ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE
(B)
THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES
I
Now, man--no matter whether it is for life or for thought that he is
born into the world--so long as he is acting or is thinking, is awake
and therefore _in focus_--i.e., adjusted to the one significance that
for the moment his light-world holds for him. Everyone knows that it is
almost sharply painful to switch off suddenly in the middle of, say, an
experiment in physics, in order to think about some event of the day.
I have said earlier that the innumerable settings that take turns in
man’s waking consciousness fall into two distinct groups--the worlds of
destiny and pulsation, and the worlds of causes and tensions. The two
pictures I have called _world-as-history_ and _world-as-nature_. In the
first, life makes use of critical understanding. It has the eye under
command, the felt pulsation becomes the inwardly imagined wave-train,
and the shattering spiritual experience becomes pictured as the epochal
peak. In the second, thought itself rules, and its causal criticism
turns life into a rigorous process, the living content of a fact into
an abstract truth, and tension into formula.
How is this possible? Each is an eye-picture, but in the one the seer
is giving himself up to the never-to-be-repeated facts, and in the
other he is striving to catch truths for an ever-valid system. In the
history-picture, that in which knowledge is simply an _auxiliary_,
the cosmic makes use of the microcosmic. In the picture which we
call memory and recollection, things are present to us as bathed in
an inner light and swept by the pulsation of our existence. But the
chronological element[19] tells us that history, as soon as it becomes
_thought_ history, is no longer immune from the basic conditions of
all waking-consciousness. In the nature- (or science-) picture it is
the ever-present subjective that is alien and illusive, but in the
history-picture it is the equally ineliminable objective, Number, that
leads into error.
When we are working in the domain of Nature (science), our settings
and self-adjustments should be and can be up to a certain point
impersonal--one “forgets oneself”--but every man, class, nation, or
family sees the picture of history _in relation to itself_. The mark
of Nature is an extension that is inclusive of everything, but History
is that which comes up out of the darkness of the past, presents
itself to the _seer_, and from him sweeps onward into the future. He,
as the present, is always its middle point, and it is quite impossible
for him to order the facts with any meaning if he ignores their
direction--which is an element proper to life and not to thought.
Every time, every land, every living aggregate has its own historical
horizon, and it is the mark of the genuine historical thinker that he
actualizes the picture of history that his time demands.
Thus Nature and History are distinguishable like pure and impure
criticism--meaning by “criticism” the opposite of lived experience.
Natural science _is_ criticism and nothing else. But in History,
criticism can do no more than scientifically prepare the field over
which the historian’s eye is to sweep. _History is that ranging
glance itself_, whatever the direction in which it ranges. He who
possesses such an eye can understand every fact and every situation
“historically.” Nature is a system, and systems can be learnt.
The process of _historical_ self-adjustment begins for everyone with
the earliest impressions of childhood. Children’s eyes are keen, and
the facts of the nearest environment, the life of the family and the
house and the street, are sensed and felt right down to the core, long
before the city and its population come into their visual field, and
while the words “people,” “country,” “state,” are still quite destitute
of tangible meaning to them. Just so, and so thoroughly, primitive man
knows all that is presented to his narrow field of view as history,
as living--and above all Life itself, the drama of birth and death,
sickness and eld; the history of passionate war and passionate love, as
experienced in himself or observed in others; the fate of relatives,
of the clan, of the village, their actions and their motives; tales
of long enmity, of fights, victory, and revenge. The life-horizon
widens, and shows not lives, but Life coming and going. The pageant
is not now of villages and clans, but of remote races and countries;
not of years, but of centuries. The history that is actually lived
with and participated in never reaches over more than a grandfather’s
span--neither for ancient Germans and present-day Negroes, nor for
Pericles and Wallenstein. Here the horizon of living ends, and a new
plane begins wherein the picture is based upon hearsay and historical
tradition, a plane in which direct sympathies are adapted to a
mind-picture that is both distinct and, from long use, stable. The
picture so developed shows very different amplitudes for the men of the
different Cultures. For us Westerners it is with this secondary picture
that genuine history begins, for we live under the aspect of eternity,
whereas for the Greeks and Romans it is just then that history ceases.
For Thucydides[20] the events of the Persian Wars, for Cæsar those of
the Punic Wars, were already devoid of living import.
And beyond this plane again, other historic unit-pictures rise to the
view--pictures of the destinies of the plant world and the animal
world, the landscape, the stars--which at the last fuse with the last
pictures of natural science into mythic images of the creation and the
end of the world.
The nature- (science-) picture of the child and the primitive develops
out of the petty technique of every day, which perpetually forces both
of them to turn away from the fearful contemplation of wide nature to
the critique of the facts and situations of their near environment.
Like the young animal, the child discovers its first truths through
play. Examining the toy, cutting open the doll, turning the mirror
round to see what is behind it, the feeling of triumph in having
established something as correct for good and all--no nature-research
whatsoever has got beyond this. Primitive man applies this critical
experience, as he acquires it, to his arms and tools, to the materials
for his clothing, food, and housing--i.e., to things _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 scientific,
mode of waking-consciousness. In the world-as-history we do not find
fire as such, but the conflagration of Carthage and the flames of the
faggots heaped around John Hus and Giordano Bruno.
II
I repeat, every being livingly experiences every other being and its
destiny _only in relation to itself_. A flock of pigeons is regarded
by the farmer on whose fields it settles quite otherwise than by the
nature-lover in the street or the hawk in the air. The peasant sees
in his son the future and the heritage, but what the 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.
