_Diatribe_.[449] First observed as a Hellenistic phenomenon, it is an
efficient form in _all_ Civilizations. Dialectical, practical and
plebeian through and through, it replaces the old meaningful and far-
ranging Creation of the great man by the unrestrained Agitation of the
small and shrewd, ideas by aims, symbols by programs. The expansion-
element common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of
outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also. Quantity
replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening. We must not confuse this
hurried and shallow activity with the Faustian will-to-power. All it
means is that creative inner life is at an end and intellectual
existence can only be kept up materially, by outward effect in the space
of the City. Diatribe belongs necessarily to the “religion of the
irreligious” and is the characteristic form that the “cure of souls”
takes therein. It appears as the Indian preaching, the Classical
rhetoric, and the Western journalism. It appeals not to the best but to
the most, and it values its means according to the number of successes
obtained by them. It substitutes for the old thoughtfulness an
_intellectual male-prostitution_ by speech and writing, which fills and
dominates the halls and the market-places of the megalopolis. As the
whole of Hellenistic philosophy is rhetorical, so the social-ethic
system of Zola’s novel and Ibsen’s drama is journalistic. If
Christianity in its original expansion became involved with this
spiritual prostitution, it must not be confounded with it. The essential
point of Christian missionarism has almost always been missed.[450]
Primitive Christianity was a _Magian_ religion and the soul of its
Founder was utterly incapable of this brutal activity without tact or
depth. And it was the Hellenistic practice of Paul[451] that—against the
determined opposition of the original community, as we all know—
introduced it into the noisy, urban, demagogic publicity of the Imperium
Romanum. Slight as his Hellenistic tincture may have been, it sufficed
to make him outwardly a part of the Classical Civilization. Jesus had
drawn unto himself fishermen and peasants, Paul devoted himself to the
market-places of the great cities and the megalopolitan form of
propaganda. The word “pagan” (man of the heath or country-side) survives
to this day to tell us who it was that this propaganda affected _last_.
What a difference, indeed what diametrical opposition, between Paul and
Boniface the passionate Faustian of woods and lone valleys, the joyous
cultivating Cistercians, the Teutonic Knights of the Slavonic East!
_Here_ was youth once more, blossoming and yearning in a peasant
landscape, and not until the 19th Century, when that landscape and all
pertaining to it had aged into a world based on the megalopolis and
inhabited by the masses, did Diatribe appear in it. A true peasantry
enters into the field of view of Socialism as little as it did into
those of Buddha and the Stoa. It is only now, in the Western
megalopolis, that the equivalent of the Paul-type emerges, to figure in
Christian or anti-Christian, social or theosophical “causes,” Free
Thought or the making of religious fancy-ware.
This decisive turn towards the one remaining kind of life—that is, life
as a fact, seen biologically and under causality-relations instead of as
Destiny—is particularly manifest in the ethical passion with which men
now turn to philosophies of digestion, nutrition and hygiene. Alcohol-
questions and Vegetarianism are treated with religious earnestness—such,
apparently, being the gravest problems that the “men of the New Order,”
the generations of frog-perspective, are capable of tackling. Religions,
as they are when they stand new-born on the threshold of the new
Culture—the Vedic, the Orphic, the Christianity of Jesus and the
Faustian Christianity of the old Germany of chivalry—would have felt it
degradation even to glance at questions of this kind. Nowadays, one
_rises_ to them. Buddhism is unthinkable without a bodily diet to match
its spiritual diet, and amongst the Sophists, in the circle of
Antisthenes, in the Stoa and amongst the Sceptics such questions became
ever more and more prominent. Even Aristotle wrote on the alcohol-
question, and a whole series of philosophers took up that of
vegetarianism. And the only difference between Apollinian and Faustian
methods here is that the Cynic theorized about his own digestion while
Shaw treats of “everybody’s.” The one disinterests himself, the other
dictates. Even Nietzsche, as we know, handled such questions with relish
in his _Ecce Homo_.
VIII
Let us, once more, review Socialism (independently of the economic
movement of the same name) as the Faustian example of Civilization-
ethics. Its friends regard it as the form of the future, its enemies as
a sign of downfall, and both are equally right. We are all Socialists,
wittingly or unwittingly, willingly or unwillingly. Even resistance to
it wears its form.
Similarly, and equally necessarily, all Classical men of the Late period
were Stoics unawares. The whole Roman people, as a body, has a Stoic
soul. The genuine Roman, the very man who fought Stoicism hardest, was a
Stoic of a stricter sort than ever a Greek was. The Latin language of
the last centuries before Christ was the mightiest of Stoic creations.
_Ethical Socialism is the maximum possible of attainment to a life-
feeling under the aspect of Aims_;[452] for the directional movement of
Life that is felt as Time and Destiny, when it hardens, takes the form
of an intellectual machinery of means and end. Direction is the living,
aim the dead. The passionate energy of the advance is generically
Faustian, the mechanical remainder—“Progress”—is specifically
Socialistic, the two being related as body and skeleton. And of the two
it is the generic quality that distinguishes Socialism from Buddhism and
Stoicism; these, with their respective ideals of Nirvana and Ataraxia,
are no less mechanical in design than Socialism is, but they know
nothing of the latter’s dynamic energy of expansion, of its will-to-
infinity, of its passion of the third dimension.
In spite of its foreground appearances, ethical Socialism is _not_ a
system of compassion, humanity, peace and kindly care, but one of will-
to-power. Any other reading of it is illusory. The aim is through and
through imperialist; welfare, but welfare in the expansive sense, the
welfare not of the diseased but of the energetic man who ought to be
given and must be given _freedom to do_, regardless of obstacles of
wealth, birth and tradition. Amongst us, sentimental morale, morale
directed to happiness and usefulness, is _never_ the final instinct,
however we may persuade ourselves otherwise. The head and front of moral
modernity must ever be Kant, who (in this respect Rousseau’s pupil)
excludes from his ethics the motive of Compassion and lays down the
formula “_Act_, so that....” All ethic in this style expresses and is
meant to express the will-to-infinity, and this will demands conquest of
the moment, the present, and the foreground of life. In place of the
Socratic formula “Knowledge is Virtue” we have, even in Bacon, the
formula “Knowledge is Power.” The Stoic takes the world as he finds it,
but the Socialist wants to organize and recast it in form and substance,
to fill it with _his own_ spirit. The Stoic adapts himself, the
Socialist commands. He would have the whole world bear the form of _his_
view, thus transferring the idea of the “Critique of Pure Reason” into
the ethical field. This is the ultimate meaning of the Categorical
Imperative, which he brings to bear in political, social and economic
matters alike—act as though the maxims that you practise _were to become
by your will the law for all_. And this tyrannical tendency is not
absent from even the shallowest phenomena of the time.
It is not attitude and mien, but activity that is to be given form. As
in China and in Egypt, life only counts in so far as it is deed. And it
is the mechanicalizing of the organic concept of Deed that leads to the
concept of _work_ as commonly understood, _the civilised form of
Faustian effecting_. This morale, the insistent tendency to give to Life
the most active forms imaginable, is stronger than reason, whose moral
programs—be they never so reverenced, inwardly believed or ardently
championed—are only _effective_ in so far as they either lie, or are
mistakenly supposed to lie, in the direction of this force. Otherwise
they remain mere words. We have to distinguish, in all modernism,
between the popular side with its _dolce far niente_, its solicitude for
health, happiness, freedom from care, and universal peace—in a word, its
supposedly Christian ideals—and the higher Ethos which values deeds
only, which (like everything else that is Faustian) is neither
understood nor desired by the masses, which _grandly idealizes the Aim
and therefore Work_. If we would set against the Roman “panem et
circenses” (the final life-symbol of Epicurean-Stoic existence, and, at
bottom, of Indian existence also) some corresponding symbol of the North
(and of Old China and Egypt) it would be _the_ “_Right to Work_.” This
was the basis of Fichte’s thoroughly Prussian (and now European)
conception of State-Socialism, and in the last terrible stages of
evolution it will culminate in the _Duty to Work_.
Think, lastly, of the Napoleonic in it, the "_ære perennius_," the will-
to-duration. Apollinian man looked _back_ to a Golden Age; this relieved
him of the trouble of thinking upon what was still to come. The
Socialist—the dying Faust of Part II—is the man of historical care, who
feels the Future as his task and aim, and accounts the happiness of the
moment as worthless in comparison. The Classical spirit, with its
oracles and its omens, wants only to _know_ the future, but the
Westerner would _shape_ it. _The Third Kingdom is the Germanic ideal._
From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen—arrows of yearning to the
other bank, as the Zarathustra says—every great man has linked his life
to an eternal _morning_. Alexander’s life was a wondrous paroxysm, a
dream which conjured up the Homeric ages from the grave. Napoleon’s life
was an immense toil, not for himself nor for France, but for the Future.
It is well, at this point, to recall once more that each of the
different great Cultures has pictured _world-history_ in its own special
way. Classical man only saw himself and his fortunes as statically
present with himself, and did not ask “whence” or “whither.” Universal
history was for him an impossible notion. This is the static way of
looking at history. Magian man sees it as the great cosmic drama of
creation and foundering, the struggle between Soul and Spirit, Good and
Evil, God and Devil—a strictly-defined happening with, as its
culmination, _one single Peripeteia_—the appearance of the Saviour.
Faustian man sees in history a tense unfolding towards an _aim_; its
“ancient-mediæval-modern” sequence is a _dynamic_ image. He _cannot_
picture history to himself in any other way. This scheme of three parts
is not indeed world-history as such, general world-history. But it _is_
the image of world-history as it is conceived in the Faustian style. It
begins to be true and consistent with the beginning of the Western
Culture and ceases with its ceasing; and Socialism in the highest sense
is logically the crown of it, the form of its conclusive state that has
been implicit in it from Gothic onwards.
And here Socialism—in contrast to Stoicism and Buddhism—becomes tragic.
It is of the deepest significance that Nietzsche, so completely clear
and sure in dealing with what should be destroyed, what transvalued,
loses himself in nebulous generalities as soon as he comes to discuss
the Whither, the Aim. His criticism of decadence is unanswerable, but
his theory of the Superman is a castle in the air. It is the same with
Ibsen—“Brand” and “Rosmersholm,” “Emperor and Galilean” and “Master-
builder”—and with Hebbel, with Wagner and with everyone else. And
therein lies a deep necessity; for, from Rousseau onwards, Faustian man
has nothing more to hope for in anything pertaining to the grand style
of Life. Something has come to an end. The Northern soul has exhausted
its inner possibilities, and of the dynamic force and insistence that
had expressed itself in world-historical visions of the future—visions
of millennial scope—nothing remains but the mere pressure, the passion
yearning to create, the form without the content. This soul was Will and
nothing but Will. It needed an aim for its Columbus-longing; it _had_ to
give its inherent activity at least the illusion of a meaning and an
object. And so the keener critic will find a trace of Hjalmar Ekdal in
all modernity, even its highest phenomena. Ibsen called it the lie of
life. There is something of this lie in the entire intellect of the
Western Civilization, so far as this applies itself to the future of
religion, of art or of philosophy, to a social-ethical aim, a Third
Kingdom. For deep down beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be
repressed, that all this hectic zeal is the effort of a soul that may
not and cannot rest to deceive itself. This is the tragic situation—the
inversion of the Hamlet motive—that produced Nietzsche’s strained
conception of a “return,” which nobody really believed but he himself
clutched fast lest the feeling of a mission should slip out of him. This
Life’s lie is the foundation of Bayreuth—which _would be_ something
whereas Pergamum _was_ something—and a thread of it runs through the
entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which
forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final
implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical
necessity of its own existence.
IX
It remains, now, to say a word as to the _morphology of a history of
philosophy_.
There is no such thing as Philosophy “in itself.” Every Culture has its
own philosophy, which is a part of its total symbolic expression and
forms with its posing of problems and methods of thought an intellectual
ornamentation that is closely related to that of architecture and the
arts of form. From the high and distant standpoint it matters very
little what “truths” thinkers have managed to formulate in words within
their respective schools, for, here as in every great art, it is the
schools, conventions and repertory of forms that are the basic elements.
Infinitely more important than the answers are the _questions_—the
choice of them, the inner form of them. For it is the _particular_ way
in which a macrocosm presents itself to the understanding man of a
_particular_ Culture that determines _a priori_ the whole necessity of
asking them, and the way in which they are asked.
The Classical and the Faustian Cultures, and equally the Indian and the
Chinese, have each their proper ways of asking, and further, in _each_
case, all the great questions have been posed at the very outset. There
is no modern problem that the Gothic did not see and bring into form, no
Hellenistic problem that did not of necessity come up for the old Orphic
temple-teachings.
It is of no importance whether the subtilizing turn of mind expresses
itself here in oral tradition and there in books, whether such books are
personal creations of an “I” as they are amongst ourselves or anonymous
fluid masses of texts as in India, and whether the result is a set of
comprehensible systems or, as in Egypt, glimpses of the last secrets are
veiled in expressions of art and ritual. Whatever the variations, the
general course of philosophies as organisms is the same. At the
beginning of every springtime period, philosophy, intimately related to
great architecture and religion, is the intellectual echo of a mighty
metaphysical living, and its task is to establish critically the sacred
causality in the world-image seen with the eye of faith.[453] The basic
distinctions, not only of science but also of philosophy, are dependent
on, not divorced from, the elements of the corresponding religion. In
this springtime, thinkers are, not merely in spirit but actually in
status, _priests_. Such were the Schoolmen and the Mystics of the Gothic
and the Vedic as of the Homeric[454] and the Early-Arabian[455]
centuries. With the setting-in of the Late period, and not earlier,
philosophy becomes urban and worldly, frees itself from subservience to
religion and even dares to make that religion itself the object of
epistemological criticism. The great theme of Brahman, Ionic and Baroque
philosophies is the problem of knowing. The urban spirit turns to look
at itself, in order to establish the proposition that there is no higher
judgment-seat of knowing beyond itself, and with that thought draws
nearer to higher mathematics and instead of priests we have men of the
world, statesmen and merchants and discoverers, tested in high places
and by high tasks, whose ideas about thought rest upon deep experience
of life. Of such are the series of great thinkers from Thales to
Protagoras and from Bacon to Hume, and the series of pre-Confucian and
pre-Buddha thinkers of whom we hardly know more than the fact that they
existed.
