(Goethe). Cf. Vol. II, p. 618, for functional money.
-----
XVI
The liberation of geometry from the visual, and of algebra from the
notion of magnitude, and the union of both, beyond all elementary
limitations of drawing and counting, in the great structure of function-
theory—this was the grand course of Western number-thought. The constant
number of the Classical mathematic was dissolved into the variable.
Geometry _became_ analytical and dissolved all concrete forms, replacing
the mathematical bodies from which the rigid geometrical values had been
obtained, by abstract spatial relations which in the end ceased to have
any application at all to sense-present phenomena. It began by
substituting for Euclid’s optical figures geometrical loci referred to a
co-ordinate system of arbitrarily chosen “origin,” and reducing the
postulated objectiveness of existence of the geometrical object to the
one condition that during the operation (which itself was one of
equating and not of measurement) the selected co-ordinate system should
not be changed. But these co-ordinates immediately came to be regarded
as values pure and simple, serving not so much to determine as to
represent and replace the position of points as space-elements. Number,
the boundary of things-become, was represented, not as before
pictorially by a figure, but symbolically by an equation. “Geometry”
altered its meaning; the co-ordinate system as a picturing disappeared
and the point became an entirely abstract number-group. In architecture,
we find this inward transformation of Renaissance into Baroque through
the innovations of Michael Angelo and Vignola. Visually pure lines
became, in palace and church façades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In
place of the clear co-ordinates that we have in Romano-Florentine
colonnading and storeying, the “infinitesimal” appears in the graceful
flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The constructive
dissolves in the wealth of the decorative—in mathematical language, the
functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups and clusters,
break up the façades, gather and disperse again restlessly. The flat
surfaces of wall, roof, storey melt into a wealth of stucco work and
ornaments, vanish and break into a play of light and shade. The light
itself, as it is made to play upon the form-world of mature Baroque—
viz., the period from Bernini (1650) to the Rococo of Dresden, Vienna
and Paris—has become an essentially musical element. The Dresden
Zwinger[75] is a _sinfonia_. Along with 18th Century mathematics, 18th
Century architecture develops into a form-world of _musical_ characters.
-----
Footnote 75:
Built for August II, in 1711, as barbican or fore-building for a
projected palace.—_Tr._
-----
XVII
This mathematics of ours was bound in due course to reach the point at
which not merely the limits of artificial geometrical form but the
limits of the visual itself were felt by theory and by the soul alike as
limits indeed, as obstacles to the unreserved expression of inward
possibilities—in other words, the point at which the ideal of
transcendent extension came into fundamental conflict with the
limitations of immediate perception. The Classical soul, with the entire
abdication of Platonic and Stoic ἀταραξία, submitted to the sensuous and
(as the erotic under-meaning of the Pythagorean numbers shows) it rather
_felt_ than _emitted_ its great symbols. Of transcending the corporeal
here-and-now it was quite incapable. But whereas number, as conceived by
a Pythagorean, exhibited the essence of individual and discrete _data_
in “Nature” Descartes and his successors looked upon number as
_something to be conquered_, to be _wrung out_, an abstract relation
royally indifferent to all phenomenal support and capable of holding its
own against “Nature” on all occasions. The will-to-power (to use
Nietzsche’s great formula) that from the earliest Gothic of the Eddas,
the Cathedrals and Crusades, and even from the old conquering Goths and
Vikings, has distinguished the attitude of the Northern soul to its
world, appears also in the sense-transcending energy, the _dynamic_ of
Western number. In the Apollinian mathematic the intellect is the
servant of the eye, in the Faustian its master. Mathematical, “absolute”
space, we see then, is utterly un-Classical, and from the first,
although mathematicians with their reverence for the Hellenic tradition
did not dare to observe the fact, it was something different from the
indefinite spaciousness of daily experience and customary painting, the
_a priori_ space of Kant which seemed so unambiguous and sure a concept.
It is a pure abstract, an ideal and unfulfillable postulate of a soul
which is ever less and less satisfied with sensuous means of expression
and in the end passionately brushes them aside. _The inner eye has
awakened._
And then, for the first time, those who thought deeply were obliged to
see that the Euclidean geometry, which is the _true and only_ geometry
of the simple of all ages, is when regarded from the higher standpoint
nothing but a _hypothesis_, the general validity of which, since Gauss,
we know it to be quite impossible to prove in the face of other and
perfectly non-perceptual geometries. The critical proposition of this
geometry, Euclid’s axiom of parallels, is an _assertion_, for which we
are quite at liberty to substitute another assertion. We may assert, in
fact, that through a given point, no parallels, or two, or many
parallels may be drawn to a given straight line, and all these
assumptions lead to completely irreproachable geometries of three
dimensions, which can be employed in physics and even in astronomy, and
are in some cases preferable to the Euclidean.
Even the simple axiom that extension is boundless (boundlessness, since
Riemann and the theory of curved space, is to be distinguished from
endlessness) at once contradicts the essential character of all
immediate perception, in that the latter depends upon the existence of
light-resistances and _ipso facto_ has material bounds. But abstract
principles of boundary can be imagined which transcend, in an entirely
new sense, the possibilities of optical definition. For the deep
thinker, there exists even in the Cartesian geometry the tendency to get
beyond the three dimensions of _experiential_ space, regarded as an
unnecessary restriction on the symbolism of number. And although it was
not till about 1800 that the notion of _multi-dimensional space_ (it is
a pity that no better word was found) provided analysis with broader
foundations, the real first step was taken at the moment when powers—
that is, really, logarithms—were released from their original relation
with sensually realizable surfaces and solids and, through the
employment of irrational and complex exponents, brought within the realm
of function as perfectly general relation-values. It will be admitted by
everyone who understands anything of mathematical reasoning that
directly we passed from the notion of a³ as a natural maximum to that of
a^{_n_}, the unconditional necessity of three-dimensional space was done
away with.
Once the space-element or point had lost its last persistent relic of
visualness and, instead of being represented to the eye as a cut in co-
ordinate lines, was defined as a group of three independent numbers,
there was no longer any inherent objection to replacing the number 3 by
the general number _n_. The notion of dimension was radically changed.
It was no longer a matter of treating the properties of a point
metrically with reference to its position in a visible system, but of
representing the entirely abstract properties of a number-group by means
of any dimensions that we please. The number-group—consisting of _n_
independent ordered elements—is an _image_ of the point and it is
_called_ a point. Similarly, an equation logically arrived therefrom is
_called_ a plane and is the image of a plane. And the aggregate of all
points of _n_ dimensions is _called_ an _n_-dimensional space.[76] In
these transcendent space-worlds, which are remote from every sort of
sensualism, lie the relations which it is the business of analysis to
investigate and which are found to be consistently in agreement with the
data of experimental physics. This space of higher degree is a symbol
which is through-and-through the peculiar property of the Western mind.
That mind alone has attempted, and successfully too, to capture the
“become” and the extended in _these_ forms, to conjure and bind—to
“know”—the alien by _this_ kind of appropriation or taboo. Not until
such spheres of number-thought are reached, and not for any men but the
few who have reached them, do such imaginings as systems of hypercomplex
numbers (e.g., the quaternions of the calculus of vectors) and
apparently quite meaningless symbols like ∞^{_n_} acquire the character
of something actual. And here if anywhere it must be understood that
actuality is not only sensual actuality. The spiritual is in no wise
limited to perception-forms for the actualizing of its idea.
-----
Footnote 76:
From the standpoint of the theory of “aggregates” (or “sets of
points”), a well-ordered set of points, irrespective of the dimension
figure, is called a corpus; and thus an aggregate of _n_ - 1
dimensions is considered, _relatively_ to one of _n_ dimensions, as a
surface. Thus the limit (wall, edge) of an “aggregate” represents an
aggregate of lower “potentiality.”
-----
XVIII
From this grand intuition of symbolic space-worlds came the last and
conclusive creation of Western mathematic—the expansion and subtilizing
of the function theory in that of _groups_. Groups are aggregates or
sets of homogeneous mathematical images—e.g., the totality of all
differential equations of a certain type—which in structure and ordering
are analogous to the Dedekind number-bodies. Here are worlds, we feel,
of perfectly new numbers, which are nevertheless not utterly sense-
transcendent for the _inner_ eye of the adept; and the problem now is to
discover in those vast abstract form-systems certain elements which,
relatively to a particular group of operations (viz., of transformations
of the system), remain unaffected thereby, that is, possess invariance.
In mathematical language, the problem, as stated generally by Klein, is—
given an _n_-dimensional manifold (“space”) and a group of
transformations, it is required to examine the forms belonging to the
manifold in respect of such properties as are not altered by
transformation of the group.
And with this culmination our Western mathematic, having exhausted every
inward possibility and fulfilled its destiny as the _copy and purest
expression of the idea of the Faustian soul_, closes its development in
the same way as the mathematic of the Classical Culture concluded in the
third century. Both those sciences (the only ones of which the organic
structure can even to-day be examined historically) arose out of a
wholly new idea of number, in the one case Pythagoras’s, in the other
Descartes’. Both, expanding in all beauty, reached their maturity one
hundred years later; and both, after flourishing for three centuries,
completed the structure of their ideas at the same moment as the
Cultures to which they respectively belonged passed over into the phase
of megalopolitan Civilization. The deep significance of this
interdependence will be made clear in due course. It is enough for the
moment that for us the time of the _great_ mathematicians is past. Our
tasks to-day are those of preserving, rounding off, refining, selection—
in place of big dynamic creation, the same clever detail-work which
characterized the Alexandrian mathematic of late Hellenism.
A historical paradigm will make this clearer.
column 1
column two
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CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY
I
PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY
I
PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC
I
Now, at last, it is possible to take the decisive step of sketching an
image of history that is independent of the accident of standpoint, of
the period in which this or that observer lives—independent too of the
personality of the observer himself, who as an interested member of his
own Culture is tempted, by its religious, intellectual, political and
social tendencies, to order the material of history according to a
perspective that is limited as to both space and time, and to fashion
arbitrary forms into which the superficies of history can be forced but
which are entirely alien to its inner content.
What has been missing, till now, is _detachment_ from the objects
considered (die Distanz vom Gegenstande). In respect of Nature, this
detachment has long ago been attained, though of course it was
relatively easy of attainment, since the physicist can obviously
systematize the mechanical-causal picture of his world as impersonally
as though he himself did not exist in it.
It is quite possible, however, to do the same as regards the form-world
of History. We have merely been unaware of the possibility. The modern
historian, in the very act of priding himself on his “objectivity,”
naïvely and unconsciously reveals his prepossessions. For this reason it
is quite legitimate to say—and it will infallibly be said some day—that
so far a genuinely Faustian treatment of history has been entirely
lacking. By such a treatment is meant one that has enough detachment to
admit that any “present” is only such with reference to a particular
generation of men; that the number of generations is infinite, and that
the proper present must therefore be regarded just as something
infinitely distant and alien is regarded, and treated as an interval of
time neither more nor less significant in the whole picture of History
than others. Such a treatment will employ no distorting modulus of
personal ideals, set no personal origin of co-ordinates, be influenced
by none of the personal hopes and fears and other inward impulses which
count for so much in practical life; and such a detachment will—to use
the words of Nietzsche (who, be it said, was far from possessing enough
of it himself)—enable one to view the whole fact of Man from an immense
distance, to regard the individual Cultures, one’s own included, as one
regards the range of mountain peaks along a horizon.
Once again, therefore, there was an act like the act of Copernicus to be
accomplished, an act of emancipation from the evident present in the
name of infinity. This the Western soul achieved in the domain of Nature
long ago, when it passed from the Ptolemaic world-system to that which
is alone valid for it to-day, and treats the position of the observer on
one particular planet as accidental instead of normative.
A similar emancipation of world-history from the accidental standpoint,
the perpetually re-defined “modern period,” is both possible and
necessary. It is true that the 19th Century A.D. seems to us infinitely
fuller and more important than, say, the 19th Century B.C.; but the
moon, too, seems to us bigger than Jupiter or Saturn. The physicist has
long ago freed himself from prepossessions as to relative distance, the
historian not so. We permit ourselves to consider the Culture of the
Greeks as an “ancient” related to our own “modern.” Were they in their
turn “modern” in relation to the finished and historically mature
Egyptians of the court of the great Thuthmosis who lived a millennium
before Homer? For us, the events which took place between 1500 and 1800
on the soil of Western Europe constitute the most important third of
"world"-history; for the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks
back on and judges by 4000 years of Chinese history, those centuries
generally are a brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less
significant than the centuries of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220
A.D.), which in _his_ "world"-history are epoch-making.