It is not incompatible with, rather it is essential to, a profound
knowledge of men that the appraiser should see through glasses of
his own colour. This knowledge, indeed, is exactly the component
that we discern to be wanting in those generalizations that distort
or altogether ignore that all-important fact, the uniqueness of the
constituent event in history[21]--the worst example of this being
the “materialistic” conception of history, about which we have said
almost all there is to say when we have described it as physiognomic
barrenness. But both in spite of this and on account of this[22] there
is for every man, _because_ he belongs to a class and a time and a
nation and a Culture, a typical picture of history as it ought to
appear in relation to himself, and equally there are typical pictures
specific to the time or class or Culture, _qua_ time or class or
Culture. The supreme generalization possible to each Culture as a
major being is a primary and, for it, symbolical image of its own
world-as-history, and all self-attunements of the individual--or of
the group livingly effective as individual--are with reference to
that image. Whenever we describe another person’s ideas as profound
or superficial, original or trivial, mistaken or obsolete, we are
unwittingly judging them with reference to a picture which springs up
to answer for the value at the moment of a continuous function of our
time and our personality.[23]
Obviously, then, every man of the Faustian Culture possesses his own
picture of history and, besides, innumerable other pictures from his
youth upwards, which fluctuate and alter ceaselessly in response to
the experiences of the day and the year. And how different, again,
are the typical history-images of men and different eras and classes,
the world of Otto the Great and that of Gregory VII, that of a Doge
of Venice and that of a poor pilgrim! In what different worlds lived
Lorenzo de’ Medici, Wallenstein, Cromwell, Marat, and Bismarck, a serf
of the Gothic age, a savant of the Baroque, the army officer of the
Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War, and the Wars of Liberation
respectively! Or, to consider our own times alone, a Frisian peasant
whose life of actuality is limited to his own countryside and its folk,
a high merchant of Hamburg, and a professor of physics! And yet to all
of these, irrespective of individual age, status, and period, there is
a common basis that differentiates the ensemble of these figures, their
prime-image, from that of every other Culture.
But, over and above this, there is a distinction of another kind which
separates the Classical and the Indian history-pictures from those of
the Chinese, the Arabian, and, most of all, the Western Cultures--the
_narrow horizon_ of the two first-named. Whatever the Greeks may (and
indeed must) have known of ancient Egyptian history, they never allowed
it to penetrate into their peculiar history-picture, which for the
majority was limited to the field of events that could be related by
the oldest surviving participant, and which even for the finer minds
stopped at the Trojan War, a frontier beyond which they would not
concede that there had been historical life at all.[24]
The Arabian Culture,[25] on the other hand, very early dared the
astounding gesture--we see it in the historical thought alike of the
Jews and of the Persians from Cyrus’s time--of connecting the legend of
creation to the present by means of a genuine chronology; the Persians
indeed comprised the future as well in the sweep of the gesture, and
predated the last judgment and the coming of the Messiah. This exact
and very narrow definition of human history--the Persian reckoning
allows twelve millennia from first to last, the Jewish counts less
than six up to the present--is a necessary expression of the Magian
world-feeling and fundamentally distinguishes the Judæo-Persian
creation-sagas from those of the Babylonian Culture, from which so many
of their external traits are derived.
Different, again, are the primary feelings which give historical
thought in the Chinese and the Egyptian Cultures its characteristically
wide and unbounded horizons, represented by chronologically stated
sequences of dynasties which stretch over millennia and finally
dissolve into a grey remoteness.
The Faustian picture of world-history, again, prepared in advance by
the existence of a Christian chronology,[26] 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[27] 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;[28] 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.[29]
In all other Cultures the aspects of world-history and of man-history
coincide. The beginning of the world is the beginning of man, and the
end of man is the end of the world. But the Faustian infinity-craving
for the first time separated the two notions during the Baroque, and
now it has made human history, for all its immense and still unknown
span, _a mere episode in world-history_, while the Earth--of which
other Cultures had seen not even the whole, but only superficial
fractions as “the world”--has become a little star amongst millions of
solar systems.
The extension of the historical world-picture makes it even more
necessary in this Culture than in any other to distinguish between
the everyday self-attunements of ordinary people and that extreme
self-attunement of which only the highest minds are capable, and
which even in them holds only for moments. The difference between the
historical view-field of Themistocles and that of an Attic husbandman
is probably very small, but this difference is already immense as
between Henry VI and a hind of his day,[30] and as the Faustian
Culture mounts up and up, the power of self-focusing attains to such
heights and depths that the circle of adepts grows ever smaller and
smaller. In fact, there is formed a sort of pyramid of possibilities,
in which individuals are graded according to their endowments; every
individual, according to his constitution, stands at the level which
he is capable at his best focus of holding. But it follows from this
that between Western men there are limitations to the possibilities
of reciprocal understanding of historical life-problems, limitations
that do not apply to other Cultures, at any rate in such fateful rigour
as they do to ours. Can a workman to-day really understand a peasant?
Or a diplomat a craftsman? The historico-geographical horizon that
determines for each of them the questions worth asking and the form
in which these are asked is so different from the horizons of the
others that what they can exchange is not a communication, but passing
remarks. It is, of course, the mark of the real appraiser of man that
he understands how “the other man” is adjusted and regulates his
intercourse with him accordingly (as we all do in talking to children),
but the art of appraising in this sense some man of the past (say
Henry the Lion or Dante), of living oneself into his history-picture
so thoroughly that his thoughts, feelings, and decisions take on a
character of self-evidence, is, owing to the vast difference between
the one’s and the other’s waking consciousness, so rare that up to the
eighteenth century it was not even seen that the historian ought to
attempt it. Only since 1800 has it become a desideratum for the writing
of history, and it is one very seldom satisfied at that.
The typically Faustian separation of human history, as such, from the
far wider history of the world has had the result that since the end of
the Baroque our world-picture has contained several horizons disposed
one behind the other in as many planes. For the exploration of these,
individual sciences, more or less overtly historical in character, have
taken shape. Astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, one after the
other follow up the destinies of the star-world, the earth’s crust,
life, and man, and only then do we come to the “world”-history--as it
is still called even to-day--of the higher Cultures, to which, again,
are attached the histories of the several cultural elements, family
history, and lastly (that highly developed speciality of the West)
biography.
Each of these planes demands a particular self-focusing, and the
moment the special focus becomes sharp the narrower and the broader
planes cease to be live Being and become mere given facts. If we
are investigating the battle of the Teutoburger Wald, the growing
up of this forest in the plant-world of the North German plain is
presupposed. If, on the other hand, we are examining into the history
of the German tree-world, the geological stratification of the earth is
the presupposition, though it is just a fact whose particular destiny
need not be further followed out in this connexion. If, again, our
question is the origin of the Cretaceous, the existence of the Earth
itself as a planet in the solar system is a datum, not a problem. Or,
to express it otherwise, that there is an Earth in the star-world, that
the phenomenon “life” occurs in the Earth, that within this “life”
there is the form “man,” that within the history of man there exists
the organic form of the Culture, is in each case an incident in the
picture of the next higher plane.