At the end of such series stand Kant and Aristotle,[456] and after them
there set in the Civilization-philosophies. In every Culture, thought
mounts to a climax, setting the questions at the outset and answering
them with ever-increasing force of intellectual expression—and, as we
have said before, ornamental significance—until exhausted; and then it
passes into a decline in which the problems of knowing are in every
respect stale repetitions of no significance. There is a metaphysical
period, originally of a religious and finally of a rationalistic cast—in
which thought and life still contain something of chaos, an unexploited
fund that enables them effectively to create—and an ethical period in
which life itself, now become megalopolitan, appears to call for inquiry
and has to turn the still available remainder of philosophical creative-
power on to its own conduct and maintenance. In the one period life
_reveals_ itself, the other has life as its _object_. The one is
“theoretical” (contemplative) in the grand sense, the other perforce
practical. Even the Kantian system is in its deepest characters
_contemplated_ in the first instance and _only afterwards_ logically and
systematically formulated and ordered.
We see this evidenced in Kant’s attitude to mathematics. No one is a
genuine metaphysician who has not penetrated into the form-world of
numbers, who has not lived them into himself as a symbolism. And in fact
it was the great thinkers of the Baroque who created the analytical
mathematic, and the same is true, _mutatis mutandis_, of the great pre-
Socratics and Plato. Descartes and Leibniz stand beside Newton and
Gauss, Pythagoras and Plato by Archytas and Archimedes, at the summits
of mathematical development. But already in Kant the philosopher has
become, as mathematician, negligible. Kant no more penetrated to the
last subtleties of the Calculus as it stood in his own day than he
absorbed the axiomatic of Leibniz. The same may be said of Aristotle.
And thenceforward there is no philosopher who is counted as a
mathematician. Fichte, Hegel and the Romantics were entirely
unmathematical, and so were Zeno[457] and Epicurus. Schopenhauer in this
field is weak to the point of crudity, and of Nietzsche the less said
the better. When the form-world of numbers passed out of its ken,
philosophy lost a great convention, and since then it has lacked not
only structural strength but also what may be called the _grand style_
of thinking. Schopenhauer himself admitted that he was a hand-to-mouth
thinker (_Gelegenheitsdenker_).
With the decline of metaphysics, ethics has outgrown its status as a
subordinate element in abstract theory. Henceforth it _is_ philosophy,
the other divisions being absorbed into it and practical living becoming
the centre of consideration. The passion of pure thought sinks down.
Metaphysics, mistress yesterday, is handmaid now; all it is required to
do is to provide a foundation for practical views. And the foundation
becomes more and more superfluous. It becomes the custom to despise and
mock at the metaphysical, the unpractical, the philosophy of “stone for
bread.” In Schopenhauer it is for the sake of the fourth book that the
first three exist at all. Kant merely _thought_ that it was the same
with him; in reality, pure and not applied reason is still his centre of
creation. There is exactly the same difference in Classical philosophy
before and after Aristotle—on the one hand, a grandly conceived Cosmos
to which a _formal_ ethic adds almost nothing, and, on the other, ethics
as such, as programme, as necessity with a desultory _ad hoc_ metaphysic
for basis. And the entire absence of logical scruple with which
Nietzsche, for instance, dashes off such theories makes no difference
whatever to our appreciation of his philosophy proper.
It is well known[458] that Schopenhauer did not proceed to Pessimism
from his metaphysic but, on the contrary, was led to develop his system
by the pessimism that fell upon him in his seventeenth year. Shaw, a
most significant witness, observes in his “Quintessence of Ibsenism”
that one may quite well accept Schopenhauer’s philosophy and reject his
metaphysics—therein quite accurately discriminating between that which
makes him the first thinker of the new age and that which is included
because an obsolete tradition held it to be indispensable in a complete
philosophy. No one would undertake to divide Kant thus, and the attempt
would not succeed if it were made. But with Nietzsche one has no
difficulty in perceiving that his “philosophy” was through-and-through
an inner and very early experience, while he covered his metaphysical
requirements rapidly and often imperfectly by the aid of a few books,
and never managed to state even his ethical theory with any exactitude.
Just the same overlay of living seasonable ethical thought on a stratum
of metaphysics required by convention (but in fact superfluous) is to be
found in Epicurus and the Stoics. We need have no doubt after this as to
what is the essence of a Civilization-philosophy.
Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities. The world-city has
definitely overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory
proper to itself, directed of necessity outward, soulless. Henceforward,
we might with some justice replace the word “soul” by the word “brain.”
And, since in the Western “brain” the will to power, the tyrannical set
towards the Future and purpose to organize everybody and everything,
demands practical expression, ethics, as it loses touch more and more
with its metaphysical past, steadily assumes a _social-ethical_ and
_social-economic_ character. The philosophy of the present that starts
from Hegel and Schopenhauer is, so far as it represents the spirit of
the age (which, e.g., Lotze and Herbart do not), a _critique of
society_.
The attention that the Stoic gave to his own body, the Westerner devotes
to the body social. It is not chance that Hegelian philosophy has given
rise to Socialism (Marx, Engels), to Anarchism (Stirner) and to the
problem-posing social drama (Hebbel). Socialism is political economy
converted into the ethical and, moreover, the _imperative_ mood. So long
as a metaphysic existed (that is, till Kant) political economy remained
a science. But as soon as “philosophy” became synonymous with practical
ethics, _it replaced mathematics as the basis of thought about the
world_—hence the importance of Cousin, Bentham, Comte, Mill and Spencer.
To choose his material at will is not given to the philosopher, neither
is the material of philosophy always and everywhere the same. There are
no eternal questions, but only questions arising out of the feelings of
a particular being and posed by it. _Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein
Gleichnis_ applies also to every genuine philosophy as the intellectual
expression of this being, as the actualization of spiritual
possibilities in a form-world of concepts, judgments and thought-
structures comprised in the living phenomenon of its author. Any and
every such philosophy is, from the first word to the last, from its most
abstract proposition to its most telltale trait of personality, a thing-
become, mirrored over from soul into world, from the realm of freedom
into that of necessity, from the immediate-living into the dimensional-
logical; and on that very account it is mortal, and its life has
prescribed rhythm and duration. _The choice of them, therefore, is
subject to strict necessity._ Each epoch has its own, important for
itself and for no other epoch. It is the mark of the born philosopher
that he sees his epoch and his theme with a sure eye. Apart from this,
there is nothing of any importance in philosophical production—merely
technical knowledge and the industry requisite for the building up of
systematic and conceptual subtleties.
Consequently, the distinctive philosophy of the 19th Century is _only_
Ethics and social critique in the productive sense—nothing more. And
consequently, again, its most important representatives (apart from
actual practitioners) are the _dramatists_. They are the real
philosophers of Faustian activism, and compared with them not one of the
lecture-room philosophers and systematics counts at all. All that these
unimportant pedants have done for us is, so to write and rewrite the
history of philosophy (and what history!—collections of dates and
“results”) that no one to-day knows what the history of philosophy is or
what it might be.
Thanks to this, the deep organic unity in the thought of this epoch has
never yet been perceived. The essence of it, from the philosophical
point of view, can be precised by asking the question: In how far is
Shaw the pupil and fulfiller of Nietzsche? The question is put in no
ironic spirit. Shaw is the one thinker of eminence who has consistently
advanced in the same direction as that of the true Nietzsche—namely,
productive criticism of the Western morale—while following out as poet
the last implications of Ibsen and devoting the balance of the artistic
creativeness that is in him to practical discussions.
Save in so far as the belated Romanticist in him has determined the
style, sound and attitude of his philosophy, Nietzsche is in every
respect a disciple of the materialistic decades. That which drew him
with such passion to Schopenhauer was (not that he himself or anyone
else was conscious of it) that element of Schopenhauer’s doctrine by
which he destroyed the great metaphysic and (without meaning to do so)
parodied his master Kant; that is to say, the modification of all deep
ideas of the Baroque age into tangible and mechanistic notions. Kant
speaks in inadequate words, which hide a mighty and scarcely
apprehensible intuition, an intuition of the world as appearance or
phenomenon. In Schopenhauer this becomes the world as brain-phenomenon
(Gehirnphänomen). The change-over from tragic philosophy to
philosophical plebeianism is complete. It will be enough to cite one
passage. In “The World as Will and Idea” Schopenhauer says: “The will,
as thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner, true and indestructible
essence of the man; in itself, however, it is without consciousness. For
the consciousness is conditioned by the intellect and this is a mere
accident of our being, since it is a function of the brain, and that
again (with its dependent nerves and spinal cord) is a mere fruit, a
product, nay, even a parasite of the rest of the organism, inasmuch as
it does not intervene directly in the latter’s activities but only
serves a purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with
the outer world.” Here we have exactly the fundamental position of the
flattest materialism. It was not for nothing that Schopenhauer, like
Rousseau before him, studied the English sensualists. From them he
learned to misread Kant in the spirit of megalopolitan utilitarian
modernity. The intellect as instrument of the will-to-life,[459] as
weapon in the struggle for existence, the ideas brought to grotesque
expression by Shaw in “Man and Superman”—it was because this was his
view of the world that Schopenhauer became the fashionable philosopher
when Darwin’s main work was published in 1859. In contrast to Schelling,
Hegel and Fichte, he was a philosopher, and the only philosopher, whose
metaphysical propositions could be absorbed with ease by intellectual
mediocrity. The clarity of which he was so proud threatened at every
moment to reveal itself as triviality. While retaining enough of formula
to produce an atmosphere of profundity and exclusiveness, he presented
the civilized view of the world complete and assimilable. His system is
_anticipated Darwinism_, and the speech of Kant and the concepts of the
Indians are simply clothing. In his book “Ueber den Willen in der Natur”
(1835) we find already the struggle for self-preservation in Nature, the
human intellect as master-weapon in that struggle and sexual love as
unconscious selection according to biological interest.[460]
It is the view that Darwin (via Malthus) brought to bear with
irresistible success in the field of zoology. The economic origin of
Darwinism is shown by the fact that the system deduced from the
similarities between men and the higher animals ceases to fit even at
the level of the plant-world and becomes positively absurd as soon as it
is seriously attempted to apply it with its will-tendency (natural
selection, mimicry) to primitive organic forms.[461] Proof, to the
Darwinian, means to the ordering and pictorial presentation of a
selection of facts so that they conform to his historico-dynamic basic
feeling of “Evolution.” Darwinism—that is to say, that totality of very
varied and discrepant ideas, in which the common factor is merely the
application of the causality principle to living things, which therefore
is a _method and not a result_—was known in all details to the 18th
Century. Rousseau was championing the ape-man theory as early as 1754.
What Darwin originated is only the “Manchester School” system, and it is
this _latent political element in it that accounts for its popularity_.
The spiritual unity of the century is manifest enough here. From
Schopenhauer to Shaw, everyone has been, without being aware of it,
bringing the same principle into form. Everyone (including even those
who, like Hebbel, knew nothing of Darwin) is a derivative of the
evolution-idea—and of the shallow civilized and not the deep Goethian
form of it at that—whether he issues it with a biological or an economic
imprint. There is evolution, too, in the evolution-idea itself, which is
Faustian through and through, which displays (in sharpest contrast to
Aristotle’s timeless entelechy-idea) all our passionate urgency towards
infinite future, our _will_ and sense of _aim_ which is so immanent in,
so specific to, the Faustian spirit as to be the _a priori_ form rather
than the discovered principle of our Nature-picture. And in the
evolution of evolution we find the same change taking place as
elsewhere, the turn of the Culture to the Civilization. In Goethe
evolution is upright, in Darwin it is flat; in Goethe organic, in Darwin
mechanical; in Goethe an experience and emblem, in Darwin a matter of
cognition and law. To Goethe evolution meant inward fulfilment, to
Darwin it meant “Progress.” Darwin’s struggle for existence, which he
read _into_ Nature and not out of it, is only the plebeian form of that
primary feeling which in Shakespeare’s tragedies moves the great
realities against one another; but what Shakespeare inwardly saw, felt
and actualized in his figures as destiny, Darwinism comprehends as
causal connexion and formulates as a superficial system of utilities.
And it is this system and not this primary feeling that is the basis of
the utterances of “Zarathustra,” the tragedy of “Ghosts,” the problems
of the “Ring of the Nibelungs.” Only, it was with terror that
Schopenhauer, the first of his line, perceived what his own knowledge
meant—that is the root of his pessimism, and the “Tristan” music of his
adherent Wagner is its highest expression—whereas the late men, and
foremost among them Nietzsche, face it with enthusiasm, though it is
true, the enthusiasm is sometimes rather forced.
Nietzsche’s breach with Wagner—that last product of the German spirit
over which greatness broods—marks his silent change of school-
allegiance, his unconscious step from Schopenhauer to Darwin, from the
metaphysical to the physiological formulation of the same world-feeling,
from the denial to the affirmation of the aspect that in fact is common
to _both_, the one seeing as will-to-life what the other regards as
struggle for existence. In his “Schopenhauer als Erzieher” he still
means by evolution an inner ripening, but the Superman is the product of
evolution as machinery. And “Zarathustra” is _ethically_ the outcome of
an unconscious protest against “Parsifal”—which _artistically_ entirely
governs it—of the rivalry of one evangelist for another.
But Nietzsche was also a Socialist without knowing it. Not his
catchwords, but his instincts, were Socialistic, practical, directed to
that welfare of mankind that Goethe and Kant never spent a thought upon.
Materialism, Socialism and Darwinism are only artificially and on the
surface separable. It was this that made it possible for Shaw in the
third act of “Man and Superman” (one of the most important and
significant of the works that issued from the transition) to obtain, by
giving just a small and indeed perfectly logical turn to the tendencies
of “master-morale” and the production of the Superman, the specific
maxims of _his own_ Socialism. Here Shaw was only expressing with
remorseless clarity and full consciousness of the commonplace, what the
uncompleted portion of the Zarathustra would have said with Wagnerian
theatricality and woolly romanticism. All that we are concerned to
discover in Nietzsche’s reasoning is its _practical_ bases and
consequences, which proceed of necessity from the structure of modern
public life. He moves amongst vague ideas like “new values,” “Superman,”
“Sinn der Erde,” and declines or fears to shape them more precisely.
