Theory as Myth, p. 377. Every Natural Science depends upon a
preceding Religion, p. 391. Statics, Alchemy, Dynamics as the
theories of three Cultures, p. 382. The Atomic theory, p. 384.
The problem of motion insoluble, p. 388. The style of causal
process and experience, p. 391. The feeling of God and the
knowing of Nature, p. 392. The great Myth, p. 394. Classical,
Magian and Faustian _numina_, p. 397. Atheism, p. 408. Faustian
physics as a dogma of force, p. 411. Limits of its theoretical
(as distinct from its technical) development, p. 417. Self-
destruction of Dynamics, and invasion of historical ideas; theory
dissolves into a system of morphological relationships, p. 420.
INDEX _Following page_ 428
TABLES ILLUSTRATING THE COMPARATIVE _At end of volume_
MORPHOLOGY OF HISTORY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
I
In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of
predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the
destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time
and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment—the West-
European-American.
Hitherto the possibility of solving a problem so far-reaching has
evidently never been envisaged, and even if it had been so, the means of
dealing with it were either altogether unsuspected or, at best,
inadequately used.
Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and
incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call
a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is
essentially independent of the outward forms—social, spiritual and
political—which we see so clearly? Are not these actualities indeed
secondary or derived from that something? Does world-history present to
the seeing eye certain grand traits, again and again, with sufficient
constancy to justify certain conclusions? And if so, what are the limits
to which reasoning from such premisses may be pushed?
Is it possible to find in life itself—for human history is the sum of
mighty life-courses which already have had to be endowed with ego and
personality, in customary thought and expression, by predicating
entities of a higher order like “the Classical” or “the Chinese
Culture,” “Modern Civilization”—a series of stages which must be
traversed, and traversed moreover in an ordered and obligatory sequence?
For everything organic the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime
are fundamentals—may not these notions, in this sphere also, possess a
rigorous meaning which no one has as yet extracted? In short, is all
history founded upon general biographic archetypes?
The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the
corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in
time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when
comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great
question of Being.
If therefore we are to discover in what form the destiny of the Western
Culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to what culture
_is_, what its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul, to
nature, to intellect, what the forms of its manifestation are and how
far these forms—peoples, tongues and epochs, battles and ideas, states
and gods, arts and craft-works, sciences, laws, economic types and
world-ideas, great men and great events—may be accepted and pointed to
as symbols.
II
The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means
whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means we are
enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.
It is, and has always been, a matter of knowledge that the expression-
forms of world-history are limited in number, and that eras, epochs,
situations, persons are ever repeating themselves true to type. Napoleon
has hardly ever been discussed without a side-glance at Cæsar and
Alexander—analogies of which, as we shall see, the first is
morphologically quite inacceptable and the second is correct—while
Napoleon himself conceived of his situation as akin to Charlemagne’s.
The French Revolutionary Convention spoke of Carthage when it meant
England, and the Jacobins styled themselves Romans. Other such
comparisons, of all degrees of soundness and unsoundness, are those of
Florence with Athens, Buddha with Christ, primitive Christianity with
modern Socialism, the Roman financial magnate of Cæsar’s time with the
Yankee. Petrarch, the first passionate archæologist (and is not
archæology itself an expression of the sense that history is
repetition?) related himself mentally to Cicero, and but lately Cecil
Rhodes, the organizer of British South Africa, who had in his library
specially prepared translations of the classical lives of the Cæsars,
felt himself akin to the Emperor Hadrian. The fated Charles XII of
Sweden used to carry Quintus Curtius’s life of Alexander in his pocket,
and to copy that conqueror was his deliberate purpose.
Frederick the Great, in his political writings—such as his
_Considérations_, 1738—moves among analogies with perfect assurance.
Thus he compares the French to the Macedonians under Philip and the
Germans to the Greeks. “Even now,” he says, “the Thermopylæ of Germany,
Alsace and Lorraine, are in the hands of Philip,” therein exactly
characterizing the policy of Cardinal Fleury. We find him drawing
parallels also between the policies of the Houses of Habsburg and
Bourbon and the proscriptions of Antony and of Octavius.
Still, all this was only fragmentary and arbitrary, and usually implied
rather a momentary inclination to poetical or ingenious expressions than
a really deep sense of historical forms.
Thus in the case of Ranke, a master of artistic analogy, we find that
his parallels of Cyaxares and Henry the Fowler, of the inroads of the
Cimmerians and those of the Hungarians, possess morphologically no
significance, and his oft-quoted analogy between the Hellenic city-
states and the Renaissance republics very little, while the deeper truth
in his comparison of Alcibiades and Napoleon is accidental. Unlike the
strict mathematician, who finds inner relationships between two groups
of differential equations where the layman sees nothing but
dissimilarities of outward form, Ranke and others draw their historical
analogies with a Plutarchian, popular-romantic, touch, and aim merely at
presenting comparable scenes on the world-stage.
It is easy to see that, at bottom, it is neither a principle nor a sense
of historic necessity, but simple inclination, that governs the choice
of the tableaux. From any _technique_ of analogies we are far distant.
They throng up (to-day more than ever) without scheme or unities, and if
they do hit upon something which is true—in the essential sense of the
word that remains to be determined—it is thanks to luck, more rarely to
instinct, never to a principle. In this region no one hitherto has set
himself to work out a _method_, nor has had the slightest inkling that
there is here a root, in fact the only root, from which can come a broad
solution of the problems of History.
Analogies, in so far as they laid bare the organic structure of history,
might be a blessing to historical thought. Their technique, developing
under the influence of a comprehensive idea, would surely eventuate in
inevitable conclusions and logical mastery. But as hitherto understood
and practised they have been a curse, for they have enabled the
historians to follow their own tastes, instead of soberly realizing that
their first and hardest task was concerned with the symbolism of history
and its analogies, and, in consequence, the problem has till now not
even been comprehended, let alone solved. Superficial in many cases (as
for instance in designating Cæsar as the creator of the official
newspaper), these analogies are worse than superficial in others (as
when phenomena of the Classical Age that are not only extremely complex
but utterly alien to us are labelled with modern catchwords like
Socialism, Impressionism, Capitalism, Clericalism), while occasionally
they are bizarre to the point of perversity—witness the Jacobin clubs
with their cult of Brutus, that millionaire-extortioner Brutus who, in
the name of oligarchical doctrine and with the approval of the patrician
senate, murdered the Man of the Democracy.
III
Thus our theme, which originally comprised only the limited problem of
present-day civilization, broadens itself into a new philosophy—_the_
philosophy of the future, so far as the metaphysically-exhausted soil of
the West can bear such, and in any case the only philosophy which is
within the _possibilities_ of the West-European mind in its next stages.
It expands into the conception of a _morphology of world history_, of
the world-as-history in contrast to the morphology of the world-as-
nature that hitherto has been almost the only theme of philosophy. And
it reviews once again the forms and movements of the world in their
depths and final significance, but this time according to an entirely
different ordering which groups them, not in an ensemble picture
inclusive of everything known, but in a picture of _life_, and presents
them not as things-become, but as things-becoming.
The _world-as-history_, conceived, viewed and given form from out of its
opposite the _world-as-nature_—here is a new aspect of human existence
on this earth. As yet, in spite of its immense significance, both
practical and theoretical, this aspect has not been realized, still less
presented. Some obscure inkling of it there may have been, a distant
momentary glimpse there has often been, but no one has deliberately
faced it and taken it in with all its implications. We have before us
two possible ways in which man may inwardly possess and experience the
world around him. With all rigour I distinguish (as to form, not
substance) the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content
of images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and
the system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible, the
intents and purposes of imagination ordering according to plan from the
intents and purposes of experience dissecting according to scheme; and—
to mention even thus early an opposition that has never yet been noted,
in spite of its significance—the domain of _chronological_ from that of
_mathematical number_.[1]
Consequently, in a research such as that lying before us, there can be
no question of taking spiritual-political events, as they become visible
day by day on the surface, at their face value, and arranging them on a
scheme of “causes” or “effects” and following them up in the obvious and
intellectually easy directions. Such a “pragmatic” handling of history
would be nothing but a piece of “natural science” in disguise, and for
their part, the supporters of the materialistic idea of history make no
secret about it—it is their adversaries who largely fail to see the
similarity of the two methods. What concerns us is not what the
historical facts which appear at this or that time _are_, per se, but
what they signify, what they point to, _by appearing_. Present-day
historians think they are doing a work of supererogation in bringing in
religious and social, or still more art-history, details to “illustrate”
the political sense of an epoch. But the decisive factor—decisive, that
is, in so far as visible history is the expression, sign and embodiment
of soul—they forget. I have not hitherto found one who has carefully
considered the _morphological relationship_ that inwardly binds together
the expression-forms of _all_ branches of a Culture, who has gone beyond
politics to grasp the ultimate and fundamental ideas of Greeks,
Arabians, Indians and Westerners in mathematics, the meaning of their
early ornamentation, the basic forms of their architecture,
philosophies, dramas and lyrics, their choice and development of great
arts, the detail of their craftsmanship and choice of materials—let
alone appreciated the decisive importance of these matters for the form-
problems of history. Who amongst them realizes that between the
Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in the age
of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean
geometry, between the space-perspective of Western oil-painting and the
conquest of space by railroad, telephone and long-range weapon, between
contrapuntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities?
Yet, viewed from this morphological standpoint, even the humdrum facts
of politics assume a symbolic and even a metaphysical character, and—
what has perhaps been impossible hitherto—things such as the Egyptian
administrative system, the Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the
cheque, the Suez Canal, the book-printing of the Chinese, the Prussian
Army, and the Roman road-engineering can, as symbols, be made
_uniformly_ understandable and appreciable.
But at once the fact presents itself that as yet there exists no theory-
enlightened art of historical treatment. What passes as such draws its
methods almost exclusively from the domain of that science which alone
has completely disciplined the methods of cognition, viz., physics, and
thus we imagine ourselves to be carrying on historical research when we
are really following out objective connexions of cause and effect. It is
a remarkable fact that the old-fashioned philosophy never imagined even
the possibility of there being any other relation than this between the
conscious human understanding and the world outside. Kant, who in his
main work established the formal rules of cognition, took _nature_ only
as the object of reason’s activity, and neither he himself, nor anyone
after him, noted the reservation. Knowledge, for Kant, is mathematical
knowledge. He deals with innate intuition-forms and categories of the
reason, but he never thinks of the wholly different mechanism by which
historical impressions are apprehended. And Schopenhauer, who,
significantly enough, retains but one of the Kantian categories, viz.,
causality, speaks contemptuously of history.[2] That there is, besides a
necessity of cause and effect—which I may call the _logic of space_—
another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny—the
_logic of time_—is a fact of the deepest inward certainty, a fact which
suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic thought and
constitutes the essence and kernel of all history (in contradistinction
to nature) but is unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the
“Critique of Pure Reason” investigates. This fact still awaits its
theoretical formulation. As Galileo says in a famous passage of his
_Saggiatore_, philosophy, as Nature’s great book, is written “in
mathematical language.” We await, to-day, the philosopher who will tell
us in what language history is written and how it is to be read.
Mathematics and the principle of Causality lead to a naturalistic,
Chronology and the idea of Destiny to a historical ordering of the
phenomenal world. Both orderings, each on its own account, cover the
_whole_ world. The difference is only in the eyes by which and through
which this world is realized.
-----
Footnote 1:
Kant’s error, an error of very wide bearing which has not even yet
been overcome, was first of all in bringing the outer and inner Man
into relation with the ideas of space and time by pure scheme, though
the meanings of these are numerous and, above all, not unalterable;
and secondly in allying arithmetic with the one and geometry with the
other in an utterly mistaken way. It is not between arithmetic and
geometry—we must here anticipate a little—but between chronological
and mathematical number that there is fundamental opposition.
Arithmetic and geometry are _both_ spatial mathematics and in their
higher regions they are no longer separable. _Time-reckoning_, of
which the plain man is capable of a perfectly clear understanding
through his senses, answers the question “When,” not “What” or “How
Many.”
Footnote 2:
One cannot but be sensible how little depth and power of abstraction
has been associated with the treatment of, say, the Renaissance or the
Great Migrations, as compared with what is obviously required for the
theory of functions and theoretical optics. Judged by the standards of
the physicist and the mathematician, the historian becomes _careless_
as soon as he has assembled and ordered his material and passes on to
interpretation.
