead radiates it; man receives it, but does not acquire it. From Augustine, as from Spinoza so many centuries later,³ the notion of force is absent, and for both the problem of freedom refers not to the Ego and its Will, but to the part of the universal Pneuma that is infused into a man and its relation to the rest of him. Magian waking-being is the theatre of a conflict between the two world-substances of light and darkness. The Early Faustian thinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Occam, on the contrary, see a contest inherent in dynamic waking-consciousness itself, a contest of the two forces of the Ego — namely, will and reason,⁴ and so imperceptibly the question posed by Augustine changes into another, which he himself would have been incapable of understanding — are willing and thinking free forces, or are they not? Answer this question as we may, one thing at any rate is certain, that the individual ego has to wage this war and not to suffer it. The Faustian Grace refers to the success of the Will and not to the species of a substance. Says the

TTI

The waking-consciousness of every Culture allows of two ways of inwardness, that in which contemplative feeling spreads into understanding, and that in which the reverse takes place. The Magian contemplation is called by Spinoza "intellectual love of God," and by his Sufist contemporaries in Asia "extinction in God" (mahw); it may be intensified to the Magian ecstasy that was vouch-safed to Plotinus several times, and to his pupil Porphyry once in old age. The other side, the rabbinical dialectic, appears in Spinoza as geometrical method and in the Arabian-Jewish "Late" philosophy in general as Kalaam. Both, however, rest upon the fact that there in Magian there is no individual-ego, but a single Pneuma present simultaneously in each and all of the elect, which is likewise Truth. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the resultant rootidea of the ijma is much more than a concept or notion, that it can be a lived experience of even overwhelming force, and that all community of the Magian kind rests upon it and, as doing so, is removed from community in any other Culture. "The mystic Community of Islam extends from the here into the beyond; it reaches beyond the grave, in that it comprises the dead Moslems of earlier generations, nay, even the righteous of the times before Islam. The Moslem feels himself bound up in one unity with them all. They help him, and he, too, can in turn increase their beatitude by the application of his own

^<sup>1 The period at which it was written corresponds to our Carolingian. Whether the latter really brought forth any poetry of like rank we do not know, but that it may possibly have done so is shown by creations like the Voluspa, Muspilli, the Heliand, and the universe conceived by John Scotus Erigena.

ΙV

¹ Horten, op. cit., p. xii.

⁴ Aletheia (Truth) is generally employed in this way in the John Gospel, and drug (= lie) is used for Ahriman in Persian cosmology. Ahriman is often shown as though a servant of the drug.

^<sup>1 It is almost unnecessary to say that in all religions of the Germanic West the Bible stands in a quite other relationship to the faith — namely, in that of a source in the strictly historical sense irrespective of whether it is taken as inspired and immune from textual criticism or not. The relation of Chinese thought to the canonical books is similar.

^<sup>3 Identified by Mani with the Johannine Logos. Compare also Yasht 13, 31. Ahuramazda's shining soul is the Word.

it was only from the time of Cyrus that it began to take shape. The old Israelitish prophets, and no doubt Zarathustra also, see and hear in ecstasy things that afterwards they spread abroad. The Deuteronomic code (621) was given out as having been "found in the Temple," which meant that it was to be taken as the wisdom of the Father. The first (and a very deliberate) example of a "Koran" is the book of Ezekiel, which the author received in a thought-out vision from God and "swallowed" (iii, 1-3). Here, expressed in the crudest imaginable form, is the basis on which later the idea and shape of all apocalyptic writing was founded. But by degrees this substantial form of reception came to be one of the requisites for any book to be canonical. It was in post-Exilic times that the idea arose of the Tables of the Law received by Moses on Sinai; later such an origin came to be assumed for the whole Torah, and about the Maccabæan period for the bulk of the Old Testament. From the Council of Jabna (about 90 B.C.) the whole word was regarded as inspired and delivered in the most literal sense. But the same evolution took place in the Persian religion up to the sanctification of the Avesta in the third century, and the same idea of a literal delivery appears in the second vision of Hermas, in the Apocalypses, and in the Chaldean and Gnostic and Mandæan writings; lastly, it underlies, as a tacit natural basis, all the ideas that the Neo-Pythagoreans and the Neo-Platonists formed of the writings of their old masters. "Canon" is the technical expression for the totality of writings that are accepted by a religion as delivered. It was as canons in this sense that the Hermetic collection and the corpus of Chaldean oracles came into being from 200 — the latter a sacred book of the Neoplatonists which alone was admitted by Proclus, the "Father" of this Church, to stand with Plato's Timaus.

^<sup>1 See p. 73.

^<sup>2 IV Ezra xiv; S. Funk, Die Entstehung des Talmuds, p. 17; Hirsch's commentary on Exodus xxi, 2.

^<sup>3 Funk, op. cit., p. 86.

Pure Magian, too, is the Kabbalah, which out of numbers, letter-forms, points, and strokes, unfolds secret significances, and therefore cannot but be as old as the Word itself that was sent down as Substance. The secret dogma of the creation of the world out of the two-and-twenty letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and that of the throne-chariot of Ezekiel's Vision, are already traceable in Maccabæan times. Closely related to this is the allegorical exegesis of the sacred texts. All the tractates of the Mishnah, all the Fathers, all the Alexandrian philosophers are full of it; in Alexandria the whole Classical mythology and even Plato were treated in this way and brought into analogy (Moses = Musæus) with the Jewish prophets.

The only strictly scientific method that an unalterable Koran leaves open for progressive opinion is that of commentary. As by hypothesis the "word" of an authority cannot be improved upon, the only resource is reinterpretation. No one in Alexandria would ever have asserted that Plato was in "error"; instead, he was glossed upon. It was done in the strictly constructed forms of the Halakha, and the fixation of this exegesis in writing takes the commentary shape that dominates all religious, philosophical, and savant literatures of this Culture. Following the procedure of the Gnostics, the Fathers compiled written commentaries upon the Bible, and similarly the Pehlevi commentary of the Zend appeared by the side of the Avesta, and the Midrash by the side of the Jewish canon. But the "Roman" jurists of about A.D. 200 and the "Late Classical" philosophers — that is, the Schoolmen of the growing cult-Church — went just the same way; the Apocalypse of this Church, commented over and over again after Posidonius, was the Timaus of Plato. The Mishnah is one vast commentary upon the Torah. And when the oldest exegetes had become themselves authorities and their writings Korans, commentaries were written upon commentaries, as by Simplicius, the last Platonist, in the West, by the Amoraim, who added the Gemara to the Mishnah in the East, and by the jurists who compiled the Imperial Constitutions into the Digests at Byzantium.

Fromer, Der Talmud, p. 190.

one remarked it for what it was. Apart altogether from the constant references to the Law and the Prophets, it appears in the superscription of the four Gospels ("according to" Mark), each of which had thus to present its warrant if authority was to be claimed for the words of the Lord that it presented.¹ This established the chain back to the Truth that was incarnate in Jesus, and it is impossible to exaggerate the intense reality of this in the world-idea of an Augustine or a Jerome. This is the basis of the practice, which spread even more widely from the time of Alexander onwards, of providing religious and philosophical writings with names,² like Enoch, Solomon, Ezra, Hermes, Pythagoras — guarantors and vessels of divine wisdom, in whom, therefore, the Word had been made Flesh of old. We still possess a number of Apocalypses bearing the name of Baruch, who was then compared with Zarathustra, and we can scarcely form an idea of what in the way of literature circulated under the names of Aristotle and Pythagoras. The "Theology of Aristotle" was one of the most influential works of Neoplatonism. And, lastly, this the metaphysical presupposition for the style and the deeper meaning of citation, which was employed by Fathers, Rabbis, "Greek" philosophers, and "Roman" jurists, and eventuated on the one hand in the Law of Valentinian III,³ and on the other in the elimination from the Jewish and Christian canons of apocryphal writings — a fundamental notion, which differentiated the literary stock according to difference of substance.

v

^<sup>2 On the pseudonyma and anonyma of Biblical apocryphal literature the English reader will find much of interest in three small books (already referred to) of the "Home University" series: Moore, Literature of the Old Testament; Charles, Between the Old and the New Testaments; and Bacon, The Making of the New Testament. — Tr.

^<sup>3 See p. 73. — Tr.

The second wave swelled up steeply in the Apocalyptic currents after 300. Here it was the Magian waking-consciousness that arose and built itself a metaphysic of Last Things, based already upon the prime-symbol of the coming Culture, the Cavern. Ideas of an awful End of the World, of the Last Judgment, of Resurrection, Paradise, and Hell, and with them the grand thought of a process of salvation in which earth's destiny and man's were one, burst forth everywhere — we cannot say what land or people it was that created them — mantled in wondrous scenes and figures and names. The Messiah-figure presents itself, complete at one stroke. Satan's temptation of the Saviour 1 is told as a tale. But simultaneously there welled up a deep and ever-increasing fear before this certainty of an implacable — and imminent — limit of all happening, before the moment in which there would be only Past. Magian Time, the "hour," directedness under the Cavern, imparted a new pulse to life and a new import to the word "Destiny." Man's attitude before the Deity suddenly became completely different. In the dedicatory inscription of the great basilica of Palmyra (which was long thought to be Christian) Baal was called the good, the compassionate, the mild; and this feeling penetrated, with the worship of Rahman, right to southern Arabia. It fills the psalms of the Chaldeans and the teachings about the God-sent Zarathustra that took the place of his teachings. And it stirred the Jewry of Maccabean time — most of the psalms were written then — and all the other communities, long forgotten now, that lay between the Classical and the Indian worlds.

^<sup>1 Vendidad 19, 1; here it is Zarathustra who is tempted.

separable than nation, church, and state, or sacred and secular law. The prophet merges with the fighter, and the story of a great Sufferer rises to the rank of a national epic. The powers of light and darkness, fabulous beings angels and devils, Satan and the good spirits wrestle together; all nature is a battle-ground from the beginning of the world to its annihilation. Down below in the world of mankind are enacted the adventures and sufferings of the heralds, the heroes, and the martyrs of religion. Every nation, in the sense of the word attaching to this Culture, possessed its heroic saga. In the East the life of the Persian prophet inspired an epic poetry of grand outlines. At his birth the Zarathustra-laughter pealed through the heavens, and all nature echoed it. In the West the suffering of Jesus, ever broadening and developing, became the veritable epic of the Christian nation, and by its side there grew up a chain of legends of his childhood which in the end fructified a whole genre of poetry. The figure of the Mother of God and the deeds of the Apostles became, like the stories of the Western Crusade-heroes, the centre of extended romances (Acts of Thomas, Pseudo-Clementines) which in the second century sprang up everywhere from the Nile to the Tigris. In the Jewish Haggada and in the Targums is brought together a rich measure of legends about Saul, David, the Patriarchs, and the great Tannaim, like Schuda and Akiba,¹ and the insatiable fancy of the age seized also upon what it could reach of the Late-Classical cult-legends and founder-stories (lives of Pythagoras, Hermes, Apollonius of Tyana).

With the end of the second century the sounds of this exaltation die away. The flowering of epic poetry is past, and the mystical penetration and dogmatic analysis of the religious material begin. The doctrines of the new Churches are brought into theological systems. Heroism yields to Scholasticism, poetry to thought, the seer and seeker to the priest. The early Scholasticism which ends about 200 (as the Western about 1200) comprises the whole Gnosis—in the very broadest sense, the great Contemplation—the author of the John Gospel, Valentinus, Bardesanes, and Marcion, the Apologists and the early Fathers, up to Irenæus and Tertullian, the last Tannaim up to Rabbi Jehuda, the completer of the Mishna, the Neopythagoreans and Hermetics of Alexandria. All this corresponds with, in the West, the School of Chartres, Anselm, Joachim of Floris, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugo de St. Victor. Full Scholasticism begins with Neoplatonism, with Clement and Origen, the first Amoraim, and the creators of the newer Avesta under Ardeshir (226–241) and Sapor I, the Mazdaist high-priest Tanvasar above all. Simultaneously a higher religiousness begins to separate from the peasant's piety of the countryside, which still lingered in the apocalyptic disposition, and thenceforth maintained itself almost unaltered under various names right into the fellahdom of the Turkish age, while in the urban and more intellectual upper world the Persian, Jewish, and Christian community was absorbed by that of Islam.

^<sup>1 M. J. ben Gorion, Die Sagen der Juden (1913).

In the West the two cult-Churches developed (in Greek 1) a theology that was not only cognate with this, but to a great extent identical with it. In the time of Mani began the theological fusion of the Aramæan-Chaldean sunreligion and the Aramæan-Persian Mithras cult into one system, whose first great "Father" was Iamblichus (c. 300) — the contemporary of Athanasius, but also of Diocletian, the Emperor who in 295 made Mithras the God of a henotheistic State-religion. Spiritually, at any rate, its priests were in nowise distinguishable from those of Christianity. Proclus (he, too, a true "Father") received in dreams elucidations of a difficult text-passage; to him the Timaus and the Chaldean oracles were canonical, and he would gladly have seen all other writings of the philosophers destroyed. His hymns, tokens of the lacerations of a true eremite, implore Helios and other helpers to protect him against evil spirits. Hierocles wrote a moral breviary for the believers of the Neopythagorean community, which it needs a keen eye to distinguish from Christian work. Bishop Synesius was a prince-prelate of Neoplatonism before becoming one of Christianity — and the change did not involve an act of conversion; he kept his theology and only altered its names. It was possible for the Neoplatonist Asclepiades to write a great work on the likeness of all theologies. We possess Pagan gospels and hagiologies as well as Christian. Apollonius wrote the life of Pythagoras, Marinus that of Proclus, Damascius that of Isidore; and there is not the slightest difference between these works, which begin and end with prayers, and the Christian Acts of the Martyrs. Porphyry describes faith, love, hope, and truth as the four divine elements.

VI

Along with this ripe Scholasticism, there set in also, from 200, the effort to identify the visible community, as its organization became ever stricter, with the organism of the State. This followed of necessity from the world-feeling of Magian man, and in turn it led to the transformation of the rulers into caliphs—lords of a creed-society far more than of domains—to the idea of orthodoxy as the premiss of real citizenship; to the duty of persecuting false religions (the "Holy War" of Islam is as old as the Culture itself, and the first centuries were full of it); and to a special régime within the State of unbelievers—just tolerated and under laws and governance of their own 1 (for the law God had given was not for heretics)—and, with it, the ghetto manner of living.

First, Osrhoene, in the centre of the Aramæan landscape, adopted Christianity as the State religion about 200. Then Mazdaism assumed the same position in the Sassanid Empire (226) while under Aurelian (d. 275) and above all Diocletian (295) Syncretism as a compound of the Divus, Sol, and Mithras cults became the state religion of the Roman Imperium. Constantine in 312, King Trdat of Armenia about 321, and King Mirian of Georgia a few years later, went over to Christianity. In the far South, Saba must already have become Christian in the third century, Axum in the fourth; on the other hand, simultaneously with these, the Himaryite State became Jewish, and there was one more effort, that of Julian, to bring back the Pagan Church to supremacy.

Every Magian Church is itself an Order and it was only in respect of human weakness that there were stages and grades of askesis, and these not ordered, but only permitted, as among the Marcionites and the Manichæans (electi, auditores). And, in truth, a Magian nation is nothing but the sum, the order of all the orders, which, constituted in smaller and smaller, stricter and stricter groups, come out finally in the eremites, dervishes, and stylites, in whom nothing more is of the world, whose waking-consciousness now belongs only to the Pneuma. Setting aside the prophetic religions — out of which, and between which, the excitation of Apocalypse generated numerous order-like communities — the two cult-Churches of the West produced unnumbered monks, friars, and orders, distinguishable from one another in the end only by the name of the Deity upon whom they called. All observed fasting, prayer, celibacy, poverty. It is very doubtful which of the two Churches in 300 was the more ascetic in its tendency. The Neoplatonist monk Sarapion went into the desert in order to devote himself entirely to studying the hymns of Orpheus. Damascius, guided by a dream, withdrew into a noisome cave in order to pray continuously to Cybele.⁸ The schools of philosophy were nothing but ascetic orders; the Neopythagoreans stood close to the Jewish Essenes; the Mithras cult, a true order, admitted only men to its communion and its fraternities; the Emperor Julian had the intention of endowing pagan monasteries. The Mandæan religion seems to have been a group of order-communities of varying rigour; amongst them was that of John the Baptist. Christian monasticism did not begin with Pachomius (320); he was merely the builder of

¹ The Faustian monk represses his evil will, the Magian the evil substance in himself. Only the latter is dualistic.

^<sup>2 The purity- and food-laws of the Talmud and the Avesta cut far deeper into everyday life than, for example, the Benedictine rule.

^<sup>3 Asmus, "Damaskios" (Philos. Bibl., 125 (1911). Christian anchoritism is later than pagan: Reitzenstein, "Des Athanasius Werk über das Leben des Antonius" (Sitz. Heid. Ak. (1914), VIII, 12).

1 Even to the point indicated in Matt. xix, 12, which Origen followed to the letter.

^<sup>3 The followers of Baal Shem above mentioned (p. 228) not to be confused with the Hasidim or Assideans of the second century. — Tr.

The fundamental meaning of this desperate conflict which raged for a

(Hymn VII, Eudociæ Aug. rel. A. Ludwich, 1897.)

¹ See p. 60

^"But when an evil lapse of my being puts me into bondage
(And, ah, I know indeed how I am tossed about by many unholy deeds that in my
blindness I have done),

^<sup>4 See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article "Apollinaris, the Younger." — Tr.

century — not over scholarly concepts, but over the soul of a landscape that sought to be set free in its people — was the reversal of the work of Paul. If we can transport ourselves into the inmost soul of the two new-born nations, making no reservations and ignoring all minor points of dogmatics, then we see how the direction of Christianity towards the Greek West and its intellectual affinity with the Pagan Church culminated in the position that the Ruler of the West was the Head of Christianity in general. In the mind of Constantine it was self-evident that the Pauline foundation within the Pseudomorphosis was synonymous with Christianity. The Jewish Christians of Petrine tendency were to him a heretical sect, and the Eastern Christians of "Johannine" type he never even noticed. When the spirit of the Pseudomorphosis had, in the three determining councils of Nicæa, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, put its seal upon dogma, once and for all, the real Arabian world rose up with the force of nature and set up a barrier against it. With the end of the Arabian Springtime, Christianity fell apart for good into three religions, which can be symbolized by the names of Paul, Peter, and John, and of which none can henceforth claim to be regarded by the historically and doctrinally unprejudiced eye as the true and proper Christianity. These three religions are at the same time three nations, living in the old race-areas of Greeks, Jews, and Persians, and the tongues that they used were the Church-languages borrowed from them—namely, Greek, Aramaic, and Pehlevi.

VII

The Eastern Church, since the Council of Nicæa, had organized itself with an episcopal constitution, at the head of which stood the Katholikos of Ctesiphon, and with councils, liturgy, and law of its own. In 486 the Nestorian doctrine was accepted as binding, and the tie with Constantinople was thus broken. From that point on, Mazdaists, Manichæans, and Nestorians have a common destiny, of which the seed was sown in the Gnosis of Bardesanes. In the Monophysite Churches of the South, the spirit of the primitive Community emerged again and spread itself further; with its uncompromising monotheism and its hatred of images its closest affinity was with Talmudic Judaism, and its old battle-cry of êts θebs had already marked it to be, with that Judaism, the starting-point of Islam ("Allah il Allah"). The Western Church continued to be bound up with the fate of the Roman Empire — that is, the cult-Church became the State. Gradually it absorbed into itself the adherents of the Pagan Church, and thenceforth its importance lay not so much in itself — for Islam almost annihilated it — but in the accident that it was from it that the young peoples of the Western Culture received the Christian system as the basis for a new creation, receiving it, moreover, in the Latin guise of the extreme West — which for the Greek Church itself was unmeaning, since Rome was now a

And Russia, too, though hitherto Russia has kept it as a buried treasure

The Jews, as has been shown already, directed missionary effort on a large scale towards the East and the South. Through southern Arabia they drove into the heart of Africa, possibly even before the birth of Christ, while on the side of the East their presence in China is demonstrable, even in the second century. To the north the realm of the Khazars² and its capital, Astrakhan, later went over to Judaism. From this area came the Mongols of Jewish religion who advanced into the heart of Germany and were defeated, along with the Hungarians, in the battle of the Lechfeld in 955. Jewish scholars of the Span-

^<sup>2 Hermann, Chines. Geschichte (1912), p. 77

For all this, Islam is significant only as a piece of outward religious history. The inner history of the Magian religion ends with Justinian's time, as truly as that of the Faustian ends with Charles V and the Council of Trent. Any book on religious history shows "the" Christian religion as having had two ages of grand thought-movements — 0-500 in the East and 1000-1500 in the West. But these are two springtimes of two Cultures, and in them are comprised also the non-Christian forms which belong to each religious development. The closing of the University of Athens by Justinian in 529 was not, as is always stated, the end of Classical philosophy — there had been no Classical philosophy for centuries. What he did, forty years before the birth of Mohammed, was to end the theology of the Pagan Church by closing this school and — as the historians forget to add — to end the Christian theology also by closing those of Antioch and Alexandria. Dogma was complete, finished — just as it was in the West with the Council of Trent (1564) and the Confession of Augsburg (1540), for with the city and intellectualism religious creative force comes to an end. So also in Jewry and in Persia, the Talmud was concluded about 500, and when Chosroës Nushirvan in 529 bloodily suppressed the Reformation of Mazdak — which was not unlike our Anabaptism in its rejection of marriage and worldly property, and had been supported by King Kobad I as counteracting the power of Church and nobility — Avestan dogma similarly passed into fixity.

^<sup>1 A third, "contemporary," movement should follow in the Russian world in the first half of the coming millennium.

(C)

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL

CHAPTER IX

PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE

(C)

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL

₇1

Cf. pp. 3, et seq. and foot-note p. 3.

Understanding is causal only, whether deductive or inductive, whether derived from sensation or not. It is wholly impossible to distinguish being-understood from being-caused — both express the same thing. When something is "actual" for us, we see it and think it in causal (ursächlich) form, just as we feel and know ourselves and our activities as things originating, causes (Ursache). The assignment of causes is, however, different from case to case, not only in the religious, but also generally in the inorganic logic of man. A fact is thought of at one moment as having such-and-such, at another moment as having something else, as its cause. Every kind of thinking has for every one of its domains of application a proper "system." In everyday life a causal connexion in thought is never exactly repeated. Even in modern physics working hypotheses — that is, causal systems — which partially exclude one another are in use side by side; for instance, the ideas of electrodynamics and those of thermodynamics. The significance of the thought is not thereby nullified, for during a continuous spell of waking-consciousness we "understand" always in the form of single acts of which each has its own causal inception. The viewing of the entire world-as-nature in relation to the individual consciousness as a single causally-ordered concatenation is something perfectly unrealizable by our thought, inasmuch as our thinking proceeds always by unit acts. It remains a belief. It is indeed Faith itself, for it is the basis of religious understanding of the world, which, wherever something is observed, postulates numina as a necessity of thought — ephemeral numina for

^{1 &}quot;He who loves God with inmost soul, transforms himself into God" (Bernard of Clairvaux)

incidental events which are not again thought of, and enduring numina as place-definite indwellers (of springs, trees, stones, hills, stars, and so forth) or as universals (like the gods of Heaven, of War, of Wisdom) which can be present anywhere. These numina are limited only in virtue of the individualness of each separate act of thought. That which to-day is a property of the god is to-morrow itself the god. Others are now a plurality, now a unity, now a vague Ent. There are invisibles (shapes) and incomprehensibles (principles), which, to those to whom it is vouchsafed, may become phenomenal or comprehensible. Fate 1 in the Classical (eluapuévn) and in the Indian (rta) is something which stands as origin-thing (Ur-Sache) above the picturable divinities; Magian Destiny, on the contrary, is the operation of the one and formless supreme God. Religious thought ever lets itself graduate values and rank within the causal succession, and leads up to supreme beings or principles, as very first and "governing" causes; "dispensation" is the word used for the most comprehensive of all systems based upon valuation. Science, on the contrary, is a mode of understanding which fundamentally abhors distinctions of rank amongst causes; what it finds is not dispensation, but law.

In the world-around something is established — that is, fixed, spellbound.

Understanding man has the secret in the hands, whether this be, as of old, some potent charm or, as nowadays, a mathematical formula. A feeling of triumph, even to-day, accompanies every experimental step in the realm of Nature which determines something — about the purposes and powers of the god of heaven or the storm-spirits of the ground-dæmons; or about the numina of natural science (atom-nuclei, the velocity of light, gravitation); or even about the abstract numina that thought conceives in contemplating its own image (concept, category, reason) — and, in determining, fixes it in the prison of an unalterable system of causal relations. Experience in this inorganic, killing, preserving sense, which is something quite different from life-experience and knowledge of men, takes place in two modes — theory and technique, or, in religious language, myth and cult — according as the believer's intention is to open up or to confine the secrets of the world-around. Both demand a high development of human understanding. Both may be born of either fear or love. There is a mythology of fear, like the Mosaic and the primitive generally, and a mythology of love, like that of early Christianity and Gothic mysticism. Similarly there is a technique of defensive, and another technique of postulant, magic, and this, no doubt the most fundamental, distinction between sacrifice and prayer 2 distinguishes also primitive and mature mankind. Religiousness is a trait of soul, but religion is a talent. "Theory" demands the gift of vision that few possess to the extent of luminous insight and many possess not at all. It is world-view, "Weltanschauung" in the most primary sense, whether what one sees in that world is the hand and the loom of powers, or (in a colder urban spirit, not fearing or loving, but inquisitive) the theatre of law-conform forces. The secrets of Taboo and Totem are beheld in god-faiths and soul-faiths, and calculated in theoretical physics and biology. "Technique" presupposes the intellectual gift of binding and

See p. 25.

The first, and perhaps the only, outcome of man's will-to-understanding is faith. "I believe" is the great word against metaphysical fear, and at the same time it is an avowal of love. Even though one's researches or accumulation of knowledge may culminate in sudden illumination or conclusive calculation, yet all one's own sense and comprehension would be meaningless unless there were set up along with it an inward certainty of a "something" which as other and alien is — and is, moreover, exactly under the ascertained shape — in the concatenation of cause and effect. The highest intellectual possession, therefore, known to man as a being of speech-deduced thought, is the firm and hard-won belief in this something, withdrawn from the courses of time and destiny, which he has separated out by contemplation and labelled by name and number. But what that something is remains in the last analysis obscure. Was it the something of secret logic of the universe that was touched, or only a silhouette? And all the struggle and passion starts afresh, and anxious investigation directs itself upon this new doubt, which may well turn to despair. He needs in his intellectual boring of belief a final something attainable by thought, an end of dissection that leaves no remainder of mystery. The corners and pockets of his world of contemplation must all be illuminated — nothing less will give him his release.

^<sup>2 See p. 133.

³ Cf. p. 24.

Belief, in its primitive, unclear condition, acknowledges superior sources of wisdom by which things that man's own subtlety could never unravel are more or less manifest — such as prophetic words, dreams, oracles, sacred scriptures, the voice of the deity. The critical spirit, on the contrary, wants, and believes itself able, to look into everything for itself. It not only mistrusts alien truths, but even denies their possibility. Truth, for it, is only knowledge that it has proved for itself. But if pure criticism creates its means out of itself solely, it did not long go unperceived that this position assumed the reality of the result. De omnibus dubitandum is a proposition that is incapable of being actualized. It is apt to be forgotten that critical activity must rest upon a method, and the possibility of obtaining this method in turn by the way of criticism is only apparent. For, in reality, it follows from the momentary disposition of the thought.¹ That is, the results of criticism themselves are determined by the basic method, but this in turn is determined by the stream of being which carries and perfuses the waking-consciousness. The belief in a knowledge that needs no postulates is merely a mark of the immense naïveté of rationalist periods. A theory of natural science is nothing but a historically older dogma in another shape. And the only profit from it is that which life obtains, in the shape of a successful technique, to which theory has provided the key. It has already been said that the value of a working hypothesis resides not in its "correctness" but in its usableness. But discoveries of another sort, findings of insight, "Truths" in the optimistic sense, cannot be the outcome of purely scientific understanding, since this always presupposes an existing view upon which its critical, dissecting activity can operate; the natural science of the Baroque is one continuous dissection of the religious world-picture of the Gothic.

Being is a mystery that, as soon as faith and science turn their attention to it, illudes them into fateful error. Instead of the cosmic itself being reached (which is completely outside the possibilities of the active waking-consciousness) the sensible mobility of body in the field of the eye, and the conceptual image of a mechanical-causal chain abstracted therefrom, are subjected to analysis. But real life is led, not cognised. Only the Timeless is true. Truths lie beyond history and life, and vice versa life is something beyond all causes, effects, and truths. Criticism in both cases, critique of waking-consciousness and critique of being, are contrary to happening and alien to life. But in the first case the application of a critique is entirely justified by the critical intention and the inner logic of the object that is referred to; in the second case it is not. It follows that the distinction between faith and knowledge, or fear and curiosity, or revelation and criticism, is not, after all, the ultimate distinction. Knowledge is only a late form of belief. But belief and life, love springing from the secret fear of the world, and love springing from the secret hate of the sexes, knowledge of inorganic and sense of organic logic, Causes and Destinies—this is the deepest opposition of all. And here we distinguish men, not according to what their modes of thinking are—religious or critical—nor according to the objects of their thought, but according to whether they are thinkers (no matter about what) or doers.

From this starting-point we can understand (what the European-American world of to-day has wellnigh forgotten) the ultimate meaning of religious

^<sup>1 Anatole France's story Le Jongleur de Notre Dame is something deeper than a beautiful fancy. — Tr.

TT

A morphology of religious history, therefore, is a task that the Faustian spirit alone could ever formulate, and one that it is only now, at this present stage of its development, fit to deal with. The problem is enunciated, and we must dare the effort of getting completely away from our own convictions and seeing before us everything indifferently as equally alien. And how hard it is! He who undertakes the task must possess the strength not merely to imagine himself in an illusory detachment from the truths of his world-understanding — illusory even to one for whom truths are just a set of concepts and methods — but actually to penetrate his own system physiognomically to its very last cells. And even then is it possible, in a single language, which structurally and spiritually carries the whole metaphysical content of its own Culture, to capture transmissible ideas of the truths of other-tongued men?