In Goethe, from his Strassburg period to his first Weimar residence,
the inclination to attune himself to “world”-history was very
strong--as evidenced in his Cæsar, Mohammed, Socrates, Wandering
Jew, and Egmont sketches. And after that painful renunciation of the
prospect of high political achievement[31]--the pain which calls to us
in _Tasso_ even through the sober resignedness of its final form--this
precisely was the attunement that he chose to cut out of his life; and
thereafter he limits himself, almost fiercely, to the picture-planes of
plant-history, animal-history, and earth-history (his “living nature”)
on the one hand and to biography on the other.
All these “pictures,” developed in the same man, have the same
structure. Even the history of plants and animals, even that of the
earth’s crust or that of the stars, is a _fable convenue_ and mirrors
in outward actuality the inward tendency of the ego’s being. The
student of the animal world or of stratification is a man, living in a
period and having a nationality and a social status, and it is no more
possible to eliminate his subjective standpoint from his treatment of
these things than it would be to obtain a perfectly abstract account
of the French Revolution or the World War. The celebrated theories of
Kant, Laplace, Cuvier, Lyell, Darwin, have also a politico-economic
tinting, and their very power and impressiveness for the lay public
show that the mode of outlook upon all these historical planes proceeds
from a single source. And what is accomplishing itself to-day is the
final achievement of which Faustian history-thinking is capable--the
organic linking and disposition of these historical planes in a
single vast world-history of uniform physiognomic that shall enable
our glance to range from the life of the individual man without a
break to the first and last destinies of the universe. The nineteenth
century--in mechanistic (i.e., unhistorical) form--enunciated the
problem. It is one of the preordained tasks of the twentieth to solve
it.
III
The picture that we possess of the history of the Earth’s crust and of
life is at present still dominated by the ideas which civilized[32]
English thought has developed, since the Age of Enlightenment, out of
the English habit of life--Lyell’s “phlegmatic” theory of the formation
of the geological strata, and Darwin’s of the origin of species, are
actually but derivatives of the development of England herself. In
place of the incalculable catastrophes and metamorphoses such as von
Buch and Cuvier[33] admitted, they put a methodical evolution over
very long periods of time and recognize as causes only _scientifically
calculable_ and indeed _mechanical utility-causes_.
This “English” type of causality is not only shallow, but also far
too narrow. It limits possible causal connexions, in the first
place, to those which work out their _entire_ course on the earth’s
surface; but this immediately excludes all great cosmic relations
between earthly life-phenomena and the events of the solar system and
the stellar universe, and assumes the impossible postulate that the
exterior face of the earth-ball is a completely insulated region of
natural phenomena. And, secondly, it assumes that connexions which
are not comprehensible by the means at present available to the human
consciousness--namely, sensation refined by instruments and thought
precised by theory--do not even exist.
It will be the characteristic task of the twentieth century, as
compared with the nineteenth, to get rid of this system of superficial
causality, whose roots reach back into the rationalism of the Baroque
period, and to put in its place a pure physiognomic. We are sceptics in
regard to any and every mode of thought which “explains” causally. We
let things speak for themselves, and confine ourselves to sensing the
Destiny immanent in them and contemplating the form-manifestations that
we shall never penetrate. The extreme to which we can attain is the
discovery of causeless, purposeless, purely existent forms underlying
the changeful picture of nature. For the nineteenth century the word
“evolution” meant progress in the sense of increasing fitness of life
to purposes. For Leibniz--whose _Protogæa_ (1691), a work full of
significant thought, outlines, on the basis of studies made in the Harz
silver-mines, a picture of the world’s infancy that is Goethian through
and through--and for Goethe himself it meant fulfilment in the sense
of increasing connotation of 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.[34] 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.
As for mankind, discoveries of the Diluvial age indicate more and
more pointedly that the man-forms existing then correspond to those
living now; there is not the slightest trace of evolution towards a
race of greater utilitarian “fitness.” And the continued failure to
find man in the Tertiary discoveries indicates more and more clearly
that the human life-form, like every other, originates in a sudden
mutation (_Wandlung_) of which the “whence,” “how,” and “why” remain an
impenetrable secret. If, indeed, there were evolution in the English
sense of the word, there could be neither defined earth-strata nor
specific animal-classes, but only a single geological mass and a chaos
of living singular forms which we may suppose to have been left over
from the struggle for existence. But all that we see about us impels
us to the conviction that again and again profound and very sudden
changes take place in the being of plants and animals, changes which
are of a cosmic kind and nowise restricted to the earth’s surface,
which are beyond the ken of human sense and understanding in respect
of causes, if not indeed in all respects.[35] So, too, we observe
that swift and deep changes assert themselves in the history of the
great Cultures, without assignable causes, influences, or purposes of
any kind. The Gothic and the Pyramid styles come into full being as
suddenly as do the Chinese imperialism of Shi-hwang-ti and the Roman of
Augustus, as Hellenism and Buddhism and Islam. It is exactly the same
with the events in the individual life of every person who counts at
all, and he who is ignorant of this knows nothing of men and still less
of children. Every being, active or contemplative, strides on to its
fulfilment by _epochs_ and we have to assume just such epochs in the
history of solar systems and the world of the fixed stars. The origins
of the earth, of life, of the free-moving animal _are_ such epochs,
and, therefore, mysteries that we can do no more than accept.[36]
IV
That which we know of man divides clearly into two great ages of his
being. The first is, as far as our view is concerned, limited on the
one side by that profound fugue of planetary Destiny which we call the
beginning of the Ice Age--and about which we can (within the picture of
world-history) say no more than _that_ a cosmic change took place--and
on the other by the beginnings of high cultures on Nile and Euphrates,
with which the whole meaning of human existence became suddenly
different. We discover everywhere the sharp frontier of Tertiary and
Diluvial, and on the hither side of it we see man as a completely
formed type, familiar with custom, myth, wit, ornament, and technique
and endowed with a bodily structure that has not materially altered up
to the present day.
We will consider the first age as that of the primitive Culture.
The only field in which this Culture endured throughout the second
age (though certainly in a very “late” form) and is found alive and
fairly intact to-day is north-west Africa. It is the great merit of
Leo Frobenius[37] that he recognized this quite clearly, beginning
with the assumption that in this field a _whole world_ of primitive
life (and not merely a greater or less number of primitive tribes)
remained remote from the influences of the high Cultures. The
ethnologist-psychologist, on the contrary, delights in collecting,
from all over the five continents, fragments of peoples who really
have nothing in common but the negative fact of living a subordinate
existence in the middle of one or another of the high Cultures, without
participation in its inner life. The result is a congeries of tribes,
some stationary, some inferior, and some decadent, whose respective
modes of expression, moreover, are indiscriminately lumped together.
But the primitive Culture is not fragmentary, but something _strong and
integral_, something highly vital and effectual. Only, this Culture is
so different from everything that we men of a higher Culture possess in
the way of spiritual potentialities that we may question whether even
those people which have carried the first age very deep into the second
are good evidence, in their present modes of being and waking-being,
for the condition of the old time.
For some thousands of years now the waking-consciousness of man has had
the impression of constant mutual touch between the tribes and peoples
as an obvious everyday fact. But in dealing with the first age we must
not forget that in it man, cohering in a very few small groups, is
completely lost in the immensity of the landscape, the ruling element
therein being the mighty masses of the great animal-herds. The rarity
of our finds sufficiently proves this. At the time of Aurignacian Man
there were perhaps a dozen hordes, each a few hundred strong, wandering
in the whole area of France, and such hordes must have regarded it
as a deeply impressive and puzzling event when (if ever) they became
aware that fellow men existed. Can we imagine even in the least degree
what it was to live in a world almost empty of men--we for whom all
nature has long since become a background for the human multitude? How
man’s world-consciousness must have changed when, besides the forests
and the herds of beasts, other men “just like himself” began to be
met with, more and more frequently, in the country-side. The increase
of man’s numbers--this, too, doubtless took place very suddenly--made
experience of “fellow men” habitual, and replaced the impression of
astonishment by the feelings of pleasure or hostility, and these
again evoked a whole new world of experiences and of involuntary and
inevitable relations. It was for the history of the human soul perhaps
the deepest and most pregnant of all events. It was in relation to
alien life-forms that man first became conscious of his own, and now
the interior organization of the clan was enriched by a wealth of
intertribal forms of relation, which thereafter completely dominated
primitive life and thought. For it was then that, out of very simple
modes of sensuous understanding, the rudiments of verbal language (and,
therefore, of abstract thought) came into being, amongst them the
particularly fortunate few, which--though we can form no idea of their
structure--we may assume as the origins of the later Indogermanic and
Semitic language-groups.
Then, out of this general primitive Culture of a humanity linked by
intertribal relations, there shot up suddenly (about 3000 B.C.[38])
the Culture of Egypt and Babylonia. Probably for a millennium before
that date both these fields had been nursing something that differed
radically from every primitive Culture in kind and in intent, something
having an inward unity common to all its forms of expression and
directional in all its life. To me it seems highly probable that, if
not indeed all over the earth’s surface, at any rate in man’s essence
a change was accomplished at that time; and if so, then any primitive
Culture worthy of the name that is still found living later, ever
dwindling, in the midst of higher Cultures, should itself be something
different from the Culture of the first Age. But, with reference to
primitive Culture of any sort, that which I call the pre-Culture (and
which can be shown to occur as a uniform process in the beginning of
every high Culture) is something different in kind, something entirely
new.
In all primitive existence the “it,” the Cosmic, is at work with such
immediacy of force that all microcosmic utterances, whether in myth,
custom, technique, or ornament, obey only the pressures of the very
instant. For us, there are no ascertainable rules for the duration,
tempo, and course of development of these utterances. We observe, say,
an ornamental form-language--not to be called a style[39]--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.
But with the type of the higher Culture this “it” gives way to a strong
and undiffused _tendency_. Within the primitive Culture tribes and
clans are the only quickened beings--other than the individual men of
course. _Here, however, the Culture itself is such a being._ Everything
primitive is a sum--a sum of the expression-forms of primitive
groupings. The high Culture, on the contrary, is the waking-being of
a single huge organism which makes not only custom, myths, technique,
and art, but the very peoples and classes incorporated in itself the
vessels of one single form-language and one single history. The oldest
speech that we know of belongs to the primitive Culture, and has
lawless destinies of its own which cannot be deduced from those of,
say, Ornament or Marriage. But the history of script belongs integrally
with the expression-history of the several higher Cultures. That the
Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, and Mexican each formed a special
script in its pre-Cultural age--that the Indian and the Classical on
the other hand did not do so, but took over (and very late) the highly
developed writing of a neighbouring Civilization--that in the Arabian,
again, every new religion and sect immediately formed its particular
script--all these are facts that stand in a deeply intimate relation to
the generic form-history of these Cultures and its inner significance.
To these two ages our knowledge of man is restricted, and they
certainly do not suffice to justify conclusions of any sort about
possible or certain new eras or about their “when” and “how”--quite
apart from the fact that in any case the cosmic 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 therefore justifies our treating them as comparable, studying
them comparatively, and obtaining from our study a knowledge which
we can extend backwards over lost periods and forwards over the
future--provided always that a Destiny of a different order does not
replace this form-world, suddenly and basically, by another. Our
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 new being is conceived in the womb, or a seed sinks
into the earth, we do know _the inner form of this new life-course_;
and we know that the quiet course of its development and fulfilment may
be disturbed by the pressure of external powers, but never altered.
This experience teaches, further, that the Civilization which at this
present time has gripped the earth’s whole surface is not a third age,
but a stage--a necessary stage--of the Western Culture, distinguished
from its analogues only by the forcefulness of its extension-tendency.
Here experience ends, and all speculation on what new forms will govern
the life of future mankind (or, for that matter, whether there will
be any such new forms) all building of majestic card-houses on the
foundation of “it should be, it shall be” is mere trifling--far too
futile, it seems to me, to justify one single life of any value being
expended on it.
The group of the high Cultures is not, as a group, an organic
unit. That they have happened in just this number, at just these
places and times, is, for the human eye, an incident without deeper
intelligibility. The ordering of the individual Cultures, on the
contrary, has stood out so distinctly that the historical technique of
the Chinese, the Magian, and the Western worlds--often, indeed, the
mere common consent of the educated in these Cultures--has been able to
fashion a set of names upon which it would be impossible to improve.[40]
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 again and again in tragic crises, while
the Classical gets all it can out of them, without suffering. But all
these tendencies have their roots in the spirituality of the Culture
itself--and sometimes they tell us more of this Culture than does its
own language, which often hides more than it communicates.
V
A glance over the group of the Cultures discloses task after task. The
nineteenth century, in which historical research was guided by natural
science, and historical thought by the ideas of the Baroque, has simply
brought us to a pinnacle whence we see the new world at our feet. Shall
we ever take possession of that new world?
Even to-day uniform treatment of these grand life-courses is immensely
difficult, because the more remote fields have not been seriously
worked up at all. Once more, it is the lordly outlook of the West
European--he will only notice that which approaches him from one or
another antiquity by the proper and respectful route of a Middle Age,
and that which goes its own ways will get but little of his attention.
Thus, of the things of the Chinese and the Indian worlds, certain
kinds are now beginning to be tackled--art, religion, philosophy--but
the political history is dealt with, if at all, “chattily.” It does
not occur to anyone to treat the great constitutional problems of
Chinese history--the Hohenstaufen-destiny of the Li-Wang (842), the
first Congress of Princes (659), the struggle of principle between
the imperialism (Lien-heng) of the “Roman” state of Tsin and the
League-of-Nations idea (Ho-tsung) between 500 and 300, the rise of the
Chinese Augustus, Hwang-ti (221)--with anything of the thoroughness
that Mommsen devoted to the principate of Augustus. India, again;
however completely the Indians themselves have forgotten their
state-history, we have after all more available material for Buddha’s
time than we have for history of the Classical ninth and eighth
centuries, and yet even to-day we act as though “the” Indian had lived
entirely in his philosophy, just as the Athenians (so our classicists
would have us believe) spent their lives in beauty-philosophizing on
the banks of the Ilissus. But even Egyptian politics receive little
reflective attention. The later Egyptian historian concealed under the
name “Hyksos period” the same crisis which the Chinese treat of under
the name “Period of the Contending States”--here, too, is something
never yet investigated. And interest in the Arabian world has reached
to the frontier of the Classical tongues and no further. With what
endless assiduity we have described the constitution of Diocletian,
and assembled material for the entirely unimportant administrative
history of the provinces of Asia Minor--because it is written in Greek.
But the Sassanid state, the precedent and in every respect the model
of Diocletian’s, comes into the picture only occasionally, and then
as Rome’s _opponent_ in war. What about _its own_ administrative and
juristic history? What is the poor sum-total of material that we have
assembled for the law and economics of Egypt, India, and China[41] in
comparison with the work that has been done on Greek and Roman law.
About 3000[42] 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 honoured, out there in the
Germanic wild, as a magic symbol, and so may have originated some
“Early-German” ornament. But meantime the Babylonian realm itself
passed from hand to hand. Kassites, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Medes,
Persians, Macedonians--all of these small[43] warrior-hosts under
energetic leaders--successively replaced one another in the capital
city without any serious resistance on the part of its people.
It is a first example--soon paralleled in Egypt--of the Roman Empire
style. Under the Kassites rulers were set up and displaced by
prætorians; the Assyrians, like the later soldier-emperors of Rome
(after Commodus), maintained the old constitutional forms; the Persian
Cyrus and the Ostrogoth Theodoric regarded themselves as managers of
the Empire, and the warrior bands, Mede and Lombard, as master-peoples
in alien surroundings. But these are constitutional rather than factual
distinctions; in intent and purpose the legions of Septimius Severus,
the African, did not differ from the Visigoths of Alaric, and by the
battle of Adrianople[44] “Romans” and “barbarians” have become almost
indistinguishable.
After 1500 three new Cultures begin--first, the Indian, in the upper
Punjab; then, a hundred years later, the Chinese on the middle
Hwang-Ho; and then, about 1100, the Classical, on the Ægean Sea.
The Chinese historians speak of the three great dynasties of Hsia,
Shang, and Chóu in much the same way as Napoleon regarded himself as
a fourth dynasty following the Merovingians, the Carolingians, and
the Capetians--in reality, the third coexisted with the Culture right
through its course in each case. When in 441 B.C. the titular Emperor
of the Chóu dynasty became a state pensioner of the “Eastern Duke” and
when in A.D. 1793 “Louis Capet” was executed, the Culture in each case
passed into the Civilization. There are some bronzes of very great
antiquity preserved from late Chang times, which stand towards the
later art in exactly the same relation as Mycenæan to Early Classical
pottery and Carolingian to Romanesque art. In the Vedic, Homeric, and
Chinese springtimes, with their “_Pfalzen_” and “_Burgen_,” their
knighthood and feudal rulership, can be seen the whole image of our
Gothic, and the “period of the Great Protectors” (Ming-Chu, 685-691)
corresponds precisely to the time of Cromwell, Wallenstein, and
Richelieu and to the First Tyrannis of the Greek world.
The period 480-230 is called by the Chinese historians the “Period
of the Contending States”; it culminated in a century of unbroken
warfare between mass-armies with frightful social upheavals, and
out of it came the “Roman” state of Tsin as founder of a Chinese
Imperium. This phase Egypt experienced between 1780 and 1580, of which
the last century was the “Hyksos” time. The Classical experienced
it from 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.
During this period the centre of gravity changes--as from Attica to
Latium, so from the Hwang-ho (at Ho-nan-fu) to the Yang-tse (modern
province of Hu-pei). The Si-Kiang was as vague for the Chinese savants
of those days as the Elbe for the Alexandrian geographer, and of the
existence of India they had as yet no notion.
As on the other side of the globe there arose the principes of the
Julian-Claudian house, so here in China there arose the mighty figure
of Wang-Cheng, who led Tsin through the decisive struggle to sole
supremacy and in 221 assumed the title of Shi (literally equivalent
to “Augustus”) and the Cæsar-name Hwang-ti. He founded the “_Pax
Serica_,” as we may call it, carried out a grand social reform in the
exhausted Empire, and--as promptly as Rome[45]--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.[46]
Chance decreed that the heavy attacks of the Huns should break
themselves in vain upon the Chinese “Limes,” which at each crisis
found a strong emperor to defend it. The decisive repulse of the Huns
took place in 124-119 under the Chinese Trajan, Wu-ti; and it was he,
too, who finally incorporated Southern China in the Empire, with the
object of obtaining a route into India, and built a grand embattled
road to the Tarim. And so the Huns turned westward, and in due course
they appear, impelling a swarm of Germanic tribes, in face of the
Limes of the Roman world. This time they succeeded. The Roman Imperium
collapsed, and thus two only of the three empires continued, and still
continue, as desirable spoil for a succession of different powers.
To-day it is the “red-haired barbarian” of the West who is playing
before the highly civilized eyes of Brahman and Mandarin the rôle
once played by Mogul and Manchu, playing it neither better nor worse
than they, and certain like them to be superseded in due course by
other actors. But in the colonization-field of foundering Rome, on the
other hand, the future Western Culture was ripening underground in the
north-west, while in the east the Arabian Culture had flowered already.
The Arabian Culture[47] is a discovery. Its unity was suspected by late
Arabians, but it has so entirely escaped Western historical research
that not even a satisfactory name can be found for it. Conformably
to the dominant languages, the seed-time and the spring might be
called the Aramaic and the later time the Arabian, but there is no
really effectual name. In this field the Cultures were close to one
another, and the extension of the corresponding Civilizations led to
much overlaying. The pre-Cultural period of the Arabian, which we can
follow out in Persian and Jewish history, lay completely within the
area of the old Babylonian world, but the springtime was under the
mighty spell of the Classical Civilization, which invaded from the West
with all the power of a just-attained maturity, and the Egyptian and
Indian Civilizations also made themselves distinctly felt. And then
in turn the Arabian spirit--under Late Classical disguises for the
most part--cast its spell over the nascent Culture of the West. The
Arabian Civilization stratified over a still surviving Classical in
the popular soul of south Spain, Provence, and Sicily, and became the
model upon which the Gothic soul educated itself. The proper landscape
of this Culture is remarkably extended and singularly fragmented. Let
one put oneself at Palmyra or Ctesiphon, and, musing, look outwards
all round. In the north is Osrhoene; Edessa became the Florence of the
Arabian spring. To the west are Syria and Palestine--the home of the
New Testament and of the Jewish Mishna, with Alexandria as a standing
outpost. To the east Mazdaism experienced a mighty regeneration,
which corresponded to the birth of Jesus in Jewry and about which the
fragmentary state of Avesta literature enables us to say only _that_ it
happened.[48] Here, too, were born the Talmud and the religion of Mani.
Deep in the south, the future home of Islam, an age of chivalry was
able to develop as fully as in the realm of the Sassanids; even to-day
there survive, unexplored, the ruins of castles and strongholds whence
the decisive wars were waged between the Christian state of Axum and
the Jewish state of the Himyarites on the two shores of the Red Sea,
with Roman and Persian diplomacy poking the fire. In the extreme north
was Byzantium, that strange mixture of sere, civilized, Classical,
with vernal and chevaleresque which is manifested above all in the
bewildering history of the Byzantine army system. Into this world Islam
at last--and far too late--brought a consciousness of unity, and this
accounts for the self-evident character of its victorious progress
and the almost unresisting adhesion of Christians, Jews, and Persians
alike. Out of Islam in due course arose the Arabian Civilization which
was at the peak of its intellectual completeness when the barbarians
from the West broke in for a moment, marching on Jerusalem. How, we
may ask ourselves, did this inroad appear in the eyes of cultivated
Arabians of the time? Somewhat like Bolshevism, perhaps? For the
statecraft of the Arabian World the political relations of “Frankistan”
were something on a lower plane. Even in our Thirty Years’ War--from
that point of view a drama of the “Far West”--when an English envoy[49]
strove to stir up the Porte against the house of Habsburg, the
statesman who handled policy over a field stretching from Morocco to
India, evidently judged that the little predatory states on the horizon
were of no real interest. And even when Napoleon landed in Egypt, there
were still many without an inkling of the future.
Meantime yet another new Culture developed in Mexico. This lay so
remote from the rest that no word even passed between them. All the
more astonishing, therefore, is the similarity of its development to
that of the Classical. No doubt the archæologist standing before a
teocalli would be horrified to think of his Doric temple in such a
connexion; yet it was a thoroughly Classical trait--feebleness of the
will-to-power in the matter of technics--that kept the Aztecs ill armed
and so made possible their catastrophe.
For, as it happens, this is the one example of a Culture ended by
violent death. It was not starved, suppressed, or thwarted, but
murdered in the full glory of its unfolding, destroyed like a sunflower
whose head is struck off by one passing. All these states--including a
world-power and more than one federation--with an extent and resources
far superior to those of the Greek and Roman states of Hannibal’s day;
with a comprehensive policy, a carefully ordered financial system, and
a highly developed legislation; with administrative ideas and economic
tradition such as the ministers of Charles V could never have imagined;
with a wealth of literature in several languages, an intellectually
brilliant and polite society in great cities to which the West could
not show one single parallel--all this was not broken down in some
desperate war, but washed out by a handful of bandits in a few years,
and so entirely that the relics of the population retained not even
a memory of it all. Of the giant city Tenochtitlan[50] not a stone
remains above ground. The cluster of great Mayan cities in the virgin
forests of Yucatan succumbed swiftly to the attack of vegetation, and
we do not know the old name of any one of them. Of the literature three
books survive, but no one can read them.
The most appalling feature of the tragedy was that it was not in the
least a necessity of the Western Culture that it should happen. It was
a private affair of adventurers, and at the time no one in Germany,
France, or England had any idea of what was taking place. This instance
shows, as no other shows, that _the history of humanity has no meaning
whatever_ and that deep significances reside only in the life-courses
of the separate Cultures. Their 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.[51]
A sure knowledge of even the most general history of this world is
now for ever impossible. Events as important as our Crusades and
Reformation have vanished without leaving a trace. Only in recent years
has research managed to settle the outline, at any rate, of the later
course of development, and with the help of these data comparative
morphology may attempt to widen and deepen the picture by means of
those of other Cultures.[52] On this basis the epochal points of this
Culture lie about two hundred years later than those of the Arabian and
seven hundred years before those of our own. There was a pre-Cultural
period which, as in China and Egypt, developed script and calendar, but
of this we now know nothing. The time-reckoning began with an initial
date which lies far behind the birth of Christ, but it is impossible
now to fix it with certainty relative to that event.[53] In any case,
it shows an extraordinarily strongly developed history-sense in Mexican
mankind.
The springtime of the “Hellenic” Maya states is evidenced by the
dated relief-pillars of the old cities of Copan (in the south),
Tikal, and somewhat later Chichen Itza (in the north), Naranjo, and
Seibal[54]--about 160-450. At the end of this period Chichen Itza was
a model of architecture that was followed for centuries. The full glory
of Palenque and Piedras Negras (in the west) may correspond to our Late
Gothic and Renaissance (450-600 = European 1250-1400?). In the Baroque
or Late period Champutun appears as the 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.[55] The Nahua provinces were politically and militarily
secure, the southward thrust was developing rapidly, and a hand was
about to be laid on the Maya states; there is no telling what the
course of the next centuries would have been. And suddenly--the end.
At that date the West was at a level which the Maya had already
overpassed by 700; nothing short of the age of Frederick the Great
would have been ripe enough to comprehend the politics of the Mayapan
League, and what the Aztecs of A.D. 1500 were organizing lies for us
well in the future. But that which distinguished Faustian man, even
then, from the man of any other Culture was his irrepressible urge
into distance. It was this, in the last resort, that killed and even
annihilated the Mexican and Peruvian Culture--the unparalleled drive
that was ready for service in any and every domain. Certainly the Ionic
style was imitated in Carthage and in Persepolis, and Hellenistic taste
in the Gandara art of India found admirers. Future investigation will
probably find some Chinese in the primitive German wood-architecture.
The Mosque style ruled from Farther India to North Russia, to West
Africa, and to Spain. But all that amounts to nothing as compared
with the expansion-power of the Western Soul. The true style-history
of that soul, it need hardly be said, accomplished itself only on
the mother soil, but its resultant effects knew no bounds. On the
spot where Tenochtitlan had stood, the Spaniards erected a Baroque
cathedral adorned with masterpieces of Spanish painting and plastic.
Already at that date the Portuguese had got to work in Hither India
and Late-Baroque architects from Spain and Italy in the heart of
Poland and Russia. The English Rococo, and especially Empire, made for
themselves a broad province in the Plantation States of North America,
whose wonderful rooms and furniture are far less well known in Germany
than they ought to be. Classicism was at work already in Canada and at
the Cape, and presently there were no limits at all. It was just the
same in every other domain of form; the relation between this forceful
young Civilization and the still remaining old ones--is that it covers
them, all alike, with ever-thickening layers of West-European-American
life-forms under which, slowly, the ancient native form disappears.
VI
In the presence of this picture of the world of man--which is destined
to displace the older one of “Ancient-Mediæval-Modern” that is still
firmly established even in the best minds--it will become possible,
too, to give a new answer (and for our Civilization, I think, a final
answer) to the old question: What is History?
Ranke, in the preface of his _World History_ says: “History only
begins when the monuments become intelligible, and trustworthy written
evidences are available.” This is the answer of a collector and
arranger of data; obviously, it confuses that which has happened with
that which happened within the field of view open at the particular
time to the particular student. Mardonius was defeated at 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,[56] says: “Historic
is that which is, or has been, effective.... Only through historical
treatment does the individual process, lifted by history from among the
infinite mass of contemporary processes, become the historical event.”
The remark is thoroughly in the manner and spirit of Hegel. Firstly,
its starting-point is the fact and not any accidental knowledge or
ignorance of the fact, and if there is any mode of picturing history
which necessarily imposes such a starting-point, it is that presented
in these pages, since it compels us to assume the existence of facts of
the first order in majestic sequences, even when we do not (and never
will) know them in the scientific sense. We have to learn to handle
the unknown in the most comprehensive way. Secondly, truths exist for
the mind, facts only in relation to life. Historical treatment--in
my terminology, _physiognomic fact_--is decided by the _blood_, the
gift of judging men broadened out into past and future, the innate
flair for persons and situations, for the event, for that which had
to be, must have been. It does _not_ consist in bare scientific
criticism and knowing of data. The scientific mode of experience is,
for every true historian, something additional or subordinate. It
addresses to the waking-consciousness, by the way of understanding and
imparting, laborious and repetitive proof of that which _one moment_ of
illumination has already, and instantly, demonstrated to Being.
Just because the force of our Faustian being has by now worked up
about us a circumcircle of inner experiences such as no other men and
no other time could acquire--just because for us the remotest events
become increasingly significant and disclose relationships that no
one else, not even the closest contemporaries of these events, could
perceive--much has now become history (i.e., life in tune with our
life) that centuries ago was not history. Tacitus probably “knew”
the data concerning Tiberius Gracchus’s revolution, but for him it
no longer meant anything effectively, whereas for us it is full
of meaning. The history of the Monophysites and their relation to
Mohammed’s _milieu_ signify nothing whatever to the Islamic believer,
but for _us_ it is recognizably the story of English Puritanism in
another setting. For the world-view of a Civilization which has
made the whole earth its stage, nothing is in the last resort quite
unhistorical. The scheme of ancient-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_.