-----
IV
Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and
interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from
which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the
world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a
deeper reality. Whether he is capable of creating these shapes, which of
them it is that dominates his waking consciousness, is a primordial
problem of all human existence.
Man, thus, has before him two _possibilities_ of world-formation. But it
must be noted, at the very outset, that these possibilities are not
necessarily _actualities_, and if we are to enquire into the sense of
all history we must begin by solving a question which has never yet been
put, viz., _for whom_ is there History? The question is seemingly
paradoxical, for history is obviously for everyone to this extent, that
every man, with his whole existence and consciousness, is a part of
history. But it makes a great difference whether anyone lives under the
constant impression that his life is an element in a far wider life-
course that goes on for hundreds and thousands of years, or conceives of
himself as something rounded off and self-contained. For the latter type
of consciousness there is certainly no world-history, no _world-as-
history_. But how if the self-consciousness of a whole nation, how if a
whole Culture rests on this ahistoric spirit? How must actuality appear
to it? The world? Life? Consider the Classical Culture. In the world-
consciousness of the Hellenes all experience, not merely the personal
but the common past, was immediately transmuted into a timeless,
immobile, mythically-fashioned background for the particular momentary
present; thus the history of Alexander the Great began even before his
death to be merged by Classical sentiment in the Dionysus legend, and to
Cæsar there seemed at the least nothing preposterous in claiming descent
from Venus.
Such a spiritual condition it is practically impossible for us men of
the West, with a sense of time-distances so strong that we habitually
and unquestioningly speak of so many years before or after Christ, to
reproduce in ourselves. But we are not on that account entitled, in
dealing with the problems of History, simply to ignore the fact.
What diaries and autobiographies yield in respect of an individual, that
historical research in the widest and most inclusive sense—that is,
every kind of psychological comparison and analysis of alien peoples,
times and customs—yields as to the soul of a Culture as a whole. But the
Classical culture possessed no _memory_, no organ of history in this
special sense. The memory of the Classical man—so to call it, though it
is somewhat arbitrary to apply to alien souls a notion derived from our
own—is something different, since past and future, as arraying
perspectives in the working consciousness, are absent and the “pure
Present,” which so often roused Goethe’s admiration in every product of
the Classical life and in sculpture particularly, fills that life with
an intensity that to us is perfectly unknown.
This pure Present, whose greatest symbol is the Doric column, in itself
predicates the _negation of time_ (of direction). For Herodotus and
Sophocles, as for Themistocles or a Roman consul, the past is subtilized
instantly into an impression that is timeless and changeless, _polar and
not periodic_ in structure—in the last analysis, of such stuff as myths
are made of—whereas for our world-sense and our inner eye the past is a
definitely periodic and purposeful organism of centuries or millennia.
But it is just this background which gives the life, whether it be the
Classical or the Western life, its special colouring. What the Greek
called Kosmos was the image of a world that is not continuous but
complete. _Inevitably_, then, the Greek man himself was not a series but
a term.[3]
For this reason, although Classical man was well acquainted with the
strict chronology and almanac-reckoning of the Babylonians and
especially the Egyptians, and therefore with that eternity-sense and
disregard of the present-as-such which revealed itself in their broadly-
conceived operations of astronomy and their exact measurements of big
time-intervals, none of this ever became _intimately_ a part of him.
What his philosophers occasionally told him on the subject they had
heard, not experienced, and what a few brilliant minds in the Asiatic-
Greek cities (such as Hipparchus and Aristarchus) discovered was
rejected alike by the Stoic and by the Aristotelian, and outside a small
professional circle not even noticed. Neither Plato nor Aristotle had an
observatory. In the last years of Pericles, the Athenian people passed a
decree by which all who propagated astronomical theories were made
liable to impeachment (εἰσαγγελία). This last was an act of the deepest
symbolic significance, expressive of the determination of the Classical
soul to banish distance, in every aspect, from its world-consciousness.
As regards Classical history-writing, take Thucydides. The mastery of
this man lies in his truly Classical power of making alive and self-
explanatory the events of the _present_, and also in his possession of
the magnificently _practical outlook_ of the born statesman who has
himself been both general and administrator. In virtue of this quality
of _experience_ (which we unfortunately confuse with the historical
sense proper), his work confronts the merely learned and professional
historian as an inimitable model, and quite rightly so. But what is
absolutely hidden from Thucydides is perspective, the power of surveying
the history of centuries, that which for us is implicit in the very
conception of a historian. The fine pieces of Classical history-writing
are invariably those which set forth matters within the political
present of the writer, whereas for us it is the direct opposite, our
historical masterpieces without exception being those which deal with a
distant past. Thucydides would have broken down in handling even the
Persian Wars, let alone the general history of Greece, while that of
Egypt would have been utterly out of his reach. He, as well as Polybius
and Tacitus (who like him were practical politicians), loses his
sureness of eye from the moment when, in looking backwards, he
encounters motive forces in any form that is unknown in his practical
experience. For Polybius even the First Punic War, for Tacitus even the
reign of Augustus, are inexplicable. As for Thucydides, his lack of
historical feeling—in our sense of the phrase—is conclusively
demonstrated on the very first page of his book by the astounding
statement that before his time (about 400 B.C.) no events of importance
had occurred (oὐ μεγάλα γενέσθαι) in the world![4]
Consequently, Classical history down to the Persian Wars and for that
matter the structure built up on traditions at much later periods, are
the product of an essentially mythological thinking. The constitutional
history of Sparta is a poem of the Hellenistic period, and Lycurgus, on
whom it centres and whose “biography” we are given in full detail, was
probably in the beginning an unimportant local god of Mount Taygetus.
The invention of pre-Hannibalian Roman history was still going on even
in Cæsar’s time. The story of the expulsion of the Tarquins by Brutus is
built round some contemporary of the Censor Appius Claudius (310 B.C.).
The names of the Roman kings were at that period made up from the names
of certain plebeian families which had become wealthy (K. J. Neumann).
In the sphere of constitutional history, setting aside altogether the
“constitution” of Servius Tullius, we find that even the famous land law
of Licinius (367 B.C.) was not in existence at the time of the Second
Punic War (B. Niese). When Epaminondas gave freedom and statehood to the
Messenians and the Arcadians, these peoples promptly provided themselves
with an early history. But the astounding thing is not that history of
this sort was produced, but that there was practically none of any other
sort; and the opposition between the Classical and the modern outlook is
sufficiently illustrated by saying that Roman history before 250 B.C.,
as known in Cæsar’s time, was substantially a forgery, and that the
little that we know has been established by ourselves and was entirely
unknown to the later Romans. In what sense the Classical world
understood the word “history” we can see from the fact that the
Alexandrine romance-literature exercised the strongest influence upon
serious political and religious history, even as regards its matter. It
never entered the Classical head to draw any distinction of principle
between history as a story and history as documents. When, towards the
end of the Roman republic, Varro set out to stabilize the religion that
was fast vanishing from the people’s consciousness, he classified the
deities _whose cult was exactly and minutely observed by the State_,
into “certain” and “uncertain” gods, i.e., into gods of whom something
was still known and gods that, in spite of the unbroken continuity of
official worship, had survived in name only. In actual fact, the
religion of Roman society in Varro’s time, the poet’s religion which
Goethe and even Nietzsche reproduced in all innocence, was mainly a
product of Hellenistic literature and had almost no relation to the
ancient practices, which no one any longer understood.
Mommsen clearly defined the West-European attitude towards this history
when he said that “the Roman historians,” meaning especially Tacitus,
“were men who said what it would have been meritorious to omit, and
omitted what it was essential to say.”
In the Indian Culture we have the perfectly ahistoric soul. Its decisive
expression is the Brahman Nirvana. There is no pure Indian astronomy, no
calendar, and therefore no history so far as history is the track of a
conscious spiritual evolution. Of the visible course of their Culture,
which as regards its organic phase came to an end with the rise of
Buddhism, we know even less than we do of Classical history, rich though
it must have been in great events between the 12th and 8th centuries.
And this is not surprising, since it was in dream-shapes and
mythological figures that both came to be fixed. It is a full millennium
after Buddha, about 500 A.D., when Ceylon first produces something
remotely resembling historical work, the “Mahavansa.”
The world-consciousness of Indian man was so ahistorically built that it
could not even treat the appearance of a book written by a single author
as an event determinate in time. Instead of an organic series of
writings by specific persons, there came into being gradually a vague
mass of texts into which everyone inserted what he pleased, and notions
such as those of intellectual individualism, intellectual evolution,
intellectual epochs, played no part in the matter. It is in this
_anonymous_ form that we possess the Indian philosophy—which is at the
same time all the Indian history that we have—and it is instructive to
compare with it the philosophy-history of the West, which is a perfectly
definite structure made up of individual books and personalities.
Indian man forgot everything, but Egyptian man forgot _nothing_. Hence,
while the art of portraiture—which is biography in the kernel—was
unknown in India, in Egypt it was practically the artist’s only theme.
The Egyptian soul, conspicuously historical in its texture and impelled
with primitive passion towards the infinite, perceived past and future
as its _whole_ world, and the present (which is identical with waking
consciousness) appeared to him simply as the narrow common frontier of
two immeasurable stretches. The Egyptian Culture is an embodiment of
_care_—which is the spiritual counterpoise of distance—care for the
future expressed in the choice of granite or basalt as the craftsman’s
materials,[5] in the chiselled archives, in the elaborate administrative
system, in the net of irrigation works,[6] and, necessarily _bound up
therewith_, care for the past. The Egyptian mummy is a symbol of the
first importance. The body of the dead man was _made everlasting_, just
as his personality, his “Ka,” was immortalized through the portrait-
statuettes, which were often made in many copies and to which it was
conceived to be attached by a transcendental likeness.
There is a deep relation between the attitude that is taken towards the
historic past and the conception that is formed of death, and this
relation is expressed in the _disposal of the dead_. The Egyptian denied
mortality, the Classical man affirmed it in the whole symbolism of his
Culture. The Egyptians embalmed even their history in chronological
dates and figures. From pre-Solonian Greece nothing has been handed
down, not a year-date, not a true name, not a tangible event—with the
consequence that the later history, (which alone we know) assumes undue
importance—but for Egypt we possess, from the 3rd millennium and even
earlier, the names and even the exact reign-dates of many of the kings,
and the New Empire must have had a complete knowledge of them. To-day,
pathetic symbols of the will to endure, the bodies of the great Pharaohs
lie in our museums, their faces still recognizable. On the shining,
polished-granite peak of the pyramid of Amenemhet III we can read to-day
the words “Amenemhet looks upon the beauty of the Sun” and, on the other
side, “Higher is the soul of Amenemhet than the height of Orion, and it
is united with the underworld.” Here indeed is victory over Mortality
and the mere present; it is to the last degree un-Classical.
-----
Footnote 3:
In the original, these fundamental antitheses are expressed simply by
means of _werden_ and _sein_. Exact renderings are therefore
impossible in English.—_Tr._
Footnote 4:
The attempts of the Greeks to frame something like a calendar or a
chronology after the Egyptian fashion, besides being very belated
indeed, were of extreme _naïveté_. The Olympiad reckoning is not an
era in the sense of, say, the Christian chronology, and is, moreover,
a late and purely literary expedient, without popular currency. The
people, in fact, had no general need of a numeration wherewith to date
the experiences of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, though a
few learned persons might be interested in the calendar question. We
are not here concerned with the soundness or unsoundness of a
calendar, but with its currency, with the question of whether men
regulated their lives by it or not; but, incidentally, even the list
of Olympian victors before 500 is quite as much of an invention as the
lists of earlier Athenian archons or Roman consuls. Of the
colonizations, we possess not one single authentic date (E. Meyer.
_Gesch. d. Alt._ II, 442. Beloch. _Griech. Gesch._ I, 2, 219) “in
Greece before the fifth century, no one ever thought of noting or
reporting historical events.” (Beloch. I, 1, 125). We possess an
inscription which sets forth a treaty between Elis and Heraea which
“was to be valid for a hundred years from this year.” What “this year”
was, is however not indicated. After a few years no one would have
known how long the treaty had still to run. Evidently this was a point
that no one had taken into account at the time—indeed, the very “men
of the moment” who drew up the document, probably themselves soon
forgot. Such was the childlike, fairy-story character of the Classical
presentation of history that any ordered dating of the events of, say,
the Trojan War (which occupies in their series the same position as
the Crusades in ours) would have been felt as a sheer solecism.
