As an example of these hitherto almost uncomprehended signs we may take

the _clock_, a creation of highly developed Cultures that becomes more

and more mysterious as one examines it. Classical man managed to do

without the clock, and his abstention was more or less deliberate. To

the Augustan period, and far beyond it, the time of day was estimated by

the length of one’s shadow,[128] although sun-dials and water-clocks,

designed in conformity with a strict time-reckoning and imposed by a

deep sense of past and future, had been in regular use in both the older

Cultures of Egypt and Babylonia.[129] Classical man’s existence—

Euclidean, relationless, point-formed—was wholly contained in the

instant. Nothing must remind him of past or future. For the true

Classical, archæology did not exist, nor did its _spiritual inversion_,

_astrology_. The Oracle and the Sibyl, like the Etruscan-Roman

“haruspices” and “augurs,” did not foretell any distant future but

merely gave indications on particular questions of immediate bearing. No

time-reckoning entered intimately into everyday life (for the Olympiad

sequence was a mere literary expedient) and what really matters is not

the goodness or badness of a calendar but the questions: “who uses it?”

and “does the life of the nation run by it?” In Classical cities nothing

suggested duration, or old times or times to come—there was no pious

preservation of ruins, no work conceived for the benefit of future

generations; in them we do not find that durable[130] material was

deliberately chosen. The Dorian Greek ignored the Mycenæan stone-

technique and built in wood or clay, though Mycenæan and Egyptian work

was before him and the country produced first-class building-stone. The

Doric style is a timber style—even in Pausanias’s day some wooden

columns still lingered in the Heræum of Olympia. The real organ of

history is “memory” in the sense which is always postulated in this

book, viz., that which preserves as a constant present the image of

one’s personal past and of a national and a world-historical past[131]

as well, and is conscious of the course both of personal and of super-

personal becoming. That organ was not present in the make-up of a

Classical soul. There was no “Time” in it. Immediately behind his proper

present, the Classical historian sees a background that is already

destitute of temporal and therefore of inward order. For Thucydides the

Persian Wars, for Tacitus the agitation of the Gracchi, were already in

this vague background;[132] and the great families of Rome had

traditions that were pure romance—witness Cæsar’s slayer, Brutus, with

his firm belief in his reputed tyrannicide ancestor. Cæsar’s reform of

the calendar may almost be regarded as a deed of emancipation from the

Classical life-feeling. But it must not be forgotten that Cæsar also

imagined a renunciation of Rome and a transformation of the City-State

into an empire which was to be dynastic—marked with the badge of

duration—and to have its centre of gravity in Alexandria, which in fact

is the birthplace of his calendar. His assassination seems to us a last

outburst of the antiduration feeling that was incarnate in the _Polis_

and the _Urbs Roma_.

Even then Classical mankind was still living every hour and every day

for itself; and this is equally true whether we take the individual

Greek or Roman, or the city, or the nation, or the whole Culture. The

hot-blooded pageantry, palace-orgies, circus-battles of Nero or

Caligula—Tacitus is a true Roman in describing only these and ignoring

the smooth progress of life in the distant provinces—are final and

flamboyant expressions of the Euclidean world-feeling that deified the

body and the present.

The Indians also have no sort of time-reckoning (the absence of it in

their case expressing their Nirvana) and no clocks, and _therefore_ no

history, no life memories, no care. What the conspicuously historical

West calls “Indian history” achieved itself without the smallest

consciousness of what it was doing.[133] The millennium of the Indian

Culture between the Vedas and Buddha seems like the stirrings of a

sleeper; here life was _actually_ a dream. From all this our Western

Culture is unimaginably remote. And, indeed, man has never—not even in

the “contemporary” China of the Chóu period with its highly-developed

sense of eras and epochs[134]—been so awake and aware, so deeply

sensible of time and conscious of direction and fate and movement as he

has been in the West. _Western history was willed and Indian history

happened._ In Classical existence years, in Indian centuries scarcely

counted, but here the hour, the minute, yea the second, is of

importance. Of the tragic tension of a historical crisis like that of

August, 1914, when even moments seem overpowering, neither a Greek nor

an Indian could have had any idea.[135] Such crises, too, a deep-feeling

man of the West can experience _within himself_, as a true Greek could

never do. Over our country-side, day and night from thousands of

belfries, ring the bells[136] that join future to past and fuse the

point-moments of the Classical present into a grand relation. The epoch

which marks the birth of our Culture—the time of the Saxon Emperors—

marks also the discovery of the wheel-clock.[137] Without exact time-

measurement, without a _chronology of becoming_ to correspond with his

imperative need of archæology (the preservation, excavation and

collection of _things-become_), Western man is unthinkable. The Baroque

age intensified the Gothic symbol of the belfry to the point of

grotesqueness, and produced the pocket watch that constantly accompanies

the individual.[138]

Another symbol, as deeply significant and as little understood as the

symbol of the clock, is that of the funeral customs which all great

Cultures have consecrated by ritual and by art. The grand style in India

begins with tomb-temples, in the Classical world with funerary urns, in

Egypt with pyramids, in early Christianity with catacombs and

sarcophagi. In the dawn, innumerable equally-possible forms still cross

one another chaotically and obscurely, dependent on clan-custom and

external necessities and conveniences. But every Culture promptly

elevates one or another of them to the highest degree of symbolism.

Classical man, obedient to his deep unconscious life-feeling, picked

upon burning, an act of annihilation in which the Euclidean, the here-

and-now, type of existence was powerfully expressed. He _willed_ to have

no history, no duration, neither past nor future, neither preservation

nor dissolution, and therefore he _destroyed_ that which no longer

possessed a present, the _body_ of a Pericles, a Cæsar, a Sophocles, a

Phidias. And the soul passed to join the vague crowd to which the living

members of the clan paid (but soon ceased to pay) the homage of

ancestor-worship and soul-feast, and which in its _formlessness_

presents an utter contrast to the ancestor-_series_, the _genealogical

tree_, that is eternalized with all the marks of historical order in the

family-vault of the West. In this (with one striking exception, the

Vedic dawn in India) no other Culture parallels the Classical.[139] And

be it noted that the Doric-Homeric spring, and above all the “Iliad,”

invested this act of burning with all the vivid feeling of a _new-born_

symbol; for those very warriors whose deeds probably formed the nucleus

of the epic were in fact buried almost in the Egyptian manner in the

graves of Mycenæ, Tiryns, Orchomenos and other places. And when in

Imperial times the sarcophagus or “flesh-consumer”[140] began to

supersede the vase of ashes, it was again, as in the time when the

Homeric urn superseded the shaft-grave of Mycenæ, a _changed sense of

Time_ that underlay the change of rite.

The Egyptians, who preserved their past in memorials of stone and

hieroglyph so purposefully that we, four thousand years after them, can

determine the order of their kings’ reigns, so thoroughly eternalized

their bodies that today the great Pharaohs lie in our museums,

recognizable in every lineament, a symbol of grim triumph—while of

Dorian kings not even the names have survived. For our own part, we know

the exact birthdays and deathdays of almost every great man since Dante,

and, moreover, we see nothing strange in the fact. Yet in the time of

Aristotle, the very zenith of Classical education, it was no longer

known with certainty if Leucippus, the founder of Atomism and a

contemporary of Pericles—i.e., hardly a century before—had ever existed

at all; much as though for us the existence of Giordano Bruno was a

matter of doubt[141] and the Renaissance had become pure saga.

And these museums themselves, in which we assemble everything that is

left of the corporeally-sensible past! Are not they a symbol of the

highest rank? Are they not intended to conserve in mummy the entire

“body” of cultural development?

As we collect countless data in milliards of printed books, do we not

also collect _all_ the works of _all_ the dead Cultures in these myriad

halls of West-European cities, in the mass of the collection depriving

each individual piece of that instant of actualized purpose that is its

own—the one property that the Classical soul would have respected—and

_ipso facto_ dissolving it into our unending and unresting Time?

Consider what it was that the Hellenes named Μουσεῖον;[142] how deep a

significance lies in the change of sense!

-----

Footnote 127:

See Vol. II, pp. 360 et seq.

Footnote 128:

Diels, _Antike Technik_ (1920), p. 159.

Footnote 129:

About 400 B.C. savants began to construct crude sun-dials in Africa

and Ionia, and from Plato’s time still more primitive clepsydræ came

into use; but in both forms, the Greek clock was a mere imitation of

the far superior models of the older East, and it had not the

slightest connexion with the Greek life-feeling. See Diels, _op.

cit._, pp. 160 et seq.

Footnote 130:

Horace’s _monumentum ære perennius_ (Odes III, 30) may seem to

conflict with this: but let the reader reconsider the whole of that

ode in the light of the present argument, and turn also to Leuconoe

and her “Babylonian” impieties (Odes I, 11) _inter alia_, and he will

probably agree that so far as Horace is concerned, the argument is

supported rather than impugned.—_Tr._

Footnote 131:

Ordered, for us, by the Christian chronology and the ancient-mediæval-

modern scheme. It was on those foundations that, from early Gothic

times, the images of religion and of art have been built up in which a

large part of Western humanity continues to live. To predicate the

same of Plato or Phidias is quite impossible, whereas the Renaissance

artists could and did project a classical past, which indeed they

permitted to dominate their judgments completely.

Footnote 132:

See pp. 9. et seq.

Footnote 133:

The Indian history of our books is a Western reconstruction from texts

and monuments. See the chapter on epigraphy in the “Indian Gazetteer,”

Vol. II.—_Tr._

Footnote 134:

See Vol. II, pp. 482, 521 et seq.

Footnote 135:

There is one famous episode in Greek history that may be thought to

contradict this—the race against time of the galley sent to Mitylene

to countermand the order of massacre (Thucydides, III, 49). But we

observe that Thucydides gives twenty times the space to the debates at

Athens that he gives to the drama of the galley-rowers pulling night

and day to save life. And we are told that it was the Mitylenean

ambassadors who spared no expense to make it worth the rowers’ while

to win, whereupon “there arose such a zeal of rowing that....” The

final comment is, strictly construing Thucydides’s own words: “Such

was the magnitude of the danger that Mitylene passed by” (παρὰ

τοσοῦτον μὲν ἡ Μυτιλήνη ἦλθε κινδύνου), a phrase which recalls

forcibly what has just been said regarding the “situation-drama.”—

_Tr._

Footnote 136:

Besides the clock, the bell itself is a Western “symbol.” The passing-

bell tolled for St. Hilda of Whitby in 680, and a century before that

time bells had come into general use in Gaul both for monasteries and

for parish churches. On the contrary, it was not till 865 that

Constantinople possessed bells, and these were presented in that year

by Venice. The presence of a belfry in a Byzantine church is accounted

a proof of “Western influence”: the East used and still largely uses

mere gongs and rattles for religious purposes. (British Museum

“Handbook of Early Christian Antiquities)”.—_Tr._

Footnote 137:

May we be permitted to guess that the Babylonian sun-dial and the

Egyptian water-clock came into being “simultaneously,” that is, on the

threshold of the third millennium before Christ? The history of clocks

is inwardly inseparable from that of the calendar; it is therefore to

be assumed that the Chinese and the Mexican Cultures also, with their

deep sense of history, very early devised and used methods of time-

measurement.

(The Mexican Culture developed the most intricate of all known systems

of indicating year and day. See British Museum “Handbook of May on

Antiquities.”—_Tr._)

Footnote 138:

Let the reader try to imagine what a Greek would feel when suddenly

made acquainted with this custom of ours.

Footnote 139:

The Chinese ancestor-worship honoured genealogical order with strict

ceremonies. And whereas here ancestor-worship by degrees came to be

the centre of all piety, in the Classical world it was driven entirely

into the background by the cults of _present_ gods; in Roman times it

hardly existed at all.

(Note the elaborate precautions taken in the Athenian “Anthesteria” to

keep the anonymous mass of ghosts at bay. This feast was anything but

an All Souls’ Day of re-communion with the departed spirits.—_Tr._)

Footnote 140:

With obvious reference to the resurrection of the flesh (ἐκ νεκρῶν).

But the meaning of the term “resurrection” has undergone, from about

1000 A.D., a profound—though hardly noticed—change. More and more it

has tended to become identified with “immortality.” But in the

resurrection from the dead, the implication is that time begins again

to repeat in space, whereas in “immortality” it is time that overcomes

space.

Footnote 141:

For English readers, the most conspicuous case of historic doubt is

the Shakespeare-Bacon matter. But even here, it is only the work of

Shakespeare that is in question, not his existence and personality,

for which we have perfectly definite evidence.—_Tr._

Footnote 142:

Originally a philosophical and scientific lecture-temple founded in

honour of Aristotle, and later the great University of Alexandria,

bore the title Μουσεῖον. Both Aristotle and the University amassed

collections but they were collections of (_a_) books, (_b_) natural

history specimens, living or taken from life. In the West, the

collection of _memorials of the past as such_ dates from the earliest

days of the Renaissance.—_Tr._

-----

VI

It is the _primitive feeling of Care_[143] which dominates the

physiognomy of Western, as also that of Egyptian and that of Chinese

history, and it creates, further, the symbolism of the erotic which

represents the flowing on of endless life in the form of the familial

series of individual existences. The point-formed Euclidean existence of

Classical man, in this matter as in others, conceived only the here-and-

now definitive act of begetting or of bearing, and thus it comes about

that we find the birth-pangs of the mother made the centre of Demeter-

worship and the Dionysiac symbol of the phallus (the sign of a sexuality

wholly concentrated on the moment and losing past and future in it) more

or less everywhere in the Classical. In the Indian world we find,

correspondingly, the sign of the Lingam and the sect of worshippers of

Paewati.[144] In the one case as in the other, man feels himself as

nature, as a plant, as a willless and care-less element of becoming (dem

Sinn des Werdens willenlos und sorglos hingegeben). The domestic

religion of Rome centred on the _genius_, i.e., the creative power of

the head of the family. To all this, the deep and thoughtful care of the

Western soul has opposed the sign of _mother-love_, a symbol which in

the Classical Culture only appeared above the horizon to the extent that

we see it in, say, the mourning for Persephone or (though this is only

Hellenistic) the seated statue of Demeter of Knidos.[145] The Mother

with the Child—the future—at her breast, the Mary-cult in the new

Faustian form, began to flourish only in the centuries of the Gothic and

found its highest expression in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna.[146] This

conception is not one belonging to Christianity generally. On the

contrary, Magian Christianity had elevated Mary as Theotokos, “she who

gave birth to God”[147] into a symbol felt quite otherwise than by us.