Shaw does it. Nietzsche observes that the Darwinian idea of the Superman
evokes the notion of breeding, and stops there, leaves it at a sounding
phrase. Shaw pursues the question—for there is no object in talking
about it if nothing is going to be _done_ about it—asks how it is to be
achieved, and from that comes to demand the transformation of mankind
into a stud-farm. But this is merely the conclusion implicit in the
Zarathustra, which Nietzsche was not bold enough, or was too fastidious,
to draw. If we _do_ talk of systematic breeding—a completely
materialistic and utilitarian notion—we must be prepared to answer the
questions, who shall breed what, where and how? But Nietzsche, too
romantic to face the very prosaic social consequences and to expose
poetic ideas to the test of facts, omits to say that his whole doctrine,
as a derivative of Darwinism, presupposes Socialism and, moreover,
socialistic _compulsion_ as the _means_; that any systematic breeding of
a class of higher men requires as condition precedent a strictly
socialistic ordering of society; and that this “Dionysiac” idea, as it
involves a _common_ action and is not simply the private affair of
detached thinkers, is democratic, turn it how you may. It is the climax
of the ethical force of “Thou shalt”; to impose upon the world the form
of his will, Faustian man sacrifices even himself.
The breeding of the Superman follows from the notion of “selection.”
Nietzsche was an unconscious pupil of Darwin from the time that he wrote
aphorisms, but Darwin himself had remoulded the evolution-ideas of the
18th Century according to the Malthusian tendencies of political
economy, which he projected on the higher animal-world. Malthus had
studied the cotton industry in Lancashire, and already in 1857 we have
the whole system, only applied to men instead of to beasts, in Buckle’s
History of English Civilization.
In other words, the “master-morale” of this last of the Romantics is
derived—strangely perhaps but very significantly—from that source of all
intellectual modernity, the atmosphere of the English factory. The
Machiavellism that commended itself to Nietzsche as a Renaissance
phenomenon is something closely (one would have supposed, obviously)
akin to Darwin’s notion of “mimicry.” It is in fact that of which Marx
(that other famous disciple of Malthus) treats in his _Das Kapital_, the
bible of political (not ethical) Socialism.[462] That is the genealogy
of “Herrenmoral.” The Will-to-Power, transferred to the realistic,
political and economic domain, finds its expression in Shaw’s “Major
Barbara.” No doubt Nietzsche, as a personality, stands at the
culmination of this series of ethical philosophers, but here Shaw the
party politician reaches up to his level as a thinker. The will-to-power
is to-day represented by the two poles of public life—the worker-class
and the big money-and-brain men—far more effectually than it ever was by
a Borgia. The millionaire Undershaft of Shaw’s best comedy is a
Superman, though Nietzsche the Romanticist would not have recognized his
ideal in such a figure. Nietzsche is for ever speaking of
transvaluations of all values, of a philosophy of the “Future” (which,
incidentally, is merely the Western, and not the Chinese or the African
future), but when the mists of his thought do come in from the Dionysiac
distance and condense into any tangible form, the will-to-power appears
to him in the guise of dagger-and-poison and never in that of strike and
“deal.” And yet he says that the idea first came to him when he saw the
Prussian regiments marching to battle in 1870.
The drama, in this epoch, is no longer poetry in the old sense of the
Culture days, but a form of agitation, debate and demonstration. The
stage has become a moralizing institution. Nietzsche himself often
thought of putting his ideas in the dramatic form. Wagner’s Nibelung
poetry, more especially the first draft of it (1850), expresses his
social-revolutionary ideas, and even when, after a circuitous course
under influences artistic and non-artistic, he has completed the “Ring,”
his Siegfried is still a symbol of the Fourth Estate, his Brünhilde
still the “free woman.” The sexual selection of which the “Origin of
Species” enunciated the theory in 1859, was finding its musical
expression at the very same time in the third act of “Siegfried” and in
“Tristan.” It is no accident that Wagner, Hebbel and Ibsen, all
practically simultaneously, set to work to dramatize the Nibelung
material. Hebbel, making the acquaintance in Paris of Engels’s writings,
expresses (in a letter of April 2, 1844) his surprise at finding that
his own conceptions of the social principle of his age, which he was
then intending to exemplify in a drama _Zu irgend einer Zeit_, coincided
precisely with those of the future “Communist Manifesto.” And, upon
first making the acquaintance of Schopenhauer (letter of March 19,
1857), he is equally surprised by the affinity that he finds between the
_Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_ and tendencies upon which he had based
his Holofernes and his _Herodes und Mariamne_. Hebbel’s diaries, of
which the most important portion belongs to the years 1835-1845, were
(though he did not know it) one of the deepest philosophical efforts of
the century. It would be no surprise to find whole sentences of it in
Nietzsche, who never knew him and did not always come up to his level.
The _actual and effective_ philosophy of the 19th Century, then, has as
its one genuine theme the Will-to-Power. It considers this Will-to-Power
in civilized-intellectual, ethical, or social forms and presents it as
will-to-life, as life-force, as practical-dynamical principle, as idea,
and as dramatic figure. (The period that is _closed_ by Shaw corresponds
to the period 350-250 in the Classical.) The rest of the 19th-Century
philosophy is, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase, “professors’ philosophy by
philosophy-professors.” The real landmarks are these:
1819. Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_. The will to
life is for the first time put as the only reality (original force,
Urkraft); but, older idealist influences still being potent, it is put
there to be negatived (zur Verneinung empfohlen).
1836. Schopenhauer, _Ueber den Willen in der Natur_. Anticipation of
Darwinism, but in metaphysical disguise.
1840. Proud’hon, _Qu’est-ce que la Propriété_, basis of Anarchism.
Comte, _Cours de philosophic positive_; the formula “order and
progress.”
1841. Hebbel, “Judith,” first dramatic conception of the “New Woman”
and the “Superman.” Feuerbach, _Das Wesen des Christenthums_.
1844. Engels, _Umriss einer Kritik des Nationalökonomie_, foundation
of the materialistic conception of history. Hebbel, _Maria Magdalena_,
the first social drama.
1847. Marx, _Misère de la Philosophie_ (synthesis of Hegel and
Malthus). These are the _epochal years_ in which economics begins to
dominate social ethic and biology.
1848. Wagner’s “Death of Siegfried”; Siegfried as social-ethical
revolutionary, the Fafnir hoard as symbol of Capitalism.
1850. Wagner’s _Kunst und Klima_; the sexual problem.
1850-1858. Wagner’s, Hebbel’s and Ibsen’s Nibelung poetry.
1859 (year of symbolic coincidences). Darwin, “Origin of Species”
(application of economics to biology). Wagner’s “Tristan.” Marx, _Zur
Kritik der politischen Ökonomie_.
1863. J. S. Mill, “Utilitarianism.”
1865. Dühring, _Wert des Lebens_—a work which is rarely heard of, but
which exercised the greatest influence upon the succeeding generation.
1867. Ibsen, “Brand.” Marx, _Das Kapital_.
1878. Wagner “Parsifal.” First dissolution of materialism into
mysticism.
1879. Ibsen “Nora.”
1881. Nietzsche, _Morgenröthe_; transition from Schopenhauer to
Darwin, morale as biological phenomenon.
1883. Nietzsche, _Also sprach Zarathustra_; the Will-to-Power, but in
Romantic disguise.
1886. Ibsen, “Rosmersholm.” Nietzsche, _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_.
1887-8. Strindberg, “Fadren” and “Fröken Julie.”
From 1890 the conclusion of the epoch approaches. The religious works
of Strindberg and the symbolical of Ibsen.
1896. Ibsen, “John Gabriel Borkman.” Nietzsche, _Uebermensch_. 1898.
Strindberg, “Till Damascus.”
From 1900 the last phenomena.
1903. Weininger, _Geschlecht und Charakter_; the only serious attempt
to revive Kant within this epoch, by referring him to Wagner and
Ibsen.
1903. Shaw, “Man and Superman”; final synthesis of Darwin and
Nietzsche.
1905. Shaw, “Major Barbara”; the type of the Superman referred back to
its economic origins.
With this, the ethical period exhausts itself as the metaphysical had
done. Ethical Socialism, prepared by Fichte, Hegel, and Humboldt, was at
its zenith of passionate greatness about the middle of the 19th Century,
and at the end thereof it had reached the stage of repetitions. The 20th
Century, while keeping the _word_ Socialism, has replaced an ethical
philosophy that only Epigoni suppose to be capable of further
development, by a praxis of economic everyday questions. The ethical
disposition of the West will remain “socialistic” but its theory has
ceased to be a problem. And there remains the possibility of a third and
last stage of Western philosophy, that of a physiognomic scepticism. The
secret of the world appears successively as a knowledge problem, a
valuation problem and a form problem. Kant saw Ethics as an object of
knowledge, the 19th Century saw it as an object of valuation. The
Sceptic would deal with _both_ simply as the historical expression of a
Culture.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XI
FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN
NATURE-KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER XI
FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-KNOWLEDGE
I
Helmholtz observed, in a lecture of 1869 that has become famous, that
“the final aim of Natural Science is to discover the motions underlying
all alteration, and the motive forces thereof; that is, to resolve
itself into Mechanics.” What this resolution into mechanics means is the
reference of all qualitative impressions to fixed quantitative base-
values, that is, to the _extended_ and to _change of place_ therein. It
means, further—if we bear in mind the opposition of becoming and become,
form and law, image and notion—the referring of the seen Nature-picture
to the imagined picture of a single numerically and structurally
measurable Order. The specific tendency of all Western mechanics is
towards an intellectual _conquest by measurement_, and it is therefore
obliged to look for the essence of the phenomenon in a system of
constant elements that are susceptible of full and inclusive
appreciation by measurement, of which Helmholtz distinguishes _motion_
(using the word in its everyday sense) as the most important.
To the physicist this definition appears unambiguous and exhaustive, but
to the sceptic who has followed out the history of this scientific
conviction, it is very far from being either. To the physicist, present-
day mechanics is a logical system of clear, uniquely-significant
concepts and of simple, necessary relations; while to the other it is a
_picture_ distinctive of the structure of the West-European spirit,
though he admits that the picture is consistent in the highest degree
and most impressively convincing. It is self-evident that no _practical_
results and discoveries can prove anything as to the “truth” of the
_theory_, the _picture_.[463] For most people, indeed, “mechanics”
appears as the self-evident synthesis of Nature-impressions. But it
merely appears to be so. For what is motion? Is not the postulate that
everything qualitative is reducible to the motion of unalterably-alike
mass-points, essentially Faustian and not common to humanity?
Archimedes, for example, did not feel himself obliged to transpose the
mechanics that he saw into a mental picture of motions. Is motion
generally a purely mechanical quantity? Is it a word for a visual
experience or is it a notion derived from that experience? Is it the
number that is found by measurement of experimentally-produced facts, or
the picture that is subjected to that number, that is signified by it?
And if one day physics should really succeed in reaching its supposed
aim, in devising a system of law-governed “motions” and of efficient
forces behind them into which everything whatsoever appreciable by the
senses could be fitted—would it thereby have achieved “knowledge” of
that which occurs, or even made one step towards this achievement? Yet
is the form-language of mechanics one whit the less dogmatic on that
account? Is it not, on the contrary, a vessel of the myth like the root-
words, not proceeding from experience but shaping it and, in this case,
shaping it with all possible rigour? What is force? What is a cause?
What is a process? Nay, even on the basis of its own definitions, has
physics a specific problem at all? Has it an object that counts as such
for all the centuries? Has it even one unimpeachable imagination-unit,
with reference to which it may express its results?
The answer may be anticipated. Modern physics, as a science, is an
immense system of _indices_ in the form of names and numbers whereby we
are enabled to work with Nature as with a machine.[464] As such, it may
have an exactly-definable end. But as a piece of _history_, all made up
of destinies and incidents in the lives of the men who have worked in it
and in the course of research itself, physics is, in point of object,
methods and results alike an expression and actualization of a Culture,
an organic and evolving element in the essence of that Culture, and
every one of its results is a symbol. That which physics—which exists
only in the waking-consciousness of the Culture-man—thinks it finds in
its methods and in its results was already there, underlying and
implicit in, the choice and manner of its search. Its discoveries, in
virtue of their imagined content (as distinguished from their printable
formulæ), have been of a purely mythic nature, even in minds so prudent
as those of J. B. Mayer, Faraday and Hertz. In every Nature-law,
physically exact as it may be, we are called upon to distinguish between
the nameless number and the naming of it, between the plain fixation of
limits[465] and their theoretical interpretation. The formulæ represent
general logical values, pure numbers—that is to say, objective space—and
boundary-elements. But formulæ are dumb. The expression _s_ = ½_gt_²
means nothing at all unless one is able mentally to connect the letters
with particular words and their symbolism. But the moment we clothe the
dead signs in such words, give them flesh, body and life, and, in sum, a
perceptible significance in the world, we have overstepped the limits of
a mere _order_. θεωρία means image, vision, and it is this that makes a
Nature-law out of a figure-and-letter formula. Everything exact is in
itself _meaningless_, and every physical observation is so constituted
that it _proves the basis of a certain number of imaged
presuppositions_; and the effect of its successful issue is to make
these presuppositions more convincing than ever. Apart from these, the
result consists merely of empty figures. But in fact we do not and
cannot get apart from them. Even if an investigator puts on one side
every hypothesis that he knows as such, as soon as he sets his _thought_
to work on the supposedly clear task, he is not controlling but being
controlled by the unconscious form of it, for in living activity he is
always a man of his Culture, of his age, of his school and of his
tradition. Faith and “knowledge” are only two species of inner
certitude, but of the two faith is the older and it dominates all the
conditions of knowing, be they never so exact. And thus it is theories
and not pure numbers that are the support of all natural science. The
unconscious longing for that genuine science which (be it repeated) is
peculiar to the spirit of Culture-man sets itself to apprehend, to
penetrate, and to comprise within its grasp the world-image of Nature.
Mere industrious measuring for measuring’s sake is not and never has
been more than a delight for little minds. Numbers may only be the key
of the secret, no more. No significant man would ever have spent himself
on them for their own sake.
Kant, it is true, says in a well-known passage: “I maintain that in each
and every discipline of natural philosophy it is only possible to find
as much of true science as is to be found of mathematics therein.” What
Kant has in mind here is pure delimitation in the field of the become,
so far as law and formula, number and system can (at any particular
stage) be seen in that field. But a law without words, a law, consisting
merely of a series of figures read off an instrument, cannot even as an
intellectual operation be completely effective in this pure state. Every
savant’s experiment, be it what it may, is at the same time an instance
of the _kind_ of symbolism that rules in the savant’s ideation. All Laws
formulated in words are Orders that have been activated and vitalized,
filled with the very essence of the one—and only the one—Culture. As to
the “necessity” which is a postulate in all exact research, here too we
have to consider two kinds of necessity, viz., a necessity within the
spiritual and living (for it is Destiny that the history of every
individual research-act takes its course when, where and how it does)
and a necessity within the known (for which the current Western name is
Causality). If the pure numbers of a physical formula represent a causal
necessity, the existence, the birth and the life-duration of a theory
are a Destiny.