To liberate History, then, from that thraldom to the observers’
prejudices which in our own case has made of it nothing more than a
record of a partial past leading up to an accidental present, with the
ideals and interests of that present as criteria of the achievement and
possibility, is the object of all that follows.
II
_Nature_ and _History_[77] are the opposite extreme terms of man’s range
of possibilities, whereby he is enabled to order the actualities about
him as a picture of the world. An actuality is Nature in so far as it
assigns things-becoming their place as things-become, and History in so
far as it orders things-become with reference to their becoming. An
actuality as an evocation of mind is contemplated, and as an assurance
of the senses is critically comprehended, the first being exemplified in
the worlds of Plato, Rembrandt, Goethe and Beethoven, the second in the
worlds of Parmenides, Descartes, Kant and Newton. Cognition in the
strict sense of the word is that act of experience of which the
completed issue is called “Nature.” The cognized and “Nature” are one
and the same. The symbol of mathematical number has shown us that the
aggregate of things cognized is the same as the world of things
mechanically defined, things correct once and for all, things brought
under law. _Nature is the sum of the law-imposed necessities._ There are
only laws of _Nature_. No physicist who understands his duty would wish
to transcend these limits. His task is to establish an ordered code
which not only includes all the laws that he can find in the picture of
Nature that is proper to himself but, further, represents that picture
exhaustively and without remainder.
Contemplation or vision (Anschauen), on the other hand—I may recall
Goethe’s words: “vision is to be carefully distinguished from seeing”—,
is that act of experience which _is itself history because it is itself
a fulfilling_. That which has been lived is that which has happened, and
it is history. (Erlebtes ist Geschehenes, ist Geschichte.)
Every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated. It carries
the hall-mark of Direction (“Time”), of _irreversibility_. That which
has happened is thenceforth counted with the become and not with the
becoming, with the stiffened and not the living, and belongs beyond
recall to the past. Our feeling of world-fear has its sources here.
Everything cognized, on the contrary, is _timeless_, neither past nor
future but simply “there,” and consequently permanently valid, as indeed
the very constitution of natural law requires that it should be. Law and
the domain of law are _anti-historical_. They exclude incident and
casuality. The laws of nature are forms of rigorous and therefore
inorganic necessity. It becomes easy to see why mathematics, as the
ordering of things-become by number, is _always and exclusively_
associated with laws and causality.
Becoming has no number. We can count, measure, dissect only the lifeless
and so much of the living as can be dissociated from livingness. Pure
becoming, pure life, is in this sense incapable of being bounded. It
lies beyond the domain of cause and effect, law and measure. No deep and
pure historical research seeks for conformities with causal laws—or, if
it does so, it does not understand its own essence.
At the same time, history as positively treated is not pure becoming: it
is an image, a world-form radiated from the waking consciousness of the
historian, in which the becoming _dominates_ the become. The possibility
of extracting results of any sort by scientific methods depends upon the
proportion of things-become present in the subject treated, and by
hypothesis there is in this case a defect of them; the higher the
proportion is, the more mechanical, reasonable, causal, history is made
to appear. Even Goethe’s “living nature,” utterly unmathematical world-
picture as it was, contained enough of the dead and stiffened to allow
him to treat at least his foreground scientifically. But when this
content of things-become dwindles to very little, then history becomes
approximately pure becoming, and contemplation and vision become an
experience which can only be rendered in forms of _art_. That which
Dante saw before his spiritual eyes as the destiny of the world, he
_could not possibly_ have arrived at by ways of science, any more than
Goethe could have attained by these ways to what he saw in the great
moments of his “Faust” studies, any more than Plotinus and Giordano
Bruno could have distilled their visions from researches. This contrast
lies at the root of all dispute regarding the inner form of history. In
the presence of the same object or corpus of facts, every observer
according to his own disposition has a different _impression_ of the
whole, and this impression, _intangible and incommunicable_, underlies
his judgment and gives it its personal colour. The degree in which
things-become are taken in differs from man to man, which is quite
enough in itself to show that they can never agree as to task or method.
Each accuses the other of a deficiency of “clear thinking,” and yet the
something that is expressed by this phrase is something not built with
hands, not implying superiority or a priority of degree but necessary
difference of kind. The same applies to all natural sciences.
Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the fact that at bottom the wish
to write history _scientifically_ involves a contradiction. True science
reaches just as far as the notions of truth and falsity have validity:
this applies to mathematics and it applies also to the science of
historical spade-work, viz., the collection, ordering and sifting of
material. But real historical vision (which only _begins_ at this point)
belongs to the domain of significances, in which the crucial words are
not “correct” and “erroneous,” but “deep” and “shallow.” The true
physicist is not deep, but _keen_: it is only when he leaves the domain
of working hypotheses and brushes against the final things that he can
be deep, but at this stage he is already a metaphysician. Nature is to
be handled scientifically, History poetically. Old Leopold von Ranke is
credited with the remark that, after all, Scott’s “Quentin Durward” was
the true history-writing. And so it is: the advantage of a good history
book is that it enables the reader to be his own Scott.
On the other hand, within the very realm of numbers and exact knowledge
there is that which Goethe called “living Nature,” an immediate vision
of pure becoming and self-shaping, in fact, history as above defined.
Goethe’s world was, in the first instance, an organism, an existence,
and it is easy therefore to see why his researches, even when
superficially of a physical kind, do not make numbers, or laws, or
causality captured in formulæ, or dissection of any sort their object,
but are morphology in the highest sense of the word; and why his work
neither uses nor needs to use the specifically Western and un-Classical
means of causal treatment, metrical experiment. His treatment of the
Earth’s crust is invariably geology, and never mineralogy, which he
called the science of something dead.
Let it be said, once more, that there are no exact boundaries set
between the two kinds of world-notion. However great the contrast
between becoming and the become, the fact remains that they are jointly
present in every kind of understanding. He who looks at the becoming and
fulfilling in them, experiences History; he who dissects them as become
and fulfilled cognizes Nature.
In every man, in every Culture, in every culture-phase, there is found
an inherent disposition, an inherent inclination and vocation to prefer
one of the two forms as an ideal of understanding the world. Western man
is in a high degree historically disposed,[78] Classical man far from
being so. We follow up what is given us with an eye to past and future,
whereas Classical man knew only the point-present and an ambiance of
myth. We have before us a symbol of becoming in every bar of our music
from Palestrina to Wagner, and the Greeks a symbol of the pure present
in every one of their statues. The rhythm of a body is based upon a
simultaneous relation of the parts, that of a fugue in the succession of
elements in time.
-----
Footnote 77:
See p. 55, also Vol. II, pp. 25 et seq.
Footnote 78:
“Anti-historical,” the expression which we apply to a decidedly
systematic valuation, is to be carefully distinguished from
“ahistorical.” The beginning of the IV Book (53) of Schopenhauer’s
_Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_ affords a good illustration of the
man who thinks anti-historically, that is, deliberately for
theoretical reasons suppresses and rejects the historical in himself—
something that is actually there. The ahistoric Greek nature, on the
contrary, neither possesses nor understands it.
-----
III
There emerge, then, as the two basic elements of all world-picturing,
the principle of Form (Gestalt) and the principle of Law (Gesetz). The
more decidedly a particular world-picture shows the traits of “Nature,”
the more unconditionally law and number prevail in it; and the more
purely intuitive the picture of the world as eternally becoming, the
more alien to numbers its manifold and intangible elements. “Form is
something mobile, something becoming, something passing. The doctrine of
formation is the doctrine of transformation. Metamorphosis is the key to
the whole alphabet of Nature,” so runs a note of Goethe’s, marking
already the methodic difference between his famous “exact percipient
fancy” which quietly lets itself be worked upon by the living,[79] and
the exact killing procedure of modern physics. But whatever the process,
a remainder consisting of so much of the alien element as is present is
always found. In strict natural sciences this remainder takes the form
of the inevitable _theories and hypotheses_ which are imposed on, and
leaven, the stiff mass of number and formula. In historical research, it
appears as _chronology_, the number-structure of dates and statistics
which, alien though number is to the essence of becoming, is so
thoroughly woven around and into the world of historical forms that it
is never felt to be intrusive. For it is devoid of mathematical import.
Chronological number distinguishes uniquely-occurring actualities,
mathematical number constant possibilities. The one sharpens the images
and works up the outlines of epoch and fact for the understanding eye.
But the other _is itself_ the law which it seeks to establish, the end
and aim of research. Chronological number is a scientific means of
pioneering borrowed from the science of sciences, mathematics, and used
as such without regard to its specific properties. Compare, for
instance, the meaning of the two symbols 12 × 8 = 96, and 18 October,
1813.[80] It is the same difference, in the use of figures, that prose
and poetry present in the use of words.
One other point remains to be noted.[81] As a becoming always lies at
the base of the become, and as the world-picture representative of
becoming is that which history gives us, therefore history is the
_original_ world-form, and Nature—the fully elaborated world-mechanism—
is the _late_ world-form that only the men of a mature Culture can
completely actualize. In fact, the darkness encompassing the simple soul
of primitive mankinds, which we can realize even to-day from their
religious customs and myths—that entirely organic world of pure
wilfulness, of hostile demons and kindly powers—was through-and-through
a living and swaying whole, ununderstandable, indefinable, incalculable.
We may call this Nature if we like, but it is not what _we_ mean by
“nature,” i.e., the strict image projected by a knowing intellect. Only
the souls of children and of great artists can now hear the echoes of
this long-forgotten world of nascent humanity, but it echoes still, and
not rarely, even in the inelastic "nature"-medium that the city-spirit
of the mature Culture is remorselessly building up round the individual.
Hence that acute antagonism between the scientific (“modern”) and the
artistic (“unpractical”) world-idea which every Late period knows; the
man of fact and the poet do not and cannot understand one another. Hence
comes, too, that tendency of historical study, which must inevitably
contain an element of the childish, the dreamy, the Goethian, to dress
up as a science, to be (using its own naïve word) “materialistic,” at
the imminent risk of becoming a mere physics of public life.
“Nature,” in the exact sense, is a way of possessing actuality which is
special to the few, restricted to the megalopolitans of the late periods
of great Cultures, masculine, perhaps even senatorial; while History is
the naïve, youthful, more or less instinctive way that is proper to
_all_ men alike. At least, that is the position of the number-based,
unmystical, dissectable and dissected “Nature” of Aristotle and Kant,
the Sophists and the Darwinians, modern physics and chemistry, _vis-à-
vis_ the lived, felt and unconfined “Nature” of Homer and the Eddas, of
Doric and Gothic man. To overlook this is to miss the whole essence of
historical treatment. It is history that is the truly natural, and the
exact mechanically-correct “Nature” of the scientist that is the
artificial conception of world by soul. Hence the paradox that modern
man finds "nature"-study easy and historical study hard.
Tendencies towards a mechanistic idea of the world proceeding wholly
from mathematical delimitation and logical differentiation, from law and
causality, appear quite early. They are found in the first centuries of
all Cultures, still weak, scattered and lost in the full tide of the
religious world-conception. The name to be recalled here is that of
Roger Bacon. But soon these tendencies acquire a sterner character: like
everything that is wrung out of the soul and has to defend itself
against human nature, they are not wanting in arrogance and
exclusiveness. Quietly the spatial and comprehensible (comprehension is
in its essence number, in its structure quantitative) becomes prepotent
throughout the outer world of the individual and, aiding and aided by
the simple impressions of sensuous-life, effects a mechanical synthesis
of the causal and legal sort, so that at long last the sharp
consciousness of the megalopolitan—be he of Thebes, Babylon, Benares,
Alexandria or a West European cosmopolis—is subjected to so consistent a
pressure of natural-law notions that, when scientific and philosophical
prejudice (it is no more than that) dictates the proposition that this
condition of the soul is _the_ soul and the mechanical world-picture is
_the_ world, the assertion is scarcely challenged. It has been made
predominant by logicians like Aristotle and Kant. But Plato and Goethe
have rejected it and refuted it.