The lulling Mother is as alien to Early-Christian-Byzantine art as she

is to the Hellenic (though for other reasons) and most certainly Faust’s

Gretchen, with the deep spell of unconscious motherhood on her, is

nearer to the Gothic Madonna than all the Marys of Byzantine and

Ravennate mosaics. Indeed, the presumption of a spiritual relation

between them breaks down completely before the fact that the Madonna

with the Child answers exactly to the Egyptian Isis with Horus—both are

caring, nursing mothers—and that nevertheless this symbol had vanished

for a thousand years and more (for the whole duration of the Classical

and the Arabian Cultures) before it was reawakened by the Faustian

soul.[148]

From the maternal care the way leads to the paternal, and there we meet

with the highest of all the time-symbols that have come into existence

within a Culture, the State. The meaning of the child to the mother is

the future, the continuation, namely, of her own life, and mother-love

is, as it were, a welding of two discontinuous individual existences;

likewise, the meaning of the state to the man is comradeship in arms for

the protection of hearth and home, wife and child, and for the insurance

for the whole people of its future and its efficacy. The state is the

inward form of a nation, its “form” in the athletic sense, and history,

in the high meaning, is the State conceived as kinesis and not as kinema

(nicht als Bewegtes sondern als Bewegung gedacht). _The Woman as Mother

is, and the Man as Warrior and Politician makes, History._[149]

And here again the history of higher Cultures shows us three examples of

state-formations in which the element of care is conspicuous: the

Egyptian administration even of the Old Kingdom (from 3000 B.C.); the

Chinese state of the Chóu dynasty (1169-256 B.C.), of the organization

of which the Chóu Li gives such a picture that, later on, no one dared

to believe in the authenticity of the book; and the states of the West,

behind whose characteristic eye-to-the-future there is an unsurpassably

intense Will to the future.[150] And on the other hand we have in two

examples—the Classical and the Indian world—a picture of utterly care-

less submission to the moment and its incidents. Different in themselves

as are Stoicism and Buddhism (the old-age dispositions of these two

worlds), they are at one in their negation of the historical feeling of

care, their contempt of zeal, of organizing power, and of the duty-

sense; and therefore neither in Indian courts nor in Classical market-

places was there a thought for the morrow, personal or collective. The

_carpe diem_ of Apollinian man applies also to the Apollinian state.

As with the political, so with the other side of historical existence,

the economic. The hand-to-mouth life corresponds to the love that begins

and ends in the satisfaction of the moment. There was an economic

organization on the grand scale in Egypt, where it fills the whole

culture-picture, telling us in a thousand paintings the story of its

industry and orderliness; in China, whose mythology of gods and legend-

emperors turns entirely upon the holy tasks of cultivation; and in

Western Europe, where, beginning with the model agriculture of the

Orders, it rose to the height of a special science, “national economy,”

which was in very principle a _working hypothesis_, purporting to show

not what happens but what _shall_ happen. In the Classical world, on the

other hand—to say nothing of India—men managed from day to day, in spite

of the example of Egypt; the earth was robbed not only of its wealth but

of its capacities, and the casual surpluses were instantly squandered on

the city mob. Consider critically any great statesman of the Classical—

Pericles and Cæsar, Alexander and Scipio, and even revolutionaries like

Cleon and Tiberius Gracchus. Not one of them, economically, looked far

ahead. No city ever made it its business to drain or to afforest a

district, or to introduce advanced cultivation methods or new kinds of

live stock or new plants. To attach a Western meaning to the “agrarian

reform” of the Gracchi is to misunderstand its purport entirely. Their

aim was to make their supporters _possessors_ of land. Of educating

these into managers of land, or of raising the standard of Italian

husbandry in general, there was not the remotest idea—one let the future

come, one did not attempt to work upon it. Of this economic Stoicism of

the Classical world the exact antithesis is Socialism, meaning thereby

not Marx’s theory but Frederick William I’s Prussian practice which long

preceded Marx and will yet displace him—the socialism, inwardly akin to

the system of Old Egypt, that comprehends and cares for permanent

economic relations, trains the individual in his duty to the whole, and

glorifies hard work as an affirmation of Time and Future.

VII

The ordinary everyday man in all Cultures only observes so much of the

physiognomy of becoming—his own and that of the living world around him—

as is in the foreground and immediately tangible. The sum of his

experiences, inner and outer, fills the course of his day merely as a

series of facts. Only the outstanding (bedeutende) man feels behind the

commonplace unities of the history-stirred surface a deep logic of

becoming. This logic, manifesting itself in the idea of Destiny, leads

him to regard the less significant collocations of the day and the

surface as mere incidents.

At first sight, however, there seems to be only a difference of degree

in the connotations of “destiny” and “incident.” One feels that it is

more or less of an incident when Goethe goes to Sesenheim, but destiny

when he goes to Weimar;[151] one regards the former as an episode and

the latter as an epoch. But we can see at once that the distinction

depends on the inward quality of the man who is impressed. To the mass,

the whole life of Goethe may appear as a sequence of anecdotal

incidents, while a very few will become conscious, with astonishment, of

a symbolic necessity inherent even in its most trivial occurrences.

Perhaps, then, the discovery of the heliocentric system by Aristarchus

was an unmeaning incident for the Classical Culture, but its

supposed[152] rediscovery by Copernicus a destiny for the Faustian? Was

it a destiny that Luther was not a great organizer and Calvin was? And

if so, for whom was it a destiny—for Protestantism as a living unit, for

the Germans, or for Western mankind generally? Were Tiberius Gracchus

and Sulla incidents and Cæsar a destiny?

Questions like these far transcend the domain of the understanding that

operates through concepts (der begriffliche Verständigung). What is

destiny, what incident, the spiritual experiences of the individual

soul—and of the Culture-soul—decide. Acquired knowledge, scientific

insight, definition, are all powerless. Nay more, the very attempt to

grasp them epistemologically defeats its own object. For without the

inward certainty that destiny is something entirely intractable to

critical thought, we cannot perceive the world of becoming at all.

Cognition, judgment, and the establishment of _causal_ connexions within

the known (i.e., between things, properties, and positions that have

been distinguished) are one and the same, and he who approaches history

in the spirit of _judgment_ will only find “data.” But that—be it

Providence or Fate—which moves in the depths of present happening or of

represented past happening is lived, and only lived, and lived with that

same overwhelming and unspeakable certainty that genuine Tragedy awakens

in the uncritical spectator. Destiny and incident form an opposition in

which the soul is ceaselessly trying to clothe something which consists

_only_ of feeling and living and intuition, and can only be made plain

in the most subjective religious and artistic creations of those men who

are _called_ to divination. To evoke this root-feeling of living

existence which endows the picture of history with its meaning and

content, I know of no better way—for “name is mere noise and smoke”—than

to quote again those stanzas of Goethe which I have placed at the head

of this book to mark its fundamental intention.

“In the Endless, self-repeating

flows for evermore The Same.

Myriad arches, springing, meeting,

hold at rest the mighty frame.

Streams from all things love of living,

grandest star and humblest clod.

All the straining, all the striving

is eternal peace in God.”[153]

On the surface of history it is the _unforeseen_ that reigns. Every

individual event, decision and personality is stamped with its hall-

mark. No one foreknew the storm of Islam at the coming of Mohammed, nor

foresaw Napoleon in the fall of Robespierre. The coming of great men,

their doings, their fortune, are all incalculables. No one knows whether

a development that is setting in powerfully will accomplish its course

in a straight line like that of the Roman patrician order or will go

down in doom like that of the Hohenstaufen or the Maya Culture. And—

science notwithstanding—it is just the same with the destinies of every

single species of beast and plant within earth-history and beyond even

this, with the destiny of the earth itself and all the solar systems and

Milky Ways. The insignificant Augustus made an epoch, and the great

Tiberius passed away ineffective. Thus, too, with the fortunes of

artists, artworks and art-forms, dogmas and cults, theories and

discoveries. That, in the whirl of becoming, one element merely

succumbed to destiny when another became (and often enough has continued

and will continue to be) a destiny itself—that one vanishes with the

wave-train of the surface while the other _makes_ this, is something

that is not to be explained by any why-and-wherefore and yet is of

inward necessity. And thus the phrase that Augustine in a deep moment

used of Time is valid also of destiny—“if no one questions me, I know:

if I would explain to a questioner, I know not.”

So, also, the supreme ethical expression of Incident and Destiny is

found in the Western Christian’s idea of Grace—the grace, obtained

through the sacrificial death of Jesus, of being made free to will.[154]

The polarity of Disposition (original sin) and Grace—a polarity which

must ever be a projection of feeling, of the emotional life, and not a

precision of learned reasoning—embraces the existence of every truly

significant man of this Culture. It is, even for Protestants, even for

atheists, hidden though it may be behind a scientific notion of

“evolution” (which in reality is its direct descendant[155]), the

foundation of every confession and every autobiography; and it is just

its absence from the constitution of Classical man that makes

confession, by word or thought, impossible to him. It is the final

meaning of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and of music from Bach to

Beethoven. We may choose to call that something which correlates the

life-courses of all Western men disposition, Providence or “inner

evolution”[156] but it remains inaccessible to thought. “Free will” is

an inward certitude. But whatever one may will or do, that which

actually ensues upon and issues from the resolution—abrupt, surprising,

unforeseeable—_subserves_ a deeper necessity and, for the eye that

sweeps over the picture of the distant past, visibly conforms to a major

order. And when the Destiny of that which was willed has been Fulfilment

we are fain to call the inscrutable “Grace.” What did Innocent III,

Luther, Loyola, Calvin, Jansen, Rousseau and Marx will, and what came of

the things that they willed in the stream of Western history? Was it

Grace or Fate? Here all rationalistic dissection ends in nonsense. The

Predestination doctrine of Calvin and Pascal—who, both of them more

upright than Luther and Thomas Aquinas, dared to draw the causal

conclusion from Augustinian dialectic—is the _necessary_ absurdity to

which the pursuit of these secrets by the reason leads. They lost the

destiny-logic of the world-becoming and found themselves in the causal

logic of notion and law; they left the realm of direct intuitive vision

for that of a mechanical system of objects. The fearful soul-conflicts

of Pascal were the strivings of a man, at once intensely spiritual and a

born mathematician, who was determined to subject the last and gravest

problems of the soul both to the intuitions of a grand instinctive faith

and to the abstract precision of a no less grand mathematical plan. In

this wise the Destiny-idea—in the language of religion, God’s

Providence—is brought _within the schematic form of the Causality

Principle_, i.e., the Kantian form of mind activity (productive

imagination); _for that is what Predestination signifies_,

notwithstanding that thereby Grace—the causation-free, living Grace

which can only be experienced as an inward certainty—is made to appear

as a nature-force that is bound by irrevocable law and to turn the

religious world-picture into a rigid and gloomy system of machinery. And

yet was it not a Destiny again—for the world as well as for themselves—

that the English Puritans, who were filled with this conviction, were

ruined not through any passive self-surrender but through their hearty

and vigorous certainty that their will was the will of God?

-----

Footnote 143:

The connotation of “care” is almost the same as that of “Sorge,” but

the German word includes also a certain specific, _ad hoc_

apprehension, that in English is expressed by “concern” or “fear.”—

_Tr._

Footnote 144:

The _Lingayats_ are one of the chief sects of the Saivas (that is, of

the branch of Hinduism which devotes itself to Shiva) and Paewati

worshippers belong to another branch, having the generic name of

Saktas, who worship the “active female principle” in the persons of

Shiva’s consorts, of whom Paewati is one. Vaishnavism—the Vishnu

branch of Indian religion—also contains an erotic element in that form

which conceives Vishnu as Krishna. But in Krishna worship the erotic

is rather less precise and more amorous in character.

See “Imperial Gazetteer of India,” Vol. I, pp. 421 et seq., and Ency.

Brit., XI Edition, article _Hinduism_.—_Tr._

Footnote 145:

British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 146:

Dresden.—_Tr._

Footnote 147:

See Vol. II, p. 316.

Footnote 148:

In connexion with this very important link in the Author’s argument,

attention may be drawn to a famous wall-painting of very early date in

the Catacomb of St. Priscilla. In this, Mary is definitely and

unmistakably the _Stillende Mutter_. But she is, equally unmistakably,

different in soul and style from her “Early-Christian-Byzantine”

successor the Theotokos. Now, it is well known that the art of the

catacombs, at any rate in its beginnings, is simply the art of

contemporary Rome, and that this “Roman” art had its home in

Alexandria. See Woermann’s _Geschichte der Kunst_, III, 14-15, and

British Museum “Guide to Early Christian Art,” 72-74, 86. Woermann

speaks of this Madonna as the prototype of our grave, tenderly-

solicitous Mother-Madonnas. Dr. Spengler would probably prefer to

regard her as the last Isis. In any case it is significant that the

symbol disappears: in the very same catacomb is a Theotokos of perhaps

a century later date.—_Tr._

Footnote 149:

Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq.