Every fact, even the simplest, contains _ab initio_ a theory. A fact is
a uniquely-occurring impression upon a waking being, and everything
depends on whether that being, the being for whom it occurs or did
occur, is or was Classical or Western, Gothic or Baroque. Compare the
effect produced by a flash of lightning on a sparrow and on an alert
physical investigator, and think how much more is contained in the
observer’s “fact” than in the sparrow’s. The modern physicist is too
ready to forget that even words like quantity, position, process, change
of state and body represent specifically Western images. These words
excite and these images mirror a feeling of significances, too subtle
for verbal description, incommunicable to Classical or to Magian or to
other mankind as like subtleties of their thought and feeling are
incommunicable to us. And the character of scientific facts as such—that
is, the mode of their becoming known—is completely governed by this
feeling; and if so, then also _a fortiori_ such intricate intellectual
notions as work, tension, quantity of energy, quantity of heat,
probability,[466] every one of which contains a veritable scientific
myth of its own. We think of such conceptual images as ensuing from
quite unprejudiced research and, subject to certain conditions,
definitively valid. But a first-rate scientist of the time of Archimedes
would have declared himself, after a thorough study of our modern
theoretical physics, quite unable to comprehend how anyone could assert
such arbitrary, grotesque and involved notions to be Science, still less
how they could be claimed as necessary consequences from actual facts.
“The scientifically-justified conclusions,” he would have said, “are
really so-and-so”; and thereupon he would have evolved, on the basis of
the same elements made “facts” by _his_ eyes and _his_ mind, theories
that our physicists would listen to with amazed ridicule.
For what, after all, are the basic notions that have been evolved with
inward certainty of logic in the field of our physics? Polarized light-
rays, errant ions, flying and colliding gas-particles, magnetic fields,
electric currents and waves—are they not one and all Faustian visions,
closely akin to Romanesque ornamentation, the upthrust of Gothic
architecture, the Viking’s voyaging into unknown seas, the longings of
Columbus and Copernicus? Did not this world of forms and pictures grow
up in perfect tune with the contemporary arts of perspective oil-
painting and instrumental music? Are they not, in short, our passionate
directedness, our passion of the third dimension, coming to symbolic
expression in the imagined Nature-picture as in the soul-image?
II
It follows then that all “knowing” of Nature, even the exactest, is
based on a religious faith. The pure mechanics that the physicist has
set before himself as the end-form to which it is his task (and the
purpose of all this imagination-machinery) to reduce Nature, presupposes
a _dogma_—namely, the religious world-picture of the Gothic centuries.
For it is from this world-picture that the physics peculiar to the
Western intellect is derived. There is no science that is without
unconscious presuppositions of this kind, over which the researcher has
no control and which can be traced back to the earliest days of the
awakening Culture. _There is no Natural science without a precedent
Religion._ In this point there is no distinction between the Catholic
and the Materialistic views of the world—both say the same thing in
different words. Even atheistic science has religion; modern mechanics
exactly reproduces the contemplativeness of Faith.
When the Ionic reaches its height in Thales or the Baroque in Bacon, and
man has come to the urban stage of his career, his self-assurance begins
to look upon critical science, in contrast to the more primitive
religion of the countryside, as the superior attitude towards things,
and, holding as he thinks the only key to real knowledge, to explain
religion itself empirically and psychologically—in other words, to
“conquer” it with the rest. Now, the history of the higher Cultures
shows that “science” is a transitory spectacle,[467] belonging only to
the autumn and winter of their life-course, and that in the cases of the
Classical, the Indian, the Chinese and the Arabian thought alike a few
centuries suffice for the complete exhaustion of its possibilities.
Classical science faded out between the battle of Cannæ and that of
Actium and made way for the world-outlook of the “second
religiousness.”[468] And from this it is possible to foresee a date at
which our Western scientific thought shall have reached the limit of its
evolution.
There is no justification for assigning to this intellectual form-world
the primacy over others. Every critical science, like every myth and
every religious belief, rests upon an inner certitude. Various as the
creatures of this certitude may be, both in structure and in sound, they
are not different in basic principle. Any reproach, therefore, levelled
by Natural science at Religion is a boomerang. We are presumptuous and
no less in supposing that we can ever set up “The Truth” in the place of
“anthropomorphic” conceptions, for no other conceptions but these exist
at all. Every idea that is possible at all is a mirror of the being of
its author. The statement that “man created God in his own image,” valid
for every historical religion, is not less valid for every physical
theory, however firm its reputed basis of fact. Classical scientists
conceived of light as consisting in corporeal particles proceeding from
the source of light to the eye of the beholder. For the Arabian thought,
even at the stage of the Jewish-Persian academies of Edessa, Resaïna and
Pombaditha (and for Porphyry too), the colours and forms of things were
evidenced without the intervention of a medium, being brought in a magic
and “spiritual” way to the seeing-power which was conceived as
substantial and resident in the eyeball. This was the doctrine[469]
taught by Ibn-al-Haitan, by Avicenna and by the “Brothers of
Sincerity.”[470] And the idea of light as a force, an _impetus_, was
current even from about 1300 amongst the Paris Occamists who centred on
Albert of Saxony, Buridan and Oresme the discoverer of co-ordinate
geometry. Each Culture has made its own set of images of processes,
which are true only for itself and only alive while it is itself alive
and actualizing its possibilities. When a Culture is at its end and the
creative element—the imaginative power, the symbolism—is extinct, there
are left “empty” formulæ, skeletons of dead systems, which men of
another Culture read literally, feel to be without meaning or value and
either mechanically store up or else despise and forget. Numbers,
formulæ, laws _mean_ nothing and _are_ nothing. They must have a body,
and only a _living_ mankind—projecting its livingness into them and
through them, expressing itself by them, inwardly making them its own—
can endow them with that. And thus there is no absolute science of
physics, but only individual sciences that come, flourish and go within
the individual Cultures.
The “Nature” of Classical man found its highest artistic emblem in the
nude statue, and out of it logically there grew up a _static of bodies,
a physics of the near_. The Arabian Culture owned the arabesque and the
cavern-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this world-feeling there
issued _Alchemy_ with its ideas of mysterious efficient substantialities
like the “philosophical mercury,” which is neither a material nor a
property but some thing that underlies the coloured existence of metals
and can transmute one metal into another.[471] And the outcome of
Faustian man’s Nature idea was _a dynamic of unlimited span, a physics
of the distant_. To the Classical therefore belong the conceptions of
_matter and form_, to the Arabian (quite Spinozistically) the idea of
_substances_ with visible or secret _attributes_,[472] and to the
Faustian the idea of _force and mass_. Apollinian theory is a quiet
meditation, Magian a silent knowledge of Alchemy the means of Grace
(even here the religious source of mechanics is to be discerned), and
the Faustian is from the very outset a _working hypothesis_.[473] The
Greek asked, what is the essence of visible being? We ask, what
possibility is there of mastering the invisible motive-forces of
becoming? For them, contented absorption in the visible; for us,
masterful questioning of Nature and methodical experiment.
As with the formulation of problems and the methods of dealing with
them, so also with the basic concepts. They are symbols in each case of
the one and only the one Culture. The Classical root-words ἄπειρον,
ἀρχή, μορφή, ὕλη, are not translatable into our speech. To render ἀρχή
by “prime-stuff” is to eliminate its Apollinian connotation, to make the
hollow shell of the word sound an alien note. That which Classical man
saw before him as “motion” in space, he understood as ἀλλοίωσις, change
of position of bodies; we, from the way in which we experience motion,
have deduced the concept of a _process_, a “going forward,” thereby
expressing and emphasizing that element of directional energy which our
thought necessarily predicates in the courses of Nature. The Classical
critic of Nature took the visible juxtaposition of states as the
original diversity, and specified the famous four elements of
Empedocles—namely, earth as the rigid-corporeal, water as the non-rigid-
corporeal and air as the incorporeal, together with fire, which is so
much the strongest of all optical impressions that the Classical spirit
could have no doubt of its bodiliness. The Arabian “elements,” on the
contrary, are ideal and implicit in the secret constitutions and
constellations which define the phenomenon of things for the eye. If we
try to get a little nearer to this feeling, we shall find that the
opposition of rigid and fluid means something quite different for the
Syrian from what it means for the Aristotelian Greek, the latter seeing
in it different degrees of bodiliness and the former different magic
attributes. With the former therefore arises the image of the _chemical_
element as a sort of magic substance that a secret causality makes to
appear out of things (and to vanish into them again) and which is
subject even to the influence of the stars. In Alchemy there is deep
scientific doubt as to the plastic actuality of things—of the “somata”
of Greek mathematicians, physicists and poets—and it dissolves and
destroys the soma in the hope of finding its essence. It is an
iconoclastic movement just as truly as those of Islam and the Byzantine
Bogomils were so. It reveals a deep disbelief in the tangible figure of
phenomenal Nature, the figure of her that to the Greek was sacrosanct.
The conflict concerning the person of Christ which manifested itself in
all the early Councils and led to the Nestorian and Monophysite
secessions is an _alchemistic_ problem.[474] It would never have
occurred to a Classical physicist to investigate things while at the
same time denying or annihilating their perceivable form. And for that
very reason there was no Classical chemistry, any more than there was
any theorizing on the substance as against the manifestations of Apollo.
The rise of a chemical method of the Arabian style betokens a new world-
consciousness. The discovery of it, which at one blow made an end of
Apollinian natural science, of mechanical statics, is linked with the
enigmatic name of Hermes Trismegistus,[475] who is supposed to have
lived in Alexandria _at the same time as Plotinus and Diophantus_.
Similarly it was just at the time of the definite emancipation of the
Western mathematic by Newton and Leibniz that the Western chemistry[476]
was freed from Arabic form by Stahl (1660-1734) and his Phlogiston
theory. Chemistry and mathematic alike became pure analysis. Already
Paracelsus (1493-1541) had transformed the Magian effort to make gold
into a pharmaceutical science—a transformation in which one cannot but
surmise an altered world-feeling. Then Robert Boyle (1626-1691) devised
the analytical method and _with it the Western conception of the
Element_. But the ensuing changes must not be misinterpreted. That which
is called the founding of modern chemistry and has Stahl and Lavoisier
at its turning-points is anything but a building-up of “chemical” ideas,
in so far as chemistry implies the alchemistic outlook on Nature. It is
in fact the _end_ of genuine chemistry, its dissolution into the
comprehensive system of pure dynamic, its assimilation into the
mechanical outlook which the Baroque age had established through Galileo
and Newton. The elements of Empedocles designate states of bodiliness
(bezeichnen ein körperliches Sichverhalten) but the elements of
Lavoisier, whose combustion-theory followed promptly upon the isolation
of oxygen in 1771, designate energy-systems accessible to human will,
“rigid” and “fluid” becoming mere terms to describe tension-relations
between molecules. By our analysis and synthesis, Nature is not merely
asked or persuaded but forced. The modern chemistry is a chapter of the
modern physics of Deed.
What we call Statics, Chemistry and Dynamics—words that as used in
modern science are merely traditional distinctions without deeper
meaning—are really the _respective physical systems of the Apollinian,
Magian and Faustian souls_, each of which grew up in its own Culture and
was limited as to validity to the same. Corresponding to these sciences,
each to each, we have the mathematics of Euclidean geometry, Algebra and
Higher Analysis, and the arts of statue, arabesque and fugue. We may
differentiate these three kinds of physics (bearing in mind of course
that other Cultures may and in fact do give rise to other kinds) by
their standpoints towards the problem of motion, and call them
mechanical orderings of states, secret forces and processes
respectively.
III
Now, the tendency of human thought (which is always causally disposed)
to reduce the image of Nature to the simplest possible quantitative
form-units that can be got by causal reasoning, measuring and counting—
in a word, by mechanical differentiation—leads necessarily in Classical,
Western and every other possible physics, to an atomic theory. Of Indian
and Chinese science we know hardly more than the fact they once existed,
and the Arabian is so complicated that even now it seems to defy
presentation. But we do know our own and the Apollinian sciences well
enough to observe, here too, a deeply symbolical opposition.
The Classical atoms are _miniature forms_, the Western _minimal quanta_,
and quanta, too, of energy. On the one hand perceptibility, sensuous
nearness, and on the other, abstractness are the basic conditions of the
idea. The atomistic notions of modern physics—which include not only the
Daltonian or “chemical” atom but also the electrons[477] and the quanta
of thermodynamics—make more and more demands upon that truly Faustian
power of _inner vision_ which many branches of higher mathematics (such
as the Non-Euclidean geometries and the Theory of Groups) postulate, and
which is not at the disposal of laymen. A quantum of action is an
extension-element conceived without regard to sensible quality of any
kind, which eludes all relation with sight and touch, for which the
expression “shape” has no meaning whatever—something therefore which
would be utterly inconceivable to a Classical researcher. Such, already,
were Leibniz’s “Monads”[478] and such, superlatively, are the
constituents of Rutherford’s picture of the atom as positively-charged
nucleus with planetary negative electrons, and of the picture that Niels
Bohr has imagined by working these in with the “quanta” of Planck.[479]
The atoms of Leucippus and Democritus were different in form and
magnitude, that is to say, they were purely plastic units,
“indivisible,” as their name asserts, but only plastically indivisible.
The atoms of Western physics, for which “indivisibility” has quite
another meaning, resemble the figures and themes of music; their being
or essence consisting in vibration and radiation, and their relation to
the processes of Nature being that of the “motive” to the
“movement.”[480] Classical physics examines the aspect, Western the
working, of these ultimate elements in the picture of the Become; in the
one, the basic notions are notions of stuff and form, in the other they
are notions of capacity and intensity.