Equally backward was the geographical science of the Classical world
as compared with that of the Egyptians and the Babylonians. E. Meyer
(_Gesch. d. Alt._ II, 102) shows how the Greeks’ knowledge of the form
of Africa degenerated from Herodotus (who followed Persian
authorities) to Aristotle. The same is true of the Romans as the heirs
of the Carthaginians; they first repeated the information of their
alien forerunners and then slowly forgot it.
Footnote 5:
Contrast with this the fact, symbolically of the highest importance
and unparalleled in art-history, that the Hellenes, though they had
before their eyes the works of the Mycenæan Age and their land was
only too rich in stone, _deliberately reverted to wood_; hence the
absence of architectural remains of the period 1200-600. The Egyptian
plant-column was from the outset of stone, whereas the Doric column
was wooden, a clear indication of the intense antipathy of the
Classical soul towards duration.
Footnote 6:
Is there any Hellenic city that ever carried out one single
comprehensive work that tells of care for future generations? The road
and water systems which research has assigned to the Mycenæan—i.e.,
the pre-Classical—age fell into disrepair and oblivion from the birth
of the Classical peoples—that is, from the Homeric period. It is a
remarkably curious fact, proved beyond doubt by the lack of epigraphic
remains, that the Classical alphabet did not come into use till after
900, and even then only to a limited extent and for the most pressing
economic needs. Whereas in the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Mexican
and the Chinese Cultures the formation of a script begins in the very
twilight of dawn, whereas the Germans made themselves a Runic alphabet
and presently developed that respect for writing as such which led to
the successive refinements of ornamental calligraphy, the Classical
primitives were entirely ignorant of the numerous alphabets that were
current in the South and the East. We possess numerous inscriptions of
Hittite Asia Minor and of Crete, but not one of Homeric Greece. (See
Vol. II, pp. 180 et seq.)
-----
V
In opposition to this mighty group of Egyptian life-symbols, we meet at
the threshold of the Classical Culture the custom, typifying the ease
with which it could forget every piece of its inward and outward past,
of _burning the dead_. To the Mycenæan age the elevation into a ritual
of this particular funerary method amongst all those practised in turn
by stone-age peoples, was essentially alien; indeed its Royal tombs
suggest that earth-burial was regarded as peculiarly honourable. But in
Homeric Greece, as in Vedic India, we find a change, so sudden that its
origins must necessarily be psychological, from burial to that burning
which (the Iliad gives us the full pathos of the symbolic act) was the
ceremonial completion of death and the denial of all historical
duration.
From this moment the plasticity of the individual spiritual evolution
was at an end. Classical drama admitted truly historical motives just as
little as it allowed themes of inward evolution, and it is well known
how decisively the Hellenic instinct set itself against portraiture in
the arts. Right into the imperial period Classical art handled only the
matter that was, so to say, natural to it, the myth.[7] Even the “ideal”
portraits of Hellenistic sculpture are mythical, of the same kind as the
typical biographies of Plutarch’s sort. No great Greek ever wrote down
any recollections that would serve to fix a phase of experience for his
inner eye. Not even Socrates has told, regarding his inward life,
anything important in our sense of the word. It is questionable indeed
whether for a Classical mind it was even possible to react to the motive
forces that are presupposed in the production of a Parzeval, a Hamlet,
or a Werther. In Plato we fail to observe any conscious evolution of
doctrine; his separate works are merely treatises written from very
different standpoints which he took up from time to time, and it gave
him no concern whether and how they hung together. On the contrary, a
work of deep self-examination, the _Vita Nuova_ of Dante, is found at
the very outset of the spiritual history of the West. How little
therefore of the Classical pure-present there really was in Goethe, the
man who forgot nothing, the man whose works, as he avowed himself, are
only fragments of a _single great confession_!
After the destruction of Athens by the Persians, all the older art-works
were thrown on the dustheap (whence we are now extracting them), and we
do not hear that anyone in Hellas ever troubled himself about the ruins
of Mycenæ or Phaistos for the purpose of ascertaining historical facts.
Men read Homer but never thought of excavating the hill of Troy as
Schliemann did; for what they wanted was myth, not history. The works of
Æschylus and those of the pre-Socratic philosophers were already
partially lost in the Hellenistic period. In the West, on the contrary,
the piety inherent in and peculiar to the Culture manifested itself,
five centuries before Schliemann, in Petrarch—the fine collector of
antiquities, coins and manuscripts, the very type of historically-
sensitive man, viewing the distant past and scanning the distant
prospect (was he not the first to attempt an Alpine peak?), living in
his time, yet essentially not of it. The soul of the collector is
intelligible only by having regard to his conception of Time. Even more
passionate perhaps, though of a different colouring, is the collecting-
bent of the Chinese. In China, whoever travels assiduously pursues “old
traces” (Ku-tsi) and the untranslatable “Tao,” the basic principle of
Chinese existence, derives all its meaning from a deep historical
feeling. In the Hellenistic period, objects were indeed collected and
displayed everywhere, but they were curiosities of mythological appeal
(as described by Pausanias) as to which questions of date or purpose
simply did not arise—and this too in the very presence of Egypt, which
even by the time of the great Thuthmosis had been transformed into one
vast museum of strict tradition.
Amongst the Western peoples, it was the Germans who discovered the
mechanical _clock_, the dread symbol of the flow of time, and the chimes
of countless clock towers that echo day and night over West Europe are
perhaps the most wonderful expression of which a historical world-
feeling is capable.[8] In the timeless countrysides and cities of the
Classical world, we find nothing of the sort. Till the epoch of
Pericles, the time of day was estimated merely by the length of shadow,
and it was only from that of Aristotle that the word ὥρα received the
(Babylonian) significance of “hour”; prior to that there was no exact
subdivision of the day. In Babylon and Egypt water-clocks and sun-dials
were discovered in the very early stages, yet in Athens it was left to
Plato to introduce a practically useful form of clepsydra, and this was
merely a minor adjunct of everyday utility which could not have
influenced the Classical life-feeling in the smallest degree.
It remains still to mention the corresponding difference, which is very
deep and has never yet been properly appreciated, between Classical and
modern mathematics. The former conceived of things _as they are_, as
_magnitudes_, timeless and purely present, and so it proceeded to
Euclidean geometry and mathematical statics, rounding off its
intellectual system with the theory of conic sections. We conceive
things as they _become_ and _behave_, as _function_, and this brought us
to dynamics, analytical geometry and thence to the Differential
Calculus.[9] The modern theory of functions is the imposing marshalling
of this whole mass of thought. It is a bizarre, but nevertheless
psychologically exact, fact that the physics of the Greeks—being statics
and not dynamics—neither knew the use nor felt the absence of the time-
element, whereas we on the other hand work in thousandths of a second.
The one and only evolution-idea that is timeless, ahistoric, is
Aristotle’s entelechy.
This, then, is our task. We men of the Western Culture are, with our
historical sense, an exception and not a rule. World-history is _our_
world picture and not all mankind’s. Indian and Classical man formed no
image of a world in progress, and perhaps when in due course the
civilization of the West is extinguished, there will never again be a
Culture and a human type in which “world-history” is so potent a form of
the waking consciousness.
-----
Footnote 7:
From Homer to the tragedies of Seneca, a full thousand years, the same
handful of myth-figures (Thyestes, Clytæmnestra, Heracles and the
like) appear time after time without alteration, whereas in the poetry
of the West, Faustian Man figures, first as Parzeval or Tristan, then
(modified always into harmony with the epoch) as Hamlet, Don Quixote,
Don Juan, and eventually Faust or Werther, and now as the hero of the
modern world-city romance, but is always presented in the atmosphere
and under the conditions of a particular century.
Footnote 8:
It was about 1000 A.D. and therefore contemporaneously with the
beginning of the Romanesque style and the Crusades—the first symptoms
of a new Soul—that Abbot Gerbert (Pope Sylvester II), the friend of
the Emperor Otto III, invented the mechanism of the chiming wheel-
clock. In Germany too, the first tower-clocks made their appearance,
about 1200, and the pocket watch somewhat later. Observe the
significant association of time measurement with the edifices of
religion.
Footnote 9:
Newton’s choice of the name “fluxions” for his calculus was meant to
imply a standpoint towards certain metaphysical notions as to the
nature of time. In Greek mathematics time figures not at all.
-----
VI
What, then, _is_ world-history? Certainly, an ordered presentation of
the past, an inner postulate, the expression of a capacity for feeling
form. But a feeling for form, however definite, is not the same as form
itself. No doubt we feel world-history, experience it, and believe that
it is to be read just as a map is read. But, even to-day, it is only
forms of it that we know and not _the_ form of it, which is the mirror-
image of _our own_ inner life.
Everyone of course, if asked, would say that he saw the inward form of
History quite clearly and definitely. The illusion subsists because no
one has seriously reflected on it, still less conceived doubts as to his
own knowledge, for no one has the slightest notion how wide a field for
doubt there is. In fact, the _lay-out_ of world-history is an unproved
and subjective notion that has been handed down from generation to
generation (not only of laymen but of professional historians) and
stands badly in need of a little of that scepticism which from Galileo
onward has regulated and deepened our inborn ideas of nature.
Thanks to the subdivision of history into “Ancient,” “Mediæval” and
“Modern”—an incredibly jejune and _meaningless_ scheme, which has,
however, entirely dominated our historical thinking—we have failed to
perceive the true position in the general history of higher mankind, of
the little part-world which has developed on West-European[10] soil from
the time of the German-Roman Empire, to judge of its relative importance
and above all to estimate its direction. The Cultures that are to come
will find it difficult to believe that the validity of such a scheme
with its simple rectilinear progression and its meaningless proportions,
becoming more and more preposterous with each century, incapable of
bringing into itself the new fields of history as they successively come
into the light of our knowledge, was, in spite of all, never whole-
heartedly attacked. The criticisms that it has long been the fashion of
historical researchers to level at the scheme mean nothing; they have
only obliterated the one existing plan without substituting for it any
other. To toy with phrases such as “the Greek Middle Ages” or “Germanic
antiquity” does not in the least help us to form a clear and inwardly-
convincing picture in which China and Mexico, the empire of Axum and
that of the Sassanids have their proper places. And the expedient of
shifting the initial point of “modern history” from the Crusades to the
Renaissance, or from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th
Century, only goes to show that the scheme _per se_ is regarded as
unshakably sound.
It is not only that the scheme circumscribes the area of history. What
is worse, it rigs the stage. The ground of West Europe is treated as a
steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no
better reason, it seems, than because we live on it—and great histories
of millennial duration and mighty far-away Cultures are made to revolve
around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of
sun and planets! We select a single bit of ground as the natural centre
of the historical system, and make it the central sun. From it all the
events of history receive their real light, from it their importance is
judged in _perspective_. But it is in our own West-European conceit
alone that this phantom “world-history,” which a breath of scepticism
would dissipate, is acted out.
We have to thank that conceit for the immense optical illusion (become
natural from long habit) whereby distant histories of thousands of
years, such as those of China and Egypt, are made to shrink to the
dimensions of mere episodes while in the neighbourhood of our own
position the decades since Luther, and particularly since Napoleon, loom
large as Brocken-spectres. We know quite well that the slowness with
which a high cloud or a railway train in the distance seems to move is
only apparent, yet we believe that the _tempo_ of all early Indian,
Babylonian or Egyptian history was really slower than that of our own
recent past. And we think of them as less substantial, more damped-down,
more diluted, because we have not learned to make the allowance for
(inward and outward) distances.
It is self-evident that for the Cultures of the West the existence of
Athens, Florence or Paris is more important than that of Lo-Yang or
Pataliputra. But is it permissible to found a scheme of world-history on
estimates of such a sort? If so, then the Chinese historian is quite
entitled to frame a world-history in which the Crusades, the
Renaissance, Cæsar and Frederick the Great are passed over in silence as
insignificant. How, _from the morphological point of view_, should our
18th Century be more important than any other of the sixty centuries
that preceded it? Is it not ridiculous to oppose a “modern” history of a
few centuries, and that history to all intents localized in West Europe,
to an “ancient” history which covers as many millennia—incidentally
dumping into that “ancient history” the whole mass of the pre-Hellenic
cultures, unprobed and unordered, as mere appendix-matter? This is no
exaggeration. Do we not, for the sake of keeping the hoary scheme,
dispose of Egypt and Babylon—each as an individual and self-contained
history quite equal in the balance to our so-called “world-history” from
Charlemagne to the World-War and well beyond it—as a _prelude_ to
classical history? Do we not relegate the vast complexes of Indian and
Chinese culture to foot-notes, with a gesture of embarrassment? As for
the great American cultures, do we not, on the ground that they do not
“fit in” (with what?), entirely ignore them?