Footnote 150:

See, further, the last two sections of Vol. II (_Der Staat_ and

_Wirtschaftsleben_).—_Tr._

Footnote 151:

Sesenheim is the home of Friederike, and a student’s holiday took him

thither: Weimar, of course, is the centre from which all the activity

of his long life was to radiate.—_Tr._

Footnote 152:

_Vermeintlich._ The allusion is presumably to the fact that

Copernicus, adhering to the hypothesis of circular orbits, was obliged

to retain some elements of Ptolemy’s geocentric machinery of

epicycles, so that Copernicus’s sun was not placed at the true centre

of any planetary orbit.—_Tr._

Footnote 153:

Sprüche in Reimen.

Footnote 154:

See Vol. II, pp. 294 et seq., 359 et seq.

Footnote 155:

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

Footnote 156:

This is one of the eternal points of dispute in Western art-theory.

The Classical, ahistorical, Euclidean soul has no “evolution”; the

Western, on the contrary, extends itself in evolving like the

convergent function that it is. The one _is_, the other _becomes_. And

thus all Classical tragedy assumes the _constancy_ of the personality,

and all Western its _variability_, which essentially constitutes a

“character” in our sense, viz., a picture of being that consists in

continuous qualitative movement and an endless wealth of

relationships. _In Sophocles the grand gesture ennobles the suffering,

in Shakespeare the grand idea_ (Gesinnung) _ennobles the doing_. As

our æsthetic took its examples from _both_ Cultures, it was bound to

go wrong in the very enunciation of its problem.

-----

VIII

We can proceed to the further elucidation of the incidental (or casual)

without running the risk of considering it as an exception or a breach

in the causal continuity of “Nature,” for Nature is _not_ the world-

picture in which Destiny is operative. Wherever the sight emancipates

itself from the sensible-become, spiritualizes itself into Vision,

penetrates through the enveloping world and lets prime phenomena instead

of mere objects work upon it, we have the grand _historical_, trans-

natural, super-natural outlook, the outlook of Dante and Wolfram and

also the outlook of Goethe in old age that is most clearly manifested in

the finale of Faust II. If we linger in contemplation in this world of

Destiny and Incident, it will very likely seem to us incidental that the

episode of “world-history” should have played itself out in this or that

phase of one particular star amongst the millions of solar systems;

incidental that it should be men, peculiar animal-like creatures

inhabiting the crust of this star, that present the spectacle of

“knowledge” and, moreover, present it in just this form or in just that

form, according to the very different versions of Aristotle, Kant and

others; incidental that as the counter-pole of this “knowing” there

should have arisen just these codes of “natural law,” each supposedly

eternal and universally-valid and each evoking a supposedly general and

common picture of “Nature.” Physics—quite rightly—banishes incidentals

from its field of view, but it is incidental, again, that physics itself

should occur in the alluvial period of the earth’s crust, uniquely, as a

particular kind of intellectual composition.

_The world of incident is the world of once-actual facts that longingly

or anxiously we live forward to (entgegenleben) as Future, that raise or

depress us as the living Present, and that we contemplate with joy or

with grief as Past. The world of causes and effects is the world of the

constantly-possible, of the timeless truths which we know by dissection

and distinction._

The latter only are scientifically attainable—they are indeed

_identical_ with science. He who is blind to this other, to the world as

_Divina Commedia_ or drama for a god, can only find a senseless turmoil

of incidents,[157] and here we use the word in its most trivial sense.

So it has been with Kant and most other systematists of thought. But the

professional and inartistic sort of historical research too, with its

collecting and arranging of mere data, amounts for all its ingenuity to

little more than the giving of a _cachet_ to the banal-incidental. Only

the insight that can penetrate into the metaphysical is capable of

experiencing in data _symbols_ of that which happened, and so of

elevating an Incident into a Destiny. And he who is to himself a Destiny

(like Napoleon) does not need this insight, since between himself as a

fact and the other facts there is a harmony of metaphysical rhythm which

gives his decisions their dreamlike certainty.[158]

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

Shakespeare. Hitherto, neither our research nor our speculation has hit

upon this in him—that he is _the Dramatist of the Incidental_. And yet

this Incidental is the very heart of Western tragedy, which is a true

copy of the Western history idea and with it gives the clue to that

which we understand in the world—so misconstrued by Kant—“Time.” It is

incidental that the political situation of “Hamlet,” the murder of the

King and the succession question impinge upon just that character that

Hamlet is. Or, take Othello—it is incidental that the man at whom Iago,

the commonplace rogue that one could pick up in any street, aims his

blow is one whose person possesses just this wholly special physiognomy.

And Lear! Could anything be more incidental (and therefore more

“natural”) than the conjunction of this commanding dignity with these

fateful passions and the inheritance of them by the daughters? No one

has even to-day realized all the significance of the fact that

Shakespeare took his stories as he found them and _in the very finding

of them_ filled them with the force of inward necessity, and never more

sublimely so than in the case of the Roman dramas. For the _will_ to

understand him has squandered itself in desperate efforts to bring in a

moral causality, a “therefore,” a connexion of “guilt” and “expiation.”

But all this is neither correct nor incorrect—these are words that

belong to the World-as-Nature and imply that something causal is being

judged—but _superficial_, shallow, that is, in contrast to the poet’s

deep subjectivizing of the mere fact-anecdote. Only one who feels this

is able to admire the grand naïveté of the entrances of Lear and

Macbeth. Now, Hebbel is the exact opposite, he destroys the depth of the

anecdote by a system of cause and effect. The arbitrary and abstract

character of his plots, which everyone feels instinctively, comes from

the fact that the causal scheme of his spiritual conflicts is in

contradiction with the historically-motived world-feeling and the quite

other logic proper to that feeling. These people do not live, they

_prove_ something by coming on. One feels the presence of a great

understanding, not that of a deep life. Instead of the Incident we get a

Problem.

Further, this _Western_ species of the Incidental is entirely alien to

the Classical world-feeling and therefore to its drama. Antigone has no

incidental character to affect her fortunes in any way. What happened to

Œdipus—unlike the fate of Lear—might just as well have happened to

anyone else. This is the Classical “Destiny,” the _Fatum_ which is

common to all mankind, which affects the “body” and in no wise depends

upon incidents of personality.

The kind of history that is commonly written must, even if it does not

lose itself in compilation of data, come to a halt before the

_superficially_ incidental—that is the ... destiny of its authors, who,

spiritually, remain more or less in the ruck. In their eyes nature and

history mingle in a cheap unity, and incident or accident, “sa sacrée

majesté le Hazard,” is for the man of the ruck the easiest thing in the

world to understand. For him the secret logic of history ‘which he does

not feel’ is replaced by a causal that is only waiting behind the scene

to come on and prove itself. It is entirely appropriate that the

anecdotal foreground of history should be the arena of all the

scientific causality-hunters and all the novelists and sketch-writers of

the common stamp. How many wars have been begun when they were because

some jealous courtier wished to remove some general from the proximity

of his wife! How many battles have been won and lost through ridiculous

incidents! Only think how Roman history was written in the 18th Century

and how Chinese history is written even to-day! Think of the Dey

smacking the Consul with his fly-flap[159] and other such incidents that

enliven the historical scene with comic-opera motives! Do not the deaths

of Gustavus Adolphus and of Alexander seem like expedients of a

nonplussed playwright; Hannibal a simple intermezzo, a surprise

intrusion in Classical history; or Napoleon’s “transit” more or less of

a melodrama? Anyone who looks for the inner form of history in any

causal succession of its visible detail-events must always, if he is

honest, find a comedy of burlesque inconsequence, and I can well imagine

that the dance-scene of the drunken Triumvirs in “Antony and Cleopatra”

(almost overlooked, but one of the most powerful in that immensely deep

work)[160] grew up out of the contempt of the prince of _historical_

tragedy for the pragmatic aspect of history. For this is the aspect of

it that has always dominated “the world,” and has encouraged ambitious

little men to interfere in it. It was because their eyes were set on

_this_, and its rationalistic structure, that Rousseau and Marx could

persuade themselves that they could alter the “course of the world” by a

theory. And even the social or economic interpretation of political

developments, to which present-day historical work is trying to rise as

to a peak-ideal (though its biological cast constantly leads us to

suspect foundations of the causal kind), is still exceedingly shallow

and trivial.

Napoleon had in his graver moments a strong feeling for the deep logic

of world-becoming, and in such moments could divine to what extent he

_was_, and to what extent he _had_, a destiny. “I feel myself driven

towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it,

as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter

me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against

me,” he said at the beginning of the Russian campaign. Here, certainly,

is not the thought of a pragmatist. In this moment he divined how little

the logic of Destiny needs particular instances, better men or

situations. Supposing that he himself, as “empirical person,” had fallen

at Marengo—then that which he _signified_ would have been actualized in

some other form. A melody, in the hands of a great musician, is capable

of a wealth of variations; it can be entirely transformed so far as the

simple listener is concerned without altering itself—which is quite

another matter—fundamentally. The epoch of German national union

accomplished itself through the person of Bismarck, that of the Wars of

Freedom through broad and almost nameless events; but either theme, to

use the language of music, could have been “worked out” in other ways.

Bismarck might have been dismissed early, the battle of Leipzig might

have been lost, and for the group of wars 1864—1866—1870 there might

have been substituted (as “modulations”) diplomatic, dynastic,

revolutionary or economic facts—though it must not be forgotten that

_Western history, under the pressure of its own physiognomic abundance_

(as distinct from physiognomic style, for even Indian history has that)

_demands, so to say, contrapuntally strong accents—wars or big

personalities—at the decisive points_. Bismarck himself points out in

his reminiscences that in the spring of 1848 national unity could have

been achieved on a broader base than in 1870 but for the policy (more

accurately, the personal taste) of the King of Prussia;[161] and yet,

again, according to Bismarck, this would have been so tame a working-out

that a coda of one sort or another (_da capo e poi la coda_) would have

been imperatively necessary. Withal, the Theme—the meaning of the epoch—

would have been entirely unaltered by the facts assuming this or that

shape. Goethe might—possibly—have died young, but _not_ his “idea.”

Faust and Tasso would not have been written, but they would have “been”

in a deeply mysterious sense, even though they lacked the poet’s

elucidation.

For if it is incidental that the history of higher mankind fulfils

itself in the form of great Cultures, and that one of these Cultures

awoke in West Europe about the year 1000; yet from the moment of

awakening it is bound by its charter. Within every epoch there is

unlimited abundance of surprising and unforeseeable possibilities of

self-actualizing in detail-facts, but the epoch itself is necessary, for

the life-unity is in it. That its inner form is precisely what it is,

constitutes its specific determination (Bestimmung). Fresh incidentals

can affect the shape of its development, can make this grandiose or

puny, prosperous or sorrowful, but alter it they cannot. An irrevocable

fact is not merely a special case but a special type; thus in the

history of the Universe we have the type of the “solar system” of sun

and circling planets; in the history of our planet we have the type

“life” with its youth, age, duration and reproduction; in the history of

“life” the type “humanity,” and in the world-historical stage of that

humanity the type of the great individual Culture.[162] And these

Cultures are essentially related to the plants, in that they are bound

for the whole duration of their life to the soil from which they sprang.

Typical, lastly, is the manner in which the men of a Culture understand

and experience Destiny, however differently the picture may be coloured

for this individual and that; what I say here about it is not “true,”

but inwardly necessary for this Culture and this time-phase of it, and

if it convinces you, it is not because there is only one “truth” but

because you and I belong to the same epoch.

For this reason, the Euclidean soul of the Classical Culture could only

experience its existence, bound as this was to present foregrounds, in

the form of _incidents of the Classical style_. If in respect of the

Western soul we can regard incident as a minor order of Destiny, in

respect of the Classical soul it is just the reverse. Destiny is

incident become immense—that is the very signification of Ananke,

Heimarmene, Fatum. As the Classical soul did not genuinely live through

history, it possessed no genuine feeling for a _logic_ of Destiny. We

must not be misled by words. The most popular goddess of Hellenism was

Tyche, whom the Greeks were practically unable to distinguish from

Ananke. But Incident and Destiny are felt by _us_ with all the intensity

of an opposition, and on the issue of this opposition we feel that

everything fundamental in our existence depends. _Our_ history is that

of great connexions, Classical history—its full actuality, that is, and

not merely the image of it that we get in the historian (e.g.,

Herodotus)—is that of anecdotes, of a series of plastic details. The

style of the Classical life generally, the style of every individual

life within it, is anecdotal, using the word with all seriousness. The

sense-perceivable side of events condenses on _anti-historical,

daemonic, absurd_ incidents; it is the denial and disavowal of all logic

of happening. The stories of the Classical master-tragedies one and all

_exhaust_ themselves in incidents that mock at any meaning of the world;

they are the exact denotation of what is connoted by the word

εἱμαρμένη[163] in contrast to the Shakesperian _logic_ of incident.

Consider Œdipus once more: that which happened to him was wholly

extrinsic, was neither brought about nor conditioned by anything

subjective to himself, and could just as well have happened to anyone

else. This is the very _form of the Classical myth_. Compare with it the

necessity—inherent in and governed by the man’s whole existence and the

relation of that existence to Time—that resides in the destiny of

Othello, of Don Quixote, of Werther. It is, as we have said before, the

difference of situation-tragedy and character-tragedy. And this

opposition repeats itself in history proper—every epoch of the West has

character, while each epoch of the Classical only presents a situation.