_There is a Stoicism and there is a Socialism of the atom_, the words
describing the static-plastic and the dynamic-contrapuntal ideas of it
respectively. The relations of these ideas to the images of the
corresponding ethics is such that every law and every definition takes
these into account. On the one hand—Democritus’s multitude of confused
atoms, put there, patient, knocked about by the blind chance that he as
well as Sophocles called ἀνάγκη, hunted like Œdipus. On the other hand—
systems of abstract force-points working in unison, aggressive,
energetically dominating space (as “field”), overcoming resistances like
Macbeth. The opposition of basic feelings makes that of the mechanical
Nature-pictures. According to Leucippus the atoms fly about in the void
“of themselves”; Democritus merely regards shock and countershock as a
form of change of place. Aristotle explains individual movements as
accidental, Empedocles speaks of love and hate, Anaxagoras of meetings
and partings. All these are elements also of Classical tragedy; the
figures on the Attic stage are related to one another just so. Further,
and logically, they are the elements of Classical politics. There we
have minute cities, political atoms ranged along coasts and on islands,
each jealously standing for itself, yet ever needing support, shut-in
and shy to the point of absurdity, buffeted hither and thither by the
planless orderless happenings of Classical history, rising to-day and
ruined to-morrow. And in contrast—the dynastic states of our 17th and
18th Centuries, political fields of force, with cabinets and great
diplomats as effective centres of purposeful direction and comprehensive
vision. The spirit of Classical history and the spirit of Western
history can only be really understood by considering the two souls as an
opposition. And we can say the same of the atom-idea, regarded as the
basis of the respective physics. Galileo who created the concept of
force and the Milesians who created that of ἀρχή, Democritus and
Leibniz, Archimedes and Helmholtz, are “contemporaries,” members of the
same intellectual phases of quite different Cultures.
But the inner relationship between atom-theory and ethic goes further.
It has been shown how the Faustian soul—whose being consists in the
overcoming of presence, whose feeling is loneliness and whose yearning
is infinity—puts its need of solitude, distance and abstraction into all
its actualities, into its public life, its spiritual and its artistic
form-worlds alike. This pathos of distance (to use Nietzsche’s
expression) is peculiarly alien to the Classical, in which everything
human demanded nearness, support and community. It is this that
distinguishes the spirit of the Baroque from that of the Ionic, the
culture of the Ancien Régime from that of Periclean Athens. And this
pathos, which distinguishes the heroic doer from the heroic sufferer,
appears also in the picture of Western physics as _tension_. It is
tension that is missing in the science of Democritus; for in the
principle of shock and countershock it is denied by implication that
there is a force commanding space and identical with space. And,
correspondingly, the element of Will is absent from the Classical soul-
image. Between Classical men, or states, or views of the world, there
was—for all the quarrelling and envy and hatred—no inner tension, no
deep and urging need of distance, solitude, ascendancy; and consequently
there was none between the atoms of the Cosmos either. The principle of
tension (developed in the potential theory), which is wholly
untranslatable into Classical tongues and incommunicable to Classical
minds, has become for Western physics fundamental. Its content follows
from the notion of energy, _the Will-to-Power in Nature_, and therefore
it is for us just as necessary as for the Classical thought it is
impossible.
IV
_Every atomic theory, therefore, is a myth and not an experience._ In it
the Culture, through the contemplative-creative power of its great
physicists, reveals its inmost essence and very self. It is only a
preconceived idea of criticism that extension exists in itself and
independently of the form-feeling and world-feeling of the knower. The
thinker, in imagining that he can cut out the factor of Life, forgets
that knowing is related to the known as direction is to extension and
that it is only through the living quality of direction that what is
felt extends into distance and depth and becomes space. The cognized
structure of the extended is a projection of the cognizing being.
We have already[481] shown the decisive importance of the _depth-
experience_, which is identical with the awakening of a soul and
therefore with the creation of the outer world belonging to that soul.
The mere sense-impression contains only length and breadth, and it is
the living and necessary act of interpretation—which, like everything
else living, possesses direction, motion and irreversibility (the
qualities that our consciousness synthesizes in the word Time)—that
_adds_ depth and thereby fashions actuality and world. Life itself
enters into the experiences as third dimension. The double meaning of
the word “far,” which refers both to future and to horizon, betrays the
deeper meaning of this dimension, through which extension as such is
evoked. The Becoming stiffens and passes and is at once the Become; Life
stiffens and passes and is at once the three-dimensional Space of the
known. It is common ground for Descartes and Parmenides that thinking
and being, i.e., imagined and extended, are identical. “Cogito, ergo
sum” is simply the formulation of the depth-experience—I cognize, and
therefore I am in space. But in the style of this cognizing, and
therefore of the cognition-product, the prime-symbol of the particular
Culture comes into play. The perfected extension of the Classical
consciousness is one of sensuous and bodily presence. The Western
consciousness achieves extension, after its own fashion, as
transcendental space, and as it thinks its space more and more
transcendentally it develops by degrees the abstract polarity of
Capacity and Intensity that so completely contrasts with the Classical
visual polarity of Matter and Form.
But it follows from this that in the known there can be no reappearance
of living time. For this has already passed into the known, into
constant “existence,” as Depth, and hence duration (i.e., timelessness)
and extension are identical. Only the knowing possesses the mark of
direction. The application of the word “time” to the imaginary and
measurable time-dimension of physics is a mistake. The only question is
whether it is possible or not to avoid the mistake. If one substitutes
the word “Destiny” for “time” in any physical enunciation, one feels at
once that pure Nature does not contain Time. The form-world of physics
extends just as far as the cognate form-world of number and notion
extend, and we have seen that (notwithstanding Kant) there is not and
cannot be the slightest relation of any sort between mathematical number
and Time. And yet this is controverted _by the fact of motion_ in the
picture of the world-around. It is the unsolved and unsolvable problem
of the Eleatics—being (or thinking) and motion are incompatible; motion
“is” not (is only “apparent”).
And here, for the second time, Natural science becomes dogmatic and
mythological. The words Time and Destiny, for anyone who uses them
instinctively, touch Life itself in its deepest depths—life as a whole,
which is not to be separated from lived-experience. Physics, on the
other hand—i.e., the observing Reason—_must_ separate them. The
livingly-experienced “in-itself,” mentally emancipated from the act of
the observer and become object, dead, inorganic, rigid, is now “Nature,”
something open to exhaustive mathematical treatment. In this sense the
knowledge of Nature is an activity of _measurement_. All the same, we
live even when we are observing and therefore the thing we are observing
_lives with us_. The element in the Nature-picture in virtue of which it
not merely from moment to moment _is_, but in a continuous flow with and
around us _becomes_, is the copula of the waking-consciousness and its
world. This element is _called_ movement, and it contradicts Nature as a
picture, but it represents the _history_ of this picture. And therefore,
as precisely as Understanding is abstracted (by means of words) from
feeling and mathematical space from light-resistances (“things”[482]),
so also physical “time” is abstracted from the impression of motion.
Physics investigates Nature, and consequently it knows time only as a
length. But the physicist _lives_ in the midst of the _history_ of this
Nature, and therefore he is forced to conceive motion as a
mathematically determinable magnitude, as a concretion of the pure
numbers obtained in the experiment and written down in formulæ.
“Physics,” says Kirchhoff, “is the complete and simple description of
motions.” That indeed has always been its object. But the question is
one not of motions _in_ the picture but of motions _of_ the picture.
Motion, in the Nature of physics, is nothing else but that
_metaphysical_ something which gives rise to the consciousness of a
succession. The known is timeless and alien to motion; its state of
becomeness implies this. It is the _organic sequence_ of knowns that
gives the impression of a motion. The physicist receives the word as an
impression not upon “reason” but upon the whole man, and the function of
that man is not “Nature” only but the whole world. And that is the
world-as-history. “Nature,” then, is an expression of the Culture in
each instance.[483] All physics is treatment of the motion-problem—in
which the life-problem itself is implicit—not as though it could one day
be solved, _but in spite of, nay because of, the fact that it is
insoluble_. The secret of motion awakens in man the apprehension of
death.[484]
If, then, Nature-knowledge is a subtle kind of self-knowledge—Nature
understood as picture, as mirror of man—the attempt to solve the motion-
problem is an attempt of knowledge to get on the track of its own
secret, its own Destiny.
V
Only physiognomic tact can, if creative, succeed in this, and in fact it
has done so from time immemorial in the arts, particularly tragic
poetry. It is the thinking man who is perplexed by movement; for the
contemplative it is self-evident. And however completely the former can
reduce his perplexities to system, the result is systematic and not
physiognomic, pure extension logically and numerically ordered, nothing
living but something become and dead.
It is this that led Goethe, who was a poet and not a computer, to
observe that “Nature has no system. It has Life, it is Life and
succession from an unknown centre to an unknowable bourne.” For one who
does not live it but knows it, Nature has a system. But it is only a
system and nothing more, and motion is a contradiction in it. The
contradiction may be covered up by adroit formulation, _but it lives on
in the fundamental concepts_. The shock and countershock of Democritus,
the entelechy of Aristotle, the notions of force from the “impetus” of
14th-Century Occamists to the quantum-theory of radiation, all contain
it. Let the reader conceive of the motion _within_ a physical system as
the _ageing_ of that system (as in fact it is, as lived-experience of
the observer), and he will feel at once and distinctly the fatefulness
immanent in, the unconquerably organic content of, the word “motion” and
all its derivative ideas. But Mechanics, having nothing to do with
ageing, should have nothing to do with motion either, and consequently,
since no scientific system is conceivable without a motion-problem in
it, a complete and self-contained mechanics is an impossibility.
Somewhere or other there is always an organic starting-point in the
system where immediate Life enters it—an umbilical cord that connects
the mind-child with the life-mother, the thought with the thinker.
This puts the fundamentals of Faustian and Apollinian Nature-science in
quite another light. No “Nature” is pure—there is always something of
history in it. If the man is ahistorical, like the Greek, so that the
totality of his impressions of the world is absorbed in a pure point-
formed present, his Nature-image is static, self-contained (that is,
walled against past and future) in every individual moment. Time as
magnitude figures in Greek physics as little as it does in Aristotle’s
entelechy-idea. If, on the other hand, the Man is historically
constituted, the image formed is dynamic. Number, the definitive
evaluation of the become, is in the case of ahistoric man Measure, and
in that of the historical man Function. One measures only what is
present and one follows up only what has a past and a future, a course.
And the effect of this difference is that the inner inconsistencies of
the motion-problem are covered up in Classical theories and forced into
the foreground in Western.
History is eternal becoming and therefore eternal future; Nature is
become and therefore eternally past.[485] And here a strange inversion
seems to have taken place—the Becoming has lost its priority over the
Become. When the intellect looks back from _its_ sphere, the Become, the
aspect of life is reversed, the idea of Destiny which carries aim and
future in it having turned into the mechanical principle of cause-and-
effect of which the centre of gravity lies in the past. The spatially-
experienced is promoted to rank above the temporal living, and time is
replaced by a length in a spatial world-system. And, since in the
creative experience extension follows from direction, the spatial from
life, the human understanding imports life _as a process_ into the
inorganic space of its imagination. While life looks on space as
something functionally belonging to itself, intellect looks upon life as
something _in_ space. Destiny asks: “Whither?”, Causality asks:
“Whence?” To establish scientifically means, starting from the become
and actualized, to search for “causes” by going back along a
mechanically-conceived course, that is to say, by treating becoming as a
length. But it is not possible to live backwards, only to think
backwards. Not Time and Destiny are reversible, but only that which the
physicist calls “time” and admits into his formulæ as divisible, and
preferably as negative or imaginary quantities.
The perplexity is always there, though it has rarely been seen to be
originally and necessarily inherent. In the Classical science the
Eleatics, declining to admit the necessity of thinking of Nature as in
motion, set up against it the logical view that thinking is a being,
with the corollary that known and extended are identical and knowledge
and becoming therefore irreconcilable. Their criticisms have not been,
and cannot be, refuted. But they did not hinder the evolution of
Classical physics, which was a necessary expression of the Apollinian
soul and as such superior to logical difficulties. In the “classical”
mechanics so-called of the Baroque, founded by Galileo and Newton, an
irreproachable solution of the motion-problem on dynamic lines has been
sought again and again. The history of the concept of force, which has
been stated and restated with all the tireless passion of a thought that
feels its own self endangered by a difficulty, is nothing but the
history of endeavours to find a form that is unimpeachable,
mathematically and conceptually, for motion. The last serious attempt—
which failed like the rest, and of necessity—was Hertz’s.
Without discovering the true source of all perplexities (no physicist as
yet has done that), Hertz tried to eliminate the notion of force
entirely—rightly feeling that error in all mechanical systems has to be
looked for in one or another of the basic concepts—and to build up the
whole picture of physics on the quantities of time, space and mass. But
he did not observe that it is Time itself (which as direction-factor is
present in the force-concept) that is the organic element without which
a dynamic theory cannot be expressed and with which a clean solution
cannot be got. Moreover, quite apart from this, the concepts force, mass
and motion constitute a dogmatic unit. They so condition one another
that the application of one of them tacitly involves both the others
from the outset. The whole Apollinian conception of the motion-problem
is implicit in the root-word ἀρχή, the whole Western conception of it in
the force-idea. The notion of mass is only the complement of that of
force. Newton, a deeply religious nature, was only bringing the Faustian
world-feeling to expression when, to elucidate the words “force” and
“motion,” he said that masses are points of attack for force and
carriers for motion. So the 13th-Century Mystics had conceived of God
and his relation to world. Newton no doubt rejected the metaphysical
element in his famous saying “hypotheses non fingo,” but all the same he
was metaphysical through and through in the founding of his mechanics.
_Force is the mechanical Nature-picture of western man; what Will is to
his soul-picture and infinite Godhead in his world-picture._ The primary
ideas of this physics stood firm long before the first physicist was
born, for they lay in the earliest religious world-consciousness of our
Culture.
VI
With this it becomes manifest that the physical notion of Necessity,
too, has a religious origin. It must not be forgotten that the
mechanical necessity that rules in what our intellects comprehend as
Nature is founded upon another necessity which is organic and fateful in
Life itself. The latter creates, the former restricts. One follows from
inward certitude, the other from demonstration; that is the distinction
between tragic and technical, historical and physical logic.