The most appropriate designation for this current West-European scheme
of history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow orbits round
_us_ as the presumed centre of all world-happenings, is the _Ptolemaic
system_ of history. The system that is put forward in this work in place
of it I regard as the _Copernican discovery_ in the historical sphere,
in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the
Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt,
the Arabs, Mexico—separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of
mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the
Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual
greatness and soaring power.
-----
Footnote 10:
Here the historian is gravely influenced by preconceptions derived
from geography, which assumes a _Continent_ of Europe, and feels
himself compelled to draw an ideal frontier corresponding to the
physical frontier between “Europe” and “Asia.” The word “Europe” ought
to be struck out of history. There is historically no “European” type,
and it is sheer delusion to speak of the Hellenes as “European
Antiquity” (were Homer and Heraclitus and Pythagoras, then, Asiatics?)
and to enlarge upon their “mission” as such. These phrases express no
realities but merely a sketchy interpretation of the map. It is thanks
to this word “Europe” alone, and the complex of ideas resulting from
it, that our historical consciousness has come to link Russia with the
West in an utterly baseless unity—a mere abstraction derived from the
reading of books—that has led to immense real consequences. In the
shape of Peter the Great, this word has falsified the historical
tendencies of a primitive human mass for two centuries, whereas the
Russian _instinct_ has very truly and fundamentally divided “Europe”
from “Mother Russia” with the hostility that we can see embodied in
Tolstoi, Aksakov or Dostoyevski. “East” and “West” are notions that
contain real history, whereas “Europe” is an empty sound. Everything
great that the Classical world created, it created in pure denial of
the existence of any continental barrier between Rome and Cyprus,
Byzantium and Alexandria. Everything that we imply by the term
European Culture came into existence between the Vistula and the
Adriatic and the Guadalquivir and, even if we were to agree that
Greece, the Greece of Pericles, lay in Europe, the Greece of to-day
certainly does not.
-----
VII
The scheme “ancient-mediæval-modern” in its first form was a creation of
the Magian world-sense. It first appeared in the Persian and Jewish
religions after Cyrus,[11] received an apocalyptic sense in the teaching
of the Book of Daniel on the four world-eras, and was developed into a
world-history in the post-Christian religions of the East, notably the
Gnostic systems.[12]
This important conception, within the very narrow limits which fixed its
intellectual basis, was unimpeachable. Neither Indian nor even Egyptian
history was included in the scope of the proposition. For the Magian
thinker the expression “world-history” meant a unique and supremely
dramatic act, having as its theatre the lands between Hellas and Persia,
in which the strictly dualistic world-sense of the East expressed itself
not by means of polar conceptions like the “soul and spirit,” “good and
evil” of contemporary metaphysics, but by the figure of a catastrophe,
an epochal change of phase between world-creation and world-decay.[13]
No elements beyond those which we find stabilized in the Classical
literature, on the one hand, and the Bible (or other sacred book of the
particular system), on the other, came into the picture, which presents
(as “The Old” and “The New,” respectively) the easily-grasped contrasts
of Gentile and Jewish, Christian and Heathen, Classical and Oriental,
idol and dogma, nature and spirit _with a time connotation_—that is, as
a drama in which the one prevails over the other. The historical change
of period wears the characteristic dress of the religious “Redemption.”
This “world-history” in short was a conception narrow and provincial,
but within its limits logical and complete. Necessarily, therefore, it
was specific to this region and this humanity, and incapable of any
_natural_ extension.
But to these two there has been added a third epoch, the epoch that we
call “modern,” on Western soil, and it is this that for the first time
gives the picture of history the look of a progression. The oriental
picture was _at rest_. It presented a self-contained antithesis, with
equilibrium as its outcome and a unique divine act as its turning-point.
But, adopted and assumed by a wholly new type of mankind, it was quickly
transformed (without anyone’s noticing the oddity of the change) into a
conception of a _linear progress_: from Homer or Adam—the modern can
substitute for these names the Indo-German, Old Stone Man, or the
Pithecanthropus—through Jerusalem, Rome, Florence and Paris according to
the taste of the individual historian, thinker or artist, who has
unlimited freedom in the interpretation of the three-part scheme.
This third term, “modern times,” which in form asserts that it is the
last and conclusive term of the series, has in fact, ever since the
Crusades, been stretched and stretched again to the elastic limit at
which it will bear no more.[14] It was at least implied if not stated in
so many words, that here, beyond the ancient and the mediæval, something
definitive was beginning, a Third Kingdom in which, somewhere, there was
to be fulfilment and culmination, and which had an objective point.
As to what this objective point is, each thinker, from Schoolman to
present-day Socialist, backs his own peculiar discovery. Such a view
into the course of things may be both easy and flattering to the
patentee, but in fact he has simply taken the spirit of the West, as
reflected in his own brain, for the meaning of the world. So it is that
great thinkers, making a metaphysical virtue of intellectual necessity,
have not only accepted without serious investigation the scheme of
history agreed “by common consent” but have made of it the basis of
their philosophies and dragged in God as author of this or that “world-
plan.” Evidently the mystic number three applied to the world-ages has
something highly seductive for the metaphysician’s taste. History was
described by Herder as the education of the human race, by Kant as an
evolution of the idea of freedom, by Hegel as a self-expansion of the
world-spirit, by others in other terms, but as regards its ground-plan
everyone was quite satisfied when he had thought out some abstract
meaning for the conventional threefold order.
On the very threshold of the Western Culture we meet the great Joachim
of Floris (c. 1145-1202),[15] the first thinker of the Hegelian stamp
who shattered the dualistic world-form of Augustine, and with his
essentially Gothic intellect stated the new Christianity of his time in
the form of a third term to the religions of the Old and the New
Testaments, expressing them respectively as the Age of the Father, the
Age of the Son and the Age of the Holy Ghost. His teaching moved the
best of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, Dante, Thomas Aquinas, in
their inmost souls and awakened a world-outlook which slowly but surely
took entire possession of the historical sense of our Culture. Lessing—
who often designated his own period, with reference to the Classical as
the “after-world”[16] (Nachwelt)—took his idea of the “education of the
human race” with its three stages of child, youth and man, from the
teaching of the Fourteenth Century mystics. Ibsen treats it with
thoroughness in his _Emperor and Galilean_ (1873), in which he directly
presents the Gnostic world-conception through the figure of the wizard
Maximus, and advances not a step beyond it in his famous Stockholm
address of 1887. It would appear, then, that the Western consciousness
feels itself urged to predicate a sort of finality inherent in its own
appearance.
But the creation of the Abbot of Floris was a _mystical_ glance into the
secrets of the divine world-order. It was bound to lose all meaning as
soon as it was used in the way of reasoning and made a hypothesis of
_scientific_ thinking, as it has been—ever more and more frequently—
since the 17th Century.
It is a quite indefensible method of presenting world-history to begin
by giving rein to one’s own religious, political or social convictions
and endowing the sacrosanct three-phase system with tendencies that will
bring it exactly to one’s own standpoint. This is, in effect, making of
some formula—say, the “Age of Reason,” Humanity, the greatest happiness
of the greatest number, enlightenment, economic progress, national
freedom, the conquest of nature, or world-peace—a criterion whereby to
judge whole millennia of history. And so we judge that they were
ignorant of the “true path,” or that they failed to follow it, when the
fact is simply that their will and purposes were not the same as ours.
Goethe’s saying, “What is important in life is life and not a result of
life,” is the answer to any and every senseless attempt to solve the
riddle of historical form by means of a _programme_.
It is the same picture that we find when we turn to the historians of
each special art or science (and those of national economics and
philosophy as well). We find:
“Painting” from the Egyptians (or the cave-men) to the
Impressionists, or
“Music” from Homer to Bayreuth and beyond, or
“Social Organization” from Lake Dwellings to Socialism, as the case
may
be,
presented as a linear graph which steadily rises in conformity with the
values of the (selected) arguments. No one has seriously considered the
possibility that arts may have an allotted span of life and may be
attached as forms of self-expression to particular regions and
particular types of mankind, and that therefore the total history of an
art may be merely an additive compilation of separate developments, of
special arts, with no bond of union save the name and some details of
craft-technique.
We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form and
duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as
well, are determined by the _properties of its species_. No one, looking
at the oak, with its millennial life, dare say that it is at this
moment, now, about to start on its true and proper course. No one as he
sees a caterpillar grow day by day expects that it will go on doing so
for two or three years. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified
certainty, a _limit_, and this sense of the limit is identical with our
sense of the inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the
contrary, we take our ideas as to the course of the future from an
unbridled optimism that sets at naught all historical, i.e., _organic_,
experience, and everyone therefore sets himself to discover in the
accidental present terms that he can expand into some striking
progression-series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof
but on predilection. He works upon unlimited possibilities—never a
natural end—and from the momentary top-course of his bricks plans
artlessly the continuation of his structure.
“Mankind,” however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the
family of butterflies or orchids. “Mankind” is a zoological expression,
or an empty word.[17] But conjure away the phantom, break the magic
circle, and at once there emerges an astonishing wealth of _actual_
forms—the Living with all its immense fullness, depth and movement—
hitherto veiled by a catchword, a dryasdust scheme, and a set of
personal “ideals.” I see, in place of that empty figment of _one_ linear
history which can only be kept up by shutting one’s eyes to the
overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of _a number_ of mighty
Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a
mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole
life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in _its own image_;
each having _its own_ idea, _its own_ passions, _its own_ life, will and
feeling, _its own_ death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements,
that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples,
languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the
stone-pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves—but there is no ageing
“Mankind.” Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression
which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not _one_
sculpture, _one_ painting, _one_ mathematics, _one_ physics, but many,
each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in
duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its
peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline. These
cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb
aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants
and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead
Nature of Newton. I see world-history as a picture of endless formations
and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic
forms. The professional historian, on the contrary, sees it as a sort of
tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one epoch after another.
But the series “ancient-mediæval-modern history” has at last exhausted
its usefulness. Angular, narrow, shallow though it was as a scientific
foundation, still we possessed no other form that was not wholly
unphilosophical in which our data could be arranged, and world-history
(as hitherto understood) has to thank it for filtering our classifiable
solid residues. But the number of centuries that the scheme can by any
stretch be made to cover has long since been exceeded, and with the
rapid increase in the volume of our historical material—especially of
material that cannot possibly be brought under the scheme—the picture is
beginning to dissolve into a chaotic blur. Every historical student who
is not quite blind knows and feels this, and it is as a drowning man
that he clutches at the only scheme which he knows of. The word “Middle
Age,”[18] invented in 1667 by Professor Horn of Leyden, has to-day to
cover a formless and constantly extending mass which can only be
defined, negatively, as every thing not classifiable under any pretext
in one of the other two (tolerably well-ordered) groups. We have an
excellent example of this in our feeble treatment and hesitant judgment
of modern Persian, Arabian and Russian history. But, above all, it has
become impossible to conceal the fact that this so-called history of the
world is a limited history, first of the Eastern Mediterranean region
and then,—with an abrupt change of scene at the Migrations (an event
important only to us and therefore greatly exaggerated by us, an event
of purely Western and not even Arabian significance),—of West-Central
Europe. When Hegel declared so naïvely that he meant to ignore those
peoples which did not fit into his scheme of history, he was only making
an honest avowal of methodic premisses that every historian finds
necessary for his purpose and every historical work shows in its lay-
out. In fact it has now become an affair of scientific tact to determine
which of the historical developments shall be _seriously_ taken into
account and which not. Ranke is a good example.
-----
Footnote 11:
See Vol. II, pp. 31, 175.
Footnote 12:
Windelband, _Gesch. d. Phil._ (1903), pp. 275 ff.
Footnote 13:
In the New Testament the polar idea tends to appear in the dialectics
of the Apostle Paul, while the periodic is represented by the
Apocalypse.
Footnote 14:
As we can see from the expression, at once desperate and ridiculous,
“newest time” (_neueste Zeit_).
Footnote 15:
K. Burdach, _Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus_, 1918, pp. 48 et
seq. (English readers may be referred to the article _Joachim of
Floris_ by Professor Alphandery in the Encyclopædia Britannica, XI
ed., _Tr._)
Footnote 16:
The expression “antique”—meant of course in the dualistic sense—is
found as early as the _Isagoge_ of Porphyry (c. 300 A.D.).