While the life of Goethe was one of fate-filled logic, that of Cæsar was

one of mythical indidentalness, and it was left to Shakespeare to

_introduce_ logic into it. Napoleon is a tragic character, Alcibiades

fell into tragic situations. Astrology, in the form in which from Gothic

to Baroque the Western soul knew it—was dominated by it even in denying

it—was the attempt to master one’s _whole_ future life-course; the

Faustian horoscope, of which the best-known example is perhaps that

drawn out for Wallenstein by Kepler, _presupposes_ a steady and

purposeful direction in the existence that has yet to be accomplished.

But the Classical oracle, always consulted for the _individual_ case, is

the genuine symbol of the meaningless incident and the moment; it

accepts the point-formed and the discontinuous as the elements of the

world’s course, and oracle-utterances were therefore entirely in place

in that which was written and experienced as history at Athens. Was

there one single Greek who possessed the notion of a historical

_evolution_ towards this or that or any aim? And _we_—should we have

been able to reflect upon history or to make it if we had _not_

possessed it? If we compare the destinies of Athens and of France at

corresponding times after Themistocles and Louis XIV, we cannot but feel

that the style of the historical feeling and the style of its

actualization are always one. In France logic _à outrance_, in Athens

un-logic.

The ultimate meaning of this significant fact can now be understood.

History is the actualizing of a soul, and the same style governs the

history one makes as governs the history one contemplates. The Classical

mathematic excludes the symbol of infinite space, and therefore the

Classical history does so too. It is not for nothing that the scene of

Classical existence is the smallest of any, the individual _Polis_, that

it lacks horizon and perspective—notwithstanding the episode of

Alexander’s expedition[164]—just as the Attic stage cuts them off with

its flat back-wall, in obvious contrast to the long-range efficacy of

Western Cabinet diplomacy and the Western capital city. And just as the

Greeks and the Romans neither knew nor (with their fundamental

abhorrence of the Chaldean astronomy) would admit as actual any cosmos

but that of the foreground; just as at bottom their deities are house-

gods, city-gods, field-gods but never star-gods,[165] so also what they

_depicted_ was only foregrounds. Never in Corinth or Athens or Sicyon do

we find a landscape with mountain horizon and driving clouds and distant

towns; every vase-painting has the same constituents, figures of

Euclidean separateness and artistic self-sufficiency. Every pediment or

frieze group is serially and not contrapuntally built up. But then,

life-experience itself was one strictly of foregrounds. Destiny was not

the “course of life” but something upon which one suddenly stumbles. And

this is how Athens produced, with Polygnotus’s fresco and Plato’s

geometry, _a fate-tragedy_ in which fate is precisely the fate that we

discredit in Schiller’s “Bride of Messina.” The complete unmeaning of

blind doom that is embodied, for instance, in the curse of the House of

Atreus, served to reveal to the ahistorical Classical soul the full

meaning of its own world.

-----

Footnote 157:

“The older one becomes, the more one is persuaded that His Sacred

Majesty Chance does three-quarters of the work of this miserable

Universe.” (Frederick the Great to Voltaire.) So, necessarily, must

the genuine rationalist conceive it.

Footnote 158:

See Vol. II, pp. 20 et seq.

Footnote 159:

The incident which is said to have precipitated the French war on

Algiers (1827).—_Tr._

Footnote 160:

Act. II, Scene VII.—_Tr._

Footnote 161:

In the general upheaval of 1848 a German national parliament was

assembled at Frankfurt, of a strongly democratic colour, and it chose

Frederick William IV of Prussia as hereditary emperor. Frederick

William, however, refused to “pick up a crown out of the gutter.” For

the history of this momentous episode, the English reader may be

referred to the Cambridge Modern History or to the article _Germany

(History)_ in the Ency. Brit., XI Edition.—_Tr._

Footnote 162:

It is the fact that a whole group of these Cultures is available for

our study that makes possible the “comparative” method used in the

present work. See Vol. II, pp. 42 et seq.

Footnote 163:

Derived from μείρομαι, to receive as one’s portion, to have allotted

to one, or, colloquially, to “come in for” or “step into.”—_Tr._

Footnote 164:

The expedition of the Ten Thousand into Persia is no exception. The

Ten Thousand indeed formed an ambulatory Polis, and its adventures are

truly Classical. It was confronted with a series of “situations.”—

_Tr._

Footnote 165:

Helios is only a poetical figure; he had neither temples nor cult.

Even less was Selene a moon-goddess.

-----

IX

We may now point our moral with a few examples, which, though hazardous,

ought not at this stage to be open to misunderstanding. Imagine Columbus

supported by France instead of by Spain, as was in fact highly probable

at one time. Had Francis I been the master of America, without doubt he

and not the Spaniard Charles V would have obtained the imperial crown.

The early Baroque period from the Sack of Rome to the Peace of

Westphalia, which was actually the _Spanish_ century in religion,

intellect, art, politics and manners, would have been shaped from Paris

and not from Madrid. Instead of the names of Philip, Alva, Cervantes,

Calderon, Velasquez we should be talking to-day of great Frenchmen who

in fact—if we may thus roundly express a very difficult idea—remained

unborn. The style of the Church which was definitively fixed in this

epoch by the Spaniard Loyola and the Council of Trent which he

spiritually dominated; the style of politics to which the war-technique

of Spanish captains, the diplomacy of Spanish cardinals and the courtly

spirit of the Escorial gave a stamp that lasted till the Congress of

Vienna and in essential points till beyond Bismarck; the architecture of

the Baroque; the great age of Painting; ceremonial and the polite

society of the great cities—all these would have been represented by

other profound heads, noble and clerical, by wars other than Philip II’s

wars, by another architect than Vignola, by another Court. The

Incidental chose the Spanish gesture for the late period of the West.

But the _inward logic_ of that age, which was _bound_ to find its

fulfilment in the great Revolution (or some event of the same

connotation), remained intact.

This French revolution might have been represented by some other event

of different form and occurring elsewhere, say in England or Germany.

But its “idea,”—which (as we shall see later) was the transition from

Culture to Civilization, the victory of the inorganic megalopolis over

the organic countryside which was henceforward to become spiritually

“the provinces,”—was necessary, and the moment of its occurrence was

also necessary. To describe such a moment we shall use the term (long

blurred, or misused as a synonym for period) _epoch_. When we say an

event is epoch-making we mean that it marks in the course of a Culture a

necessary and fateful turning-point. The merely incidental event, a

crystallization-form of the historical surface, may be represented by

other appropriate incidents, but the _epoch_ is necessary and

predeterminate. And it is evident that the question of whether, in

respect of a particular Culture and its course, an event ranks as an

epoch or as an episode is connected with its ideas of Destiny and

Incidents, and therefore also with its idea of the Tragic as “epochal”

(as in the West) or as “episodic” (as in the Classical world).

We can, further, distinguish between _impersonal_ or anonymous and

_personal_ epochs, according to their physiognomic type in the picture

of history. Amongst “incidents” of the first rank we include those great

persons who are endowed with such formative force that the destiny of

thousands, of whole peoples, and of ages, are incorporated in their

private destinies; but at the same time we can distinguish the

adventurer or successful man who is destitute of inward greatness (like

Danton or Robespierre) from the Hero of history by the fact that his

personal destiny displays only the traits of the common destiny. Certain

names may ring, but “the Jacobins” collectively and not individuals

amongst them were the type that dominated the time. The first part of

this epoch of the Revolution is therefore thoroughly anonymous, just as

the second or Napoleonic is in the highest degree personal. In a few

years the immense force of these phenomena accomplished what the

corresponding epoch of the Classical (c. 386-322), fluid and unsure of

itself, required decades of undermining-work to achieve. It is of the

essence of all Culture that at the outset of each stage the same

potentiality is present, and that necessity fulfils itself thereafter

either in the form of a great individual person (Alexander, Diocletian,

Mohammed, Luther, Napoleon) or in that of an almost anonymous happening

of powerful inward constitution (Peloponnesian War, Thirty Years’ War,

Spanish Succession War) or else in a feeble and indistinct evolution

(periods of the Diadochi and of the Hyksos, the Interregnum in Germany).

And the question which of these forms is the more likely to occur in any

given instance, is one that is influenced in advance by the historical

and therefore also the tragic style of the Culture concerned.[166]

The tragic in Napoleon’s life—which still awaits discovery by a poet

great enough to comprehend it and shape it—was that he, who rose into

effective being by fighting British policy and the British spirit which

that policy so eminently represented, completed by that very fighting

the continental victory of this spirit, which thereupon became strong

enough, in the guise of “liberated nations” to overpower him and to send

him to St. Helena to die. It was not Napoleon who originated the

expansion principle. That had arisen out of the Puritanism of Cromwell’s

_milieu_ which called into life the British Colonial Empire.[167]

Transmitted through the English-schooled intellects of Rousseau and

Mirabeau to the Revolutionary armies, of which English philosophical

ideas were essentially the driving force, it became their tendency even

from that day of Valmy which Goethe alone read aright. It was not

Napoleon who formed the idea, but the idea that formed Napoleon, and

when he came to the throne he was obliged to pursue it further against

the only power, England namely, whose purpose was _the same_ as his own.

His Empire was a creation of French blood but of English style. It was

in London, again, that Locke, Shaftesbury, Samuel Clarke and, above all,

Bentham built up the theory of “European Civilization”—the Western

Hellenism—which Bayle, Voltaire and Rousseau carried to Paris. Thus it

was in the name of _this_ England of Parliamentarianism, business

morality and journalism that Valmy, Marengo, Jena, Smolensk and Leipzig

were fought, and in _all_ these battles it was the English spirit that

defeated the French Culture of the West.[168] The First Consul had no

intention of incorporating West Europe in France; his primary object

was—note the Alexander-idea on the threshold of every Civilization!—to

replace the British Colonial Empire by a French one. Thereby, French

preponderance in the Western culture-region would have been placed on a

practically unassailable foundation; it would have been the Empire of

Charles V on which the sun never set, but managed from Paris after all,

in spite of Columbus and Philip, and organized as an economic-military

instead of as an ecclesiastical-chivalric unit. So far-reaching,

probably, was the destiny that was in Napoleon. But the Peace of Paris

in 1763 had already decided the question _against_ France, and

Napoleon’s great plans time and again came to grief in petty incidents.

At Acre a few guns were landed in the nick of time from the British

warships: there was a moment, again, just before the signature of the

Peace of Amiens, when the whole Mississippi basin was still amongst his

assets and he was in close touch with the Maratha powers that were

resisting British progress in India; but again a minor naval

incident[169] obliged him to abandon the whole of a carefully-prepared

enterprise: and, lastly, when by the occupation of Dalmatia, Corfu and

all Italy he had made the Adriatic a French lake, with a view to another

expedition to the East, and was negotiating with the Shah of Persia for

action against India, he was defeated by the whims of the Tsar

Alexander, who at times was undoubtedly willing to support a march on

India and whose aid would infallibly have secured its success. It was

only after the failure of all extra-European combinations that he chose,

as his _ultima ratio_ in the battle against England, the incorporation

of Germany and Spain, and so, raising against himself _his own_ English-

Revolutionary ideas, the very ideas of which he had been the

vehicle,[170] he took the step that made him “no longer necessary.”

At one time it falls to the Spanish spirit to outline, at another to the

British or the French to remould, the world-embracing colonial system. A

“United States of Europe,” actualized through Napoleon as founder of a

romantic and popular military monarchy, is the analogue of the Realm of

the Diadochi; actualized as a 21st-Century economic organism by a

matter-of-fact Cæsar, it is the counterpart of the _imperium Romanum_.

These are incidentals, but they are in the picture of history. But

Napoleon’s victories and defeats (which always hide a victory of England

and Civilization over Culture), his Imperial dignity, his fall, the

_Grande Nation_, the episodic liberation of Italy (in 1796, as in 1859,

essentially no more than a change of political costume for a people long

since become insignificant), the destruction of the Gothic ruin of the

Roman-German Empire, are mere surface phenomena, behind which is

marching the great logic of genuine and invisible History, and it was in

the sense of this logic that the West, having fulfilled its French-

formed Culture in the _ancien régime_, closed it off with the English

Civilization. As symbols of “contemporary” epochal moments, then, the

storming of the Bastille, Valmy, Austerlitz, Waterloo and the rise of

Prussia correspond to the Classical-history facts of Chæronea, Gaugamela

(Arbela), Alexander’s Indian expedition and the Roman victory of

Sentinum.[171] And we begin to understand that in wars and political

catastrophies—the chief material of our historical writings—victory is

not the essence of the fight nor peace the aim of a revolution.

-----

Footnote 166:

The original is somewhat obscure. It reads: "Welche Form die

Wahrscheinlichkeit für sich hat, ist bereits eine Frage des

historischen—und also des tragischen—Stils."—_Tr._

Footnote 167:

The words of Canning at the beginning of the XIXth century may be

recalled. “South America free! and if possible English!” The expansion

idea has never been expressed in greater purity than this.

Footnote 168:

The Western Culture of maturity was through-and-through a French

outgrowth of the Spanish, beginning with Louis XIV. But even by Louis

XVI’s time the English park had defeated the French, sensibility had

ousted wit, London costume and manners had overcome Versailles, and

Hogarth, Chippendale and Wedgwood had prevailed over Watteau, Boulle

and Sèvres.