IV
The task of world-knowing—for the man of the higher Cultures a need,
seen as a duty, of expressing his own essence—is certainly in every case
the same, though its process may be called science or philosophy, and
though its affinity to artistic creation and to faith-intuition may for
one be something felt and for another something questionable. It is to
present, without accretions, that form of the world-picture which to the
individual in each case is proper and significant, and for him (so long
as he does not _compare_) is in fact “the” world.
The task is necessarily a double one, in view of the distinction between
“Nature” and “History.” Each speaks its own form-language which differs
utterly from that of the other, and however the two may overlap and
confuse one another in an unsifted and ambiguous world-picture such as
that of everyday life, they are incapable of any inner unity.
Direction and Extension are the outstanding characters which
differentiate the historical and the scientific (naturhaft) kind of
impressibility, and it is totally impossible for a man to have both
working creatively within him at the same time. The double meaning of
the German word “Ferne” (distance, farness) is illuminating. In the one
order of ideas it implies futurity, in the other a spatial interval of
standing apart, and the reader will not fail to remark that the
historical materialist almost necessarily conceives time as a
mathematical dimension, while for the born artist, on the contrary,—as
the lyrics of every land show us—the distance-impressions made by deep
landscapes, clouds, horizon and setting sun attach themselves without an
effort to the sense of a future. The Greek poet denies the future, and
consequently he neither sees nor sings of the things of the future; he
cleaves to the near, as he belongs to the present, entirely.
The natural-science investigator, the productive reasoner in the full
sense of the word, whether he be an experimenter like Faraday, a
theorist like Galileo, a calculator like Newton, finds in his world only
directionless _quantities_ which he measures, tests and arranges. It is
only the quantitative that is capable of being grasped through figures,
of being causally defined, of being captured in a law or formula, and
when it has achieved this, pure nature-knowledge has shot its bolt. All
its laws are quantitative connexions, or as the physicist puts it, all
physical processes _run a course in space_, an expression which a Greek
physicist would have corrected—without altering the fact—into “all
physical processes _occur between bodies_” conformably to the space-
denying feeling of the Classical soul.
The historical kind of impression-process is alien to everything
quantitative, and affects a different organ. To World-as-Nature certain
modes of apprehension, as to World-as-History certain other modes, are
_proper_. We know them and use them every day, without (as yet) having
become aware of their opposition. There is _nature-knowledge_ and there
is _man-knowledge_; there is _scientific_ experience and there is
_vital_ experience. Let the reader track down this contrast into his own
inmost being, and he will understand what I mean.
All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis, be
described as Morphology. _The Morphology of the mechanical and the
extended, a science which discovers and orders nature-laws and causal
relations, is called Systematic. The Morphology of the organic, of
history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and destiny,
is called Physiognomic._
V
In the West, the Systematic mode of treating the world reached and
passed its culminating-point during the last century, while the great
days of Physiognomic have still to come. In a hundred years all sciences
that are still possible on this soil will be parts of a single vast
Physiognomic of all things human. This is what the “Morphology of World-
History” means. In every science, and in the aim no less than in the
content of it, man tells the story of himself. Scientific experience is
spiritual self-knowledge. It is from this standpoint, as a chapter of
Physiognomic, that we have just treated of mathematics. We were not
concerned with what this or that mathematician _intended_, nor with the
savant as such or his results as a contribution to an aggregate of
knowledge, but with the mathematician as a human being, with his work as
a part of the phenomenon of himself, with his knowledge and purposes as
a part of his expression. This alone is of importance to us here. He is
the mouthpiece of a Culture which tells us about itself through him, and
he belongs, as personality, as soul, as discoverer, thinker and creator,
to the physiognomy of that Culture.
Every mathematic, in that it brings out and makes visible to all the
idea of number that is proper to itself and inborn in its conscious
being, is, whether the expression-form be a scientific system or (as in
the case of Egypt) an architecture, the confession of a Soul. If it is
true that the intentional accomplishments of a mathematic belong only to
the surface of history, it is equally true that its unconscious element,
its number-as-such, and the style in which it builds up its self-
contained cosmos of forms are an expression of its existence, its blood.
Its life-history of ripening and withering, its deep relation to the
creative acts, the myths and the cults of the same Culture—such things
are the subject-matter of a second or historical morphology, though the
possibility of such a morphology is hardly yet admitted.
The visible foregrounds of history, therefore, have the same
significance as the outward phenomena of the individual man (his statue,
his bearing, his air, his stride, his way of speaking and writing), as
distinct from what he says or writes. In the “knowledge of men” these
things exist and matter. The body and all its elaborations—defined,
“become” and _mortal_ as they are—are an expression of the soul. But
henceforth “knowledge of men” implies also knowledge of those
superlative human organisms that I call Cultures, and of their mien,
their speech, their acts—these terms being meant as we mean them already
in the case of the individual.
Descriptive, creative, Physiognomic is the art of portraiture
transferred to the spiritual domain. Don Quixote, Werther, Julian Sorel,
are portraits of an epoch, Faust the portrait of a whole Culture. For
the nature-researcher, the morphologist as systematist, the portrayal of
the world is only a business of imitation, and corresponds to the
“fidelity to nature” and the “likeness” of the craftsman-painter, who,
at bottom, works on purely mathematical lines. But a real portrait in
the Rembrandt sense of the word is physiognomic, that is, _history_
captured in a moment. The set of his self-portraits is nothing else but
a (truly Goethian) autobiography. So should the biographies of the great
Cultures be handled. The “fidelity” part, the work of the professional
historian on facts and figures, is only a means, not an end. The
countenance of history is made up of all those things which hitherto we
have only managed to evaluate according to personal standards, i.e., as
beneficial or harmful, good or bad, satisfactory or unsatisfactory—
political forms and economic forms, battles and arts, science and gods,
mathematics and morals. Everything whatsoever that has _become_ is a
symbol, and the expression of a soul. Only to one having the knowledge
of men will it unveil itself. The restraint of a law it abhors. What it
demands is that its significance should be sensed. And thus research
reaches up to a final or superlative truth—Alles Vergängliche ist nur
ein Gleichnis.[82]
The nature-researcher can be educated, but the man who knows history is
born. He seizes and pierces men and facts with one blow, guided by a
feeling which cannot be acquired by learning or affected by persuasion,
but which only too rarely manifests itself in full intensity. Direction,
fixing, ordering, defining by cause and effect, are things that one can
do if one likes. These things are work, but the other is creation. Form
and law, portrayal and comprehension, symbol and formula, have different
organs, and their opposition is that in which life stands to death,
production to destruction. Reason, system and comprehension kill as they
“cognize.” That which is cognized becomes a rigid object, capable of
measurement and subdivision. Intuitive vision, on the other hand,
vivifies and incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity.
Poetry and historical study are kin. Calculation and cognition also are
kin. But, as Hebbel says somewhere, systems are not dreamed, and art-
works are not calculated or (what is the same thing) thought out. The
artist or the real historian sees the becoming of a thing (schaut, wie
etwas wird), and he can re-enact its becoming from its lineaments,
whereas the systematist, whether he be physicist, logician, evolutionist
or pragmatical historian, learns the thing that has become. The artist’s
soul, like the soul of a Culture, is something potential that may
actualize itself, something complete and perfect—in the language of an
older philosophy, a microcosm. The systematic spirit, narrow and
withdrawn “abs-tract”) from the sensual, is an autumnal and passing
phenomenon belonging to the ripest conditions of a Culture. Linked with
the _city_, into which its life is more and more herded, it comes and
goes with the city. In the Classical world, there is science only from
the 6th-century Ionians to the Roman period, but there was art in the
Classical world for just as long as there was existence.
Once more, a paradigm may help in elucidation.
_Soul_ _World_
Existence { potentiality → fulfilment → actuality
{ (_Life_)
{ becoming → the become
Consciousness { direction extension
{ organic mechanical
{ symbol, portrait, number,
notion.
[Crossed
↓ downward ↓
arrows]
{ _History_ _Nature_
World-image { Rhythm, form. Tension, law.
{ Physiognomic. Systematic.
{ Facts Truths
Seeking thus to obtain a clear idea of the unifying principle out of
which each of these two worlds is conceived, we find that
mathematically-controlled cognition relates always (and the purer it is,
the more directly) to a continuous present. The picture of nature dealt
with by the physicist is that which is deployed before his senses at the
given moment. It is one of the tacit, but none the less firm,
presuppositions of nature-research that “Nature” (_die_ Natur) is the
same for every consciousness and for all times. An experiment is
decisive for good and all; time being, not precisely denied, but
eliminated from the field of investigation. Real history rests on an
equally certain sense of the contrary; what it presupposes as its origin
is a nearly indescribable sensitive faculty within, which is
continuously labile under continuous impressions, and is incapable
therefore of possessing what may be called a centre of time.[83] (We
shall consider later what the physicist means by “time.”) The picture of
history—be it the history of mankind, of the world of organisms, of the
earth or of the stellar systems—is a _memory_-picture. “Memory,” in this
connexion, is conceived as a higher state (certainly not proper to every
consciousness and vouchsafed to many in only a low degree), a perfectly
definite kind of imagining power, which enables experience to traverse
each particular moment _sub specie æternitatis_ as one point in an
integral made up of all the past and all the future, and it forms the
necessary basis of all looking-backward, all self-knowledge and all
self-confession. In this sense, Classical man has no memory and
therefore no history, either in or around himself. “No man can judge
history but one who has himself experienced history,” says Goethe. In
the Classical world-consciousness all Past was absorbed in the instant
Present. Compare the entirely historical heads of the Nürnberg Cathedral
sculptures, of Dürer, of Rembrandt, with those of Hellenistic sculpture,
for instance the famous Sophocles statue. The former tell the whole
history of a soul, whereas the latter rigidly confines itself to
expressing the traits of a momentary being, and tells nothing of how
this being is the issue of a course of life—if indeed we can speak of
“course of life” at all in connexion with a purely Classical man, who is
always complete and never becoming.
-----
Footnote 79:
“There are prime phenomena which in their godlike simplicity we must
not disturb or infringe.”
Footnote 80:
The date of Napoleon’s defeat, and the liberation of Germany, on the
field of Leipzig.—_Tr._
Footnote 81:
See Vol. II, pp. 25 et seq., 327 et seq.
Footnote 82:
“All we see before us passing
Sign and symbol is alone.”
From the final stanza of Faust II (Anster’s translation).—_Tr._
Footnote 83:
This phrase, derived by analogy from the centre of gravity of
mechanics, is offered as a translation of “mithin in einim Zeitpunkte
ger nicht zusammengefasst werden können.”—_Tr._
-----
VI
And now it is possible to discover the ultimate elements of the
historical form-world.
Countless shapes that emerge and vanish, pile up and melt again, a
thousand-hued glittering tumult, it seems, of perfectly wilful chance—
such is the picture of world-history when first it deploys before our
inner eye. But through this seeming anarchy, the keener glance can
detect those pure forms which underlie all human becoming, penetrate
their cloud-mantle, and bring them unwillingly to unveil.
But of the whole picture of world-becoming, of that cumulus of grand
planes that the Faust-eye[84] sees piled one beyond another—the becoming
of the heavens, of the earth’s crust, of life, of man—we shall deal here
only with that very small morphological unit that we are accustomed to
call “world-history,” that history which Goethe ended by despising, the
history of higher mankind during 6000 years or so, without going into
the deep problem of the inward homogeneity of all these aspects. What
gives this fleeting form-world meaning and substance, and what has
hitherto lain buried deep under a mass of tangible “facts” and “dates”
that has hardly yet been bored through, is the _phenomenon of the Great
Cultures_. Only after these prime forms shall have been seen and felt
and worked out in respect of their physiognomic meaning will it be
possible to say that the essence and inner form of human History as
opposed to the essence of Nature are understood—or rather, that we
understand them. Only after this inlook and this outlook will a serious
philosophy of history become feasible. Only then will it be possible to
see each fact in the historical picture—each idea, art, war,
personality, epoch—according to its symbolic content, and to regard
history not as a mere sum of past things without intrinsic order or
inner necessity, but as an organism of rigorous structure and
significant articulation, an organism that does not suddenly dissolve
into a formless and ambiguous future when it reaches the accidental
present of the observer.