Footnote 17:
“Mankind? It is an abstraction. There are, always have been, and
always will be, men and only men.” (Goethe to Luden.)
Footnote 18:
“Middle Ages” connotes the history of the space-time region in which
_Latin was the language of the Church and the learned_. The mighty
course of Eastern Christianity, which, long before Boniface, spread
over Turkestan into China and through Sabæa into Abyssinia, was
entirely excluded from this “world-history.”
-----
VIII
To-day we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and
historians who have not realized that we do so. Of what significance to
us, then, are conceptions and purviews that they put before us as
universally valid, when in truth their furthest horizon does not extend
beyond the intellectual atmosphere of Western Man?
Examine, from this point of view, our best books. When Plato speaks of
humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians, which is
entirely consonant with the ahistoric mode of the Classical life and
thought, and his premisses take him to conclusions that _for Greeks_
were complete and significant. When, however, Kant philosophizes, say on
ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his theses for men of all
times and places. He does not say this in so many words, for, for
himself and his readers, it is something that goes without saying. In
his æsthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias’s art, or
Rembrandt’s art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary
forms of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought,
though a glance at Aristotle and his essentially different conclusions
should have sufficed to show that Aristotle’s intellect, not less
penetrating than his own, was of different structure from it. The
categories of the Westerner are just as alien to Russian thought as
those of the Chinaman or the ancient Greek are to him. For us, the
effective and complete comprehension of Classical root-words is just as
impossible as that of Russian[19] and Indian, and for the modern Chinese
or Arab, with their utterly different intellectual constitutions,
“philosophy from Bacon to Kant” has only a curiosity-value.
It is _this_ that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in
whom we might have expected to find it—insight into the _historically
relative_ character of his data, which are expressions of one _specific
existence and one only_; knowledge of the necessary limits of their
validity; the conviction that his “unshakable” truths and “eternal”
views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty
of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have
with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That and nothing else
will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, and only
through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the
symbolism of history. Here there is nothing constant, nothing universal.
We must cease to speak of the forms of “Thought,” the principles of
“Tragedy,” the mission of “The State.” Universal validity involves
always the fallacy of arguing from particular to particular.
But something much more disquieting than a logical fallacy begins to
appear when the centre of gravity of philosophy shifts from the
abstract-systematic to the practical-ethical and our Western thinkers
from Schopenhauer onward turn from the problem of cognition to the
problem of life (the will to life, to power, to action). Here it is not
the ideal abstract “man” of Kant that is subjected to examination, but
actual man as he has inhabited the earth during historical time,
grouped, whether primitive or advanced, by peoples; and it is more than
ever futile to define the structure of his highest ideas in terms of the
“ancient-mediæval-modern” scheme with its local limitations. But it is
done, nevertheless.
Consider the historical horizon of Nietzsche. His conceptions of
decadence, militarism, the transvaluation of all values, the will to
power, lie deep in the essence of Western civilization and are for the
analysis of that civilization of decisive importance. But what, do we
find, was the foundation on which he built up his creation? Romans and
Greeks, Renaissance and European present, with a fleeting and
uncomprehending side-glance at Indian philosophy—in short “ancient,
mediæval and modern” history. Strictly speaking, he never once moved
outside the scheme, not did any other thinker of his time.
What correlation, then, is there or can there be of his idea of the
“Dionysian” with the inner life of a highly-civilized Chinese or an up-
to-date American? What is the significance of his type of the
“Superman”—for the world of Islam? Can image-forming antitheses of
Nature and Intellect, Heathen and Christian, Classical and Modern, have
any meaning for the soul of the Indian or the Russian? What can Tolstoi—
who from the depths of his humanity rejected the whole Western world-
idea as something alien and distant—_do_ with the “Middle Ages,” with
Dante, with Luther? What can a Japanese do with Parzeval and
“Zarathustra,” or an Indian with Sophocles? And is the thought-range of
Schopenhauer, Comte, Feuerbach, Hebbel or Strindberg any wider? Is not
their whole psychology, for all its intention of world-wide validity,
one of purely West-European significance?
How comic seem Ibsen’s woman-problems—which also challenge the attention
of all “humanity”—when, for his famous Nora, the lady of the North-west
European city with the horizon that is implied by a house-rent of £100
to £300 a year and a Protestant upbringing, we substitute Cæsar’s wife,
Madame de Sévigné, a Japanese or a Turkish peasant woman! But, for that
matter, Ibsen’s own circle of vision is that of the middle class in a
great city of yesterday and to-day. His conflicts, which start from
spiritual premisses that did not exist till about 1850 and can scarcely
last beyond 1950, are neither those of the great world nor those of the
lower masses, still less those of the cities inhabited by non-European
populations.
All these are local and temporary values—most of them indeed limited to
the momentary “intelligentsia” of cities of West-European type. World-
historical or “eternal” values they emphatically are not. Whatever the
substantial importance of Ibsen’s and Nietzsche’s generation may be, it
infringes the very meaning of the word “world-history”—which denotes the
totality and not a selected part—to subordinate, to undervalue, or to
ignore the factors which lie outside “modern” interests. Yet in fact
they are so undervalued or ignored to an amazing extent. What the West
has said and thought, hitherto, on the problems of space, time, motion,
number, will, marriage, property, tragedy, science, has remained narrow
and dubious, because men were always looking for _the_ solution of _the_
question. It was never seen that many questioners implies many answers,
that any philosophical question is really a veiled desire to get an
explicit affirmation of what is implicit in the question itself, that
the great questions of any period are fluid beyond all conception, and
that therefore it is only by obtaining a _group of historically limited
solutions_ and measuring it by _utterly impersonal_ criteria that the
final secrets can be reached. The real student of mankind treats no
standpoint as absolutely right or absolutely wrong. In the face of such
grave problems as that of Time or that of Marriage, it is insufficient
to appeal to personal experience, or an inner voice, or reason, or the
opinion of ancestors or contemporaries. These may say what is true for
the questioner himself and for his time, but that is not all. In other
Cultures the phenomenon talks a different language, for other men there
are different truths. The _thinker_ must admit the validity of all, or
of none.
How greatly, then, Western world-criticism can be widened and deepened!
How immensely far beyond the innocent relativism of Nietzsche and his
generation one must look—how fine one’s sense for form and one’s
psychological insight must become—how completely one must free oneself
from limitations of self, of practical interests, of horizon—before one
dare assert the pretension to understand world-history, the _world-as-
history_.
-----
Footnote 19:
See Vol. II, p. 362, foot-note. To the true Russian the basic
proposition of Darwinism is as devoid of meaning as that of Copernicus
is to a true Arab.
-----
IX
In opposition to all these arbitrary and narrow schemes, derived from
tradition or personal choice, into which history is forced, I put
forward the natural, the “Copernican,” form of the historical process
which lies deep in the essence of that process and reveals itself only
to an eye perfectly free from prepossessions.
Such an eye was Goethe’s. That which Goethe called _Living Nature_ is
exactly that which we are calling here world-history, _world-as-
history_. Goethe, who as artist portrayed the life and development,
always the life and development, of his figures, the thing-becoming and
not the thing-become (“Wilhelm Meister” and “Wahrheit und Dichtung”)
hated Mathematics. For him, the world-as-mechanism stood opposed to the
world-as-organism, dead nature to living nature, law to form. As
naturalist, every line he wrote was meant to display the image of a
thing-becoming, the “impressed form” living and developing. Sympathy,
observation, comparison, immediate and inward certainty, intellectual
_flair_—these were the means whereby he was enabled to approach the
secrets of the phenomenal world in motion. _Now these are the means of
historical research_—precisely these and no others. It was this
_godlike_ insight that prompted him to say at the bivouac fire on the
evening of the Battle of Valmy: “Here and now begins a new epoch of
world history, and you, gentlemen, can say that you ‘were there.’” No
general, no diplomat, let alone the philosophers, ever so directly felt
history “becoming.” It is the deepest judgment that any man ever uttered
about a great historical act in the moment of its accomplishment.
And just as he followed out the development of the plant-form from the
leaf, the birth of the vertebrate type, the process of the geological
strata—_the Destiny in nature and not the Causality_—so here we shall
develop the form-language of human history, its periodic structure, its
_organic logic_ out of the profusion of all the challenging details.
In other aspects, mankind is habitually, and rightly, reckoned as one of
the organisms of the earth’s surface. Its physical structure, its
natural functions, the whole phenomenal conception of it, all belong to
a more comprehensive unity. Only in _this_ aspect is it treated
otherwise, despite that deeply-felt relationship of plant destiny and
human destiny which is an eternal theme of all lyrical poetry, and
despite that similarity of human history to that of any other of the
higher life-groups which is the refrain of endless beast-legends, sagas
and fables.
But only bring analogy to bear on this aspect as on the rest, letting
the world of human Cultures intimately and unreservedly work upon the
imagination instead of forcing it into a ready-made scheme. Let the
words youth, growth, maturity, decay—hitherto, and to-day more than
ever, used to express subjective valuations and entirely personal
preferences in sociology, ethics and æsthetics—be taken at last as
objective descriptions of organic states. Set forth the Classical
Culture as a self-contained phenomenon embodying and expressing the
Classical soul, put it beside the Egyptian, the Indian, the Babylonian,
the Chinese and the Western, and determine for each of these higher
individuals what is typical in their surgings and what is necessary in
the riot of incident. And then at last will unfold itself the picture of
world-history that is natural to us, men of the West, and to us alone.
X
Our narrower task, then, is primarily to determine, from such a world-
survey, the state of West Europe and America as at the epoch of 1800-
2000—to establish the chronological position of this period in the
ensemble of Western culture-history, its significance as a chapter that
is in one or other guise necessarily found in the biography of every
Culture, and the organic and symbolic meaning of its political,
artistic, intellectual and social expression-forms.
Considered in the spirit of analogy, this period appears as
chronologically parallel—“contemporary” in our special sense—with the
phase of Hellenism, and its present culmination, marked by the World-
War, corresponds with the transition from the Hellenistic to the Roman
age. _Rome_, with its rigorous realism—uninspired, barbaric,
disciplined, practical, Protestant, _Prussian_—will always give us,
working as we must by analogies, the key to understanding our own
future. The _break of destiny that we express by hyphening the words
“Greeks = Romans” is occurring for us also, separating that which is
already fulfilled from that which is to come_. Long ago we might and
should have seen in the “Classical” world a development which is the
complete counterpart of our own Western development, differing indeed
from it in every detail of the surface but entirely similar as regards
the inward power driving the great organism towards its end. We might
have found the constant _alter ego_ of our own actuality in establishing
the correspondence, item by item, from the “Trojan War” and the
Crusades, Homer and the Nibelungenlied, through Doric and Gothic,
Dionysian movement and Renaissance, Polycletus and John Sebastian Bach,
Athens and Paris, Aristotle and Kant, Alexander and Napoleon, to the
world-city and the imperialism common to both Cultures.
Unfortunately, this requires an interpretation of the picture of
Classical history very different from the incredibly one-sided,
superficial, prejudiced, limited picture that we have in fact given to
it. We have, in truth been only too conscious of our near relation to
the Classical Age, and only too prone in consequence to unconsidered
assertion of it. Superficial similarity is a great snare, and our entire
Classical study fell a victim to it as soon as it passed from the
(admittedly masterly) ordering and critique of the discoveries to the
interpretation of their spiritual meaning. That close inward relation in
which we conceive ourselves to stand towards the Classical, and which
leads us to think that we are its pupils and successors (whereas in
reality we are simply its adorers), is a venerable prejudice which ought
at last to be put aside. The whole religious-philosophical, art-
historical and social-critical work of the 19th Century has been
necessary to enable us, not to _understand_ Æschylus, Plato, Apollo and
Dionysus, the Athenian state and Cæsarism (which we are far indeed from
doing), but to begin to realize, once and for all, how immeasurably
alien and distant these things are from our inner selves—more alien,
maybe, than Mexican gods and Indian architecture.
Our views of the Græco-Roman Culture have always swung between two
extremes, and our standpoints have invariably been defined for us by the
“ancient-mediæval-modern” scheme. One group, public men before all else—
economists, politicians, jurists—opine that “present-day mankind” is
making excellent progress, assess it and its performances at the very
highest value and measure everything earlier by its standards. There is
no modern party that has not weighed up Cleon, Marius, Themistocles,
Catiline, the Gracchi, according to its own principles. On the other
hand we have the group of artists, poets, philologists and philosophers.
These feel themselves to be out of their element in the aforesaid
present, and in consequence choose for themselves in this or that past
epoch a standpoint that is in its way just as absolute and dogmatic from
which to condemn “to-day.” The one group looks upon Greece as a “not
yet,” the other upon modernity as a “nevermore.” Both labour under the
obsession of a scheme of history which treats the two epochs as part of
the same straight line.
In this opposition it is the two souls of Faust that express themselves.
The danger of the one group lies in a clever superficiality. In its
hands there remains finally, of all Classical Culture, of all
reflections of the Classical soul, nothing but a bundle of social,
economic, political and physiological facts, and the rest is treated as
“secondary results,” “reflexes,” “attendant phenomena.” In the books of
this group we find not a hint of the mythical force of Æschylus’s
choruses, of the immense mother-earth struggle of the early sculpture,
the Doric column, of the richness of the Apollo-cult, of the real depth
of the Roman Emperor-worship. The other group, composed above all of
belated romanticists—represented in recent times by the three Basel
professors Bachofen, Burckhardt and Nietzsche—succumb to the usual
dangers of ideology. They lose themselves in the clouds of an antiquity
that is really no more than the image of their own sensibility in a
philological mirror. They rest their case upon the only evidence which
they consider worthy to support it, viz., the relics of the old
literature, yet there never was a Culture so incompletely represented
for us by its great writers.[20] The first group, on the other hand,
supports itself principally upon the humdrum material of law-sources,
inscriptions and coins (which Burckhardt and Nietzsche, very much to
their own loss, despised) and subordinates thereto, often with little or
no sense of truth and fact, the surviving literature. Consequently, even
in point of critical foundations, neither group takes the other
seriously. I have never heard that Nietzsche and Mommsen had the
smallest respect for each other.
But neither group has attained to that higher method of treatment which
reduces this opposition of criteria to ashes, although it was within
their power to do so. In their self-limitation they paid the penalty for
taking over the causality-principle from natural science. Unconsciously
they arrived at a pragmatism that sketchily copied the world-picture
drawn by physics and, instead of revealing, obscured and confused the
quite other-natured forms of history. They had no better expedient for
subjecting the mass of historical material to critical and normative
examination than to consider one complex of phenomena as being primary
and causative and the rest as being secondary, as being consequences or
effects. And it was not only the matter-of-fact school that resorted to
this method. The romanticists did likewise, for History had not revealed
even to their dreaming gaze its specific logic; and yet they _felt_ that
there was an immanent necessity in it to determine this somehow, rather
than turn their backs upon History in despair like Schopenhauer.
-----
Footnote 20:
This is conclusively proved by the selection that determined survival,
which was governed not by mere chance but very definitely by a
deliberate tendency. The Atticism of the Augustan Age, tired, sterile,
pedantic, back-looking, conceived the hall-mark “classical” and
allowed only a very small group of Greek works up to Plato to bear it.
The rest, including the whole wealth of Hellenistic literature, was
rejected and has been almost entirely lost. It is this pedagogue’s
anthology that has survived (almost in its entirety) and so fixed the
imaginary picture of “Classical Antiquity” alike for the Renaissance
Florentine and for Winckelmann, Hölderlin, and even Nietzsche.
[In this English translation, it should be mentioned, the word
“Classical” has almost universally been employed to translate the
German _antike_, as, in the translator’s judgment, no literal
equivalent of the German word would convey the specific meaning
attached to _antike_ throughout the work, “antique,” “ancient” and the
like words having for us a much more general connotation.—_Tr._]
-----
XI
Briefly, then, there are two ways of regarding the Classical—the
materialistic and the ideological. By the former, it is asserted that
the sinking of one scale-pan has its cause in the rising of the other,
and it is shown that this occurs invariably (truly a striking theorem);
and in this juxtaposing of cause and effect we naturally find the social
and sexual, at all events the purely political, facts classed as causes
and the religious, intellectual and (so far as the materialist tolerates
them as facts at all) the artistic as effects. On the other hand, the
ideologues show that the rising of one scale-pan follows from the
sinking of the other, which they are able to prove of course with equal
exactitude; this done, they lose themselves in cults, mysteries,
customs, in the secrets of the strophe and the line, throwing scarcely a
side-glance at the commonplace daily life—for them an unpleasant
consequence of earthly imperfection. Each side, with its gaze fixed on
causality, demonstrates that the other side either cannot or will not
understand the true linkages of things and each ends by calling the
other blind, superficial, stupid, absurd or frivolous, oddities or
Philistines. It shocks the ideologue if anyone deals with Hellenic
finance-problems and instead of, for example, telling us the deep
meanings of the Delphic oracle, describes the far-reaching money
operations which the Oracle priests undertook with their accumulated
treasures. The politician, on the other hand, has a superior smile for
those who waste their enthusiasm on ritual formulæ and the dress of
Attic youths, instead of writing a book adorned with up-to-date
catchwords about antique class-struggles.
The one type is foreshadowed from the very outset in Petrarch; it
created Florence and Weimar and the Western classicism. The other type
appears in the middle of the 18th Century, along with the rise of
civilized,[21] economic-megalopolitan[22] politics, and England is
therefore its birthplace (Grote). At bottom, the opposition is between
the conceptions of culture-man and those of civilization-man, and it is
too deep, too essentially human, to allow the weaknesses of _both
standpoints alike_ to be seen or overcome.
The materialist himself is on this point an idealist. He too, without
wishing or desiring it, has made his views dependent upon his wishes. In
fact all our finest minds without exception have bowed down reverently
before the picture of the Classical, abdicating in this one instance
alone their function of unrestricted criticism. The freedom and power of
Classical research are always hindered, and its data obscured, by a
certain almost religious awe. In all history there is no analogous case
of one Culture making a passionate cult of the memory of another. Our
devotion is evidenced yet again in the fact that since the Renaissance,
a thousand years of history have been undervalued so that an ideal
“Middle” Age may serve as a link between ourselves and antiquity. We
Westerners have sacrificed on the Classical altar the purity and
independence of our art, for we have not dared to create without a side-
glance at the “sublime exemplar.” We have projected our own deepest
spiritual needs and feelings on to the Classical picture. Some day a
gifted psychologist will deal with this most fateful illusion and tell
us the story of the “Classical” that we have so consistently reverenced
since the days of Gothic. Few theses would be more helpful for the
understanding of the Western soul from Otto III, the first victim of the
South, to Nietzsche, the last.
Goethe on his Italian tour speaks with enthusiasm of the buildings of
Palladio, whose frigid and academic work we to-day regard very
sceptically: but when he goes on to Pompeii he does not conceal his
dissatisfaction in experiencing “a strange, half-unpleasant impression,”
and what he has to say on the temples of Pæstum and Segesta—masterpieces
of Hellenic art—is embarrassed and trivial. Palpably, when Classical
antiquity in its full force met him face to face, he did not recognize
it. It is the same with all others. Much that was Classical they chose
not to see, and so they saved their inward image of the Classical—which
was in reality the background of a life-ideal that they themselves had
created and nourished with their heart’s blood, a vessel filled with
their own world-feeling, a phantom, an idol. The audacious descriptions
of Aristophanes, Juvenal or Petronius of life in the Classical cities—
the southern dirt and riff-raff, terrors and brutalities, pleasure-boys
and Phrynes, phallus worship and imperial orgies—excite the enthusiasm
of the student and the dilettante, who find the same realities in the
world-cities of to-day too lamentable and repulsive to face. “In the
cities life is bad; there are too many of the lustful.”—_also sprach
Zarathustra_. They commend the state-sense of the Romans, but despise
the man of to-day who permits himself any contact with public affairs.
There is a type of scholar whose clarity of vision comes under some
irresistible spell when it turns from a frock-coat to a toga, from a
British football-ground to a Byzantine circus, from a transcontinental
railway to a Roman road in the Alps, from a thirty-knot destroyer to a
trireme, from Prussian bayonets to Roman spears—nowadays, even, from a
modern engineer’s Suez Canal to that of a Pharaoh. He would admit a
steam-engine as a symbol of human passion and an expression of
intellectual force if it were Hero of Alexandria who invented it, not
otherwise. To such it seems blasphemous to talk of Roman central-heating
or book-keeping in preference to the worship of the Great Mother of the
Gods.
But the other school sees _nothing but_ these things. It thinks it
exhausts the essence of this Culture, alien as it is to ours, by
treating the Greeks as simply equivalent, and it obtains its conclusions
by means of simple factual substitutions, ignoring altogether the
Classical _soul_. That there is not the slightest inward correlation
between the things meant by “Republic,” “freedom,” “property” and the
like then and there and the things meant by such words here and now, it
has no notion whatever. It makes fun of the historians of the age of
Goethe, who honestly expressed their own political ideals in classical
history forms and revealed their own personal enthusiasms in
vindications or condemnations of lay-figures named Lycurgus, Brutus,
Cato, Cicero, Augustus—but it cannot itself write a chapter without
reflecting the party opinion of its morning paper.
It is, however, much the same whether the past is treated in the spirit
of Don Quixote or in that of Sancho Panza. Neither way leads to the end.
In sum, each school permits itself to bring into high relief that part
of the Classical which best expresses its own views—Nietzsche the pre-
Socratic Athens, the economists the Hellenistic period, the politicians
Republican Rome, poets the Imperial Age.
Not that religious and artistic phenomena are more primitive than social
and economic, any more than the reverse. For the man who in these things
has won his unconditional freedom of outlook, beyond _all_ personal
interests whatsoever, there is no dependence, no priority, no relation
of cause and effect, no differentiation of value or importance. That
which assigns relative ranks amongst the individual detail-facts is
simply the greater or less purity and force of their form-language,
their symbolism, beyond all questions of good and evil, high and low,
useful and ideal.
-----
Footnote 21:
As will be seen later, the words _zivilisierte_ and _Zivilisation_
possess in this work a special meaning.—_Tr._
Footnote 22:
English not possessing the adjective-forming freedom of German, we are
compelled to coin a word for the rendering of _grossstädtisch_, an
adjective not only frequent but of emphatic significance in the
author’s argument.—_Tr._
-----
XII
Looked at in this way, the “Decline of the West” comprises nothing less
than the problem of _Civilization_. We have before us one of the
fundamental questions of all higher history. What is Civilization,
understood as the organic-logical sequel, fulfilment and finale of a
culture?
For every Culture has _its own_ Civilization. In this work, for the
first time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more
or less ethical, distinction, are used in a _periodic_ sense, to express
a strict and necessary _organic succession_. The Civilization is the
inevitable _destiny_ of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the
viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical
morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the most
external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity
is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the
thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion,
intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following
mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are
an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again.
So, for the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as the
_successors_ of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest
secrets of the late-Classical period. What, but this, can be the meaning
of the fact—which can only be disputed by vain phrases—that the Romans
were barbarians who did not _precede_ but _closed_ a great development?
Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of
brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand between
the Hellenic Culture and nothingness. An imagination directed purely to
practical objects—they had religious laws governing godward relations as
they had other laws governing human relations, but there was no
specifically Roman saga of gods—was something which is not found at all
in Athens. In a word, Greek _soul_—Roman _intellect_; and this
antithesis is the differentia between Culture and Civilization. Nor is
it only to the Classical that it applies. Again and again there appears
this type of strong-minded, completely non-metaphysical man, and in the
hands of this type lies the intellectual and material destiny of each
and every “late” period. Such are the men who carried through the
Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the Chinese, the Roman
Civilizations, and in such periods do Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism
ripen into definitive world-conceptions which enable a moribund humanity
to be attacked and re-formed in its intimate structure. _Pure_
Civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive
_taking-down_ of forms that have become inorganic or dead.
The transition from Culture to Civilization was accomplished for the
Classical world in the 4th, for the Western in the 19th Century. From
these periods onward the great intellectual decisions take place, not as
in the days of the Orpheus-movement or the Reformation in the “whole
world” where not a hamlet is too small to be unimportant, but in three
or four world-cities that have absorbed into themselves the whole
content of History, while the old wide landscape of the Culture, become
merely provincial, serves only to feed the cities with what remains of
its higher mankind.
_World-city and province_[23]—the two basic ideas of every civilization—
bring up a wholly new form-problem of History, the very problem that we
are living through to-day with hardly the remotest conception of its
immensity. In place of a world, there is a _city, a point_, in which the
whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In
place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a
new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical
city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless,
clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially
that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. This is a very
great stride towards the inorganic, towards the end—what does it
signify? France and England have already taken the step and Germany is
beginning to do so. After Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome.