Footnote 169:

The allusion is to the voyage of Linois’s small squadron to Pondichéry

in 1803, its confrontation by another small British squadron there,

and the counter-order which led Linois to retire to Mauritius.—_Tr._

Footnote 170:

Hardenberg’s reorganization of Prussia was thoroughly English in

spirit, and as such incurred the severe censure of the old Prussian

Von der Marwitz. Scharnhorst’s army reforms too, as a breakaway from

the professional army system of the eighteenth-century cabinet-wars,

are a sort of “return to nature” in the Rousseau-Revolutionary sense.

Footnote 171:

Where in 295 B.C. the Romans decisively defeated the last great

Samnite effort to resist their hegemony over Italy.—_Tr._

-----

X

Anyone who has absorbed these ideas will have no difficulty in

understanding how the causality principle is bound to have a fatal

effect upon the capacity for genuinely experiencing History when, at

last, it attains its rigid form in that “late” condition of a Culture to

which it is proper and in which it is able to tyrannize over the world-

picture. Kant, very wisely, established causality as a necessary form of

knowledge, and it cannot be too often emphasized that this was meant to

refer exclusively to the understanding of man’s environment by the way

of reason. But while the word “necessary” was accepted readily enough,

it has been overlooked that this limitation of the principle to a single

domain of knowledge is just what forbids its application to the

contemplation and experiencing of living history. Man-knowing and

Nature-knowing are in essence entirely incapable of being compared, but

nevertheless the whole Nineteenth Century was at great pains to abolish

the frontier between Nature and History in favour of the former. The

more historically men tried to think, the more they forgot that in this

domain they ought _not_ to think. In forcing the rigid scheme of a

spatial and anti-temporal relation of cause and effect upon something

alive, they disfigured the visible face of becoming with the

construction-lines of a physical nature-picture, and, habituated to

their own late, megalopolitan and causally-thinking _milieu_, they were

unconscious of the fundamental absurdity of a science that sought to

understand an organic becoming by methodically misunderstanding it as

the _machinery_ of the thing-become. Day is not the cause of night, nor

youth of age, nor blossom of fruit. Everything that we grasp

intellectually has a _cause_, everything that we live organically with

inward certitude has a _past_. The one recognizes the _case_, that which

is generally possible and has a fixed inner form which is the same

whenever and wherever and however often it occurs, the other recognizes

the _event_ which once was and will never recur. And, according as we

grasp something in our envelope-world critically and consciously or

physiognomically and involuntarily, we draw our conclusion from

technical or from living experience, and we relate it to a timeless

cause in space or to a direction which leads from yesterday to to-day

and to-morrow.

But the spirit of our great cities _refuses_ to be involuntary.

Surrounded by a machine-technique that it has itself created in

surprising Nature’s most dangerous secret, the “law,” it seeks to

conquer history also technically, “theoretically and practically.”

“Usefulness,” suitableness to purpose (Zweckmässigkeit), is the great

word which assimilates the one to the other. A materialist conception of

history, ruled by laws of causal Nature, leads to the setting up of

usefulness-ideals such as “enlightenment,” “humanity,” “world-peace,” as

aims of world-history, to be reached by the “march of progress.” But in

these schemes of old age the feeling of Destiny has died, and with it

the young reckless courage that, self-forgetful and big with a future,

presses on to meet a dark decision.

For only youth has a future, and _is_ Future, that enigmatic synonym of

directional Time and of Destiny. _Destiny is always young._ He who

replaces it by a mere chain of causes and effects, sees even in the not-

yet-actualized something, as it were, old and past—_direction_ is

wanting. But he who lives towards a something in the superabundant flow

of things need not concern himself with aims and abilities, for he feels

that he himself is the meaning of what is to happen. This was the faith

in the Star that never left Cæsar nor Napoleon nor the great doers of

another kind; and this it is that lies deepest of all—youthful

melancholy notwithstanding—in every childhood and in every young clan,

people, Culture, that extends forward over all their history for men of

act and of vision, who are young however white their hair, younger even

than the most juvenile of those who look to a timeless utilitarianism.

The feeling of a significance in the momentarily present world-around

discloses itself in the earliest days of childhood, when it is still

only the persons and things of the nearest environment that essentially

exist, and develops through silent and unconscious experience into a

comprehensive picture. This picture constitutes the general expression

of the whole Culture as it is at the particular stage, and it is only

the fine judge of life and the deep searcher of history who can

interpret it.

At this point a distinction presents itself between the _immediate

impression_ of the present and the _image_ of the past that is only

presented in the spirit, in other words between the world as happening

and the world as history. The eye of the man of action (statesman and

general) appreciates the first, that of the man of contemplation

(historian and poet) the second. Into the first one plunges practically

to do or to suffer; chronology,[172] that great symbol of irrevocable

past, claims the second. We look backwards, and we live forward towards

the unforeseen, but even in childhood our _technical_ experience soon

introduces into the image of the singular occurrence elements of the

foreseeable, that is, an image of regulated Nature which is subject not

to physiognomic fact but to calculation. We apprehend a “head of game”

as a living entity and immediately afterwards as food; we see a flash of

lightning as a peril and then as an electrical discharge. And this

second, later, petrifying projection of the world more and more tends to

overpower the first in the Megalopolis; the image of the past is

mechanized and materialized and from it is deduced a set of causal rules

for present and future. We come to believe in historical laws and in a

rational understanding of them.

Nevertheless science is always natural science. Causal knowledge and

technical experience refer only to the become, the extended, the

comprehended. As life is to history, so is knowledge (Wissen) to Nature,

viz., to the sensible world apprehended as an element, treated as in

space and subjected to the law of cause and effect. Is there, then, a

science of History at all? To answer this question, let us remember that

in every personal world-picture, which only approximates more or less to

the ideal picture, there is both something of Nature and something of

History. No Nature is without living, and no History without causal,

_harmonies_. For within the sphere of Nature, although two like

experiments, conformably to law, have the like result, yet each of these

experiments is a historical event possessing a date and not recurring.

And within that of History, the dates or data of the past (chronologies,

statistics, names, forms[173]) form a rigid web. “Facts are facts” even

if we are unaware of them, and all else is image, _Theoria_, both in the

one domain and in the other. But history is itself the condition of

being “in the focus” and the material is only an aid to this condition,

whereas in Nature the real aim is the winning of the material, and

theory is only the servant of this purpose.

There is, therefore, not a science _of_ history but an ancillary science

_for_ history, which ascertains that which has been. For the historical

outlook itself the data are always symbols. Scientific research, on the

contrary, is science and only science. In virtue of its technical origin

and purpose it sets out to find data and laws of the causal sort and

nothing else, and from the moment that it turns its glance upon

something else it becomes _Metaphysics_, something trans-scientific. And

just because this is so, historical and natural-science data are

different. The latter consistently repeat themselves, the former never.

The latter are _truths_, the former _facts_. However closely related

incidentals and causals may appear to be in the everyday picture,

fundamentally they belong to different worlds. As it is beyond question

that the shallowness of a man’s history-picture (the man himself,

therefore) is in proportion to the dominance in it of frank incidentals,

so it is beyond question that the emptiness of written history is in

proportion to the degree in which it makes the establishment of purely

factual relations its object. The more deeply a man lives History, the

more rarely will he receive “causal” impressions and the more surely

will he be sensible of their utter insignificance. If the reader

examines Goethe’s writings in natural science, he will be astounded to

find how “living nature” can be set forth without formulas, without

laws, almost without a trace of the causal. For him, Time is not a

distance but a feeling. But the experience of last and deepest things is

practically denied to the ordinary savant who dissects and arranges

purely critically and allows himself neither to contemplate nor to feel.

In the case of History, on the contrary, this power of experience is

_the_ requisite. And thus is justified the paradox that the less a

historical researcher has to do with real science, the better it is for

his history.

To elucidate once more by a diagram:

Soul ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯➛ World

\——————————————————————————————————v———————————————————————————————/

Life, Direction Extension

Destiny-Experience Causal Knowledge

The uniquely The

occurring and irrevocable constantly-possible

“Fact” “Truth”

Physiognomic tact (instinct) Systematic criticism (reason)

↓ [Crossed downward ↓

arrows]

Consciousness Consciousness

as _servant_ of Being as _master_ of Being

The world-image of “History” The world-image of "Nature"

_Life-experience_ _Scientific methods_

Image of the Past Religion. Natural Science

Constructive Contemplation Theoretical: Myth and Dogma.

Hypothesis

(Historian, Tragic Dramatist) Practical: Cult. Technique

to _investigate_ Destiny

Direction into the Future

Constructive Action

(Statesman)

to _be_ Destiny

XI

Is it permissible to fix upon one, any one, group of social, religious,

physiological or ethical facts as the “cause” of another? “Certainly,”

the rationalistic school of history, and still more the up-to-date

sociology, would reply. That, they would say, is what is meant by our

comprehending history and deepening our knowledge of it. But in reality,

with “civilized” man there is always the implicit postulate of an

underlying _rational_ purpose—without which indeed his world would be

meaningless. And there is something rather comic in the most

unscientific freedom that he allows himself in his _choice_ of his

fundamental causes. One man selects this, another that, group as _prima

causa_—an inexhaustible source of polemics—and all fill their works with

pretended elucidations of the “course of history” on natural-science

lines. Schiller has given us the classical expression of this method in

one of his immortal banalities, the verse in which the “Weltgetriebe” is

stat “durch Hunger und durch Liebe”; and the Nineteenth Century,

progressing from Rationalism to Materialism, has made this opinion

canonical. The cult of the useful was set up on high. To it Darwin, in

the name of his century, sacrificed Goethe’s Nature-theory. The organic

logic of the facts of life was supplanted by a mechanics in

physiological garb. Heredity, adaptation, natural selection, are

utility-causes of purely mechanical connotation. The historical

_dispensations_ were superseded by a naturalistic _movement_ “in space.”

(But _are there_ historical or spiritual “processes,” or life-

“processes” of any sort whatever? Have historical “movements” such as,

for example, the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment anything

whatever to do with the scientific notion of movement?) The word

“process” eliminated Destiny and unveiled the secret of becoming, and

lo! there was no longer a tragic but only an exact mathematical

structure of world-happening. And thereupon the “exact” historian

enunciated the proposition that in the history-picture we had before us

a sequence of “states” of mechanical type which were amenable to

rational analysis like a physical experiment or a chemical reaction, and

that therefore causes, means, methods and objects were capable of being

grouped together as a comprehensible system on the visible surface. It

all becomes astonishingly simple. And one is bound to admit that given a

sufficiently shallow observer, the hypothesis (so far as concerns _his_

personality and its world-picture) comes off.

Hunger and Love[174] thus become mechanical causes of mechanical

processes in the “life of peoples.” Social problems and sexual problems

(both belonging to a “physics” or “chemistry” of public—all-too-public—

existence) become the obvious themes of utilitarian history and

_therefore of the corresponding tragedy_. For the social drama

necessarily accompanies the materialist treatment of history, and that

which in Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften” was destiny in the highest

sense has become in Ibsen’s “Lady from the Sea” nothing but a sexual

problem. Ibsen and all the reason-poets of our great cities build—build

from their very first causes to their very last effect—but they do not

sing. As artist, Hebbel fought hard to overcome this merely prosaic

element in his more critical than intuitive temperament, to be a poet

_quand même_, hence his desperate and wholly un-Goethean effort to

_motive_ his events. In Hebbel, as in Ibsen, motiving means trying to

shape tragedy _causally_, and he dissected and re-dissected and

transformed and retransformed his Anecdote until he had made it into a

system that proved a case. Consider his treatment of the Judith story—

Shakespeare would have taken it as it was, and scented a world-secret in

the physiognomic charm of the pure adventure. But Goethe’s warning: “Do

not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. _They are themselves

their own lesson_ (sie selbst sind die Lehre)” had become

incomprehensible to the century of Marx and Darwin. The idea of trying

to read a destiny in the physiognomy of the past and that of trying to

represent unadulterated Destiny as a tragedy were equally remote from

them. In both domains, the cult of the useful had set before itself an

entirely different aim. Shapes were called into being, not to be, but to

prove something. “Questions” of the day were “treated,” social problems

suitably “solved,” and the stage, like the history-book, became a means

to that end. Darwinism, however unconscious of what it was doing, has

made biology politically effective. Somehow or other, democratic

stirrings happened in the protoplasm, and the struggle for existence of

the rain-worms is a useful lesson for the bipeds who have scraped

through.

With all this, the historians have failed to learn the lesson that our

ripest and strictest science, Physics, would have taught them, the

lesson of prudence. Even if we concede them their causal method, the

superficiality with which they apply it is an outrage. There is neither

the intellectual discipline nor the keen sight, let alone the scepticism

that is inherent in our handling of physical hypotheses.[175] For the

attitude of the physicist to his atoms, electrons, currents, and fields

of force, to æther and mass, is very far removed from the naïve faith of

the layman and the Monist in these things. They are _images_ which he

subjects to the abstract relationships of his differential equations, in

which he clothes trans-phenomenal numbers, and if he allows himself a

certain freedom to choose amongst several theories, it is because he

does not try to find in them any actuality but that of the “conventional

sign.”[176] He knows, too, that over and above an experimental

acquaintance with the technical structure of the world-around, all that

it is possible to achieve by this process (which is the only one open to

natural science) is a symbolic interpretation of it, no more—certainly

not “Knowledge” in the sanguine popular sense. For, the image of Nature

being a creation and copy of the Intellect, its “alter ego” in the

domain of the extended, to _know_ Nature means to know oneself.