All the more enigmatic, therefore, are the "pre-" periods of the grand Cultures, still primitive through and through, and yet more and more distinctly anticipating and pointing in a definite direction. It is just these periods, of some centuries' duration, that ought to have been accurately examined and compared amongst themselves and for themselves. In what shape does the coming phenomenon prepare itself? In the case of the Magian religions the threshold period, as we have seen, produced the type of the Prophetic religion, which led up to the Apocalyptic. How comes it that this particular form is more deeply grounded in the essence of this particular Culture? Or why is it that the Mycenæan prelude of the Classical is filled from one end to the other with imaginings of beast-formed deities? They are not the gods of the warriors up in the megaron of the Mycenæan castle, where soul- and ancestor-worship was practised with a high and noble piety evidenced still in the monuments, but the gods of down below, the powers believed in in the peasant's hut. The great menlike gods of the Apollinian religion, which must have arisen about 1100 out of a mighty religious upheaval, bear traces of their dark past on all sides. Hardly one of these figures is without some cognomen, attribute, or telltale transformation-myth indicative of its origin. To Homer Hera is invariably the cow-eyed; Zeus appears as a bull, and the Poseidon of the Thelpusan

But what are the features, now, of the primitive religion of Merovingian times that foreshadow the mighty uprising of the Gothic that was at hand? That both are ostensibly the same religion, Christianity, proves nothing when we consider the entire difference in their deeps. For (we must be quite clear in our own mind on this) the primitive character of a religion does not lie in its stock of doctrines and usages, but in the specific spirituality of the mankind that adopts them and feels, speaks, and thinks with them. The student has to familiarize himself with the fact that primitive Christianity (more exactly, the early Christianity of the Western Church) has twice subsequently become the expression-vehicle of a primitive piety, and therefore itself a primitive religion—namely, in the Celtic-Germanic West between 500 and 900, and in Russia up to this day. Now, how did the world mirror itself to these "converted" minds? Leaving out of account some few clerics of, say, Byzantine education, what did one actually think and imagine about these ceremonies and dogmas. Bishop Gregory of Tours, who, we must remember, represents the highest intellectual outlook of his generation, once lauded the powder rubbed from a saint's tombstone in these words: "O divine purgative, superior to all doctors' recipes, which cleanses the belly like scammony and washes away all stains from our conscience!" For him the death of Jesus was a crime which filled him with indignation, but no more; the Resurrection, on the contrary, which hovered before him vaguely, he felt deep down as an athletic tour de force that stamped the Messiah as the grand wizard and so legitimated him as the true Saviour. Of any mystic meaning in the story of the Passion he has not an inkling.⁴

¹ Eumenides, 126

Bernoulli Die Heiligen der Mergwinger (1900) - a good account of this primitive religion

In Russia the conclusions of the "Synod of a Hundred Chapters," of 1551, evidence a wholly primitive order of belief. Shaving of the beard and wrong handling of the cross both figure here as deadly sins — they were affronts to the dæmons. The "Synod of Antichrist," of 1667, led to the vast secession of the Raskol movement, because thenceforward the sign of the cross was to be made with three fingers instead of two, and the name "Jesus" was to be pronounced "Yissus" instead of "Issus" — whereby, for the strict believer, the power of this magic over the dæmons would be lost. But this effect of fear is, after all, not the only one nor even the most potent. Why is it that the Merovingian period shows not the slightest trace of that glowing inwardness and longing to sink into the metaphysical that suffuses the Magian seed-time of Apocalyptic and the closely analogous period of the Holy Synod (1721-1917) in Russia? What was it that from Peter the Great's time on led all those martyr-sects of the Raskolniki to celibacy, poverty, pilgrimage, self-mutilation, and asceticism in its most fearful forms, and in the seventeenth century had driven thousands, in religious frenzy, to throw themselves en masse into the flames? The doctrines of the Chlysti, with their "Russian Christs" (of whom seven are counted so far); the Dukhobors with their Book of Life, which they use as their Bible and hold to contain psalms of Jesus orally transmitted; the Skoptsi with their ghastly mutilation-precepts — manifestations, one and all, of something without which Tolstoi, Nihilism, and the political revolutions are incomprehensible 2 — how is it that in comparison the Frankish period seems so dull and shallow? Is it that only Aramæans and Russians possess religious genius — and, if so, what have we to expect of the Russia that is to come, now that (just in the decisive centuries) the obstacle of scholarly orthodoxy has been destroyed?

Ш

^<sup>2 Kattenbusch, Lehrb. d. vgl. Konfessionsk., I (1892), pp. 234, et seq.; N. P. Milyukov, Skizz russ. Kulturg. (1901) II, pp. 104, et seq.

bound by all the roots of its being to the land over which its world-image has risen. Sacral practices and dogmas may be carried far and wide, but their inner evolution stays spellbound in the place of their birth. It is simply an impossibility that the slightest trace of evolution of Classical city-cults should be found in Gaul, or a dogmatic advance of Faustian Christianity in America. Whatever disconnects itself from the land becomes rigid and hard.

^<sup>1 Erman, "Ein Denkmal memphitsiche Theologie," Ber. Berl. Ak. (1911), pp. 916, et seq.

^<sup>2 Even though Hesiod is two centuries nearer to the source of his Culture than the German mystic is to that of our own. See the article "Boehme," Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

^<sup>3 Insolent prosperity tempting Nemesis. — Tr

Orphic opponent of the Homeric conception of life, sets forth very ancient doctrines of hell and the judgment of the dead in his Phado. We know the tremendous formula of Orphism, the Nay of the mysteries that answered the Yea of the agon, which arose, certainly by 1100 at latest, as a protest of Waking-Consciousness against Being — $\sigma \hat{\omega} \mu a$ $\sigma \hat{\eta} \mu a$ , that splendid Classical body a gravel Here man is no longer feeling himself as a thing of breeding, strength, and movement; he knows himself and is terrified by what he knows. Here begins the Classical askesis, which by strictest rites and expiations, even by voluntary suicide, seeks deliverance from this Euclidean body-being. It is an entirely erroneous interpretation of the Pre-Socratics to suppose that it was from the view-point of enlightenment that they spoke against Homer. It was as ascetics that they did so. These "contemporaries" of Descartes and Leibniz were brought up in the strict traditions of the old great Orphism, which were as faithfully preserved in the almost claustral meditation-schools — old and famous holy places — as Gothic Scholasticism was treasured in the wholly intellectual universities of the Baroque. From the self-immolation of Empedocles the line runs straight forward to the suicide of the Roman Stoic, and straight back to "Orpheus."

Out of these last surviving traces, however, an outline of the Early Classical religion emerges bright and distinct. Just as all Gothic inwardness directed itself upon Mary, Queen of Heaven and Virgin and Mother, so in that moment of the Classical World there arose a garland of myths, images, and figures around Demeter, the bearing mother, around Gaia and Persephone, and also Dionysus the begetter, chthonian ¹ and phallic cults, festivals and mysteries of birth and death. All this, too, was characteristically Classical, conceived under the aspect of present corporeality. The Apollinian religion venerated body, the Orphic rejected it, that of Demeter celebrated the moments of fertilization and birth, in which body acquired being. There was a mysticism that reverently honoured the secret of life, in doctrine, symbol, and mime, but side by side with it there was orgiasm too, for the squandering of the body is as deeply and closely akin to asceticism as sacred prostitution is to celibacy — both, all, are negations of time. It is the reverse of the Apollinian "halt!" that checks on the threshold of Hybris; detachment is not kept, but flung away. He who has experienced these things in his soul has "from being a mortal become a god." In those days there must have been great saints and seers who towered as far above the figures of Heraclitus and Empedocles as the latter above the itinerant teachers of Cynicism and Stoicism — things of this order do not happen namelessly and impersonally. As the songs of Achilles and Odysseus were dying down everywhere, a grand, strict doctrine arose at the famous old cult-places, a mysticism and scholasticism with developed educational methods and a secret

^<sup>1 The work of J. J. Bachofen in this field has recently been assembled in concentrated form under the title Mythus von Occident und Orient (1926). — Tr.

² Conrady, in Wassiljew, Die Erschliessung Chinas (1909), p. 232; B. Schindler, Das Priestertum im alten China. I (1919).

4 Conrady, China, p. 516.

^<sup>1 As in De Groot's Universismus (1918), where, in fact, the systems of Taoists, Confucians, and Buddhists are handled without a qualm as the religions of China. This amounts to the same as saying that the Classical religion dates from Caracalla.

^<sup>3 The Shu-Ching or Canon of History is a collection of ancient annals, the Shi-King a canonical anthology of rhymed tales made by Confucius. — Tr.

of which an outstanding example is the Edda -Te

^<sup>6 See article "Heliand" in Ency. Brit., XI edit., and works there referred to. A handy edition of the text is included in the "Reclam" series — Tr

When Alexander appeared on the Indus, the piety of these three Cultures — Chinese, Indian, Classical — had long been moulded into the historyless forms of a broad Taoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. But it was not long before the group of Magian religions arose in the region intermediate between the Classical and the Indian field, and it must have been at about the same time that the

^<sup>1 This idea differs essentially from that of the Egyptian duality of the spiritual ka and the soul-bird bai, and still more so from the Magian duality of soul-substances.

^<sup>1 Reference may again be made to Yrjo Hirn, The Sacred Shrine. — Tr

breeds ill, pierces, destroys, seduces — namely, the realm of the Devil. It penetrates the whole of Creation, it lies ambushed everywhere. All around is an army of goblins, night-spirits, witches, werewolves, all in human shape. No man knows whether or not his neighbour has signed himself away to the Evil One. No one can say of an unfolding child that it is not already a devil's temptress. An appalling fear, such as is perhaps only paralleled in the early spring of Egypt, weighs upon man. Every moment he may stumble into the abyss. There were black magic, and devils' masses and witches' sabbaths, night feasts on mountain-tops, magic draughts and charm-formulæ. The Prince of Hell, with his relatives — mother and grandmother, for as his very existence denies and scorns the sacrament of marriage, he may not have wife or child — his fallen angels and his uncanny henchmen, is one of the most tremendous creations in all religious history. The Germanic Loki is hardly more than a preliminary hint of him. Their grotesque figures, with horns, claws, and horses' hoofs, were already fully formed in the mystery plays of the eleventh century; everywhere the artist's fancy abounded in them, and, right up to Dürer and Grünewald, Gothic painting is unthinkable without them. The Devil is sly, malignant, malicious, but yet in the end the powers of light dupe him. He and his brood, bad-tempered, coarse, fiendishly inventive, are of a monstrous imaginativeness, incarnations of hellish laughter opposed to the illumined smile of the Queen of Heaven, but incarnations, too, of Faustian world-humour 1 opposed to the panic of the sinner's contrition.

It is not possible to exaggerate either the grandeur of this forceful, insistent picture or the depth of sincerity with which it was believed in. The Marymyths and the Devil-myth formed themselves side by side, neither possible without the other. Disbelief in either of them was deadly sin. There was a Mary-cult of prayer, and a Devil-cult of spells and exorcisms. Man walked continuously on the thin crust of the bottomless pit. Life in this world is a ceaseless and desperate contest with the Devil, into which every individual plunges as a member of the Church Militant, to do battle for himself and to win his knight's spurs. The Church Triumphant of angels and saints in their glory looks down from on high, and heavenly Grace is the warrior's shield in the battle. Mary is the protectress to whose bosom he can fly to be comforted, and the high lady who awards the prizes of valour. Both worlds have their legends, their art, their scholasticism, and their mysticism — for the Devil, too, can work miracles. Characteristic of this alone among the religious Springtimes is the symbolism of colour — to the Madonna belong white and blue, to the Devil black, sulphur-yellow, and red. The saints and angels float in the æther, but the devils leap and crouch and the witches rustle through the night. It is the two together, light and night, which fill Gothic art with its indescrib-

^<sup>1 Consider, for example, the fantastic paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Breughel's similar humour, too, is unthinkable without the tradition of a rank-and-file of evil creatures. — Tr.

able inwardness — that, and not any "artistic" fancifulness. Every marknew the world to be peopled with angel and devil troops. The light-encircled angels of Fra Angelico and the early Rhenish masters, and the grimacing things on the portals of the great cathedrals, really filled the air. Men saw them, feltheir presence everywhere. To-day we simply no longer know what a myth is for it is no mere æsthetically pleasing mode of representing something to oneself but a piece of the most lively actuality that mines every corner of the waking consciousness and shakes the innermost structure of being. These creatures were about one all the time. They were glimpsed without being seen. They were believed in with a faith that felt the very thought of proof as a desecration. What we call myth nowadays, our littérateur's and connoisseur's taste for Gothic colour, is nothing but Alexandrinism. In the old days men did not "enjoy" it — behind it stood Death.¹

^<sup>1 So also in the Classical, the Homeric figures were for educated people of Hellenistic times nothing but literature, representation, artistic motive. Even for Plato's period they were little more than this. But in 1100 B.c., Demeter and Dionysus were a fearful actuality before which men collapsed.

^<sup>2 The stern object of Roger Bacon's science; see p. 502, foot-note. — Tr.

The Renaissance had ever the strong faith of the Gothic at the back of its world-outlook. When Vasari eulogized Cimabue and Giotto for returning to Nature as their teacher, it was this Gothic nature that he had in mind, a nature influenced in every nook by the encircling troops of angels and devils that stood there, ever threatening, in the light. "Imitation" of Nature meant imitation of its soul, not of its surface. Let us be rid at last of the fable of a renewal of Classical "Antiquity." Renaissance, Rinascita, meant then the Gothic uplift from a.d. 1000 onward, the new Faustian world-feeling, the new personal experience of the Ego in the Infinite. For some individual spirits, no doubt, it meant a sentimental enthusiasm for the Classical (or what was thought to be the Classical), but that was a manifestation of taste, nothing more. The Classical myth was entertainment-material, an allegorical play, through the thin veil of which men saw, no less definitely than before, the old Gothic actuality. When Savonarola stood up, the antique trappings vanished from the surface of Florentine life in an instant. It was all for the church that the Florentines laboured, and with conviction. Raphael was the most deeply intimate of all Madonna-painters. A firm belief in the realm of Satan, and in deliverance from it through the saints, lay at the root of all this art and literature; and every one of them, painters, architects, and humanists — however often the names of Cicero and Virgil, Venus and Apollo were on their lips — looked upon the burning of witches as something entirely natural and wore amulets against the devil. The writings of Marsilius Ficinus are full of learned disquisitions on devils and witches. Francesco della Mirandola wrote (in elegant Latin) his dialogue "The Witch" in order to warn the fine intellects of his circle against a danger. When Leonardo da Vinci, at the summit of the Renaissance,

³ Bezold, Hist, Zeitschr., 45, p. 208.

It was the tremendous background of this myth that awakened in the Faustian soul a feeling of what it was. An Ego lost in Infinity, an Ego that was all force, but a force negligibly weak in an infinity of greater forces; 4 that was all will, but a will full of fear for its freedom. Never has the problem of Freewill been meditated upon more deeply or more painfully. Other Cultures have simply not known it. But precisely because here Magian resignation was totally impossible — because that which thought was not an "it" or particle of an all-soul, but an individual, fighting Ego, seeking to maintain itself — every limitation upon freedom was felt as a chain that had to be dragged along through life, and life in turn was felt as a living death. And if so — why? For what?

To be able to will freely is, at the very bottom, the one gift that the Faustian soul asks of heaven. The seven sacraments of the Gothic, felt as one by Peter Lombard, elevated into dogma by the Lateran Council of 1215, and grounded

^<sup>1 Italian, "Anna Metterza." The reference is to the St. Anne of the Louvre and the Royal Academy Diploma Gallery. London. — Tr.

^<sup>2 Cf. Vol. I, p. 232. — Tr.

^<sup>8 Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli. — Tr.

^<sup>5 See article "Mysticism" in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

But more important still — and by far — was the essentially Faustian prime-sacrament of Contrition. This ranks with the Mary-myth and the Devil-myth as the third great creation of the Gothic. And, indeed, it is from this third that the other two derive depth and meaning; it discloses the last secrets of this Culture's soul, and so sets it apart from all other Cultures. The effect of the Magian baptism was to incorporate a man in the great consensus — the one great "it" of the divine spirit took up its abode in him as in the others, and thereafter resignation to all that should happen became his duty. But in the Faustian contrition the idea of personality was implicit. It is not true that the Renaissance discovered personality?; what it did was to bring personality up to a brilliant surface, whereby it suddenly became visible to everyone. Its birth is in Gothic; it is the most intimate and peculiar property of Gothic; it is one and the same with Gothic soul. For this contrition is something that each one accomplishes for himself alone. He alone can search his own conscience. He alone stands rueful in the presence of the Infinite: He alone can and must in confession understand and put into words his own past. And even the absolution that frees his Ego for new responsible action is personal to himself. Baptism is wholly impersonal — one receives it because one is a man, not because one is this man — but the idea of contrition presupposes that the value of every act depends uniquely upon the man who does it. This is what differentiates the Western drama from the Classical, the Chinese, and the Indian. This is what directs our legislation more and more with reference to the doer rather than to the deed,

^<sup>1 After its confirmation in 1311, the character of this festival as one of popular joy became still more marked by its association with the nascent drama (see Ency. Brit., XI ed., articles "Corpus Christi," "Drama"; and Y. Hirn, op. cit., pp. 144-5. — Tr.

and bases our primary ethical conceptions on individual doing and not typical behaviour. Faustian responsibility instead of Magian resignedness, the individual instead of the consensus; relief from, instead of submissiveness under, burdens — that is the difference between the most active and the most passive of all sacraments, and at the back of it again lies the difference between the world-cavern and infinity-dynamics. Baptism is something done upon one, Contrition something done by oneself within oneself. And, moreover, this conscientious searching of one's own past is both the earliest evidence of, and the finest training for, the historical sense of Faustian mankind. There is no other Culture in which the personal life of the living man, the conscientious tracing of each feature, has been so important, for this alone has required the accounts to be rendered in words. If historical research and biography are characteristic of the spirit of the West from its beginnings; if both in the last resort are self-examination and confession; if our lives are led with an assuredness and conscious reference to the historic background that nowhere else has been even imagined as possible or tolerable; if, lastly, we habitually look at history in terms of millennia, not rhapsodically or decoratively as in the Classical World and in China, but directionally and with the almost sacramental formula "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner" ever in our minds — we have this sacrament of the Gothic Church, this continual unburdening of the Ego by historical test and justification to thank for it. Every confession is an autobiography. This peculiar liberation of the will is to us so necessary that the refusal of absolution drives to despair, even to destruction. Only he who senses the bliss of such an inward acquittal can comprehend the old name of the sacramentum resurgentium, the sacrament of those who are risen again.

^<sup>1 Hence it is that this sacrament has conferred a position of such immense power upon the Western priest. He receives the personal confession, and speaks personally, in the name of the Infinite the absolution, without which life would be unbearable.

Puritan, heroism, which could fight on, even hopeless, in a lost position. "Auricular confession," said Goethe once, "ought never to have been taken from mankind." Over the lands in which it had died out, a heavy earnestness spread itself. Ethic and costume, art and thought, took on the night-colour of the only myth that remained outstanding. Nothing is less sunlit than the doctrines of Kant. "Every man his own priest" is a conviction to which men could win through, but only as to that part of priesthood that involves duties, not as to that which possesses powers. No man confesses himself with the inward certainty of absolution. And as the need of the soul to be relieved of its past and to be redirected remained urgent as ever, all the higher forms of communication were transmuted, and in Protestant countries music and painting, letter-writing and memoirs, from being modes of description became modes of self-denunciation, penance, and unbounded confession. Even in Catholic regions too — in Paris above all — art as psychology set in as doubt in the sacrament of Contrition and Absolution grew. Outlook on the world was lost in ceaseless mine-warfare within the self. In lieu of the Infinite, contemporaries and descendants were called in to be priests and judges. Personal art, in the sense that distinguishes Goethe from Dante, and Rembrandt from Michelangelo, was a substitute for the sacrament of confession. It was, also, the sign that this Culture was already in the condition of a Late period.1

ΙV

centuries of the beginning. In no Culture is this movement missing, whether we know about it, as in the case of Egypt, or not, as in that of China. It means, further, that the city and with it the city-spirit are gradually freeing themselves from the soul of the country-side, setting up in opposition to the latter's all-power and reconsidering the feelings and thoughts of the primitive pre-urban time with reference to its present self. It was Destiny and not intellectual necessities of thought that led, in the Magian and Faustian worlds, to the budding-off of new religions at this point. We know to-day that, under Charles V, Luther was within an ace of becoming the reformer of the whole undivided Church.

For Luther, like all reformers in all Cultures, was not the first, but the last of a grand succession which led from the great ascetics of the open land to the city-priest. Reformation is Gothic, the accomplishment and the testament thereof. Luther's chorale "Ein' feste Burg' does not belong to the spiritual lyrism of the Baroque. There rumbles in it still the splendid Latin of the Dies ira. It is the Church Militant's last mighty Satan-song.\footnote{1} Luther, like every reformer that had arisen since the year 1000, fought the Church not because it demanded too much, but because it demanded too little. The great stream flows on from Cluny: through Arnold of Brescia, who preached return to Apostolic simplicity and was burned in 1155; through Joachim of Floris, who was the first to use the world "reformare;" the spirituals of the Franciscan Order; Jacopone da Todi, revolutionary and singer of the Stabat Mater, the knight whom the death of a young wife turned into an ascetic and who tried to overthrow Boniface VIII for governing the Church too slackly; through Wyclif and Hus and Savonarola; to Luther, Karlstadt, Zwingli, Calvin, and—Loyola. The intention of these men, one and all, was not to overcome the Christianity of the Gothic, but to bring it to inward fulfilment. So also with Marcion, Athanasius, the Monophysites, and the Nestorians, who sought in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon to purify the faith and lead it back to its origins.\footnote{2} But so also the Orphics of the Classical seventh century were the last and not the first of a series that must have begun even before 1000 B.C. So with the establishment of the Re religion in Egypt at the close of the Old Kingdom, the Egyptian Gothic. It is an ending, not a new beginning, that these

^{1 &}quot;Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär'

Es soll uns doch gelingen,"

In those times the West — and the situation was the same in the other Cultures — divided the Corpus Christianorum of the population into the three classes of status policticus, ecclesiasticus, and aconomicus (that is, urban), but as the outlook was that of the city and no longer that of the castle and the village, officials and judges belonged to the first-named class, men of learning to the second — and the peasant was forgotten. This is the key to the opposition of the Renaissance and Reformation, which was an opposition of class and not a difference in world-feeling like that of Renaissance and Gothic. Castle-taste and cloister-soul moved into town, and remained there, as before, in opposition — as in Florence the Medici to Savonarola, and as in old Greece the noble families of the cities — with their Homer now finally written down — to the last Orphics — these, too, writers. The Renaissance artists and Humanists are the legitimate successors of the Troubadours and Minnesingers, and just as there is a line from Arnold of Brescia to Luther, so there is a line from Bertrand de Born and Peire Cardinal, through Petrarch, to Ariosto. The castle has become the town-house, the knight the patrician. The whole movement adhered to palaces, as courts; it limits itself to those fields of expression that affect and interest polite society; it is bright and gay, like Homer, because it is courtly — an atmosphere where problems were bad taste, where Dante and Michelangelo cannot but have felt themselves out of place — and it spread over the Alps to the courts of the North, not as a new world-outlook, but as a new taste. The "Northern" Renaissance of the mercantile and capital cities consisted simply in the fact that the bon ton of the Italian patriciate replaced that of the French chivalry.

The holy Causality of the Contrition-sacrament Luther replaced by the mystic experience of inward absolution "by faith alone." He came very near to Bernard of Clairvaux in this concept of contrition as lifelong, as a continuous intellectual askesis in contrast to the askesis of outward and visible works. Both of them understood absolution as a divine miracle: in so far as the man changes himself, it is God changing him. But what no purely intellectual mysticism can replace is the "Tu" outside, in free nature. The one and the other preached: "Thou must believe that God has forgiven thee," but for Bernard belief was through the powers of the priest elevated to knowledge, whereas for Luther it sank to doubt and desperate insistence. This little "I," detached from the cosmos, nailed up in an individual being and (in the most terrific sense of the word) alone, needed the proximity of a powerful "Thou," and the weaker the intellect, the more urgent the need. Herein lies the ultimate meaning of the Western priest, who from 1215 was elevated above the rest of mankind by the sacrament of ordination and its character indelebilis: he was a hand with which even the poorest wretch could grasp God. This visible link with the Infinite, Protestantism destroyed. Strong souls could and did win it back for themselves, but for the weaker it was gradually lost. Bernard, although for him the inward miracle was successful of itself, would not deprive

others of the gentler way, for the very illumination of his soul showed him the Mary-world of living nature, all-pervading, ever near, and ever helpful. Luther, who knew himself only and not men, set postulated heroism in place of actual weakness. For him life was desperate battle against the Devil, and that battle he called upon everyone to fight. And everyone who fought it fought alone.

The Reformation abolished the whole bright and consoling side of the Gothic myth — the cult of Mary, the veneration of the saints, the relics, the pilgrimages, the mass. But the myth of devildom and witchcraft remained, for it was the embodiment and cause of the inner torture, and now that torture at last rose to its supreme horror. Baptism was, for Luther at least, an exorcism, the veritable sacrament of devil-banning. There grew up a large, purely Protestant literature about the Devil. Out of the Gothic wealth of colour, there remained black; of its arts, music, in particular organ-music. But in the place of the mythic light-world, whose helpful nearness the faith of the common people could not, after all, forgo, there rose again out of long-buried depths an element of ancient German myth. It came so stealthily that even to-day its true significance is not yet realized. The expressions "folk-tale" and "popular custom" are inadequate: it is a true Myth that inheres in the firm belief in dwarfs, bogies, nixies, house-sprites, and sweeping clouds of the disembodied, and a true Cult that is seen in the rites, offerings, and conjurings that are still practised with a pious awe. In Germany, at any rate, the Saga took the place, unperceived, of the Mary-myth: Mary was now called Frau Holde, and where once the saints had stood, appeared the faithful Eckart. In the English people what arose was something that has long been designated "Bible-ferishism."

v

^<sup>1 Clocks being an outstanding example. See Vol. I., p. 15, foot-note. — Tr.

^<sup>2 The famous Bishop of Lincoln (1175-1253), scholar and philosopher, scientist and statesman — the British Oresme. — Tr.

² M. Baumgartner, Gesch. der Philos. des Mittelalters (1915), pp. 425, 571, 620, et seq. [Brief

See Ch. XIV below. — Tr.

and the Pythagoreans, and the disciples of Mohammed, all alike experienced it, not with the senses, but primarily as a concept. Parshva, who about 600 B.C. founded the sect of the "Unfettered" on the Ganges, taught, like the other Puritans of his time, that salvation came, not from sacrifices and rights, but only from knowledge of the identity of Atman and Brahman. In all Puritan poetry the place of the old Gothic visions is taken by an unbridled, yet withal jejune, spirit of allegory. In the waking-consciousness of these ascetics the concept is the only real power. Pascal's wrestlings were about concepts and not, like Meister Eckart's, about shapes. Witches were burnt because they were proved, and not because they were seen in the air o' nights; the Protestant jurists employed the witches' hammer of the Dominicans because it was built on concepts. The Madonnas of the early Gothic had appeared to their suppliants, but those of Bernini no man ever saw. They exist because they are proved — and there came to be a positive enthusiasm for existence of this sort. Milton, Cromwell's great secretary of state, clothed concepts with shapes, and Bunyan brings a whole mythology of concepts into ethical-allegorical activity. From that it is but a step to Kant, in whose conceptual ethics the Devil assumes his final shape as the Radically Evil.

We have to emancipate ourselves from the surfaces of history — and, especially, to thrust aside the artificial fences in which the methodology of Western sciences has paddocked it — before we can see that Pythagoras, Mohammed, and Cromwell embody one and the same movement in three Cultures.

Islam was no more a religion of the desert in particular than Zwingli's

The great figures of Mohammed's entourage, such as Abu Bekr and Omar, are the near relatives of the Pyms and Hampdens of the English Revolution, and we should see this relationship to be nearer still if we knew more than we do about the Hanifs, the Arabian Puritans before and about the Prophet. All of them had won out of Predestination the guarantee that they were God's

^<sup>1 542. See p. 197.

⁸ Krumbacher, Byzant, Literaturgesch, p. 12

^<sup>4 See Ency. Brit., XI ed., under these names. — Tr

¹ Not to say the twentieth. - Tr.

^<sup>2 To which may be added Edinburgh. — Tr.

³ noòs την πειβώ τῶν noλλῶν, Metabhysics XI, 8, p. 1074 (Bekker) 13. — Tr.

perienced, but something proved, something born of, and accessible only to, the intellect — a Nature that has no existence at all for a peasantry, a Nature by which one is not in the least overawed but merely put into a condition of sensibility. Natural religion, rational religion, Deism — all this is not lived metaphysics, but a comprehended mechanics, called by Confucius the "Laws of Heaven" and by Hellenism $\tau \nu \chi \dot{\eta}$ . Formerly philosophy was the handmaid of transcendent religiousness, but now comes sensibility, and philosophy must therefore become scientific as epistemology and critique of nature and critique of values. No doubt there was a feeling that this philosophy was, even so, nothing but a diluted dogmatism, for the idea that pure knowledge was possible itself involved a belief. Systems were woven out of phenomenally guaranteed beginnings, but in the long run the result was merely to say "Force" instead of "God," and "Conservation of Energy" instead of "Eternity." Under all Classical rationalism is to be found Olympus, under all Western the dogma of the sacraments. And so our Western philosophy swings to and fro between religion and technical science, and is defined thus, or thus, according as the author of the definition is a man with some relic of priesthood still in him, or is a pure expert and technician of thought.

"Weltansschauung" is the characteristic expression for an enlightened waking-consciousness that, under the guidance of the critical understanding, looks about it in a godless light-world and, when sense-perceptions are found not to square with sound human reason, treats sense as a "lying jade." That which was once myth—the actualest of the actual—is now subjected to the methods of what is called Euhemerism. The learned Euhemerus, about 300 B.C., "explained" the Classical divinities to the public that they had formerly served so well, and the process occurs under one form or another in every "age of enlightenment." We have our Euhemeristic interpretations of Hell as a guilty conscience, the Devil as evil desire, and God as the beauty of nature, and it is the same tendency that declares itself when Attic tombinscriptions of about 400 invoke, not the city-goddess Athene, but a goddess "Demos"—a near relation, by the way, of the Jacobins' Goddess of Reason—and where the δαιμονίον for Socrates, νοῦς for other philosophers, take the place of Zeus. Confucius says "heaven" instead of "Shang-ti," which means that he believes only in laws of nature. The "collection" and "ordering" of the canonical writings of China by the Confucians was a colossal act of Euhemerism, in which actually almost all the old religious works were literally destroyed and the residue subjected to rationalist falsification. Had it been possible, the enlighteners of our eighteenth century would no doubt have served the Gothic heritage in the same way.¹ Confucius belongs to the Chinese

^<sup>1 Caliphs like Al Maimun (813-33) and the last Ommayads would have entirely approved of similar measures in Islam. In those times there was a club in Baghdad in which Christians, Jews, Moslems, and Atheists debated, and appeals to the authority of Bible or Koran were "out of order."

"eighteenth century" through and through. Lao-tse (who despised him) stands at a midpoint in the Taoist movement, which manifested traits of Protestantism, Puritanism, and Pietism in turn, and both finally propagated a practical world-tone based upon a wholly mechanistic world-view. The word "tao" underwent in the Late period of China just the same continuous alteration of its fundamental content, and in the same mechanistic direction, as the word "Logos" in the history of Classical thought from Heraclitus to Posidonius, and as the word "Force" between Galileo's day and ours. That which once had been grandly moulded myth and cult is called, in this "religion of educated people," Nature and Virtue—but this Nature is a reasonable mechanism, and this Virtue is knowledge.(^1) Confucius and Buddha, Socrates and Rousseau are at one in this. Confucius contains little of prayer or of meditation upon the life after death, and nothing at all of revelation. To busy oneself overmuch with sacrifices and rites stamps one as uneducated and unreasoning. Gotama Buddha and his contemporary Mahavira, the founder of Jainism (^2)—both of whom came from the political world of the lower Ganges, east of the old Brahmanic Culture-field—recognized, as everyone knows, east of the old Brahmanic Culture-field—recognized, as everyone knows, enither the idea of God nor myth and cult. Of the real teaching of Buddha little can now be ascertained—for it all appears in the colours of the later fellah-religion baptized by his name—but one of the unquestionably authentic ideas concerning "conditioned arising" (^3) is the derivation of suffering from ignorance—ignorance, namely, of the "Four Noble Truths." This is true rationalism. Nirvana, for them, is a purely intellectual release and corresponds exactly with the "Autarkeia" and "Eudaimonia" of the Stoics. It is that condition of the understanding and waking-consciousness for which Being no longer is.

^<sup>2 See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article "Jains." - Tr.

ordered ideas, and the pedantry of the Socratic life-wisdom is insurmountable.