There are, further, differences within the necessity postulated and
assumed by science (that of cause-and-effect) which have so far eluded
the keenest sight. We are confronted here with a question at once of
very great difficulty and of superlative importance. A Nature-knowledge
is (however philosophy may express the relation) a function of knowing,
which is in each case knowing in a particular style. A scientific
necessity therefore has the style of _the appropriate intellect_, and
this brings morphological differences into the field at once. It is
possible to see a strict necessity in Nature even where it may be
impossible to express it in natural laws. In fact natural laws, which
for us are self-evidently the proper expression-form in science, are not
by any means so for the men of other Cultures. They presuppose a quite
special form, the distinctively Faustian form, of understanding and
therefore of Nature-knowing. There is nothing inherently absurd in the
conception of a mechanical necessity wherein each individual case is
morphologically self-contained and never exactly reproduced, in which
therefore the acquisitions of knowledge cannot be put into consistently-
valid formulæ. In such a case Nature would appear (to put it
metaphorically) as an unending decimal that was also non-recurring,
destitute of periodicity. And so, undoubtedly, it was conceived by
Classical minds—the feeling of it manifestly underlies their primary
physical concepts. For example, the proper motion of Democritus’s atoms
is such as to exclude any possibility of calculating motions in advance.
Nature-laws are forms of the known in which an aggregate of individual
cases are brought together as a unit of higher degree. Living Time is
ignored—that is, it does not matter whether, when or how often the case
arises, for the question is not of chronological sequence but of
mathematical consequence.[486] But in the consciousness that no power in
the world can shake this calculation lies our will to command over
Nature. That is Faustian. It is only from this standpoint that miracles
appear as breaches of the laws of Nature. Magian man saw in them merely
the exercise of a power that was not common to all, not in any way a
contradiction of the laws of Nature. And Classical man, according to
Protagoras, was only the measure and not the creator of things—a view
that unconsciously forgoes all conquest of Nature through the discovery
and application of laws.
We see, then, that the causality-principle, in the form in which it is
self-evidently necessary for us—the agreed basis of truth for our
mathematics, physics and philosophy—is a Western and, more strictly
speaking, a Baroque phenomenon. It cannot be proved, for every proof set
forth in a Western language and every experiment conducted by a Western
mind presupposes itself. In every problem, the enunciation contains the
proof in germ. The method of a science is the science itself. Beyond
question, the notion of laws of Nature and the conception of physics as
“scientia experimentalis,”[487] which has held ever since Roger Bacon,
contains _a priori_ this specific kind of necessity. The Classical mode
of regarding Nature—the alter ego of the Classical mode of being—on the
contrary, does _not_ contain it, and yet it does not appear that the
scientific position is weakened in logic thereby. If we work carefully
through the utterances of Democritus, Anaxagoras, and Aristotle (in whom
is contained the whole sum of Classical Nature-speculation), and, above
all, if we examine the connotations of key-terms like ἀλλοίωσις, ἀνάγκη,
ἐντελέχεια, we look with astonishment into a world-image totally unlike
our own. This world-image is self-sufficing and therefore, for this
definite sort of mankind, unconditionally true. And causality in our
sense plays no part therein.
The alchemist or philosopher of the Arabian Culture, too, assumes a
necessity within his world-cavern that is utterly and completely
different from the necessity of dynamics. There is no causal nexus of
law-form but only _one_ cause, God, immediately underlying _every_
effect. To believe in Nature-laws would, from this standpoint, be to
doubt the almightiness of God. If a rule seems to emerge, it is because
it pleases God so; but to suppose that this rule was a necessity would
be to yield to a temptation of the Devil. This was the attitude also of
Carneades, Plotinus and the Neo-Pythagoreans.[488] _This_ necessity
underlies the Gospels as it does the Talmud and the Avesta, and upon it
rests the technique of alchemy.
The conception of number as function is related to the dynamic principle
of cause-and-effect. Both are creations of the same intellect,
expression-forms of the same spirituality, formative principles of the
same objectivized and “become” Nature. In fact the physics of Democritus
differs from the physics of Newton in that the chosen starting-point of
the one is the optically-given while that of the other is abstract
relations that have been deduced from it. The “facts” of Apollinian
Nature-knowledge are things, and they lie on the surface of the known,
but the facts of Faustian science are relations, which in general are
invisible to lay eyes, which have to be mastered intellectually, which
require for their communication a code-language that only the expert
researcher can fully understand. The Classical, static, necessity is
immediately evident in the changing phenomena, while the dynamic
causation-principle prevails beyond things and its tendency is to
weaken, or to abolish even, their sensible actuality. Consider, for
example, the world of significance that is connected, under present-day
hypotheses, with the expression “a magnet.”
The principle of the Conservation of Energy, which since its
enunciation by J. R. Mayer has been regarded in all seriousness as a
plain conceptual necessity, is in fact a redescription of the
_dynamic_ principle of causality by means of the physical concept of
force. The appeal to “experience,” and the controversy as to whether
judgment is necessary or empirical—i.e., in the language of Kant (who
greatly deceived himself about the highly-fluid boundaries between the
two), whether it is _a priori_ or _a posteriori_ certain—are
characteristically Western. Nothing seems to us more self-evident and
unambiguous than “experience” as the source of exact science. The
Faustian experiment, based on working hypotheses and employing the
methods of measurement, is nothing but the systematic and exhaustive
exploitation of this “experience.” But no one has noticed that a whole
world-view is implicit in such a concept of “experience” with its
aggressive dynamic connotation, and that there is not and cannot be
“experience” in this pregnant sense for men of other Cultures. When we
decline to recognize the scientific results of Anaxagoras or
Democritus as experiential results, it does not mean that these
Classical thinkers were incapable of interpreting and merely threw off
fancies, but that we miss in their generalizations that causal element
which for us _constitutes_ experience in our sense of the word.
Manifestly, we have never yet given adequate thought to the
_singularity_ of this, the pure Faustian, conception of experience.
The contrast between it and faith is obvious—and entirely superficial.
For indeed exact sensuous-intellectual experience is in point of
structure completely congruent with that heart-experience (as we may
well call it), that illumination which deep religious natures of the
West (Pascal, for instance, whom one and the same necessity made
mathematician and Jansenist) have known in the significant moments of
their being. Experience means to us an _activity_ of the intellect,
which does not resignedly confine itself to receiving, acknowledging
and arranging momentary and purely present impressions, but seeks them
out and calls them up in order to overcome them in their sensuous
presence and to bring them into an unbounded unity in which their
sensuous discreteness is dissolved. Experience in our sense possesses
the tendency _from particular to infinite_. And for that very reason
it is in contradiction with the feeling of Classical science. What for
us is the way to acquire experience is for the Greek the way to lose
it. And therefore he kept away from the drastic method of experiment;
therefore his physics, instead of being a mighty system of worked-out
laws and formulæ that strong-handedly override the sense-present
(“only knowledge is power”), is an aggregate of impressions—well
ordered, intensified by sensuous imagery, clean-edged—which leaves
Nature intact in its self-completeness. Our exact Natural science is
imperative, the Classical is θεωρία in the literal sense, the result
of passive contemplativeness.
VII
We can now say without any hesitation that the form-world of a Natural
science corresponds to those of the appropriate mathematic, the
appropriate religion, the appropriate art. A deep mathematician—by which
is meant not a master-computer but a man, any man, who feels the spirit
of numbers living within him—realizes that through it he “knows God.”
Pythagoras and Plato knew this as well as Pascal and Leibniz did so.
Terentius Varro, in his examination of the old Roman religion (dedicated
to Julius Cæsar), distinguished with Roman seriousness between the
_theologia civilis_, the sum of officially-recognized belief, the
_theologia mythica_, the imagination-world of poets and artists, and the
_theologia physica_ of philosophical speculation. Applying this to the
Faustian Culture, that which Thomas Aquinas and Luther, Calvin and
Loyola taught belongs to the first category, Dante and Goethe belong to
the second; and to the third belongs scientific physics, inasmuch as
behind its formulæ there are images.
Not only primitive man and the child, but also the higher animals
spontaneously evolve from the small everyday experiences an image of
Nature which contains the sum of technical indications observed as
recurrent. The eagle “knows” the moment at which to swoop down on the
prey; the singing-bird sitting on the eggs “knows” the approach of the
marten; the deer “finds” the place where there is food. In man, this
experience of all the senses has narrowed and deepened itself into
experience of the eye. But, as the habit of verbal speech has now been
superadded, understanding comes to be abstracted from seeing, and
thenceforward develops independently as reasoning; to the instantly-
comprehending _technique_ is added the reflective _theory_. Technique
applies itself to visible near things and plain needs, theory to the
distance and the terrors of the invisible. By the side of the petty
knowledge of everyday life it sets up belief. And still they evolve,
there is a new knowledge and a new and higher technique, and to the myth
there is added the cult. The one teaches how to know the “numina,” the
other how to conquer them. For theory in the eminent sense is religious
through and through. It is only in quite late states that scientific
theory evolves out of religious, _through men having become aware of
methods_. Apart from this there is little alteration. The image-world of
physics remains mythic, its procedure remains a cult of conjuring the
powers in things, and the images that it forms and the methods that it
uses remain generically dependent upon those of the appropriate
religion.[489]
From the later days of the Renaissance onward, the notion of God has
steadily approximated, in the spirit of every man of high significance,
to the idea of pure endless Space. The God of Ignatius Loyola’s
_exercitia spiritualis_ is the God also of Luther’s “ein’ feste Burg,”
of the Improperia of Palestrina and the Cantatas of Bach. He is no
longer the Father of St. Francis of Assisi and the high-vaulted
cathedrals, the personally-present, caring and mild God felt by Gothic
painters like Giotto and Stephen Lochner, but an impersonal principle;
unimaginable, intangible, working mysteriously in the Infinite. Every
relic of personality dissolves into insensible abstraction, such a
divinity as only instrumental music of the grand style is capable of
representing, a divinity before which painting breaks down and drops
into the background. This God-feeling it was that formed the scientific
world-image of the West, its “Nature,” its “experience” and therefore
its theories and its methods, in direct contradiction to those of the
Classical. The force which moves the mass—that is what Michelangelo
painted in the Sistine Chapel; that is what we feel growing more and
more intense from the archetype of Il Gesù to the climax in the
cathedral façades of Della Porta and Maderna, and from Heinrich Schütz
to the transcendent tone-worlds of 18th-Century church music; that is
what in Shakespearian tragedy fills with world-becoming scenes widened
to infinity. And that is what Galileo and Newton captured in formulæ and
concepts.
The word “God” rings otherwise under the vaulting of Gothic cathedrals
or in the cloisters of Maulbronn and St. Gallen than in the basilicas of
Syria and the temples of Republican Rome. The character of the Faustian
cathedral is that of the _forest_. The mighty elevation of the nave
above the flanking aisles, in contrast to the flat roof of the basilica;
the transformation of the columns, which with base and capital had been
set as self-contained individuals in space, into pillars and clustered-
pillars that grow up out of the earth and spread on high into an
infinite subdivision and interlacing of lines and branches; the giant
windows by which the wall is dissolved and the interior filled with
mysterious light—these are the architectural actualizing of a world-
feeling that had found the first of all its symbols in the high forest
of the Northern plains, the deciduous forest with its mysterious
tracery, its whispering of ever-mobile foliage over men’s heads, its
branches straining through the trunks to be free of earth. Think of
Romanesque ornamentation and its deep affinity to the sense of the
woods. The endless, lonely, twilight wood became and remained the secret
wistfulness in all Western building-forms, so that when the form-energy
of the style died down—in late Gothic as in closing Baroque—the
controlled abstract line-language resolved itself immediately into
naturalistic branches, shoots, twigs and leaves.
Cypresses and pines, with their corporeal and Euclidean effect, could
never have become symbols of unending space. But the oaks, beeches and
lindens with the fitful light-flecks playing in their shadow-filled
volume are felt as bodiless, boundless, spiritual. The stem of the
cypress finds conclusive fulfilment of its vertical tendency in the
defined columniation of its cone-masses, but that of an oak seems, ever
restless and unsatisfied, to strain beyond its summit. In the ash, the
victory of the upstriving branches over the unity of the crown seems
actually to be won. Its aspect is of something dissolving, something
expanding into space, and it was for this probably that the World-Ash
Yggdrasil became a symbol in the Northern mythology. The rustle of the
woods, a charm that no Classical poet ever felt—for it lies beyond the
possibilities of Apollinian Nature-feeling—stands with its secret
questions “whence? whither?” its merging of presence into eternity, in a
deep relation with Destiny, with the feeling of History and Duration,
with the quality of Direction that impels the anxious, caring, Faustian
soul towards infinitely-distant Future. And for that reason the organ,
that roars deep and high through our churches in tones which, compared
with the plain solid notes of aulos and cithara, seem to know neither
limit nor restraint, is the instrument of instruments in Western
devotions. Cathedral and organ form a symbolic unity like temple and
statue. The history of organ-building, one of the most profound and
moving chapters of our musical history, is a history of a longing for
the forest, a longing to speak in the language of that true temple of
Western God-fearing. From the verse of Wolfram von Eschenbach to the
music of “Tristan” this longing has borne fruit unceasingly. Orchestra-
tone strove tirelessly in the 18th Century towards a nearer kinship with
the organ-tone. The word “schwebend”—meaningless as applied to Classical
things—is important alike in the theory of music, in oil-painting, in
architecture and in the dynamic physics of the Baroque. Stand in a high
wood of mighty stems while the storm is tearing above, and you will
comprehend instantly the full meaning of the concept of a force which
moves mass.
Out of such a primary feeling in the existence that has become
thoughtful there arises, then, an idea of the Divine immanent in the
world-around, and this idea becomes steadily more definite. The
thoughtful percipient takes in the impression of motion in outer Nature.
He feels about him an almost indescribable _alien life_ of unknown
powers, and traces the origin of these effects to “numina,” to The
Other, inasmuch as this Other also possesses Life. Astonishment at
_alien motion_ is the source of religion and of physics both;
respectively, they are the elucidations of Nature (world-around) by the
soul and by the reason. The “powers” are the first object both of
fearful or loving reverence and of critical investigation. There is a
religious experience _and_ a scientific experience.