After Madrid, Paris, London come Berlin and New York. It is the destiny
of whole regions that lie outside the radiation-circle of one of these
cities—of old Crete and Macedon and to-day the Scandinavian North[24]—to
become “provinces.”
Of old, the field on which the opposed conception of an epoch came to
battle was some world-problem of a metaphysical, religious or dogmatic
kind, and the battle was between the soil-genius of the countryman
(noble, priest) and the “worldly” patrician genius of the famous old
small towns of Doric or Gothic springtime. Of such a character were the
conflicts over the Dionysus religion—as in the tyranny of Kleisthenes of
Sikyon[25]—and those of the Reformation in the German free cities and
the Huguenot wars. But just as these cities overcame the country-side
(already it is a purely civic world-outlook that appears in even
Parmenides and Descartes), so in turn the world-city overcame them. It
is the common intellectual process of later periods such as the Ionic
and the Baroque, and to-day—as in the Hellenistic age which at its
outset saw the foundation of artificial, land-alien Alexandria—Culture-
cities like Florence, Nürnberg, Salamanca, Bruges and Prag, have become
provincial towns and fight inwardly a lost battle against the world-
cities. The world-city means cosmopolitanism in place of “home,”[26]
cold matter-of-fact in place of reverence for tradition and age,
scientific irreligion as a fossil representative of the older religion
of the heart, “society” in place of the state, natural instead of hard-
earned rights. It was in the conception of _money_ as an inorganic and
abstract magnitude, entirely disconnected from the notion of the
fruitful earth and the primitive values, that the Romans had the
advantage of the Greeks. Thenceforward any high ideal of life becomes
largely a question of money. Unlike the Greek stoicism of Chrysippus,
the Roman stoicism of Cato and Seneca presupposes a private income;[27]
and, unlike that of the 18th Century, the social-ethical sentiment of
the 20th, if it is to be realized at a higher level than that of
professional (and lucrative) agitation, is a matter for millionaires. To
the world-city belongs not a folk but a mass. Its uncomprehending
hostility to all the traditions representative of the Culture (nobility,
church, privileges, dynasties, convention in art and limits of knowledge
in science), the keen and cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom of
the peasant, the new-fashioned naturalism that in relation to all
matters of sex and society goes back far beyond Rousseau and Socrates to
quite primitive instincts and conditions, the reappearance of the _panem
et circenses_ in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds—all
these things betoken the definite closing-down of the Culture and the
opening of a quite new phase of human existence—anti-provincial, late,
futureless, but quite inevitable.
This is what has to be _viewed_, and viewed not with the eyes of the
partisan, the ideologue, the up-to-date novelist, not from this or that
“standpoint,” but in a high, time-free perspective embracing whole
millenniums of historical world-forms, if we are really to comprehend
the great crisis of the present.
To me it is a symbol of the first importance that in the Rome of
Crassus—triumvir and all-powerful building-site speculator—the Roman
people with its proud inscriptions, the people before whom Gauls,
Greeks, Parthians, Syrians afar trembled, lived in appalling misery in
the many-storied lodging-houses of dark suburbs,[28] accepting with
indifference or even with a sort of sporting interest the consequences
of the military expansion: that many famous old-noble families,
descendants of the men who defeated the Celts and the Samnites, lost
their ancestral homes through standing apart from the wild rush of
speculation and were reduced to renting wretched apartments; that, while
along the Appian Way there arose the splendid and still wonderful tombs
of the financial magnates, the corpses of the people were thrown along
with animal carcases and town refuse into a monstrous common grave—till
in Augustus’s time it was banked over for the avoidance of pestilence
and so became the site of Mæcenas’s renowned park; that in depopulated
Athens, which lived on visitors and on the bounty of rich foreigners,
the mob of parvenu tourists from Rome gaped at the works of the
Periclean age with as little understanding as the American globe-trotter
in the Sistine Chapel at those of Michelangelo, every removable art-
piece having ere this been taken away or bought at fancy prices to be
replaced by the Roman buildings which grew up, colossal and arrogant, by
the side of the low and modest structures of the old time. In such
things—which it is the historian’s business not to praise or to blame
but to consider morphologically—there lies, plain and immediate enough
for one who has learnt to see, an _idea_.
For it will become manifest that, from this moment on, all great
conflicts of world-outlook, of politics, of art, of science, of feeling
will be under the influence of this one opposition. What is the hall-
mark of a politic of Civilization to-day, in contrast to a politic of
Culture yesterday? It is, for the Classical rhetoric, and for the
Western journalism, both serving that abstract which represents the
power of Civilization—_money_.[29] It is the money-spirit which
penetrates unremarked the historical forms of the people’s existence,
often without destroying or even in the least disturbing these forms—the
form of the Roman state, for instance, underwent very much less
alteration between the elder Scipio and Augustus than is usually
imagined. Though forms subsist, the great political parties nevertheless
cease to be more than reputed centres of decision. The decisions in fact
lie elsewhere. A small number of superior heads, whose names are very
likely not the best-known, settle everything, while below them are the
great mass of second-rate politicians—rhetors, tribunes, deputies,
journalists—selected through a provincially-conceived franchise to keep
alive the illusion of popular self-determination. And art? Philosophy?
The ideals of a Platonic or those of a Kantian age had for the higher
mankind concerned a general validity. But those of a Hellenistic age, or
those of our own, are valid exclusively for the brain of the
Megalopolitan. For the villager’s or, generally, the nature-man’s world-
feeling our Socialism—like its near relation Darwinism (how utterly un-
Goethian are the formulæ of “struggle for existence” and “natural
selection”!), like its other relative the woman-and-marriage problem of
Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw, like the impressionistic tendencies of
anarchic sensuousness and the whole bundle of modern longings,
temptations and pains expressed in Baudelaire’s verse and Wagner’s
music—are simply non-existent. The smaller the town, the more unmeaning
it becomes to busy oneself with painting or with music of these kinds.
To the Culture belong gymnastics, the tournament, the agon, and to the
Civilization belongs Sport. This is the true distinction between the
Hellenic palæstra and the Roman circus.[30] Art itself becomes a sport
(hence the phrase “art for art’s sake”) to be played before a highly-
intelligent audience of connoisseurs and buyers, whether the feat
consist in mastering absurd instrumental tone-masses and taking harmonic
fences, or in some _tour de force_ of colouring. Then a new fact-
philosophy appears, which can only spare a smile for metaphysical
speculation, and a new literature that is a necessity of life for the
megalopolitan palate and nerves and both unintelligible and ugly to the
provincials. Neither Alexandrine poetry nor _plein-air_ painting is
anything to the “people.” And, then as now, the phase of transition is
marked by a series of scandals only to be found at such moments. The
anger evoked in the Athenian populace by Euripides and by the
“Revolutionary” painting of Apollodorus, for example, is repeated in the
opposition to Wagner, Manet, Ibsen, and Nietzsche.
It is possible to understand the Greeks without mentioning their
economic relations; the Romans, on the other hand, can _only_ be
understood through these. Chæronea and Leipzig were the last battles
fought about an idea. In the First Punic War and in 1870 economic
motives are no longer to be overlooked. Not till the Romans came with
their practical energy was slave-holding given that big collective
character which many students regard as the die-stamp of Classical
economics, legislation and way of life, and which in any event vastly
lowered both the value and the inner worthiness of such free labour as
continued to exist side by side with gang-labour. And it was not the
Latin, but the Germanic peoples of the West and America who developed
out of the steam-engine a big industry that transformed the face of the
land. The relation of these phenomena to Stoicism and to Socialism is
unmistakable. Not till the Roman Cæsarism—foreshadowed by C. Flaminius,
shaped first by Marius, handled by strong-minded, large-scale men of
fact—did the Classical World learn the _pre-eminence of money_. Without
this fact neither Cæsar, nor “Rome” generally, is understandable. In
every Greek is a Don Quixote, in every Roman a Sancho Panza factor, and
these factors are dominants.
-----
Footnote 23:
See Vol. II, pp. 117 et seq.
Footnote 24:
One cannot fail to notice this in the development of Strindberg and
especially in that of Ibsen, who was never quite at home in the
civilized atmosphere of his problems. The motives of “Brand” and
“Rosmersholm” are a wonderful mixture of innate provincialism and a
theoretically-acquired megalopolitan outlook. Nora is the very type of
the provincial derailed by reading.
Footnote 25:
Who forbade the cult of the town’s hero Adrastos and the reading of
the Homeric poems, with the object of cutting the Doric nobility from
its spiritual roots (c. 560 B.C.).
Footnote 26:
A profound word which obtains its significance as soon as the
barbarian becomes a culture-man and loses it again as soon as the
civilization-man takes up the motto “_Ubi bene, ibi patria_.”
Footnote 27:
Hence it was that the first to succumb to Christianity were the Romans
who could _not afford_ to be Stoics. See Vol. II, pp. 607 et seq.
Footnote 28:
In Rome and Byzantium, lodging-houses of six to ten stories (with
street-widths of ten feet at most!) were built without any sort of
official supervision, and frequently collapsed with all their inmates.
A great part of the _cives Romani_, for whom _panem et circenses_
constituted all existence, possessed no more than a high-priced
sleeping-berth in one of the swarming ant-hills called _insulæ_.
(Pohlmann, _Aus Altertum und Gegenwart_, 1911, pp. 199 ff.)
Footnote 29:
See Vol. II, 577.
Footnote 30:
German gymnastics, from the intensely provincial and natural forms
imparted to it by Jahn, has since 1813 been carried by a very rapid
development into the sport category. The difference between a Berlin
athletic ground on a big day and a Roman circus was even by 1914 very
slight.
-----
XIII
Considered in itself, the Roman world-dominion was a negative
phenomenon, being the result not of a surplus of energy on the one side—
that the Romans had never had since Zama—but of a deficiency of
resistance on the other. That the Romans did _not_ conquer the world is
certain;[31] they merely took possession of a booty that lay open to
everyone. The _Imperium Romanum_ came into existence not as the result
of such an extremity of military and financial effort as had
characterized the Punic Wars, but because the old East forwent all
external self-determinations. We must not be deluded by the appearance
of brilliant military successes. With a few ill-trained, ill-led, and
sullen legions, Lucullus and Pompey conquered whole realms—a phenomenon
that in the period of the battle of Ipsus would have been unthinkable.
The Mithradatic danger, serious enough for a system of material force
which had never been put to any real test, would have been nothing to
the conquerors of Hannibal. After Zama, the Romans never again either
waged or were capable of waging a war against a great military
Power.[32] Their classic wars were those against the Samnites, Pyrrhus
and Carthage. Their grand hour was Cannæ. To maintain the heroic posture
for centuries on end is beyond the power of any people. The Prussian-
German people have had three great moments (1813, 1870 and 1914), and
that is more than others have had.
Here, then, I lay it down that _Imperialism_, of which petrifacts such
as the Egyptian empire, the Roman, the Chinese, the Indian may continue
to exist for hundreds or thousands of years—dead bodies, amorphous and
dispirited masses of men, scrap-material from a great history—is to be
taken as the typical symbol of the passing away. Imperialism is
Civilization unadulterated. In this phenomenal form the destiny of the
West is now irrevocably set. The energy of culture-man is directed
inwards, that of civilization-man outwards. And thus I see in Cecil
Rhodes the first man of a new age. He stands for the political style of
a far-ranging, Western, Teutonic and especially German future, and his
phrase “expansion is everything” is the Napoleonic reassertion of the
indwelling tendency of _every_ Civilization that has fully ripened—
Roman, Arab or Chinese. It is not a matter of choice—it is not the
conscious will of individuals, or even that of whole classes or peoples
that decides. The expansive tendency is a doom, something daemonic and
immense, which grips, forces into service, and uses up the late mankind
of the world-city stage, willy-nilly, aware or unaware.[33] Life is the
process of effecting possibilities, and for the brain-man there are
_only extensive_ possibilities.[34] Hard as the half-developed Socialism
of to-day is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-
expansionist with all the vehemence of destiny. Here the form-language
of politics, as the direct intellectual expression of a certain type of
humanity, touches on a deep metaphysical problem—on the fact, affirmed
in the grant of unconditional validity to the causality-principle, that
_the soul is the complement of its extension_.