If Physics is the maturest of our sciences, Biology, whose business is

to explore the picture of organic life, is in point both of content and

of methods the weakest. What historical investigation _really_ is,

namely pure Physiognomic, cannot be better illustrated than by the

course of Goethe’s nature-studies. He works upon mineralogy, and at once

his views fit themselves together into a conspectus of an earth-history

in which his beloved granite signifies nearly the same as that which I

call the proto-human signifies in man’s history. He investigates well-

known plants, and the prime phenomenon of metamorphosis, the original

form of the history of all plant existence, reveals itself; proceeding

further, he reaches those extraordinarily deep ideas of vertical and

spiral tendencies in vegetation which have not been fully grasped even

yet. His studies of ossature, based entirely on the contemplation of

life, lead him to the discovery of the “os intermaxillare” in man and to

the view that the skull-structure of the vertebrates developed out of

six vertebræ. Never is there a word of causality. He feels the necessity

of Destiny just as he himself expressed it in his _Orphische Urworte_:

“So must thou be. Thou canst not Self escape.

So erst the Sibyls, so the Prophets told.

Nor Time nor any Power can mar the shape

Impressed, that living must itself unfold.”

The mere chemistry of the stars, the mathematical side of physical

observations, and physiology proper interested him, the great historian

of Nature very little, because they belonged to Systematic and were

concerned with experiential learning of the become, the dead, and the

rigid. This is what underlies his anti-Newton polemic—a case in which,

it must be added, both sides were in the right, for the one had

“knowledge” of the regulated nature-process in the dead colour[177]

while the experiencing of the other, the artist, was intuitive-sensuous

“feeling.” Here we have the two worlds in plain opposition; and now

therefore the essentials of their opposition must be stated with all

strictness.

History carries the mark of the _singular-factual_, Nature that of the

_continuously possible_. So long as I scrutinize the image of the world-

around in order to see by what laws it _must_ actualize itself,

irrespective of whether it does happen or merely might happen—

irrespective, that is, of time—then I am working in a genuine science.

For the necessity of a nature-law (and there are no other laws) it is

utterly immaterial whether it becomes phenomenal infinitely often or

never. _That is, it is independent of Destiny._ There are thousands of

chemical combinations that never are and never will be produced, but

they are demonstrably possible and therefore they _exist_—for the fixed

System of Nature though not for the Physiognomy of the whirling

universe. A system consists of truths, a history rests on facts. Facts

follow one another, truths follow _from_ one another, and this is the

difference between “when” and “how.” That there has been a flash of

lightning is a fact and can be indicated, without a word, by the

pointing of a finger. “When there is lightning there is thunder,” on the

contrary, is something that must be communicated by a proposition or

sentence. Experience-lived may be quite wordless, while systematic

knowing can only be through words. “Only that which has no history is

capable of being defined,” says Nietzsche somewhere. But History is

present becoming that tends into the future and looks back on the past.

Nature stands beyond all time, its mark is extension, and it is without

directional quality. Hence, for the one, the necessity of the

mathematical, and for the other the necessity of the tragic.

In the actuality of waking existence both worlds, that of scrutiny and

that of acceptance (Hingebung), are interwoven, just as in a Brabant

tapestry warp and woof together effect the picture. Every law must, to

be _available_ to the understanding at all, once have been discovered

through some destiny-disposition in the history of an intellect—that is,

it must have once been in experiential life; and every destiny appears

in some sensible garb—as persons, acts, scenes and gestures—in which

Nature-laws are operative. Primitive life is submissive before the

daemonic unity of the fateful; in the consciousness of the mature

Culture this “early” world-image is incessantly in conflict with the

other, “late,” world-image; and in the civilized man the tragic world-

feeling succumbs to the mechanizing intellect. History and nature

_within ourselves_ stand opposed to one another as _life_ is to _death_,

as _ever-becoming time_ to _ever-become space_. In the waking

consciousness, becoming and become struggle for control of the world-

picture, and the highest and maturest forms of both sorts (possible only

for the great Cultures) are seen, in the case of the Classical soul, in

the opposition of Plato and Aristotle, and, in the case of our Western,

in that of Goethe and Kant—the pure physiognomy of the world

contemplated by the soul of an eternal child, and its pure system

comprehended by the reason of an eternal greybeard.

XII

Herein, then, I see the _last_ great task of Western philosophy, the

only one which still remains in store for the aged wisdom of the

Faustian Culture, the preordained issue, it seems, of our centuries of

spiritual evolution. No Culture is at liberty to _choose_ the path and

conduct of its thought, but here for the first time a Culture can

foresee the way that destiny has chosen for it.

Before my eyes there seems to emerge, as a vision, a hitherto unimagined

mode of superlative historical research that is truly Western,

necessarily alien to the Classical and to every other soul but ours—a

comprehensive Physiognomic of all existence, a morphology of becoming

for _all_ humanity that drives onward to the highest and last ideas; a

duty of penetrating the world-feeling not only of our proper soul but of

all souls whatsoever that have contained grand possibilities and have

expressed them in the field of actuality as grand Cultures. This

philosophic view—to which we and we alone are entitled in virtue of our

analytical mathematic, our contrapuntal music and our perspective

painting—in that its scope far transcends the scheme of the systematist,

presupposes the eye of an artist, and of an artist who can feel the

whole sensible and apprehensible environment dissolve into a deep

infinity of mysterious relationships. So Dante felt, and so Goethe felt.

To bring up, out of the web of world-happening, a millennium of organic

culture-history as an entity and person, and to grasp the conditions of

its inmost spirituality—such is the aim. Just as one penetrates the

lineaments of a Rembrandt portrait or a Cæsar-bust, so the new art will

contemplate and understand the grand, fateful lines in the visage of a

Culture as a superlative human individuality.

To attempt the interpretation of a poet or a prophet, a thinker or a

conqueror, is of course nothing new, but to enter a culture-soul—

Classical, Egyptian or Arabian—so intimately as to absorb into one’s

self, to make part of one’s own life, the totality expressed by typical

men and situations, by religion and polity, by style and tendency, by

thought and customs, is quite a new manner of experiencing life. Every

epoch, every great figure, every deity, the cities, the tongues, the

nations, the arts, in a word everything that ever existed and will

become existent, are physiognomic traits of high symbolic significance

that it will be the business of quite a new kind of “judge of men”

(Menschenkenner) to interpret. Poems and battles, Isis and Cybele,

festivals and Roman Catholic masses, blast furnaces and gladiatorial

games, dervishes and Darwinians, railways and Roman roads, “Progress”

and Nirvana, newspapers, mass-slavery, money, machinery—all these are

equally signs and symbols in the world-picture of the past that the soul

presents to itself and would interpret. "_Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein

Gleichnis._" Solutions and panoramas as yet unimagined await the

unveiling. Light will be thrown on the dark questions which underlie

dread and longing—those deepest of primitive human feelings—and which

the will-to-know has clothed in the “problems” of time, necessity,

space, love, death, and first causes. There is a wondrous music of the

spheres which _wills to be heard_ and which a few of our deepest spirits

will hear. The physiognomic of world-happening will become the _last

Faustian philosophy_.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER V

MAKROKOSMOS

I

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND THE

SPACE-PROBLEM

CHAPTER V

MAKROKOSMOS

I

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

I

The notion of a world-history of physiognomic type expands itself

therefore into the wider idea of an _all-embracing symbolism_.

Historical research, in the sense that we postulate here, has simply to

investigate the picture of the once-living past and to determine its

inner form and logic, and the Destiny-idea is the furthest limit to

which it can penetrate. But this research, however comprehensive the new

orientation tends to make it, cannot be more than a fragment and a

foundation of a still wider treatment. Parallel with it, we have a

Nature-investigation that is equally fragmentary and is limited to its

own causal system of relations. But neither tragic nor technical

“motion” (if we may distinguish by these words the respective bases of

the lived and the known) exhausts the living itself. We both live and

know when we are awake, but, in addition, we live when mind and senses

are asleep. Though night may close every eye, the blood does not sleep.

We are moving in the moving (so at least we try to indicate, by a word

borrowed from science, the inexpressible that in sleep-hours we feel

with inward certainty). But it is only in the waking existence that

“here” and “there” appear as an irreducible duality. Every impulse

proper to oneself has an expression and every impulse alien to oneself

makes an impression. And thus everything of which we are conscious,

whatever the form in which it is apprehended—“soul” and “world,” or life

and actuality, or History and Nature, or law and feeling, Destiny or

God, past and future or present and eternity—has for us a deeper meaning

still, a final meaning. And the one and only means of rendering this

incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of metaphysics which

regards _everything whatsoever_ as having significance as a _symbol_.

Symbols are sensible signs, final, indivisible and, above all, unsought

impressions of definite meaning. A symbol is a trait of actuality that

for the sensuously-alert man has an immediate and inwardly-sure

significance, and that is incommunicable by process of reason. The

detail of a Doric or Early-Arabic or Early-Romanesque ornament; the

forms of the cottage and the family, of intercourse, of costume and

rite; the aspect, gait and mien of a man and of whole classes of peoples

and men; the communication-and community-forms of man and beast; and

beyond all this the whole voiceless language of Nature with her woods

and pastures, flocks, clouds, stars, moonlight and thunderstorm, bloom

and decay, nearness and distance—all this is the emblematical impression

of the Cosmos upon us, who are both aware and in our reflective hours

quite capable of listening to this language. Vice versa, it is the sense

of a homogeneous understanding that raises up the family, the class, the

tribe, or finally the Culture, out of the general humanity and assembles

it as such.

Here, then, we shall not be concerned with what a world “is,” but with

what it signifies to the being that it envelops. When we wake up, at

once something extends itself between a “here” and a “there.” We live

the “here” as something proper, we experience the “there” as something

alien. There is a dualizing of soul and world as poles of actuality; and

in the latter there are both resistances which we grasp causally as

things and properties, and impulses in which we feel beings, _numina_

(“just like ourselves”) to be operative. But there is in it, further,

something which, as it were, eliminates the duality. Actuality—the world

_in relation to_ a soul—is for every individual the projection of the

Directed upon the domain of the Extended—the Proper mirroring itself on

the Alien; one’s _actuality then signifies oneself_. By an act that is

both creative and unconscious—for it is not “I” who actualize the

possible, but “it” actualizes itself through me—the bridge of symbol is

thrown between the living “here” and “there.” Suddenly, necessarily, and

completely “the” world comes into being out of the totality of received

and remembered elements: and as it is an individual who apprehends the

world, there is for each individual a singular world.

There are therefore as many worlds as there are waking beings and like-

living, like-feeling groups of beings. The supposedly single,

independent and external world that each believes to be common to all is

really an ever-new, uniquely-occurring and non-recurring experience in

the existence of each.

A whole series of grades of consciousness leads up from the root-

beginnings of obscure childish intuition, in which there is still no

clear world for a soul or self-conscious soul within a world, to the

highly intellectualized states of which only the men of fully-ripened

civilizations are capable. This gradation is at the same time an

expansion of symbolism from the stage in which there is an inclusive

meaning of _all_ things to one in which separate and specific signs are

distinguished. It is not merely when, after the manner of the child, the

dreamer and the artist, I am passive to a world full of dark

significances; or when I am awake without being in a condition of

extreme alertness of thought and act (such a condition is much rarer

even in the consciousness of the real thinker and man of action than is

generally supposed)—it is continuously and always, for as long as my

life can be considered to be a waking life at all, that I am endowing

that which is outside me with the _whole_ content that is in me, from

the half-dreamy impressions of world-coherence to the rigid world of

causal laws and number that overlies and binds them. And even in the

domain of pure number the symbolical is not lacking, for we find that

refined _thought_ puts inexpressible meanings into signs like the

triangle, the circle and the numbers 7 and 12.

This is the _idea of the Macrocosm, actuality as the sum total of all

symbols in relation to one soul_. From this property of being

significant nothing is exempt. All that is, symbolizes. From the

corporeal phenomena like visage, shape, mien (of individuals and classes

and peoples alike), which have always been known to possess meaning, to

the supposedly eternal and universally-valid forms of knowledge,

mathematics and physics, everything speaks out of the essence of one and

only one soul.

At the same time these individuals’ worlds as lived and experienced by

men of _one_ Culture or spiritual community are interrelated, and on the

greater or less degree of this interrelation depends the greater or less

communicability of intuitions, sensations and thoughts from one to

another—that is, the possibility of making intelligible what one has

created in the style of one’s own being, through expression-media such

as language or art or religion, by means of word-sounds or formulæ or

signs that are themselves also symbols. The degree of interrelation

between one’s world and another’s fixes the limit at which understanding

becomes self-deception. Certainly it is only very imperfectly that we

can understand the Indian or the Egyptian soul, as manifested in the

men, customs, deities, root-words, ideas, buildings and acts of it. The

Greeks, ahistoric as they were, could not even guess at the essence of

alien spiritualities—witness the naïveté with which they were wont to

rediscover their own gods and Culture in those of alien peoples. But in

our own case too, the current translations of the ἀρχή, or _Atman_, or

_Tao_ of alien philosophers presuppose our proper world-feeling, which

is that from which our “equivalents” claim their significance, as the

basis of an alien soul-expression. And similarly we elucidate the

characters of early Egyptian and Chinese portraits with reference to our

own life-experience. In both cases we deceive ourselves. That the

artistic masterpieces of all Cultures are still living for us—“immortal”

as we say—is another such fancy, kept alive by the unanimity with which

we understand the alien work in the proper sense. Of this tendency of

ours the effect of the Laocoön group on Renaissance sculpture and that

of Seneca on the Classicist drama of the French are examples.