Now it is important to observe how the consciousness of the Culture
intellectually concretes its primary “numina.” It imposes significant
words—_names_—on them and there conjures (seizes or bounds) them. By
virtue of the Name they are subject to the intellectual power of the man
who possesses the Name, and (as has been shown already) the whole of
philosophy, the whole of science, and everything that is related in any
way to “knowing” is at the very bottom nothing but an infinitely-refined
mode of _applying the name-magic of the primitive to the “alien.”_ The
pronouncement of the right name (in physics, the right concept) is an
incantation. Deities and basic notions of science alike come into being
first as vocable names, with which is linked an idea that tends to
become more and more sensuously definite. The outcome of a _Numen_ is a
_Deus_, the outcome of a notion is an idea. In the mere naming of
“thing-in-itself,” “atom,” “energy,” “gravitation,” “cause,” “evolution”
and the like is for most learned men the same sense of deliverance as
there was for the peasant of Latium in the words “Ceres,” “Consus,”
“Janus,” “Vesta.”[490]
For the Classical world-feeling, conformably to the Apollinian depth-
experience and its symbolism, the individual body was “Being.” Logically
therefore the form of this body, as it presented itself in the light,
was felt as its essence, as the true purport of the word “being.” What
has not shape, what is not a shape, is not at all. On the basis of this
feeling (which was of an intensity that we can hardly imagine) the
Classical spirit created as counter-concept[491] to the form of “The
Other” _Non-Form_ viz., stuff, ἀρχή, ὕλη, that which in itself possesses
no being and is merely complement to the actual “Ent,” representing a
secondary and corollary necessity. In these conditions, it is easy to
see how the Classical pantheon inevitably shaped itself, as a higher
mankind side by side with the common mankind, as a set of perfectly-
formed bodies, of high possibilities incarnate and present, but in the
unessential of stuff not distinguished and therefore subject to the same
cosmic and tragic necessity.
It is otherwise that the Faustian world-feeling experiences depth. Here
the sum of true Being appears as pure efficient Space, which _is_ being.
And therefore what is sensuously felt, what is very significantly
designated the plenum (das Raumerfüllende), is felt as a fact of the
second order, as something questionable or specious, as a resistance
that must be overcome by philosopher or physicist before the true
content of Being can be discovered. Western scepticism has never been
directed against Space, always against tangible things only. Space is
the _higher_ idea—force is only a less abstract expression for it—and it
is only as a counter-concept to space that mass arises. For mass is what
is _in_ space and is logically and physically dependent upon space. From
the assumption of a wave-motion of light, which underlies the conception
of light as a form of energy, the assumption of a corresponding mass,
the “luminiferous æther” necessarily followed. A definition of mass and
ascription of properties to mass follows from the definition of force
(and not vice versa) with all the necessity of a symbol. All Classical
notions of substantiality, however they differed amongst themselves as
realist or idealist, distinguish a “to-be-formed,” that is, a Nonent,
which only receives closer definition from the basic concept of form,
whatever this form may be in the particular philosophical system. All
Western notions of substantiality distinguish a “to-be-moved,” which
also is a negative, no doubt, but one polar to a different positive.
_Form and non-form, force and non-force_—these words render as clearly
as may be the polarities that in the two Cultures underlie the world-
impression and contain all its modes. That which comparative philosophy
has hitherto rendered inaccurately and misleadingly by the one word
“matter” signifies in the one case the substratum of shape, in the other
the substratum of force. No two notions could differ more completely.
For here it is the feeling of God, a _sense of values_, that is
speaking. The Classical deity is superlative shape, the Faustian
superlative force. The “Other” is the Ungodly to which the spirit will
not accord the dignity of Being; to the Apollinian world-feeling this
ungodly “other” is substance without shape, to the Faustian it is
substance without force.
VIII
Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of
primitive man, and that as spiritual culture “advances,” this myth-
forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, and had not
the morphology of history remained to this day an almost unexplored
field, the supposedly universal mythopoetic power would long ago have
been found to be limited to particular periods. It would have been
realized that this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes,
traits and symbols—like and consistent amongst themselves—belongs most
decidedly not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the
springtimes of _great_ Cultures.[492] Every myth of the great style
stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first
formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found.
There—it _must_ be.
I make the assumption that that which a primitive folk—like the
Egyptians of Thinite times, the Jews and Persians before Cyrus,[493] the
heroes of the Mycenæan burghs and the Germans of the Migrations—
possesses in the way of religious ideas is not yet myth in the higher
sense. It may well be a sum of scattered and irregular traits, of cults
adhering to names, fragmentary saga-pictures, but it is not yet a divine
order, a mythic organism, and I no more regard this as myth than I
regard the ornament of that stage as art. And, be it said, the greatest
caution is necessary in dealing with the symbols and sagas current to-
day, or even those current centuries ago, amongst ostensibly primitive
peoples, for in those thousands of years every country in the world has
been more or less affected by some high Culture alien to it.
There are, therefore, as many form-worlds of great myth as there are
Cultures and early architectures. The antecedents—that chaos of
undeveloped imagery in which modern folk-lore research, for want of a
guiding principle, loses itself—do not, on this hypothesis, concern us;
but we _are_ concerned, on the other hand, with certain cultural
manifestations that have never yet been thought of as belonging to this
category. It was in the Homeric age (1100-800 B.C.) and in the
corresponding knightly age of Teutonism (900-1200 A.D.), that is, the
_epic_ ages, and neither before nor after them, that the great world-
image of a new religion came into being. The corresponding ages in India
and Egypt are the Vedic and the Pyramid periods; one day it will be
discovered that Egyptian mythology did in fact ripen into _depth_ during
the Third and Fourth Dynasties.
Only in this way can we understand the immense wealth of religious-
intuitive creations that fills the three centuries of the Imperial Age
in Germany. What came into existence then was _the Faustian mythology_.
Hitherto, owing to religious and learned preconceptions, either the
Catholic element has been treated to the exclusion of the Northern-
Heathen or vice versa, and consequently we have been blind to the
breadth and the unity of this form-world. In reality there is no such
difference. The deep change of meaning in the Christian circle of ideas
is identical, as a creative act, with the consolidation of the old
heathen cults of the Migrations. It was in this age that the folk-lore
of Western Europe became an entirety; if the bulk of its material was
far older, and if, far later again, it came to be linked with new outer
experiences and enriched by more conscious treatment, yet it was then
and neither earlier nor later that it was vitalized with its symbolic
meaning. To this lore belong the great God-legends of the Edda and many
motives in the gospel-poetry of learned monks; the German hero-tales of
Siegfried and Gudrun, Dietrich and Wayland; the vast wealth of chivalry-
tales, derived from ancient Celtic fables, that was simultaneously
coming to harvest on French soil, concerning King Arthur and the Round
Table, the Holy Grail, Tristan, Percival and Roland. And with these are
to be counted—beside the spiritual transvaluation, unremarked but all
the deeper for that, of the Passion-Story—the Catholic hagiology of
which the richest floraison was in the 10th and 11th Centuries and which
produced the Lives of the Virgin and the histories of SS. Roch, Sebald,
Severin, Francis, Bernard, Odilia. The _Legenda Aurea_ was composed
about 1250—this was the blossoming-time of courtly epic and Icelandic
skald-poetry alike. The great Valhalla Gods of the North and the mythic
group of the “Fourteen Helpers” in South Germany are contemporary, and
by the side of Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, in the Völuspa we
have a Christian form in the South German Muspilli. This great myth
develops, like heroic poetry, at the _climax_ of the early Culture. They
both belong to the two primary estates, priesthood and nobility; they
are at home in the cathedral and the castle and not in the village
below, where amongst the people the simple saga-world lives on for
centuries, called “fairy-tale,” “popular beliefs” or “superstition” and
yet inseparable from the world of high centemplation.[494]
Nowhere is the final meaning of these religious creations more clearly
indicated than in the history of Valhalla. It was not an original German
idea, and even the tribes of the Migrations were totally without it. It
took shape just at _this_ time, instantly and as an inward necessity, in
the consciousness of the peoples newly-arisen on the soil of the West.
Thus it is “contemporary” with Olympus, which we know from the Homeric
epos and which is as little Mycenæan as Valhalla is German in origin.
Moreover, it is only for the two higher estates that Valhalla emerges
from the notion of Hel; in the beliefs of the people Hel remained the
realm of the dead.[495]
The deep inward unity of this Faustian world of myth and saga and the
complete congruence of its expression-symbolism has never hitherto been
realized, and yet Siegfried, Baldur, Roland, Christ the King in the
“Heliand,” are different names for one and the same figure. Valhalla and
Avalon, the Round Table and the communion of the Grail-templars, Mary,
Frigga and Frau Holle mean the same. On the other hand, the external
provenance of the material motives and elements, on which mythological
research has wasted an excessive zeal, is a matter of which the
importance does not go deeper than the surface. As to the meaning of a
myth, its provenance proves _nothing_. The “numen” itself, the primary
form of the world-feeling, is a pure, necessary and unconscious
creation, and it is not transferable. What one people takes over from
another—in “conversion” or in admiring imitation—is a name, dress and
mask for its own feeling, never the feeling of that other. The old
Celtic and old Germanic myth-motives have to be treated, like the
repertory of Classical forms possessed by the learned monk, and like the
entire body of Christian-Eastern faith taken over by the Western Church,
simply as the material out of which the Faustian soul in these centuries
created a mythic architecture of its own. It mattered little whether the
persons through whose minds and mouths the myth came to life were
individual skalds, missionaries, priests or “the people,” nor did the
circumstance that the Christian ideas dictated its forms affect the
inward independence of that which had come to life.
In the Classical, Arabian and Western Cultures, the myth of the
springtime is in each case that which we should expect; in the first
static, in the second Magian, in the third dynamic. Examine every detail
of form, and see how in the Classical it is an attitude and in the West
a deed, there a being and here a will that underlies them; how in the
Classical the bodily and tangible, the sensuously-saturated, prevails
and how therefore in the mode of worshipping the centre of gravity lies
in the sense-impressive _cult_, whereas in the North it is space, force
and therefore a religiousness that is predominantly dogmatic in
colouring that rule. These very earliest creations of the young soul
tell us that there is relationship between the Olympian figures, the
statue and the corporeal Doric temple; between the domical basilica, the
“Spirit” of God and the arabesque; between Valhalla and the Mary myth,
the soaring nave and instrumental music.
The Arabian soul built up its myth in the centuries between Cæsar and
Constantine—that fantastic mass of cults, visions and legends that to-
day we can hardly even survey,[496] syncretic cults like that of the
Syrian Baal and of Isis and Mithras not only transported to but
transformed in Syrian soil; Gospels, Acts of Apostles and Apocalypses in
astonishing profusion; Christian, Persian, Jewish, Neoplatonist and
Manichæan legends, and the heavenly hierarchy of angels and spirits of
the Fathers and the Gnostics. In the suffering-story of the Gospels,
_the very epic of the Christian nation_, set between the story of
Jesus’s childhood and the Acts of the Apostles, and in the Zoroaster-
legend that is contemporary with it, we are looking upon the hero-
figures of Early Arabian epic as we see Achilles in the Classical and
Siegfried and Percival in the Faustian. The scenes of Gethsemane and
Golgotha stand beside the noblest pictures of Greek and Germanic saga.
These Magian visions, almost without exception, grew up under the
pressure of the dying Classical which, in the nature of things unable to
communicate its spirit, the more insistently lent its forms. It is
almost impossible now to estimate the extent to which given Apollinian
elements had to be accepted and transvalued before the old Christian
myth assumed the firmness that it possessed in the time of Augustine.
IX
The Classical polytheism, consequently, has a style of its own which
puts it in a different category from the conceptions of any other world-
feelings, whatever the superficial affinities may be. This mode of
possessing gods without godhead has only existed once, and it was in the
one Culture that made the statue of naked Man the whole sum of its art.
Nature, as Classical man felt and knew it about him, viz., a sum of
well-formed bodily things, could not be deified in any other form but
this. The Roman felt that the claim of Yahweh to be recognized as sole
God had something atheistic in it. One God, for him, was no God, and to
this may be ascribed the strong dislike of popular feeling, both Greek
and Roman, for the philosophers in so far as they were pantheists and
godless. Gods are bodies, σώματα of the perfectest kind, and plurality
was an attribute of bodies alike for mathematicians, lawyers and poets.
The concept of ζῷον πολιτικόν was valid for gods as well as for men;
nothing was more alien to them than oneness, solitariness and self-
adequacy; and no existence therefore was possible to them save under the
aspect of eternal propinquity. It is a deeply significant fact that in
Hellas of all countries star-gods, the numina of the Far, are wanting.
Helios was worshipped only in half-Oriental Rhodes and Selene had no
cult at all. Both are merely artistic modes of expression (it is as such
only that they figure in the courtly epos of Homer), elements that Varro
would class in the _genus mythicum_ and not in the _genus civile_. The
old Roman religion, in which the Classical world-feeling was expressed
with special purity, knew neither sun nor moon, neither storm nor cloud
as deities. The forest stirrings and the forest solitude, the tempest
and the surf, which completely dominated the Nature of Faustian man
(even that of pre-Faustian Celts and Teutons) and imparted to their
mythology its peculiar character, left Classical man unmoved. Only
concretes—hearth and door, the coppice and the plot-field, this
particular river and that particular hill—condensed into Being for him.
We observe that everything that has farness, everything that contains a
suggestion of unbounded and unbodied in it and might thereby bring space
as Ent and divine into the felt Nature, is excluded and remains excluded
from Classical myth; how should it surprise, then, if clouds and
horizons, that are the very meaning and soul of Baroque landscapes, are
totally wanting in the Classical backgroundless frescoes? The unlimited
multitude of antique gods—every tree, every spring, every house, nay
every part of a house is a god—means that every tangible thing is an
_independent_ existence, and therefore that none is functionally
subordinate to any other.
The bases of the Apollinian and the Faustian Nature-images respectively
are in all contexts the two opposite symbols of _individual thing_ and
_unitary space_. Olympus and Hades are perfectly sense-definite places,
while the kingdom of the dwarfs, elves and goblins, and Valhalla and
Niflheim are all somewhere or other in the universe of space. In the old
Roman religion “Tellus Mater” is not the all-mother but the visible
ploughable field itself. Faunus _is_ the wood and Vulturnus _is_ the
river, the name of the seed _is_ Ceres and that of the harvest _is_
Consus. Horace is a true Roman when he speaks of “sub Jove frigido,”
under the cold sky. In these cases there is not even the attempt to
reproduce the God in any sort of image at the places of worship, for
that would be tantamount to duplicating him. Even in very late times the
instinct not only of the Romans but of the Greeks also is opposed to
idols, as is shown by the fact that plastic art, as it became more and
more profane, came into conflict more and more with popular beliefs and
the devout philosophy.[497] In the house, Janus is the door as god,
Vesta the hearth as goddess, the two functions of the house are
objectivized and deified at once. A Hellenic river-god (like Acheloüs,
who appears as a bull,) is definitely understood as being the river and
not as, so to say, dwelling in the river. The Pans[498] and Satyrs are
the fields and meadows as noon defines them, well bounded and, as having
figure, having also existence. Dryads and Hamadrayads _are_ trees; in
many places, indeed, individual trees of great stature were honoured
with garlands and votive offerings without even the formality of a name.