When, between 480 and 230,[35] the Chinese group of states was tending
towards imperialism, it was entirely futile to combat the principle of
Imperialism (Lien-heng), practised in particular by the “Roman” state of
Tsin[36] and theoretically represented by the philosopher Dschang Yi, by
ideas of a League of Nations (Hoh-tsung) largely derived from Wang Hü, a
profound sceptic who had no illusions as to the men or the political
possibilities of this “late” period. Both sides opposed the anti-
political idealism of Lao-tse, but as between themselves it was Lien-
heng and not Hoh-tsung which swam with the natural current of expansive
Civilization.[37]
Rhodes is to be regarded as the first precursor of a Western type of
Cæsars, whose day is to come though yet distant. He stands midway
between Napoleon and the force-men of the next centuries, just as
Flaminius, who from 232 B.C. onward pressed the Romans to undertake the
subjugation of Cisalpine Gaul and so initiated the policy of colonial
expansion, stands between Alexander and Cæsar. Strictly speaking,
Flaminius was a private person—for his real power was of a kind not
embodied in any constitutional office—who exercised a dominant influence
in the state at a time when the state-idea was giving way to the
pressure of economic factors. So far as Rome is concerned, he was the
archetype of opposition Cæsarism; with him there came to an end the
_idea of state-service_ and there began the “will to power” which
ignored traditions and reckoned only with forces. Alexander and Napoleon
were romantics; though they stood on the threshold of Civilization and
in its cold clear air, the one fancied himself an Achilles and the other
read Werther. Cæsar, on the contrary, was a pure man of fact gifted with
immense understanding.
But even for Rhodes political success means territorial and financial
success, and only that. Of this Roman-ness within himself he was fully
aware. But Western Civilization has not yet taken shape in such strength
and purity as this. It was only before his maps that he could fall into
a sort of poetic trance, this son of the parsonage who, sent out to
South Africa without means, made a gigantic fortune and employed it as
the engine of political aims. His idea of a trans-African railway from
the Cape to Cairo, his project of a South African empire, his
intellectual hold on the hard metal souls of the mining magnates whose
wealth he forced into the service of his schemes, his capital Bulawayo,
royally planned as a future Residence by a statesman who was all-
powerful yet stood in no definite relation to the State, his wars, his
diplomatic deals, his road-systems, his syndicates, his armies, his
conception of the “great duty to civilization” of the man of brain—all
this, broad and imposing, is the prelude of a future which is still in
store for us and with which the history of West-European mankind will be
definitely _closed_.
He who does not understand that this outcome is obligatory and
insusceptible of modification, that our choice is between willing _this_
and willing nothing at all, between cleaving to _this_ destiny or
despairing of the future and of life itself; he who cannot feel that
there is grandeur also in the realizations of powerful intelligences, in
the energy and discipline of metal-hard natures, in battles fought with
the coldest and most abstract means; he who is obsessed with the
idealism of a provincial and would pursue the ways of life of past ages—
must forgo all desire to comprehend history, to live through history or
to make history.
Thus regarded, the Imperium Romanum appears no longer as an isolated
phenomenon, but as the normal product of a strict and energetic,
megalopolitan, predominantly practical spirituality, as typical of a
final and irreversible condition which has occurred often enough though
it has only been identified as such in this instance.
Let it be realized, then:
That the secret of historical form does not lie on the surface, that it
cannot be grasped by means of similarities of costume and setting, and
that in the history of men as in that of animals and plants there occur
phenomena showing deceptive similarity but inwardly without any
connexion—e.g., Charlemagne and Haroun-al-Raschid, Alexander and Cæsar,
the German wars upon Rome and the Mongol onslaughts upon West Europe—and
other phenomena of extreme outward dissimilarity but of identical
import—e.g., Trajan and Rameses II, the Bourbons and the Attic Demos,
Mohammed and Pythagoras.
That the 19th and 20th centuries, hitherto looked on as the highest
point of an ascending straight line of world-history, are in reality a
stage of life which may be observed in every Culture that has ripened to
its limit—a stage of life characterized not by Socialists,
Impressionists, electric railways, torpedoes and differential equations
(for these are only body-constituents of the time), but by a civilized
spirituality which possesses not only these but also quite other
creative possibilities.
That, as our own time represents a transitional phase which occurs with
certainty under particular conditions, there are perfectly well-defined
states (such as have occurred more than once in the history of the past)
_later_ than the present-day state of West Europe, and therefore that
The future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and onwards
for all time towards our present ideals, but a single phenomenon of
history, strictly limited and defined as to form and duration, which
covers a few centuries and can be viewed and, in essentials, calculated
from available precedents.
-----
Footnote 31:
See Vol. II, 529.
Footnote 32:
The conquest of Gaul by Cæsar was frankly a colonial, i.e., a one-
sided, war; and the fact that it is the highest achievement in the
later military history of Rome only shows that the well of real
achievement was rapidly drying up.
Footnote 33:
The modern Germans are a conspicuous example of a people that has
become expansive without knowing it or willing it. They were already
in that state while they still believed themselves to be the people of
Goethe. Even Bismarck, the founder of the new age, never had the
slightest idea of it, and believed himself to have reached the
_conclusion_ of a political process (cf. Vol. II, 529).
Footnote 34:
This is probably the meaning of Napoleon’s significant words to
Goethe: “What have we to-day to do with destiny? Policy is destiny.”
Footnote 35:
Corresponding to the 300-50 B.C. phase of the Classical world.
Footnote 36:
Which in the end gave its name to the Empire (Tsin = China).
Footnote 37:
See Vol. II, 521-539.
-----
XIV
This high plane of contemplation once attained, the rest is easy. To
this _single_ idea one can refer, and by it one can solve, without
straining or forcing, all those separate problems of religion, art-
history, epistemology, ethics, politics, economics with which the modern
intellect has so passionately—and so vainly—busied itself for decades.
This idea is one of those truths that have only to be expressed with
full clarity to become indisputable. It is one of the inward necessities
of the Western Culture and of its world-feeling. It is capable of
entirely transforming the world-outlook of one who fully understands it,
i.e., makes it intimately his own. It immensely deepens the world-
picture natural and necessary to us in that, already trained to regard
world-historical evolution as an organic unit seen backwards from our
standpoint in the present, we are enabled by its aid to follow the broad
lines into the future—a privilege of dream-calculation till now
permitted only to the physicist. It is, I repeat, in effect the
substitution of a Copernican for a Ptolemaic aspect of history, that is,
an immeasurable widening of horizon.
Up to now everyone has been at liberty to hope what he pleased about the
future. Where there are no facts, sentiment rules. But henceforward it
will be every man’s business to inform himself of what _can_ happen and
therefore of what with the unalterable necessity of destiny and
irrespective of personal ideals, hopes or desires, _will_ happen. When
we use the risky word “freedom” we shall mean freedom to do, not this or
that, but the necessary or nothing. The feeling that this is “just as it
should be” is the hall-mark of the man of fact. To lament it and blame
it is not to alter it. To birth belongs death, to youth age, to life
generally its form and its allotted span. The present is a civilized,
emphatically not a cultured time, and _ipso facto_ a great number of
life-capacities fall out as impossible. This may be deplorable, and may
be and will be deplored in pessimist philosophy and poetry, but it is
not in our power to make otherwise. It will not be—already it is not—
permissible to defy clear historical experience and to expect, merely
because we hope, that this will spring or that will flourish.
It will no doubt be objected that such a world-outlook, which in giving
this certainty as to the outlines and tendency of the future cuts off
all far-reaching hopes, would be unhealthy for all and fatal for many,
once it ceased to be a mere theory and was adopted as a practical scheme
of life by the group of personalities effectively moulding the future.
Such is not my opinion. We are civilized, not Gothic or Rococo, people;
we have to reckon with the hard cold facts of a _late_ life, to which
the parallel is to be found not in Pericles’s Athens but in Cæsar’s
Rome. Of great painting or great music there can no longer be, for
Western people, any question. Their architectural possibilities have
been exhausted these hundred years. Only _extensive_ possibilities are
left to them. Yet, for a sound and vigorous generation that is filled
with unlimited hopes, I fail to see that it is any disadvantage to
discover betimes that some of these hopes must come to nothing. And if
the hopes thus doomed should be those most dear, well, a man who is
worth anything will not be dismayed. It is true that the issue may be a
tragic one for some individuals who in their decisive years are
overpowered by the conviction that in the spheres of architecture,
drama, painting, there is nothing left for _them_ to conquer. What
matter if they do go under! It has been the convention hitherto to admit
no limits of any sort in these matters, and to believe that each period
had its own task to do in each sphere. Tasks therefore were found by
hook or by crook, leaving it to be settled posthumously whether or not
the artist’s faith was justified and his life-work necessary. Now,
nobody but a pure romantic would take this way out. Such a pride is not
the pride of a Roman. What are we to think of the individual who,
standing before an exhausted quarry, would rather be told that a new
vein will be struck to-morrow—the bait offered by the radically false
and mannerized art of the moment—than be shown a rich and virgin clay-
bed near by? The lesson, I think, would be of benefit to the coming
generations, as showing them what is possible—and therefore necessary—
and what is excluded from the inward potentialities of their time.
Hitherto an incredible total of intellect and power has been squandered
in false directions. The West-European, however historically he may
think and feel, is at a certain stage of life invariably uncertain of
his own direction; he gropes and feels his way and, if unlucky in
environment, he loses it. But now at last the work of centuries enables
him to view the disposition of his own life in relation to the general
culture-scheme and to test his own powers and purposes. And I can only
hope that men of the new generation may be moved by this book to devote
themselves to technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of the paint-
brush, and politics instead of epistemology. Better they could not do.
XV
It still remains to consider the relation of a morphology of world-
history to Philosophy. All genuine historical work is philosophy, unless
it is mere ant-industry. But the operations of the systematic
philosopher are subject to constant and serious error through his
assuming the permanence of his results. He overlooks the fact that every
thought lives in a historical world and is therefore involved in the
common destiny of mortality. He supposes that higher thought possesses
an everlasting and unalterable objectiveness (Gegenstand), that the
great questions of all epochs are identical, and that therefore they are
capable in the last analysis of unique answers.
But question and answer are here one, and the great questions are made
great by the very fact that unequivocal answers to them are so
passionately demanded, so that it is as life-symbols only that they
possess significance. There are no eternal truths. Every philosophy is
the expression of its own and only its own time, and—if by philosophy we
mean effective philosophy and not academic triflings about judgment-
forms, sense-categories and the like—no two ages possess the same
philosophic intentions. The difference is not between perishable and
imperishable doctrines but between doctrines which live their day and
doctrines which never live at all. The immortality of thoughts-become is
an illusion—the essential is, what kind of man comes to expression in
them. The greater the man, the truer the philosophy, with the inward
truth that in a great work of art transcends all proof of its several
elements or even of their compatibility with one another. At highest,
the philosophy may absorb the entire content of an epoch, realize it
within itself and then, embodying it in some grand form or personality,
pass it on to be developed further and further. The scientific dress or
the mark of learning adopted by a philosophy is here unimportant.
Nothing is simpler than to make good poverty of ideas by founding a
system, and even a good idea has little value when enunciated by a
solemn ass. Only its necessity to life decides the eminence of a
doctrine.
For me, therefore, the test of value to be applied to a thinker is his
eye for the great facts of his own time. Only this can settle whether he
is merely a clever architect of systems and principles, versed in
definitions and analyses, or whether it is the very soul of his time
that speaks in his works and his intuitions. A philosopher who cannot
grasp and command actuality as well will never be of the first rank. The
Pre-Socratics were merchants and politicians _en grand_. The desire to
put his political ideas into practice in Syracuse nearly cost Plato his
life, and it was the same Plato who discovered the set of geometrical
theorems that enabled Euclid to build up the Classical system of
mathematics. Pascal—whom Nietzsche knows only as the “broken Christian”—
Descartes, Leibniz were the first mathematicians and technicians of
their time.
The great “Pre-Socratics” of China from Kwan-tsi (about 670) to
Confucius (550-478) were statesmen, regents, lawgivers like Pythagoras
and Parmenides, like Hobbes and Leibniz. With Lao-tsze—the opponent of
all state authority and high politics and the enthusiast of small
peaceful communities—unworldliness and deed-shyness first appear,
heralds of lecture-room and study philosophy. But Lao-tsze was in his
time, the _ancien régime_ of China, an exception in the midst of sturdy
philosophers for whom epistemology meant the knowledge of the important
relations of actual life.