Along with this (shall we call it) scholasticism of sane reason, there must of inner necessity be a rationalistic mysticism of the educated. The Western Enlightenment is of English origin and Puritan parentage. The rationalism of the Continent comes wholly from Locke. In opposition to it there arose in Germany the Pietists (Herrnhut, 1700, Spener and Francke, and in Württemberg Oetinger) and in England the Methodists (Wesley "awakened" by Herrnhut, 1738). It was Luther and Calvin over again — the English at once organized themselves for a world-movement and the Germans lost themselves in mid-European conventicles. The Pietists of Islam are to be found in Sufism, which is not of "Persian" but of common Aramæan origin and in the eighth century spread all over the Arabian world. Pietists or Methodists, too, are the Indian lay preachers, who shortly before Buddha's time were teaching release from the cycle of life (sansara) through immersion in the identity of Atman and Brahman. But Pietists or Methodists, too, are Lao-tse and his disciples and — notwithstanding their rationalism — the Cynic mendicants and itinerant preachers and the Stoic tutors, domestic chaplains, and confessors of early Hellenism.(^1) And Pietism may ascend even to the peak of rationalist vision, of which Swedenborg is the great example, which created for Stoics and Sufists whole worlds of fancy, and by which Buddhism was prepared for its reconstruction as Mahayana. The expansion of Buddhism and that of Taoism in their original significations are closely analogous to the Methodist expansion in America, and it is no accident that they both reached their full maturity in those regions (lower Ganges and south of the Yang-tse-kiang) which had cradled the respective Cultures.

vi

Unique and self-contained, again, is the Faustian materialism, in the narrower sense of the word. In it the technical outlook upon the world reached fulfilment. The whole world a dynamic system, exact, mathematically disposed, capable down to its first causes of being experimentally probed and numerically fixed so that man can dominate it — this is what distinguishes our particular "return to Nature" from all others. That "Knowledge is Virtue" Confucius also believed, and Buddha, and Socrates, but "Knowledge is Power" is a phrase that possesses meaning only within the European-American Civilization. "Return to nature" here means the elimination of all forces that stand between the practical intelligence and nature — everywhere else materialism has contented itself with establishing (by way of contemplation or logic, as the case may be) supposedly simple units whose causal play accounts for everything without any residue of secrets, the supernatural being put down to want of knowledge. But the grand intellectual myth of Energy and Mass is at the same time a vast working hypothesis. It draws the picture of nature in such a way that men can use it. The Destiny element is mechanized as evolution, development, progress, and put into the centre of the system; the Will is an albumen-process; and all these doctrines of Monism, Darwinism, Positivism, and what not are elevated into the fitness-moral which is the beacon of American business men, British politicians, and German progress-Philistines alike — and turns out, in the last analysis, to be nothing but an intellectualist caricature of the old justification by faith.

^<sup>1 Compare the renewed controversy as to Transubstantiation in the English Church, 1926-8, in which a bishop actually proposed that physical tests could be applied to the altar-miracle. — Tr.

Which was ordered no less than four times in the decade 58-49.

^<sup>2 Horace's fine lady, Leuconoë. — Tr.

Every "Age of Enlightenment" proceeds from an unlimited optimism of the reason — always associated with the type of the megalopolitan — to an equally unqualified scepticism. The sovereign waking-consciousness, cut off by walls and artificialities from living nature and the land about it and under it, cognises nothing outside itself. It applies criticism to its imaginary world, which it has cleared of everyday sense-experience, and continues to do so till it has found the last and subtlest result, the form of the form — itself: namely, nothing. With this the possibilities of physics as a critical mode of world-understanding are exhausted, and the hunger for metaphysics presents itself afresh. But it is not the religious pastimes of educated and literature-soaked cliques, still less is it the intellect, that gives rise to the Second Religiousness. Its source is the naïve belief that arises, unremarked but spontaneous, among the masses that there is some sort of mystic constitution of actuality (as to which formal proofs are presently regarded as barren and tiresome wordjugglery), and an equally naïve heart-need reverently responding to the myth with a cult. The forms of neither can be foreseen, still less chosen — they appear of themselves, and as far as we are ourselves concerned, we are as yet far distant from them.¹ But already the opinions of Comte and Spencer, the Materialism and the Monism and the Darwinism, which stirred the best minds of the nineteenth century to such passion, have become the world-view proper to country cousins.

Contemporary with the "Positivist" Meng-tse (372–289) there suddenly began a powerful movement towards alchemy, astrology, and occultism. It has long been a favourite topic of dispute whether this was something new or a recrudescence of old Chinese myth-feeling — but a glance at Hellenism supplies the answer. This syncretism appears "simultaneously" in the Classical, in India and China, and in popular Islam. It starts always on rationalist doctrines — the Stoa, Lao-tse, Buddha — and carries these through with peasant and springtime and exotic motives of every conceivable sort. From about 200 B.C. the Classical Syncretism — which must not be confused with that of the later Magian Pseudomorphosis 2 — raked in motives from Orphism, from Egypt, from Syria; from 67 B.C. the Chinese brought in Indian Buddhism in the popular Mahayana form, and the potency of the holy writings as charms, and the Buddha-figures as fetishes, was thought to be all the greater for their alien origin. The original doctrine of Lao-tse disappeared very quickly. At the beginning of Han times (c. A.D. 200) the troops of the Sen had ceased to be "moral representations" and become kindly beings. The wind-, cloud-, thunder-, and rain-gods came back. Crowds of cults which purported to drive out the evil spirits by the aid of the gods acquired a footing. It was in that time that there arose — doubtless out of some basic principle of pre-Confucian philosophy — the myth of Pan-ku, the prime principle from which the series of mythical emperors descended. As we know, the Logos-idea followed a similar line of development.³

¹ Arnim, Stoic. vet. fragm., 537.

^<sup>2 See p. 202

The theory and practice of the conduct of life that Buddha taught were the outcome of world-weariness and intellectual disgusts, and were wholly unrelated to religious questions. And yet at the very beginning of the Indian "Imperial" period (250 B.C.) he himself had already become a seated god-figure; and the Nirvana-theories, comprehensible only to the learned, were giving place more and more to solid and tangible doctrines of heaven, hell, and salvation, which were probably borrowed, as in other syncretisms, from an alien source — namely, Persian Apocalyptic. Already in Asoka's time there were eighteen Buddhist sects. The salvation-doctrine of Mahayana found its first great herald in the poet-scholar Asvagosha (c. 50 B.C.) and its fulfilment proper in Naganjuna (c. A.D. 150). But side by side with such teaching, the whole mass of proto-Indian mythology came back into circulation. The Vishnu- and Shiva-religions were already in 300 B.C. in definite shape, and, moreover, in syncretic form, so that the Krishna and the Rama legends were now transferred to Vishnu. We have the same spectacle in the Egyptian New Empire, where Amen of Thebes formed the centre of a vast syncretism, and again in the Arabian world of the Abbassids, where the folk-religion, with its images of Purgatory, Hell, Last Judgment, the heavenly Kaaba, Logos-Mohammed, fairies, saints, and spooks drove pristine Islam entirely into the background.¹

^<sup>1 M. Horten, Die religiöse Gedankenwelt des Volkes im heutigen Islam (1917).

^<sup>2 1018-78; cf. Dieterich, Byzant. Charakterköpfe (1909), p. 63. [Or Ency. Brit., XI ed., article "Psellus." — Tr.]

^<sup>2 De Groot, Universismus (1918), p. 134.

epoch, now whole centuries pass unimportantly, and the ups and downs of superficial changes only serve to show the unalterable finality of the inner state. It matters nothing that "Chufucianism" appeared in China (1200) as a variant of the Confucian state-doctrine, when it appeared, and whether or not it succeded. Equally, it signifies nothing that Indian Buddhism, long become a polytheistic religion of the people, went down before Neo-Brahmanism (whose great divine, Sankhara, lived about 800), nor is it of importance to know the date at which the latter passed over into the Hinduism of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. There always are and always will be a handful of superlatively intellectual, thoughtful, and perfectly self-sufficing people, like the Brahmins in India, the Mandarins in China, and the Egyptian priests who amazed Herodotus. But the fellah-religion itself is once more primitive through and through—the animal-cults of the Egyptian XXVIth dynasty; the composite of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism that constitutes the state religion of China; the Islam of the present-day East. The religion of the Aztecs was very likely another case in point, for, as Cortez found it, it seems remote indeed from the intensely intellectualized religion of the Mayas.

VII

^<sup>1 See, for the following paragraphs, the articles "Jews," "Hebrew Religion," "Hebrew Literature," "Kabbalah," "Oaraites," etc., in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

^<sup>2 Strunz, Gesch. der Naturwiss. im Mittelalter, p. 89.

Only with Nicolaus Cusanus was this state of things reversed.

But these young nations were, besides, bound up with the soil and the idea of a fatherland, and the landless "Consensus," which was cemented, not by deliberate organization, but by a wholly unconscious, wholly metaphysical impulse — an expression of the Magian world-feeling in its simplest and directest form — appeared to them as something uncanny and incomprehensible. It was in this period that the legend of the Wandering Jew arose. It meant a good deal for a Scottish monk to visit a Lombard monastery, and nostalgia soon took him home again, but when a rabbi of Mainz — in 1000 the seat of the most important Talmudic seminary of the West — or of Salerno betook himself to Cairo or Merv or Basra, he was at home in every ghetto. In this tacit cohesion lay the very idea of the Magian nation! — although the contemporary West was unaware of the fact, it was for the Jews, as for the Greeks of the period and the Parsees and Islam, State and Church and people all in one. This State had its own jurisprudence and (what Christians never perceived) its own public life,² and despised the surrounding world of the host-peoples as a sort of outland; and it was a veritable treason-trial that expelled Spinoza and Uriel Acosta — an event of which these host-peoples could not possibly grasp the under meaning. And in 1799 the leading thinker among the Eastern Hasidim, Senior Salman, was handed over by the rabbinical opposition to the Petersburg Government as though to a foreign state.

^<sup>1 P. 174.

^<sup>2 The reader is recommended to study, in the light of all this, recent literature of the type of Hajim Bloch's Golem and the works of the brothers Tharaud. — Tr.

megalopolis, and its inhabitants (like those of hardened India and China) split into castes — the Rabbi is the Brahmin or Mandarin of the ghetto — and a coolie-mass characterized by civilized, cold, superior intelligence and an undeviating eye to business. But this phenomenon, again, is not unique if our historical sense takes in the wider horizon, for all Magian nations have been in this condition since the Crusade period. The Parsee in India possesses exactly the same business-power as the Jews in the European-American world and the Armenians and Greeks in southern Europe. The same phenomenon occurs in every other Civilization, when it pushes into a younger milieu — witness the Chinese in California (where they are the targets of a true Anti-Semitism of western America), in Java, and in Singapore; that of the Indian trader in East Africa; and that of the Romans in the Early Arabian World. In the last instance, indeed, the conditions were the exact reverse of those of to-day, for the "Jews" of those days were the Romans, and the Armæan felt for them an apocalyptic hatred that is very closely akin to our West-European Anti-Semitism. The outbreak of 88, in which, at a sign from Mithridates, a hundred thousand Roman business-people were murdered by the exasperated population of Asia Minor, was a veritable pogrom.

Over and above these oppositions there was that of race, which passed from contempt into hate in proportion as the Western Culture itself caught up with the Civilization and the "difference of age," expressed in the way of life and the increasing primacy of intelligence, became smaller. But all this has nothing to do with the silly catchwords "Aryan" and "Semite" that have been borrowed from philology. The "Aryan" Persians and Armenians are in our eyes entirely indistinguishable from the Jews, and even in South Europe and the Balkans there is almost no bodily difference between the Christian and Jewish inhabitants. The Jewish nation is, like every other nation of the Arabian Culture, the result of an immense mission, and up to well within the Crusades it was changed and changed again by accessions and secessions en masse.(^1) One part of Eastern Jewry conforms in bodily respects to the Christian inhabitants of the Caucasus, another to the South-Russian Tatars, and a large portion of Western Jewry to the North African Moors. What has mattered in the West more than any other distinction is the difference between the race-ideal of the Gothic springtime,(^2) which has bred its human type, and that of the Sephardic Jew, which first formed itself in the ghettos of the West and was likewise the product of a particular spiritual breeding and training under exceedingly hard external conditions — to which, doubtless, we must add the effectual spell of the land and people about him, and his metaphysical defensive reaction to that spell, especially after the loss of the Arabic language had made this part of the nation a self-contained world. This feeling of being "different" is the more potent on both sides, the more breed the individual possesses. It is want of race,

¹ D 48

^<sup>2 Prague contains a veritable corpus of commentary upon these pages. — Tr.

^<sup>8 A.D. 132. See Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XV, p. 402, and Vol. III, p. 395. — Tr.

world has displayed a complete incomprehension of the fellah-revolutions of Turkey (1908) and China (1911); the inner life and thought of these peoples, and consequently, even their notions of state and sovereignty (the Caliph in the one, the Son of Heaven in the other) being of an utterly different cast and, therefore, a sealed book, the course of events could neither be weighed up, nor even reckoned upon in advance. The member of an alien Culture can be a spectator, and therefore also a descriptive historian of the past, but he can never be a statesman, a man who feels the future working in him. If he does not possess the material power to enable him to act in the cadre of his own Culture, ignoring or manipulating those of the alien (which, of course, may occur, as with the Romans in the young East or Disraeli in England), he stands helpless in the midst of events. The Roman and the Greek always mentally projected the life-conditions of his Polis into the alien event; the modern European always regards alien Destinies in terms of constitution, parliament, and democracy, although the application of such ideas to other Cultures is ridiculous and meaningless; and the Jew of the Consensus follows the history of the present (which is nothing but that of the Faustian Civilization spread over continents and oceans) with the fundamental feelings of Magian mankind, even when he himself is firmly convinced of the Western character of his thought.

As every Magian Consensus is non-territorial and geographically unlimited, it involuntarily sees in all conflicts concerning the Faustian ideas of fatherland, mother tongue, ruling house, monarchy, constitution, a return from forms that are thoroughly alien (therefore burdensome and meaningless) to him towards forms matching with his own nature. Hence the word "international," whether it be coupled with socialism, pacificism, or capitalism, can excite him to enthusiasm, but what he hears in that word is the essence of his landless and boundless Consensus. While for the European-American democracy constitutional struggles and revolutions mean an evolution towards the Civilized ideal, for him they mean (as he almost never consciously realizes) the breaking-down of all that is of other build than himself. Even when the force of the Consensus in him is broken and the life of his host-people exercises an outward attraction upon him to the point of an induced patriotism, yet the party that he supports is always that of which the aims are most nearly comparable with the Magian essence. Hence in Germany he is a democrat and in England (like the Parsee in India) an imperialist. It is exactly the same misunderstanding as when West Europeans regard Young Turks and Chinese reformers as kindred spirits — that is, as "constitutionalists." If there is inward relationship, a man affirms even where he destroys; if inward alienness, his effect is negative even where his desire is to be constructive. What the Western Culture has destroyed, by reform-efforts of its own type where it has had power, hardly bears thinking of; and Jewry has been equally destructive

against the Talmudic pharisees of his time, his Christlike figure, the wealth of legends that were rapidly woven about his person and the persons of his disciples — all this is of the pure Magian spirit, and at bottom as alien to us of the West as primitive Christianity itself. The thought-processes of Hasidist writings are to non-Jews practically unintelligible, and so also is the ritual. In the excitement of the service some fall into convulsions and others begin to dance like the dervishes of Islam.¹ The original teaching of Baal Shem was developed by one of the disciples in Zaddikism, and this too, which was a belief in successive divine embassies of saints (Zaddiks), whose mere proximity brought salvation, has obvious kinship with Islamic Mahdism and still more with the Shiite doctrine of the imams in whom the "Light of the Prophet" takes up its abode. Another disciple, Solomon Maimon — of whom a remarkable autobiography exists — stepped from Baal Shem to Kant (whose abstract kind of thought has always possessed an immense attraction for Talmudic intellects). The third is Otto Weininger, whose moral dualism is a purely Magian conception and whose death in a spiritual struggle of essentially Magian experience is one of the noblest spectacles ever presented by a Late religiousness.² Something of the sort Russians may be able to experience, but neither the Classical nor the Faustian soul is capable of it.

In the "Enlightenment" of the eighteenth century the Western Culture in turn becomes megalopolitan and intellectual, and so, suddenly, accessible to the intelligentsia of the Consensus. And the latter, thus dumped into the middle of an epoch corresponding, for them, to the remote past of a long-expired Sephardic life-current, were inevitably stirred by echo-feelings, but these echoes were of the critical and negative side only, and the tragically unnatural outcome was that a cohesion already historically complete and incapable of organic progress was swept into the big movement of the host-peoples, which it shook, loosened, displaced, and vitiated to its depths. For, for the Faustian spirit, the Enlightenment was a step forward along its own road — a step over débris, no doubt, but still affirmative at bottom — whereas for Jewry it was destruction and nothing else, the demolition of an alien structure that it did not understand. And this is why we so often see the spectacle — paralleled by the case of the Parsees in India, of the Chinese and Japanese in a Christian milieu, and by modern Americans in China — of enlightenment, pushed to the point of cynicism and unqualified atheism, opposing an alien religion, while the fellah-practices of its own folk go on wholly unaffected. There are Socialists who superficially — and yet quite sincerely — combat every sort of religion, and yet in their own case follow the food-prohibitions and routine prayers and phylacteries with an anxious exactitude. More frequent actually is inward lapse from the Consensus qua creed — the spectacle that is presented to us by

^<sup>2 O. Weininger, Taschenbuch (1919), above all pp. 19, et seq.

² See p. 260, et seq.

¹ Their ship-building was in Roman times more Classical than Phoenician, their state was or ganized as a Polis, and their educated people, like Hannibal, were familiar with Greek.

CHAPTER X THE STATE

(A)

THE PROBLEM OF THE ESTATES—NOBILITY
AND PRIESTHOOD

CHAPTER X

THE STATE

(A)

THE PROBLEM OF THE ESTATES - NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD

1

¹ Cf. p. 2 and foot-note.

^<sup>3 Cf. pp. 120., et seq.

^<sup>1 Mitteis, Reichsrecht und Volksrecht (1891), p. 63

² Sohm, Institutionen (1911), p. 614. [Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XXIII, pp. 540-1. — Tr.]

^<sup>4 See Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XXIII, p. 574. — Tr.

⁵ See p. 18.

^<sup>6 An inversion of Clausewitz's famous expression that war is a continuation of policy by other means. (On War, I, i, § 24). — Tr.

in all successful diplomacy, tactics, strategy; in the competition of states or social classes or parties; has been the product of living unities that found themselves "in form."

⁾ Not excluding art, although we are not conscious of them save through deduction from art

^<sup>2 Original: "Sie liegen im gesteigerten Dasein von Einzelnen und Kreisen, eben in dem, was soeben 'Dasein in Form' genannt worden ist, und durch diese Höhe des Geformtseins erst die Kultur repräsentirt."

^<sup>1 So in the German, but see foot-note p. 329. "Stand" would have expressed the sense better. — Tr.

^<sup>2 R. Fick, Die soziale Gliederung im nordöstlichen Indien zu Buddhas Zeit (1897), p. 201; K. Hille brandt, Alt-Indien (1899), p. 82. [Also the article "Brahmanism," Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.]

But the great Estates are something quite different from occupation-groups like those of artisans, officials, artists, which are professionally held together by technical tradition and the spirit of their work. They are, in fact, emblems in flesh and blood, whose entire being, as phenomenon, as attitude, and as mode of thought, possesses symbolic meaning. Within every Culture, moreover—while peasantry is a piece of pure nature and growth and, therefore, a completely impersonal manifestation—nobility and priesthood are the results of high breeding and forming and therefore express a thoroughly personal Culture, which, by the height of its form, rejects not merely barbarians, but presently also all who are not of their status, as a residue—regarded by the nobility as the "people" and by clergy as the "laity." And this style of personality is the material that, when the fellah-age arrives, petrifies into the type of a caste, which thereafter endures unaltered for centuries. As in the living Culture race and estate are in antithesis as the impersonal and the personal, in fellah-times the mass and the caste, the coolie and the Brahmin, are in antithesis as the formless and the formal. The living form has become formula, still possessing style, but possessing it as stylistic rigidity. This petrified style of the caste is of an extreme subtlety, dignity, and intellectuality, and feels itself infinitely superior

^<sup>1 See Vol. I, p. 157. — Tr.

TT

In the Carolingian pre-Culture men distinguished Knechte, Freie, and Edle. This is a primitive differentiation based merely on the facts of external life. But in Early Gothic times it runs:

God hath shapen lives three, Boor and knight and priest they be.¹

¹ Got hât driu leben geschaffen
Gebûre, ritter, phaffen.
[Note the collective ge- attached to the first-named. — Tr.]

Every nobility is a living symbol of Time, every priesthood of Space. Destiny and sacred Causality, History and Nature, the When and the Where, race and language, sex-life and feeling-life — all these attain in them to the highest possible expression. The noble lives in a world of facts, the priest in one of truths; the one has shrewdness, the other knowledge; the one is a doer, the other a thinker. Aristocratic world-feeling is essentially pulse-sense; priestly world-feeling proceeds entirely by tensions. Between the time of Charlemagne and that of Conrad II something formed itself in the time-stream that cannot be elucidated, but has to be felt if we are to understand the dawn of the new Culture. There had long been noblemen and ecclesiastics, but then first — and not for long — there were nobility and clergy, in the grand sense of the words and the full force of their symbolic significance. So mighty is this onset of a symbolism that at first all other distinctions, such as those of country, people, and language, fall into the background. In all the lands from Ireland to Calabria the Gothic hierarchy was a single great community; the Early Classical chivalry before Troy, or the Early Gothic before Jerusalem, seems to us as of one great family. The old Egyptian nomes and the feudal states of the first Chou times appear, in comparison with such Estates as these (and because of the comparison) just as colourless as Burgundy and Lorraine in the Hohenstaufen period. There is a cosmopolitan condition both at the beginning and at the end of every Culture, but in the first case it exists because the symbolic might of aristocratic-hierarchic forms still towers above those of nationality, and in the second because the formless mass sinks below them.

The two Estates in principle exclude one another. The prime opposition of

Of all this the priesthood (and philosophy so far as it is priesthood) is the direct negative. The Estate of pure waking-consciousness and eternal truths combats time and race and sex in every sense. Man as peasant or noble turns towards, man as priest turns away from, woman. Aristocracy runs the danger of dissipating and losing the broad being-stream of public life in the petty channels of its minor ancestors and relatives. The true priest, on the other hand, refuses in principle to recognize private life, sex, family, the "house." For the man of race death begins to be real and appalling only when it is death without heirs — Icelandic sagas no less than Chinese ancestor-worship teach us this. He does not entirely die who lives on in sons and nephews. But for the true priest media vita in morte sumus; what he shall bequeath is intellectual, and rejected woman bears no part in it. The phenomenal forms of this second Estate that occur again and again are celibacy, cloister, battlings with seximpulse fought to the extreme of self-emasculation, and a contempt for motherhood which expresses itself in orgiasm and hallowed prostitution, and not less in the intellectual devaluation of sexual life down to the level of Kant's vile definition of marriage. Throughout the Classical world it was the rule that in the sacred precinct, the Temenos, no one must be born or die. The timeless must not come into contact with time. It is possible for the priest to have an intellectual recognition of the great moments of generation and birth, and to honour them sacramentally, but experience them he may not.

^<sup>1 As a treaty of reciprocal possession by the two parties which is made effective by the reciprocal use of their sex-properties.

¹ Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden (1915), p. 5.

But Civilization, the real "return to Nature," is the extinction of nobility—not as physical stock (which would not matter), but as living tradition—and the supplanting of destiny-pulse by causal intelligence. With this, nobility becomes no more than a prefix. And, for that very reason, Civilized history is superficial history, directed disjointedly to obvious aims, and so become formless in the cosmic, dependent on the accident of great individuals, destitute of inward sureness, line, and meaning. With Cæsarism history relapses back into the historyless, the old beat of primitive life, with endless and meaningless battles for material power, such as those of the Roman soldier-emperors of the third century and the corresponding "Sixteen States" of China (265-420), which differ only in unessentials from the events of beast-life in a jungle.

111

It follows from this that true history is not "cultural" in the sense of antipolitical, as the philosophers and doctrinaires of all commencing Civilizations assert. On the contrary, it is breed history, war history, diplomatic history, the history of being-streams in the form of man and woman, family, people, estate, state, reciprocally defensive and offensive in the wave-beat of grand facts. Politics in the highest sense is life, and life is politics. Every man is willy-nilly a member of this battle-drama, as subject or as object—there is no third alternative. The kingdom of the spirit is not of this world. True, but it presupposes it, as waking-being presupposes being. It is only possible as a consistent saying of "no" to the actuality that nevertheless exists and, indeed, must exist before it can be renounced. Race can dispense with language, but the very speaking of a language is an expression of antecedent race, as are religions and arts and styles of thought and everything else that happens in the history of the spirit—and that there is such a history is shown by the power that blood possesses over feeling and reason. For all these are active waking-consciousness "in form," expressive, in their evolution and symbolism and passion, of the blood (again the blood) that courses through these forms in the waking-being of generation after generation. A hero does not need to know anything at all of this second world—he is life through and through—but a saint can only by the severest asceticism beat down the life that is in him and gain solitary communion with his spirit— and his strength for this again comes from life itself. The hero despises death and the saint life, but in the contrast between the heroism of great ascetics and martyrs and the piety of most (which is of

For this very reason nobility in the world-historical sense is much more than comfortable Late periods consider it; it is not a sum of titles and privileges and ceremonies, but an inward possession, hard to acquire, hard to retain — worth, indeed, for those who understand, the sacrifice of a whole life. An old family betokens not simply a set of ancestors (we all have ancestors), but ancestors who lived through whole generations on the heights of history; who not merely had Destiny, but were Destiny; in whose blood the form of happening was bred up to its perfection by the experience of centuries. As history in the grand sense begins with the Culture, it was mere panache for a Colonna to trace back his ancestry into Late Roman times. But it was not meaningless for the grandee of Late Byzantium to derive himself from Constantine, nor is it so for an American of to-day to trace his ancestry to a Mayflower immigrant of 1620. In actual fact Classical nobility begins with the Trojan period and not the Mycenæan, and the Western with the Gothic and not the Franks and Goths—in England with the Normans and not the Saxons. Only from these real starting-points is there History, and, therefore, only from then can there be an original aristocracy, as distinct from nobles and heroes. That which in the first chapter of this volume 2 called cosmic beat or pulse receives in this aristocracy its fulfilment. For all that in riper times we call diplomatic and social "tact"—which includes strategic and business flair, the collector's eye for precious things, and the subtle insight of the judge of men—and generally all that which one has and does not learn; which arouses the impotent envy of the rest who cannot participate; which as "form" directs the course of events; is nothing but a particular case of the same cosmic and dreamlike sureness that is visibly expressed in the circlings of a flock of birds or the controlled movements of a thoroughbred horse.

^"So, then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth."

^<sup>2 P. 4, et seq

consciousness — having no relation to origin in the race sense; and thus, in this respect as in others, it is a negation of Time and History. Intellectual affinity and blood-affinity — ponder and probe into the depths of these contrasted expressions! Heritable priesthood is a contradiction in terms. It existed indeed, in a sense, in Vedic India, but the basis of that existence was the fact that there was a second nobility, which reserved the privilege of priesthood to the gifted members of its own circle.¹ And elsewhere celibacy made an end even of this much infringement of principle. The "priest in the man" — whether the man be noble or not — stands for a focus of sacred Causality in the world. The priestly power is itself of a causal nature, brought about by higher causes and itself in turn an efficient cause. The priest is the middleman in the timeless extended that is stretched taut between the waking-consciousness and the ultimate secret; and, therefore, the importance of the clergy in each Culture is determined by its prime-symbol. The Classical soul denies Space and therefore needs no middleman for dealings with it, and so the Classical priesthood disappears in its very beginnings. Faustian man stands face to face with the Infinite, nothing a priori shields him from the crushing force of this aspect, and so the Gothic priesthood elevated itself to the heights of the Papal idea.

^<sup>1 The case of Egypt is of course similar. — Tr.

^<sup>4 Pp. 272, et seq.

³ Ienseits von Gut und Böse, § 260.

The one is historical through and through, and recognizes rank-distinctions and privileges as actual and axiomatic. Honour is always class-honour—there is no such thing as an "honour of humanity." The duel is not an obligation of unfree persons. Every man, be he Bedouin or Samurai or Corsican, peasant or workman, judge or bandit, has his own binding notions of honour, loyalty, courage, revenge, that do not apply to other kinds of life. Every life has custom-ethic—it is unthinkable without it. Children have it already in their play; they know at once, of themselves, what is fitting. No one has laid down these rules, but they exist. They arise, quite unconsciously, out of the "we" that has formed itself out of the uniform pulse of the group. Here, too, each being is "in form." Every crowd that, under one or another stimulus, has collected in the street has for the moment its own ethic, and anyone who does not absorb it and stand for it as self-evident—to say "follow it" would presume more rationality in the action than there is—is a poor, mean creature, an outsider. Uneducated people and children possess an astonishingly fine reactivity to this. Children, however, are also required to learn the Catechism, and in it they hear about the good and evil that are laid down—and are any thing rather than self-evident. Custom-ethic is not that which is true, but that which is there; it is a thing of birth and growth, feeling and organic logic. Moral, in contrast to this, is never actuality (for, if it were, all the world would be saintly), but an eternal demand hanging over the consciousness—and, ex hypothesis, over that of all men alike, irrespective of all differences of actual life and history. And, therefore, all moral is negative and all custom-ethic affirmative. In the latter "devoid of honour" is the worst, in the former "devoid of sin" is the highest, that can be said of anyone.

ne basic concept of all living custom-ethic is honour. Everything else

— loyalty, modesty, bravery, chivalry, self-control, resolution — is comprised in it. And honour is a matter of the blood and not of the reason. One does not reflect on a point of honour — that is already dishonour. To lose honour means to be annulled so far as Life and Time and History are concerned. The honour of one's class, one's family, of man and woman, of one's people and one's country, the honour of peasant and soldier and even bandit — honour means that the life in a person is something that has worth, historical dignity, delicacy, nobility. It belongs to directional Time, as sin belongs to timeless Space. To have honour in one's body means about the same as to have race. The opposite sort are the Thersites-natures, the mud-souled, the riff-raff, the "kick-me-but-let-me-live's." To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy — all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous. But this is not at all the same thing as priestly moral, for that moral does not cleave to life at any cost of degradation, but rather rejects and abstains from life as such, and therefore incidentally from honour. As has been said already, every moral action is, at the very bottom, a piece of askesis and a killing of being. And eo ipso it stands outside the field of life and the world of history.

τv

^<sup>1 Conversely, it can successfully be controverted — and often has been so in the Chinese and Classical, Indian and Western philosophies — but it does not get abolished.

other acquisitions into ground and soil is an evidence of sound stock. The plant possesses the ground in which it roots. It is its property, which it defends to the utmost, with the desperate force of its whole being, against alien seeds, against overshadowing neighbour plants, against all nature. So, too, a bird defends the nest in which it is hatching. The bitterness fights over property occur — not in the Late periods of great Cultures, between rich and poor, and about movable goods — but here in the beginnings of the plant-world. When, in a wood, one feels all about one the silent, merciless battle for the soil that goes on day and night, one is appalled by the depth of an impulse that is almost identical with life itself. Here is a yearlong, tenacious, embittered wrestle, a hopeless resistance of the weak against the strong, that goes on to the point that the victor too is broken — such as is only paralleled in the most primitive of mankind when an old peasant-family is expelled from the clod, from the nest, or a family of noble stock is uprooted or, more truly, cut off from its roots, by money. The far more conspicuous conflicts in the later cities have quite another meaning, for here — in communism of all kinds — it is not the experience of possessing, but the idea of property purely as material means that is fought for. The negation of property is never race-impulse, but the doctrinaire protest of the purely intellectual, urban, uprooted, anti-vegetal waking-consciousness of saints, philosophers, and idealists. The same reason actuates the monk of the hermitage and the scientific Socialist — be his name Moh-ti, Zeno, or Marx — to reject the plantlike; the same feeling impels men of race to defend it. Here, as ever, fact and truth are opposed. "Property is theft" is the ultra-materialistic form of the old thought: "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" When the priest gives up property, he is giving up something dangerous and alien; when a noble does so, he i

This brings us to a duality of the property-idea feeling — Having as power and Having as spoil. Both, in primitive men of race, lie immediately together. Every Bedouin or Viking intends both. The sea-hero is always a sea-robber also; every war is concerned with possessions and, above all, possessions in land. But a step, and the knight becomes the robber-knight, the adventurer becomes conqueror and king, like Rurik the Norman in Russia and many an Achæan and Etruscan pirate in Homeric times. In all heroic poetry we find,

^<sup>1 See p. 248

^<sup>2 See these headings in Ency. Brit., XI, ed. — Tr.

Wholly outside the category of the true Estates are the calling-classes of the craftsmen, officials, artists, and labourers, whose organization in guilds (e.g., of smiths in China, of scribes in Egypt, and of singers in the Classical world) dates from pristine antiquity, and who because of their professional segregation (which sometimes goes as far as to cut off their connubium with others) actually develop into genuine tribes, as, for instance, the Falasha of Abyssinia and some of the Sudra classes named in Manu's code. Their separation is due merely to their technical accomplishments and therefore not to their being vessels of the symbolism of Time and Space. Their tradition, likewise, is limited to their techniques and does not refer to a customary-ethic or a moral of their own, such as is always found in economy and science as such. As derived from a nobility, judges and officers are classes, whereas officials are a profession; as derived from priesthood, scholars are a class, while artists are a profession. Sense of honour, conscience, adhere in one case to the status, in the other to the achievement. There is something, slight though it may be, of symbolism in every category on the one side, and none in any category on the other. And consequently something of strangeness, irregularity, often disgrace, clings to them — consider, for example, executioners, actors, and strolling singers, or the Classical estimation of the artist. Their classes or guilds separate from general society, or seek the protection of other orders of society (or individual patrons and Mæcenases), but fit themselves in with that society they cannot, and their inability to do so finds expression in the guild-wars of the old cities and in uncouthness of every sort in the instincts and manners of artists.

v

¹ Black Tews, who are smiths to a man.

^<sup>2 The genuinely primitive Mir, contrary to the assertions of enthusiastic socialists and panslavists, dates only from after 1600, and has been abolished since 1861. Here the soil is communal soil, and the villagers are as far as possible held fast, in order to ensure that the tilling of this soil shall cover the demands of taxation.

^<sup>1 See Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XI, pp. 94, 786, or any histories of German literature. — Tr.

See, further, below.

⁴ Even I-wang (934-909) was obliged to leave conquered territories to his vassals, who put in counts and reeves of their own choice.

recruit-quota.¹ Between 250 and 300 the "colonus" became legally bound to the soil (adscriptus gleba). And with that the differentiation of feudal lord and vassal as class and class ² was reached.

^<sup>1 Thus, later, under Justinian, Belisarius could furnish seven thousand cavalry from his own domains for the Gothic War. Very few German princes could have done so much in Charles V's time. [The last of such armies in Western history was the army of the House of Condé in the seventeenth century. These centuries of ours "correspond" with the period that set in with Justinian. — $T_{r}$ ]

² Pohlmann Rom Kairergeit (Pflugh-Harttungs Weltgesch I pp. 200 et seg.)

^<sup>3 See p. 286

⁴ In spite of Ed. Meyer (Gesch. d. Altertums, I, § 243)

Hardy, Indische Keligionsgesch., p. 260.

history, are the acknowledged foci of its thoughts and feelings. The Northern skald-poetry and the Southern Minnesang correspond to the old love-songs of the Chinese age of chivalry in the Shi-King, which were sung in the Pi-Yung, the places of noble training (hiao). And the ceremonial public archery-displays, like the Early Classical agon, and the Gothic and the Persian-Byzantine tourney, were manifestations of the life on its Homeric side.

^<sup>1 M. Granet, Coutumes matrimoniales de la Chine antique, T'oung Pao (1912), pp. 517, et seq.

^<sup>2 The tournament was an institution in the other, western, half of the Magian world as well. — Tr.

In the Classical world, which abhorred the infinite in every sense, Time was reduced to the present and Extension to tangible unit-bodies; as the result, the grand symbolic estates became so voided of meaning that, as compared with the city-state, which expressed the Classical prime-symbol in the strongest imaginable form, they did not count as independent forces at all. In the history of Egyptian mankind, on the other hand, which is the history of striving with equal force towards distances of time and of space, the struggle of the two estates and their symbolisms is constantly recognizable right into the period of complete fellahdom. For the transition from the IVth to the Vth Dynasty is accompanied also by a visible triumph of the priestly over the knightly world-feeling; the Pharaoh, from being the body and vessel of the supreme deity, becomes its servant, and the Re sanctuary overpowers the tomb-temple of the ruler both in architectural and in suggestive force. The New Empire witnessed, immediately after its great Cæsars, the political autocracy of the Amen priesthood, Thebes, and then again the revolution of the "heretic" king Amenophis IV (Akhenaton) — in which one feels unmistakably a political as well as a religious side — and so on until after interminable conflicts between warrior-and priestly-castes, the Egyptian world ended in foreign domination.

^<sup>1 The life of John Chrysostom is an instance.

Now supervened the city with its own soul, first emancipating itself from the soul of the countryside, then setting up as an equal to it, and finally seeking to suppress and extinguish it. But this evolution accomplished itself in kinds of life, and it also, therefore, is part of the history of the estates. The city-life as such emerges — through the inhabitants of these small settlements acquiring a common soul, and becoming conscious that the life within is something different from the life outside — and at once the spell of personal freedom begins to operate and to attract within the walls life-streams of more and more new kinds. There sets in a sort of passion for becoming urban and for propagating urban life. It is this, and not material considerations, that produced the fever of the colonization period in the Classical world, which is still recognizable to us in its last offshoots, and which it is not quite exact to speak of as colonization at all. For it was a creative enthusiasm in the man of the city that from the tenth century B.C. (and "contemporaneously" in other Cultures) drew generation after generation under the spell of a new life, with which there emerges for the first time in human history the idea of freedom. This idea is not of political (still less of abstract) origin, but is something bringing to expression the fact that within the city walls plantlike attachment to a soil has ceased, and that the threads that run through the whole life of the countryside have been snapped. And consequently the freedom-idea ever contains a negative; it looses, redeems, defends, always frees a man from something. Of this freedom the city is the expression; the city-spirit is understanding become free, and everything in the way of intellectual, social, and national movements that bursts forth in Late periods under the name of Freedom leads back to an origin in this one prime fact of detachment form the land.

But the city is older than the "citizen." It attracts first the calling-classes, which as such are outside the symbolic estates, and, when urban, take form as guilds. Then it draws in the primary estates themselves; the minor nobility moves its castles, the Franciscans their cloisters, within the contour. As yet, not much is inwardly altered. Not only Papal Rome, but all Italian cities of this time are filled with the fortified towers of the families, who issued thence to fight out their feuds in the streets. In a well-known fourteenth-century picture of Siena these towers stand up like factory chimneys round the market-place.(^1) As for the Florentine palace of the Renaissance, if, in respect of the bright life within, it is the successor of Provençal courts, it is equally, with its "rusticated" façade, an offshoot of the Gothic castles that the French and German knights were still building on their hills. It was, in fact, only slowly that the new life separated out. Between 1250 and 1450, throughout the West, the immigrant families concentrated, (vis-\frac{\partial}{\partial})-(\frac{\partial}{\partial}) is odoing detached themselves, spiritually as in other respects, from the country nobility. It was exactly the same in early China, Egypt, and the Byzantine Empire, and it is only in the light of this that we become able to understand the older Classical city-leagues (such as the Etruscan and, it may be, even the Latin) and the sacral connexions of colonial daughter-cities with their mother city. It was not the Polis as such, so far, that was the backbone of events, but the patriciate of phylæ and phratriæ within it. The original Polis is identical with the nobility, as Rome was up to 471, and Sparta and the Etruscan cities throughout. Synœcism grew out of it, and the city-state was formed by it. But here, as in other Cultures, the difference between country- and city-nobility was at first quite unimportant as compared with the strong and deep distinction between the nobility (in general) and the residu

when rationalism becomes omnipotent, in practice, even the bloody practice of revolutions. Nobility and clergy, so far as they are still extant, appear rather markedly as privileged classes, the tacit significance of the emphasis being that their claim to prescriptive rights on the ground of historical status is (from the point of view of timeless rational or "natural" law) obsolete nonsense. They now have their centre in the capital city (this also a Late-period idea) and now, and now only, develop aristocratic forms to that imposing combination of hauteur and elegance that we see, for example, in the portraits of Reynolds and Lawrence. In opposition to them stand the intellectual powers of the now supreme city, economy and science, which in conjunction with the mass of artisans, functionaries, and labourers feel themselves as a party, diverse in its constituents, but invariably solid at the call to battle for freedom — that is, for urban independence of the great old-time symbols and the rights that flowed from them. As components of the Third Estate, which counts by heads and not by rank, they are all, in all Late periods of all Cultures, "liberal" in one way or another — namely, free from the inward powers of non-urban life. Economy is freed to make money, science freed to criticize. And so in all the great decisions we perceive the intellect with its books and its meetings having the word ("Democracy"), and money obtaining the advantages ("Plutocracy") — and it is never ideas, but always capital, that wins. But this again is just the opposition of truths and facts, in the form in which it develops from the city-life.

Moreover, by way of protest against the ancient symbols of the soil-bound life, the city opposes to the aristocracy of birth the notion of an aristocracy of money and an aristocracy of intellect — the one not very explicit as a claim, but all the more effective as a fact; the other a truth, but nothing more than that and, as a spectacle for the eye, not very convincing. In every Late period there grows on to the ancient nobility — that in which some big bit of history (say, Crusades, or Norman conquest) has become stored as form and beat, but which often has inwardly decayed at the great courts — a genuine second crop. Thus in the fourth century B.c. the entry of great plebeian families as conscripti into the Roman Senate of patres produced within the senatorial order an aristocracy of "nobiles" — a nobility holding lands, but entitled by office. In just the same way a nobility of nepotism arose in Papal Rome; in 1650 there were scarcely fifty families of more than three centuries' status. In the Southern States of the American Union there grew up, from Baroque times onward, that planter-aristocracy which was annihilated by the money-powers of the North in the Civil War of 1861–5. The old merchant-nobility of the type of the Fugger, Welser, and Medici and the great Venetian and Genoese houses — to this type, too, must be assigned practically the whole of the patriciate of the Hellenic colonial cities of 800 — had always something of aristocracy in them,¹ race, tradition, high standards, and the nature-impulse to re-establish connexion

Ambrogio Spinola is a case in point. — Tr.

^<sup>1 The memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon give a vivid picture of this evolution

^<sup>2 P. 75.

^); Ed. Meyer, Kl. Schriften, pp. 351, et. seq.

^<sup>5 A. Rosenberg, Studien zur Entstehung der Plehs, Herm. XLVIII (1913), pp. 359, et seq.

Pp. 102, et seq.

(B)

STATE AND HISTORY

CHAPTER XI

THE STATE

(B)

STATE AND HISTORY

I

If all life were one uniform being-stream, the words "people," "state," "war," "policy," "constitution," would never have been heard of. But the

Pp. 170, et seq.

A law that has been laid down by a community expresses a duty for every

member, but it is no proof of every member's power. On the contrary, it is a question of Destiny, who makes the law and for whom it is made. There are subjects and there are objects in the making of laws, although everyone is an object as to the validity thereof — and this holds good without distinction for the inner law of families, guilds, estates, and states. But for the State, which is the highest law-subject existing in historical actuality, there is, besides, an external law that it imposes upon aliens by hostilities. Ordinary civil law is a case of the first kind, a peace treaty of the second. But in all cases the law of the stronger is the law of the weaker also. To "have the right" is an expression of power. This is a historical fact that every moment confirms, but it is not acknowledged in the realm of truth, which is not of this world. In their conceptions of right, therefore, as in other things, being and waking-being, Destiny and Causality, stand implacably opposed. To the priestly and idealistic moral of good and evil belongs the moral distinction of right and wrong, but in the race-moral of good and bad the distinction is between those who give and those who receive the law. An abstract idea of justice pervades the minds and writings of all whose spirit is noble and strong and whose blood is weak, pervades all religions and all philosophies — but the fact-world of history knows only the success which turns the law of the stronger into the law of all. Over ideals it marches without pity, and if ever a man or a people renounces its power of the moment in order to remain righteous — then, certainly, his or its theoretical fame is assured in the second world of thought and truth, but assured also is the coming of a moment in which it will succumb to another life-power that has better understood realities.

power annihilates also these laws — they remain true, but they are no longer actual. External laws on the other hand, such as all peace treaties, are essentially never true and always actual — indeed appallingly so. They set up no pretension whatever of being just — it is quite enough that they are valid. Out of them speaks Life, which possesses no causal and moral logic, but is organically all the more consistent and consequent for the lack of it. Its will is to possess validity itself; it feels with an inward certainty what is required to that end and, seeing that, knows what is law for itself and has to be made law for others. This logic is seen in every family, and particularly in old true-born peasant families as soon as authority is shattered and someone other than the head tries to determine "what is." It appears in every state, as soon as one party therein dominates the position. Every feudal age is filled with the contests between lords and vassals over the "right to rights." In the Classical world this conflict ended almost everywhere with the unconditional victory of the First Estate, which deprived the kingship of its legislative powers and made it an object of its own law-making — as the origin and significance of the Archons in Athens and the Ephors in Sparta prove beyond doubt. But the same happened in the Western field too — for a moment in France (institution of the States-General, 1302), and for good in England, where in 1215 the Norman baronage and the higher clergy imposed Magna Charta and thus sowed the seed that was to ripen into the effective sovereignty of Parliament. Hence it was that the old Norman law of the Estates here remained permanently valid. In Germany, on the contrary, the weak Imperial power, hard-pressed by the claims of the great feudatories, called in the "Roman" law of Justinian (that is, the law of the unlimited central power) to aid it against the early German landlaws.

^<sup>2 See pp. 65, et seq.

^<sup>3 Above all in connexion with divorce, in which the civil and the ecclesiastical views both hold good, literally side by side.

TI

It is clear, then, that on the heights of history two such life-forms, Estate and State, contend for supremacy, both being-streams of great inward form and symbolic force, each resolved to make its own destiny the Destiny of the whole. That— if we try to understand the matter in its depths and unreservedly put aside our everyday conceptions of people, economy, society, and politics—is the meaning of the opposition between the social and the political conduct of events. Social and political ideas do not begin to be differentiated till a great Culture has dawned, or even till feudalism is declining and the lord-vassal relation represents the social, and the king-people relation the political, side. But the social powers of the early time (nobility and priesthood) not less actively than those of the later (money and mind)—and the vocational groups of the craftsmen and officials and workers, too, as they were rising to their power in the growing cities—sought, each for itself, to subordinate the State-ideal to its own Estate-ideal, or more usually to its estate interests. And so there arose, at all planes from that of the national unit to that of the individual consciousness, a fight over the respective limits and claims each—the result of which, in extreme cases, is that the one element succeeds so completely as to make the other its tool.²

¹ See n 220 - Te

In all cases, however, it is the State that determines the external position, and therefore the historical relations between peoples are always of a political and not a social nature. In domestic politics, on the contrary, the situation is so dominated by class-oppositions that at first sight social and political tactics appear inseparable, and indeed, in the thought of people who (as, for example, a bourgeoisie) equate their own class-ideal with historical actuality — and consequently cannot think in external politics at all — identical. In the external battle the State seeks alliances with other States, in the internal it is always in alliance with one or another Estate — the sixth-century Tyrannis, for instance, rested upon the combination of the State-idea with the interests of the Third Estate vis-à-vis the ancient noble oligarchy, and the French Revolution became inevitable from the moment that the Tiers — that is, intellect and money — left its friend the Crown in the lurch and joined the two other Estates (from the Assembly of Notables, 1787). We are thoroughly right therefore in feeling a distinction between State-history and class-history, between political (horizontal) and social (vertical) history, war and revolution. But it is a grave error of modern doctrinaires to regard the spirit of domestic history as that of history in general. World-history is, and always will be, State-history. The inner constitution of a nation aims always at being "in condition" for the outer fight (diplomatic, military, or economic) and anyone who treats a nation's constitution as an aim and ideal in itself is merely ruining the nation's body. But, from the other point of view, it falls to the inner-political pulsesense of a ruling stratum (whether belonging to the First or to the Fourth Estate) so to manage the internal class-oppositions that the focus and ideas of the nation are not tied up in party conflict, nor treason to the country thought of as an ace of trumps.

^<sup>1 Which is most definitely not identical with economic history in the sense of the materialist historian. More of this in the next chapter.

^<sup>2 It is to be noted that the author uses the terms "horizontal" and "vertical" here in the reverse sense to that in which they commonly figure in present-day political literature, although in economic works the usage is the same as that of the text. — Tr.

It is, however, a distinction of quite another kind that holds as between the State-idea and the idea of any one of the other Estates. All these are inwardly alien to the State as such, and the State-ideals that they fashion out of their own lives have not grown up out of the spirit and the political forces of actual history — hence, indeed, the conscious emphasis with which they are labelled as social. And while in Early times the situation is simply that historical facts oppose the Church-community in its efforts to actualize religious ideals, in Late periods both the business ideal of the free economic life, and the Utopian ideal of the enthusiast who would actualize this or that abstraction, also come into the field.

problems lie, not in the working-out of constitutions, but in the organization of a sound working government; not in the distribution of political rights according to "just" principles (which at bottom are simply the idea that a class forms of its own legitimate claims), but in the efficient pulse of the whole (efficient in the sense that the play of muscle and sinew is efficient when an extended racehorse nears the winning-post), in that rhythm which attracts even strong genius into syntony; not, lastly, in any world-alien moral, but in the steadiness, sureness, and superiority of political leadership. The more self-evident all these things are, the less is said or argued about them; the more fully matured the State, the higher the standing, the historical capacity, and therefore the Destiny of the Nation. State-majesty, sovereignty, is a life-symbol of the first order. It distinguishes subjects and objects 1 in political events not only in inner, but also (which is far more important) in external, history. Strength of leadership, which comes to expression in the clear separation of these two factors, is the unmistakable sign of the life-force in a political unity — so much so that the shattering of existing authority (for example, by the supporters of an opposed constitutional ideal) almost always results not in this new party's making itself the subject of domestic policy, but in the whole nation's becoming the object of alien policy — and not seldom for ever.

^<sup>1 Attention is drawn to this phrase, so as to avoid misconceptions as to the meaning of "subject" in the sequel. — Tr.

that it is always a single social stratum which, constitutionally or otherwise, provides the political leading. It is always a definite minority that represents the world-historical tendency of a State; and, within that again, it is a more or less self-contained minority that in virtue of its aptitudes (and often enough against the spirit of the Constitution) actually holds the reins. And, if we ignore, as exceptions proving the rule, revolutionary interregna and Cæsarian conditions, in which individuals and fortuitous groupings maintain their power merely by material means (and often without any aptitude for ruling), it is always the minority within an Estate that rules by tradition. In by far the greater number of cases this minority is one within the nobility — for example, the "gentry" which governed the Parliamentary style of England, the nobiles at the helm of Roman politics in Punic War times, the merchant-aristocracy of Venice, the Jesuit-trained (nobles who conducted the diplomacy of the Papal Curia in the Baroque). Similarly, we find the political aptitude in self-contained groups within the religious Estate — not only in the Roman Catholic Church, but also in Egypt and India and still more in Byzantium and Sassanid Persia. In the Third Estate — though this seldom produces it, not being in itself a life-unit — there are cases such as those of third-century Rome, where a stratum of the plebs contains men trained in commerce, and France since 1789, where an element of the bourgeoisie has been trained in law; in these cases, it is ensured by a closed circle of persons possessing homogeneous practical gifts, which constantly recruits itself and preserves in its midst the whole sum of unwritten political tradition and experience.

111

¹ See p. 180.

^<sup>3 See p. 350.

^<sup>1 Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Altertums, I, § 244.

^<sup>2 Even by Chinese critics. See, however, Schindler, Das Priestertum im alten China, I, pp. 61, et seq.; Conrady, China, p. 533.

⁸ See pp. 349, et seq.

^{4 &}quot;Compotus," "contrarotulus" (the counter-roll retained for checking), "quittancia," "recordatum."

The idea of a Ruler whose writ should run throughout the whole historical world, whose Destiny should be that of all mankind, has taken visible shape in, so far, three instances — firstly, in the conception of the Pharaoh as Horus; ¹ secondly, in the great Chinese imagining of the Ruler of the Middle, whose domain is tien-bia, everything lying below the heavens; ² and, thirdly, in early Gothic times. In 962 Otto the Great, answering to the deep mystical sense and yearning for historical and spatial infinity that was sweeping through the world of those days, conceived the idea of the "Holy Roman Empire, German by nation." But even earlier, Pope Nicolas I (860), still completely involved in Augustinian — that is, Magian — lines of thought, had dreamed of a Papal democracy which was to stand above the princes of this world, and from 1059 Gregory VII with all the prime force of his Faustian nature set out to actualize a papal world-dominion under the forms of a universal feudalism, with kings as vassals. The Papacy itself, indeed, under its domestic aspect, constituted the small feudal State of the Campagna, whose noble families controlled the election of popes, and which very rapidly converted the college of cardinals (to which the duty was entrusted from 1059 on) into a sort of noble oligarchy. But under the broader aspect of external policy Gregory VII actually obtained feudal supremacy over the Norman states of England and Sicily, both of which were created with his support, and actually awarded the Imperial crown as Otto

^<sup>1 See p. 279

^<sup>2 "For the ruler of the Middle there is no foreign land" (Kung-yang). "The heaven speaks not; it causes its thoughts to be promulgated by a man" (Tung Chung-shu). His errors affect the whole Cosmos and bring about cataclysms in Nature (O. Franke, Zur Geschichte des konfuzianischen Dogmas (1920), pp. 212, et seq., 244, et seq.). Such mystic universalism was completely alien to Indian and Classical state-notions.

the Great had awarded the tiara. But a little later Henry VI of Hohenstausen succeeded in the opposite sense; even Richard Cœur-de-Lion swore the vassal's oath to him for England, and the universal Empire was on the point of becoming a fact when the greatest of all popes, Innocent III (1198–1216) made the papal overlordship of the world real for a short time. England became a Papal sief in 1213; Aragon and Leon and Portugal, Denmark and Poland and Hungary, Armenia and the recently founded Latin Empire in Byzantium followed. But with Innocent's death disintegration set in within the Church itself, and the great spiritual dignitaries, whom their investitures turned into vassals of the Pope as overlord, soon followed the lay vassals' example and set about limiting him by means of respresentative institutions for their order.¹ The notion that a General Council stood higher than a pope was not of religious origin, but arose primarily out of the feudal principle. Its tendency corresponded precisely to that which the English magnates had made good in Magna Charta. In the councils of Constance (1414) and Basel (1431) the last attempts were made to turn the Church, under its temporal aspect, into a clerical feudalism, in which an oligarchy of cardinals would have become the representative of the whole Clerical Estate of the West and taken the place hitherto held by the Roman nobility. But by that time the feudal idea had long taken second place to that of the State, and so the Roman barons won the victory. The field of candidature for the Papacy was limited to the narrowest environs of Rome, and unlimited power over the organizations of the Church was ipso facto secured to the centre. As for the Empire, it had long ago become a venerated shadow, like the Egyptian and the Chinese.

great families therefore developed, not separately in their counties, as in Egypt, China, and the West, but in the closest touch with the city, where they obtained possession of the rights of the King, one after the other, until nothing was left to the ruling house but that which could not be touched because of the gods — namely, the title attaching to its sacrificial function (hence the rex sacrorum). In the later parts of the Homeric epic (c. 800) it is the nobles who invite the king to take his seat, and even unseat him. The Odyssey really knows the kingship only as part of the saga — the actual Ithaca that it shows us is a city dominated by oligarchs. The Spartiates, like the Roman partriciate of the Comitia Curiata, are the product of a feudal relation. In the phiditia 3 there are evident remains of the old open table of the noble, but the power of the king has sunk to the shadowy dignity of the rex sacrorum of Rome, or the "kings" of Sparta, who were liable to be imprisoned or removed at any time by the Ephors. The essential similarity of these conditions forces us to presume that in Rome the Tarquinian Tyrannis of 500 was preceded by a period of oligarchical dominance, and this view is supported by the unquestionably genuine tradition of the Interrex, a person appointed by the council of the nobles (the Senate) from amongst its own members to act until it should please them to elect a king again.

Here, as elsewhere, there comes a time in which feudalism is falling into decay, but the coming State is not yet completed, the nation not yet "in form." This is the fearful crisis that emerges everywhere in the shape of the Interregnum, and forms the boundary between the feudal union and the class-State. In Egypt feudalism was fully developed by about the middle of the Vth Dynasty. The Pharaoh Asosi gave away his domains literally piece by piece to the vassals, and, further, the rich fiefs of the priesthood were (exactly as in the West) free of taxation and gradually became the permanent property ("mortmain," as we should say) of the great temples.⁴ With the Vth Dynasty (c. 2530 B.C.) the "Hohenstaufen" age comes to an end. Under the shadow-kingship of the shortlived VIth Dynasty the princes (rpati) and counts (hetio) become independent; the high offices are all hereditary and the tomb-inscriptions show us more and more proud stress upon ancient lineage. That which later Egyptian historians have hidden under the reputed VIIth and VIIIth dynasties is really half a century of anarchy and lawless conflicts between princes for each other's domains or for the Pharaoh-title. In China, even I-Wang (934-909) was obliged by his vassals to give out all conquered lands, and to do so to sub-tenants

Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, I, 1, pp. 214, et seq.

^<sup>2 The Spartiates mustered in the best period of the sixth century some 4000 warriors, out of a total population of nearly 300,000, including Periocci and Helots (Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., III, § 264). The Roman families must at that time have been of about the same strength relatively to the clientela and the Latins.

^<sup>8 Men's messes. See the article $\Sigma v\sigma\sigma l \tau large in Smith's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. — $Tr\$\; .$

^<sup>5 Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., I, § 267, et seq

τv

What this fall of Papacy and Empire meant was the victory of State over Estate. At the root of the feudal system there had been the feeling that the purpose of existence was that a "life" should be led in the light of what it meant. History was exhaustively comprised in the destinies of noble blood. But now the feeling sprang up that there was something else besides, something to which even nobility was subordinate, and which it shared with all other classes (whether of status or of vocation), something intangible, an idea. Events came to be viewed, no longer from a frankly private-law standpoint, but under a "public"-law aspect. The State might (and almost without exception did) remain aristocratic to its core; its outward appearance might be scarcely altered by the transition from the feudal group to the Class-State; the idea that those outside the Estates possessed rights as well as duties might be still unknown; but the feeling had become different, and the consciousness that Life existed to be lived on the heights of history had given way to the other sentiment, that it contained a task. The difference becomes very distinct when we contrast the policy of Rainald van Dassel (d. 1167) — one of the greatest German statesmen of all periods — with that of the Emperor Charles IV (d. 1378), and consider in parallel therewith the transition in Classical feeling from the "Themis" of the knightly age to the "Dike" of the growing Polis. Themis involves only a claim, Dike implies a task as well.

¹ See Ehrenberg, Die Rechtsidee im frühen Griechentum (1921), pp. 65, et seg.

^<sup>2 P. 18.

With this cosmic fact is bound up one of the most intimately inward traits of all directional life, the inherited will, which presents itself with the force of a natural phenomenon in every strong race and compellingly urges even the momentary leader (often quite unconsciously) to uphold his rank for the duration of his personal existence or, beyond it, for that of his blood streaming on through children and grandchildren. The same deep and plantlike trait inspires every real following, which feels in the continuance of the blood of leadership both a surety for and a symbol of the continuance of its own. It is precisely in revolutions that this primitive instinct comes out, full and strong and regardless of all principles. Precisely because of it the France of 1800 saw not only Napoleon, but also his hereditary position, as the true fulfilment of the Revolution. Theorists who, like Marx and Rousseau, start from conceptual ideals instead of from blood-facts have never grasped this immense force that dwells in the historical world, and have in consequence labelled its manifested effects as damnable and reactionary. But they are there, and with a force so insistent that even the symbolism of the high Cultures can only override them temporarily and artificially, as is shown in the engrossing of elective officers by particular families in the Classical, and the nepotism of the Baroque popes in our own case. Behind the fact that leadership is very often freely resigned, and the saying that "merit should rule," there is practically always the rivalry of magnates, who have no objection of principle to hereditary rulership, but prevent it in practice because each one of them secretly claims it for his own blood. This state of active, creative jealousy is the foundation on which the forms of Classical oligarchy are built up.

Pp. 171, et seq.

P. 181, et seq.

State, and Nation in one, as Augustine described it in his Civitas Dei. The Western ruler is by the grace of God monarch in the historical world; his people is subordinated to him because God has invested him with it. But in matters of faith he is himself a subordinate — to God's Vicar on earth, or to his own conscience, as the case may be. That is the separation of State authority and Church authority, the great Faustian conflict between Time and Space. When, in 800, the Pope crowned the Emperor, he chose a new ruler for himself in order that he himself might thrive. Whereas the Emperor in Byzantium was, according to Magian world-feeling, his spiritual as well as his secular superior, an Emperor in the Frank lands was his servant in spiritual matters, besides being (perhaps) his arm in secular affairs. As an idea, the Papacy could arise only by separation from the Caliphate, for the Pope is included in the Caliph.

^<sup>1 See p. 243. ² Krumbacher, Byzant, Literaturegesch., p. 918.

fact that the rulers of the Egyptian XIIth dynasty, with whom the late period of the Culture ended, had their sons crowned during their own lifetime. The inward relationship between these three dynastic ideas is yet another proof that Being in these three Cultures was akin.

Individual rulership and the will to transmit to heirs were unmistakably taken for granted in the oldest kingship.² But they had become questionable even by 800, as the rôle of Telemachus in the older parts of the Odyssey indicates. The royal title was frequently borne by great vassals and the most conspicuous of the nobles. In Sparta and in Lycia there were two of them, and in the Phæacian city of the epic and in many actual cities there were more. Next comes the splitting-off of offices from dignities. Lastly, the kingship itself becomes an office which the nobility confers (though at first, perhaps, only upon members of the old royal family); thus in Sparta the Ephors, as representing the First Estate, were in no wise limited in their choice by rule; and in Corinth from about 750 the royal clan of the Bacchiadæ abolished hereditary succession, and on each occasion set up a prytaneus with royal rank from within their own body. The great offices, which likewise were hereditary at first, came to be for one life only, then were limited to a term, and lastly became annual, and, further, were so arranged that there were more holders than offices, and the leadership was exercised by each in turn — the custom which, as is well known, led to the disaster of Cannæ. These annual offices, from the Etruscan annual dictature ³ to the Doric ephorate (which is found in Heraclea and Messene as well as Sparta) are firmly bound up with the essence of the Polis, and they reach their full structure about 650. Exactly at the corresponding date of the Western class-State (end of the fifteenth century), the hereditary power of dynasties was being secured by the Emperor Maximilian and his

^<sup>1 Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., I, § 281.

³ A. Rosenberg, Der Staat der alten Italiker (1913), pp. 75, et seq.