On the contrary, not a trace of this localized materiality clings to the
elves, dwarfs, witches, Valkyries and their kindred the armies of
departed souls that sweep round o’nights. Whereas Naiads _are_ sources,
nixies and hags, and tree-spirits and brownies are souls that are only
bound to sources, trees and houses, from which they long to be released
into the freedom of roaming. This is the very opposite of the plastic
Nature-feeling, for here things are experienced merely as spaces of
another kind. A nymph—a spring, that is—assumes human form when she
would visit a handsome shepherd, but a nixy is an enchanted princess
with nenuphars in her hair who comes up at midnight from the depths of
the pool wherein she dwells. Kaiser Barbarossa sits in the Kyffhäuser
cavern and Frau Venus in the Hörselberg. It is as though the Faustian
universe abhorred anything material and impenetrable. In things, we
suspect other worlds. Their hardness and thickness is merely appearance,
and—a trait that would be impossible in Classical myth, because fatal to
it—some favoured mortals are accorded the power to see through cliffs
and crags into the depths. But is not just this the secret intent of our
physical theories, of each new hypothesis? No other Culture knows so
many fables of treasures lying in mountains and pools, of secret
subterranean realms, palaces, gardens wherein other beings dwell. The
whole substantiality of the visible world is denied by the Faustian
Nature-feeling, for which in the end nothing is of earth and the only
actual is Space. The fairy-tale dissolves the matter of Nature as the
Gothic style dissolves the stone-mass of our cathedrals, into a ghostly
wealth of forms and lines that have shed all weight and acknowledge no
bounds.
The ever-increasing emphasis with which Classical polytheism somatically
individualized its deities is peculiarly evident in its attitude to
“strange gods.” For Classical man the gods of the Egyptians, the
Phœnicians and the Germans, in so far as they could be imagined as
figures, were as real as his own gods. Within his world-feeling the
statement that such other gods “do not exist” would have no meaning.
When he came into contact with the countries of these deities he did
them reverence. The gods were, like a statue or a polis, Euclidean
bodies having locality. They were beings of the near and not the general
space. If a man were sojourning in Babylon, for instance, and Zeus and
Apollo were far away, all the more reason for _particularly_ honouring
the local gods. This is the meaning of the altars dedicated “to the
unknown gods,” such as that which Paul so significantly misunderstood in
a Magian monotheistic sense at Athens.[499] These were gods not known by
name to the Greek but worshipped by the foreigners of the great seaports
(Piræus, Corinth or other) and therefore entitled to their due of
respect from him. Rome expressed this with Classical clearness in her
religious law and in carefully-preserved formulæ like, for example, the
_generalis invocatio_.[500] As the universe is the sum of things, and as
gods are things, recognition had to be accorded even to those gods with
whom the Roman had not yet practically and historically come into
relations. He did not know them, or he knew them as the gods of his
enemies, but they _were_ gods, for it was impossible for him to conceive
the opposite. This is the meaning of the sacral phrase in Livy, VIII, 9,
6: “di quibus est potestas nostrorum hostiumque.” The Roman people
admits that the circle of its own gods is only momentarily bounded, and
after reciting these by name it ends the prayer thus so as not to
infringe the rights of others. According to its sacral law, the
annexation of foreign territory involves the transfer to Urbs Roma of
all the religious obligations pertaining to this territory and its gods—
which of course logically follows from the _additive_ god-feeling of the
Classical. Recognition of a deity was very far from being the same as
acceptance of the forms of its cult; thus in the Second Punic War the
Great Mother of Pessinus[501] was received in Rome as the Sibyl
commanded, but the priests who had come in with her cult, which was of a
highly un-Classical complexion, practised under strict police
supervision, and not only Roman citizens but even their slaves were
forbidden under penalty to enter this priesthood. The reception of the
goddess gave satisfaction to the Classical world-feeling, but the
personal performance of her despised ritual would have infringed it. The
attitude of the Senate in such cases is unmistakable, though the people,
with its ever-increasing admixture of Eastern elements, had a liking for
these cults and in Imperial times the army became in virtue of its
composition a vehicle (and even the chief vehicle) of the Magian world-
feeling.
This makes it the easier to understand how the cult of deified men could
become a _necessary_ element in this religious form-world. But here it
is necessary to distinguish sharply between Classical phenomena and
Oriental phenomena that have a superficial similarity thereto. Roman
emperor-worship—i.e., the reverence of the “genius” of the living
Princes and that of the dead predecessors as “Divi”—has hitherto been
confused with the ceremonial reverence of the Ruler which was customary
in Asia Minor (and, above all, in Persia,)[502] and also with the later
and quite differently meant Caliph-deification which is seen in full
process of formation in Diocletian and Constantine. Actually, these are
all very unlike things. However intimately these symbolic forms were
interfused in the East of the Empire, in Rome itself the Classical type
was actualized unequivocally and without adulteration. Long before this
certain Greeks (e.g., Sophocles, Lysander and, above all, Alexander) had
been not merely hailed as gods by their flatterers but felt as gods in a
perfectly definite sense by the people. It is only a step, after all,
from the deification of a thing—such as a copse or a well or, in the
limit, a statue which represented a god—to the deification of an
outstanding man who became first hero and then god. In this case as in
the rest, what was reverenced was the perfect shape in which the world-
stuff, the un-divine, had actualized itself. In Rome the consul on the
day of his triumph wore the armour of Jupiter Capitolinus, and in early
days his face and arms were even painted red, in order to enhance his
similarity to the terra-cotta statue of the God whose “numen” he for the
time being incorporated.
X
In the first generations of the Imperial age, the antique polytheism
gradually dissolved, often without any alteration of outward ritual and
mythic form, into the Magian monotheism.[503] A new soul had come up,
and it lived the old forms in a new mode. The names continued, but they
covered other numina.
In all Late-Classical cults, those of Isis and Cybele, of Mithras and
Sol and Serapis, the divinity is no longer felt as a localized and
formable being. In old times, Hermes Propylæus had been worshipped at
the entrance of the Acropolis of Athens, while a few yards away, at the
point where later the Erechtheum was built, was the cult-site of Hermes
as the husband of Aglaure. At the South extremity of the Roman Capitol,
close to the sanctuary of Juppiter Feretrius (which contained, not a
statue of the god, but a holy stone, _silex_[504]) was that of Juppiter
Optimus Maximus, and when Augustus was laying down the huge temple of
the latter he was careful to avoid the ground to which the numen of the
former adhered.[505] But in Early Christian times Juppiter Dolichenus or
Sol Invictus[506] could be worshipped “wheresoever two or three were
gathered together in his name.” All these deities more and more came to
be felt as a single numen, though the adherents of a particular cult
would believe that they in particular knew the numen in its true shape.
Hence it is that Isis could be spoken of as the “million-named.”
Hitherto, names had been the designations of so many gods different in
body and locality, now they are _titles_ of the One whom every man has
in mind.
This Magian monotheism reveals itself in all the religious creations
that flooded the Empire from the East—the Alexandrian Isis, the Sun-god
favoured by Aurelian (the Baal of Palmyra), the Mithras protected by
Diocletian (whose Persian form had been completely recast in Syria), the
Baalath of Carthage (Tanit, Dea Cælestis[507]) honoured by Septimius
Severus. The importation of these figures no longer increases as in
Classical times the number of concrete gods. On the contrary, they
absorb the old gods into themselves, and do so in such a way as to
deprive them more and more of picturable shape. Alchemy is replacing
statics. Correspondingly, instead of the image we more and more find
symbols—e.g., the Bull, the Lamb, the Fish, the Triangle, the Cross—
coming to the front. In Constantine’s “in hoc signo vinces” scarcely an
echo of the Classical remains. Already there is setting in that aversion
to human representation that ended in the Islamic and Byzantine
prohibitions of images.
Right down to Trajan—long after the last trait of Apollinian world-
feeling had departed from the soil of Greece—the Roman state-worship had
strength enough to hold to the Euclidean tendency and to _augment_ its
world of deities. The gods of the subject lands and peoples were
accorded recognized places of worship, with priesthood and ritual, in
Rome, and were themselves associated as perfectly definite individuals
with the older gods. But from that point the Magian spirit began to gain
ground even here, in spite of an honourable resistance which centred in
a few of the very oldest patrician families.[508] The god-figures as
such, as bodies, vanished from the consciousness of men, to make way for
a transcendental god-feeling which no longer depended on sense-
evidences; and the usages, festivals and legends melted into one
another. When in 217 Caracalla put an end to all sacral-legal
distinctions between Roman and foreign deities and Isis, absorbing all
older female numina, became actually the first goddess of Rome[509] (and
thereby the most dangerous opponent of Christianity and the most
obnoxious target for the hatred of the Fathers), then Rome became a
piece of the East, a religious diocese of Syria. Then the Baals of
Doliche, Petra, Palmyra and Edessa began to melt into the monotheism of
Sol, who became and remained (till his representative Licinius fell
before Constantine) God of the Empire. By now, the question was not
between Classical and Magian—Christianity was in so little danger from
the old gods that it could offer them a sort of sympathy—but it was,
which of the Magian religions should dictate religious form to the world
of the Classical Empire? The decline of the old plastic feeling is very
clearly discernible in the stages through which Emperor-worship passed—
first, the dead emperor taken into the circle of State gods by
resolution of the Senate (Divus Julius, 42 B.C.), a priesthood provided
for him and his image removed from amongst the ancestor-images that were
carried in purely domestic celebrations; then, from Marcus Aurelius, no
further consecrations of priests (and, presently, no further building of
temples) for the service of deified emperors, for the reason that
religious sentiment was now satisfied by a general “templum divorum”;
finally, the epithet Divus used simply as a _title_ of members of the
Imperial family. This end to the evolution marks the victory of the
Magian feeling. It will be found that multiple names in the inscriptions
(such as Isis-Magna Mater-Juno-Astarte-Bellona, or Mithras-Sol Invictus-
Helios) come to signify titles of one sole existent Godhead.[510]
XI
Atheism is a subject that the psychologist and the student of religion
have hitherto regarded as scarcely worth careful investigation. Much has
been written and argued about it, and very roundly, by the free-thought
martyr on the one hand and the religious zealot on the other. But no one
has had anything to say about the _species_ of atheism; or has treated
it analytically as an _individual and definite_ phenomenon, positive and
necessary and intensely symbolic; or has realized how it is limited in
time.
Is “Atheism” the _a priori_ constitution of a certain world-
consciousness or is it a voluntary self-expression? Is one born with it
or converted to it? Does the unconscious feeling that the cosmos has
become godless bring in its train the consciousness that it is so, the
realization that "Great Pan is dead"? Are there early atheists, for
example in the Doric or the Gothic ages? Has this thinker or that been
denounced as atheist with injustice as well as with passion? And can
there be civilized men who are _not_ wholly or at any rate partially
atheist?
It is not in dispute (the word itself shows it in all languages) that
atheism is essentially a negation, that it signifies the foregoing of a
spiritual idea and therefore the precedence of such an idea, and that it
is not the creative act of an unimpaired formative power. But what is it
that it denies? In what way? And who is the denier?
Atheism, rightly understood, is the necessary expression of a
spirituality that has accomplished itself and exhausted its religious
possibilities, and is declining into the inorganic. It is entirely
compatible with a living wistful desire for real religiousness[511]—
therein resembling Romanticism, which likewise would recall that which
has irrevocably gone, namely, the Culture—and it may quite well be in a
man as a creation of his feeling without his being aware of it, without
its ever interfering with the habits of his thought or challenging his
convictions. We can understand this if we can see what it was that made
the devout Haydn call Beethoven an atheist after he had heard some of
his music. Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture but with
the dawn of the Civilization. It belongs to the great city, to the
“educated man” of the great city who acquires mechanistically what his
forefathers the creators of the Culture had lived organically. In
respect of the Classical feeling of God, Aristotle is an atheist
unawares. The Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism is atheistic like the Socialism
of Western and the Buddhism of Indian modernity, reverently though they
may and do use the word “God.”
But, if this late form of world-feeling and world-image which preludes
our “second religiousness” is universally a negation of the religious in
us, the structure of it is different in each of the Civilizations. There
is no religiousness that is without an atheistic opposition belonging
uniquely to itself and directed uniquely against itself. Men continue to
experience the outer world that extends around them as a cosmos of well-
ordered bodies or a world-cavern or efficient space, as the case may be,
but they no longer livingly experience the sacred causality in it. They
only learn to know it in a profane causality that is, or is desired to
be, inclusively mechanical.[512] There are atheisms of Classical,
Arabian and Western kinds and these differ from one another in meaning
and in matter. Nietzsche formulated the dynamic atheism on the basis
that “God is dead,” and a Classical philosopher would have expressed the
static and Euclidean by saying that the “gods who dwell in the holy
places are dead,” the one indicating that boundless space has, the other
that countless bodies have, become godless. But _dead_ space and _dead_
things are the “facts” of physics. The atheist is unable to experience
any difference between the Nature-picture of physics and that of
religion. Language, with a fine feeling, distinguishes wisdom and
intelligence—the early and the late, the rural and the megalopolitan
conditions of the soul. Intelligence even sounds atheistic. No one would
describe Heraclitus or Meister Eckart as an intelligence, but Socrates
and Rousseau were intelligent and not “wise” men. There is something
root-less in the word. It is only from the standpoint of the Stoic and
of the Socialist, of the typical irreligious man, that want of
intelligence is a matter for contempt.
The spiritual in every living Culture is religious, has religion,
whether it be conscious of it or not. That it exists, becomes, develops,
fulfils itself, _is_ its religion. It is not open to a spirituality to
be irreligious; at most it can play with the idea of irreligion as
Medicean Florentines did. But the megalopolitan _is_ irreligious; this
is part of his being, a mark of his historical position. Bitterly as he
may feel the inner emptiness and poverty, earnestly as he may long to be
religious, it is out of his power to be so. All religiousness in the
Megalopolis rests upon self-deception. The degree of piety of which a
period is capable is revealed in its attitude towards toleration. One
tolerates, either because the form-language appears to be expressing
something of that which in one’s own lived experience is felt as divine,
or else because that experience no longer contains _anything_ so felt.