_Cultures are organisms_, and world-history is their collective
biography. Morphologically, the immense history of the Chinese or of the
Classical Culture is the exact equivalent of the petty history of the
individual man, or of the animal, or the tree, or the flower. For the
Faustian vision, this is not a postulate but an experience; if we want
to learn to recognize inward forms that constantly and everywhere repeat
themselves, the comparative morphology[85] of plants and animals has
long ago given us the methods. In the destinies of the several Cultures
that follow upon one another, grow up with one another, touch,
overshadow, and suppress one another, is compressed the whole content of
human history. And if we set free their shapes, till now hidden all too
deep under the surface of a trite “history of human progress,” and let
them march past us in the spirit, it cannot but be that we shall succeed
in distinguishing, amidst all that is special or unessential, the
primitive culture-form, _the_ Culture that underlies as ideal all the
individual Cultures.
I distinguish the _idea_ of a Culture, which is the sum total of its
inner possibilities, from its sensible _phenomenon_ or appearance upon
the canvas of history as a fulfilled actuality. It is the relation of
the soul to the living body, to its expression in the light-world
perceptible to our eyes. This history of a Culture is the progressive
actualizing of its possible, and the fulfilment is equivalent to the
end. In this way the Apollinian soul, which some of us can perhaps
understand and share in, is related to its unfolding in the realm of
actuality, to the “Classical” or “antique” as we call it, of which the
tangible and understandable relics are investigated by the archæologist,
the philologist, the æsthetic and the historian.
Culture is the _prime phenomenon_ of all past and future world-history.
The deep, and scarcely appreciated, idea of Goethe, which he discovered
in his “living nature” and always made the basis of his morphological
researches, we shall here apply—in its most precise sense—to all the
formations of man’s history, whether fully matured, cut off in the
prime, half opened or stifled in the seed. It is the method of living
into (erfühlen) the object, as opposed to dissecting it. “The highest to
which man can attain, is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him
wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing
further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.” The prime
phenomenon is that in which the idea of becoming is presented net. To
the spiritual eye of Goethe the idea of the prime plant was clearly
visible in the form of every individual plant that happened to come up,
or even that could possibly come up. In his investigation of the “os
intermaxillare” his starting-point was the _prime phenomenon of the
vertebrate type_; and in other fields it was geological stratification,
or the leaf as the prime form of the plant-organism, or the
metamorphosis of the plants as the prime form of all organic becoming.
“The same law will apply to everything else that lives,” he wrote, in
announcing his discovery to Herder. It was a look into the heart of
things that Leibniz would have understood, but the century of Darwin is
as remote from such a vision as it is possible to be.
At present, however, we look in vain for any treatment of history that
is entirely free from the methods of Darwinism—that is, of systematic
natural science based on causality. A physiognomic that is precise,
clear and sure of itself and its limits has never yet arisen, and it can
only arise through the discoveries of method that we have yet to make.
Herein lies the great problem set for the 20th Century to solve—to
explore carefully the inner structure of the organic units through and
in which world-history fulfils itself, to separate the morphologically
necessary from the accidental, and, by seizing the _purport_ of events,
to ascertain the languages in which they speak.
VII
A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; up-
stream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of
definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods
to hide away an eternally-unsolvable riddle; down-stream, a future even
so dark and timeless—such is the groundwork of the Faustian picture of
human history.
Over the expanse of the water passes the endless uniform wave-train of
the generations. Here and there bright shafts of light broaden out,
everywhere dancing flashes confuse and disturb the clear mirror,
changing, sparkling, vanishing. These are what we call the clans,
tribes, peoples, races which unify a series of generations within this
or that limited area of the historical surface. As widely as these
differ in creative power, so widely do the images that they create vary
in duration and plasticity, and when the creative power dies out, the
physiognomic, linguistic and spiritual identification-marks vanish also
and the phenomenon subsides again into the ruck of the generations.
Aryans, Mongols, Germans, Kelts, Parthians, Franks, Carthaginians,
Berbers, Bantus are names by which we specify some very heterogeneous
images of this order.
But over this surface, too, the great Cultures[86] accomplish their
majestic wave-cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines,
flatten again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a
sleeping waste.
A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the
proto-spirituality (_dem urseelenhaften Zustande_) of ever-childish
humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and
mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of
an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It
dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in
the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and
reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that sequence of
great epochs which define and display the stages of fulfilment, is an
inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of
Chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not
only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and
the stifling of the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply-
symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space,
in which and through which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once
attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled
and made externally actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies,
its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes
_Civilization_, the thing which we feel and understand in the words
Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such they may, like a worn-out
giant of the primeval forest, thrust their decaying branches towards the
sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in
the Islamic world. It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose
gigantic, in the Imperial age, with a false semblance of youth and
strength and fullness, and robbed the young Arabian Culture of the East
of light and air.[87]
This—the inward and outward fulfilment, the finality, that awaits every
living Culture—is the purport of all the historic “declines,” amongst
them that decline of the Classical which we know so well and fully, and
another decline, entirely comparable to it in course and duration, which
will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium but is heralded
already and sensible in and around us to-day—the decline of the
West.[88] Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual
man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age. It is a young
and trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, that reveals itself in the
morning of Romanesque and Gothic. It fills the Faustian landscape from
the Provence of the troubadours to the Hildesheim cathedral of Bishop
Bernward.[89] The spring wind blows over it. “In the works of the old-
German architecture,” says Goethe, “one sees the blossoming of an
extraordinary state. Anyone immediately confronted with such a
blossoming can do no more than wonder; but one who can see into the
secret inner life of the plant and its rain of forces, who can observe
how the bud expands, little by little, sees the thing with quite other
eyes and knows what he is seeing.” Childhood speaks to us also—and in
the same tones—out of early-Homeric Doric, out of early-Christian (which
is really early-Arabian) art and out of the works of the Old Kingdom in
Egypt that began with the Fourth Dynasty. There a mythic world-
consciousness is fighting like a harassed debtor against all the dark
and daemonic in itself and in Nature, while slowly ripening itself for
the pure, day-bright expression of the existence that it will at last
achieve and know. The more nearly a Culture approaches the noon
culmination of its being, the more virile, austere, controlled, intense
the form-language it has secured for itself, the more assured its sense
of its own power, the clearer its lineaments. In the spring all this had
still been dim and confused, tentative, filled with childish yearning
and fears—witness the ornament of Romanesque-Gothic church porches of
Saxony[90] and southern France, the early-Christian catacombs, the
Dipylon[91] vases. But there is now the full consciousness of ripened
creative power that we see in the time of the early Middle Kingdom of
Egypt, in the Athens of the Pisistratidæ, in the age of Justinian, in
that of the Counter-Reformation, and we find every individual trait of
expression deliberate, strict, measured, marvellous in its ease and
self-confidence. And we find, too, that everywhere, at moments, the
coming fulfilment suggested itself; in such moments were created the
head of Amenemhet III (the so-called “Hyksos Sphinx” of Tanis), the
domes of Hagia Sophia, the paintings of Titian. Still later, tender to
the point of fragility, fragrant with the sweetness of late October
days, come the Cnidian Aphrodite and the Hall of the Maidens in the
Erechtheum, the arabesques on Saracen horseshoe-arches, the Zwinger of
Dresden, Watteau, Mozart. At last, in the grey dawn of Civilization, the
fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-
successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is
common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in
Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary,
reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome,
wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of
protomysticism, in the womb of the mother, in the grave. The spell of a
“second religiousness”[92] comes upon it, and Late-Classical man turns
to the practice of the cults of Mithras, of Isis, of the Sun—those very
cults into which a soul just born in the East has been pouring a new
wine of dreams and fears and loneliness.
-----
Footnote 84:
Cf. Vol. II, p. 33 et seq.
Footnote 85:
Not the dissecting morphology of the Darwinian’s pragmatic zoology
with its hunt for causal connexions, but the seeing and overseeing
morphology of Goethe.
Footnote 86:
See Vol. II, pp. 41 et seq.
Footnote 87:
See Vol. II, pp. 227 et seq.
Footnote 88:
See Vol. II, pp. 116 et seq. What constitutes the downfall is not,
e.g., the catastrophe of the Great Migrations, which like the
annihilation of the Maya Culture by the Spaniards (see Vol. II, p. 51
et seq.) was a coincidence without any deep necessity, but the inward
undoing that began from the time of Hadrian, as in China from the
Eastern Han dynasty (25-220).
Footnote 89:
St. Bernward was Bishop of Hildesheim from 993 to 1022, and himself
architect and metal-worker. Three other churches besides the cathedral
survive in the city from his time or that of his immediate successors,
and Hildesheim of all North German cities is richest in monuments of
the Romanesque.—_Tr._
Footnote 90:
By “Saxony,” a German historian means not the present-day state of
Saxony (which was a small and comparatively late accretion), but the
whole region of the Weser and the lower Elbe, with Westphalia and
Holstein.—_Tr._
Footnote 91:
Vases from the cemetery adjoining the Dipylon Gate of Athens, the most
representative relics that we possess of the Doric or primitive age of
the Hellenic Culture (about 900 to 600 B.C.).—_Tr._
Footnote 92:
See Vol. II, pp. 381 et seq.
-----
VIII
The term “habit” (Habitus) is used of a plant to signify the special
way, proper to itself, in which it manifests itself, i.e., the
character, course and duration of its appearance in the light-world
where we can see it. By its habit each kind is distinguished, in respect
of each part and each phase of its existence, from all examples of other
species. We may apply this useful notion of “habit” in our physiognomic
of the grand organisms and speak of the habit of the Indian, Egyptian or
Classical Culture, history or spirituality. Some vague inkling of it has
always, for that matter, underlain the notion of _style_, and we shall
not be forcing but merely clearing and deepening that word if we speak
of the religious, intellectual, political, social or economic style[93]
of a Culture. This “habit” of existence in space, which covers in the
case of the individual man action and thought and conduct and
disposition, embraces in the case or the existence of whole Cultures the
totality of life-expressions of the higher order. The choice of
particular branches of art (e.g., the round and fresco by the Hellenes,
counterpoint and oil-painting by the West) and the out-and-out rejection
of others (e.g., of plastic by the Arabs); inclination to the esoteric
(India) or the popular (Greece and Rome); preference for oratory
(Classical) or for writing (China, the West) as the form of spiritual
communication, are all style-manifestations, and so also are the various
types of costume, of administration, of transport, of social courtesies.
All great personalities of the Classical world form a self-contained
group, whose spiritual habit is definitely different from that of all
great men of the Arabian or the Western groups. Compare even Goethe and
Raphael with Classical men, and Heraclitus, Sophocles, Plato,
Alcibiades, Themistocles, Horace and Tiberius rank themselves together
instantly as members of one family. Every Classical Cosmopolis—from
Hiero’s Syracuse to Imperial Rome the embodiment and sense-picture of
one and the same life-feeling—differs radically in lay-out and street-
plan, in the language of its public and private architecture, in the
type of its squares, alleys, courts, façades, in its colour, noises,
street-life and night-life, from the group of Indian or that of Arabian
or that of Western world-cities. Baghdad and Cairo could be felt in
Granada long after the conquest; even Philip II’s Madrid had all the
physiognomic hall-marks of modern London and Paris. There is a high
symbolism in every dissimilarity of this sort. Contrast the Western
tendency to straight-lined perspectives and street-alignments (such as
the grand tract of the Champs-Elysées from the Louvre, or the Piazza
before St. Peter’s) with the almost deliberate complexity and narrowness
of the Via Sacra, the Forum Romanum and the Acropolis, whose parts are
arranged without symmetry and with no perspective. Even the town-
planning—whether darkly as in the Gothic or consciously as in the ages
of Alexander and Napoleon—reflects the same principle as the mathematic—
in the one case the Leibnizian mathematic of infinite space, in the
other the Euclidean mathematic of separate bodies.[94] But to the
“habit” of a group belong, further, its definite _life-duration_ and its
definite tempo of development. Both of these are properties which we
must not fail to take into account in a historical theory of structure.
The rhythm (Takt) of Classical existence was different from that of
Egyptian or Arabian; and we can fairly speak of the _andante_ of Greece
and Rome and the _allegro con brio_ of the Faustian spirit.
The notion of life-duration as applied to a man, a butterfly, an oak, a
blade of grass, comprises a specific time-value, which is quite
independent of all the accidents of the individual case. Ten years are a
slice of life which is approximately equivalent for all men, and the
metamorphosis of insects is associated with a number of days exactly
known and predictable in individual cases. For the Romans the notions of
_pueritia_, _adolescentia_, _iuventus_, _virilitas_, _senectus_
possessed an almost mathematically precise meaning. Without doubt the
biology of the future will—in opposition to Darwinism and to the
exclusion in principle of causal fitness-motives for the origins of
species—take these _pre-ordained_ life durations as the starting-point
for a new enunciation of its problem.[95] The duration of a generation—
whatever may be its nature—is a fact of almost mystical significance.
Now, such relations are valid also, and to an extent never hitherto
imagined, for all the higher Cultures. _Every Culture, every adolescence
and maturing and decay of a Culture, every one of its intrinsically
necessary stages and periods, has a definite duration, always the same,
always recurring with the emphasis of a symbol._ In the present work we
cannot attempt to open up this world of most mysterious connexions, but
the facts that will emerge again and again as we go on will tell us of
themselves how much lies hidden here. What is the meaning of that
striking fifty-year period, the rhythm of the political, intellectual
and artistic “becoming” of all Cultures?[96] Of the 300-year period of
the Baroque, of the Ionic, of the great mathematics, of Attic sculpture,
of mosaic painting, of counterpoint, of Galileian mechanics? What does
the _ideal_ life of one millennium for each Culture mean in comparison
with the individual man’s "three-score years and ten"? As the plant’s
being is brought to expression in form, dress and carriage by leaves,
blossoms, twigs and fruit, so also is the being of a Culture manifested
by its religious, intellectual, political and economic formations. Just
as, say, Goethe’s individuality discourses of itself in such widely-
different forms as the _Faust_, the _Farbenlehre_, the _Reineke Fuchs_,
_Tasso_, _Werther_, the journey to Italy and the Friederike love, the
_Westöstliche Diwan_ and the _Römische Elegien_; so the individuality of
the Classical world displays itself in the Persian wars, the Attic
drama, the City-State, the Dionysia and not less in the Tyrannis, the
Ionic column, the geometry of Euclid, the Roman legion, and the
gladiatorial contests and “panem et circenses” of the Imperial age.
In this sense, too, every individual being that has any sort of
importance recapitulates,[97] of intrinsic necessity, all the epochs of
the Culture to which it belongs. In each one of us, at that decisive
moment when he begins to know that he is an ego, the inner life wakens
just where and just how that of the Culture wakened long ago. Each of us
men of the West, in his child’s day-dreams and child’s play, lives again
its Gothic—the cathedrals, the castles, the hero-sagas, the crusader’s
“Dieu le veult,” the soul’s oath of young Parzival. Every young Greek
had his Homeric age and his Marathon. In Goethe’s Werther, the image of
a tropic youth that every Faustian (but no Classical) man knows, the
springtime of Petrarch and the Minnesänger reappears. When Goethe
blocked out the _Urfaust_,[98] he was Parzival; when he finished _Faust
I_, he was Hamlet, and only with _Faust II_ did he become the world-man
of the 19th Century whom Byron could understand. Even the senility of
the Classical—the faddy and unfruitful centuries of very late Hellenism,
the second-childhood of a weary and blasé intelligence—can be studied in
more than one of its grand old men. Thus, much of Euripides’ _Bacchæ_
anticipates the life-outlook, and much of Plato’s _Timæus_ the religious
syncretism of the Imperial age; and Goethe’s _Faust II_ and Wagner’s
_Parsifal_ disclose to us in advance the shape that _our_ spirituality
will assume in our next (_in point of creative power our last_)
centuries.
Biology employs the term _homology_ of organs to signify morphological
equivalence in contradistinction to the term _analogy_ which relates to
functional equivalence. This important, and in the sequel most fruitful,
notion was conceived by Goethe (who was led thereby to the discovery of
the “os intermaxillare” in man) and put into strict scientific shape by
Owen;[99] this notion also we shall incorporate in our historical
method.
It is known that for every part of the bone-structure of the human head
an exactly corresponding part is found in all vertebrated animals right
down to the fish, and that the pectoral fins of fish and the feet, wings
and hands of terrestrial vertebrates are homologous organs, even though
they have lost every trace of similarity. The lungs of terrestrial, and
the swim-bladders of aquatic animals are homologous, while lungs and
gills on the other hand are analogous—that is, similar in point of
use.[100] And the trained and deepened morphological insight that is
required to establish such distinctions is an utterly different thing
from the present method of historical research, with its shallow
comparisons of Christ and Buddha, Archimedes and Galileo, Cæsar and
Wallenstein, parcelled Germany and parcelled Greece. More and more
clearly as we go on, we shall realize what immense views will offer
themselves to the historical eye as soon as the rigorous morphological
method has been understood and cultivated. To name but a few examples,
_homologous_ forms are: Classical sculpture and West European
orchestration, the Fourth Dynasty pyramids and the Gothic cathedrals,
Indian Buddhism and Roman Stoicism (Buddhism and Christianity are _not
even analogous_); the periods of “the Contending States” in China, the
Hyksos in Egypt and the Punic Wars; the age of Pericles and the age of
the Ommayads; the epochs of the Rigveda, of Plotinus and of Dante. The
Dionysiac movement is homologous with the Renaissance, analogous to the
Reformation. For us, "Wagner is the _résumé_ of modernity," as Nietzsche
rightly saw; and the equivalent that logically _must_ exist in the
Classical modernity we find in Pergamene art. (Some preliminary notion
of the fruitfulness of this way of regarding history, may be gathered
from studying the tables included in this volume.)
The application of the “homology” principle to historical phenomena
brings with it an entirely new connotation for the word “contemporary.”
I designate as contemporary two historical facts that occur in exactly
the same—relative—positions in their respective Cultures, and therefore
possess exactly equivalent importance. It has already been shown how the
development of the Classical and that of the Western mathematic
proceeded in complete congruence, and we might have ventured to describe
Pythagoras as the contemporary of Descartes, Archytas of Laplace,
Archimedes of Gauss. The Ionic and the Baroque, again, ran their course
_contemporaneously_. Polygnotus pairs in time with Rembrandt, Polycletus
with Bach. The Reformation, Puritanism and, above all, the turn to
Civilization appear simultaneously in all Cultures; in the Classical
this last epoch bears the names of Philip and Alexander, in our West
those of the Revolution and Napoleon. Contemporary, too, are the
building of Alexandria, of Baghdad, and of Washington; Classical coinage
and our double-entry book-keeping; the first Tyrannis and the Fronde;
Augustus and Shih-huang-ti;[101] Hannibal and the World War.
I hope to show that without exception all great creations and forms in
religion, art, politics, social life, economy and science appear, fulfil
themselves and die down _contemporaneously_ in all the Cultures; that
the inner structure of one corresponds strictly with that of all the
others; that there is not a single phenomenon of deep physiognomic
importance in the record of one for which we could not find a
counterpart in the record of every other; and that this counterpart is
to be found under a characteristic form and in a perfectly definite
chronological position. At the same time, if we are to grasp such
homologies of facts, we shall need to have a far deeper insight and a
far more critical attitude towards the visible foreground of things than
historians have hitherto been wont to display; who amongst them, for
instance, would have allowed himself to dream that the counterpart of
Protestantism was to be found in the Dionysiac movement, and that
English Puritanism was for the West what Islam was for the Arabian
world?
Seen from this angle, history offers possibilities far beyond the
ambitions of all previous research, which has contented itself in the
main with arranging the facts of the past so far as these were known
(and that according to a one-line scheme)—the possibilities, namely, of
Overpassing the present as a research-limit, and predetermining the
spiritual form, duration, rhythm, meaning and product of the _still
unaccomplished_ stages of our western history; and
Reconstructing long-vanished and unknown epochs, even whole Cultures
of the past, by means of morphological connexions, in much the same
way as modern palæontology deduces far-reaching and trustworthy
conclusions as to skeletal structure and species from a single
unearthed skull-fragment.
It is possible, given the physiognomic rhythm, to recover from scattered
details of ornament, building, script, or from odd political, economic
and religious data, the organic characters of whole centuries of
history, and from known elements on the scale of art-expression, to find
corresponding elements on the scale of political forms, or from that of
mathematical forms to read that of economic. This is a truly Goethian
method—rooted in fact in Goethe’s conception of the _prime phenomenon_—
which is already to a limited extent current in comparative zoology, but
can be extended, to a degree hitherto undreamed of, over the whole field
of history.
-----
Footnote 93:
In English the word “cast” will evidently satisfy the sense better on
occasion. The word “stil” will therefore not necessarily be always
rendered “style.”—_Tr._
Footnote 94:
See Vol. II, pp. 109 et seq.
Footnote 95:
See Vol. II, pp. 36 et seq.
Footnote 96:
I will only mention here the distances apart of the three Punic Wars,
and the series—likewise comprehensible only as rhythmic—Spanish
Succession War, Silesian wars, Napoleonic Wars, Bismarck’s wars, and
the World War (cf. Vol. II, p. 488). Connected with this is the
spiritual relation of grandfather and grandson, a relation which
produces in the mind of primitive peoples the conviction that the soul
of the grandfather returns in the grandson, and has originated the
widespread custom of giving the grandson the grandfather’s _name_,
which by its mystic spell binds his soul afresh to the corporeal
world.
Footnote 97:
The word is used in the sense in which biology employs it, viz., to
describe the process by which the embryo traverses all the phases
which its species has undergone.—_Tr._
Footnote 98:
The first draft of _Faust I_, discovered only comparatively recently.—
_Tr._
Footnote 99:
See Ency. Brit., XIth Ed., articles _Owen, Sir Richard; Morphology and
Zoology_ (p. 1029).—_Tr._
Footnote 100:
It is not superfluous to add that there is nothing of the causal kind
in these _pure phenomena_ of “Living Nature.” Materialism, in order to
get a system for the pedestrian reasoner, has had to adulterate the
picture of them with fitness-causes. But Goethe—who anticipated just
about as much of Darwinism as there will be left of it in fifty years
from Darwin—_absolutely_ excluded the causality-principle. And the
very fact that the Darwinians quite failed to notice its absence is a
clear indication that Goethe’s “Living Nature” belongs to actual life,
"cause"-less and "aim"-less; for the idea of the prime-phenomenon does
not involve causal assumptions of any sort unless it has been
misunderstood in advance in a mechanistic sense.
Footnote 101:
Reigned 246-210 B.C. He styled himself “first universal emperor” and
intended a position for himself and his successors akin to that of
“Divus” in Rome. For a brief account of his energetic and
comprehensive work see Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article _China_, p. 194.—
_Tr._
-----
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY
II
THE IDEA OF DESTINY AND THE PRINCIPLE
OF CAUSALITY
CHAPTER IV
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY
II
THE IDEA OF DESTINY AND THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSALITY
I
Following out this train of thought to the end, we come into the
presence of an opposition in which we perceive the key—the only key—
wherewith to approach, and (so far as the word has any meaning at all)
to solve, one of the oldest and gravest of man’s riddles. This is the
opposition of the _Destiny Idea_ and the _Causality Principle_—an
opposition which, it is safe to say, has never hitherto been recognized
for what it is, the necessary foundation of world-building.
Anyone who understands at all what is meant by saying that the soul is
the _idea of an existence_, will also divine a near relationship between
it and the _sure sense of a destiny_ and must regard Life itself (our
name for the form in which the actualizing of the possible is
accomplished) as directed, irrevocable in every line, fate-laden.
Primitive man feels this dimly and anxiously, while for the man of a
higher Culture it is definite enough to become his vision of the world—
though this vision is communicable only through religion and art, never
through notions and proofs.
Every higher language possesses a number of words such as luck, doom,
conjuncture, vocation, about which there is, as it were, a veil. No
hypothesis, no science, can ever get into touch with that which we feel
when we let ourselves sink into the meaning and sound of these words.
They are symbols, not notions. In them is the centre of gravity of that
world-picture that I have called the World-as-history as opposed to the
World-as-nature. The Destiny-idea demands life-experience and not
scientific experience, the power of seeing and not that of calculating,
depth and not intellect. There is an _organic logic_, an instinctive,
dream-sure logic of all existence as opposed to the _logic of the
inorganic_, the logic of understanding and of things understood—a logic
of direction as against a logic of extension—and no systematist, no
Aristotle or Kant, has known how to deal with it. They are on their own
ground when they tell us about “judgment,” “perception,” “awareness,”
and “recollection,” but as to what is in the words “hope,” “happiness,”
“despair,” “repentance,” “devotion,” and “consolation” they are silent.
He who expects here, in the domain of the living, to find reasons and
consequences, or imagines that an inward certainty as to the meaning of
life is the same thing as “Fatalism” or “Predestination,” simply knows
nothing of the matters in question, confusing experience lived with
experience acquired or acquirable. Causality is the reasonable, the law-
bound, the describable, the badge of our whole waking and reasoning
existence. But destiny is the word for an inner certainty that is _not_
describable. We bring out that which is in the causal by means of a
physical or an epistemological system, through numbers, by reasoned
classification; but the idea of destiny can be imparted only by the
artist working through media like portraiture, tragedy and music. The
one requires us to _distinguish_ and in distinguishing to dissect and
destroy, whereas the other is _creative_ through and through, and thus
destiny is related to life and causality to death.
In the Destiny-idea the soul reveals its world-longing, its desire to
rise into the light, to accomplish and actualize its vocation. To no man
is it entirely alien, and not before one has become the unanchored
“late” man of the megalopolis is original vision quite overpowered by
matter-of-fact feeling and mechanizing thought. Even then, in some
intense hour, the lost vision comes back to one with terrible clearness,
shattering in a moment all the causality of the world’s surface. For the
world as a system of causal connexions is not only a “late” but also a
highly rarefied conception and only the energetic intellects of high
Cultures are capable of possessing it—or perhaps we should say, devising
it—with conviction. The notion of causality is coterminous with the
notion of law: the only laws that are, are causal laws. But just as
there lies in the causal, according to Kant, a _necessity of the
thinking consciousness_ and the _basic form of its relation to the
essence of things_, so also, designated by the words destiny,
dispensation, vocation, there is a something that is an inevitable
_necessity of life_. Real history is heavy with fate but free of laws.
One can divine the future (there is, indeed, a certain insight that can
penetrate its secrets deeply) but one cannot reckon it. The physiognomic
flair which enables one to read a whole life in a face or to sum up
whole peoples from the picture of an epoch—and to do so without
deliberate effort or “system”—is utterly remote from all “cause and
effect.”
He who comprehends the light-world that is before his eyes not
physiognomically but systematically, and makes it intellectually his own
by the methods of _causal_ experience, must necessarily in the end come
to believe that every living thing can be understood by reference to
cause and effect—that there is no secret and no inner directedness. He,
on the other hand, who as Goethe did—and for that matter as everyone
does in nine out of ten of his waking moments—lets the impressions of
the world about him work merely upon his senses, absorbs these
impressions as a whole, feels the become in its becoming. The stiff mask
of causality is lifted by mere _ceasing to think_. Suddenly, Time is no
more a riddle, a notion, a “form” or “dimension” but becomes an inner
certainty, destiny itself; and in its directedness, its
_irreversibility_, its livingness, is disclosed the very meaning of the
historical world-picture. _Destiny and Causality are related as Time and
Space._
In the two possible world-forms then—History and Nature, the physiognomy
of all becoming and the system of all things become—destiny _or_
causality prevails. Between them there is all the difference between a
feeling of life and a method of knowledge. Each of them is the starting-
point of a complete and self-contained, but not _of a unique_ world.
Yet, after all, just as the become is founded upon a becoming, so the
_knowledge_ of cause and effect is founded upon the sure _feeling_ of a
destiny. Causality is—so to say—destiny become, destiny made inorganic
and modelled in reason-forms. Destiny itself (passed over in silence by
Kant and every other builder of rational world-systems because with
their armoury of _abstractions_ they could not touch _life_) stands
beyond and outside all comprehended Nature. Nevertheless, being itself
the original, it alone gives the stiff dead principle of cause-and-
effect the opportunity to figure in the later scenes of a culture-drama,
alive and historical, as the incarnation of a tyrannical thinking. The
existence of the Classical soul is the _condition_ for the appearance of
Democritus’s method, the existence of the Faustian soul for that of
Newton’s. We may well imagine that either of these Cultures might have
failed to produce a natural science of its own, but we cannot imagine
the systems without their cultural foundations.
Here again we see how becoming and the become, direction and extension,
include one another and are subordinated each to the other, according as
we are in the historical or in the “natural” focus. If history is that
kind of world-order in which all the become is fitted to the becoming,
then the products of scientific work must _inter alia_ be so handled;
and, in fact, for the historical eye there is only a _history_ of
physics. It was Destiny that the discoveries of oxygen, Neptune,
gravitation and spectrum analysis happened as and when they did. It was
Destiny that the phlogiston theory, the undulatory theory of light, the
kinetic theory of gases could arise at all, seeing that they were
elucidations of results and, as such, highly personal to their
respective authors, and that other theories (“correct” or “erroneous”)
might equally well have been developed instead. And it is again Destiny
and the result of strong personality when one theory vanishes and
another becomes the lodestar of the physicist’s world. Even the born
physicist speaks of the “fate” of a problem or the “history” of a
discovery.
Conversely, if “Nature” is that constitution of things in which the
becoming should logically be incorporated in the thing-become, and
living direction in rigid extension, history may best be treated as a
chapter of epistemology; and so indeed Kant would have treated it if he
had remembered to include it at all in his system of knowledge.
Significantly enough, he did not; for him as for every born systematist
Nature is _The_ World, and when he discusses time without noticing that
it has direction and is irreversible, we see that he is dealing with the
Nature-world and has no inkling of the possibility of another, the
history-world. Perhaps, for Kant, this other world _was_ actually
impossible.
Now, _Causality has nothing whatever to do with Time_. To the world of
to-day, made up of Kantians who know not how Kantian they are, this must
seem an outrageous paradox. And yet every formula of Western physics
exhibits the “how” and the “how long” as distinct in essence. As soon as
the question is pressed home, causality restricts its answer rigidly to
the statement _that_ something happens—and not _when_ it happens. The
“effect” must of necessity be put with the “cause.” The _distance_
between them belongs to a different order, it lies within the act of
understanding itself (which is an element of life) and not within the
thing or things understood. It is of the essence of the extended that it
overcomes directedness, and of Space that it contradicts Time, _and yet
the latter, as the more fundamental, precedes and underlies the former_.
Destiny claims the same precedence; we begin with the idea of Destiny,
and only later, when our waking-consciousness looks fearfully for a
spell that will bind in the sense-world and overcome the death that
cannot be evaded, do we conceive causality as an anti-Fate, and make it
_create another world to protect us from and console us for this_. And
as the web of cause and effect gradually spreads over the visible
surfaces there is formed a convincing picture of timeless duration—
essentially, Being, but Being endowed with attributes by the sheer force
of pure thought. This tendency underlies the feeling, well known in all
mature Cultures, that “Knowledge is Power,” the power that is meant
being power over Destiny. The abstract savant, the natural-science
researcher, the thinker in systems, whose whole intellectual existence
bases itself on the causality principle, are “late” manifestations of an
unconscious _hatred_ of the powers of incomprehensible Destiny. “Pure
Reason” denies all possibilities that are outside itself. Here strict
thought and great art are eternally in conflict. The one keeps its feet,
and the other lets itself go. A man like Kant must always feel himself
as superior to a Beethoven as the adult is to the child, but this will
not prevent a Beethoven from regarding the “Critique of Pure Reason” as
a pitiable sort of philosophy. _Teleology_, that nonsense of all
nonsenses within science, is a misdirected attempt to deal mechanically
with the _living_ content of scientific knowledge (for knowledge implies
someone to know, and though the substance of thought may be “Nature” the
_act_ of thought is history), and so with life itself as an inverted
causality. Teleology is a caricature of the Destiny-idea which
transforms the _vocation_ of Dante into the _aim_ of the savant. It is
the deepest and most characteristic tendency both of Darwinism—the
megalopolitan-intellectual product of the most abstract of all
Civilizations—and of the materialist conception of history which springs
from the same root as Darwinism and, like it, kills all that is organic
and fateful. Thus the morphological element of the Causal is a
_Principle_, and the morphological element of Destiny is an _Idea_, an
idea that is incapable of being “cognized,” described or defined, and
can only be felt and inwardly lived. This idea is something of which one
is either entirely ignorant or else—like the man of the spring and every
truly significant man of the late seasons, believer, lover, artist,
poet—entirely certain.
Thus Destiny is seen to be the true _existence-mode of the prime
phenomenon_, that in which the living idea of becoming unfolds itself
immediately to the intuitive vision. And therefore the Destiny-idea
dominates the whole world-picture of history, while causality, which is
the existence-mode of _objects_ and stamps out of the world of
sensations a set of well-distinguished and well-defined _things_,
_properties_ and _relations_, dominates and penetrates, as the form of
the understanding, the Nature-world that is the understanding’s “alter
ego.”
But inquiry into the degree of validity of causal connexions within a
presentation of nature, or (what is henceforth the same thing for us)
into the destinies involved in that presentation, becomes far more
difficult still when we come to realize that for primitive man or for
the child no comprehensive causally-ordered world exists at all as yet
and that we ourselves, though “late” men with a consciousness
disciplined by powerful speech-sharpened thought, can do no more, even
in moments of the most strained attention (the only ones, really, in
which we are exactly in the physical focus), than _assert_ that the
causal order which we see in such a moment is continuously present in
the actuality around us. Even waking, we take in the actual, “the living
garment of the Deity,” _physiognomically_, and we do so involuntarily
and by virtue of a power of experience that is rooted in the deep
sources of life.
A _systematic_ delineation, on the contrary, is the expression of an
understanding emancipated from perception, and by means of it we bring
the mental picture of all times and all men into conformity with the
moment’s picture of Nature as ordered by ourselves. But the mode of this
ordering, which has a history that we cannot interfere with in the
smallest degree, is not the working of a cause, but a destiny.
II
The way to the problem of Time, then, begins in the primitive
wistfulness and passes through its clearer issue the Destiny-idea. We
have now to try to outline, briefly, the content of that problem, so far
as it affects the subject of this book.
The _word_ Time is a sort of charm to summon up that intensely personal
something designated earlier as the “proper,” which with an inner
certainty we oppose to the “alien” something that is borne in upon each
of us amongst and within the crowding impressions of the sense-life.
“The Proper,” “Destiny” and “Time” are interchangeable words.
The problem of Time, like that of Destiny, has been completely
misunderstood by all thinkers who have confined themselves to the
systematic of the Become. In Kant’s celebrated theory there is not one
word about its character of directedness. Not only so, but the omission
has never even been noticed. But what _is_ time as a length, time
without direction? Everything living, we can only repeat, has “life,”
direction, impulse, will, a movement-quality (Bewegtheit) that is most
intimately allied to yearning and has not the smallest element in common
with the “motion” (Bewegung) of the physicists. The living is
indivisible and irreversible, once and uniquely occurring, and its
course is entirely indeterminable by mechanics. For all such qualities
belong to the essence of Destiny, and “Time”—that which we actually feel
at the sound of the word, which is clearer in music than in language,
and in poetry than in prose—has this _organic_ essence, while Space has
not. Hence, Kant and the rest notwithstanding, it is impossible to bring
Time _with Space_ under one general Critique. Space is a _conception_,
but time is a _word_ to indicate something inconceivable, a sound-
symbol, and to use it as a notion, scientifically, is utterly to
misconceive its nature. Even the word direction—which unfortunately
cannot be replaced by another—is liable to mislead owing to its visual
content. The vector-notion in physics is a case in point.
For primitive man the word “time” can have no meaning. He simply lives,
without any necessity of specifying an opposition to something else. He
_has_ time, but he _knows_ nothing of it. All of us are conscious, as
being aware, of space only, and not of time. Space “is,” (i.e. exists,
in and with our sense-world)—as a self-extension while we are living the
ordinary life of dream, impulse, intuition and conduct, and as space in
the strict sense in the moments of strained attention. “Time,” on the
contrary, is a _discovery_, which is only made by thinking. We create it
as an idea or notion and do not begin till much later to suspect that
_we ourselves are Time_, inasmuch as we live.[102] And only the higher
Cultures, whose world-conceptions have reached the mechanical-Nature
stage, are capable of deriving from their consciousness of a well-
ordered measurable and comprehensible Spatial, the projected image of
time, the _phantom_ time,[103] which satisfies their need of
comprehending, measuring and causally ordering all. And this impulse—a
sign of the sophistication of existence that makes its appearance quite
early in every Culture—fashions, outside and beyond the real life-
feeling, that which is called time in all higher languages and has
become for the town-intellect a completely _inorganic magnitude_, as
deceptive as it is current. But, if the characteristics, or rather the
characteristic, of extension—limit and causality—is really wizard’s gear
wherewith our proper soul attempts to conjure and bind alien powers—
Goethe speaks somewhere of the “principle of reasonable order that we
bear within ourselves and could impress as the seal of our power upon
everything that we touch”—if all law is a fetter which our world-dread
hurries to fix upon the incrowding sensuous, a deep necessity of self-
preservation, so also the invention of a time that is knowable and
spatially representable within causality is a later act of this same
self-preservation, an attempt to bind by the force of _notion_ the
tormenting inward riddle that is doubly tormenting to the intellect that
has attained power only to find itself defied. Always a subtle hatred
underlies the intellectual process by which anything is forced into the
domain and form-world of measure and law. The living is _killed_ by
being introduced into space, for space is dead and makes dead. With
birth is given death, with the fulfilment the end. Something _dies_
within the woman when she conceives—hence comes that eternal hatred of
the sexes, child of world-fear. The man destroys, in a very deep sense,
when he begets—by bodily act in the sensuous world, by “knowing” in the
intellectual. Even in Luther[104] the word “know” has the secondary
genital sense. And with the “knowledge” of life—which remains alien to
the lower animals—the knowledge of death has gained that power which
dominates man’s whole waking consciousness. By a _picture_ of time the
actual is changed into the transitory.[105]
The mere creation of the _name_ Time was an unparalleled deliverance. To
name anything by a name is to win power over it. This is the essence of
primitive man’s art of magic—the evil powers are constrained by naming
them, and the enemy is weakened or killed by coupling certain magic
procedures with his name.[106]
And there is something of this primitive expression of world-fear in the
way in which all systematic philosophies use mere names as a last resort
for getting rid of the Incomprehensible, the Almighty that is all too
mighty for the intellect. We name something or other the “Absolute,” and
we feel ourselves at once its superior. Philosophy, the _love_ of
Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible. What
is named, comprehended, measured is _ipso facto_ overpowered, made inert
and taboo.[107] Once more, “knowledge is power.” Herein lies one root of
the difference between the idealist’s and the realist’s attitude towards
the Unapproachable; it is expressed by the two meanings of the German
word _Scheu_—respect and abhorrence.[108] The idealist contemplates, the
realist would subject, mechanize, render innocuous. Plato and Goethe
accept the secret in humility, Aristotle and Kant would open it up and
destroy it. The most deeply significant example of this realism is in
its treatment of the Time problem. The dread mystery of Time, life
itself, must be spellbound and, by the magic of comprehensibility,
neutralized.
All that has been said about time in “scientific” philosophy, psychology
and physics—the supposed answer to a question that had better never have
been asked, namely what _is_ time?—touches, not at any point the secret
itself, but only a spatially-formed _representative_ phantom. The
livingness and directedness and fated course of real Time is replaced by
a figure which, be it never so intimately absorbed, is only a _line_,
measurable, divisible, reversible, and not a portrait of that which is
incapable of being portrayed; by a “time” that can be mathematically
expressed in such forms as √_t_, _t_², -_t_, from which the assumption
of a time of zero magnitude or of negative times is, to say the least,
_not_ excluded.[109] Obviously this is something quite outside the
domain of Life, Destiny, and living _historical_ Time; it is a purely
conceptual time-system that is remote even from the sensuous life. One
has only to substitute, in any philosophical or physical treatise that
one pleases, this word “Destiny” for the word “time” and one will
instantly see how understanding loses its way when language has
emancipated it from sensation, and how impossible the group “time and
space” is. What is not experienced and felt, what is merely _thought_,
necessarily takes a _spatial_ form, and this explains why no systematic
philosopher has been able to make anything out of the mystery-clouded,
far-echoing sound symbols “Past” and “Future.” In Kant’s utterances
concerning time they do not even occur, and in fact one cannot see any
relation which could connect them with what is said there. But only this
spatial form enables time and space to be brought into functional
interdependence as magnitudes _of the same_ order, as four-dimensional
vector analysis[110] conspicuously shows. As early as 1813 Lagrange
frankly described mechanics as a four-dimensional geometry, and even
Newton’s cautious conception of “tempus absolutum sive duratio” is not
exempt from this _intellectually inevitable_ transformation of the
living into mere extension. In the older philosophy I have found one,
and only one, profound and reverent presentation of Time; it is in
Augustine—“If no one questions me, I know: if I would explain to a
questioner, I know not.”[111]
When philosophers of the present-day West “hedge”—as they all do—by
saying that things _are_ in time as in space and that “outside” them
nothing is “conceivable,” they are merely putting another kind of space
(Räumlichkeit) beside the ordinary one, just as one might, if one chose,
call hope and electricity the two forces of the universe. It ought not,
surely, to have escaped Kant when he spoke of the “two forms” of
perception, that whereas it is easy enough to come to a scientific
understanding about space (though not to “explain” it, in the ordinary
sense of the word, for that is beyond human powers), treatment of time
on the same lines breaks down utterly. The reader of the “Critique of
Pure Reason” and the “Prolegomena” will observe that Kant gives a well-
considered proof for the connexion of space and geometry but carefully
avoids doing the same for time and arithmetic. There he did not go
beyond enunciation, and constant reassertion of analogy between the two
conceptions lured him over a gap that would have been fatal to his
system. _Vis-à-vis_ the Where and the How, the When forms a world of its
own as distinct as is metaphysics from physics. Space, object, number,
notion, causality are so intimately akin that it is impossible—as
countless mistaken systems prove—to treat the one independently of the
other. Mechanics is a copy of the logic of its day and vice versa. The
picture of thought as psychology builds it up and the picture of the
space-world as contemporary physics describes it are reflections of one
another. Conceptions and things, reasons and causes, conclusions and
processes coincide so nicely, as received by the consciousness, that the
abstract thinker himself has again and again succumbed to the temptation
of setting forth the thought-“process” graphically and schematically—
witness Aristotle’s and Kant’s tabulated categories. “Where there is no
scheme, there is no philosophy” is the objection of principle—
unacknowledged though it may be—that all professional philosophers have
against the “intuitives,” to whom inwardly they feel themselves far
superior. That is why Kant crossly describes the Platonic style of
thinking “as the art of spending good words in babble” (die Kunst,
wortreich zu schwatzen), and why even to-day the lecture-room
philosopher has not a word to say about Goethe’s philosophy. Every
logical operation is capable of being _drawn_, every system a
_geometrical_ method of handling thoughts. And therefore Time either
finds no place in the system at all, or is made its victim.
This is the refutation of that widely-spread misunderstanding which
connects time with arithmetic and space with geometry by superficial
analogies, an error to which Kant ought never to have succumbed—though
it is hardly surprising that Schopenhauer, with his incapacity for
understanding mathematics, did so. Because the living act of numbering
is somehow or other related to time, number and time are constantly
confused. But numbering is not number, any more than drawing is a
drawing. Numbering and drawing are a becoming, numbers and figures are
things become. Kant and the rest have in mind now the living act
(numbering) and now the result thereof (the relations of the finished
figure); but the one belongs to the domain of Life and Time, the other
to that of Extension and Causality. _That_ I calculate is the business
of organic, _what_ I calculate the business of inorganic, logic.
Mathematics as a whole—in common language, arithmetic and geometry—
answers the _How?_ and the _What?_—that is, the problem of the Natural
order of things. In opposition to this problem stands that of the
_When?_ of things, the specifically historical problem of destiny,
future and past; and all these things are comprised in the word
_Chronology_, which simple mankind understands fully and unequivocally.
Between arithmetic and geometry there is no opposition.[112] Every kind
of number, as has been sufficiently shown in an earlier chapter, belongs
entirely to the realm of the extended and the become, whether as a
Euclidean magnitude or as an analytical function; and to which heading
should we have to assign the cyclometric[113] functions, the Binomial
Theorem, the Riemann surfaces, the Theory of Groups? Kant’s scheme was
refuted by Euler and d’Alembert before he even set it up, and only the
unfamiliarity of his successors with the mathematics of their time—what
a contrast to Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz, who evolved the mathematics
of _their_ time from the depths of their own philosophy!—made it
possible for mathematical notions of a relation between time and
arithmetic to be passed on like an heirloom, almost uncriticized.
But between Becoming and any part whatsoever of mathematics there is not
the slightest contact. Newton indeed was profoundly convinced (and he
was no mean philosopher) that in the principles of his Calculus of
Fluxions[114] he had grasped the problem of Becoming, and therefore of
Time—in a far subtler form, by the way, than Kant’s. But even Newton’s
view could not be upheld, even though it may find advocates to this day.
Since Weierstrass proved that continuous functions exist which either
cannot be differentiated at all or are capable only of partial
differentiation, this most deep-searching of all efforts to close with
the Time-problem mathematically has been abandoned.
-----
Footnote 102:
The sensuous life and the intellectual life too are Time; it is only
sensuous _experience_ and intellectual _experience_, the “world,” that
is spatial nature. (As to the nearer affinity of the Feminine to Time,
see Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq.)
Footnote 103:
The expression “space of time” (Zeitraum) which is common to many
languages, is evidence of our inability to represent direction
otherwise than by extension.
Footnote 104:
I.e., the translated Bible.—_Tr._
Footnote 105:
See Vol. II, pp. 19 et seq.
Footnote 106:
See p. 80 of this volume, and Vol. II, pp. 166, 328.
Footnote 107:
See Vol. II, p. 137.
Footnote 108:
The nearest English equivalent is perhaps the word “fear.” “Fearful”
would correspond exactly but for the fact that in the second sense the
word is objective instead of subjective. The word “shy” itself bears
the second meaning in such trivial words as gun-shy, work-shy.—_Tr._
Footnote 109:
The Relativity theory, a working hypothesis which is on the way to
overthrowing Newton’s mechanics—which means at bottom his view of the
problem of motion—admits cases in which the words “earlier” and
“later” may be inverted. The mathematical foundation of this theory by
Minkowski uses _imaginary_ time units for measurement.
Footnote 110:
The dimensions are _x_, _y_, _z_ (in respect of space) and _t_ (in
respect of time), and all four appear to be regarded as perfectly
equivalent in transformations. [The English reader may be referred to
A. Einstein, “Theory of Relativity,” Ch. XI and appendices I, II.—
_Tr._]
Footnote 111:
Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicari velim, nescio.
(_Conf._ XI, 14.)
Footnote 112:
Save in elementary mathematics. (It may be remarked that most
philosophers since Schopenhauer have approached these questions with
the prepossessions of elementary mathematics.)
Footnote 113:
The “inverse circular functions” of English text-books.—_Tr._
Footnote 114:
The Newtonian form of the differential calculus was distinct from the
Leibnizian, which is now in general use. Without going into
unnecessary detail, the characteristic of Newton’s method was that it
was meant not for the calculation of quadratures and tangents (which
had occupied his predecessors), nor as an organ of functional theory
as such (as the differential calculus became much later), but quite
definitely as a method of dealing with _rate of change_ in pure
mechanics, with the “flowing” or “fluxion” of a dependent variable
under the influence of a variable which for Newton was the “fluent,”
and which we call the argument of a function.—_Tr._
-----
III
_Time is a counter-conception (Gegenbegriff) to Space_, arising out of
Space, just as the notion (as distinct from the fact) of Life arises
only in opposition to thought, and the notion (as distinct from the
fact) of birth and generation only in opposition to death.[115] This is
implicit in the very essence of all awareness. Just as any sense-
impression is only remarked when it detaches itself from another, so any
kind of understanding that is genuine critical activity[116] is only
made possible through the setting-up of a new concept as anti-pole to
one already present, or through the divorce (if we may call it so) of a
pair of inwardly-polar concepts which as long as they are mere
constituents, possess no actuality.[117] It has long been presumed—and
rightly, beyond a doubt—that all root-words, whether they express things
or properties, have come into being by pairs; but even later, even to-
day, the connotation that every new word receives is a reflection of
some other. And so, guided by language, the understanding, incapable of
fitting a sure inward subjective certainty of Destiny into its form-
world, created “time” out of space as its opposite. But for this we
should possess neither the word nor its connotation. And so far is this
process of word-formation carried that the particular style of extension
possessed by the Classical world led to a specifically Classical notion
of time, differing from the time-notions of India, China and the West
exactly as Classical space differs from the space of these
Cultures.[118]
For this reason, the notion of an art-form—which again is a “counter-
concept”—has only arisen when men became aware that their art-creations
had a connotation (Gehalt) at all, that is, when the expression-language
of the art, along with its effects, had ceased to be something perfectly
natural and taken-for-granted, as it still was in the time of the
Pyramid-Builders, in that of the Mycenæan strongholds and in that of the
early Gothic cathedrals. Men become suddenly aware of the existence of
“works,” and then for the first time the understanding eye is able to
distinguish a causal side and a destiny side in every living art.
In every work that displays the _whole_ man and the _whole_ meaning of
the existence, fear and longing lie close together, but they are and
they remain different. To the fear, to the Causal, belongs the whole
“taboo” side of art—its stock of motives, developed in strict schools
and long craft-training, carefully protected and piously transmitted;
all of it that is comprehensible, learnable, _numerical_; all the
_logic_ of colour, line, structure, order, which constitutes the mother-
tongue of every worthy artist and every great epoch. But the other side,
opposed to the “taboo” as the directed is to the extended and as the
development-destiny within a form-language to its syllogisms, comes out
in genius (namely, in that which is wholly personal _to the individual
artists_, their imaginative powers, creative passion, depth and
richness, as against all mere mastery of form) and, beyond even genius,
in that superabundance of creativeness in the race which conditions the
rise and fall of whole arts. This is the “totem” side, and owing to it—
notwithstanding all the æsthetics ever penned—there is no timeless and
solely-true way of art, but only a _history_ of art, marked like
everything that lives with the sign of irreversibility.[119]
And this is why architecture of the grand style—which is the only one of
the arts that handles the alien and fear-instilling itself, the
immediate Extended, the stone—is naturally _the_ early art in all
Cultures, and only step by step yields its primacy to the special arts
of the city with their more mundane forms—the statue, the picture, the
musical composition. Of all the great artists of the West, it was
probably Michelangelo who suffered most acutely under the constant
nightmare of world-fear, and it was he also who, alone among the
Renaissance masters, never freed himself from the architectural. He even
painted as though his surfaces were stone, become, stiff, _hateful_. His
work was a bitter wrestle with the powers of the cosmos which faced him
and challenged him in the form of material, whereas in the yearning
Leonardo’s colour we see, as it were, a glad materialization of the
spiritual. But in every large architectural problem an implacable causal
logic, not to say mathematic, comes to expression—in the Classical
orders of columns a Euclidean relation of _beam_ and _load_, in the
“analytically” disposed thrust-system of Gothic vaulting the dynamic
relation of _force_ and _mass_. Cottage-building traditions—which are to
be traced in the one and in the other, which are the necessary
background even of Egyptian architecture, which in fact develop in every
early period and are regularly lost in every later—contain the whole sum
of this logic of the extended. But the symbolism of direction and
destiny is beyond all the “technique” of the great arts and hardly
approachable by way of æsthetics. It lies—to take some instances—in the
contrast that is always felt (but never, either by Lessing or by Hebbel,
elucidated) between Classical and Western tragedy; in the succession of
scenes of old Egyptian relief and generally in the _serial_ arrangement
of Egyptian statues, sphinxes, temple-halls; in the choice, as distinct
from the treatment, of materials (hardest diorite to affirm, and softest
wood to deny, the future); in the occurrence, and not in the grammar, of
the individual arts, e.g., the victory of arabesque over the Early
Christian picture, the retreat of oil-painting before chamber music in
the Baroque; in the utter diversity of intention in Egyptian, Chinese
and Classical statuary. All these are not matters of “can” but of
“must,” and therefore it is not mathematics and abstract thought, but
the great arts in their kinship with the contemporary religions, that
give the key to the problem of Time, a problem that can hardly be solved
within the domain of history[120] alone.
-----
Footnote 115:
See Vol. II, pp. 13, 19.
Footnote 116:
See Vol. II, p. 16.
Footnote 117:
The original reads: “(So ist jede Art von Verstehen ... nur dadurch
möglich ...) dass ein Begriffspaar von innerem Gegensatz
gewissermassen durch Auseinandertreten erst Wirklichkeit erhält.”—
_Tr._
Footnote 118:
At this point the German text repeats the paragraph which in this
edition begins at “But inquiry” (p. 121) and ends at the close of
section I (p. 121).—_Tr._
Footnote 119:
See Vol. II, pp. 137, 159.
Footnote 120:
Here the author presumably means history in the ordinary acceptation
of the word.—_Tr._
-----
IV
It follows from the meaning that we have attached to the Culture as a
prime phenomenon and to destiny as the organic logic of existence, that
each Culture must necessarily possess its own destiny-idea. Indeed, this
conclusion is implicit from the first in the feeling that every great
Culture is nothing but the actualizing and form of a single, singularly-
constituted (einzigartig) soul. And what cannot be felt by one sort of
men exactly as it is felt by another (since the life of each is the
expression of the idea _proper_ to himself) and still less transcribed,
what is named by us “conjuncture,” “accident,” “Providence” or “Fate,”
by Classical man “Nemesis,” “Ananke,” “Tyche” or “Fatum,” by the Arab
“Kismet,” by everyone in some way of his own, is just that of which each
unique and unreproduceable soul-constitution, quite clear to those who
share in it, is a rendering.
The Classical form of the Destiny-idea I shall venture to call
Euclidean. Thus it is the sense-actual person of Œdipus, his “empirical
ego,” nay, his σῶμα that is hunted and thrown by Destiny. Œdipus
complains that Creon has misused his “body”[121] and that the oracle
applied to his “body.”[122] Æschylus, again, speaks of Agamemnon as the
“royal body, leader of fleets.”[123] It is this same word σῶμα that the
mathematicians employ more than once for the “bodies” with which they
deal. But the destiny of King Lear is of the “analytical” type—to use
here also the term suggested by the corresponding number-world—and
consists in dark inner relationships. The idea of fatherhood emerges;
spiritual threads weave themselves into the action, incorporeal and
transcendental, and are weirdly illuminated by the counterpoint of the
secondary tragedy of Gloster’s house. Lear is at the last a mere name,
the axis of something unbounded. _This_ conception of destiny is the
“infinitesimal” conception. It stretches out into infinite time and
infinite space. It touches the bodily, Euclidean existence not at all,
but affects only the Soul. Consider the mad King between the fool and
the outcast in the storm on the heath, and then look at the Laocoön
group; the first is the Faustian, the other the Apollinian way of
suffering. Sophocles, too, wrote a Laocoön drama; and we may be certain
that there was nothing of _pure soul-agony_ in it. Antigone goes below
ground in the body, because she has buried her brother’s body. Think of
Ajax and Philoctetes, and then of the Prince of Homburg and Goethe’s
Tasso—is not the difference between magnitude and relation traceable
right into the depths of artistic creation?
This brings us to another connexion of high symbolic significance. The
drama of the West is ordinarily designated _Character-Drama_. That of
the Greeks, on the other hand, is best described as _Situation-Drama_,
and in the antithesis we can perceive what it is that Western, and what
it is that Classical, man respectively feel as the basic life-form that
is imperilled by the onsets of tragedy and fate. If in lieu of
“direction” we say “irreversibility,” if we let ourselves sink into the
terrible meaning of those words “too late” wherewith we resign a
fleeting bit of the present to the _eternal_ past, we find the deep
foundation of every tragic crisis. It is Time that is the tragic, and it
is by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to Time that one Culture
is differentiated from another; and consequently “tragedy” of the grand
order has only developed in the Culture which has most passionately
affirmed, and in that which has most passionately denied, Time. The
sentiment of the ahistoric soul gives us a Classical tragedy of the
moment, and that of the ultrahistorical soul puts before us Western
tragedy that deals with the _development of a whole life_. Our tragedy
arises from the feeling of an _inexorable_ Logic of becoming, while the
Greek feels the _illogical, blind Casual of the moment_—the life of Lear
matures inwardly towards a catastrophe, and that of Œdipus stumbles
without warning upon a situation. And now one may perceive how it is
that synchronously with Western drama there rose and fell a mighty
portrait-art (culminating in Rembrandt), a kind of historical and
biographical art which (_because_ it was so) was sternly discountenanced
in Classical Greece at the apogee of Attic drama. Consider the veto on
likeness-statuary in votive offerings[124] and note how—from Demetrius
of Alopeke (about 400)[125]—a timid art of “ideal” portraiture began to
venture forth when, and only when, grand tragedy had been thrown into
the background by the light society-pieces of the “Middle Comedy.”[126]
Fundamentally all Greek statues were standard masks, like the actors in
the theatre of Dionysus; all bring to expression, in significantly
strict form, _somatic_ attitudes and positions. Physiognomically they
are _dumb_, corporeal and _of necessity_ nude—character-heads of
definite individuals came only with the Hellenistic age. Once more we
are reminded of the contrast between the Greek number-world, with its
computations of tangible results, and the other, our own, in which the
relations between groups of functions or equations or, generally,
formula-elements of the same order are investigated morphologically, and
the character of these relations fixed _as such_ in express laws.
-----
Footnote 121:
_Œd. Rex._, 642. κακῶς εἴληφα τοὐμὸν σῶμα σὺν τέχνῃ κακῇ. (Cf. Rudolf
Hirsch, _Die Person_ (1914), p. 9.)
Footnote 122:
_Œd. Col._, 355. μαντεῖα ... ἃ τοῦδ’ ἐχρήσθη σώματος.
Footnote 123:
_Choëphoræ_, 710. ἐπὶ ναυάρχῳ σώματι ... τῷ βασιλείῳ.
Footnote 124:
Phidias, and through him his patron Pericles, were attacked for
alleged introduction of portraits upon the shield of Athene Parthenos.
In Western religious art, on the contrary, portraiture was, as
everyone knows, a habitual practice. Every Madonna, for instance, is
more or less of a portrait.
With this may be compared again the growing resistance of Byzantine
art, as it matured, to portraiture in sacred surroundings, evidenced
for instance in the history of the _nimbus_ or halo—which was removed
from the insignia of the Prince to become the badge of the Saint—in
the legend of the miraculous effacement of Justinian’s pompous
inscription on Hagia Sophia, and in the banishment of the human patron
from the celestial part of the church to the earthly.—_Tr._
Footnote 125:
Who was criticized as “no god-maker but a man-maker” and as one who
spoilt the _beauty_ of his work by aiming at _likeness_.
Cresilas, the sculptor from whom the only existing portrait of
Pericles is derived, was a little earlier; in him, however, the
“ideal” was still the supreme aim.—_Tr._
Footnote 126:
The writers immediately succeeding Aristophanes.—_Tr._
-----
V
In the capacity of experientially living history and the way in which
history, particularly the history of personal becoming, is lived, one
man differs very greatly from another.
Every Culture possesses a wholly individual way of looking at and
comprehending the world-as-Nature; or (what comes to the same thing) it
_has_ its own peculiar “Nature” which no other sort of man can possess
in exactly the same form. But in a far greater degree still, every
Culture—including the individuals comprising it (who are separated only
by minor distinctions)—possesses a specific and peculiar sort of
history—and it is in the picture of this and the style of this that the
general and the personal, the inner and the outer, the world-historical
and the biographical becoming, are immediately perceived, felt and
lived. Thus the autobiographical tendency of Western man—revealed even
in Gothic times in the symbol of auricular confession[127]—is utterly
alien to Classical man; while his intense historical awareness is in
complete contrast to the almost dreamy unconsciousness of the Indian.
And when Magian man—primitive Christian or ripe scholar of Islam—uses
the words “world-history,” what is it that he sees before him?
But it is difficult enough to form an exact idea even of the “Nature”
proper to another kind of man, although in this domain things
specifically cognizable are causally ordered and unified in a
communicable system. And it is quite impossible for us to penetrate
completely a historical world-aspect of “becoming” formed by a soul that
is quite differently constituted from our own. Here there must always be
an intractable residue, greater or smaller in proportion to our
historical instinct, physiognomic tact and knowledge of men. All the
same, the solution of this very problem is the condition-precedent of
all really deep understanding of the world. The historical environment
of another is a part of his _essence_, and no such other can be
understood without the knowledge of his time-sense, his destiny-idea and
the style and degree of acuity of his inner life. In so far therefore as
these things are not directly confessed, we have to extract them from
the symbolism of the alien Culture. And as it is thus and only thus that
we can approach the incomprehensible, the style of an alien Culture, and
the great time-symbols belonging thereto acquire an immeasurable
importance.