With these glimpses into Greece to go upon, we may venture, though under all reserves of course, to outline the history of primitive Rome. The Roman syncecism — the assembling of widely scattered noble families — is identical with the "founding" of the city, an Etruscan undertaking of the beginning of the seventh century. Facing the royal stronghold of the Capitol, there had long been two other settlements on the Palatine and the Quirinal. To the first of these belonged the ancient goddess Diva Rumina and the Etruscan Ruma clan; the god of the second was Quirinus Pater. From these comes the dual name of Romans and "Quirites," and the dual priesthoods of the Salii and Luperci, which adhered to the two hills. Now, as the three blood-tribes named Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres are in all probability common to all Etruscan localities, they must have existed in both of those which concern us here; and thus are explained, on the one hand, the number six of centuries of equites, of military tribunes, of aristocratic Vestals, and, on the other, the number two of the prætors (or consuls) who were, quite early, attached to the King as representatives of the nobles and gradually deprived him of all influence. Already by 600 the constitution of Rome must have been a strong oligarchy of "Patres" with a shadow-kingship as figure-head. Thus both the older theory of an expulsion of the kings, and the newer of a slow disintegration of the royal power, can stand side by side after all, the former as referring to the fall of the Tarquinian Tyrannis, which (as everywhere else in the Classical world — Pisistratus in Athens, for example) had set itself up in opposition to the oli-

^<sup>2 The Greek lecythi found in graves on the Esquiline date form this period

⁸ Wissowa Religion der Römer, p. 242.

W. Schulze, Zur Geschichte lateinischen Eigennamen, pp. 379, et. seq., 580, et seq.

See p. 251.

^<sup>6 This is seen also in the relation of the Pontifiex Maximus to the Rex Sacrorum — the latter with the three great Flamens to the kingship, the Pontifices and the Vestals to the aristocracy.

This was the Classical world's manner of being politically "in form" and, correspondingly, of thinking and feeling. There are no exceptions. The Etruscans were as much under its domination as the Dorians and the Macedonians. When Alexander and his successors dotted the Orient far and wide with their Hellenistic cities, they did so without conscious choice, for they could not imagine any other form of political organization. Antioch was to be Syria, and Alexandria Egypt. The latter, under the Ptolemies and later under the Cæsars, was, not indeed legally, but certainly in practice, a Polis on a vast scale—for the country outside, long reverted to townless fellahdom and managed by immemorial precedents, stood at its gates like an alien frontier. The Roman Imperium was nothing but the last and greatest Classical city-state standing on foundations of a colossal synœcism. Under Marcus Aurelius the rhetor Aristides could say with perfect justification that it had "brought together this world in the name of one city: wheresoever a man may be born in it, it is at its centre that he dwells." Even the conquered populations of the Empire—the wandering desert-tribes, the upland-valley communities of the Alps—were constituted as civitates. Livy thinks invariably in the forms of the city-state, and for Tacitus provincial history simply does not exist. When, in 49, Pompey, withdrawing before Cæsar, gave up Rome as militarily unimportant and betook himself to the East to create there a firm base of operations, he

^<sup>1 See p. 62, et seq

^" P. 173, et seq.

This is clearly to be seen from Wilcken, Grundzüge der Papyruskunde (1912), pp. 1, et seq

These city-states were in principle inextensible. Their number could increase, but not their ambit. The notion that the transformation of the Roman clientela into a voting plebs, and the creation of the country tribes, meant a breach in the Polis-idea is incorrect. It was in Rome as in Attica — the whole life of the State remained as before limited to one point, which was the Agora, the Forum. However far away those to whom citizenship was granted might live — in Hannibal's day it might be anywhere in Italy, and later anywhere in the world — the exercise of his political right depended upon personal presence in the Forum. Hence the majority of the citizens were, not legally, but practically without influence in political business.² What citizenship meant for them, therefore, was simply the duty of military service and the enjoyment of the city's domestic law.³ But even for the citizen coming to Rome, political power was limited by a second and artificial syncecism which came into existence after, and as the result of, enfranchisement of the peasant, and can only be understood as an unconscious effort to maintain the idea of the Polis strictly unimpaired; the new citizens were inscribed, regardless of their numbers, in a very few tribes (eight, under the Lex Julia), and were always, therefore, in a minority in the Comitia relatively to the citizens of the older franchise.

^<sup>1 Ed. Meyer, Casars Monarchie (1918), p. 308.

^<sup>8 In the Western dynasty-states the domestic law of each is valid for its territory and applies therefore to all persons present therein, irrespective of allegiance. In the city-state, on the contrary, the validity of its domestic law for a person arises from that person's possession of citizenship; civitas, therefore, means infinitely more than present-day nationality, for without it a man was without rights at all — as a "person," non-existent.

See p. 60.

term of office, according to ancient custom, with a declaration of war against the Helots. The relation was reversed whenever in consequence of a revolution the non-noble became the Demos — but its meaning remained. As in inward, so also in outward relationships, the body politic was the foundation of all events throughout Classical history. The cities, hundreds of them, lay in wait for each other, each as self-gathered, politically and economically, as it was possible to make it, ready to bite, letting fly on the smallest excuse, and having as its war-aim, not the extension of its own state, but the extinction of the other side's. Wars ended with the destruction of the enemy's city and the killing or enslavement of his citizens, just as revolutions ended with the massacre or expulsion of the losers and the confiscation of their property by the victorious party. The natural interstate condition of the West is a close network of diplomatic relations, which may be broken through by wars; but the Classical law of nations assumes war as a normal condition, interrupted from time to time by peace treaties, and a declaration of war merely re-established the natural state of policy. Only so do the forty- and fifty-year peace treaties, spondai (such as the famous one of Nicias in 421), become intelligible, as temporary guarantee-treaties.

v

effort of resistance. For them, now, everything is at stake — the heroic and the saintly, the old law, rank, blood — and, from their point of view, against what?

In the Polis, on the contrary, where the State consisted exclusively in the form and embodied no hereditary head, the necessity of bringing out the unclassed on behalf of the State-idea produced the Tyrannis, in which a family or a faction of the nobility itself assumed the dynastic rôle, without which action on the part of the Third Estate would have been impossible. Late Classical historians were too remote from this process to seize its meaning, and dealt with it merely in terms of externals of private life. In reality, the Tyrannis was the State, and oligarchy opposed it under the banner of class. it rested, therefore, upon the support of peasants and burghers — in Athens (c. 580) the Diakrii and Paralii parties. Therefore, again, it backed the Dionysiac and Orphic cults against the Apollinian; thus in Attica Pisistratus forced the worship of Dionysus 1 on the peasantry, in Sicyon Clisthenes forbade the recital of the Homeric poems, 2 and in Rome it was almost certainly in the time of the Tarquins that the trinity Demeter (Ceres)-Dionysus-Kore was introduced. 3 Its temple was dedicated in 483 by Spurius Cassius, the same who perished later in an attempt to reintroduce the Tyrannis. The Ceres temple was the sanctuary of the Plebs, and its managers, the ædiles, were their trusted spokesmen before the tribunate was ever heard of. 4 The Tyrants, like the princes of the Western Baroque, were liberals in a broad sense of the word that ceased to be possible for them in the subsequent stage of bourgeois dominance. But the Classical also began at that time to pass round the word that

¹ Gercke-Norden, Einl. i.d. Alt.-Wiss., II. p. 202.

Busolt, Griech. Geschichte, II, pp. 346, et seq.

⁴ G. Wissowa, Religion der Römer, pp. 297, et seq

"money makes the man (χρήματ' 'ανήρ)" ¹ The sixth-century Tyrannis brought the Polis-idea to its conclusions and created the constitutional concept of the Citizen, the Polites, the Civis, the sum of these, irrespective of their class-provenance, forming the soma of the city-state. When, therefore, the oligarchy contrived to win after all — thanks once more to the Classical craving for the present, and the consequent fear and hatred evoked by the quasi-will-to-duration of the dynasts — the concept of the citizen was there, firmly established, and the non-patrician had learned to regard himself as an estate vis-à-vis a "rest." He had become a political party — the word "democracy" (in its specifically Classical sense) now acquired a really serious content — and what he set himself to do was, no longer to come to the aid of the State, but to be himself the State as the nobility had been before. He began to count — money and heads, for the money-census and the general franchise are alike bourgeois weapons — whereas an aristocracy does not count, but values, and votes not by heads, but by classes. As the absolute State came out of Fronde and First Tyrannis, so it perished in French Revolution and Second Tyrannis. In this second conflict, which is already one of defence, the dynasty returns to the side of the nobility in order to guard the State-idea against a new class-rule, that of the bourgeois.

In Egypt, too, the period between Fronde and Revolution is hall-marked. It is the Middle Kingdom. The XIIth Dynasty (2000–1788) — in particular Amenemhet I and Sesostris I — had established the absolute State in severe conflicts with the baronage. The first of these rulers, as a famous poem of the time relates, barely escaped from a court conspiracy, and the biography of Sinuhet ² shows us that after his death, which was kept secret for a time, rebellion threatened. The third was murdered by palace officials. We learn from the inscriptions in the family grave of the earl Chmenotep ³ that the cities had become rich and almost independent, and warred with each other. Certainly they cannot have been smaller at that time than the Greek cities at the time of the Persian Wars. It was on them and on a certain number of loyal magnates that the dynasty rested. Finally, Sesostris III (1887–1850) succeeded in completely abolishing feudal nobility. Thenceforward there was only a court-nobility and a single, admirably ordered bureau-State; but already some lamented that people of standing were reduced to misery and that the "sons of nobodies" enjoyed rank and consideration. Democracy was beginning and the great social evolution of the Hyksos period was brewing.

The corresponding place in China is that of the Ming-Chu (or Pa, 685-

^<sup>2 Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., § 281.

^<sup>3 Ibid., §§ 280, et seq.

On the means taken to secure the succession, cf. p. 279.

^<sup>5 Ed. Meyer, op. cit., § 286.

These were Protectors of princely origin, who exercised an unconstitutional, but none the less real, power over a world of states weltering in anarchy, and called congresses of princes for the restoration of order and the recognition of stable political principles, even summoning the "Ruler of the Middle" himself (now become totally unimportant) out of the house of Chóu. The first was Hwang of Tsi (d. 645), who called the Diet of 659 and of whom Confucius wrote that he had rescued China from a reversion to barbarism. Their name Ming-dshu became later, like the word "tyrant," a term of obloquy, because later men were unwilling to see in the phenomenon anything but a power unauthorized by law — but it is beyond all question that these great diplomatists were an element working with a devoted care for the State and the historical future against the old Estates, and supported by the young classes of mind and money. It is a high Culture that speaks to us in the little that we so far know about them from Chinese sources. Some were writers; others selected philosphers to be their ministers. It is a matter of indifference whether we mentally parallel them with Richelieu or with Wallenstein or with Periander — in any case it is with them that the "people" first emerges as a political quantity. It is the outlook and high diplomacy of genuine Baroque — the absolute State sets itself up in principle as the opponent of the aristocratic State, and wins through.

In this lies the close parallelism of these events with the Fronde of Western Europe. In France the Crown after 1614 ceased to summon the State-General, this body having shown itself to be too strong for the united forces of State and bourgeoisie. In England Charles I similarly tried to govern without Parliament after 1628. In Germany, at the same time, the Thirty Years' War broke out. The magnitude of its religious significance is apt to overshadow for us the other issue involved, and it must not be forgotten that it was also an effort to bring to a decision the struggle between imperial power and the Fronde of the great electors, and that between the individual princes and the lesser Frondes of their local estate-assemblies. But the centre of world-politics then lay in Spain. There, in conjunction with the high courtesies generally, the diplomatic style of the Baroque had evolved in the cabinet of Philip II; and the dynastic principle — which embodied the absolute State vis-à-vis the Cortes — had attained to its highest development in the course of the long struggle with the House of Bourbon. The attempt to align England also in the Spanish system had failed under Philip II, when Queen Mary, his wife, was disappointed of an heir already expected and announced. But now, under Philip IV, the idea of a universal monarchy spanning the oceans revived — no longer the mystic dream-monarchy of the early Gothic, the "Holy Roman Empire, German by nation," but the tangible ideal of a world-dominion in Habsburg hands, which

^<sup>1 S. Plath, Verfassung und Verevaltung Chinas (Abh. Münch. Ak., 1864), p. 97, O. Franke, Studien z. Gesch. d. Konfuz. Dogmas, pp. 255, et seq.

Wallenstein, unconsciously, began where the Hohenstaufen had stopped. Since the death of Frederick II, in 1250, the power of the Estates of the Empire had become unlimited, and it was against them, and as champion of an absolute emperor's state, that he fought during the first tenure of command. Had he been a greater diplomatist, had he been clearer and above all more resolute (for actually he was timid in the presence of decisive turnings), and had he, in particular, taken the trouble as Richelieu did to bring the person of the monarch under his influence — then probably it would have been all up with princedom within the Empire. He saw in these princes rebels, to be unseated and dispossessed of their lands; at the peak of his power (end of 1629), when militarily he held Germany in the hollow of his hand, he said aloud in conversation that the Emperor ought to be master in the Empire as the Kings of France and Spain were masters of their own. His army, which was "self-supporting" and by reason of its numbers also independent of the Estates, was the first instance in German history of an Imperial army of European significance; in comparison with it Tilly's army of the Fronde (for that was what the League really was) counted for little. When Wallenstein, in 1628, leaguered before Stralsund, visualizing a Habsburg sea-power in the Baltic wherewith to take the Bourbon system in the rear — and just then Richelieu was besieging La Rochelle, with better fortune — hostilities between himself and the League had become almost unavoidable. He absented himself from the Diet of Regensburg in 1630, saying that its seat "would presently be in Paris." This was the most serious political error of his life, for in his absence the Frondist Electors

defeated the Emperor by threatening to displace him in favour of Louis XIII, and forced him to dismiss his general. And with that, though it did not realize the consequence of the step, the central power in Germany gave away its army. Henceforth Richelieu supported the greater Fronde in Germany with the object of breaking the Spanish power there, while on the other side Olivarez, and Wallenstein as soon as he regained his power, allied themselves with the French aristocrats, who thereupon took the offensive under the Queen-mother and Gaston of Orléans. But the Imperial power had missed its grand chance. The Cardinal won in both games. In 1632 he executed the last of the Montmorencys 1 and brought the Catholic Electors of Germany into open alliance with France. And thenceforward Wallenstein, becoming unsure of his own final purposes, learned more and more against the Spanish idea, thinking that he could keep the Empire-idea clear of it, and so ipso facto approached nearer and nearer to the standpoint of the Estates — like Marshal Turenne in the French Fronde a few years later. This was the decisive turn in later German history. With Wallenstein's secession the absolute emperor-state became impossible, and his murder in 1634 did not remedy matters, for the Emperor had no substitute to take his place.

of the two Habsburg lines in quick succession and the diplomatic and warlike events that throng in 1700-10 round the Spanish, and in 1740-60 round the Austrian succession. It is the climax also of the genealogical principle. Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Austria, nube! was indeed "an extension of war by other means." The phrase indeed was coined long before (in connexion with Maximilian I), but it was not until now that it reached its fullest effects Fronde Wars pass over into Succession Wars, decided upon in cabinets and fought out chivalrously by small armies and according to strict conventions. What was contended for was the heritage of half the world which the marriage-politics of early Baroque had brought together in Habsburg hands. The State is still "well up to form"; the nobility has become a loyal aristocracy of court and service, carrying on the wars of the Crown and organizing its administration. Side by side with the France of Louis XIV, there presently arose in Prussia a masterpiece of State organization. From the conflicts of the Great Elector with his Estates (1660) to the death of Frederick the Great (who received Mirabeau in audience three years before the Fall of the Bastille) Prussia's road is the same as France's, and the outcome in each case is a State which was in every point the opposite of the English order.

^<sup>2 See C. von B(inder)-K(rieglstein), Geist und Stoff im Kriege (1896); F. N. Maude, War and the World's Life (1907), and other works by the same author; also, in more summary terms, the articles "Army" and "French Revolutionary Wars" by the present translator in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

doned to the realm of dreams — that other world which is not of race but of language, not of Destiny but of Causality. And in it arose the idea, and finally the fact, of the "people" as conceived by poets and thinkers, who founded themselves a republic in the clouds of verse and logic and at last came to believe that politics consisted in idealistic writing and reading and speaking, and not in deed and resolve — so that even to-day real deeds and resolves are confused with mere expressions of inclination.

For this, and what follows, see my Preussentum und Sozialismus, pp. 31, et seq.

This steadiness of last, deepest, and ripest form, which springs from the historical feeling of Western mankind, was denied to the Classical. Tyrannis vanished. Strict oligarchy vanished. The Demos which the politics of the sixth century had created as the sum of all men belonging to the Polis burst into factions and spasmodic shocks of noble versus non-noble, and conflicts began within states, and between states, in which each party tried to exterminate the other lest it should itself be exterminated. When in 511 — that is, still in the age of the Tyrants — Sybaris was annihilated by the Pythagoreans, the event, the first of its kind, shocked the entire Classical world; even in distant Miletus mourning was worn. But now the elimination of a Polis or a party was so usual that a regular form and choice of methods — corresponding to the typical peace-treaties of Western Baroque — arose for the disposal of the vanquished — for example, the inhabitants might be massacred or sold into slavery, the houses razed or divided as spoil. The will to absolutism is there — after the Persian Wars it is universal, in Rome and Sparta no less than in Athens — but the willed narrowness of the Polis, the point-politic, and the willed brevity of office-holding and immediacy of schemes made it impossible ever to reach a firm decision as to who should be "the State." ¹ The high craft of diplomacy, which in the West was practised by cabinets inspired by a tradition, was here handicapped by an amateurism founded not on any accidental inadequacy of persons — the men were available — but solely in the political form itself. The course of this form from the First to the Second Tyrannis is unmistakable and corresponds to the same evolution in all other Late periods; but the specifically Classical style of it appears in the disorder and subjection to incidentals which naturally and inevitably followed from a life that could not and would not dissociate itself from the moment.

^<sup>1 R. von Pöhlmann, Griech. Gesch. (1914), pp. 223–45.

1 Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt. V § 809. If Latin became a literary language, only very late — after Alexander — the only deduction to be made from the fact is that under the Tarquins Greek and Etruscan must have been in general use — which, after all, goes without saying for a city that was of a size and position to have relations with Carthage; that waged war in alliance with Cyme and made use of the Treasury of Massalia at Delphi; whose standard weights and measures were Dorian; whose mode of warfare was Sicilian; and whose walls contained a large foreign colony. Livy (IX, 36), following older statements, observes that about 300 the Roman boy was still brought upon Etruscan culture, as he was later on Greek. The ancient form "Ulixes" for Odysseus shows that the Homeric sagas were not only known, but popularly known here (cf. p. 284). The provisions of the Twelve Tables (c. 450) agree with the more or less contemporary law of Gortyn in Crete (cf. p. 63), not merely as to substance, but even stylistically — so exactly that the Roman patricians who drew them up must have been entirely at home with juristic Greek.

The crisis of 471 was not unique but generically Classical. Its target was the oligarchy, which even now, within the Demos created by the Tyrannis, strove to be the impulsive force in affairs. It was no longer, as in Hesiod's day, the oligarchy as estate versus non-estate, but the oligarchic party against a second party—both in the cadre of the absolute state, which as such was not brought into the controversy. In Athens, 487 B.C., the archons were overthrown and their rights transferred to the college of strategi.¹ In 461 the Areopagus, the Athenian equivalent of the Senate, was overthrown. In Sicily (where relations with Rome were close) the democracy triumphed at Acragas (Agrigentum) in 471, at Syracuse in 465, at Rhegium and Messana in 461. In Sparta the kings Cleomenes (488) and Pausanias (470) tried in turn, without success, to free the Helots—in Roman terms, the Clientela—and thereby to acquire for the kingship, vis-à-vis the oligarchic Ephors, the importance of the tribunate in Rome. The missing element in this case, which was present (though overlooked by our scholars) in that of Rome, was the population-strength of the mercantile city that gives such movements both weight and leadership; it was on this that even the great Helot rising of 464 broke down (an event which probably inspired the Roman legends of a secession of the Plebs to the Mons Sacer).

There can be no doubt, of course, that there were factions within both the patrician and the plebeian parties which would have liked to upset this fundamental trait of the Roman Polis, the opposition of Senate and Tribunate, by abolishing the one or the other; but the form turned out to be so right that it was never seriously challenged. With the enforcement by the Army of plebeian eligibility to the highest offices (399) the contest took a quite different turn. The fifth century may be summed up, under the aspect of internal politics, as that of the struggle for lawful Tyrannis; thenceforward the polarity of the constitution was admitted, and the parties contended no longer for the abolition, but for the capture, of the great offices. This was the substance of the revolution that took place in the period of the Samnite Wars. From 287 the Plebes had the entrée to all offices, and the proposals of the tribunes, when approved by them, automatically became law; on the other hand, it was thenceforward always practicable for the Senate by corruption or otherwise to induce some one tribune to exercise his veto and thus to deprive the institution of its power. It was in the struggle of two competent authorities that the juristic subtlety of the Romans was developed. Elsewhere decisions were usually by way of fist and bludgeon—the technical word is "Cheirocracy"—but in this "best" period of Roman constitutional law, the fourth century, the habit was formed of using the weapons of thesis and interpretation, a mode of contest in which the slightest points of legal wording could be decisive.

VI

The State, with its heavy demands on each individual in it, is felt by urban reason as a burden. So, in the same phase, the great forms of the Baroque arts begin to be felt as restrictive and become Classicist or Romanticist — that is, sickly or unformed; German literature from 1770 is one long revolt of strong individual personalities against strict poetry. The idea of the whole nation being "in training" or "in form" for anything becomes intolerable, for the individual himself inwardly is no longer in condition. This holds good in morals, in arts, and in modes of thought, but most of all in politics. Every bourgeois revolution has as its scene the great city, and as its hall-mark the incomprehension of old symbols, which it replaces by tangible interests and the craving (or even the mere wish) of enthusiastic thinkers and world-improvers to see their conceptions actualized. Nothing now has value but that which can be justified by reason. But, deprived thus of the exaltation of a form that is essentially symbolical and works metaphysically, the national life loses the power of keeping its head up in the being-streams of history. Follow the desperate attempts of the French Government — the handful of capable and farsighted men under the mediocre Louis XVI — to keep their country in "condition" when, after the death of Vergennes in 1787, the whole gravity of the external situation had become manifest. With the death of this diplomatist France disappeared for years from the political combinations of Europe;

But the bourgeoisie, the class of urban "freedom," strong as its class-feeling remained for generations (in West Europe even beyond 1848), was at no time wholly master of its actions. For, first of all, it became manifest in every critical situation that its unity was a negative unity, only really existent in moments of opposition to something, anything, else — "Tiers État" and "Opposition" are almost synonymous — and that when something constructive of its own had to be done, the interests of the various groups pulled all ways. To be free from something — that, all wanted. But the intellectual desired the State as an actualization of "justice" against the force of historical facts; or the "rights of man"; or freedom of criticism as against the dominant religion. And Money wanted a free path to business success. There were a good many who desired rest and renunciation of historical greatness, or wished this and that tradition and its embodiments, on which physically or spiritually they lived, to be spared. But there was another element, now and henceforth, that had not existed in the conflicts of the Fronde (the English Civil War included) or the first Tyrannis, but this time stood for a power — namely, that which is found in all Civilizations under different contemptuous labels — dregs, canaille, mob, Pöbel — but with the same tremendous connotation. In the great cities, which alone now spoke the decisive words — the open land can at most accept or reject faits accomplis, as our eighteenth century proves 2 — a mass of rootless fragments of population stands outside all social linkages. These do not feel themselves as attached either to an Estate or to a vocational class, nor even to the real working-class, although they are obliged to work.

^<sup>2 Even the highly provincial March Revolution of 1848 in Germany was a purely urban matter; hence the vanishingly small proportion of the population involved as participants.

Elements drawn from all classes and conditions belong to it instinctively—uprooted peasantry, literates, ruined business men, and above all (as the age of Catiline shows with terrifying clarity) derailed nobles. Their power is far in excess of their numbers, for they are always on the spot, always on hand at the big decisions, ready for anything, devoid of all respect for orderliness, even the orderliness of a revolutionary party. It is from them that events acquire the destructive force which distinguishes the French Revolution from the English, and the Second Tyrannis from the First. The bourgeoisie looks at these masses with real uneasiness, defensively, and seeks to separate itself from them—it was to a defensive act of this category, the 13th Vendémiaire, that Napoleon owed his rise.¹ But in the pressure of facts the separating frontier cannot be drawn; wherever the bourgeoisie throws into the scale against the older orders its feeble weight of aggressiveness—feeble in relative numbers and feeble because its inner cohesion is risked at every moment—this mass has forced itself into their ranks, pushed to the front, imparted most of the drive that wins the victory, and very often managed to secure the conquered position for itself—not seldom with the continued idealistic support of the educated who are intellectually captivated, or the material backing of the money powers, which seek to divert the danger from themselves on to the nobility and the clergy.

^<sup>2 Pp. 97, and 305.

But — the critical spirit is only one of the two tendencies which emerge out of the chaotic mass of the Non-Estate. Along with abstract concepts abstract Money, — money divorced from the prime values of the land — along with the study the counting-house, appear as political forces. The two are inwardly cognate and inseparable — the old opposition between priest and noble continued, acute as ever, in the bourgeois atmosphere and the city framework. Of the two, moreover, it is the Money that, as pure fact, shows itself unconditionally superior to the ideal truths, which so far as the fact-world is concerned exist (as I have just said) only as catchwords, as means. If by "democracy" we mean the form which the Third Estate as such wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the tragic comedy of the world-improvers' and freedom-teachers' desperate fight against money that they are ipso facto assisting money to be effective. Respect for the big number — expressed in the principles of equality for all, natural rights, and universal suffrage — is just as much a class-ideal of the unclassed as freedom of public opinion (and more particularly freedom of the press) is so. These are ideals, but in actuality the feedom of public opinion involves the preparation of public

^<sup>1 See pp. 348.

But it was on British soil, too, that the rationalistic catchwords had, one and all, sprung up, and their relation to the principles of the Manchester School was intimate — Hume was the teacher of Adam Smith. "Liberty" self-evidently meant intellectual and trade freedom. An opposition between fact-politics and enthusiasm for abstract truths was as impossible in the England of George III as it was inevitable in the France of Louis XVI. Later, Edmund Burke could retort upon Mirabeau that "we demand our liberties, not as rights of man, but as rights of Englishmen." France received her revolutionary ideas without exception from England, as she had received the style of her absolute monarchy from Spain. To both she imparted a brilliant and irresistible shape that was taken as a model far and wide over the Continent, but of the practical employment of either she had no idea. The successful utilization of the bourgeois catchwords 2 in politics presupposes the shrewd eye of a ruling class for the intellectual constitution of the stratum which intends to attain power, but will not be capable of wielding it when attained. Hence in England it was successful. But it was in England too that money was most unhesitatingly used in politics — not the bribery of individual high personages which had been customary in the Spanish or Venetian style, but the "nursing" of the democratic forces themselves. In eighteenth-century England, first the Parliamentary elections and then the decisions of the elected Commons were systematically managed by money; 8 England, too, discovered the ideal of a Free Press, and discovered along with it that the press serves him who owns it. It does not spread "free" opinion — it generates it.

^<sup>1 Both the old parties possessed clear lines of tradition back to 1680.

^<sup>2 The moral and political "Enlightenment" movement was in England also a product of the Third Estate (Priestley and Paley, Paine, Godwin), and for that reason was unable to grasp things with the fine discrimination of a Shaftesbury.

of a class, a domination which recognizes no overriding supremacy of the State. Mind and money, being both inorganic, want the State, not as a matured form of high symbolism to be venerated, but as an engine to serve a purpose. Thus the difference between these forces and those of Frondism is fundamental, for the latter's reaction had been a defence of the old Gothic against the intrusive Baroque way of living and being "in form," — and now both these are on the defensive together and almost indistinguishable. Only in England (it must be emphasized again and again) the Fronde had disarmed, not only the State in open battle, but also the Third Estate by its inward superiority, and so attained to the one kind of first-class form that democracy is capable of working up to, a form neither planned nor aped, but naturally matured, the expression of an old breed and an unbroken sure tact that can adapt itself to the use of every new means that the changes of Time put into its hands. Thus it came about that the English Parliament, while taking part in the Succession-Wars of the Absolute States, handled them as economic wars with business aims. The mistrust felt for high form by the inwardly formless Non-Estate is so deep that everywhere and always it is ready to rescue its freedom — from all form — by means of a dictatorship, which acknowledges no rules and is, therefore, hostile to all that has grown up, which, moreover, in virtue of its mechanizing tendency, is acceptable to the taste both of intellect and of money — consider, for example, the structure of the statemachine of France which Robespierre began and Napoleon completed. Dictatorship in the interests of a class-ideal appealed to Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Rodbertus, and Lassalle as it had to the Classical ideologues of the fourth century — Xenophon in the Cyropædia and Isocrates in the Nicocles. 1

Further, in these revolutions too, as ever in Classical history, there were only local and temporary solutions — nothing resembling the splendid sweep of the French Revolution from the Bastille to Waterloo — and the scenes in them were more atrocious still, for the reason that in this Culture, with its basically Euclidean feeling, the only possible way seemed to be that of physical collision of party against party, and the only possible end for the loser, not functional incorporation in the victor's system as in the West, but destruction root and branch. At Corcyra (427) and Argos (370) the possessing classes were slaughtered en masse; in Leontini (422) they were expelled from the city by the lower classes, which carried on affairs for a while with slaves until, in fear of an avenging return, they evacuated altogether and migrated to Syracuse. The refugees from hundreds of these revolutions inundated the cities, recruited the mercenary armies of the Second Tyrannis, and infested the routes by land and sea. The readmission of such exiled fractions is a standing feature in the peace-terms offered by the Diadochi and later by the Romans. But the Second Tyrannis itself secured its positions by acts of this kind. Dionysius I (407–367) secured his hegemony over Syracuse — the city in whose higher society, along with that of Athens, centred the ripest culture of Hellas, the city where Æschylus had produced his Persian trilogy in 470 — by wholesale executions of educated people and confiscations of their property; this he followed up by entirely rebuilding the population, in the upper levels by granting large proper-

^<sup>8 Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., IV, §§ 626, 630.

The fact that the government of Rome was exclusively in the hands of a military committee ¹ from 390 to 367 ² reveals pretty clearly that the army had a policy of its own. It is well known that Alexander, the Romanticist of the Second Tyrannis, fell more and more under the influence of his generals, who not only compelled the retreat from India but also disposed of his inheritance amongst themselves as a matter of course.

^<sup>2 It is perhaps not a mere coincidence that 367 is the year of Dionysius's death.

VII

In Rome the strong and happily conceived form of the State that was reached about 340 kept the social revolution within constitutional limits. A Napoleonic figure like Appius Claudius the Censor of 310, who built the first aqueduct and the Appian Way, and ruled in Rome almost as a tyrant, very soon failed when he tried to eliminate the peasantry by means of the great-city masses and so to impart the one-sided Athenian direction to politics — for that was his aim in taking up the sons of slaves into the Senate, in reorganizing the Centuries on a money instead of a land-assessment basis, and in distributing freedmen and landless men amongst the country tribes, so that they might outvote the rustics (as they were always able to do, since the latter rarely attended). But his successors in the censorship lost no time in reversing this, and relegated the landless to the great city-tribes again. The non-estate itself, well led by a minority of distinguished families, saw its aim (as has been said before) not in the destruction, but in the acquisition, of the senatorial organs of administration. In the end, it forced its way into all offices (even, by the Lex Ogulnia, of 300, into the politically important priesthoods of the Pontifices and Augurs), and by the outbreak of 287 it secured force of law for plebiscita even without the Senate's approval.

The practical result of this freedom-movement was precisely the reverse of that which ideologues would have expected — there were no idealogues in Rome. The greatness of its success robbed the non-estate of its object and thereby deprived it of its driving force, for positively, when not "in opposition," it was null. After 287 the state-form existed for the purpose of being politically used, and used, too, in a world in which only the states of the great fringe — Rome, Carthage, Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt — really counted. It had ceased to be in any danger of becoming the passive of "peoples'-rights"

¹ According to K. J. Neumann, this goes back to the great Censor

Nevertheless, on the other side of the picture, the result of the Revolution was the emancipation of Money. Thenceforward money was master in the Comitia Centuriata. That which called itself "populus" there became more and more a tool in the hands of big money, and it required all the tactical superiority of the ruling circles to maintain a counterpoise in the Plebs, and to keep effective a representation of the yeomanry, under the leadership of the noble families, in the thirty-one country tribes from which the great city mass continued to be excluded. Hence the drastic energy with which the arrangements made by Appius Claudius were revoked. The natural alliance between high finance and the mass, though we see it actually at work later (under the Gracchi and Marius) for the destruction of the tradition of the blood, was at any rate made impossible for many generations. Bourgeoisie and yeomanry, money and landowning, maintained a reciprocal equilibrium of separate organisms, and were held together and made efficient by the State-idea (of which the nobility was the incarnation) until this inward form fell to pieces, and the two tendencies broke apart in enmity. The First Punic War was a traders' war and directed against the agrarian interest, and, therefore, the consul Appius Claudius (a descendant of the great Censor) laid the decision of the matter in 284 before the Comitia Centuriata. The conquest of the Po plain, on the other hand, was in the interests of the peasantry and it was, therefore, in the Comita Tributa that it was carried by the Tribune C. Flaminius — the first genuinely Cæsarian type in Roman history, builder of the Via Flaminia and the Circus Flaminius. But when in pursuance of his policy he (as Censor in 220) forbade the Senators

Another instance, among many, is its rôle in preparing the German crash of 1918.

The result of the turn, and the basic form of the Continental States at the

beginning of the Civilization, is "Constitutional Monarchy," the extremest possibility of which appears as what we call nowadays a Republic. It is necessary to get clear, once and for all, of the mumblings of the doctrinaires who think in timeless and therefore unreal concepts and for whom "Republic" is a form-in-itself. The republican ideal of the nineteenth century has no more resemblance to the Classical res publica, or even to Venice or the original Swiss cantons, than the English constitution to a "constitution" in the Continental sense. That which we call republic is a negation, which of inward necessity postulates that the thing denied is an ever-present possibility. It is non-monarchy in forms borrowed from the monarchy. The genealogical feeling is immensely strong in Western mankind; it strains its conscience so far as to pretend that Dynasty determines its political conduct even when Dynasty no longer exists at all. The historical is embodied therein, and unhistorically we cannot live. It makes a great difference whether, as in the case of the Classical world, the dynastic principle conveys absolutely nothing to the inner feelings of a man, or, as in the case of the West, it is real enough to need six generations of educated people to fight it down in themselves. Feeling is the secret enemy of all constitutions that are plans and not growths; they are in last analysis nothing but defensive measures born of fear and mistrust. The urban conception of freedom — freedom from something — narrows itself to a merely anti-dynastic significance, and republican enthusiasm lives only on this feeling.

Such a negation inevitably involves a preponderance of theory. While Dynasty and its close congener Diplomacy conserve the old tradition and pulse, Constitutions contain an overweight of systems, bookishness, and framed concepts — such as is entirely unthinkable in England, where nothing negative and defensive adheres to the form of government. It is not for nothing that the Faustian is par excellence the reading and writing Culture. The printed book is an emblem of temporal, the Press of spatial, infinity. In contrast with the immense power and tyranny of these symbols, even the Chinese Civilization seems almost empty of writing. In Constitutions, literature is put into the field against knowledge of men and things, language against race, abstract right against successful tradition — regardless of whether a nation involved in the tide of events is still capable of work and "maintaining its form." Mirabeau was quite alone and unsuccessful in combating the Assembly, which "confused politics with fiction." Not only the three doctrinaire constitutions of the age — the French of 1791, the German of 1848 and 1919 — but practically all such attempts shut their eyes to the great Destiny in the factworld and imagine that that is the same as defeating it. In lieu of unforeseen happenings, the incidents of strong personality and imperious circumstances, it is Causality that is to rule — timeless, just, unvarying, rational cohesion of cause and effect. It is symptomatic that no written constitution knows of money as a political force. It is pure theory that they contain, one and all.

^<sup>1 Early, that is, in the post-revolutionary era here considered. — Tr

matic service outwards and the Parliamentary activity inwards developed in two divergent directions. Each became in fundamental feeling alien to, and contemptuous of, the other. Life fretted itself to soreness in a form that it had not developed out of itself. After Thermidor, France succumbed to the rule of the Bourse, mitigated from time to time by the setting up of a military dictature (1800, 1851, 1871, 1918). Bismarck's creation was in fundamentals of a dynastic nature, with a parliamentary component of decidedly subordinate importance, and in it the inner friction was so strong as to monopolize the available political energy, and finally, after 1916, to exhaust the organism itself. The Army had its own history, with a great tradition going back to Frederick William I,¹ and so also had the administration. In them was the source of Socialism as one kind of true political "training," diametrically opposed to the English² but, like it, a full expression of strong race-quality. The officer and the official were trained high. But the necessity of breeding up a corresponding political type was not recognized. Higher policy was handled "administratively" and minor policy was hopeless squabbling. And so army and administration finally became aims in themselves, after Bismarck's disappearance had removed the one man who even without a supply of real politicians to back him (this tradition alone could have produced) was big enough to treat both as tools of policy. When the issue of the World War removed the upper layers, nothing remained but parties educated for opposition only, and these brought the activity of Government down to a level hitherto unknown in any Civilization.

All the same, Parliamentarism is not a summit as the absolute Polis and the Baroque State were summits, but a brief transition — namely, between the

^<sup>2 See Preussentum und Sozialismus, pp. 40, et seq.

The genesis of the Roman Tribunate was a blind incident, the happy consequences of which no one really foresaw. Western Constitutions, on the contrary, have been thoroughly thought out and their effects precisely calculated — whether the calculation proved to be correct or incorrect, the care is undeniable.

VIII

^<sup>1 From the few European works that concern themselves with questions of ancient Chinese history, it emerges that Chinese literature contains a very great amount of material bearing on this

^<sup>1 Corresponding more or less to the province of Shen-si

On the middle Yang-tse-kiang

^<sup>4 See pp. 312, et seq.

Now approximately Shan-tung and Pe-chi-li.

No era confronts its mankind so distinctly with the alternative of great form or great individual powers as this "Period of the Contending States." In the degree in which the nations cease to be politically in "condition," in that degree possibilities open up for the energetic private person who means to be politically creative, who will have power at any price, and who as a phenomenon of force becomes the Destiny of an entire people or Culture. Events have become unpredictable on the basis of form. Instead of the given tradition that can dispense with genius (because it is itself cosmic force at highest capacity), we have now the accident of great fact-men. The accident of their rise brings a weak people (for example, the Macedonians), to the peak of events overnight, and the accident of their death (for example, Cæsar's) can immediately plunge a world from personally secured order into chaos.

This indeed had been manifested earlier in critical times of transition. The epoch of the Fronde, the Ming-shu, the First Tyrannis, when men were not in form, but fought about form, has always thrown up a number of great figures who grew too big for definition and limitation in terms of office. The change from Culture to Civilization, with its typical Napoleonism, does so too. But with this, which is the preface to unredeemed historical formlessness, dawns the real day of the great individual. For us this period attained almost to its climax in the World War; in the Classical World it began with Hannibal, who challenged Rome in the name of Hellenism (to which inwardly he belonged), but went under because the Hellenistic East, in true Classical fashion, apprehended the meaning of the hour too late, or not at all. With his downfall began that proud sequence that runs from the Scipios through Æmilius Paullus, Flamininus, the Catos, the Gracchi, Marius, and Sulla to Pompey, Cæsar, and Augustus. In China, correspondingly, during the period of the "Contending States," a like chain of statesmen and generals centred on Tsin as the Classical figures centred on Rome. In accordance with the complete want of understanding of the political side of Chinese history that prevails, these men are usually described as Sophists. They were so, but only in the same sense as leading

The Culture had bound up all its forces in strict form. Now they were released, and "Nature" — that is, the cosmic — broke forth immediate. The change from the absolute State to the battling Society of nations that marks the beginning of every Civilization may mean for idealists and ideologues what they like — in the world of facts it means the transition from government in the style and pulse of a strict tradition to the sic volo, sic jubeo of the unbridled personal régime. The maximum of symbolic and super-personal form coincides with that of the Late period of the Culture — in China about 600, in the Classical about 450, for ourselves about 1700. The minimum in the Classical lies in the time of Sulla and Pompey, and for us will be reached (and possibly passed) in the next hundred years. Great interstate and internal conflicts, revolutions of a fearful kind, interpenetrate increasingly, but the questions at issue in all of them without exception are (consciously and frankly or not) questions of unofficial, and eventually purely personal, power. It is historically of no importance what they themselves aimed at theoretically, and we need not know the catchwords under which the Chinese and Arabian revolutions of this stage broke out, nor even whether there were such catchwords. None of the innumerable revolutions of this era — which more and more become blind outbreaks of uprooted megalopolitan masses — has ever attained, or ever had the possibility of attaining, an aim. What stands is only the historical fact of an accelerated demolition of ancient forms that leaves the path clear for Cæsarism.

methods become more and more the creation, not of the epoch, but of uncontrolled individual captains, who in many cases discovered their genius very late and by accident. While in 300 there were Roman armies, in 100 there were the armies of Marius and Sulla and Cæsar; and Octavian's army, which was composed of Cæsar's veterans, led its general much more than it was led by him. But with this the methods of war, its means, and its aims assumed rawnatural and ferocious forms, very different from those prevailing before. Their duels were not eighteenth-century Trianon duels, encounters in knightly forms with fixed rules to determine when a man might declare himself exhausted, what maximum of force might be employed, and what conditions the chivalry permitted a victor to impose. They were ring-battles of infuriated men with fists and teeth, fought to the bodily collapse of one and exploited without reserve or restraint by the victor. The first great example of this "return to Nature" is afforded by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, which, instead of artificial manœuvres with small bodies, practised the mass-onset without regard to losses and thereby shattered to atoms the refined strategy of the Rococo. To bring the whole muscular force of a nation on to the battle-fields by the universal-service system was an idea utterly alien to the age of Frederick the Great.²

Then for the first time it became possible to carry out sieges like those of Rhodes (305), Syracuse (213), Carthage (146), and Alesia (52), in which also the increasing importance of rapidity, even for Classical strategy, became evident. It was in line with this tendency that the Roman legion, the characteristic structure of which developed only in the Hellenistic age, worked like a machine as compared with the Athenian and Spartan militias of the fifth century. In China, correspondingly, iron was worked up for cutting and thrusting weapons from 474, light cavalry of the Mongolian model displaced the heavy warchariot, and fortress warfare suddenly acquired outstanding importance. The fundamental craving of Civilized mankind for speed, mobility, and masseffects finally combined, in the world of Europe and America, with the Faustian will to domination over Nature and produced dynamic methods of war that even to Frederick the Great would have seemed like lunacy, but to us of to-day, in close proximity to our technics of transportation and industry, are perfectly natural. Napoleon horsed his artillery and thereby made it highly mobile (just as he broke up the mass army of the Revolution into a system of self-contained and easily moved corps), and already at Wagram and Borodino it hald augmented its purely physical effectiveness to the point of what we should call rapid-fire and drum fire. The second stage is — most significantly — marked by the American Civil War of 1861–5 — which even in the numbers of troops it involved far surpassed the order of magnitude of the Napoleonic Wars 3 and in which for the first time the railway was used for large troop-movements, the telegraph-network for messages, and a steam fleet, keeping the sea for months on end, for blockade, and in which armoured ships, the torpedo, rifled weapons, and monster artillery of extraordinary range were discovered. The third stage is that of the World War, preluded by the Russo-Japanese conflict: 6 here submarine and aircraft were set to work, speed

² A whole literature exists for Napoleon's "case-shot attack," which was closely studied in the years before 1914 with the definite aim of finding a key to victories that the mechanical developments in the defensive rifle had made doubtful. — Tr.

³ On the side of the North, more than 1½ million men out of barely 20 million inhabitants.

[The total of men of military age in the North was 4,600,000, of whom 2,780,000 actually enlisted. The figure of 1,700,000 is a reduction to a three-year level — i.e., men who served throughout the war counting as $1\frac{1}{3}$ each and men who served for one year as $\frac{1}{3}$ each. The Southern states put into the field, on the same three-years' basis, 900,000 out of 1,065,000 men of military age. (Dodge, Birds Eye View of our Civil War.) — Tr.]

⁴ To which should be added, though on a small scale, the first serious attempts at submarines,

machine-guns, and magazine rifles. — Tr.

⁵ Amongst the wholly new problems was that of rapidly restoring railways and bridges; the bridge at Chattanooga, for the heaviest military trains, 240 metres long and 30 metres high, was built in 4½ days.

third century to the Classical.

a new arm in itself, and the extent (though most certainly not the intensity) of the means used attained a maximum. But to this expenditure of force there corresponds everywhere the ruthlessness of the decisions. At the very outset of the Chinese Shan-Kwo period we find the utter annihilation of the State of Wu — an act which in the preceding Chun-tsiu period chivalry would have made impossible. Even in the peace of Campo Formio Napoleon outraged the convenances of the eighteenth century, and after Austerlitz he introduced the practice of exploiting military success without regard to any but material restrictions. The last step still possible is being taken in the peace treaty of the Versailles type, which deliberately avoids finality and settlement, and keeps open the possibility of setting up new conditions at every change in the situation. The same evolution is seen in the chain of the three Punic Wars. The idea of wiping out one of the leading great powers of the world — which eventually became familiar to everyone through Cato's deliberately dry insistence on his "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam" — never crossed the mind of the victor of Zama and, for all the wild war-ethics of the Classical Poleis, it would have seemed to Lysander, as he stood victorious in Athens, an impiety towards every god.

The Period of the Contending States begins for the Classical world with the battle of Ipsus (301) which established the trinity of Eastern great powers, and the Roman victory over the Etruscans and Samnites at Sentinum (295), which created a mid-Italian great power by the side of Carthage. Then, however, the characteristic Classical preference for things near and in the present resulted in eyes' being shut while Rome won, first the Italian south in the Pyrrhic adventure, then the sea in the first Punic War, and then the Celtic north through C. Flaminius. The significance even of Hannibal (probably the only man of his time who clearly saw the trend of events) was ignored by all, the Romans themselves not excepted. It was at Zama, and not merely later at Magnesia and Pydna, that the Hellenistic Eastern powers were defeated. All in vain the great Scipio, truly anxious in the presence of the destiny to which a Polis overloaded with the tasks of a world-dominion was marching, sought thereafter to avoid all conquest. In vain his entourage forced through the Macedonian War, against the will of every party, merely in order that the East could thenceforth be ignored as harmless. Imperialism is so necessary a product of any Civilization that when a people refuses to assume the rôle of master, it is seized and pushed into it. The Roman Empire was not conquered—the "orbis terrarum" condensed itself into that form and forced the Romans to give it their name. It is all very Classical. While the Chinese states defended even the mere remnants of their independence with the last bitterness, Rome after 146 only took upon herself to transform the Eastern land-masses into provinces because there was no other resource against anarchy left. And even this much resulted in the inward form of Rome—the last which had remained

^<sup>1 For the politico-social history of the Arabian World there is the same lack of deep and penetrating research as for the Chinese. Only the political evolution of the Western margin up to Diocletian, regarded hitherto as within the Classical pale, is an exception.

But with the fall of the gay and enlightened dynasty that has resided in Damascus — that is, West-Aramæan and Monophysite Syria — the natural centre of gravity of the Arabian Culture reappeared; it was the East-Aramæan region. Once the basis of Sassanid and now of Abbassid power, but always — irrespective of whether its shaping was Persian or Arabian, or its religion Mazdaist, Nestorian, or Islamic — it expressed one and the same grand line of development and was the exemplar for Syria as for Byzantium alike. From Kufa the movement started which led to the downfall of the Ommaiyads and their ancien régime, and the character of this movement — of which the whole extent has never to this day been observed — was that of a social revolution directed against the primary orders of society and the aristocratic tradition.² It began among the Mavali, the small bourgeoisie in the East, and directed itself with bitter hostility against the Arabs, not qua champions of Islam but qua new nobility. The recently converted Mavali, almost all former Mazdaists, took Islam more seriously than the Arabs themselves, who represented also a class-ideal. Even in the army of Ali the wholly democratic and Puritan Qaraites had split off,³ and in their ranks we see for the first time the combination of fanatic sectarianism and Jacobinism. Here and now there emerged not only the Shiite tendency, but also the first impulses towards the Communistic Karramiyya movement, which can be traced to Mazdak ⁴ and later produced the vast outbreaks under Babek. The Abbassids were anything but favourites with the insurgents of Kufa, and it was only owing to their great diplomatic skill that they were first allowed a footing as officers and then — almost like Napoleon — were able to enter into the heritage of a Revolution that had spread over the whole

⁴ See p. 261

^<sup>1 K. Dieterich, Byz. Charakterköpfe, p. 54: "Since thou wilt have an answer from us, receive it then! Paul has said some in the Church are ordained by God to be Apostles, some prophets, but he said nothing about Emperors — we will not follow though it were an angel that bade us; how much less if thou!"

^<sup>2 Cf. p. 316. ³ Huart, Gesch. d. Araber (1914), I, p. 299

^<sup>4 See Ency. Brit., XI ed., art. "Carmathians." — Tr.

⁵ Krumbacher, Byz. Lit. Gesch., p. 060

^<sup>1 For all this see Krumbacher, op. cit., pp. 969-90; C. Neumann, Die Weltstellung des Byz Reiches vor den Kreuzzügen (1894), pp. 21, et seq.

¹ Krumbacher, op. cit., 993.

² And perhaps not in Baghdad alone, for the gifted Maniakes, who was hailed by the army in

Sicily as Emperor and fell in 1043 in his march on Byzantium, must have been a Turk.

4 P. 387.

The fall of the Government and the victory of the mass is followed by outbreaks of the army and the rise of ambitious soldiers. In Egypt from about 1680 appears the name of the "Hyksos," a designation with which the historians of the New Empire, who no longer understood or wished to understand the meaning of the epoch, covered up the shame of these years. These Hyksos, there can be no doubt whatever, played the part that the Armenians played in Byzantium; and in the Classical world too, the destinies of the Cimbri and Teutones, would have gone the same way had they defeated Marius and his legions of city canaille; they would have filled the armies of the Triumvirs again and again, and in the end probably set up barbarian chieftains in their place — for the case of Jugurtha shows the lengths to which foreigners dared to go with the Rome of those days. The provenance or constitution of the intruders does not matter — they might be body-guards, insurgent slaves, Jacobins, or purely alien tribes. What does matter is what they were for the Egyptian world in that century of theirs. In the end they set up a state in the Western Delta and built a capital, Auaris, for it. One of their leaders, Khyan by name, who styled himself, not Pharaoh, but "Embracer of the Country" and "prince of the young men" (names as essentially revolutionary as the Consul sine collega or dictator prepetuus of Cæsar's time) a man probably of the stamp of John Tzimisces, ruled over all Egypt and spread his renown as far as Crete and the Euphrates. But after him began a fight of all the districts for the Imperium, and out of that fight Amasis and the Theban dynasty eventually emerged victorious.

^<sup>1 The Papyrus says: "the archer-folk from without" — that is, the barbarian mercenary troops. To these the native youth attached itself.

latterly millions, of men have stood ready to march, and mighty fleets renewed every ten years have filled the harbours. It is a war without war, a war of overbidding in equipment and preparedness, a war of figures and tempo and technics, and the diplomatic dealings have been not of court with court, but of headquarters with headquarters. The longer the discharge was delayed, the more huge became the means and the more intolerable the tension. This is the Faustian, the dynamic, form of "the Contending States" during the first century of that period, but it ended with the explosion of the World War. For the demand of these four years has been altogether too much for the principle of universal service — child of the French Revolution, revolutionary through and through, as it is in this form — and for all tactical methods evolved from it. The place of the permanent armies as we know them will gradually be taken by professional forces of volunteer war-keen soldiers; and from millions we shall revert to hundreds of thousands. But ipso facto this second century will be one of actually Contending States. These armies are not substitutes for war—they are for war, and they want war. Within two generations it will be they whose will prevails over that of all the comfortables put together. In these wars of theirs for the heritage of the whole world, continents will be staked, India, China, South Africa, Russia, Islam called out, new technics and tactics played and counterplayed. The great cosmopolitan foci of power will dispose at their pleasure of smaller states — their territory, their economy and their men alike — all that is now merely province, passive object, means to end, and its destinies are without importance to the great march of things. We ourselves, in a very few years, have learned to take little or no notice of events that before the War would have horrified the world; who to-day seriously thinks about the millions that perish in Russia?

^<sup>1 Piton, op. cit., p. 521.

^<sup>2 Hist. III. t.

³ Including the constitution of the United States of America. Only thus can we account for the reverence that the American cherishes for it, even where he clearly sees its insufficiency.

X

Presently, however, the idea-less facts come forward again, naked and gigantic. The eternal-cosmic pulse has finally overcome the intellectual tensions of a few centuries. In the form of democracy, money has won. There has been a period in which politics were almost its preserve. But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the Culture, the chaos gives forth a new and

^<sup>2 See p. 48

^<sup>1 See p. 48.

De Re Publica, 54 B.C., a monograph intended for Pompey

^<sup>2 See p. 395.

³ See p. 409

Divus-cult they opposed a Cato- and Brutus-cult; the philosophers in the Senate (which by then was only a noble club) never wearied of lamenting the downfall of "freedom" and fomenting conspiracies such as Piso's in 65. Had this been the state of things at Nero's death, it would have been Sulla over again; and that is why Nero put to death the Stoic Thrasea Pætus, why Vespasian executed Helvidius Priscus, and why copies of the history of Cremutius Cordus, which lauded Brutus as the last of the Romans, were collected and burnt in Rome. These were acts of defensive State necessity vis-à-vis blind ideology—acts such as those we know of Cromwell and Robespierre—and it was in exactly the same position that the Chinese Cæsars found themselves vis-à-vis the school of Confucius, which had formerly worked out their ideal of a state-constitution and now had no notion of enduring the actuality. This great Burning of the Books was nothing but the destruction of one part of the politico-philosophical literature and the abolition of propaganda and secret organizations.(^1) This defensive lasted in both Imperia for a century, and then even reminiscences of party-political passions faded out and the two philosophies became the ruling world-outlook of the Imperial age in its maturity.(^2) But the world was now the theatre of tragic family-histories into which state-histories were dissolved; the Julian-Claudian house destroyed Roman history, and the house of Shi-hwang-ti (even from 206 B.C.) destroyed Chinese, and we darkly discern something of the same kind in the destinies of the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut and her brothers (1501-1447). It is the last step to the definitive. With world-peace — the peace of high policies — the "sword side" of being retreats and the "spindle side" rules again; henceforth there are only private histories, private destinies, private ambitions, from top to bottom, from the possession of the world. The wars of the age of world-peace are private wars, more fearful than any State wars because they a

^<sup>1 Taoism, on the other hand, was supported, as preaching the entire renunciation of politics. Said Shakespeare's Cæsar:

³ P. 329.

With the formed state, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timeless village and the "eternal" peasant 1 reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth — a busy, not inadequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors passingly blows. In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities, empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a historyless mankind slowly nests itself. Men live from hand to mouth, with petty thrifts and petty fortunes, and endure. Masses are trampled on in the conflicts of the conquerors who contend for the power and the spoil of this world, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive fertility and suffer on. And while in high places there is eternal alternance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts for ever.² There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual — and there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it — but it is there.

^<sup>1 Pp. 89 and 349.

² P. 310

CHAPTER XII THE STATE

(C)
PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS

CHAPTER XII

THE STATE

(C)

PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS

T

To Politics as an idea we have given more thought than has been good for us, since, correspondingly, we have understood all the less about the observation of Politics as a reality. The great statesmen are accustomed to act immediately and on the basis of a sure flair for facts. This is so self-evident, to them, that it simply never enters their heads to reflect upon the basic general principles of their action — supposing indeed that such exist. In all ages they have known what they had to do, and any theory of this knowledge has been foreign to both their capacities and their tastes. But the professional thinkers who have turned their attention to the faits accomplis of men have been so remote, inwardly, from these actions that they have just spun for themselves a web of abstractions — for preference, abstraction-myths like justice, virtue, freedom — and then applied them as criteria to past and, especially, future historical happening. Thus in the end they have forgotten that concepts are only concepts, and brought themselves to the conclusion that there is a political science whereby we can form the course of the world according to an ideal recipe. As nothing of the kind has ever or anywhere happened, political doing has come to be considered as so trivial in comparison with abstract thinking that they debate in their books whether there is a "genius of action" at all.

^"Empires perish, but a good verse stands," said W. von Humboldt on the field of Waterloo. But, all the same, the personality of Napoleon preformed the history of the next century. Good verses!—he should have questioned a peasant by the way-side. They "stand"—for literary teaching. Plato is eternal—for philologists. But Napoleon inwardly rules us, all of us, our states and our armies, our public opinion, the whole of our political outlook, and the more effectually the less we are conscious of it.

object moved.¹ Politics is the way in which this fluent Being maintains itself, grows, triumphs over other life-streams. All living is politics, in every trait of instinct, in the inmost marrow.² That which we nowadays like to call life-energy (vitality), the "it" in us that at all costs strives forward and upward, the blind cosmic drive to validity and power that at the same time remains plantwise and racewise, bound up with the earth, the "home"-land; the directedness, the need to actualize—it is this that appears in every higher mankind, as its political life, seeking naturally and inevitably the great decisions that determine whether it shall be, or shall suffer, a Destiny. For it grows or it dies out; there is no third possibility.

It is only in and between these being-streams that fill the field of the high Culture that high policy exists. They are only possible, therefore, in the plural. A people is, really, only in relation to peoples. But the natural, "race," relation between them is for that very reason a relation of war — this is a fact that no truths avail to alter. War is the primary politics of everything that lives, and so much so that in the deeps battle and life are one, and being and will-to-battle expire together. Old Germanic words for this, like "orrusta" and "orlog," mean seriousness and destiny in contrast to jest and play — and the contrast is one of intensity, not of qualitative difference. And even though all high politics tries to be a substitution of more intellectual weapons for the sword and though it is the ambition of the statesman at the culminations of all the Cultures to feel able to dispense with war, yet the primary relationship between diplomacy and the war-art endures. The character of battle is common to both, and the tactics and stratagems, and the necessity of material forces in the background to give weight to the operations. The aim, too, remains the same — namely, the growth of one's own life-unit (class or nation) at the cost of the other's. And every attempt to eliminate the "race" element only leads to its transfer to other ground; instead of the conflict of states we have that of

^<sup>3 P. 363.

^<sup>2 Pp. 18 and 364.

TT

How is politics done? The born statesman is above all a valuer — a valuer of men, situations, and things. He has the "eye" which unhesitatingly and inflexibly embraces the round of possibilities. The judge of horses takes in an animal with one glance and knows what prospects it will have in a race. To do the correct thing without "knowing" it, to have the hands that imperceptibly tighten or ease the bit — his talent is the very opposite to that of the man of theory. The secret pulse of all being is one and the same in him and in the things of history. They sense one another, they exist for one another. The fact-man is immune from the risk of practising sentimental or program politics. He does not believe in the big words. Pilate's question is constantly on his lips — truths? The born statesman stands beyond true and false. He does not confuse the logic of events with the logic of systems. "Truths" or "errors" — which here amount to the same — only concern him as intellectual currents, and in respect of workings. He surveys their potency, durability, and direction, and duly books them in his calculations for the destiny of the power that he directs. He has convictions, certainly, that are dear to him, but he has them as a private person; no real politician ever felt himself tied to them when in action. "The doer is always conscienceless; no one has a conscience except the spectator," said Goethe, and it is equally true of Sulla and Robespierre as it is of Bismarck and Pitt. The great Popes and the English party-leaders, so long as they had still to strive for the mastery of things, acted on the same principles as the conquerors and upstarts of all ages. Take the dealings of Innocent III, who very nearly succeeded in creating a world-dominion of the Church, and deduce therefrom the catechism of success; it will be found to be in the extremest contradiction with all religious moral. Yet without it there could have been no bearable existence for any Church, not to mention English Colonies, American fortunes, victor

But the true statesman must also be, in a large sense of the word, an educator—not the representative of a moral or a doctrine, but an exemplar in doing.¹ It is a patent fact that a religion has never yet altered the style of an existence. It penetrated the waking-consciousness, the intellectual man, it threw new light on another world, it created an immense happiness by way of humanity, resignation, and patience unto death, but over the forces of life it possessed no power. In the sphere of the living only the great personality—the "it," the race, the cosmic force bound up in that personality—has been creative (not shaping, but breeding and training) and has effectively modified the type of entire classes and peoples. It is not "the" truth or "the" good or "the" upright, but "the" Roman or "the" Puritan or "the" Prussian that is a fact. The sum of honour and duty, discipline, resolution, is a thing not learned from books, but awakened in the stream of being by a living exemplar; and that is why Frederick William I was one of those educators, great for all time, whose personal race-forming conduct does not vanish in the course of the generations. The genuine statesman is distinguished from the "mere politician"—the player who plays for the pleasure of the game, the arriviste on the heights of history, the seeker after wealth and rank—as also from the schoolmaster of an ideal, by the fact that he dares to demand sacrifices—and obtains them, because his feeling that he is necessary to the time and the nation is shared by thousands, transforms them to the core, and renders them capable of deeds to which otherwise they could never have risen.²

¹ See p. 341.

^<sup>2 The same, too, holds good of the Churches, which are different in kind from the Religion — namely, elements of the world of facts and, therefore, political and not religious in the type of their leadership. It was not the Christian evangel, but the Christian martyr, who conquered the world, and that which gave him his strength was not the doctrine, but the example, of the Man on the Cross.

Highest of all, however, is not action, but the ability to command. It is this that takes the individual up out of himself and makes him the centre of a world of action. There is one kind of commanding that makes obedience a proud, free, and noble habit. That kind Napoleon, for example, did not possess. A residue of subaltern outlook in him prevented him from training men to be men and not bureau-personnel, and led him to govern through edicts instead of through personalities; as he did not understand this subtlest tact of command and, therefore, was obliged to do everything really decisive himself, he slowly collapsed from inability to reconcile the demands of his position with the limit of human capabilities. But one who, like Cæsar or Frederick the Great, possesses this last and highest gift of complete humanity feels — on a battle-evening when operations are sweeping to the willed conclusion, and the victory is turning out to be conclusive of the campaign; or when the last signature is written that rounds off a historical epoch — a wondrous sense of power that the man of truths can never know. There are moments — and they indicate the maxima of cosmic flowings — when the individual feels himself to be identical with Destiny, the centre of the world, and his own personality seems to him almost as a covering in which the history of the future is about to clothe itself.

The first problem is to make oneself somebody; the second—less obvious, but harder and greater in its ultimate effects—to create a tradition, to bring on others so that one's work may be continued with one's own pulse and spirit, to release a current of like activity that does not need the original leader to maintain it in form. And here the statesman rises to something that in the Classical world would doubtless have been called divinity. He becomes the creator of a new life, the spirit-ancestor of a young race. He himself, as a unit, vanishes from the stream after a few years. But a minority called into being by him takes up his course and maintains it indefinitely. This cosmic something, this soul of a ruling stratum, an individual can generate and leave as a heritage, and throughout history it is this that has produced the durable effects. The great statesman is rare. Whether he comes, or wins through, too soon or too late, incident determines. Great individuals often destroy more than they have built up — by the gap that their death makes in the flow of happening. But the creation of tradition means the elimination of the incident. A tradition breeds a high average, with which the future can reckon — no Cæsar, but a Senate, no Napoleon, but an incomparable officer-corps. A strong tradition attracts talents from all quarters, and out of small gifts produces great results. The schools of painting of Italy and Holland are proof of this, no less than the Prussian army and the diplomacy of the Roman Curia. It was the great flaw in Bismarck, as compared with Frederick William I, that he could achieve, but could not form a tradition; that he did not parallel Moltke's officer-corps by a corresponding race of politicians who would identify themselves in feeling with his State and its new tasks, would constantly take up good men from below

Every doer is born in a time and for a time, and thereby the ambit of bis attainable achievement is fixed. For his grandfather, for his grandson, the data, and therefore the task and the object, are not the same. The circle is further narrowed by the limits of his personality, the properties of his people, the situation, and the men with whom he has to work. It is the hall-mark of the high politician that he is rarely caught out in a misappreciation of this limit, and equally rarely overlooks anything realizable within it. With this—one cannot too often repeat, especially to Germans—goes a sure discrimination between what "ought" to be and what will be. The basic forms of the state and of political life, the direction and the degree of their evolution, are given values unalterably dependent on the given time. They are the track of political success and not its goal. On the other hand the worshippers of political ideals create out of nothing. Their intellectual freedom is astounding, but their castles of the mind, built of airy concepts like wisdom and righteousness, liberty and equality, are in the end all the same; they are built from the top storey downwards. The master of fact, for his part, is content to direct imperceptibly that which he sees and accepts as plain reality. This does not seem very much, yet it is the very starting-point of freedom, in a grand sense of the word. The knack lies in the little things, the last careful touch of the helm, the fine sensing of the

most delicate oscillations of collective and individual souls. The art of the statesman consists not only in a clear idea of the main lines drawn undeviably before him, but also in the sure handling of the single occurrences and the single persons, encountered along those lines, which can turn an impending disaster into a decisive success. The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious. An adept in the game can, like Talleyrand, go to Vienna as ambassador of the vanquished party and make himself master of the victor. At the Lucca meeting, Cæsar, whose position was wellnigh desperate, not only made Pompey's power serviceable to his own ends, but undermined it at the same time, and without his opponent's becoming aware of the fact. But the domain of the possible has dangerous edges, and if the finished tact of the great Baroque diplomatists almost always managed to keep clear, it is the very privilege of the ideologues to be always stumbling over it. There have been turns in history in which the statescraftman has let himself drift with the current awhile, in order not to lose the leadership. Every situation has its elastic limit, and in the estimation of that limit not the smallest error is permissible. A revolution that reaches explosion-point is always a proof of lack of the political pulse in the governors and in their opponents.

Further, the necessary must be done opportunely — namely, while it is a present wherewith the governing power can buy confidence in itself, whereas if it has to be conceded as a sacrifice, it discloses a weakness and excites contempt. Political forms are living forms whose changes inexorably follow a definite direction, and to attempt to prevent this course or to divert it towards some ideal is to confess oneself "out of condition." The Roman nobility possessed this congruence of pulse, the Spartan did not. In the period of mounting democracy we find again and again (as in France before 1789 and Germany before 1918) the arrival of a fatal moment when it is too late for the necessary reform to be given as a sacrifice, and so becomes the sign of dissolution. But those who fail to detect the first necessity in good time will all the more certainly fail to misunderstand the second situation. Even a journey to Canossa can be made too soon or too late — the timing may settle the future of whole peoples, whether they shall be Destiny for others, or themselves the objects of another's Destiny. But the declining democracy also repeats the same error of trying to hold what was the ideal of yesterday. This is the danger of our twentieth century. On the path towards Cæsarism there is ever a Cato to be found.

The influence that a statesman — even one in an exceptionally strong position — possesses over the methods of politics is very small, and it is one of the characteristics of the high-grade statesman that he does not deceive himself on this matter. His task is to work in and with the historical form that he finds in existence; it is only the theorist who enthusiastically searches for more

ideal forms. But to be politically "in form" means necessarily, amongst other things, an unconditional command of the most modern means. There is no choice about it. The means and methods are premisses pertaining to the time and belong to the inner form of the time — and one who grasps at the inapposite, who permits his taste or his feelings to overpower the pulse in him, loses at once his grip of realities. The danger of an aristocracy is that of being conservative in its means, the danger of a democracy is the confusion of formula and form. The means of the present are, and will be for many years, parliamentary — elections and the press. He may think what he pleases about them, he may respect them or despise them, but he must command them. Bach and Mozart commanded the musical means of their times. This is the hall-mark of mastery in any and every field, and statecraft is no exception. Now, the publicity visible outer form thereof is not the essential but merely the disguise, and consequently it may be altered, rationalized, and brought down to constitutional texts — without its actualities being necessarily affected in the slightest — and hence the ambitions of all revolutionaries expend themselves in playing the game of rights, principles, and franchises on the surface of history. But the statesman knows that the extension of a franchise is quite unimportant in comparison with the technique — Athenian or Roman, Jacobin or American or present-day German — of operating the votes. How the English constitution reads is a matter of small import compared with the fact that it is managed by a small stratum of high families, so that an Edward VII is simply a minister of his Ministry. And as for the modern Press, the sentimentalist may beam with contentment when it is constitutionally "free" — but the realist merely asks at whose disposal it is.

in the world, and that its future will be decided by its force-relationships towards other peoples and powers and not by its mere internal ordering. And, since the ordinary man is not so long-sighted, it is the ruling minority that must possess this quality on behalf of the rest, and not unless there is such a minority does the statesman find the instrument wherewith he can carry his purposes into effect.

TTI

now it must needs be shaped. Politics becomes awake, not merely comprehended, but reduced to comprehensible ideas. The powers of intellect and money set themselves up against blood and tradition. In place of the organic we have the organized; in place of the Estate, the Party. A party is not a growth of race, but an aggregate of heads, and therefore as superior to the old estates in intellect as it is poorer in instinct. It is the mortal enemy of naturally matured class-ordering, the mere existence of which is in contradiction with its essence. Consequently, the notion of party is always bound up with the unreservedly negative, disruptive, and socially levelling notion of equality. Noble ideals are no longer recognized, but only vocational interests. It is the same with the freedom-idea, which is likewise a negative. Parties are a purely urban phenomenon. With the emancipation of the city from the country, everywhere (whether we happen to know it evidentially or not) Estate politics gives way to party politics — in Egypt at the end of the Middle Kingdom, in China with the Contending States, in Baghdad and Byzantium with the Abbassid period. In the capitals of the West the parties form in the parliamentary style, in the city-states of the Classical they are forum-parties, and we recognize parties of the Magian style in the Mavali and the monks of Theodore of Studion.³

⁾ Hence it is that on the soil of burgher equality the possession of money immediately takes the place of genealogical rank.

^<sup>2 See p. 354.

^<sup>3 Pp. 424, et seq. Compare also Wellhausen, Die relig.-polit. Oppositionsparteien im alten Islam 1901).

It has in fact no choice but to do so. All modern constitutions repudiate the Estates and are built on the Party as self-evidently the basic form of politics. The nineteenth century — correspondingly, therefore, the third century B.C. — is the heyday of party politics. Its democratic character compels the formation counter-parties, and whereas formerly, as late even as the eighteenth century, the "Tiers" constituted itself in imitation of the nobility as an Estate, now there arises the defensive figure of the Conservative party, copied from the Liberal, dominated completely by the latter's forms, bourgeois-ized without being bourgeois, and obliged to fight with rules and methods that liberalism has laid down. It has the choice of handling these means better than its adversary or of perishing; but it is of the intimate structure of an Estate that it does not understand the situation and challenges the form instead of the foe, and is thus involved in that use of extreme methods which we see dominating the inner politics of whole states in the early phases of every Civilization, and delivering them helpless into the hands of the enemy. The compulsion that there is upon every party to be bourgeois, at any rate in appearance, turns to sheer caricature when below the bourgeoisie of education and possessions the Residue also organizes itself as a party. Marxism, for example, is in theory a negation of bourgeoisie, but as a party it is in attitude and leadership essentially middle-class. There is a continuous conflict between its will — which necessarily steps outside the bounds of party politics and therefore of constitutionalism (both being exclusively liberal phenomena), and can in honesty only be called civil war — and the appearances which it feels obliged, in justice to itself, to keep up. But for Marxism, again, these appearances are indispensable, at this particular period, if durable success is to be attained. A noble party in a parliament is inwardly just as spurious as a proletarian. Only the bourgeoisie is

And with its content of race-strength it has an excellent chance of successfully doing so

⁸ P. 400.

^<sup>2 P. 412.

^<sup>1 For what follows see M. Gelzer, Die Nobilität d. röm. Republik (1912), pp. 43, et seq.; A. Rosenberg, Untersuchungen zur röm. Centurienverfassung (1911), pp. 62, et seq.

^<sup>2 The reputation of Tammany Hall in New York is universal, but the relations approximate to this condition in all countries ruled by parties. The American Caucus, which first distributes the

^<sup>1 P. 305.

The power that these abstract ideals possess, however, scarcely extends in time beyond the two centuries that belong to party politics, and their end comes not from refutation, but from boredom — which has killed Rousseau long since and will shortly kill Marx. Men finally give up, not this or that theory, but the belief in theory of any kind and with it the sentimental optimism of an eighteenth century that imagined that unsatisfactory actualities could be improved by the application of concepts. When Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries defined and blended the various kinds of Classical constitution so as to obtain a wise and beautiful resultant, all the world listened, and Plato himself tried to transform Syracuse in accordance with an ideological recipe—and sent the city downhill to its ruin.² It appears to me equally certain that it was philosophical experimentation of this kind that put the Chinese southern states out of condition and delivered them up to the imperialism of Tsin.³ The Jacobin fanatics of liberty and equality delivered France, from the Directory onward, into the hands of Army and Bourse for ever, and every Socialistic oubreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism. But when Cicero wrote his De re publica for Pompey, and Sallust his two comminations for Cæsar, nobody any longer paid attention. In Tiberius Gracchus we may discover perhaps an influence derived from the Stoic enthusiast Blossius, who later committed suicide after having similarly brought Aristonicus of Pergamum to ruin; ⁴ but in the first century B.c. theories had become a threadbare school-exercise, and thenceforward power and power alone mattered.

^<sup>1 P. 18, et seq.

1848, so belief in Marx lost its force from the World War. When one contrasts the devotion unto death that Rousseau's ideas found in the French Revolution with the attitude of the Socialists of 1918, who had to keep up before and in their adherents a conviction that they themselves no longer possessed — for the sake, not of the idea, but of the power that depended on it — one discerns also the stretches of the road ahead, where what still remains of program is doomed to fall by the way as being henceforth a mere handicap in the struggle for power. Belief in program was the mark and the glory of our grandfathers — in our grandsons it will be a proof of provincialism. In its place is developing even now the seed of a new resigned piety, sprung from tortured conscience and spiritual hunger, whose task will be to found a new Hither-side that looks for secrets instead of steel-bright concepts and in the end will find them in the deeps of the "Second Religiousness." 1

īν

^<sup>1 P. 310.

In the beginning of a democracy the field belongs to intellect alone. History has nothing nobler and purer to show than the night session of the 4th August 1789 and the Tennis-Court Oath, or the assembly in the Frankfurt Paulskirche on the 18th May 1848 — when men, with power in their very hands, debated general truths so long that the forces of actuality were able to rally and thrust the dreamers aside. But, meantime, that other democratic quantity lost not time in making its appearance and reminding men of the fact that one can make use of constitutional rights only when one has money. That a franchise should work even approximately as the idealist supposes it to work presumes the absence of any organized leadership operating on the electors (in its interest) to the extent that its available money permits. As soon as such leadership does appear, the vote ceases to possess anything more than the significance of a censure applied by the multitude to the individual organizations, over whose structure it possesses in the end not the slightest positive influence. So also with the ideal thesis of Western constitutions, the fundamental right of the mass to choose its own representatives — it remains pure theory, for in actuality every developed organization recruits itself. Finally the feeling emerges that the universal franchise contains no effective rights at all, not even that of choosing between parties. For the powerful figures that have grown up on their soil control, through money, all the intellectual machinery of speech and script, and are able, on the one hand, to guide the individual's opinions as they please above the parties, and, on the other, through their patronage, influence, and legislation, to create a firm body of whole-hearted supporters (the "Caucus") which excludes the rest and induces in it a vote-apathy which at the last it cannot shake off even for the great crises.

^* P. 452

³ And legislation, too, was bound up with an office. Even when, as a formality, acceptance or rejection by an assembly was requisite, the law in question could be brought in only by an official for example, a Tribune. The constitutional demands of the masses, therefore (which in any case were mostly instigated by the real power-holders), expressed themselves in the issue of the elections to office, as the Gracchan period shows.

The career of office in Rome from the time when its course took form as a series of elections, required so large a capital that every politician was the debtor of his entire entourage. Especially was this so in the case of the ædileship, in which the incumbent had to outbid his predecessors in the magnificance of his public games, in order later to have the votes of the spectators. (Sulla failed in his first attempt on the prætorship precisely because he had not previously been ædile.) Then again, to flatter the crowd of loafers it was necessary to show oneself in the Forum daily with a brilliant following. A law forbade the maintenance of paid retainers, but the acquisition of persons in high society by lending them money, recommending them for official and commercial employments, and covering their litigation expenses, in return for their company in the Forum and their attendance at the daily levee, was more expensive still. Pompey was patronus to half the world. From the peasant of Picenum to the kings of the Orient, he represented and protected them all, and this was his political capital which he could stake against the non-interest-bearing loans of Crassus and the "gilding" of every ambitious fellow by the conqueror of Gaul. Dinners were offered to the electors of whole wards, or free seats for the gladiatorial shows, or even (as in the case of Milo) actual cash, delivered at home — out of respect, Cicero says, for traditional morals. Election-capital rose to American dimensions, sometimes hundreds of millions of sesterces; vast as was the stock of cash available in Rome, the elections of 54 locked up so much of it that the rate of interest rose from four to eight per cent. Cæsar

^{2 &}quot;Inaurari," to which end Cicero recommended his friend Trebatius to Cæsar.

^{3 &}quot;Tributim ad prandium vocare," Cicero, Pro Murena, 72

paid out so much as ædile that Crassus had to underwrite him for twenty millions before his creditors would allow him to depart to his province, and in his candidature for the office of Pontifex Maximus he so overstrained his credit that failure would have ruined him, and his opponent Catulus could seriously offer to buy him off. But the conquest and exploitation of Gaul — this also an undertaking motived by finance — made him the richest man in the world. In truth, Pharsalus was won there in advance.¹ For it was for power that Cæsar amassed these milliards, like Cecil Rhodes, and not because he delighted in wealth like Verres or even like Crassus, who was first and foremost a financier and only secondarily a politician. Cæsar grasped the fact that on the soil of a democracy constitutional rights signify nothing without money and everything with it. When Pompey was still dreaming that he could evoke legions by stamping on the ground, Cæsar had long since condensed the dream to reality with his money. It must be clearly understood, however, that he did not introduce these methods but found them in existence, that he made himself master of them but never identified himself with them. For practically a century parties grouped on principles had been dissolving into personal followings grouped upon men who pursued private political aims and were expert in handling the political weapons of their time.

^<sup>2 Gelzer, op. cit., p. 68.

of the judges, the number of patrons, and the size of the crowd of backers—the number of the witnesses was really only paraded in order to bring the financial and political power of the plaintiff into the limelight. The intention in all Cicero's oratory against Verres was to convince the judges, under the veil of fine ethical passion, that the condemnation of the accused was in the interests of their order. Given the general outlook of the Classical, the courts self-evidently existed to serve private and party interests. Democratic complainants in Athens were accustomed at the end of their speeches to remind the jurymen from the people that they would forfeit their fees by acquitting the wealthy defendant.¹ The tremendous power of the Roman Senate consisted mainly in their occupancy of every seat of the judicial (jurors') bench, which placed the destinies of every citizen at their mercy; hence the far-reachingness of the Gracchan law of 122 which handed over the judicature to the Equites and delivered over the nobility—that is, the official class—to the financial magnates, restored the judicature to the Senate, as political weapon, of course, and the final duel of the potentates finds one more expression in the ceaseless changing of the judges selected.

^<sup>1 The great Burning of the Books in China (p. 433) was innocuous by comparison

² P. 121

other Civilization has the will-to-power manifested itself in so inexorable a form as in this of ours. The thought, and consequently the action, of the mass are kept under iron pressure—for which reason, and for which reason only, men are permitted to be readers and voters—that is, in a dual slavery—while the parties become the obedient retinues of a few, and the shadow of coming Cæsarism already touches them. As the English kingship became in the nineteenth century, so parliaments will become in the twentieth, a solemn and empty pageantry. As then sceptre and crown, so now peoples' rights are paraded for the multitude, and all the more punctiliously the less they really signify—it was for this reason that the cautious Augustus never let pass an opportunity of emphasizing old and venerated customs of Roman freedom. But the power is migrating even to-day, and correspondingly elections are degenerating for us into the farce that they were in Rome. Money organizes the process in the interests of those who possess it, and election affairs become a preconcerted game that is staged as popular self-determination. If election was originally revolution in legitimate forms, that has exhausted those forms, and what takes place is that mankind "elects" its Destiny again by the primitive methods of bloody violence when the politics of money become intolerable.

Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect. But, just because the illusion that actuality can allow itself to be improved by the ideas of any Zeno or Marx has fled away; because men have learned that in the realm of reality one power-will can be overthrown only by another (for that is the great human experience of Contending States periods); there wakes at last a deep yearning for all old and worthy tradition that still lingers alive. Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honour and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty. And now dawns the time when the form-filled powers of the blood, which the rationalism of the Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken in the depths. Everything in the order of dynastic tradition and old nobility that has saved itself up for the future, everything that there is of high money-disdaining ethic, everything that is intrinsically sound enough to be, in Frederick the Great's words, the servant — the hard-working, self-sacrificing, caring servant — of the State, all that I have described elsewhere in one word as Socialism in contrast to Capitalism 3 — all this becomes suddenly the focus of immense life-forces. Cæsarism grows on the soil of Democracy, but its roots thread deeply into the underground of blood tradition. The Classical

² P. 415

³ See Preussentum und Sozialismus, p. 41, et seq.

(A)

MONEY

CHAPTER XIII

(A)

MONEY

1

The standpoint from which to comprehend the economic history of great Cultures is not to be looked for on economic ground. Economic thought and action are a side of life that acquires a false appearance when regarded as a self-contained kind of life. Least of all is the secure standpoint to be had on the basis of the present-day world-economics, which for the last 150 years has been mounting fantastically, perilously, and in the end almost desperately — an economics, moreover, that is exclusively Western-dynamic, anything but common-human.

That which we call national economy to-day is built up on premisses that are openly and specifically English. The industry of machines, which is unknown to all other Cultures, stands in the centre as though it were a matter of course and, without men being conscious of the fact, completely dominates the formulation of ideas and the deduction of so-called laws. Credit-money, in the special form imparted to it by the relations of world-trade and export-industry in a peasantless England, serves as the foundation whereupon to define words like capital, value, price, property — and the definitions are then transferred without more ado to other Culture-stages and life-cycles. The insular position of England has determined a conception of politics, and of its relation to economics, that rules in all economic theories. The creators of this economic picture were David Hume ¹ and Adam Smith.² Everything that has since been written about them or against them always presupposes the critical structure and methods of their systems. This is as true of Carey and List as it is of Fourier and Lassalle. As for Smith's greatest adversary, Marx, it matters little how loudly one protests against English capitalism when one is thoroughly imbued with its images; the protest is itself a recognition, and its only aim is, through a new kind of accounting, to confer upon objects the advantage of being subjects.

¹ Political Discourses, 1752.

The attempt which follows is meant only as a flying survey of the possibilities here available.

^<sup>1 It was the opinion of the expert, almost everywhere, that the economic consequences of general mobilization would compel the breaking-up of hostilities within a few weeks.

^<sup>2 P. 81

Life, therefore, has a political and an economic kind of "condition" of fitness for history. They overlie, they support, they oppose each other, but the political is unconditionally the first. Life's will is to preserve itself and to prevail, or, rather, to make itself stronger in order that it may prevail. But in the economic state of fitness the being-streams are fit as self-regarding, whereas in a political they are fit as other-regarding. And this holds good all along the series, from the simplest unicellular plant to swarms and to peoples of the highest free mobility in space. Nourishment and winning-through — the difference of dignity between the two sides of life is recognizable in their relation to death. There is no contrast so profound as that between hunger-death and hero-death. Economically life is in the widest sense threatened, dishonoured, and debased by hunger — with which is to be included stunting of possibilities, straitened circumstances, darkness, and pressure not less than starvation in the literal sense. Whole peoples have lost the tense force of their race through the gnawing wretchedness of their living. Here men die of something and not for something. Politics sacrifices men for an idea; they fall for an idea; but economy merely wastes them away. War is the creator, hunger the destroyer, of all great things. In war life is elevated by death, often to that point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory, but in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, vulgar, and wholly unmetaphysical sort of fearfulness for one's life under which the higher form-world of a Culture miserably collapses and the naked struggle for existence of the human beasts begins.

^<sup>1 Pp. 1, et seq., and 335

^<sup>2 P. 327, et seq.

the economic now attached itself. The duration of a flourishing life is inseparable from its strength; its secret of begetting and conceiving is seen at its purest in the being of breed-strong peasant stock that is rooted, healthy and fruitful, in its soil. And as in the form of the body the organ of sex is bound up with that of the circulation, so the middle of the house in another sense is formed by the sacred hearths, the Vesta.

For this very reason the significance of economic history is something quite different from that of political. In the latter the foreground is taken up by the great individual destinies, which fulfil themselves indeed in the binding forms of their epoch, but are nevertheless, each in itself, strictly personal. The concern of the former, and of family history, is the course of development of the form-language; everything once-occurring and personal is an unimportant private-destiny, and only the basic form common to the million cases matters. But even so economics is only a foundation, for Being that is in any way meaningful. What really signifies is not that an individual or a people is "in condition," well nourished and fruitful, but for what he or it is so; and the higher man climbs historically, the more conspicuously his political and religious will to inward symbolism and force of expression towers above everything in the way of form and depth that the economic life as such possesses. It is only with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form-world begins to ebb, that mere life-preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and insistently — this is the time when the banal assertion that "hunger and love" are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a matter of "happiness of the greatest number," of comfort and ease, of "panem et circenses"; and when, in the place of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end in itself.

MONEY 473

11

1 "Negotium" (by which is meant every form of gainful activity; business is commercium) "negatium neque quarit veram quietem qua est deus." are the words of the Decretum Gratiani (cf. p. 77).

^<sup>2 Pilate's question settles also the relation of economy to science. The religious man will always try in vain, catechism in hand, to improve the instincts of his political environment. But it goes on its way undisturbed and leaves him to his thoughts. The saint can only choose between adapting himself to this environment — and then he becomes a Church politician and conscienceless — and fleeing from it into a hermitage or even into the Beyond. But the same happens also — and here not without a comic side to it — in the intellectualism of the city. The philosopher who has built up an ethical-social system that is replete with virtue and (of course) the only true one, may enlighten the economic life as to how it should behave and at what it should aim. It is even the same spectacle, whether labelled liberal, anarchistic, or socialistic, or derived from Plato, Proudhon, or Marx. Here, too, economy carries on undisturbed and leaves the thinker to choose between withdrawing to pour out on paper his lamentations of this world, and entering it as an economic politician, in which case he either makes himself ridiculous, or else promptly throws his theory to the devil and starts to win himself a leading place.

See pp. 1, et seq.

life-anxiety, leading to touch and scent, sight and hearing with ever-sharper senses; and presently to movements in space for the purpose of searching, gathering, pursuing, tricking, stealing, which develop in many species of animals (such as beavers, ants, bees, numerous birds and beasts of prey) into a rudimentary economy-technique which presupposes a process of reflection and, therefore, a certain emancipation of understanding from sensation. Man is genuinely man inasmuch as his understanding has freed itself from sensation and, as thought, intervened creatively in the relations between microcosm and macrocosm. Quite animal still is the trickery of woman towards man, and equally so the peasant's shrewdness in obtaining small advantages — both differing in no wise from the slyness of the fox, both consisting in the ability to see into the secret of the victim at one glance. But on the top of this there supervenes, now, the economic thought that sows a field, tames animals, changes and appreciates and exchanges things, and finds a thousand ways and means of better preserving life and transforming a dependence upon the environment into a mastery over it. That is the underlayer of all Cultures. Race makes use of an economic thought that can become so powerful as to detach itself from given purposes, build up castles of abstraction, and finally lose itself in Utopian expanses.

¹ See p. 6.

^<sup>2 Exactly the same is true of wandering bands of hunters and pastorals. But the economic foundation of the great Culture is always a mankind that adheres fast to the soil, and nourishes and supports the higher economic forms.

^<sup>3 See p. 331.

³ Using the phrase widely, as including, for instance, the rise of workmen, journalists, and men of learning to positions of leadership.

All this, however, is the very manifestation of the hidden course of a high Culture. In the beginning appear the primary orders, nobility and priesthood, with their symbolism of Time and Space. The political life, like the religious experience, has its fixed place, its ordained adepts, and its allotted aims for facts and truths alike, in a well-ordered society, and down below, the economic life moves unconscious along a sure path. Then the stream of being becomes entangled in the stone structures of the town, and intellect and money thence-forward take over its historical guidance. The heroic and the saintly with their youthful symbolic force become rarer, and withdraw into narrower and narrower circles. Cool bourgeois clarity takes their place. At bottom, the concluding of a system and the concluding of a deal call for one and the same kind of professional intelligence. Scarcely differentiated now by any measure of symbolic force, political and economic life, religious and scientific experience make each other's acquaintance, jostle one another, commingle. In the frictions of the city the stream of being loses its strict rich form. Elementary economic factors come to the surface and interplay with the remains of form-imbued politics, just as sovereign science at the same time adds religion to its stock of objects. Over a life of economics political self-satisfaction spreads a critical-edifying world-sentiment. But out of it all emerge, in place of the decayed Estates, the individual life-courses, big with true political or religious force, that are to become destiny for the whole.

P. 331.

^<sup>2 P. 31.

¹ See pp. 172 and 280.

^<sup>1 Including the medical profession, which indeed is indistinguishable in primitive times from the priests and magicians.

MONEY 479

nature and whose honour and conscience are bound up in achievement.¹ Its oldest guild, which reaches back into the sheer primitive and fills the picture of this primitive with its dark sagas and rites and notions, is the guild of the smiths, who — as the result of their proud aloofness from the peasantry and the fear that hangs about them, and leads to their being venerated and banned by turns — have often become true tribes with a race of their own, as in the case of the Abyssinian Falasha or "Black Jews."²

In these three economics of production, preparation, and distribution, as in everything else belonging to politics and life at large, there are the subjects and objects of leading — in this case, whole groups that dispose, decide, organize, discover; and other whole groups whose function is simply to execute. The grading may be hard and definite or it may be scarcely perceptible,3 promotion may be impossible or unimpeded, the relative dignity of the task may be almost equal throughout a long scale of slow transitions or different beyond comparison. Tradition and law, talent and possessions, population numbers, cultural level, and economic situation may effectively override this basic antithesis of subjects and objects — but it exists, it is as much a premiss as life itself, and it is unalterable. Nevertheless, economically there is no worker-class; that is an invention of theorists who have fixed their eyes on the position of factory-workers in England — an industrial, peasantless land in a transitional phase — and then extended the resultant scheme so confidently over all the Cultures and all the ages that the politicians have taken it up and used it as a means of building themselves parties. In actuality there is an almost uncountable number of purely serving activities in workshop and counting-houses, office and cargo-deck, roads, mine-shafts, fields, and meadows. This counting-up, portering, running of errands, hammering, serving, and minding often enough lacks that element which elevates life above mere upkeep and invests work with the dignity and the delight attaching, for example, to the status-duties of the officer and the savant, or the personal triumphs of the engineer, the manager, and the merchant — but, even apart from that, all these things are quite

[British readers will recall in this connexion the "Chinese slavery" controversy in South Africa in 1904, and the questions of indentured labour that come to the surface not infrequently in Australian politics. And in an older generation defenders of slavery as practised in the sugar islands of the West Indies are still to be found — not to mention the survivors and tradition-bearers of the "Old South" in the United States — Tr]

incapable of being compared amongst themselves. The brain or brawn of the work, its situation in village or in megalopolis, the duration and intensity of the doing of it, bring it to pass that farm-labourers, bank clerks, and tailors' hands live in perfectly different economic worlds, and it is only, I repeat, the party politics of quite Late phases that lures them by means of catchwords into a protest-combination, with the intention of making use of its aggregate mass. The classical slave, on the contrary, is such chiefly in terms of constitutional law — that is, so far as the body-Polis was concerned, he simply did not exist ¹—but economically he might be land-worker or craftsman, or even director or wholesale merchant with a huge capital (peculium), with palaces and country villas and a host of subordinates — freemen included. And what he could become, over and above this, in late Roman times will appear in the sequel.

TTI

^<sup>1 P. 60.

^° P. 343

MONEY 481

With this goods become wares, exchange turnover, and in place of thinking in goods we have thinking in money.

With this a purely extensional something, a form of limit-defining, is abstracted from the visible objects of economics just as mathematical thought abstracts something from the mechanistically conceived environment. Abstract

⁴ P. ot.

It is an error of all modern money-theories that they start from the value-token or even the material of the payment-medium instead of from the form of economic thought.² In reality, money, like number and law, is a category of thought. There is a monetary, just as there is a juristic and a mathematical and a technical, thinking of the world-around. From the sense-experience of a house we obtain quite different abstracts, according as we are mentally appraising it from the point of view of a merchant, a judge, or an engineer, and with reference to a balance-sheet, a lawsuit, or a danger of collapse. Next of kin to thinking in money, however, is mathematics. To think in terms of business is to calculate. The money-value is a numerical value measured by a unit of reckoning.³ This exact "value-in-itself," like number-in-itself, the man of the town, the man without roots, is the first to imagine; for peasants there are only ephemeral felt values in relation to now this and now that object of exchange. What he does not use, or does not want to possess, has "no value" for him. Only in the economy-picture of the real townsman are there objective values and kinds of values which have an existence apart from his private needs, as thought-elements of a generalized validity, although in actuality every individual has his proper system of values and his proper stock of the most varied kinds of value, and feels the ruling prices of the market as "cheap" or "dear" with reference to these.⁴

Whereas the earlier mankind compares goods, and does so not by means of the reason only, the later reckons the values of wares, and does so by rigid un-

^<sup>1 Cf. Vol. I, Ch. II

MONEY 483

The outcome of this way of thinking is that the old possession, bound up with life and the soil, gives way to the fortune, which is essentially mobile and qualitatively undefined: it does not consist in goods, but it is laid out in them. Considered by itself, it is a purely numerical quantum of money-value.²

As the seat of this thinking, the city becomes the money-market, the centre of values, and a stream of money-values begins to infuse, intellectualize, and command the stream of goods. And with this the trader, from being an organ of economic life, becomes its master. Thinking in money is always, in one way or another, trade or business thinking. It presupposes the productive economy of the land, and, therefore, is always primarily acquisitive, for there is no third course. The very words "acquisition," gain," "speculation," point to a profit tricked off from the goods en route to the consumer — an intellectual plunder — and for that reason are inapplicable to the early peasantry. Only by attuning ourselves exactly to the spirit and economic outlook of the true townsman can we realize what they mean. He works not for needs, but for sales, for "money." The business view gradually infuses itself into every kind of activity. The countryman, inwardly bound up with traffic in goods, was at once giver and taker, and even the trader of the primitive market was hardly an exception to this rule. But with money-traffic there appears between producer and consumer, as though between two separate worlds, the third party, the middleman, whose thought is dominated a priori by the business side of life. He forces the producer to offer, and the consumer to inquire of him. He elevates mediation

to a monopoly and thereafter to economic primacy, and forces the other two to be "in form" in his interest, to prepare the wares according to his reckonings, and to cheapen them under the pressure of his offers.

^<sup>1 Even to the modern pirates of the money-market who intervene amongst the interveners and gamble with money as "wares."

^<sup>4 The name "bourse" can be applied even in other Cultures, if by that word we mean the thought-organ of a developed money-economy.

MONEY 484

The Faustian money-thinking "opens up" whole continents, the water-

Preface to Major Barbara (Constable, London 1909).

2 P 242

³ The "farmer" is the man whose connexion with the piece of land is no longer anything

IV

As every Culture has its own mode of thinking in money, so also it has its proper money-symbol through which it brings to visible expression its principle of valuation in the economic field. This something, a sense-actualizing of the thought, is in importance fully the equal of the spoken, written, or drawn figures and other symbols of the mathematic. Here lies a deep and fruitful domain of inquiry, so far almost unexplored. Not even the basic notions have been correctly enunciated, and it is therefore quite impossible to-day to translate intelligibly the money-idea that underlay the barter and the bill business of Egypt, the banking of Babylonia, the book-keeping of China, and the capitalism of the Jews, Parsees, Greeks, and Arabs from Haroun-al-Raschid's day. All that is possible is to set forth the essential opposition of Apollinian and Faustian money — the one, money as magnitude, and the other, money as function.¹

Cf. Vol. I, Ch. II.

IONEY 487

Sallust, Catilina, 35, 3.

P. 458.

^<sup>4 Not very much can have been left of Classical art-treasures even by Augustus's time. The refined Athenians themselves thought far too unhistorically to be moved to spare a chryselephantine statue merely because it was the work of Phidias. It is worth remembering that the gold parts of the famous Athene-figure of the Parthenon cella were made removable and tested for weight from time to time. Economic use of them, therefore, was provided for from the ourset.

^<sup>5 Ges. Schriften, IV, 200, et seq.

ancient Thebes, but a city in which an important part of the world's cash was actually collected. It may be taken that in Cæsar's time much more than half of the Classical world's gold was in Rome.

E. 3 P. 480.

^<sup>4 Herein lies the difference between this slavery and the sugar-slavery of our own Baroque. The latter represents a threshold phase of our machine industry, an organization of "living" energy, which began with man-fuel, but presently passed over to coal-fuel; and slavery came to be considered immoral only when coal had established itself. Looked at from this angle, the victory of the North in the American Civil War (1865) meant the economic victory of the concentrated energy of coal over the simple energy of the muscles.

MONEY 489

In extremest contrast to this stands the symbol of Faustian money — money as Function, the value of which lies in its effect and not its mere existence. The specific style of this economic thinking appears already in the way in which the Normans of A.D. 1000 organized their spoils of men and land into an economic force.¹ Compare the pure book-valuation of these ducal officials (commemorated in our words "cheque," "account," and "checking")² with the "contemporary" gold talent of the Iliad, one meets at the very outset of the Culture the rudiments of its modern credit-system, which is the outcome of confidence in the force and durability of its economic mode, and with which the idea of money in our sense is almost identical. These financial methods, transplanted to the Roman Kingdom of Sicily by Roger II, were developed by the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II (about 1230) into a powerful system far surpassing the original in dynamism and making him the "first capitalist power of the world"; ³ and while this fraternization of mathematical thinking-power and royal will-to-power made its way from Normandy into France and was applied on the grand scale to the exploitation of conquered England (to this day English soil is nominally royal demesne) its Sicilian side was imitated by the Italian city-republics, and (as their ruling patricians soon took the methods of the civic economy into use for their private book-keeping,) spread over the commercial thought and practice of the whole Western world. Little later, the Sicilian methods were adopted by the Order of the Teutonic Knights and by the dynasty of Aragon, and it is probably to these origins that we should assign the model accountancy of Spain in the days of Philip II, and of Prussia in those of Frederick William I.

Yet side by side with this the West, in its unquestioning admiration of the Classical, has gone on striking coins, not merely as tokens of sovereignty, but in the belief that this evidenced money was money corresponding in reality to

P. 75.

^<sup>2 Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, II, p. 119.

MONEY 491

the economics in thought. In just the same way, even within the Gothic age, we took over Roman law with its equating of things to bodily magnitudes, and the Euclidean mathematic, which was built upon the concept of number as magnitude. And so it befell that the evolution of these three intellectual formworlds of ours proceeded, not like the Faustian music in a pure and flowerlike unfolding, but in the shape of a progressive emancipation from the notion of magnitude. The mathematic had already achieved this by the close of the Baroque age.¹ The jurisprudence, on the other hand, has not yet even recognized its coming task,² but this century is going to set it, and to demand that which for Roman jurists was the self-evident basis of law, namely, the inward congruence of economic and legal thought and an equal practical familiarity with both. The conception of money that was symbolized in the coin agreed precisely with the Classical thing-law, but with us there is nothing remotely like such an agreement. Our whole life is disposed dynamically, not statically and Stoically; therefore our essentials are forces and performances, relations and capacities — organizing talents and intuitive intellects, credit, ideas, methods, energy-sources — and not mere existence of corporeal things. The "Romanist" thing-thought of our jurists, and the theory of money that consciously or unconsciously starts from the coin, are equally alien to our life. The vast metallic hoard to which, in imitation of the Classical, we were continually adding till the World War came, has indeed made a rôle for itself off the main road, but with the inner form, tasks, and aims of modern economy it has nothing to do; and if as the result of the war it were to disappear from currency altogether, nothing would be altered thereby.³

Vol. I, Ch. II.

² P. 81.

^<sup>3 In our Culture the credit of a country rests upon its economic capacity and the political organization thereof — which imparts to the operations and bookings of finance the character of real money-creations — and not on any quantity of gold that may be put into this or that. It is the Classicist superstition that raises the gold reserve to the status of an actual measure of credit — actual in that the level of credit is thereby made dependent, not upon "will," but upon "can." But the current coins are wares, which, relatively to national credit, possess a price — the poorer the credit, the higher the price of gold — so that thenceforth it can only be upheld against that of other wares. Thus gold is measured like other wares against the unit of book-reckoning, and not vice versa as the term "gold standard" suggests. It serves also as means of payment in minor transactions, as for that matter a postage-stamp does. In old Egypt (whose money-thought is astoundingly like the Western) there was nothing resembling the coin even under the New Empire. The written transfer was entirely sufficient, and the Classical coins that filtered in from 650 to the founding of Alexandria and the Hellenistic régime were usually cut to pieces and reckoned by weight as a ware.

1 That is why it does not exist for our (present) jurisprudence

v

Asia Minor on long mule-trains to the battle-field of Philippi — one can imagine what sort of an economic operation the plunder of a camp after a battle must have been — and even C. Gracchus, almost a century earlier, alluded to the amphoræ that went out from Rome to the provinces full of wine and came back full of gold. This hunt for the gold possessions of alien peoples corresponds exactly to the present-day hunt for coal, which in its deeper meaning is not a thing, but a store of energy.

Consequently, as the Western Culture presents a maximum, so the Classical shows a minimum, of organization. For this was completely absent even as an idea from Classical man. His finance was one of provisional expedients made rule and habit. The wealthy burgher of Athens and Rome could be burdened with the equipment of war-ships. The political power of the Roman ædile (and his debts) rested on the fact that he not only produced the games and the streets and the buildings, but paid for them too — of course, he could recoup himself later by plundering his province. Sources of income were thought of only when the need of income presented itself, and then drawn upon, without any regard for the future, as the moment required — even at the cost of entirely destroying them. Plunder of the treasures of one's own temples, sea-piracy against one's own city, confiscation of the wealth of one's own fellow-citizens were everyday methods of finance. If surpluses were available, they were distributed to the citizens — a proceeding to which plenty of people besides Eubulus of Athens owed their popularity.² Budgets were as unknown as any other part of financial policy. The "economic management" of Roman provinces was a system of robbery, public and private, practised by senators and financiers without the slightest consideration as to whether the exported values could be replaced. Never did Classical man think of systematically intensifying his economic life, but ever looked to the result of the moment, the tangible quantum of cash. Imperial Rome would have gone down in ruin had it not

MONEY 495

² Kromayer, in Hartmann's Röm. Gesch., p. 150.

The "Jews" of those times were the Romans (p. 318), and the Jews themselves were peasants and artizans and small traders (Parván, Die Nationalität der Kausteute iuröm. Kaiserreich, 1909; also Mommsen, Röm. Gesch., V, p. 471); that is, they followed the very callings that in the Gothic period became the object of their merchant activity. Present-day "Europe" is in exactly the same position vis-à-vis the Russians whose profoundly mystical inner life feels "thinking in money" as a sin. (The Pilgrim in Gorki's Night-asylum, and Tolstoi's thought generally; pp. 194, 278.) Here to-day as in the Syria of Jesus's time we have two economic worlds juxtaposed (pp. 192, et seq.): an upper, alien, and civilized world intruded from the West (the Bolshevism of the first years, totally Western and un-Russian, is the lees of this infiltration), and a townless barter-life that goes on deep below, uncalculating and exchanging only for immediate needs. We have to think of the catchwords of the surface as a voice, in which the Russian, simple and busied wholly with his soul, hears resignedly the will of God. Marxism amongst Russians is based on an inward misunderstanding. They bore with the higher conomic life of Petrinism, but they neither created it nor recognized it. The Russian does not fight Capital, but he does not comprehend it. Anyone who understands Dostoyevski will sense in these people a young humanity for which as yet no money exists, but only goods in relation to a life whose centre of gravity does not lie on the economical side. The horror of values supervening from nowhere which before the war drove many to suicide is a misconstrued literary disguise of the fact that, for a townless barter-thinking, money-getting by means of money is an impiety, and (from the view-point of the coming Russian religion) a sin. To-day, with the towns of Tsarism in ruin and the mankind in them living the village life under the crust (temporarily) of urban-thinking Bolshevism, he has freed himself from the Western economy. His apocalyptic

immense outflow of gold into the farther East after Hadrian's reign, which has hithero been unaccountable. And as economic life in forms of gold-streams was extinguished in the upheaval of a young Culture, so also the slave ceased to be money, and the ebb of the gold was paralleled by that mass-emancipation of the slaves which numerous Imperial laws, from Augustus's reign onwards, tried in vain to check — till under Diocletian, in whose famous maximum tariff 1 money-economy was no longer the standpoint, the type of the Classical slave had ceased to exist.

^<sup>1 See the article "Diocletian, Edict of," Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

(B)

CHAPTER XIV

(B)

THE MACHINE

1

With that, the system of identification-marks develops into a theory, a picture which detaches itself from the technique of the day 1— whether this be a day of high-level Civilized technics or a day of simplest beginnings — by way of abstraction, as a piece of waking-consciousness uncommitted to activity. One "knows" what one wants, but much must have happened for one to have that knowledge, and we must make no mistake as to its character. By numerical experience man is enabled to switch the secret on and off, but he has not discovered it. The figure of the modern sorcerer — a switchboard with levers and labels at which the workman calls mighty effects into play by the pressure of a finger without possessing the slightest notion of their essence — is only the symbol of human technique in general. The picture of the light-world around us — in so far as we have developed it critically, analytically, as theory, as picture — is nothing but a switchboard of the kind, on which particular things are so labelled that by (so to say) pressing the appropriate button particular effects follow with certainty. The secret itself remains none the less oppressive on that account.² But through this technique the waking-consciousness does, all the same, intervene masterfully in the fact-world. Life makes use of thought as an "open sesame," and at the peak of many a Civilization, in its great cities, there arrives finally the moment when technical critique becomes tired of being life's servant and makes itself tyrant. The Western Culture is even now experiencing an orgy of this unbridled thought, and on a tragic scale.

approached by the high-hearted, happy research of the early Gothic monks. Here, if anywhere, the religious origins of all technical thought are manifested. These meditative discoverers in their cells, who with prayers and fastings wrung God's secret out of him, felt that they were serving God thereby. Here is the Faust-figure, the grand symbol of a true discovering Culture. The Scientia experimentalis, as Roger Bacon was the first to call nature-research, the insistent questioning of Nature with levers and screws, began that of which the issue lies under our eyes as a countryside sprouting factory-chimneys and conveyor-towers. But for all of them, too, there was the truly Faustian danger of the Devil's having a hand in the game, the risk that he was leading them in spirit to that mountain on which he promises all the power of the earth. This is the significance of the perpetuum mobile dreamed of by those strange Dominicans like Petrus Peregrinus, which would wrest the almightiness from God. Again and again they succumbed to this ambition; they forced this secret out of God in order themselves to be God. They listened for the laws of the cosmic pulse in order to overpower it. And so they created the idea of the machine as a small cosmos obeying the will of man alone. But with that they overpassed the slender border-line whereat the reverent piety of others saw the beginning of sin, and on it, from Roger Bacon to Giordano Bruno, they came to grief. Ever and ever again, true belief has regarded the machine as of the Devil.

^<sup>2 P. 268. According to Roger Bacon the "third rôle of science," which is not relative to the other sciences, consists in the power that makes it to search the secrets of nature, to discover past and future, and to produce so many marvellous results that power is assured to those who possess it.

. . . The Church should take it into consideration in order to spare Christian blood in the struggle with the infidel and above all in preparation for the perils that will menace us in the days of Anti-christ (E. Gilson, Philosophie du Moyen Age, p. 218). Tr.

^<sup>3 P. 288.

^<sup>4 Greek fire was only to terrify and to ignite, but here the tense force of the gases of explosion are converted into energy of motion. Anyone who seriously compares the two does not understand the spirit of the Western technique.

This is the outward- and upward-straining life-feeling — true descendant, therefore, of the Gothic — as expressed in Goethe's Faust monologue when the steam-engine was yet young. The intoxicated soul wills to fly above space and Time. An ineffable longing tempts him to indefinable horizons. Man would free himself from the earth, rise into the infinite, leave the bonds of the body, and circle in the universe of space amongst the stars. That which the glowing and soaring inwardness of St. Bernard sought at the beginning, that which Grünewald and Rembrandt conceived in their backgrounds, and Beethoven in the trans-earthly tones of his last quartets, comes back now in the intellectual intoxication of the inventions that crowd one upon another. Hence the fantastic traffic that crosses the continents in a few days, that puts itself across oceans in floating cities, that bores through mountains, rushes about in subterranean labyrinths, uses the steam-engine till its last possibilities have been exhausted, and then passes on to the gas-engine, and finally raises itself above the roads and railways and flies in the air; hence it is that the spoken word is sent in one moment over all the oceans; hence comes the ambition to break all records and beat all dimensions, to build giant halls for giant machines, vast ships and bridge-spans, buildings that deliriously scrape the clouds, fabulous forces pressed together to a focus to obey the hand of a child, stamping and quivering and droning works of steel and glass in which tiny man moves as unlimited monarch and, at the last, feels nature as beneath him.

11

But for that very reason Faustian man has become the slave of his creation. His number, and the arrangement of life as he lives it, have been driven by the machine on to a path where there is no standing still and no turning back. The peasant, the hand-worker, even the merchant, appear suddenly as inessential in comparison with the three great figures that the Machine has bred and trained up in the cause of its development: the entrepreneur, the engineer, and the factoryworker. Out of a quite small branch of manual work — namely, the preparation-economy — there has grown up (in this one Culture alone) a mighty tree that casts its shadow over all the other vocations — namely, the economy of the machine-industry. It forces the entrepreneur not less than the workman to obedience. Both become slaves, and not masters, of the machine, that now for the first time develops its devilish and occult power. But although the Socialistic theory of the present day has insisted upon looking only at the latter's contribution and has claimed the word "work" for him alone, it has all become possible only through the sovereign and decisive achievement of the former. The famous phrase concerning the "strong arm" that bids every wheel cease from running is a piece of wrong-headedness. To stop them — yes! but it does not need a worker to do that. To keep them running — no! The centre of this

artificial and complicated realm of the Machine is the organizer and manager. The mind, not the hand, holds it together. But, for that very reason, to preserve the ever endangered structure, one figure is even more important than all the energy of enterprising master-men that make cities to grow out of the ground and alter the picture of the landscape; it is a figure that is apt to be forgotten in this conflict of politics — the engineer, the priest of the machine, the man who knows it. Not merely the importance, but the very existence of the industry depends upon the existence of the hundred thousand talented, rigorously schooled brains that command the technique and develop it onward and onward. The quiet engineer it is who is the machine's master and destiny. His thought is as possibility what the machine is as actuality. There have been fears, thoroughly materialistic fears, of the exhaustion of the coal-fields. But so long as there are worthy technical path-finders, dangers of this sort have no existence. When, and only when, the crop of recruits for this army fails — this army whose thought-work forms one inward unit with the work of the machine — the industry must flicker out in spite of all that managerial energy and the workers can do. Suppose that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find their soul's health more important than all the powers of this world; suppose that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the place of rationalism to-day, the very élite of intellect that is now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its Satanism (it is the step from Roger Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux) — then nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries.

III

to be the only power. The ancient wrestle between the productive and the acquisitive economies intensifies now into a silent gigantomachy of intellects, fought out in the lists of the world-cities. This battle is the despairing struggle of technical thought to maintain its liberty against money-thought.

The coming of Cæsarism breaks the dictature of money and its political weapon democracy. After a long triumph of world-city economy and its interests over political creative force, the political side of life manifests itself after all as the stronger of the two. The sword is victorious over the money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will. If we call these money-powers "Capitalism," then we may designate as Socialism the will to call into life a mighty politico-economic order that transcends all class interests, a system of lofty thoughtfulness and duty-sense that keeps the whole in fine condition for the decisive battle of its history, and this battle is also the battle of money and law. The private powers of the economy want free paths for their acquisition of great resources. No legislation must stand in their way. They want to make the laws themselves, in their interests, and to that end they make use of the tool they have made for themselves, democracy, the subsidized party. Law needs, in order to resist this onslaught, a high tradition and an ambition of strong families that finds its satisfaction not in the heaping-up of riches, but in the tasks of true rulership, above and beyond all money-advantage. A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront

³ P. 345.

money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic onflow in microcosmic form. It is the fact of facts within the world-as-history. Before the irresistible rhythm of the generation-sequence, everything built up by the waking-consciousness in its intellectual world vanishes at the last. Ever in History it is life and life only—race-quality, the triumph of the will-to-power—and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money that signifies. World-bistory is the world court, and it has ever decided in favour of the stronger, fuller, and more self-assured life—decreed to it, namely, the right to exist, regardless of whether its right would hold before a tribunal of waking-consciousness. Always it has sacrificed truth and justice to might and race, and passed doom of death upon men and peoples in whom truth was more than deeds, and justice than power. And so the drama of a high Culture—that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities—closes with the return of the pristine facts of the blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-circling cosmic flow. The bright imaginative Waking-Being submerges itself into the silent service of Being, as the Chinese and Roman empires tell us. Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man—a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes.

Ducunt Fata volentem, nolentem trahunt

INDEX

Prepared by David M. Matteson

i

v INDEX

Cæsarius of Heisterbach, and Devil-cult, 290 Calani, as term for philosophers, 175n.

Calchas, and Classical religious beginnings, 282

Caliphate, deification, 68; yields to sultanate, 425, 426

Calvin, John, and Grace, 59; as Gothic, 296 and world-politics, 299; and science, 300

Canada, public-land survey, 101n.

Cannae, battle, importance, 101, 228

Canon, fixation, 71, 248; as term, 245; Arabian style, 346. See also Bible

Canon law, development, 77

Capital, Western, as movement of values, 493 Classical sort. 494. See also Money

Capitulations, origin, 177n.

Caracalla, citizenship edict, and emperorworship, 68

modes, 365; financial officialdom, 371

Carolingian Renaissance, character, 87

Carthage, as Babylonian, 108; in Classical

Chrysostom, John, and conflict of estates, 353n. Chthonian cults, 283, 286

Church, and religion, 443n.

Church of England, new transubstantiation

Cicero, M. Tullius, rise, 409n.; on elections, 432n.; and party, weakling, 433; and Divus idea, 433; and killing of Cæsar, 433n.; and demagogy, 458; and Trebatius, 458n.

Cimabue, Giovanni, as Gothic, 291

Circus parties as term 2812

Citation, deeper meaning, 24

City. See Megalopolitanism; Town

Ciry planning, soulless chessboard form, 100 Civil War, American, defeat of aristocracy, 356, 369n.; and military art, 421; as victory of

Clary, Desirée, as destiny, 329

Classes, and history, 96; economic, 477. Ses

Claudii, and Roman history, 336; social composition, 357

Claudius I, importance, 50

Clausewitz, Karl von, inversion of phrase, 330m., as military writer, 419m.

Clearing-house, electrical analogy, 490n

Clement, baint, period, 250

Cleomenes III, fall, 65; and Sphærus, 45

Cleomenes, Alexander's administrator, and speculation, 484

INDEX vii

Triumvirate and Cæsarism, 423; politics and finance, 458, 459; and court, 459

Credit-system, Western concept, 489. See also Money

Crete, Minoan art and Mycenæ, 87-89; and ethnology, 129; and Mycenæan beast-deities, 276n.

Criticism, relation to science and history, 24 Cromwell, Oliver, Puritan manifestation, 302; power, 389; dictatorship, 390

Croton, Sybaris, 303; style of school, 345

Crusades, and Arabian Civilization, 43; as rural, 97; and nationalism, 180; Jewish parallel, 198

Ctesiphon, school, 200; location, 200n.

Cujacius, and Roman law, 77

Cult, and dogma, cultural attitude, 200, 201; technique, and myth, 268, 499. See also

Religion

Cumont, Franz, on old Persian religion, 207 Customs, purpose, 475n.

Cuvier, Baron Georges, theory, 31 Cynics, Pietism, 308; and Socrates, 309 Cyprus, massacre, 321n. Cyrene, massacre, 198n.

Damascenus, John, as Al Manzor, 260 Damascius, as biographer, 252; anchorite, 254 Damiani, Petrus, and Mary-cult, 288 Danai, as name, 161, 164

Daniel, fictitious, 72.11.

Dante Alighieri, and Devil-cult, 292; and "virtue," 307n.

Death, man and fear, 15, 16; relation to light, 265; as punishment, 272; and Classical cults,

Decemvirs, code, 65; significance, 396

Dediticii peregrins, as class, 68

Dehio, Georg, on houses and architecture, 12.1 Deism, as technic, 306

Delbrück, Hans, on ancient armies, 40n., 199n.; on migrant minority, 164

Delos, slave market, 489; temples as banks,

Demeter cult, Homer's ignoring, 282; and Pythagoreans, 282; survival, 282n.; and sex, 283; power, 290n.

Demeter-Dionysus-Kore cult, in Rome, 386

Democritus, atomic theory, 58

Depth-experience, Western, "I" as light-centre 8; and nations, 179; as prime symbol, 288 and gunpowder and printing, 460; and technique, 501-504

Descartes, René, and doubt, 12

Deutero-Isaiah, Persian influence, 208

Diakrii, and Tyrannis, 386

INDEX

Eastern Empire. See Byzantine Empire Ebionities, origin, 220n.; disappearance, 252 Eckart, Meister, on Mysticism, 292; and Devilcult, 303

Edinburgh, as intellectual centre, 305n.

ran-Sui, character, 419

Fas, and jus, 72, 78

Fate, cultural attitude, 267. See also Destiny;

austian Culture. See Western Culture

Fehbellin, battle, importance, 182

Fellahism, as post-Civilization residue, 105; as term, 169; of Arabian nations, 178; and pacifism, 185, 186; religious, 314; rigidity, 362

Ficinus, Marcilius, and Devil-cult, 291

Fictitious authorship, significance in Arabian Culture, 72n.

Finance, rise of officialdom, 371; classical att

Firm, as Western symbol, 490

Flaminius, C., significance, 65; conquest, 408; consul-list, 409n.; and finance, 410, 411; and party, 451

tion, 452

Flavius, Cneius, son of freedman, 1661

Form, being "in form," 330; of historical movement, 361; family and State, 362; Civilization and loss, Cæsarism, 398, 404, 406, 418, 431; economic "in form," 471

Fortune as displacing possession 482

Fourier, François, M. C., and English economics

Fourth Estate, significance, 358. See also Crowd Fox, Charles James, and French Revolution, 412 France, Anatole, on law, 64; and moral, 272n.

Francis of Assisi, and compassion, 273

Francke, August H., Pietism, 308

Franco-German War, German bankers and French loans, 402n.

Frangipani, and Papacy, 354

Frankish dynasty, notion, 379n.

Fratres Arvales, end of records, 255; rites, 314 formal restoration, 433

Frau Holde, and Mary-cult, 299

Frederick I Barbarossa, and Henry the Lion 180n.

Frederick II, emperor, and finance, 372, 489

Frederick the Great of Prussia, and conscription, 420n.; tact of command, 444; economics and politics, 475

Frederick William of Brandenburg, as real ruler

Frederick William I of Prussia, and army, 415; as politician, 443; finance, 489

Frederick William III of Prussia, and army, 406 Freedom, rise of idea, significance, 354, 356, 358; as negation, 456; and money, 481n.

Function, Western money concept, 486, 489

Furniture, race in, 122

INDEX xiii

Labna, and Mexican Culture, 45
Labor. See Economics
Laity, vis-à-vis clergy, 333
Lakayata, system, 309
Lakhmids, court, poetry, 198
Lambert, Édouard, on Twelve Tables, 65n.
Land, and Classical money wealth, 487. See also Peasantry
Landscape, necessity of study in man's history, 39n.; of Arabian Culture, 42; relation to Culture, 46; and transfer of forms 57; and

Lao-tse, Taoism, 307; Pietism, 308

Lao-Tzu, and sterility, 105

Lassalle, Ferdinand, and class dictatorship, 404; and English economics, 469

Latin-America. and Cæsarism. 435

I N D E X xvii

Mam, lordship of sight, visual thought, 7-9; language and understanding, theoretical thought, 9, 10; and fear of death, 15, 16; destiny and causality types, 16-19; refutation of Darwinism, 32; two great ages, 33;

in primitive Culture, 33, 34; effect of agriculture, 89. See also Animal; Being; Microcosm; Sex; Waking-being

Management, American development, 82n. See also Technique

Manchester School, and Rationalism, 403

Maniakes, Turk, 427n. Manichæism, and Chaldeau

Manichæism, and Chaldean, 176; origins, 209, 251; Logos and Paraclete, 227, 251n.; development, 251; missionarism, 260; Albegensians, 260n.

Marcion, Bible and Church, 225–228, 245, period, 250; and reform, 296

Marcionites, era, 239

Marcus Aurelius, as episode, 171; religiousness, 313; and peace, 430; Cæsarism and Stoicism, 434n.

Market, status, 91, 480 Marozia, as destiny, 339

Marriage, law, control over it, 78, 365; Civilization type, 105; defined, 344n.: "in form" relation, 362

Qaro, Joseph, as expositor, 321 Quaraites, Puritanism, rise, 255, 316 Quirinus Pater, god, 382 Quirites, origin of name, 382

Rabbi, law-man, 71

Rainald van Dassel, policy, 376
Rameses III, and sea-folks, 122, 164n.; history-\nless, 432

Ramnes, tribe, 351, 382

Ranke, J. Johannes, on skull forms, 128, 129 Ranke, Leopold von, on history, 46

Raskol movement, 278

Reading, defined, 149

intellectual creation, 300; and oligarchy, 386n.

Reger, Max, "playing" with music, 137
Reitzenstein, Richard, on Jesus as Mandæan,
214n.

Resaina, school, 200

Retz, Cardinal de, Fronde, 390
Retzius, Anders A., and skull-forms, 128
Revelation, Arabian concept, 243–246; secret
246

Robespierre, Maximilian, adventurer, 19; Statemachine, 404, 405; as mass-leader, 448n.

Rodbertus, Johann K., and class dictatorship

Roe, Sir Inomas, Turkish mission, 43n.

Roger II of Sicily, finance, 489

Roman Catholic Church, Classical survivals in popular, 110; and style of Western learning 346; changed basis of politics, 451n. Se

xvi INDEX

Romanticism, and world-literature, 108; and idea of people, 113; and apocalyptic, 236, 237, 250

demagogy, 410, 411, 457-459; evolution and completion of Cæsarism, 422, 423, 430, 432-434; political factions and parties, 450; courts and politics, 459; finance, 487, 494, 495 cosevel. Theodore, on race suicide, 106

Rothschilds, founding of fortune, 402n

Rubens, Peter Paul, "tigress" expression, 128n. Ruma clan, 382

Rumina, goddess, 382

Russo-Japanese War, and military art, 42.1

Saba, ignored history, 190; feudalism, 196-198; geography, 196n.; religion, 209, 253; chronology, 239

Sabazius, cult, 201

Sabbath, Chaldean and Jewish, 207

Sabiniani, legal school, style, 67, 346

Sacraments, Pagan, 203; Western concept, and free will, 293; effect of Reformation, 298. See also Contrition

Sadducees, tendency, 211

Sage, as ideal, 207

Sahara, extension, 39n.

Saint-Simon, Comte de, and class dictatorship

Saint-Simon, Duc de, on nobility and nation, 172; on new nobility, 357n.

Salisbury, Marquess of, and family, 393

Salman, trial, 317

Samarra, plan, 100; area, 101n.; abandoned,

San Gemigniano, fortified towers, 355

Sapor I and Mazdaism as a

Saracens, Charles Martel's victory, 192. See also Islam

Ujjaina, as world-city, 99 Ulemas, law-men, 71 Ulpian, as jurist, 71 I N D E X xxxi

character of second religiousness, 311n.; religion and style of learning, 346; style of nobility, genealogical principle, 350; style of priesthood, 352; relation of primary estates, 353; capital city, 381; teading and writing, 413; money as function, 489-493; capital and financial organization, 493, 494; future, 507. See also Baroque; Cultures; Gothic; Politics; Technique

Westminster Confession, on Grace, 242
Westphalia, Peace of, effect on nobility, 391
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, on
patriarchal kingdom, 380n.

William I of England, and property, 371
William of Occam, will and reason, 241
Wilson, Woodrow, as tool, 475
Winchester, Eng., as royal residence, 92n.
Winckler, Hugo, on post-exilic Jews, 205
Witchcraft, Western cult, 291; persecution, 3
Woman. See Sex

Work, quantity and quality in Western concept of value, 491-493

Works, religious technique and moral, 272.

See also Faith

World-ciry. See Megalopolitanism

Worms, Diet of, code, 76

Writing, cultural relation, 36, 146, 150; Arabian religions and scripts, 73, 150, 227n.; Egyptian, 108; grammatical decomposition, 145, 146; technique of signs and thoughts 146; and linguistic history, 147, and "present" training, 149; dependence on grammar 149; and reading, 149; and extension and duration, 150; and historical endowment 150; and colloquial language, 150; relation to race, as taboo, ornament, 151; city and utilitarian, standardization, 152, 155; stenography, 152; dependence of world history on 153. See also Language

Wu, State, annihilation, 422

Wu-ti, as ruler, 41

Wullenweber, Jürgen, economics and politics, 475

Wundt, Wilhelm M., an origin of language, 138 Wurlif John and reform 206

yclit, John, and retorm, 296

Xenophon, and class dictatorship, 404

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THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

CORRIGENDA TO VOLUME I

CORRIGENDA TO VOLUME 1

p. 259, Insert "1" after
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foot-note

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p. 369, line 9 from bottom, text for act read nude

for "imporant" read "important"

for "compre" read "compare"

for "portrait" read "Portrait" for "Guéricault" read "Géricault"

for "essense" read "essence"

for "passico" read "passio"

for "285" read "385"

for "spritual" read "spiritual" dele "to"

CORRIGENDA TO VOLUME I