A battle between two Negro tribes in the Sudan, or between the Cherusci
and Chatti of Cæsar’s time, or--what is substantially the same--between
ant-communities, is merely a drama of “living Nature.” But when the
Cherusci beat the Romans, as in the year 9,[57] or the Aztecs the
Tlascalans, it is _history_. Here the “when” is of importance and
each decade, or even year, matters, for here one is dealing with the
march of a grand life-course, in which every decision takes rank as an
epoch. Here there is an object towards which every happening impels, a
being that strives to fulfil its predestination, a tempo, an organic
duration--and not the disorderly ups and downs of Scythians, Gauls,
or Caribs, of which the particular detail is as unimportant as that
of doings in a colony of beavers or a steppe-herd of gazelles. These
are _zoölogical happenings_ and have their place in an altogether
different orientation of our outlook, that in which we are concerned
not with the destiny of individual peoples or herds, but with that of
“man,” or “the” gazelle, or “the” ants, _as species_. Primitive man has
history only in the biological sense, and all prehistoric study boils
down to the investigation of this sense. The increasing familiarity
of men with fire, stone tools, and the mechanical laws which make
weapons effective, characterizes only the development of the type and
of its latent possibilities. The objects for which one tribe employed
these weapons against another tribe are of no importance in this plane
of history. Stone Age and Baroque are age-grades in the existence of
respectively a genus and a Culture--i.e., two organisms belonging to
two fundamentally different settings. And here I would protest against
two assumptions that have so far vitiated all historical thought: the
assertion of an ultimate aim of mankind as a whole and the denial
of there being ultimate aims at all. The life _has_ an aim. It is
the fulfilment of that which was ordained at its conception. But the
individual belongs by birth to the particular high Culture on the
one hand and to the type Man on the other--there is no third unit of
being for him. His destiny must lie either in the zoölogical or in the
world-historical field. “Historical” man, as I understand the word
and as all great historians have meant it to be taken, is the man of
a Culture that is in full march towards self-fulfilment. Before this,
after this, outside this, man is _historyless_; and the destinies of
the people to which he belongs matter as little as the Earth’s destiny
matters when the plane of attention is the astronomical and not the
geological.
From this there follows a fact of the most decisive importance, and
one that has never before been established: that man is not only
historyless before the birth of the Culture, but again becomes so as
soon as a Civilization has worked itself out fully to the definitive
form which betokens the end of the living development of the Culture
and the exhaustion of the last potentialities of its significant
existence. That which we see in the Egyptian Civilization after Seti
I (1300) and in the Chinese, the Indian, the Arabian to this day
is--notwithstanding all the cleverness of the religious, philosophical
and, especially, political forms in which it is wrapped--just the old
zoölogical up-and-down of the primitive age again. Whether the lords
sitting in Babylon were wild war-hordes like the Kassites or refined
inheritors like the Persians, when, for how long, and with what
success they kept their seats, signified nothing from the standpoint
of Babylon. The comfort of the population was affected by such things,
naturally, but they made no difference either way to the fact that the
soul of this world was extinct and its events, therefore, void of any
deep meaning. A new dynasty, native or foreign, in Egypt, a revolution
or a conquest in China, a new Germanic people in the Roman Empire, were
elements in the history of the landscape like a change in the fauna or
the migration of a flock of birds.
In the history, the genuine history, of higher men the stake fought
for and the basis of the animal struggle to prevail is ever--even when
driver and driven are completely unconscious of the symbolic force of
their doings, purposes, and fortunes--the actualization of something
that is essentially spiritual, the translation of an idea into a
living historical form. This applies equally to the struggle of big
style-tendencies in art (Gothic and Renaissance), of philosophy (Stoics
and Epicureans), of political ideals (Oligarchy and Tyrannis), and of
economic forms (Capitalism and Socialism). But the post-history is
void of all this. All that remains is the struggle for mere power, for
animal advantage _per se_. Whereas previously power, even when to all
appearance destitute of any inspiration, was always serving the Idea
somehow or other, in the late Civilization even the most convincing
illusion of an idea is only the mask for purely zoölogical strivings.
The distinction between Indian philosophy before and after Buddha
is that the former is a grand movement towards attaining the aim of
Indian thought by and in the Indian soul, and the latter the perpetual
turning-up of new facets of a now crystallized and undevelopable
thought-stock. The solutions are there, for good, though the fashions
of expressing them change. The same is true of Chinese painting before
and after the Han dynasties--whether we know it or not--and of Egyptian
architecture before and after the beginning of the New Empire. So
also with technics. The West’s discoveries of the steam-engine and
of electricity are accepted by the Chinese to-day in just the same
way--and with just the same religious awe--as bronze and the plough
were accepted four thousand years ago, and fire in a still remoter
age. Both, spiritually, differ _in toto_ from the discoveries which
the Chinese made for themselves in the Chóu period and which in each
instance signified an epoch in their inner history.[58] Before and
after that time, centuries play a vastly less important rôle than
decades and even years within the Culture, _for the spans of time are
gradually returning to the biological order_. This it is that confers
upon these very Late conditions--which to the people living in them
seem almost self-evident--that character of changeless pageantry
which the genuine Culture-man--e.g., Herodotus in Egypt and the
Western successors of Marco Polo in China--has found so astonishing
in comparison with his own vigorous pulse of development. It is the
changelessness of non-history.
Is not Classical history at an end with Actium and the _Pax Romana?_
There are no more of those great decisions which concentrate the
inner meaning of a whole Culture. Unreason, biology, is beginning
to dominate, and it is becoming a matter of indifference for the
world--though not for the actions of the private individual--whether an
event turns out thus or thus. All great political questions are solved,
as they are solved sooner or later in every Civilization, inasmuch
as questions are no longer felt as questions and are not asked. Yet
a little while, and man will cease to understand what problems were
really involved in the earlier catastrophes; what is not livingly
experienced of 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.
Compare the death of Tiberius Gracchus with the death of Nero, when
Rome received the news of Galba’s rising, or the victory of Sulla
over the Marian party with that of Septimius Severus over Pescennius
Niger. If in these later cases the event had gone otherwise, would
the course of the Imperial Age have been altered in any way? The
distinction so carefully drawn by Mommsen and Eduard Meyer[59] between
the “principate” of Pompey and Augustus and the “monarchy” of Cæsar
misses the mark completely. At that stage, the point is merely a
constitutional one, though fifty years before it would still have
signified an opposition between ideas. When Vindex and Galba in 68
set out to restore “the Republic,” they were gambling on a notion in
days when notions having genuine symbolic force had ceased to be, and
the only question was who should have the plain material power. The
struggle for the 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.