II

Symbols, as being things actualized, belong to the domain of the

extended. They are become and not becoming (although they may stand for

a becoming) and they are therefore rigidly limited and subject to the

laws of space. There are _only_ sensible-spatial symbols. The very word

“form” designates something extended in the extended,—even the inner

forms of music are no exception, as we shall see. But extension is the

hall-mark of the fact “waking consciousness,” and this constitutes only

one side of the individual existence and is intimately bound up with

that existence’s destinies. Consequently, every trait of the actual

waking-consciousness, whether it be feeling or understanding, is in the

moment of our becoming aware of it, already _past_. We can only

_reflect_ upon impressions, “think them over” as our happy phrase goes,

but that which for the sensuous life of the animals is _past_, is for

the grammatical (wortgebundene) understanding of man _passing_,

_transient_. That which happens is, of course, transient, for a

happening is irrevocable, but every kind of significance is also

transient. Follow out the destiny of the Column, from the Egyptian tomb-

temple in which columns are ranked to mark the path for the traveller,

through the Doric peripteros in which they are held together by the body

of the building, and the Early-Arabian basilica where they support the

interior, to the façades of the Renaissance in which they provide the

upward-striving element. As we see, an old significance never returns;

that which has entered the domain of extension has begun and ended at

once. A deep relation, and one which is early felt, exists _between

space and death_. Man is the only being that knows death; all others

become old, but with a consciousness wholly limited to the moment which

must seem to them eternal. They live, but like children in those first

years in which Christianity regards them as still “innocent,” they know

nothing of life, and they die and they see death without knowing

anything about it. Only fully-awakened man, man proper, whose

understanding has been emancipated by the habit of language from

dependence on sight, comes to possess (besides sensibility) the _notion_

of transience, that is, a memory of the past as past and an experiential

conviction of irrevocability. We _are_ Time,[178] but we _possess_ also

an image of history and in this image death, and with death birth,

appear as the two riddles. For all other beings life pursues its course

without suspecting its limits, i.e., without conscious knowledge of

task, meaning, duration and object. It is because there is this deep and

significant identity that we so often find the awakening of the inner

life in a child associated with the death of some relation. The child

_suddenly_ grasps the lifeless corpse for what it is, something that has

become wholly matter, wholly space, and at the same moment it feels

itself as an individual _being_ in an alien extended world. “From the

child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the

child of five is an appalling distance,” said Tolstoi once. Here, in the

decisive moments of existence, when man first becomes man and realizes

his immense loneliness in the universal, the world-fear reveals itself

for the first time as the essentially human fear in the presence of

death, the limit of the light-world, rigid space. Here, too, the higher

thought originates as meditation upon death. Every religion, every

scientific investigation, every philosophy proceeds from it. Every great

symbolism attaches its form-language to the cult of the dead, the forms

of disposal of the dead, the adornment of the graves of the dead. The

Egyptian style begins with the tomb-temples of the Pharaohs, the

Classical with the geometrical decoration of the funerary urns, the

Arabian with catacomb and sarcophagus, the Western with the cathedral

wherein the sacrificial death of Jesus is re-enacted daily under the

hands of the priest. From this primitive fear springs, too, historical

sensitiveness in all its modes, the Classical with its cleaving to the

life-abundant present, the Arabian with its baptismal rite that wins new

life and overcomes death, the Faustian with its contrition that makes

worthy to receive the Body of Jesus and therewith immortality. Till we

have the constantly-wakeful concern for the life that is _not yet past_,

there is no concern for that which _is past_. The beast has only the

future, but man knows also the past. And thus every new Culture is

awakened in and with a new view of the world, that is, a sudden glimpse

of death as the secret of the perceivable world. It was when the idea of

the impending end of the world spread over Western Europe (about the

year 1000) that the Faustian soul of this religion was born.

Primitive man, in his deep amazement before death, sought with all the

forces of his spirit to penetrate and to spellbind this world of the

extended with the inexorable and always present limits of its causality,

this world filled with dark almightiness that continuously threatened to

make an end of him. This energetic defensive lies deep in unconscious

existence, but, as being the first impulse that genuinely projects soul

and world as parted and opposed, it marks the threshold of _personal_

conduct of life. Ego-feeling and world-feeling begin to work, and all

culture, inner or outer, bearing or performance, is as a whole only the

intensification of this being-human. Henceforward all that resists our

sensations is not mere resistance or thing or impression, as it is for

animals and for children also, but an expression as well. Not merely are

things actually contained in the world-around but also they possess

_meaning_, as phenomena in the world-_view_. Originally they possessed

only a relationship to men, but now there is also a relationship of men

to them. They have become emblems of his existence. And thus the essence

of every genuine—_unconscious and inwardly necessary_—symbolism proceeds

from the knowledge of death in which the secret of space reveals itself.

All symbolism implies a defensive; it is the expression of a deep

_Scheu_ in the old double sense of the word,[179] and its form-language

tells at once of hostility and of reverence.

_Every thing-become is mortal._ Not only peoples, languages, races and

Cultures are transient. In a few centuries from now there will no more

be a Western Culture, no more be German, English or French than there

were Romans in the time of Justinian. Not that the sequence of human

generations failed; it was the inner form of a people, which had put

together a number of these generations as a single gesture, that was no

longer there. The _Civis Romanus_, one of the most powerful symbols of

Classical being, had nevertheless, as a form, only a duration of some

centuries. But the primitive phenomenon of the great Culture will itself

have disappeared some day, and with it the drama of world-history; aye,

and man himself, and beyond man the phenomenon of plant and animal

existence on the earth’s surface, the earth, the sun, the whole world of

sun-systems. All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but

the arts themselves. One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last

bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—though possibly a coloured canvas

and a sheet of notes may remain—because the last eye and the last ear

accessible to their message will have gone. Every thought, faith and

science dies as soon as the spirits in whose worlds their “eternal

truths” were true and necessary are extinguished. Dead, even, are the

star-worlds which “appeared,” a proper world to the proper eye, to the

astronomers of the Nile and the Euphrates, for our eye is different from

theirs; and our eye in its turn is mortal. All this we know. The beast

does not know, and what he does not know does not exist in his

experienced world-around. But if the image of the past vanishes, the

longing to give a deeper meaning to the passing vanishes also. And so it

is with reference to the purely human macrocosm that we apply the oft-

quoted line, which shall serve as motto for all that follows: _Alles

Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis_.

From this we are led, without our noticing it, back to the space-

problem, though now it takes on a fresh and surprising form. Indeed, it

is as a corollary to these ideas that it appears for the first time as

capable of solution—or, to speak more modestly, of enunciation—just as

the time-problem was made more comprehensible by way of the Destiny-

idea. From the moment of our awakening, the fateful and directed life

appears in the phenomenal life as an experienced _depth_. Everything

extends itself, but it is not yet “space,” not something established in

itself but a self-extension continued from the moving here to the moving

there. World-experience is bound up with the essence of _depth_ (i.e.,

_far-ness_ or _distance_). In the abstract system of mathematics,

“depth” is taken along with “length” and “breadth” as a “third”

dimension; but this trinity of elements of like order is misleading from

the outset, for in our impression of the spatial world these elements

are unquestionably _not_ equivalents, let alone homogeneous. Length and

breadth are no doubt, experientially, a unit and not a mere sum, but

they are (the phrase is used deliberately) simply a form of reception;

they represent the purely sensuous impression. But depth is a

representation of _expression_, of _Nature_, and with it begins the

“world.”

This discrimination between the “third” and the other two dimensions, so

called, which needless to say is wholly alien to mathematics, is

inherent also in the opposition of the notions of sensation and

contemplation. Extension into depth converts the former into the latter;

in fact, depth is the first and genuine dimension in the literal sense

of the word.[180] In it the waking consciousness is active, whereas in

the others it is strictly passive. It is the _symbolic content of a

particular order_ as understood by one particular Culture that is

expressed by this original fundamental and unanalysable element. The

experiencing of depth (this is a premiss upon which all that follows is

dependent) is an act, as entirely involuntary and necessary as it is

creative, whereby the ego keeps its world, so to say, in subordination

(zudiktiert erhält). Out of the rain of impressions the ego fashions a

formal unit, a cinematic _picture_, which as soon as it is mastered by

the understanding is subjected to law and the causality principle; and

therefore, as the projection of an individual spirit it is transient and

mortal.

There is no doubt, however reason may contest it, that this extension is

capable of infinite variety, and that it operates differently not merely

as between child and man, or nature-man and townsman, or Chinese and

Romans, but as between individual and individual according as they

experience their worlds contemplatively or alertly, actively or

placidly. Every artist has rendered “Nature” by line and by tone, every

physicist—Greek, Arabian or German—has dissected “Nature” into ultimate

elements, and how is it that they have not all discovered the same?

Because every one of them has had his own Nature, though—with a naïveté

that was really the salvation of his world-idea and of his own self—

every one believed that he had it in common with all the rest. Nature is

a possession which is saturated through and through with the most

personal connotations. _Nature is a function of the particular Culture._

III

Kant believed that he had decided the great question of whether this _a

priori_ element was pre-existent or obtained by experience, by his

celebrated formula that Space is the form of perception which underlies

all world impressions. But the “world” of the careless child and the

dreamer undeniably possess this form in an insecure and hesitant

way,[181] and it is only the tense, practical, _technical_ treatment of

the world-around—imposed on the free-moving being which, unlike the

lilies of the fields, must care for its life—that lets sensuous self-

extension stiffen into rational tridimensionality. And it is only the

city-man of matured Cultures that really _lives_ in this glaring

wakefulness, and only for his thought that there is a Space wholly

divorced from sensuous life, “absolute,” dead and alien to Time; and it

exists not as a form of the intuitively-perceived but as a form of the

rationally-comprehended. There is no manner of doubt that the “space”

which Kant saw all around him with such unconditional certainty when he

was thinking out his theory, did not exist in anything like so rigorous

a form for his Carolingian ancestors. Kant’s greatness consists in his

having created the idea of a "form _a priori_," but not in the

application that he gave it. We have already seen that Time is not a

“form of perception” nor for that matter a form at all—forms exist only

in the extended—and that there is no possibility of defining it except

as a counter-concept to Space. But there is the further question—does

this word “space” exactly cover the formal content of the intuitively-

perceived? And beyond all this there is the plain fact that the “form of

perception” _alters with distance_. Every distant mountain range is

“perceived” as a scenic plane. No one will pretend that he sees the moon

as a body; for the eye it is a pure plane and it is only by the aid of

the telescope—i.e. when the distance is artificially reduced—that it

progressively obtains a spatial form. Obviously, then, the “form of

perception” is a function of distance. Moreover, when we reflect upon

anything, we do not exactly remember the impressions that we received at

the time, but “represent to ourselves” the picture of a space abstracted

from them. But this representation may and does deceive us regarding the

living actuality. Kant let himself be misled; he should certainly not

have permitted himself to distinguish between forms of perception and

forms of ratiocination, for _his_ notion of Space in principle embraced

both.[182]

Just as Kant marred the Time-problem by bringing it into relation with

an essentially misunderstood arithmetic and—on that basis—dealing with a

phantom sort of time that lacks the life-quality of direction and is

therefore a mere spatial scheme, so also he marred the Space-problem by

relating it to a common-place geometry.

It befell that a few years after the completion of Kant’s main work

Gauss discovered the first of the Non-Euclidean geometries. These,

irreproachably demonstrated as regards their own internal validity,

enable it to be proved that there are _several_ strictly mathematical

kinds of three-dimensional extension, all of which are _a priori_

certain, and none of which can be singled out to rank as the genuine

“form of perception.”

It was a grave, and in a contemporary of Euler and Lagrange an

unpardonable, error to postulate that the Classical school-geometry (for

it was that which Kant always had in mind) was to be found reproduced in

the forms of Nature around us. In moments of attentive observation at

very short range, and in cases in which the relations considered are

sufficiently small, the living impressions and the rules of customary

geometry are certainly in approximate agreement. But the _exact_

conformity asserted by philosophy can be demonstrated neither by the eye

nor by measuring-instruments. Both these must always stop short at a

certain limit of accuracy which is very far indeed below that which

would be necessary, say, for determining which of the Non-Euclidean

geometries is the geometry of “empirical” Space.[183] On the large

scales and for great distances, where the experience of depth completely

dominates the perception-picture (for example, looking on a broad

landscape as against a drawing) the form of perception is in fundamental

contradiction with mathematics. A glance down any avenue shows us that

parallels meet at the horizon. Western perspective and the otherwise

quite different perspective of Chinese painting are both alike based on

this fact, and the connexion of these perspectives with the root-

problems of their respective mathematics is unmistakable.

Experiential Depth, in the infinite variety of its modes, eludes every

sort of numerical definition. The whole of lyric poetry and music, the

entire painting of Egypt, China and the West by hypothesis deny any

strictly mathematical structure in space as felt and seen, and it is

only because all modern philosophers have been destitute of the smallest

understanding of painting that they have failed to note the

contradiction. The “horizon” _in and by which every visual image

gradually passes into a definitive plane_, is incapable of any

mathematical treatment. Every stroke of a landscape painter’s brush

refutes the assertions of conventional epistemology.

As mathematical magnitudes abstract from life, the “three dimensions”

have no natural limits. But when this proposition becomes entangled with

the surface-and-depth of experienced impression, the original

epistemological error leads to another, viz., that apprehended extension

is also without limits, although in fact our vision only comprises the

_illuminated_ portion of space and stops at the light-limit of the

particular moment, which may be the star-heavens or merely the bright

atmosphere. The “visual” world is the totality of _light-resistances_,

since vision depends on the presence of radiated or reflected light. The

Greeks took their stand on this and stayed there. It is the Western

world-feeling that has produced the idea of a limitless universe of

space—a space of infinite star-systems and distances that far transcends

all optical possibilities—and this was a creation of the _inner_ vision,

incapable of all actualization through the eye, and, even as an idea,

alien to and unachievable by the men of a differently-disposed Culture.

IV

The outcome, then, of Gauss’s discovery, which _completely_ altered the

course of modern mathematics,[184] was the statement that there are

severally equally valid structures of three-dimensional extension. That

it should even be asked which of them corresponds to actual perception

shows that the problem was not in the least comprehended. Mathematics,

whether or not it employs visible images and representations as working

conveniences, concerns itself with systems that are entirely emancipated

from life, time and distance, with form-worlds of pure numbers whose

validity—not _fact-foundation_—is timeless and like everything else that

is “known” is known by causal logic and not experienced.

With this, the difference between the living intuition-way and the

mathematical form-language became manifest and the secret of _spatial

becoming_ opened out.

As becoming is the foundation of the become, continuous living history

that of fulfilled dead nature, the organic that of the mechanical,

destiny that of causal law and the causally-settled, so too _direction

is the origin of extension. The secret of Life accomplishing itself

which is touched upon by the word Time forms the foundation of that

which, as accomplished, is understood by_ (or rather _indicated to an

inner feeling in us by_) _the word Space_. Every extension that is

actual has first been accomplished in and with an experience of depth,

and what is primarily indicated by the word Time is just this process of

extending, first sensuously (in the main, visually) and only later

intellectually, into depth and distance, i.e., the _step_ from the

planar semi-impression to the macrocosmically ordered world-picture with

its mysterious-manifest kinesis. We feel—and the feeling is what

constitutes the state of all-round awareness in us—that we are _in_ an

extension that encircles us; and it is only necessary to follow out this

original impression that we have of the worldly to see that in reality

there is only one true “dimension” of space, which is direction from

one’s self outwards into the distance, the “there” and the future, and

that the abstract system of three dimensions is a mechanical

representation and not a fact of life. By the depth-experience sensation

is _expanded_ into the world. We have seen already that the directedness

that is in life wears the badge of _irreversibility_, and there is

something of this same hall-mark of Time in our instinctive tendency to

feel the depth that is in the world uni-directionally also—viz., from

ourselves outwards, and never from the horizon inwards. The bodily

mobility of man and beast is disposed in this sense. We move _forward_—

towards the Future, nearing with every step not merely our aim but our

old age—and we feel every _backward_ look as a glance at something that

is past, that has already become history.[185]

If we can describe the basic form of the understood, viz., causality, as

_destiny become rigid_, we may similarly speak of spatial depth as a

_time become rigid_. That which not only man but even the beast _feels_

operative around him as destiny, he _perceives_ by touching, looking,

listening, scenting as movement, and under his intense scrutiny it

stiffens and becomes causal. We _feel_ that it is drawing towards spring

and we feel in advance how the spring landscape expands around us; but

we _know_ that the earth as it moves in space revolves and that the

duration of spring consists of ninety such revolutions of the earth, or

days. Time gives birth to Space, but Space gives death to Time.

Had Kant been more precise, he would, instead of speaking of the “two

forms of perception,” have called time the form of perception and space

the form of the perceived, and then the connexion of the two would

probably have revealed itself to him. The logician, mathematician, or

scientist in his moments of intense thought, knows only the Become—which

has been detached from the singular event by the very act of meditating

upon it—and true systematic space—in which everything possesses the

_property_ of a mathematically-expressible “duration.” But it is just

this that indicates to us how space is continuously “becoming.” While we

gaze into the distance with our senses, it floats around us, but when we

are startled, the alert eye sees a tense and rigid space. This space

_is_; the principle of its existing at all is that it is, outside time

and detached from it and from life. In it duration, a piece of perished

time, resides as a known property of things. And, as we know ourselves

too as _being_ in this space, we know that we also have a duration and a

limit, of which the moving finger of our clock ceaselessly warns us. But

the rigid Space itself is transient too—at the first relaxation of our

intellectual tension it vanishes from the many-coloured spread of our

world-around—and so it is a sign and symbol of _the most elemental and

powerful symbol_, of life itself.

For the involuntary and unqualified realization of depth, which

dominates the consciousness with the force of an elemental event

(_simultaneously with the awakening of the inner life_), marks the

frontier between child and ... Man. The symbolic experience of depth is

what is lacking in the child, who grasps at the moon and knows as yet no

meaning in the outer world but, like the soul of primitive man, dawns in

a dreamlike continuum of sensations (in traumhafter Verbundenheit mit

allem Empfindungshaften hindämmert). Of course the child is not without

experience of the extended, of a very simple kind, but there is no

_world-perception_; distance is felt, but it does not yet speak to the

soul. And with the soul’s awakening, direction, too, first reaches

living expression—Classical expression in steady adherence to the near-

present and exclusion of the distant and future; Faustian in direction-

energy which has an eye only for the most distant horizons; Chinese, in

free hither-and-thither wandering that nevertheless goes to the goal;

Egyptian in resolute march down the path once entered. Thus the Destiny-

idea manifests itself in every line of a life. With it alone do we

become members of a particular Culture, whose members are connected by a

common world-feeling and a common world-form derived from it. A deep

identity unites the awakening of the _soul_, its birth into clear

existence in the name of a Culture, with the sudden realization of

distance and time, the _birth of its outer world_ through the symbol of

extension; and thenceforth this symbol is and remains the _prime symbol_

of that life, imparting to it its specific style and the historical form

in which it progressively actualizes its inward possibilities. From the

specific directedness is derived the specific prime-symbol of extension,

namely, for the Classical world-view the near, strictly limited, self-

contained Body, for the Western infinitely wide and infinitely profound

three-dimensional Space, for the Arabian the world as a Cavern. And

therewith an old philosophical problem dissolves into nothing: this

prime form of the world is _innate_ in so far as it is an original

possession of the soul of that Culture which is expressed by our life as

a whole, and _acquired_ in so far that every individual soul re-enacts

for itself that creative act and unfolds in early childhood the symbol

of depth to which its existence is predestined, as the emerging

butterfly unfolds its wings. The first comprehension of depth is _an act

of birth_—the spiritual complement of the bodily.[186] In it the Culture

is born out of its mother-landscape, and the act is repeated by every

one of its individual souls throughout its life-course. This is what

Plato—connecting it with an early Hellenic belief—called anamnesis. The

definiteness of the world-form, which for each dawning soul _suddenly

is_, derives meaning from Becoming. Kant the systematic, however, with

his conception of the form _a priori_, would approach the interpretation

of this very riddle from a dead result instead of along a living way.

From now on, we shall consider the _kind of extension as the prime

symbol of a Culture_. From it we are to deduce the entire form-language

of its actuality, its physiognomy as contrasted with the physiognomy of

every other Culture and still more with the almost entire lack of

physiognomy in primitive man’s world-around. For now the interpretation

of depth rises to acts, to formative expression in works, to the

_trans_-forming of actuality, not now merely in order to subserve

necessities of life (as in the case of the animals) but above all to

create a picture out of extensional elements of all sorts (material,

line, colour, tone, motion)—a picture, often, that re-emerges with power

to charm after lost centuries in the world-picture of another Culture

and tells new men of the way in which its authors understood the world.

But the prime symbol does not actualize itself; it is operative through

the form-sense of every man, every community, age and epoch and dictates

the style of every life-expression. It is inherent in the form of the

state, the religious myths and cults, the ethical ideals, the forms of

painting and music and poetry, the fundamental notions of each science—

but it is not presented by these. Consequently, it is not presentable by

words, for language and words are themselves _derived_ symbols. Every

individual symbol tells of it, but only to the inner feelings, not to

the understanding. And when we say, as henceforth we shall say, that the

prime-symbol of the Classical soul is the material and individual body,

that of the Western pure infinite space, it must always be with the

reservation that concepts cannot represent the inconceivable, and thus

at the most a _significative feeling_ may be evoked by the sound of

words.

Infinite space is the ideal that the Western soul has always striven to

find, and to see immediately actualized, in its world-around; and hence

it is that the countless space-theories of the last centuries possess—

over and above all ostensible “results”—a deep import as symptoms of a

world-feeling. In how far does unlimited extension _underlie_ all

objective things? There is hardly a single problem that has been more

earnestly pondered than this; it would almost seem as if every other

world-question was dependent upon the one problem of the nature of

space. And is it not in fact so—_for us_? And how, then, has it escaped

notice that the whole Classical world never expended one word on it, and

indeed did not even possess a word[187] by which the problem could be

exactly outlined? Why had the great pre-Socratics nothing to say on it?

Did they overlook in their world just that which appears to us the

problem of all problems? Ought we not, in fact, to have seen long ago

that the answer is in the very fact of their silence? How is it that

according to _our_ deepest feeling the “world” is nothing but that

world-of-space which is the true offspring of our depth-experience, and

whose grand emptiness is corroborated by the star-systems lost in it?

Could a “world” of this sense have been made even comprehensible to a

Classical thinker? In short, we suddenly discover that the “eternal

problem” that Kant, in the name of humanity, tackled with a passion that

itself is symbolic, is a _purely Western_ problem that simply does not

arise in the intellects of other Cultures.

What then was it that Classical man, whose insight into his own world-

around was certainly not less piercing than ours, regarded as the prime

problem of all being? It was the problem of ἀρχή, the _material origin

and foundation_ of all sensuously-perceptible things. If we grasp this

we shall get close to the significance of the fact—not the fact of

space, but the fact that made it a necessity of destiny for the space-

problem to become the problem of the Western, and only the Western,

soul.[188] This very spatiality (Räumlichkeit) that is the truest and

sublimest element in the aspect of _our_ universe, that absorbs into

itself and begets out of itself the substantiality of all things,

Classical humanity (which knows no word for, and therefore has no idea

of, space) with one accord cuts out as the nonent, τὸ μὴ ὄν, that which

_is not_. The pathos of this denial can scarcely be exaggerated. The

whole passion of the Classical soul is in this act of excluding by

symbolic negation that which it _would_ not feel as actual, that in

which its own existence _could_ not be expressed. A world of other

colour suddenly confronts us here. The Classical statue in its splendid

bodiliness—all structure and expressive surfaces and no incorporeal

_arrière-pensée_ whatsoever—contains without remainder all that

Actuality is for the Classical eye. The material, the optically

definite, the comprehensible, the immediately present—this list exhausts

the characteristics of this kind of extension. The Classical universe,

the _Cosmos_ or well-ordered aggregate of all near and completely

viewable things, is concluded by the corporeal vault of heaven. More

there is not. The need that is in us to think of “space” as being behind

as well as before this shell was wholly absent from the Classical world-

feeling. The Stoics went so far as to treat even properties and

relations of things as “bodies.” For Chrysippus, the Divine Pneuma is a

“body,” for Democritus seeing consists in our being penetrated by

material particles of the things seen. The State is a body which is made

up of all the bodies of its citizens, the law knows only corporeal

persons and material things. And the feeling finds its last and noblest

expression in the stone body of the Classical temple. The windowless

interior is carefully concealed by the array of columns; but outside

there is not one truly straight line to be found. Every flight of steps

has a slight sweep outward, every step relatively to the next. The

pediment, the roof-ridge, the sides are all curved. Every column has a

slight swell and none stand truly vertical or truly equidistant from one

another. But swell and inclination and distance vary from the corners to

the centres of the sides in a carefully toned-off ratio, and so the

whole corpus is given a something that swings mysterious about a centre.

The curvatures are so fine that to a certain extent they are invisible

to the eye and only to be “sensed.” But it is just by these means that

direction in depth is eliminated. While the Gothic style _soars_, the

Ionic _swings_. The interior of the cathedral pulls up with primeval

force, but the temple is laid down in majestic rest. All this is equally

true as relating to the Faustian and Apollinian Deity, and likewise of

the fundamental ideas of the respective physics. To the principles of

position, material and form we have opposed those of straining movement,

force and mass, and we have defined the last-named as a constant ratio

between force and acceleration, nay, finally volatilized both in the

purely spatial elements of _capacity_ and _intensity_. It was an

obligatory consequence also of this way of conceiving actuality that the

instrumental music of the great 18th-Century masters should emerge as a

master-art—for it is the only one of the arts whose form-world is

inwardly related to the contemplative vision of pure space. In it, as

opposed to the statues of Classical temple and forum, we have bodiless

realms of tone, tone-intervals, tone-seas. The orchestra swells, breaks,

and ebbs, it depicts distances, lights, shadows, storms, driving clouds,

lightning flashes, colours etherealized and transcendent—think of the

instrumentation of Gluck and Beethoven. “Contemporary,” in our sense,

with the Canon of Polycletus, the treatise in which the great sculptor

laid down the strict rules of human body-build which remained

authoritative till beyond Lysippus, we find the strict canon (completed

by Stamitz about 1740) of the sonata-movement of four elements which

begins to relax in late-Beethoven quartets and symphonies and, finally,

in the lonely, utterly infinitesimal tone-world of the “Tristan” music,

frees itself from all earthly comprehensibleness. This prime feeling of

a loosing, Erlösung, solution, of the Soul in the Infinite, of a

liberation from all material heaviness which the highest moments of our

music always awaken, sets free also the energy of depth that is in the

Faustian soul: whereas the effect of the Classical art-work is to bind

and to bound, and the body-feeling secures, brings back the eye from

distance to a Near and Still that is saturated with beauty.

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Footnote 172: