The Decline of the West (full text, United States public domain translation)  

• Strzygowski's Ursprung dtr Cbristluhtn Kirchtnkutut (1910), p. 80.

• Sec Vol. II, p. 101 et seq.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 185

that the Doric and Etruscan temple-type arises. All "Early" art is religious, and this symbolic Negation is not less so than the Egyptian and the Gothic Affirmation. The idea of burning the dead accords with the cult-site but not with the cult-building; and the Early Classical religion which conceals itself from us behind the solemn names of Calchas, Tiresias, Orpheus and (probably) Numa ^ possessed for its rites simply that which is left of an architectural idea when one has subtracted the architecture, viz., the sacred precinct. The original cult-plan is thus the Etruscan templum, a sacred area merely staked off on the ground by the augurs with an impassable boundary and a propitious entrance on the East side.^ A "templum" was created where a rite was to be performed or where the representative of the state authority, senate or army, happened to be. It existed only for the duration of its use, and the spell was then removed. It was probably only about 700 b.c. that the Classical soul so far mastered itself as to represent this architectural Nothing in the sensible form of a built body. In the long run the Euclidean feeling proved stronger than the mere antipathy to duration.

Faustian architecture, on the contrary, begins on the grand scale simultane- ously with the first stirrings of a new piety (the Cluniac reform, c. 1000) and a new thought (the Eucharistic controversy between Berengar of Tours and Lanfranc 1050),' and proceeds at once to plans of gigantic intention; often enough, as in the case of Speyer, the whole community did not suffice to fill the cathedral,* and often again it proved impossible to complete the projected scheme. The passionate language of this architecture is that of the poems too.^ Far apart as may seem the Christian hymnology of the south and the Eddas of the still heathen north, they are alike in the implicit space-endlessness of prosody, rhythmic syntax and imagery. Read the Dies Ira together with the Voluspa,^ which is little earlier; there is the same adamantine will to over-

^ Se&Vol. II, pp. 345 ct scq.

2 Miiller-Deckcr, Die Etrusker (1877), II, pp. 12.8 ct scq. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Romer (i9ix), p. 517. The oldest plan of Roma Quadrata was a " templum " whose limits had nothing to do with the building-up of the city but were connected with sacral rules, as the significance of this precinct (the " Pomccrium ") in later times shows. A " templum," too, was the Roman camp whose rectangular outline is visible to-day in many a Roman-founded town; it was the consecrated area within which the army felt itself under the protection of its gods, and originally had nothing what- ever to do with fortification, which is a product of Hellenistic times. (It may be added that Roman camps retained their rigidity of outhne even where obvious "military considerations" of ground, etc., must have suggested its modification. — Tr.^ Most Roman stone-temples Q'ades"^ were not "tcmpla" at all. On the other hand, the early Greek rkixevos of Homeric times must have had a similar significance.

3 The student may consult the articles "Church History," " Monasticism," "Eucharist" and other articles therein referred to in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, XI Edition. — Tr.

< English readers may remember that Cobbett ("Rural Rides," passim) was so impressed with the spaciousness of English country churches as to formulate a theory that mediaeval England must have been more populous than modern England is. — Tr.

6 Cf. my introduction to Ernst Droem's Gesdnge, p. ix.

• The oldest and most mystical of the poems of the "Elder Edda." — Tr,

i86 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

come and break all resistances of the visible. No rhythm ever imagined radiates immensities of space and distance as the old Northern does :

Zum Unhcil wcrdcn — noch allzulangc Manner und Wcibcr — zur Welt gcborcn Abcr wir beide — bleibcn zusammcn

Ich und Sigurd.

The accents of the Homeric hexameter are the soft rustle of a leaf in the midday sun, the rhythm oi matter; but the "Stabreim," like "potential energy" in the world-pictures of modern physics, creates a tense restraint in the void without limits, distant night-storms above the highest peaks. In its swaying indefiniteness all words and things dissolve themselves — it is the dynamics, not the statics, of language. The same applies to the grave rhythm of Media vita in mortt sumus. Here is heralded the colour of Rembrandt and the instru- mentation of Beethoven — here infinite solitude is felt as the home of the Faustian soul. What is Valhalla? Unknown to the Germans of the Migrations and even to the Merovingian Age, it was conceived by the nascent Faustian soul. It was conceived, no doubt, under Classic-pagan and Arabian-Christian impressions, for the antique and the sacred writings, the ruins and mosaics and miniatures, the cults and rites and dogmas of these past Cultures reached into the new life at all points. And yet, this Valhalla is something beyond all sensible actualities floating in remote, dim, Faustian regions. Olympus rests on the homely Greek soil, the Paradise of the Fathers is a magic garden somewhere in the Universe, but Valhalla is nowhere. Lost in the limitless, it appears with its inharmonious gods and heroes the supreme symbol of solitude. Siegfried, Parzeval, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust are the loneliest heroes in all the Cultures. Read the wondrous awakening of the inner life in Wolfram's Parzeval. The longing for the woods, the mysterious compassion, the ineffable sense of forsakenness — it is all Faustian and only Faustian. Every one of us knows it. The motive returns with all its profundity in the Easter scene of Faust I.

" A longing pure and not to be described drove me to wander over woods and fields, and in a mist of hot abundant tears I felt a world arise and live for me."

Of this world-experience neither ApoUinian nor Magian man, neither Homer nor the Gospels, knows anything whatever. The climax of the poem of Wolf- ram, that wondrous Good Friday morning scene when the hero, at odds with God and with himself, meets the noble Gawan and resolves to go on pilgrimage to Tevrezent, takes us to the heart of the Faustian religion. Here one can feel the mystery of the Eucharist which binds the communicant to a mystic com- pany, to a Church that alone can give bliss. In the myth of the Holy Grail and its Knights one can feel the inward necessity of the German-Northern Catholicism. In opposition to the Classical sacrifices offered to individual gods

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 187

in separate temples, there is here the one never-ending sacrifice repeated everywhere and every day. This is the Faustian idea of the 9th-iith Centuries, the Edda time, foreshadowed by Anglo-Saxon missionaries like Winfried but only then ripened. The Cathedral, with its High Altar enclosing the accomplished miracle, is its expression in stone. ^

The plurality of separate bodies which represents Cosmos for the Classical soul, requires a similar pantheon — hence the antique polytheism. The single world-volume, be it conceived as cavern or as space, demands the single god of Magian or Western Christianity. Athene or Apollo might be represented by a statue, but it is and has long been evident to our feeling that the Deity of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation can only be "manifested" in the storm of an organ fugue or the solemn progress of cantata and mass. From the rich manifold of figures in the Edda and contemporary legends of saints to Goethe our myth develops itself in steady opposition to the Classical — in the one case a continuous disintegration of the divine that culminated in the early Empire in an impossible multitude of deities, in the other a process of simplification that led to the Deism of the i8th Century.

The Magian hierarchy of heaven — angels, saints, persons of the Trinity — has grown paler and paler, more and more disembodied, in the sphere of the Western pseudomorphosis,^ supported though it was by the whole weight of Church authority, and even the Devil — the great adversary in the Gothic world-drama ^ — has disappeared unnoticed from among the possibilities of the Faustian world-feeling. Luther could still throw the inkpot at him, but he has been passed over in silence by perplexed Protestant theologians long ago. For the solitude of the Faustian soul agrees not at all with a duality of world powers. God himself is the All. About the end of the 17th Century this reli- giousness could no longer be limited to pictorial expression, and instrumental music came as its last and only form-language: we may say that the Catholic faith is to the Protestant as an altar-piece is to an oratorio. But even the Germanic gods and heroes are surrounded by this rebuffing immensity and enigmatic gloom. They are steeped in music and in night, for daylight gives visual bounds and therefore shapes bodily things. Night eliminates body, day soul. Apollo and Athene have no souls. On Olympus rests the eternal light of the transparent southern day, and Apollo's hour is high noon, when great Pan ' sleeps. But Valhalla is light-less, and even in the Eddas we can trace that deep midnight of Faust's study-broodings, the midnight that is caught by Rem- brandt's etchings and absorbs Beethoven's tone colours. No Wotan or Baldur or Freya has "Euclidean" form. Of them, as of the Vedic gods of India, it can be said that they suffer not "any graven image or any likeness whatsoever"; and this impossibility carries an implicit recognition that eternal space, and not the corporeal copy — which levels them down, desecrates them, denies them

1 Sec Vol. II, p. 358 et seq. * See Vol. II, pp. 241 et seq. » See Vol. U, p. 354.

i88 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

— is the supreme symbol. This is the deep-felt motive that underlies the iconoclastic storms in Islam and Byzantium (J)othy be it noted, of the yth cen- tury), and the closely similar movement in our Protestant North. Was not Descartes's creation of the anti-Euclidean analysis of space an iconoclasm? The Classical geometry handles a number-world of day, the function-theory is the genuine mathematic of night.

II

That which is expressed by the soul of the West in its extraordinary wealth of media — words, tones, colours, pictorial perspectives, philosophical sys- tems, legends, the spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals and the formulas of func- tions — namely its world-feeling, is expressed by the soul of Old Egypt (which was remote from all ambitions towards theory and literariness) almost exclu- sively by the immediate language of Stone. Instead of spinning word-subtleties around its form of extension, its "space" and its "time," instead of forming hypotheses and number-systems and dogmas, it set up its huge symbols in the landscape of the Nile in all silence. Stone is the great emblem of the Timeless- Become; space and death seem bound up in it. "Men have built for the dead," says Bachofen in his autobiography, "before they have built for the living, and even as a perishable wooden structure suffices for the span of time that is given to the living, so the housing of the dead for ever demands the solid stone of the earth. The oldest cult is associated with the stone that marks the place of burial, the oldest temple-building with the tomb-structure, the origins of art and decoration with the grave-ornament. Symbol has created itself in the graves. That which is thought and felt and silently prayed at the grave-side can be expressed by no word, but only hinted by the boding symbol that stands in unchanging grave repose." The dead strive no more. They are no more Time, but only Space — something that stays (if indeed it stays at all) but does not ripen towards a Future; and hence it is stone, the abiding stone, that ex- presses how the dead is mirrored in the waking consciousness of the living. The Faustian soul looks for an immortality to follow the bodily end, a sort of marriage with endless space, and it disembodiesof the macrocosm as the man of the particular kind sees and comprehends it. Both have system. Each is pene- trated with the religious side of life — fear and love.^ A genuine symbol can instil fear or can set free from fear; the "right" emancipates and the "wrong" hurts and depresses. The imitative side of the arts, on the contrary, stands closer to the real race-feelings of hate and love, out of which arises the opposi-

^ Imitation, being life, is past in the very moment of accomplishment. The curtain falls, and it passes either into oblivion or, if the product is a durable artifact, into art-history. Of the songs and dances of old Cultures nothing remains, of their pictures and poems little. And even this little con- tains, substantially, only the ornamental side of the original imitation. Of a grand drama there remains only the text, not the image and the sound; of a poem only the words, not the recital; and of all their music the notes at most, not the tone-colours of the instruments. The essential is irrevocably gone, and every "reproduction" is in reality something new and different.

2 For the workshop of Thothmes at Tell-el-Amarna, see Mitteilungen der Deutschett-Qrimt-Gtsell' schaft. No. 5X, pp. x8 et seq.

3 K. Burdach, Deutsche Renaissance, p. ii. The pictorial art of the Gothic period also has its strict typism and symbolism.

• E. Norden, Antike Kunst-prosa, pp. 8 et seq.

6 See Vol. II, p. 32.3.

194 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

tion of u^y and beautiful. This is in relation only with the living, of which the inner rhythm repels us or draws us into phase with it, whether it be that of the sunset-cloud or that of the tense breath of the machine. An imitation is beau- tiful, an ornament significant, and therein lies the difference between direction and extension, organic and inorganic logic, life and death. That which wc think beautiful is "worth copying." Easily it swings with us and draws us on to imitate, to join in the singing, to repeat. Our hearts beat higher, our limbs twitch, and we are stirred till our spirits overflow. But as it belongs to Time, it "has its time." A symbol endures, but everything beautiful vanishes with the life-pulsation of the man, the class, the people or the race that feels it as a specific beauty in the general cosmic rhythm.^ The "beauty" that Classical sculpture and poetry contained for Classical eyes is something different from the beauty that they contain for ours — something extinguished irrecoverably with the Classical soul — while what we regard as beautiful in it is some- thing that only exists for us. Not only is that which is beautiful for one kind of man neutral or ugly for another — e.g., the whole of our music for the Chinese, or Mexican sculpture for us. For one and the same life the accustomed, the habitual, owing to the very fact of its possessing duration, cannot possess beauty.

And now for the first time wc can see the opposition between these two sides of every art in all its depth. Imitation spiritualizes and quickens, ornament enchants and kills. The one becomes, the other is. And therefore the one is allied to love and, above all — in songs and riot and dance — to the sexual love, which turns existence to face the future; and the other to care of the past, to recollection ^ and to the funerary. The beautiful is longingly pursued, the significant instils dread, and there is no deeper contrast than that between the house of the living and the house of the dead.^ The peasant's cottage ^ and its derivative the country noble's hall, the fenced town and the castle are man- sions of life, unconscious expressions of circling blood, that no art produced and no art can alter. The idea of the family appears in the plan of the proto- house, the inner form of the stock in the plan of its villages — which after many a century and many a change of occupation still show what race it was that founded them^ — the life of a nation and its social ordering in the plan (not the elevation or silhouette) of the city.® On the other hand. Orna- mentation of the high order develops itself on the stiff symbols of death,

^ The translation is so far a paraphrase here that it is desirable to reproduce the German original : " AUes Schone vcrgcht mit dem Lebenspulsschlag (desscn) dcr cs aus dem kosmischcn Takt heraus als solches empfindet."

' Hence the ornamental character of script.

• See p. i88. < See Vol. II, p. 104.

» E.g., the Slavonic round-villages and Teutonic street-villages cast of the Elbe. Similarly, conclusions can be drawn as to many of the events of the Homeric age from the distribution of round and rectangular buildings in ancient Italy.

• Sec Vol. U, p. 109.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 195

the urn, the sarcophagus, the stele and the temple of the dead/ and beyoijd these in gods' temples and cathedrals which are Ornament through and through, not the expressions of a race but the language of a world-view. They are pure art through and through — just what the castle and the cottage arc not.2

For cottage and castle are buildings in which art, and, specifically, imitative art, is made and done, the home of Vedic, Homeric and Germanic epos, of the songs of heroes, the dance of boors and that of lords and ladies, of the min- strel's lay. The cathedral, on the other hand, is art, and, moreover, the only art by which nothing is imitated; it alone is pure tension of persistent forms, pure three-dimensional logic that expresses itself in edges and surfaces and volumes. But the art of villages and castles is derived from the inclina- tions of the moment, from the laughter and high spirit of feasts and games, and to such a degree is it dependent on Time, so much is it a thing of occasion, that the troubadour obtains his very name from finding, while Improvisation — as we see in the Tzigane music to-day — is nothing but race manifesting itself to alien senses under the influence of the hour. To this free creative power all spiritual art opposes the strict school in which the individual — in the hymn as in the work of building and carving — is the servant of a logic of timeless forms, and so in all Cultures the seat of its style-history is in its early cult architecture. In the castle it is the life and not the structure that possesses style. In the town the plan is an image of the destinies of a people, whereas the silhouette of emergent spires and cupolas tells of the logic in the builders' world-picture, of the "first and last things" of their universe.

In the architecture of the living, stone serves a worldly fur-pose, but in the architecture of the cult it is a symbol.^ Nothing has injured the history of the great architectures so much as the fact that it has been regarded as the history of architectural techniques instead of as that of architectural ideas which took their technical expression-means as and where they found them. It has been just the same with the history of musical instruments,^ which also were de- veloped on a foundation of tone-language. Whether the groin and the flying buttress and the squinch-cupola were imagined specially for the great archi- tectures or were expedients that lay more or less ready to hand and were taken into use, is for art-history a matter of as little importance as the question of whether, technically, stringed instruments originated in Arabia or in Celtic Britain. It may be that the Doric column was, as a matter of workmanship, borrowed from the Egyptian temples of the New Empire, or the late-Roman domical construction from the Etruscans, or the Florentine court from the North-African Moors. Nevertheless the Doric peripteros, the Pantheon, and

1 See p. 167. 2 See Vol. II, pp. i^x ct scq.

3 Sec p. iz8. * Sec p. 62..

196 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the Palazzo Farnese belong to wholly different worlds — they subserve the artistic expression of the prime-symbol in three different Cultures.

IV

In every springtime, consequently, there arc two definitely ornamental and non-imitative arts, that of building and that of decoration. In the longing and pregnant centuries before it, elemental expression belongs exclusively to Orna- mentation in the narrow sense. The Carolingian period is represented only by its ornament, as its architecture, for want of the Ideay stands between the styles. And similarly, as a matter of art-history, it is immaterial that no buildings of the Mycenasan age have survived.^ But with the dawn of the great Culture, architecture as ornament comes into being suddenly and with such a force of ex- pression that for a century mere decoration-as-such shrinks away from it in awe. The spaces, surfaces and edges of stone speak alone. The tomb of Cheph- ren is the culmination of mathematical simplicity — everywhere right angles, squares and rectangular pillars, nowhere adornment, inscription or desinence — and it is only after some generations have passed that Relief ventures to in- fringe the solemn magic of those spaces and the strain begins to be eased. And the noble Romanesque of Westphalia-Saxony (Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulin- zella, Paderborn), of Southern France and of the Normans (Norwich and Peterborough) managed to render the whole sense of the world with indescrib- able power and dignity in one line, one capital, one arch.

When the form-world of the springtime is at its highest, and not before, the ordained relation is that architecture is lord and ornament is vassal. And the word "ornament" is to be taken here in the widest possible sense. Even con- ventionally, it covers the Classical ««/>-motive with its quiet poised symmetry or meander supplement, the spun surface of arabesque and the not dissimilar sur- face-patterning of Mayan art, and the "Thunder-pattern" ^ and others of the early Chou period which prove once again the landscape basis of the old Chinese architecture without a doubt. But the warrior figures of Dipylon vases are also conceived in the spirit of ornament, and so, in a far higher degree still, are the statuary groups of Gothic cathedrals. "The figures were composed pillar- wise from the spectator, the figures of the pillar being, with reference to the spec- tator, ranked upon one another like rhythmic figures in a symphony that soars heavenward and expands its sounds in every direction." ^ And besides draper- ies, gestures, and figure-types, even the structure of the hymn-strophe and the parallel motion of the parts in church music are ornament in the service of the

^ The same applies to the architecture of Thinitc Egypt and to the Seleucid-Pcrsian sun and fire temples of the pre-Christian area.

• The combination of scrolls and "Greek keys" with the Dragon or other emblem of storm- power, — Tr.

• Dvorik, Idtalisnms und Natstralismus in der got. Skulptttr u. Malerti Qiist. Ztitschrift, 1918, pp. 44 et seq.).

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 197

all-ruling architectural idea.^ The spell of the great Ornamentation remains unbroken till in the beginning of a "late" period architecture falls into a group of civic and worldly special arts that unceasingly devote themselves to pleasing and clever imitation and become ipso facto personal. To Imitation and Orna- ment the same applies that has been said already of time and space. Time gives birth to space, but space gives death to time.^ In the beginning, rigid symbol- ism had petrified everything alive; the Gothic statue was not permitted to be a living body, but was simply a set of lines disposed in human form. But now Ornament loses all its sacred rigour and becomes more and more decoration for the architectural setting of a polite and mannered life. It was purely as this, namely as a beautifying element, that Renaissance taste was adopted by the courtly and patrician world of the North (and by it alone!). Ornament meant something quite different in the Egyptian Old Kingdom from what it meant in the Middle; in the geometric period from what it meant in the Hellenistic; at the end of the lith Century from what it meant at the end of Louis XIV's reign. And architecture too becomes pictorial and makes music, and its forms seem always to be trying to imitate something in the picture of the world-around. From the Ionic capital we proceed to the Corinthian, and from Vignola through Bernini to the Rococo.

At the last, when Civilization sets in, true ornament and, with it, great art as a whole are extinguished. The transition consists — in every Culture — in Classicism and Romanticism of one sort or another, the former being a senti- mental regard for an Ornamentation (rules, laws, types) that has long been archaic and soulless, and the latter a sentimental Imitation, not of life, but of an older Imitation. In the place of architectural style we find architectural taste. Methods of painting and mannerisms of writing, old forms and new, home and foreign, come and go with the fashion. The inward necessity is no longer there, there are no longer "schools," for everyone selects what and where it pleases him to select. Art becomes craft-art (K.unstgewerhe) in all its branches — architec- ture and music, poetry and drama — and in the end we have a pictorial and literary stock-in-trade which is destitute of any deeper significance and is em- ployed according to taste. This final or industrial form of Ornament — no longer historical, no longer in the condition of "becoming" — we have before us not only in the patterns of oriental carpets, Persian and Indian metal work,

1 And, finally, ornament in the highest sense includes scrip, and with it, the Book, which is the true associate of the cult-building, and as an art-work always appears and disappears with it. (Sec Vol. II, pp. i8i et seq., pp. xgS et seq.) In writing, \x. is understanding as distinct from intuition that attains to form: it is not essences that those signs symbolize but notions abstracted therefrom by words, and as for the speech-habituated human intellect rigid space is the presented objective, the writing of a Culture is (after its stone-building) the purest of all expressions of its prime-symbol. It is quite impossible to understand the history of Arabesque if we leave the innumerable Arabian scripts out of consideration, and it is no less impossible to separate Egyptian and Chinese style- history from the history of the corresponding writing-signs and their arrangement and application.

2 See p. 173.

198 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Chinese porcelain, but also in Egyptian (and Babylonian) art as the Greeks and Romans met it. The Minoan art of Crete is pure craft-art, a northern outlier of Egyptian post-Hyksos taste; and its "contemporary," Hellenistic-Roman art from about the time of Scipio and Hannibal, similarly subserves the habit of comfort and the play of intellect. From the richly-decorated entablature of the Forum of Nerva in Rome to the later provincial ceramics in the West, we can trace the same steady formation of an unalterable craft-art that we find in the Egyptian and the Islamic worlds, and that wc have to presume in India after Buddha and in China after Confucius.

Now, Cathedral and Pyramid-temple are different in spite of their deep in- ward kinship, and it is precisely in these differences that we seize the mighty phenomenon of the Faustian soul, whose depth-impulse refuses to be bound in the prime symbol of a way, and from its earliest beginnings strives to transcend every optical limitation. Can anything be more alien to the Egyptian concep- tion of the State — whose tendency we may describe as a noble sobriety — than the political ambitions of the great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen Emperors, who came to grief because they overleapt all political actualities and for whom the recognition of any bounds would have been a betrayal of the idea of their rulership? Here the prime symbol of infinite space, with all its in- describable power, entered the field of active political existence. Beside the figures of the Ottos, Conrad II, Henry VI and Frederick II stand the Viking- Normans, conquerors of Russia, Greenland, England, Sicily and almost of Constantinople; and the great popes, Gregory VII and Innocent III — all of whom alike aimed at making their visible spheres of influence coincident with the whole known world. This is what distinguishes the heroes of the Grail and Arthurian and Siegfried sagas, ever roaming in the infinite, from the heroes of Homer with their geographically modest horizon; and the Crusades, that took men from the Elbe and the Loire to the limits of the known world, from the historical events upon which the Classical soul built the "Iliad" and which from the style of that soul wc may safely assume to have been local, bounded, and completely appreciable.

The Doric soul actualized the symbol of the corporally-present individual thing, while deliberately rejecting all big and far-reaching creations, and it is for this very good reason that the first post-Mycenasan period has bequeathed nothing to our archaeologists. The expression to which this soul finally attained was the Doric temple with its purely outward effectiveness, set upon the land- scape as a massive image but denying and artistically disregarding the space within as the fiii 6v, that which was held to be incapable of existence. The ranked columns of the Egyptians carried the roof of a hall. The Greek in bor- rowing the motive invested it with a meaning proper to himself — he turned

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 199

the architectural type inside out like a glove. The outer column-sets are, in a sense, relics of a denied interior.^

The Magian and the Faustian souls, on the contrary, built high. Their dream-images became concrete as vaultings above significant inner-spaces, structural anticipations respectively of the mathematic of algebra and that of analysis. In the style that radiated from Burgundy and Flanders rib-vaulting with its lunettes and flying buttresses emancipated the contained space from the sense-appreciable surface ^ bounding it. In the Magian interior ' ' the window is merely a negative component, a utility-form in no wise yet developed into an art-form — to put it crudely, nothing but a hole in the wall. ' ' ^ When windows were in practice indispensable, they were for the sake of artistic impression concealed by galleries as in the Eastern basilica.'* The window as architecture^ on the other hand, is peculiar to the Faustian soul and the most significant symbol of its depth-experience. In it can be felt the will to emerge from the interior into the boundless. The same will that is immanent in contrapuntal music was native to these vaultings. The incorporeal world of this music was and re- mained that of the first Gothic, and even when, much later, polyphonic music rose to such heights as those of the Matthew Passion, the Eroica, and Tristan and Parsifal, it became of inward necessity cathedral-like and returned to its home, the stone language of the Crusade-time. To get rid of every trace of Classical corporeality, there was brought to bear the full force of a deeply significant Ornamentation, which defies the delimiting power of stone with its weirdly impressive transformations of vegetal, animal and human bodies (St. Pierre in Moissac), which dissolves all its lines into melodies and variations on a theme, all its fagades into many- voiced fugues, and all the bodiliness of its statuary into a music of drapery-folds. It is this spirituality that gave their deep meaning to the gigantic glass-expanses of our cathedral-windows with their polychrome, translucent and therefore wholly bodiless, painting — an art that has never and nowhere repeated itself and forms the completest contrast that can be imagined to the Classical fresco. It is perhaps in the Sainte-Chapelle at Paris that this emancipation from bodiliness is most evident. Here the stone practically vanishes in the gleam of the glass. Whereas the fresco-painting is co-material with the wall on and with which it has grown and its colour is effective as material, here we have colours dependent on no carrying surface

^ Certainly the Greeks at the time when they advanced from the Anta: to the Peripteros were under the mighty influence of the Egyptian series-cohimns — it was at this time that their sculpture in the round, indisputably following Egyptian models, freed itself from the relief manner which still clings to the Apollo figures. But this does not alter the fact that the motive of the Classical column and the Classical application of the rank-principle were wholly and peculiarly Classical.

2 The surface of the space-volume itself, not that of the stone. Dvorak, Hist. Ztschr., 1918, pp. 17 et seq.

^ Dehio, Gesch. der deutschen Kunst, I, p. 16.

• For descriptions and illustrations of types of Doming and Vaulting, see the article Vault in

Ency. Brit., XI Ed. — Tr.

loo THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

but as free in space as organ notes, and shapes poised in the infinite. Compare with the Faustian spirit of these churches — almost wall-less, loftily vaulted, irradiated with many-coloured light, aspiring from nave to choir — the Ara- bian (that is, the Early-Christian Byzantine) cupola-church. The pendentive cupola, that seems to float on high above the basilica or the octagon, was indeed also a victory over the principle of natural gravity which the Classical expressed in architrave and column; it, too, was a defiance of architectural body, of "exterior." But the very absence of an exterior emphasizes the more the unbroken coherence of the wall that shuts in the Cavern and allows no look and no hope to emerge from it. An ingeniously confusing interpenetration of spherical and polygonal forms; a load so placed upon a stone drum that it seems to hover weightless on high, yet closing the interior without outlet; all structural lines concealed; vague light admitted, through a small opening in the heart of the dome but only the more inexorably to emphasize the walling-in — such are the characters that we see in the masterpieces of this art, S. Vitale in Ravenna, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the Dome of the Rock ^ in Jerusalem. Where the Egyptian puts reliefs that with their flat planes studi- ously avoid any foreshortening suggestive of lateral depth, where the Gothic architects put their pictures of glass to draw in the world of space without, the Magian clothes his walls with sparkling, predominantly golden, mosaics and arabesques and so drowns his cavern in that unreal, fairy-tale light which for Northerners is always so seductive in Moorish art.

VI

The phenomenon of the great style, then, is an emanation from the essence of the Macrocosm, from the prime-symbol of a great culture. No one who can appreciate the connotation of the word sufficiently to see that it designates not a form-aggregate but a form-history, will try to aline the fragmentary and chaotic art-utterances of primitive mankind with the comprehensive certainty of a style that consistently develops over centuries. Only the art of great Cultures, the art that has ceased to be only art and has begun to be an efl^ectivc unit of expression and significance, possesses style.

The organic history of a style comprises a "pre — ," a "non — " and a "post — ." The bull tablet of the First Dynasty of Egypt ^ is not yet "Egyp- tian." Not till the Third Dynasty do the works acquire a style — but then they do so suddenly and very definitely. Similarly the Carolingian period stands " between-styles." We see difl^erent forms touched on and explored, but nothing of inwardly necessary expression. The creator of the Aachen Minster " thinks

• "Mosque of Omar." — Tr.

' H. Schiifcr, Von Aegyptischtr Kunst, I, pp. 15 ct scq.

(The bulls arc shown in Fig. 18 in the article Eijpt in the Encyclopaedia Britaooica, XI Edition, Vol. IX, pp. 65-66. — TrO

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL loi

surely and builds surely, but does not feel surely." ^ The Marienkirche in, the Castle of Wiirzburg (c. 700) has its counterpart in Salonika (St. George), and the Church of St. Germigny des Pres (c. 800) with its cupolas and horseshoe niches is almost a mosque. For the whole of West Europe the period 850-950 is almost a blank. And just so to-day Russian art stands between two styles. The primitive wooden architecture with its steep eight-sided tent-roof (which extends from Norway to Manchuria) is impressed with Byzantine motives from over the Danube and Armenian-Persian from over the Caucasus. We can cer- tainly feel an "elective affinity" between the Russian and the Magian souls, but as yet the prime symbol of Russia, the plane without limit ^ finds no sure expression either in religion or in architecture. The church roof emerges, hill- ockwise, but little from the landscape and on it sit the tent-roofs whose points are coifed with the " kokoshniks " that suppress and would abolish the upward tendency. They neither tower up like the Gothic belfry nor enclose like the mosque-cupola, but sit, thereby emphasizing the horizontality of the building, which is meant to be regarded merely from the outside. When about 1760 the Synod forbade the tent roofs and prescribed the orthodox onion-cupolas, the heavy cupolas were set upon slender cylinders, of which there may be any number ^ and which sit on the roof-plane.^ It is not yet a style, only the promise of a style that will awaken when the real Russian religion awakens.

In the Faustian West, this awakening happened shortly before a.d. iooo. In one moment, the Romanesque style was there. Instead of the fluid organiza- tion of space on an insecure ground plan, there was, suddenly, a strict dynamic of space. From the very beginning, inner and outer construction were placed in a fixed relation, the wall was penetrated by the form-language and the form worked into the wall in a way that no other Culture has ever imagined. From the very beginning the window and the belfry were invested with their mean- ings. The form was irrevocably assigned. Only its development remained to be worked out.

The Egyptian style began with another such creative act, just as unconscious, just as full of symbolic force. The prime symbol of the Way came into being suddenly with the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty (2.930 b.c). The world- creating depth-experience of this soul gets its substance from the direction- factor itself. Spatial depth as stiffened Time, distance, death, Destiny itself

1 Frankl, Baukunst des Mimlalters (1918), pp. 16 et seq.

2 See Vol. II, pp. 361 et seq. The lack of any vertical tendency in the Russian life-feeling is perceptible also in the saga-figure of Ilya Murometz (see Vol. II, p. 2.31). The Russian has not the smallest relation with a Fafher-God. His ethos is not a filial but purely a. fraternal love, radiating in all directions along the human plane. Christ, even, is conceived as a Brother. The Faustian, wholly vertical, tendency to strive up to fulfilment is to the real Russian an incomprehensible pretension. The same absence of all vertical tendency is observable in Russian ideas of the state and property.

3 The cemetery church of Kishi has xx.

4 J. Grabar, " History of Russian Art " (Russian, 1911), I-III. Eliasberg, Kuss. Baukunst (1912.), Introduction.

2.01 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

dominate the expression, and the merely sensuous dimensions of length and breadth become an escorting plane which restricts and prescribes the Way of destiny. The Egyptian flat-relief, which is designed to be seen at close quarters and arranged serially so as to compel the beholder to pass along the wall-planes in the prescribed direction, appears with similar suddenness about the begin- ning of the Fifth Dynasty.^ The still later avenues of sphinxes and statues and the rock- and terrace-temples constantly intensify that tendency towards the one distance that the world of Egyptian mankind knows, the grave. Observe how soon the colonnades of the early period come to be systems of huge, close-set pillars that screen off all side-view. This is something that has never reproduced itself in any other architecture.

The grandeur of this style appears to us as rigid and unchanging. And cer- tainly it stands beyond the passion which is ever seeking and fearing and so imparts to subordinate characters a quality of restless personal movement in the flow of the centuries. But, vice versa, we cannot doubt that to an Egyptian the Faustian style (which is our style, from earliest Romanesque to Rococo and Empire) would with its unresting persistent search for a Something, appear far more uniform than we can imagine. It follows, we must not forget, from the conception of style that we are working on here, that Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo are only stages of one and the same style, in which it is naturally the variable that we and the constant that men of other eyes remark. In actual fact, the inner unity of the Northern Renaissance is shown in innumerable reconstructions of Romanesque work in Baroque and of late Gothic work in Rococo that are not in the least startling. In peasant art, Gothic and Baroque have been identical, and the streets of old towns with their pure harmony of all sorts of gables and facades (wherein definite attributions to Romanesque or Gothic Renaissance or Baroque or Rococo are often quite impossible) show that the family resemblance between the members is far greater than they themselves realize.

The Egyptian style was purely architectural, and remained so till the Egyp- tian soul was extinguished. It is the only one in which Ornamentation as a decorative supplement to architecture is entirely absent. It allowed of no diver- gence into arts of entertainment, no display-painting, no busts, no secular music. In the Ionic phase, the centre of gravity of the Classical style shifted from architecture to an independent plastic art; in that of the Baroque the style of the West passed into music, whose form-language in its turn ruled the entire building art of the i8th Century; in the Arabian world, after Justinian and

• The disposition of Egyptian and that of Western history are so clear as to admit of comparison

being earned right down into the details, and it would be well worth the expert's while to carry out such an investigation. The Fourth Dynasty, that of the strict Pyramid style, b.c. 1930-1750 (Cheops, Chephren), corresponds to the Romanesque (980-1100), the Fifth Dynasty (1750-1615, Sahu-ri) «o the early Gothic (1100-1130), and the Sixth Dynasty, prime of the archaic portraiture (1613- 1475, Phiops I and II), to the mature Gothic of ii3o-x4oa

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 103

Chosroes-Nushirvan, Arabesque dissolved all the forms of architecture, paint- ing and sculpture into style-impressions that nowadays we should consider as craft-art. But in Egypt the sovereignty of architecture remained unchallenged; it merely softened its language a little. In the chambers of the pyramid-temple of the Fourth Dynasty (Pyramid of Chephren) there are unadorned angular pillars. In the buildings of the Fifth (Pyramid of Sahu-re) the plant-column makes its appearance. Lotus and papyrus branches turned into stone arise gigantic out of a pavement of transparent alabaster that represents water, enclosed by purple walls. The ceiling is adorned with birds and stars. The sacred way from the gate-buildings to the tomb-chamber, the picture of life, is a stream — it is the Nile itself become one with the prime-symbol of direc- tion. The spirit of the mother-landscape unites with the soul that has sprung from it.

In China, in lieu of the awe-inspiring pylon with its massy wall and narrow entrance, we have the "Spirit-wall" (yin-pi) that conceals the way in. The Chinaman slips into life and thereafter follows the Tao of life's path; as the Nile valley is to the up-and-down landscape of the Hwang Ho, so is the stone- enclosed temple-way to the mazy paths of Chinese garden-architecture. And just so, in some mysterious fashion, the Euclidean existence is linked with the multitude of little islands and promontories of the i^gean, and the passion- ate Western, roving in the infinite, with the broad plains of Franconia and Burgundy and Saxony.

VII

The Egyptian style is the expression of a brave soul. The rigour and force of it Egyptian man himself never felt and never asserted. He dared all, but said nothing. In Gothic and Baroque, on the contrary, the triumph over heaviness became a perfectly conscious motive of the form-language. The drama of Shakespeare deals openly with the desperate conflict of will and world. Classi- cal man, again, was weak in the face of the "powers." The Kadapais of fear and pity, the relief and recovery of the Apollinian soul in the moment of the TreptTT^reta was, according to Aristotle, the effect deliberately aimed at in Attic tragedy. As the Greek spectator watched someone whom he knew (for every- one knew the myth and its heroes and lived in them) senselessly maltreated by fortune, without any conceivable possibility of resistance to the Powers, and saw him go under with splendid mien, defiant, heroic, his own Euclidean soul experienced a marvellous uplifting. If life was worthless, at any rate the grand gesture in losing it was not so. The Greek willed nothing and dared nothing, but he found a stirring beauty in enduring. Even the earlier figures of Odysseus the patient, and, above all, Achilles the archetype of Greek manhood, have this characteristic quality. The morale of the Cynics, that of the Stoics, that of Epicurus, the common Greek ideals of ao}(f>po<Tvvr] and arapa^la, Diogenes

104 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

devoting himself to Oeojpla in a tub — all this is masked cowardice in the face of grave matters and responsibilities, and different indeed from the pride of the Egyptian soul. Apollinian man goes below ground out of life's way, even to the point of suicide, which in this Culture alone (if we ignore certain related In- dian ideals) ranked as a high ethical act and was treated with the solemnity of a ritual symbol.^ The Dionysiac intoxication seems a sort of furious drowning of uneasinesses that to the Egyptian soul were utterly unknown. And con- sequently the Greek Culture is that of the small, the easy, the simple. Its technique is, compared with Egyptian or Babylonian, a clever nullity. ^ No ornamentation shows such a poverty of invention as theirs, and their stock of sculptural positions and attitudes could be counted on one's fingers. "In its poverty of forms, which is conspicuous even allowing that at the beginning of its development it may have been better off than it was later, the Doric style pivoted everything on proportions and on measure." ' Yet, even so, what adroitness in avoiding! The Greek architecture with its commensuration of load and support and its peculiar smallness of scale suggests a persistent evasion of difficult architectural problems that on the Nile and, later, in the high North were literally looked for, which moreover were known and cer- tainly not burked in the Mycenasan age. The Egyptian loved the strong stone of immense buildings; it was in keeping with his self-consciousness that he should choose only the hardest for his task. But the Greek avoided it; his architecture first set itself small tasks, then ceased altogether. If we survey it as a whole, and then compare it with the totality of Egyptian or Mexican or even, for that matter. Western architecture, we are astounded at the feeble development of the style. A few variations of the Doric temple and it was exhausted. It was already closed off about 400 when the Corinthian capital was invented, and everything subsequent to this was merely modification of what existed.

The result of this was an almost bodily standardization of form- types and style-species. One might choose between them, but never overstep their strict limits — that would have been in some sort an admission of an infinity of possibilities. There were three orders of columns and a definite disposition of the architrave corresponding to each; to deal with the difficulty (considered, as early as Vitruvius, as a conflict) which the alternation of triglyphs and metopes produced at the corners, the nearest intercolumniations were narrowed — no one thought of imagining new forms to suit the case. If greater dimen- sions were desired, the requirements were met by superposition, juxtaposition, etc., of additional elements. Thus the Colosseum possesses three rings, the Didymajum of Miletus three rows of columns in front, and the Frieze of the

• That which differentiates the Japanese harakiri from this suicide is its intensely pu;poseful

and (so to put it) active and demonstrative character. — Tr. * Sec Vol. II, p. 616.

» Koldewcy-Puchstcin, DU griech. Ttmptl in Unttr-Italim und SiT^lim^ I, p. 1x8.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 105

Giants of Pergamum an endless succession of individual and unconnected motives. Similarly with the style-species of prose and the types of lyric poetry, narrative and tragedy. Universally, the expenditure of pov^rers on the basic form is restricted to the minimum and the creative energy of the artist directed to detail-fineness. It is a statical treatment of static genera, and it stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the dynamic fertility of the Faustian with its ceaseless creation of new types and domains of form.

VIII

We are now able to see the organism in a great style-course. Here, as in so many other matters, Goethe was the first to whom vision came. In his " Winckelmann " he says of Velleius Paterculus: "with his standpoint, it was not given to him to see all art as a living thing (XGmv) that must have an incon- spicuous beginning, a slow growth, a brilliant moment of fulfilment and a gradual decline like every other organic being, though it is presented in a set of individuals." This sentence contains the entire morphology of art-history. Styles do not follow one another like waves or pulse-beats. It is not the per- sonality or will or brain of the artist that makes the style, but the style that makes the tyfe of the artist. The style, like the Culture, is a prime phenomenon in the strictest Goethian sense, be it the style of art or religion or thought, or the style of life itself. It is, as "Nature" is, an ever-new experience of waking man, his alter ego and mirror-image in the world-around. And therefore in the general historical picture of a Culture there can be but one style, the style of the Culture. The error has lain in treating mere style-phases — Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, Empire — as if they were styles on the same level as units of quite another order such as the Egyptian, the Chinese (or even a prehistoric ' ') style. Gothic and Baroque are simply the youth and age of one and the same vessel of forms, the style of the West as ripening and ripened. What has been wanting in our art-research has been detachment, freedom from prepossessions, and the will to abstract. Saving ourselves trouble, we have classed any and every form-domain that makes a strong impression upon us as a "style," and it need hardly be said that our insight has been led astray still further by the Ancient-Mediasval-Modern scheme. But in reality, even a masterpiece of strictest Renaissance like the court of the Palazzo Farnese is infinitely nearer to the arcade-porch of St. Patroclus in Soest, the interior of the Magdeburg cathedral, and the staircases of South-German castles of the i8th Century than it is to the Temple of Passtum or to the Erechtheum. The same relation exists between Doric and Ionic, and hence Ionic columns can be as completely combined with Doric building forms as late Gothic is with early Baroque in St. Lorenz at Niirnberg, or late Romanesque with late Baroque in the beautiful upper part of the West choir at Mainz. And our eyes have scarcely yet learned to distinguish within the Egyptian style the Old King-

2.06 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

dom and Middle Empire elements corresponding to Doric and Gothic youth and to Ionic and Baroque maturity, because from the Twelfth Dynasty these elements interpenetrate in all harmony in the form-language of all the greater works.

The task before art-history is to write the comparative biographies of the great styles, all of which as organisms of the same genus possess structurally cognate life histories.

In the beginning there is the timid, despondent, naked expression of a newly-awakened soul which is still seeking for a relation between itself and the world that, though its proper creation, yet is presented as alien and un- friendly. There is the child's fearfulness in Bishop Bernward's building at Hildesheim, in the Early-Christian catacomb-painting, and in the pillar-halls of the Egyptian Fourth Dynasty. A February of art, a deep presentiment of a coming wealth of forms, an immense suppressed tension, lies over the land- scape that, still wholly rustic, is adorning itself with the first strongholds and townlets. Then follows the joyous mounting into the high Gothic, into the Constantinian age with its pillared basilicas and its domical churches, into the relief-ornament of the Fifth-Dynasty temple. Being is understood, a sacred form-language has been completely mastered and radiates its glory, and the Style ripens into a majestic symbolism of directional depth and of Destiny. But fervent youth comes to an end, and contradictions arise within the soul itself. The Renaissance, the Dionysiac-musical hostility to Apollinian Doric, the Byzantine of 450 that looks to Alexandria and away from the overjoyed art of Antioch, indicate a moment of resistance, of effective or ineffective impulse to destroy what has been acquired. It is very difficult to elucidate this moment, and an attempt to do so would be out of place here.

And now it is the manhood of the style-history that comes on. The Culture is changing into the intellectuality of the great cities that will now dominate the country-side, and pari passu the style is becoming intellectualized also. The grand symbolism withers; the riot of superhuman forms dies down; milder and more worldly arts drive out the great art of developed stone. Even in Egypt sculpture and fresco are emboldened to lighter movement. The artist appears, and "plans " what formerly grew out of the soil. Once more existence becomes self-conscious and now, detached from the land and the dream and the mystery, stands questioning, and wrestles for an expression of its new duty — as at the beginning of Baroque when Michelangelo, in wild discontent and kicking against the limitations of his art, piles up the dome of St. Peter's — in the age of Justinian I which built Hagia Sophia and the mosaic-decked domed basilicas of Ravenna — at the beginning of that Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt which the Greeks condensed under the name of Sesostris — and at the decisive epoch in Hellas (c. 600) whose architecture probably, nay certainly, expressed that which is echoed for us in its grandchild i^schylus.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 107

Then comes the gleaming autumn of the style. Once more the soul depipts its happiness, this time conscious of self-completion. The "return to Nature" which already thinkers and poets — Rousseau, Gorgias and their "contempo- raries" in the other Cultures — begin to feel and to proclaim, reveals itself in the form-world of the arts as a sensitive longing and pesentiment of the end. A perfectly clear intellect, joyous urbanity, the sorrow of a parting — these arc the colours of these last Culture-decades of which Talleyrand was to remark later: "Qui n'a pas vecu avant 1789 ne connait pas la douceur de vivre." So it was, too, with the free, sunny and superfine art of Egypt under Sesostris III (c. 1850 B.C.) and the brief moments of satiated happiness that produced the varied splendour of Pericles 's Acropolis and the works of Zeuxis and Phidias. A thousand years later again, in the age of the Ommaiyads, we meet it in the glad fairyland of Moorish architecture with its fragile col- umns and horseshoe arches that seem to melt into air in an iridescence of arabesques and stalactites. A thousand years more, and we see it in the music of Haydn and Mozart, in Dresden shepherdesses, in the pictures of Wat- teau and Guardi, and the works of German master-builders at Dresden, Potsdam, Wiirzburg and Vienna.

Then the style fades out. The form-language of the Erechtheum and the Dresden Zwinger, honeycombed with intellect, fragile, ready for self- destruction, is followed by the flat and senile Classicism that we find in the Hellenistic megalopolis, the Byzantium of 900 and the "Empire" modes of the North. The end is a sunset reflected in forms revived for a moment by pedant or by eclectic — semi-earnestness and doubtful genuineness dominate the world of the arts. We to-day are in this condition — playing a tedious game with dead forms to keep up the illusion of a living art.

IX

No one has yet perceived that Arabian art is a single phenomenon. It is an idea that can only take shape when we have ceased to be deceived by the crust which overlaid the young East with post-Classical art-exercises that, whether they were imitation-antique or chose their elements from proper or alien sources at will, were in any case long past all inward life; when we have discovered that Early Christian art, together with every really living element in "late- Roman," is in fact the springtime of the Arabian style; and when we see the epoch of Justinian I as exactly on a par with the Spanish- Venetian Baroque that ruled Europe in the great days of Charles V or Philip II, and the palaces of Byzantium and their magnificent battle-pictures and pageant-scenes — the van- ished glories that inspired the pens of courtly literati like Procopius — on a par with the palaces of early Baroque in Madrid, Vienna and Rome and the great decorative-painting of Rubens and Tintoretto. This Arabian style embraces the entire first millennium of our era. It thus stands at a critical position in

2.08 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the picture of a general history of "Art," and its organic connectedness has been imperceptible under the erroneous conventions thereof. ^

Strange and — if these studies have given us the eye for things latent — moving it is to see how this young Soul, held in bondage to the intellect of the Classical and, above all, to the political omnipotence of Rome, dares not rouse itself into freedom but humbly subjects itself to obsolete value-forms and tries to be content with Greek language, Greek ideas and Greek art-elements. De- vout acceptance of the powers of the strong day is present in every young Culture and is the sign of its youth — witness the humility of Gothic man in his pious high-arched spaces with their pillar-statuary and their light-filled pictures in glass, the high tension of the Egyptian soul in the midst of its world of pyramids, lotus-columns and relief-lined halls. But in this instance there is the additional element of an intellectual prostration before forms really dead but supposedly eternal. Yet in spite of all, the taking-over and continu- ance of these forms came to nothing. Involuntarily, unobserved, not supported by an inherent pride as Gothic was, but felt, there in Roman Syria, almost as a lamentable come-down, a whole new form-world grew up. Under a mask of Grasco-Roman conventions, it filled even Rome itself. The master-masons of the Pantheon and the Imperial Fora were Syrians. In no other example is the primitive force of a young soul so manifest as here, where it has to make its own world by sheer conquest.

In this as in every other Culture, Spring seeks to express its spirituality in a new ornamentation and, above all, in religious architecture as the sublime form of that ornamentation. But of all this rich form-world the only part that (till recently) has been taken into account has been the Western edge of it, which consequently has been assumed to be the true home and habitat of Magian style-history. In reality, in matters of style as in those of religion, science and social-political life, what we find there is only an irradiation from outside the Eastern border of the Empire. ^ Riegl ^ and Strzygowski * have discovered this, but if we are to go further and arrive at a conspectus of the development of Arabian art we have to shed many philological and religious prepossessions. The misfortune is that our art-research, although it no longer recognizes the religious frontiers, nevertheless unconsciously assumes them. For there is in reality no such thing as a Late-Classical nor an Early-Christian nor yet an Islamic art in the sense of an art proper to each of those faiths and evolved by the community of believers as such. On the contrary, the totality of these religions — from Armenia to Southern Arabia and Axum, and from Persia to Byzantium and Alexandria — possess a broad uniformity of artistic expression

1 Sec Vol. II, Chapter III. « See Vol. II, pp. 140 et seq.

• Sfilfragen, Grundlagt ZM 'intf Gescbichtt dtr Ornamtntik (1893). Spatromische Kunstindustric (1901). « Amida (1910). Die bildende Kurut dts Osttns (1916), Altai-Iran (1917). Die Baukunst der Amunier und Ettropa (1918).

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 109

that overrides the contradictions of detail.^ All these religions, the Christian, the Jewish, the Persian, the Manichasan, the Syncretic,^ possessed cult-buildings and (at any rate in their script) an Ornamentation of the first rank; and however different the items of their dogmas, they are all pervaded by an homogeneous religiousness and express it in a homogeneous symbolism of depth-experience. There is something in the basilicas of Christianity, Hellenistic, Hebrew and Baal-cults, and in the Mithrasum,^ the Mazdaist fire-temple and the Mosque, that tells of a like spirituality: it is the Cavem-iecling.

It becomes therefore the bounden duty of research to seek to establish the hitherto completely neglected architecture of the South-Arabian and Persian temple, the Syrian and the Mesopotamian synagogue, the cult-buildings of Eastern Asia Minor and even Abyssinia; ^ and in respect of Christianity to investigate no longer merely the Pauline West but also the Nestorian East that stretched from the Euphrates to China, where the old records significantly call its buildings ' ' Persian temples. ' ' If in all this building practically nothing has, so far, forced itself specially upon our notice, it is fair to suppose that both the advance of Christianity first and that of Islam later could change the religion of a place of worship without contradicting its plan and style. We know that this is the case with Late Classical temples : but how many of the churches in Armenia may once have been fire-temples?

The artistic centre of this Culture was very definitely — as Strzygowski has observed — in the triangle of cities Edessa, Nisibis, Amida. To the west- ward of it is the domain of the Late-Classical "Pseudomorphosis," ^ the Pauline Christianity that conquered in the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon,* Western Judaism and the cults of Syncretism. The architectural type of the Pseudo- morphosis^ both for Jew and Gentile, is the Basilica. It employs the means of the Classical to express the opposite thereof, and is unable to free itself from these means — that is the essence and the tragedy of "Pseudomorphosis." The more "Classical " Syncretism modifies a cult that is resident in a Euclidean place into one which is professed by a community of indefinite estate, the more the interior of the temple gains in importance over the exterior without needing to change either plan or roof or columns very much. The space-feeling is

1 These contradictions of detail are not greater, after all, than those between Doric, Attic and Etruscan art, and certainly less than those which existed about 1450 between Florentine Renaissance, North French, Spanish and East-German (brick) Gothic.

2 See Vol. II, pp. 304 et seq.

» For a brief description of the components of a Mithrasum, the student may be referred to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, XI Edition, art. Mithras (Section II). — Tr.

• The oldest Christian designs in the Empire of Axum undoubtedly agree with the pagan work

of the Sabaeans.

6 See Vol. II, pp. 2.43 et seq. 6 See Vol. II, pp. 316 et seq.

' Kohl & Watzinger, Antike Synagogtn in Galilda (1916). The Baal-shrines in Palmyra, Baalbek and many other localities are basilicas : some of them are older than Christianity and many of them were later taken over into Christian use.

no THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

different, but not — at first — the means of expressing it. In the pagan relig- ious architecture of the Imperial Age there is a perceptible — though never yet perceived — movement from the wholly corporeal Augustan temple, in which the cella is the architectural expression of nothingness^ to one in which the interior only possesses meaning. Finally the external picture of the Pcrip- teros of the Doric is transferred to the four inside walls. Columns ranked in front of a windowless wall are a denial of space beyond — that is, for the Classical beholder, of space within, and for the Magian, of space without. It is therefore a question of minor importance whether the entire space is covered in as in the Basilica proper, or only the sanctuary as in the Sun-temple of Baalbek with the great forecourt,^ which later becomes a standing element of the mosque and is probably of South Arabian origin. ^ That the Nave originates in a court surrounded by halls is suggested not only by the special development of the basilica-type in the East Syrian steppe (particularly Hauran) but also by the basic disposition of porch, nave and choir as stages leading to the altar — for the aisles (originally the side-halls of the court) end blind, and only the nave proper corresponds with the apse. This basic meaning is very evident in St. Paul at Rome, albeit the Pseudomorphosis (inversion of the Classical temple) dictated the technical means, viz., column and architrave. How sym- bolic is the Christian reconstruction of the Temple of Aphrodisias in Caria, in which the cella within the colunms is abolished and replaced by a new wall outside them.'

Outside the domain of the "Pseudomorphosis," on the contrary, the cavern- feeling was free to develop its own form-language, and here therefore it is the definite roof that is emphasized (whereas in the other domain the protest against the Classical feeling led merely to the development of an interior). When and where the various possibilities of dome, cupola, barrel-vaulting, rib-vaulting, came into existence as technical methods is, as we have already said, a matter of no significance. What is of decisive importance is the fact that about the time of Christ's birth and the rise of the new world-feeling, the new space- symbolism must have begun to make use of these forms and to develop them further in expressiveness. It will very likely come to be shown that the fire- temples and synagogues of Mesopotamia (and possibly also the temples of Athtar in Southern Arabia) were originally cupola-buildings.* Certainly the

• Fraubcrgcr, Dit Akropolis von Baalbek^ plate ii. (Sec Ency. Brit., XI Edition, art. " Baalbek,"

for plan, etc. — TV.)

• Diez, Die Kunst dtr islamischen Volker, pp. 8 et scq. In old Sabican temples the altar-court

(mahdar) is in front of the oracle chapel (makanat).

• WulfF, Altchristlicht und hyxantinische Kunst, p. xxj.

< Pliny records that this region was rich in temples. It is probable that the type of the transept- basilica — i.e., with the entrance in one of the long sides — which is found in Hauran and is dis- tinctly marked in the transverse direction of the altar space of St. Paul Without at Rome, is derived from a South Arabian archetype. (For the Hauran type of church see Ency. Brit., XI Ed., Vol. II, p. 390; and for St. Paul Without, Vol. Ill, p. 474. — Tr.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL iii

pagan mama-temple at Gaza was so, and long before Pauline Christianity took possession of these forms under Constantine, builders of Eastern origin had introduced them, as novelties to please the taste of the Megalopolitans, into all parts of the Roman Empire. In Rome itself, Apollodorus of Damascus was employed under Trajan for the vaulting of the temple of "Venus and Rome," and the domed chambers of the Baths of Caracalla and the so-called "Minerva Medica" of Gallienus's time were built by Syrians. But the masterpiece, the earliest of all Mosques y is the Pantheon as rebuilt by Hadrian. Here, without a doubt, the emperor was imitating, for the satisfaction of his own taste, cult-buildings that he had seen in the East.^

The architecture of the central-dome, in which the Magian world-feeling achieved its purest expression, extended beyond the limits of the Roman Em- pire. For the Nestorian Christianity that extended from Armenia even into China it was the only form, as it was also for the Manichseans and the Maz- daists, and it also impressed itself victoriously upon the Basilica of the West when the Pseudomorphosis began to crumble and the last cults of Syncretism to die out. In Southern France — where there were Manichasan sects even as late as the Crusades — the form of the East was domesticated. Under Justinian, the interpenetration of the two produced the domical basilica of Byzantium and Ravenna. The pure basilica was pushed into the Germanic West, there to be transformed by the energy of the Faustian depth-impulse into the cathedral. The domed basilica, again, spread from Byzantium and Armenia into Russia, where it came by slow degrees to be felt as an element of exterior architecture belonging to a symbolism concentrated in the roof. But in the Arabian world Islam, the heir of Monophysite and Nestorian Christianity and of the Jews and the Persians, carried the development through to the end. When it turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque it only resumed possession of an old property. Islamic domical building followed Mazdaist and Nestorian along the same tracks to Shan-tung and to India. Mosques grew up in the far West in Spain and Sicily, where, moreover, the style appears rather in its East-Aramsean- Persian than in its West-Aramsean-Syrian mode.^ And while Venice looked to Byzantium and Ravenna (St. Mark), the brilliant age of the Norman- Hohenstaufen rule in Palermo taught the cities of the Italian west coast, and even Florence, to admire and to imitate these Moorish buildings. More than

1 Neither technically nor in point of space-feeling has this piece of purely interior architecture any connexion whatever with Etruscan round-buildings. (Altmann, Die ital. Rundbaufen, 1906.) With the cupolas of Hadrian's Villa at Tibur (Tivoli), on the contrary, its affinity is evident.

2 Probably synagogues of domical type reached these regions, and also Morocco, long before Islam, through the missionary enterprise of Mesopotamian Judaism (see Vol. II, p. 2.53), which was closely allied in matters of taste to Persia. The Judaism of the Pseudomorphosis, on the contrary, built basilicas; its Roman catacombs show that artistically it was entirely on a par with Western Christianity. Of the two, it is the Judxo-Persian style coming from Spain that has become the pattern for the synagogues of the West — a point that has hitherto entirely escaped the notice of art-research.

Ill THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

one of the motives that the Renaissance thought were Classical — e.g., the court surrounded by halls and the union of column and arch — really origi- nated thus.

What is true as regards architecture is even more so as regards ornamenta- tion, which in the Arabian world very early overcame all figure-representation and swallowed it up in itself. Then, as "arabesque," it advanced to meet, to charm and to mislead the young art-intention of the West.

The early-Christian-Late-Classical art of the Pseudomorphosis shows the same ornament-plus-figure mixture of the inherited "alien" and the inborn "proper" as does the Carolingian-Early Romanesque of (especially) Southern France and Upper Italy. In the one case Hellenistic intermingles with Early-Magian, in the other Mauro-Byzantine with Faustian. The researcher has to examine line after line and ornament after ornament to detect the form-feeling which differentiates the one stratum from the other. In every architrave, in every frieze, there is to be found a secret battle between the conscious old and the unconscious, but victorious, new motives. One is confounded by this general interpenetration of the Late-Hellenistic and the Early-Arabian form- senses, as one sees it, for example, in Roman portrait-busts (here it is often only in the treatment of the hair that the new way of expression is manifested); in the acanthus-shoots which show — often on one and the same frieze — chisel-work and drill-work side by side; in the sarcophagi of the 3rd Century in which a childlike feeling of the Giotto and Pisano character is entangled with a certain late and megalopolitan Naturalism that reminds one more or less of David or Carstens; and in buildings such as the Basilica of Maxentius and many parts of the Baths and the Imperial Fora that are still very Classical in conception.

Nevertheless, the Arabian soul was cheated of its maturity — like a young tree that is hindered and stunted in its growth by a fallen old giant of the forest. Here there was no brillant instant felt and experienced as such, like that of ours in which, simultaneously with the Crusades, the wooden beams of the Cathedral roof locked themselves into rib-vaulting and an interior was made to actualize and fulfil the idea of infinite space. The political creation of Diocle- tian was shattered in its glory upon the fact that, standing as he did on Classical ground, he had to accept the whole mass of the administrative tradition of Urbs Roma; this sufficed to reduce his work to a mere reform of obsolete con- ditions. And yet he was the first of the Caliphs. With him, the idea of the Arabian State emerges clearly into the light. It is Diocletian's dispensation, together with that of the Sassanids which preceded it somewhat and served in all respects as its model, that gives us the first notion of the ideal that ought to have gone on to fulfilment here. But so it was in all things. To this very day wc admire as last creations of the Classical — because we cannot or will

• Generally called the " Basilica of G)nstantine." — Tr.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 2.13

not regard them otherwise — the thought of Plotinus and Marcus Aurelius, the cults of Isis, Mithras and the Sun-God, the Diophantine mathematics and, lastly, the whole of the art which streamed towards us from the Eastern marches of the Roman Empire and for which Antioch and Alexandria were merely points d'appui.

This alone is sufficient to explain the intense vehemence with which the Arabian Culture, when released at length from artistic as from other fetters, flung itself upon all the lands that had inwardly belonged to it for centuries past. It is the sign of a soul that feels itself in a hurry, that notes in fear the first symptoms of old age before it has had youth. This emancipation of Magian mankind is without a parallel. Syria is conquered, or rather delivered, in 634. Damascus falls in 637, Ctesiphon in 637. In 641 Egypt and India are reached, in 647 Carthage, in 676 Samarkand, in 710 Spain. And in 732. the Arabs stood before Paris. Into these few years was compressed the whole sum of saved-up passions, postponed hopes, reserved deeds, that in the slow maturing of other Cultures suffice to fill the history of centuries. The Crusaders before Jerusalem, the Hohenstaufen in Sicily, the Hansa in the Baltic, the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic East, the Spaniards in America, the Portuguese in the East Indies, the Empire of Charles V on which the sun never set, the beginnings of England's colonial power under Cromwell — the equivalent of all this was shot out in one discharge that carried the Arabs to Spain and France, India and Turkestan.

True, all Cultures (the Egyptian, the Mexican and the Chinese excepted) have grown up under the tutelage of some older Culture. Each of the form- worlds shows certain alien traits. Thus, the Faustian soul of the Gothic, already predisposed to reverence by the Arabian origin of Christianity, grasped at the treasures of Late-Arabian art. An unmistakably Southern, one might even say an Arabian, Gothic wove itself over the fagades of the Burgundian and Provencal cathedrals, dominated with a magic of stone the outward language of Strassburg Minster, and fought a silent battle in statues and porches, fabric- patterns, carvings and metalwork — and not less in the intricate figures of scho- lastic philosophy and in that intensely Western symbol, the Grail legend^ — with the Nordic prime-feeling of Viking Gothic that rules the interior of the Magdeburg Cathedral, the points of Freiburg Minster and the mysticism of Meister Eckart. More than once the pointed arch threatens to burst its re- straining line and to transform itself into the horseshoe arch of Moorish- Norman architecture.

So also the Apollinian art of the Doric spring — whose first efforts are practically lost to us — doubtless took over Egyptian elements to a very large extent, and by and through these came to its own proper symbolism.

^ The Grail legend contains, besides old Celtic, well-marked Arabian elements; but where Wolfram von Eschenbach goes beyond his model Chrestien de Troyes, his Parzival is entirely Faus- tian. (See articles Grail and Perceval, Ency. Brit., XI Ed. — Tr.

114 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

But the Magian soul of the Pseudomorphosis had not the courage to appro- priate alien means without yielding to them. And this is why the physiognomic of the Magian soul has still so much to disclose to the quester.

The idea of the Macrocosm, then, which presents itself in the style-problem as simplified and capable of treatment, poses a multitude of tasks for the future to tackle. To make the form-world of the arts available as a means of pene- trating the spirituality of entire Cultures — by handling it in a thoroughly physiognomic and symbolic spirit — is an undertaking that has not hitherto got beyond speculations of which the inadequacy is obvious. We are hardly as yet aware that there may be a psychology of the metaphysical bases of all great architectures. We have no idea what there is to discover in the change of meaning that a form of pure extension undergoes when it is taken over into another Culture. The history of the column has never yet been written, nor have we any notion of the deeply symbolic significances that reside in the means and the instruments of art.

Consider mosaic. In Hellenic times it was made up of pieces of marble, it was opaque and corporeal-Euclidean (e.g., the famous Battle of Issus at Naples), and it adorned the floor. But with the awakening of the Arabian soul it came to be built up of pieces of glass and set in fused gold, and it simply covered the walls and roofs of the domed basilica. This Early-Arabian Mosaic- picturing corresponds exactly, as to phase, with the glass-picturing of Gothic cathedrals, both being "early" arts ancillary to religious architectures. The one by letting in the light enlarges the church-space into world-space, while the other transforms it into the magic, gold-shimmering sphere which bears men away from earthly actuality into the visions of Plotinus, Origen, the Manichasans, the Gnostics and the Fathers, and the Apocalyptic poems.

Consider, again, the beautiful notion of uniting the round arch and the column; this again is a Syrian, if not a North- Arabian, creation of the third (or "high Gothic") century.^ The revolutionary importance of this motive, which is specifically Magian, has never in the least degree been recognized; on the con- trary, it has always been assumed to be Classical, and for most of us indeed it is even representatively Classical. The Egyptians ignored any deep relation between the roof and the column; the latter was for them a plant-column, and represented not stoutness but growth. Classical man, in his turn, for whom the monolithic column was the mightiest symbol of Euclidean existence — all body, all unity, all steadiness — connected it, in the strictest proportions of vertical and horizontal, of strength and load, with his architrave. But here,

• The relation of column and arch spiritually corresponds to that of wall and cupola, and the

interposition of the drum between the rectangle and the dome occurs "simultaneously" with that of the impost between the column and the arch.

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL 115

in this union of arch and column which the Renaissance in its tragicomic deludedness admired as expressly Classical (though it was a notion that the Classical neither possessed nor could possess), the bodily principle of load and inertia is rejected and the arch is made to spring clear and open out of the slender column. The idea actualized here is at once a liberation from all earth- gravity and a capture of space, and between this element and that of the dome which soars free but yet encloses the great "cavern," there is the deep relation of like meaning. The one and the other are eminently and powerfully Magian, and they come to their logical fulfilment in the ' ' Rococo * ' stage of Moorish mosques and castles, wherein ethereally delicate columns — often growing out of, rather than based on, the ground — seem to be empowered by some secret magic to carry a whole world of innumerable notched arcs, gleaming ornaments, stalactites, and vaultings saturated with colours. The full importance of this basic form of Arabian architecture may be expressed by saying that the com- bination of column and architrave is the Classical, that of column and round arch the Arabian, and that of pillar and pointed arch the Faustian Leitmotiv. Take, further, the history of the Acanthus motive.^ In the form in which it appears, for example, on the Monument of Lysicrates at Athens, it is one of the most distinctive in Classical ornamentation. It has body, it is and remains individual, and its structure is capable of being taken in at one glance. But already it appears heavier and richer in the ornament of the Imperial Fora (Nerva's, Trajan's) and that of the temple of Mars Ultor; the organic dis- position has become so complicated that, as a rule, it requires to be studied, and the tendency to fill up the surfaces appears. In Byzantine art — of which Riegl thirty years ago noticed the "latent Saracenic character" though he had no suspicion of the connexion brought to light here — the acanthus leaf was broken up into endless tendril-work which (as in Hagia Sophia) is disposed quite inorganically over whole surfaces. To the Classical motive are added the old-Aramasan vine and palm leaves, which have already played a part in Jewish ornamentation. The interlaced borders of "Late-Roman" mosaic pavements and sarcophagus-edges, and even geometrical plane-patterns are introduced, and finally, throughout the Persian-Anatolian world, mobility and bixarrerie culminate in the Arabesque. This is the genuine Magian motive — anti-plastic to the last degree, hostile to the pictorial and to the bodily alike. Itself bodi- less, it disembodies the object over which its endless richness of web is drawn. A masterpiece of this kind — a piece of architecture completely opened out into Ornamentation — is the fagade of the Castle of Mashetta in Moab built by the Ghassanids.^ The craft-art of Byzantine-Islamic style (hitherto called Lombard, Frankish, Celtic or Old-Nordic) which invaded the whole youthful

^ A. Riegl, Stilfragen (1893), pp. 148 et scq., iyi et scq.

2 The Ghassanid Kingdom flourished in the extreme North-west of Arabia dm-ing the sixth century of our reckoning. Its people were essentially Arab, and probably came from the south; and an outlying cousimy inhabited Medina in the time of the Prophet. — Tr.

xi6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

West and dominated the Carolingian Empire, was largely practised by Oriental craftsmen or imported as patterns for our own weavers, metal-workers and armourers.^ Ravenna, Lucca, Venice, Granada, Palermo were the efficient centres of this then highly-civilized form-language; in the year looo, when in the North the forms of a new Culture were already being developed and established, Italy was still entirely dominated by it.

Take, lastly, the changed point of view towards the human body. With the victory of the Arabian world-feeling, men's conception of it underwent a complete revolution. In almost every Roman head of the period 100-2.50 that the Vatican Collection contains, one may perceive the opposition of Apollinian and Magian feeling, and of muscular position and "look" as different bases of expression. Even in Rome itself, since Hadrian, the sculptor made constant use of the drill, an instrument which was wholly repugnant to the Euclidean feeling towards stone — for whereas the chisel brings out the limiting surfaces and ipso facto affirms the corporeal and material nature of the marble block, the drill, in breaking the surfaces and creating effects of light and shade, denies it; and accordingly the sculptors, be they Christian or "pagan," lose the old feeling for the phenomenon of the naked body. One has only to look at the shallow and empty Antinous statues — and yet these were quite definitely "Classical." Here it is only the head that is physiognomically of interest — as it never is in Attic sculpture. The drapery is given quite a new meaning, and simply dominates the whole appearance. The consul-statues in the Capi- tol ine Museum ^ are conspicuous examples. The pupils are bored, and the eyes look into the distance, so that the whole expression of the work lies no longer in its body but in that Magian principle of the " Pneuma" which Neo-Platonism and the decisions of the Church Councils, Mithraism and Mazdaism alike presume in man.

The pagan "Father" lamblichus, about 300, wrote a book concerning statues of gods in which the divine is substantially present and working upon the beholder.^ Against this idea of the image — an idea of the Pseudo- morphosis — the East and the South rose in a storm of iconoclasm; and the sources of this iconoclasm lay in a conception of artistic creation that is nearly impossible for us to understand.

• Dchio, Gesch. der deutschen Kunst, I, pp. 16 ct scq.

• WulfF, Altchristl.-byxant. Kunst, pp. 153 ct scq.

» Sec Vol. II, p. 315, Gcffckcn, Dtr Ausgang des griech-rom. Heidentums (1910), p. 113.

CHAPTER VII MUSIC AND PLASTIC

I

THE ARTS OF FORM

CHAPTER VII

MUSIC AND PLASTIC

I

THE ARTS OF FORM

The dearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of higher mankind has found for itself is (if we except the mathematical-scientific domain of presentation and the symbolism of its basic ideas) that of the arts of form,^ of which the number is legion. And with these arts we count musk in its many and very dissimilar kinds; had these been brought within the domain of art- historical research instead of being put in a class apart from that of the pictorial- plastic arts, we should have progressed very much further in our understanding of the import of this evolution towards an end. For the formative impulse that is at work in the wordless ^ arts can never be understood until we come to regard the distinction between optical and acoustic means as only a superficial one. To talk of thFarFof the eye and the art of the ear takes us no further. It is not such things that divide one art from another. Only the 19th Century could so over-estimate the influence of physiological conditions as to apply it to expression, conception or communion. A "singing ' ' picture of Claude Lorrain or of Watteau does not really address itself to the bodily eye any more than the space-straining music since Bach addresses itself to the bodily ear. The

^ Die bildenden Kunsfe. The expression is a standard one in German, but unfamiliar in English. Ordinarily, however, "die bildenden Kiinste" (shaping arts, arts of form) are contrasted with " die redenden Kiinste " (speaking arts) — music, as giving utterance rather than spatial form to things, being counted among the latter. — Tr.

• As soon as the word, which is a transmission-agent of the understanding, comes to be used as

the expression-agent of an art, the waking consciousness ceases to express or to take in a thing integrally. Not to mention the read word of higher Cultures — the medium of literature proper — > even the spoken word, when used in any artificial sense, separates hearing from understanding, for the ordinary meaning of the word also takes a hand in the process and, as this art grows in power, the wordless arts themselves arrive at expression-methods in which the motives are joined to word- meanings. Thus arises the Allegory, or motive that signifies a word, as in Baroque sculpture after Bernini. So, too, painting very often develops into a sort of painting-writing, as in Byzantium after the second Niccne Council (787) which took from the artist his freedom of choice and arrangement. This also is what distinguishes the arias of Gluck, in which the melody grew up out of the meaning of the libretto, from those of Alessandro Scarlatti, in which the texts arc in themselves of no sig- nificance and mostly serve to carry the voices. The high-Gothic counterpoint of the 13th Cen- tury is entirely free from any connexion with words : it is a pure architecture of human voices in which several texts, Latin and vernacular, sacred and secular, were sung together.

119

i2x> THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Classical relation between art-work and sense-organ — of which we so often and so erroneously remind ourselves here — is something quite different from, something far simpler and more material than ours. We read "Othello" and "Faust" and we study orchestral scores — that is, we change one sense-agency for another in order to let the undiluted spirit of these works take effect upon us. Here there is always an appeal from the outer senses to the "inner," to the truly Faustian and wholly un-Classical power of imagination. Only thus can we understand Shakespeare's ceaseless change of scene as against the Clas- sical unity of place. In extreme cases indeed, for instance in that of "Faust" itself, no representation of the work (that is, of its full content) is physically possible. But in music too — in the unaccompanied "A capella" of the Pales- trina style as well as a fortiori in the Passions of Heinrich Schiitz, in the fugues of Bach, in the last quartets of Beethoven, and in "Tristan" — we livingly experience behind the sensuous impressions a whole world of others. And it is only through these latter that all the fullness and depth of the work begins to be present to us, and it is only mediately — through the images of blond, brown, dusky and golden colours, of sunsets and distant ranked mountain- summits, of storms and spring landscapes, of foundered cities and strange faces which harmony conjures up for us — that it tells us something of itself. It is not an incident that Beethoven wrote his last works when he was deaf — deafness merely released him from the last fetters. For this music, sight and hearing equally are bridges into the soul and nothing more. To the Greek this visionary kind of artistic enjoyment was utterly alien. He jelt the marble with his eye, and the thick tones of an aulos moved him almost corporally. For him, eye and ear are the receivers of the whole of the impression that he wished to receive. But for us this had ceased to be true even at the stage of Gothic.

In the actual, tones are something extended, limited and numerable just as lines and colours are; harmony, melody, rhyme and rhythm no less so than perspective, proportion, chiaroscuro and outline. The distance separating two kinds of painting can be infinitely greater than that separating the painting and the music of a period. Considered in relation to a statue of Myron, the art of a Poussin landscape is the same as that of a contemporary chamber- cantata; that of Rembrandt as that of the organ works of Buxtehude, Pachelbel and Bach; that of Guardi as that of the Mozart opera — the /««^r form-language is so nearly identical that the difference between optical and acoustic means is negligible.

The importance which the "science of art" has always attached to a time- less and conceptual delimitation of the individual art-spheres only proves that the fundamentals of the problem have not been attacked. Arts are living units, and the living is incapable of being dissected. The first act of the learned pedant has always been to partition the infinitely wide domain into provinces

THE ARTS OF FORM 2.2.1

determined by perfectly superficial criteria of medium and technique and to endow these provinces with eternal validity and immutable (!) form-principles. Thus he separated "Music" and "Painting," "Music" and "Drama," "Paint- ing ' ' and ' ' Sculpture. ' ' And then he proceeded to define ' ' the ' * art of Painting, "the" art of Sculpture, and so on. But in fact the technical form-language is no more than the mask of the real work. Style is not what the shallow Semper — worthy contemporary of Darwin and materialism — supposed it to be, the product of material, technique, and purpose. It is the very opposite of this, something inaccessible to art-reason, a revelation of the metaphysical order, a mysterious "must," a Destiny. With the material boundaries of the different arts it has ho concern whatever.

To classify the arts according to the character of the sense-impression, then, is to pervert the problem of form in its very enunciation. For how is it possible to predicate a genus ' ' Sculpture " of so general a character as to admit of general laws being evolved from it? What is ' ' Sculpture?

Take painting again. There is no such thing as "the*' art of Painting, and anyone who compares a drawing of Raphael, effected by outline, with one of Titian, effected by flecks of light and shade, without feeling that they belong to two different arts; any one who does not realize a dissimilarity of essence between the works of Giotto or Mantegna — relief, created by brush- stroke — and those of Vermeer or Goya — music, created on coloured canvas — such a one will never grasp the deeper questions. As for the frescoes of Polyg- notus and the mosaics of Ravenna, there is not even the similarity of technical means to bring them within the alleged genus, and what is there in common between an etching and the art of Fra Angelico, or a proto-Corinthian vase- painting and a Gothic cathedral-window, or the reliefs of Egypt and those of the Parthenon?

If an art has boundaries at all — boundaries of its soul-become-form — they | ,^ art historical and not technical or physiological boundaries.^ An art is an j 1^1 c^ organism, not a system. There is no art-genus that runs through all the cen- ^

turies and all the Cultures. Even where (as in the case of the Renaissance) supposed technical traditions momentarily deceive us into a belief in the eternal validity of antique art-laws, there is at bottom entire discrepance. There is nothing in Greek and Roman art that stands in any relation whatever to the form-language of a Donatello statue or a painting of Signorelli or a fagade of Michelangelo. Inwardly, the Quattrocento is related to the contemporary Gothic and to nothing else. The fact of the archaic Greek Apollo-type being influenced" by Egyptian portraiture, or early Tuscan representation by Etrus-

• Our pedantic method has given us an art-history that excludes music-history; and while the

one has become a normal clement of higher education, the other has remained an affair solely for the expert. It is just as though one tried to write a history of Greece without taking Sparta into account. The result is a theory of "Arc" that is a pious fraud.

212L THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

can tomb-painting, implies precisely what is implied by that of Bach's writing a fugue upon an alien theme — he shows what he can express with it. Every individual art — Chinese landscape or Egyptian plastic or Gothic counterpoint — is once existent^ and departs with its soul and its symbolism never to return.

With this, the notion of Form opens out immensely. Not only the tech- nical instrument, not only the form-language, but also the choice of art-genus itself is seen to be an expression-means. What the creation of a masterpiece means for an individual artist — the "Night Watch" for Rembrandt or the " Meistersinger " for Wagner — that the creation of a species of art, compre- hended as such, means for the life-history of a Culture. It is epochal. Apart from the merest externals, each such art is an individual organism without predecessor or successor. Its theory, technique and convention all belong to its character, and contain nothing of eternal or universal validity. When one of these arts is born, when it is spent, whether it dies or is transmuted into another, why this or that art is dominant in or absent from a particular Culture — all these are questions of Form in the highest sense, just as is that other question of why individual painters and musicians unconsciously avoid certain shades and harmonies or, on the contrary, show preferences so marked that authorship-attributions can be based on them.

The importance of these groups of questions has not yet been recognized by theory, even by that of the present day. And yet it is precisely from this side, the side of their physiognomic, that the arts are accessible to the under- standing. Hitherto it has been supposed — without the slightest examination of the weighty questions that the supposition involves — that the several "arts" specified in the conventional classification-scheme (the validity of which is assumed) are all possible at all times and places, and the absence of one or another of them in particular cases is attributed to the accidental lack of creative personalities or impelling circumstances or discriminating patrons to guide "art" on its "way." Here we have what I call a transference of the causality-principle from the world of the become to that of the becoming. Having no eye for the perfectly different logic and necessity of the Living, for Destiny and the inevitableness and unique occurrence of its expression-possibilities, men had recourse to tangible and obvious "causes" for the building of their art-history, which thus came to consist of a series of events of only superficial concordance.

I have already, in the earliest pages of this work, exposed the shallowness of the notion of a linear progression of "mankind" through the stages of "ancient," "mediaeval" and "modern," a notion that has made us blind to the true history and structure of higher Cultures. The history of art is a con- spicuous case in point. Having assumed as self-evident the existence of a

THE ARTS OF FORM 113

number of constant and well-defined provinces of art, one proceeded to order the history of these several provinces according to the — equally self-evident — scheme of ancient-mediasval-modern, to the exclusion, of course, of Indian and East-Asiatic art, of the art of Axum and Saba, of the Sassanids and of Russia, which if not omitted altogether were at best relegated to appendices. It occurred to no one that such results argued unsoundness in the method; the scheme was there, demanded facts, and must at any price be fed with them. And so a futile up-and-down course was stolidly traced out. Static times were described as "natural pauses," it was called "decline" when some great art in reality died, and "renaissance" where an eye really free from prepossessions would have seen another art being born in another landscape to express another humanity. Even to-day we are still taught that the Renaissance was a rebirth of the Classical. And the conclusion was drawn that it is possible and right to take up arts that are found weak or even dead (in this respect the present is a veritable battle-field) and set them going again by conscious reformation- program or forced "revival."

And yet it is precisely in this problem of the end, the impressively sudden end, of a great art — the end of the Attic drama in Euripides, of Florentine sculpture with Michelangelo, of instrumental music in Liszt, Wagner and Bruckner — that the organic character of these arts is most evident. If we look closely enough we shall have no difficulty in convincing ourselves that no one art of any greatness has ever been "reborn."

Of the Pyramid style nothing passed over into the Doric. Nothing connects the Classical temple with the basilica of the Middle East, for the mere taking over of the Classical column as a structural member, though to a superficial observer it seems a fact of the first importance, weighs no more in reality than Goethe's employment of the old mythology in the "Classical Walpurgis Night" scene of "Faust." To believe genuinely in a rebirth of Classical art, or any Classical art, in the Western 15th Century requires a rare stretch of the imagination. And that a great art may die not merely with the Culture but within it, we may see from the fate of music in the Classical world. ^ Possibili- ties of great music there must have been in the Doric springtime — how other- wise can we account for the importance of old-fashioned Sparta in the eyes of such musicians as there were later (for Terpander, Thaletas and Alcman were effective there when elsewhere the statuary art was merely infantile)? — and yet the Late-Classical world refrained. In just the same fashion everything that the Magian Culture had attempted in the way of frontal portraiture, deep relief and mosaic finally succumbed before the Arabesque; and everything of the plastic that had sprung up in the shade of Gothic cathedrals at Chartres, Reims, Bamberg, Naumburg, in the Niirnberg of Peter Vischer and the Florence of

^ This sentence is not in the original. It has been inserted, and the following sentence modified, for the sake of clarity. — Tr.

234 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Verrocchio, vanished before the oil-painting of Venice and the instrumental music of the Baroque.

Ill

The temple of Poseidon at Pa:stum and the Minster of Ulm, works of the ripest Doric and the ripest Gothic, differ precisely as the Euclidean geometry of bodily bounding-surfaces differs from the analytical geometry of the position of points in space referred to spatial axes. All Classical building begins from the outside, all Western from the inside. The Arabian also begins with the inside, but it stays there. There is one and only one soul, the Faustian, that craves for a style which drives through walls into the limitless universe of space and makes both the exterior and the interior of the building complemen- tary images of one and the same world-feeling. The exterior of the basilica and the domical building may be a field for ornamentation, but architecture it is not. The impression that meets the beholder as he approaches is that of some- thing shielding, something that hides a secret. The form-language in the cavern-twilight exists for the faithful only — that is the factor common to the highest examples of the style and to the simplest Mithrasa and Catacombs, the prime powerful utterance of a new soul. Now, as soon as the Germanic spirit takes possession of the basilical type, there begins a wondrous mutation of all structural parts, as to both position and significance. Here in the Faus- tian North the outer form of the building, be it cathedral or mere dwelling- house, begins to be brought into relation with the meaning that governs the arrangement of the interior, a meaning undisclosed in the mosque and non- existent in the temple. The Faustian building has a visage and not merely a facade (whereas the front of a peripteros is, after all, only one of four sides and the centre-domed building in principle has not even a front) and with this visage, this head, is associated an articulated trunk that draws itself out through the broad plain like the cathedral at Speyer, or erects itself to the heavens like the innumerable spires of the original design of Reims. The motive of the fagade, which greets the beholder and tells him the inner meaning of the house, dominates not only individual major buildings but also the whole aspect of our streets, squares and towns with their characteristic wealth of windows.*

The great architecture of the early period is ever the mother of all following arts; it determines the choice of them and the spirit of them. Accordingly, we find that the history of the Classical shaping art is one untiring effort to ac- complish one single ideal, viz., the conquest of the free-standing human body

^ Sec Vol. II, p. no. The aspect of the streets of Old Egypt may have been very similar to this, if we can draw conclusions from tessera: discovered in Cnossus (see H. Bossert, Alt Krefa (1911), T. 14). And the Pylon is an undoubted and genuine facade. (Such tessera:, bearing pictures of win- dowed houses, arc illustrated in Art. " /Egean Civilizafion," Ency. Brit., XI Edition, Vol. I, p. 151, plate IV, fig. I. — Tr.).

THE ARTS OF FORM 115

as the vessel of the pure real present. The temple of the naked body was t,o it what the cathedral of voices was to the Faustian from earliest counterpoint to the orchestral writing of the i8th Century. We have failed hitherto to understand the emotional force of this secular tendency of the Apollinian, because we have not felt how the purely material, soulless body (for the Temple of the Body, too, has no "interior "!)is the object 'which archaic relief, Corinthian painting on clay, and Attic fresco were all striving to obtain until Polycletus and Phidias showed how to achieve it in full. We have, with a wonderful blindness, assumed this kind of sculpture as both authoritative and universally possible, as in fact, "the art of sculpture." We have written its history as one concerned with all peoples and periods, and even to-day our sculptors, under the influence of unproved Renaissance doctrines, speak of the naked human body as the noblest and most genuine object of "the" art of sculpture. Yet in reality this statue-art, the art of the naked body standing free upon its footing and appreciable from all sides alike, existed in the Classical and the Classical only, for it was that Culture alone which quite decisively refused to transcend sense-limits in favour of space. The Egyptian statue is always meant to be seen from the front — it is a variant of plane-relief. And the seemingly Classically-conceived statues of the Renais- sance (we are astounded, as soon as it occurs to us to count them, to find how few of them there are ^^ nothing but a semi-Gothic reminiscence.

The evolution of this rigorously non-spatial art occupies the three centuries from 650 to 350, a period extending from the completion of the Doric and the simultaneous appearance of a tendency to free the figures from the Egyptian limitation of frontalness ^ to the coming of the Hellenistic and its illusion- painting which closed-ofF the grand style. This sculpture will never be rightly appreciated until it is regarded as the last and highest Classical, as springing from a plane art, first obeying and then overcoming the fresco. No doubt the technical origin can be traced to experiments in figure-wise treatment of the pristine column, or the plates that served to cover the temple wall,^ and no doubt there are here and there imitations of Egyptian works (seated figures of Miletus), although very few Greek artists can ever have seen one.'* But as a form-ideal the statue goes back through relief to the archaic clay-painting in which fresco also originated. Relief, like fresco, is tied to the bodily wall. All this sculpture right down to Myron may be considered as relief detached from the

^ Ghiberti has not outgrown the Gothic, nor has even Donatello; and already in Michelangelo the feeling is Baroque, i.e., musical.

• The struggle to fix the problem is visible in the series of "Apollo-figures." See Deonna, Les

Apo lions archaiques (1909).

• Woermann, Geschkhte der Kunsf, I (191 5), p. 136. The first tendency is seen in the

Samian Hera of Cheramues and the persistent turning of columns into caryatids; the second in the Delian figure dedicated to Artemis by Nicandra, with its relation to the oldest metope- technique.

• Miletus was in a particular relation with Egypt through Naucratis. — Tr.

12.6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

plane. In the end, the figure is treated as a self-contained body apart from the mass of the building, but it remains essentially a silhouette in front of a wall.' Direction in depth is excluded, and the work is spread out frontally before the beholder. Even the Marsyas of Myron can be copied upon vases or coins without much trouble or appreciable foreshortenings.^ Consequently, of the two major "late" arts after 650, fresco definitely has the priority. The small stock of types is always to be found first in vase-figuring, which is often exactly par- alleled by quite late sculptures. We know that the Centaur group of the West pediment at Olympia was worked out from a painting. On the ^gina temple, the advance from the West to the East pediment is an advance from the fresco- character to the body-character. The change is completed about 460 with Polycletus, and thenceforward plastic groups become the model for strict paint- ing. But it is from Lysippus that the wholly cubic and "all-ways" treatment becomes thoroughly veristic and yields "fact." Till then, even in the case of Praxiteles, we have still a lateral or planar development of the subject, with a clear outline that is only fully effective in respect of one or two standpoints. But an undeviating testimony to the picture-origin of independent sculpture is the practice of polychroming the marble — a practice unknown to the Renais- sance and to Classicism, which would have felt it as barbaric ' — and we may say the same of the gold-and-ivory statuary and the enamel overlaying of bronze, a metal which already possesses a shining golden tone of its own.

rv

The corresponding stage of Western art occupies the three centuries 1500- 1800, between the end of late Gothic and the decay of Rococo which marks the end of the great Faustian style. In this period, conformably to the persistent growth into consciousness of the will to spatial transcendence, it is instrumental music that develops into the ruling art. At the beginning, in the 17th Century, music uses the characteristic tone-colours of the instruments, and the contrasts of strings and wind, human voices and instrumental voices, as means where- with to faint. Its (quite unconscious) ambition is to parallel the great masters from Titian to Velasquez and Rembrandt. It makes pictures (in the sonata from Gabrieli [d. 1611] to Corelli [d. 1713] every movement shows a theme embellished with graces and set upon the background of a basso continuo), paints heroic landscapes (in the pastoral cantata), and draws a portrait in lines of melody (in Monteverde's "Lament of Ariadne," 1608). With the German masters, all this goes. Painting can take music no further. Music becomes itself absolute: it is music that (quite unconsciously again) dominates

• Most of the works arc pcdimcnt-groups or metopes. But even the Apollo-figures and the

"Maidens" of the Acropolis could not have stood free.

« V. Salis, Yjtnst der Griechcn (1919), pp. 47, 98 et seq.

• The decisive preference of the white stone is itself significant of the opposition of Renaissance

to Classical feeling.

THE ARTS OF FORM ill-j

both painting and architecture in the i8th Century. And, ever more and more decisively, sculpture fades out from among the deeper possibilities of this form-world.

What distinguishes painting as it was before, from painting as ix. was after, the shift from Florence to Venice — or, to put it more definitely, what sepa- rates the painting of Raphael and that of Titian as two entirely distinct arts — is that the plastic spirit of the one associates painting with relief, while the musical spirit of the other works in a technique of visible brush-strokes and atmospheric depth-effects that is akin to the chromatic of string and wind choruses. It is an opposition and not a transition that we have before us, and the recognition of the fact is vital to our understanding of the organism of these arts. Here, if anywhere, we have to guard against the abstract hypothesis of "eternal art-laws." "Painting" is a mere word. Gothic glass-painting was an element of Gothic architecture, the servant of its strict symbolism just as the Egyptian and the Arabian and every other art in this stage was the servant of the stone-language. Draped figures were built up as cathedrals were. Their folds were an ornamentation of extreme sincerity and severe expressiveness. To criticize their "stiffness" from a naturalistic-imitative point of view is to miss the point entirely.

Similarly "music" is a mere word. Some music there has been everywhere and always, even before any genuine Culture, even among the beasts. But the serious music of the Classical was nothing but a plastic for the ear. The tetra- chords, chromatic and enharmonic, have a structural and not a harmonic meaning: ^ but this is the very difference between body and space. This music was single-voiced. The few instruments that it employed were all developed in respect of capacity for tone-plastic; and naturally therefore it rejected the Egyptian harp, an instrument that was probably akin in tone-colour to the harpischord. But, above all, the melody — like Classical verse from Homer to Hadrian's time — was treated quantitatively and not accentually; that is, the syllables, their bodies and their extent, decided the rhythm. The few frag- ments that remain suffice to show us that the sensuous charm of this art is something outside our comprehension; but this very fact should cause us also

• All Greek scales are capable of reduction to "tetrachords" or four-note scales of which the

form E — note — note — A is typical. In the diatonic the unspecified inner notes are F, G; in the chromatic they are F, F sharp; and in the enharmonic they are E half-sharp, F. Thus, the chromatic and enharmonic scales do not provide additional notes as the modern chromatic does, but simply displace the inner members of the scale downwards, altering the proportionate distances between the same given total. In Faustian music, on the contrary, the meaning of "enharmonic" is simply relational. It is applied to a change, say from A flat to G sharp. The difference between these two is not a quarter-tone but a "very small" interval (theory and practice do not even agree as to which note is the higher, and in tempered instruments with standardized scales the physical difference is eliminated altogether). While a note is being sounded, even without any physical change in it, its harmonic co-ordinates (i.e., substantially, the key of the harmony) may alter, so that hcQceforth the note, from A flat, has become G sharp. — Tr.

ii8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

to reconsider our ideas as to the impressions purposed and achieved by the statuary and the fresco, for we do not and cannot experience the charm that these exercised upon the Greek eye.

Equally incomprehensible to us is Chinese music: in which, according to educated Chinese, wc arc never able to distinguish gay from grave. ^ Vice versa, to the Chinese all the music of the West without distinction is march- music. Such is the impression that the rhythmic dynamic of our life makes upon the accentless Tao of the Chinese soul, and, indeed, the impression that our entire Culture makes upon an alien humanity — the directional energy of our church-naves and our storey ed fagades, the depth-perspectives of our pictures, the march of our tragedy and narrative, not to mention our technics and the whole course of our private and public life. We ourselves have accent in our blood and therefore do not notice it. But when our rhythm is juxtaposed with that of an alien life, we find t]^ discordance intolerable.

Arabian music, again, is^uite another world. Hitherto we have only observed it through the medium of the Pseudomorphosis, as represented by Byzantine hymns and Jewish psalmody, and even these we know only in so far as they have penetrated to the churches of the far West as antiphons, re- sponsorial psalmody and Ambrosian chants. ^ But it is self-evident that not only the religious west of Edessa (the syncretic cults, especially Syrian sun- worship, the Gnostic and the Manda:an) but also those to the east (Mazdaists, Manichasans, Mithraists, the synagogues of Irak and in due course the Nesto- rian Christians) must have possessed a sacred music of the same style; that side by side with this a gay secular music developed (above all, amongst the South- Arabian and Sassanid chivalry 0; and that both found their culmination in the Moorish style that reigned from Spain to Persia.

Out of all this wealth, the Faustian soul borrowed only some few church- forms and, moreover, in borrowing them, it instantly transformed them root and branch (loth Century, Hucbald, Guido d'Arezzo). Melodic accent and beat produced the "march," and polyphony (like the rime of contemporary poetry) the image of endless space. To understand this, we have to distinguish between the i mitative ^ and the or namental sides of music, and although owing to the fleeting nature of all tone-creations ^ our knowledge is limited to the musical history of our own West, yet this is quite sufficient to reveal that duality of development which is one of the master-keys of all art-history.

' In the same way the whole of Russian music appears to us infinitely mournful, but real Rus- sians assure us that it is not at all so for themselves.

' See articles under these headings in Grove's "Dictionary of Music." — Tr.

» See Vol. II, p. i}8.

• In Baroque music the word "imitation" means something quite different from this, viz.,

the exact repetition of a motive in a new colouring (starting from a different note of the scale).

6 For all that survives performance is the notes, and these speak only to one who still knows and can manage the tone and technique of the expression-means appropriate to them.

THE ARTS OF FORM

119

The one is soul, landscape, feeling, the other strict form, style, school. West Europe has an ornamental music of the grand style (corresponding to the full plastic of the Classical) which is associated with the architectural history of the cathedral, which is closely akin to Scholasticism and Mysticism, and which finds its laws in the motherland of high Gothic between Seine and Scheldt. Counterpoint developed simultaneously with the flying-buttress system, and its source was the "Romanesque" style of the Fauxbourdon and the Discant with their simple parallel and contrary motion.^ It is an architecture of human voices and, like the statuary-group and the glass-paintings, is only conceivable in the setting of these stone vaultings. With them it is a high art of space, of that space to which Nicolas of Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux, gave mathematical meaning by the introduction of co-ordinates.^ This is the genuine "rinascita" and "reformatio" as Joachim of Floris saw it at the end of the izth Century ^ — the birth of a new soul mirrored in the form^nguage of a new art.

Along with this there came into being in caSle and village a secular imita- tive music, that of troubadours, Minnesanger and minstrels. As "ars nova" this travelled from the courts of Provence to the palaces of Tuscan patricians about 1300, the time of Dante and Petrarch. It consisted of simple melodies that appealed to the heart with their major and minor, of canzoni, madrigals and caccias, and it included also a type of galante operetta (Adam de la Hale's "Robin and Marion"). After 1400, these forms give rise to forms of collec- tive singing — the rondeau and the ballade. All this is "art" for a public* Scenes are painted from life, scenes of love, hunting, chivalry. The point of it is in the melodic inventiveness, instead of in the symbolism of its linear progress.

Thus, musically as otherwise, the castle and the cathedral are distinct. The cathedral is music and the castle makes music. The one begins with theory, the other with impromptu: it is the distinction between waking consciousness and living existence, between the spiritual and the knightly singer. Imitation stands nearest to life and direction and therefore begins with melody, while the symbolism of counterpoint belongs to extension and through polyphony signifies infinite space. The result was, on the one side, a store of "eternal" rules and, on the other, an inexhaustible fund of folk-melodies on which even the 1 8th Century was still drawing. The same contrast reveals itself, artisti- cally, in the c/^jj-opposition of Renaissance and Reformation.^ The courtly taste of Florence was antipathetic to the spirit of counterpoint; the evolution

^ Sec articles Fauxbourdon, Discant and Gimel in Grove's "Dictionary of Music." — Tr.

• Note that Oresme was a contemporary of Machault and Philippe de Vitry, in whose generation

the rules and prohibitions of strict counterpoint were definitively established.

' See p. 19 and Vol. II, p. 357.

• Even the first great troubadour, Guilhem of Poitiers, though a reigning sovereign, made it his

ambition to be regarded as a "professional," as we should say. — Tr.

6 See also Vol. II, p. 365.

2.30 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

of strict musical form from the Motet to the four-voice Mass through Dun- staple, Binchois and Dufay (c. 1430) proceeded wholly within the magic circle of Gothic architecture. From Fra Angelico to Michelangelo the great Nether- landers ruled alone in ornamental music. Lorenzo de* Medici found no one in Florence who understood the strict style, and had to send for Dufay. And while in this region Leonardo and Raphael were painting, in the north Okeghem (d. 1495) ^^^ ^is school and Josquin des Pres (d. 1511) brought the formal polyphony of human voices to the height of fulfilment.

The transition into the "Late" age was heralded in Rome and Venice. With Baroque the leadership in music passes to Italy. But at the same time architecture ceases to be the ruling art and there is formed a group of Faustian special-arts in which oil-painting occupies the central place. About 1560 the empire of the human voice comes to an end in the a cappella style of Pales- trina and Orlando Lasso (both d. 1594). Its powers could no longer express the passionate drive into the infinite, and it made way for the chorus of in- struments, wind and string. And thereupon Venice produced Titian-music, the new madrigal that in its flow and ebb follows the sense of the text. The music of the Gothic is architectural and vocal, that of the Baroque pictorial and instrumental. The one builds, the other operates by means of motives. For all the arts have become urban and therefore secular. We pass from super- personal Form to the personal expression of the Master, and shortly before 1600 Italy produces the basso continuo which requires virtuosi and not pious participants.

Thenceforward, the great task was to extend the tone-corpus into the infinity, or rather to resolve it into an infinite space of tone. Gothic had developed the instruments into families of definite timbre. But the new-born ' ' orchestra ' ' no longer observes limitations imposed by the human voice, but treats it as a voice to be combined with other voices — at the same moment as our mathe- matic proceeds from the geometrical analysis of Fermat to the purely functional analysis of Descartes.^ In Zarlino's "Harmony" OSS^) appears a genuine perspective of pure tonal space. We begin to distinguish between ornamental and fundamental instruments. Melody and embellishment join to produce the Motive, and this in development leads to the rebirth of counterpoint in the form of the fugal style, of which Frescobaldi was the first master and Bach the culmination. To the vocal masses and motets the Baroque opposes its grand, orchestrally-conceived forms of the oratorio (Carissimi), the cantata (Viadana) and the opera (Monteverde). Whether a bass melody be set against upper voices, or upper voices be concerted against one another upon a background of basso continuo^ always sound-worlds of characteristic expres- sion-quality work reciprocally upon one another in the infinity of tonal space, supporting, intensifying, raising, illuminating, threatening, overshadowing —

» Sec p. 74.

THE ARTS OF FORM 131

a music all of interplay, scarcely intelligible save through ideas of contempo- rary Analysis.

From out of these forms of the early Baroque there proceeded, in the 17th Century, the sonata-like forms of suite, symphony and concerto grosso. The inner structure and the sequence of movements, the thematic working-out and modulation became more and more firmly established. And thus was reached the great, immensely dynamic, form in which music — now completely bodiless — was raised by Corelli and Handel and Bach to be the ruling art of the West. When Newton and Leibniz, about 1670, discovered the Infinitesimal Calculus, the fugal style was fulfilled. And when, about 1740, Euler began the definitive formulation of functional Analysis, Stamitz and his generation were discover- ing the last and ripest form of musical ornamentation, the four-part movement ^ as vehicle of pure and unlimited motion. For, at that time, there was still this one step to be taken. The theme of the fugue "is," that of the new sonata- movement "becomes," and the issue of its working out is in the one case a picture, in the other a drama. Instead of a series of pictures we get a cyclic succession, 2 and the real source of this tone-language was in the possibilities, realized at last, of our deepest and most intimate kind of music — the music of the strings. Certain it is that the violin is the noblest of all instruments that the Faustian soul has imagined and trained for the expression of its last secrets, and certain it is, too, that it is in string quartets and violin sonatas that it has experienced its most transcendent and most holy moments of full illumination. Here, in chamber-music. Western art as a whole reaches its highest point. Here our prime symbol of endless space is expressed as completely as the Spearman of Polycletus expresses that of intense bodiliness. When one of those ineffably yearning violin-melodies wanders through the spaces expanded around it by the orchestration of Tartini or Nardini, Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven, we know ourselves in the presence of an art beside which that of the Acropolis is alone worthy to be set.

With this, the Faustian music becomes dominant among the Faustian arts. It banishes the plastic of the statue and tolerates only the minor art — an entirely musical, refined, un-Classical and counter-Renaissance art — of porcelain, which (as a discovery of the West) is contemporary with the rise of chamber-music to full effectiveness. Whereas the statuary of Gothic is through-and-through architectural ornamentation, human espalier-work, that of the Rococo re- markably exemplifies the pseudo-plastic that results from entire subjection to the form-language of music, and shows to what a degree the technique govern-

• A movement in sonata form consists essentially of (a) First Subject; (J>) Second Subject (in an

allied key); (c) Working-out, or free development of the themes grouped under (a) and (F); and (JP) Recapitulation, in which the two subjects are repeated in the key of the tonic.

The English usage is to consider (a) and Q>) with the bridge or modulation connecting them, to- gether as the "Exposition," and the form is consequtntly designated "three-part." — Tr.

• Einstein, Gesch. der Musik, p. 6y.

131 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

ing the presented foreground can be in contradiction with the real expression- language that is hidden behind it. Compare Coysevox's ^ (1686) crouching Venus in the Louvre with its Classical prototype in the Vatican — in the one plastic is understudying music, in the other plastic is itself. Terms like "stac- cato," "accelerando," "andante" and "allegro" best describe the kind of movements that we have here, the flow of the lines, the fluidity in the being of the stone itself which like the porcelain has more or less lost its fine compact- ness. Hence our feeling that the granular marble is out of keeping. Hence, too, the wholly un-Classical tendency to work with reference to efi^ects of light and shade. This is quite in conformity with the principles of oil-painting from Titian onwards. That which in the i8th Century is called "colour" in an etch- ing, a drawing, or a sculpture-group really signifies music. Music dominates the painting of Watteau and Fragonard and the art of Gobelins and pastels, and since then, have we not acquired the habit of speaking of colour-tones or tone-colours? And do not the very words imply a recognition of a final homo- geneity between the two arts, superficially dissimilar as they are? And arc not these same words perfectly meaningless as applied to any and every Classical art? But music did not stop there; it transmuted also the architecture of Ber- nini's Baroque into accord with its own spirit, and made of it Rococo, a style of transcendent ornamentation upon which lights (or rather "tones") play to dissolve ceilings, walls and everything else constructional and actual into polyphonies and harmonies, with architectural trills and cadences and runs to complete the identification of the form-language of these halls and galleries with that of the music imagined for them. Dresden and Vienna are the homes of this late and soon-extinguished fairyland of visible chamber music, of curved furniture and mirror-halls, and shepherdesses in verse and porcelain. It is the final brilliant autumn with which the Western soul completes the expression of its high style. And in the Vienna of the Congress-time it faded and died.

The Art of the Renaissance, considered from this particular one of its many aspects,^ is a revolt against the spirit of the Faustian forest-music of counterpoint, which at that time was preparing to vassal ize the whole form-language of the Western Culture. It was the logical consequence of the open assertion of this will in matured Gothic. It never disavowed its origin and it maintained the character of a simple counter-movement; necessarily therefore it remained de- pendent upon the forms of the original movement, and represented simply the effect of these upon a hesitant soul. Hence, it was without true depth, either

^ Coysevox lived 1640-17x0. Much of the embellishmenc and statuary of Versailles is his work.

• See Vol. II, pp. 337 et scq., 365 et seq.

THE ARTS OF FORM 2.33

ideal or phenomenal. As to the first, we have only to think of the bursting passion with which the Gothic world-feeling discharged itself upon the whole Western landscape, and we shall see at once what sort of a movement it was that the handful of select spirits — scholars, artists and humanists — initiated about 1410.^ In the first the issue was one of life and death for a new-born soul, in the second it was a point of — taste. The Gothic gripped life in its entirety, penetrated its most hidden corners. It created new men and a new world. From the idea of Catholicism to the state-theory of the Holy Roman Emperors, from the knightly tourney to the new city-form, from cathedral to cottage, from language-building to the village maiden's bridal attire, from oil-painting to the Spielmann's song, everything is hall-marked with the stamp of one and the same symbolism. But the Renaissance, when it had mastered some arts of word and picture, had shot its bolt. It altered the ways of thought and the life-feeling of West Europe not one whit. It could penetrate as far as costume and gesture, but the roots of life it could not touch — even in Italy the world-outlook of the Baroque is essentially a continuation of the Gothic.^ It produced no wholly great personality between Dante and Michelangelo, each of whom had one foot outside its limits. And as for the other — phe- nomenal or manifested depth — the Renaissance never touched the people, even in Florence itself. The man for whom they had ears was Savonarola — a phe- nomenon of quite another spiritual order and one which begins to be compre- hensible when we discern the fact that, all the time, the deep under-currents are steadily flowing on towards the Gothic-musical Baroque. The Renaissance as an anti-Gothic movement and a reaction against the spirit of polyphonic music has its Classical equivalent in the Dibnysiac movement. This was a re- action against Doric and against the sculptural-Apollinian world-feeling. It did not "originate" in the Thracian Dionysus-cult, but merely took this up as a weapon against and counter-symbol to the Olympian religion, precisely as in Florence the cult of the antique was called in for the justification and confirma- tion of a feeling already there. The period of the great protest was the 7th Century in Greece and (therefore) the 15 th in West Europe. In both cases we have in reality an outbreak of deep-seated discordances in the Culture, which physi- ognomically dominates a whole epoch of its history and especially of its artistic world — in other words, a stand that the soul attempts to make against the Destiny that at last it comprehends. The inwardly recalcitrant forces — Faust's second Soul that would separate itself from the other — are striving to deflect the

^ It was not merely national-Italian (for that Italian Gothic was also): it was purely Florentine, and even within Florence the ideal of one class of society. That which is called Renaissance in the Trecento has its centre in Provence and particularly in the papal court at Avignon, and is nothing whatever but the southern type of chivalry, that which prevailed in Spain and Upper Italy and was so strongly influenced by the Moorish polite society of Spain and Sicily.

2 Renaissance ornament is merely embellishment and self-conscious "art "-inventiveness. It is only with the frank and outspoken Baroque that we return to the necessities of high symbolism.

234 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

sense of the Culture, to repudiate, to get rid of or to evade its inexorable neces- sity; it stands anxious in presence of the call to accomplish its historical fate in Ionic and Baroque. This anxiety fastened itself in Greece to the Dionysus- cult with its musical, dematerializing, body-squandering orgasm, and in the Renaissance to the tradition of the Antique and its cult of the bodily-plastic tradition. In each case, the alien expression-means was brought in consciously and deliberately, in order that the force of a directly-opposite form-language should provide the suppressed feelings with a weight and a pathos of their own, and so enable them to stand against the stream — in Greece the stream which flowed from Homer and the Geometrical to Phidias, in the West that which flowed from the Gothic cathedrals, through Rembrandt, to Beethoven.

It follows from the very character of a counter-movement that it is far easier for it to define what it is opposing than what it is aiming at. This is the diffi- culty of all Renaissance research. In the Gothic (and the Doric) it is just the opposite — men arc contending for something, not against it — but Renais- sance art is nothing more nor less than anti-Gothic art. Renaissance music, too, is a contradiction in itself; the music of the Medicean court was the Southern French "ars nova," that of the Florentine Duomo was the Low- German counterpoint, both alike essentially Gothic and the property of the whole West.

The view that is customarily taken of the Renaissance is a very clear instance of how readily the proclaimed intentions of a movement may be mistaken for its deeper meaning. Since Burckhardt,^ criticism has controverted every indi- vidual proposition that the leading spirits of the age put forward as to their own tendencies — and yet, this done, it has continued to use the word Renais- sance substantially in the former sense. Certainly, one is conscious at once in passing to the south of the Alps of a marked dissimilarity in architecture in particular and in the look of the arts in general. But the very obviousness of the conclusion that the impression prompts should have led us to distrust it and to ask ourselves, instead, whether the supposed distinction of Gothic and " antique" was not in reality merely a difi^erence between Northern and Southern aspects of one and the same form-world. Plenty of things in Spain give the impression of being "Classical" merely because they are Southern, and if a layman were confronted with the great cloister of S. Maria Novella or the fagade of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and asked to say if these were "Gothic" he would certainly guess wrong. Otherwise, the sharp change of spirit ought to have set in not beyond the Alps but only beyond the Apennines, for Tuscany is artistically an island in Italian Italy. Upper Italy belongs entirely to a Byzantine-tinted Gothic; Siena in particular is a genuine monument of the

^ Jacob Burckhardc, Die Cultur dtr Renaissanct in Italitn. (An English traaslation was published in 1878. — Tr.^

THE ARTS OF FORM 135

counter-Renaissance, and Rome is already the home of Baroque. But, in fact, it is the change of landscape that coincides with the change of feeling.

In the actual birth of the Gothic style Italy had indeed no inward share. At the epoch of 1000 the country was still absolutely under the domination of Byzantine taste in the East and Moorish taste in the South. When Gothic first took root here it was the mature Gothic, and it implanted itself with an intensity and force for which we look in vain in any of the great Renaissance creations — think of the "Stabat Mater," the "Dies Iras," Catharine of Siena, Giotto and Simone Martini! At the same time, it was lighted from the South and its strangeness was, as it were, softened in acclimatization. That which it suppressed or expelled was not, as has been supposed, some lingering strains of the Classical but purely the Byzantine-caw-Saracen form-language that ap- pealed to the senses in familiar everyday life — in the buildings of Ravenna and Venice but even more in the ornament of the fabrics, vessels and arms imported from the East.

If the Renaissance had been a "renewal" (whatever that may mean) of the Classical world-feeling, then, surely, would it not have had to replace the symbol of embraced and rhythmically-ordered space by that of closed structural bodyl But there was never any questiorTnTthis. On the contrary, the Renais- sance practised wholly and exclusively an architecture of space prescribed for it by Gothic, from which it differed only in that in lieu of the Northern "Sturm und Drang ' ' it breathed the clear equable calm of the sunny, care-free and un- questioning South. It produced no new building-idea, and the extent of its architectural achievement might almost be reduced to fagades and courtyards.

Now, this focussing of expressible effort upon the street-front of a house or the side of a cloister — many-windowed and ever significant of the spirit within ' — is characteristic of the Gothic (and deeply akin to its art of portraiture); and the cloistered courtyard itself is, from the Sun-temple of Baalbek to the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra, as genuinely Arabian. And in the midst of this art the Poseidon temple of Passtum, all body, stands lonely and un- related: no one saw it, no one attempted to copy it. Equally un-Attic is the Florentine sculpture, for Attic is free plastic, "in the round" in the full sense of the words, whereas every Florentine statue feels behind it the ghost of the niche into which the Gothic sculptor had built its real ancestors. In the relation of figure to background and in the build of the body, the masters of the "Kings' heads" at Chartres and the masters of the "George" choir at Bamberg exhibit the same interpenetration of "Antique" and Gothic expression-means that we have, neither intensified nor contradicted, in the manner of Giovanni Pisano and Ghiberti and even Verrocchio.

If we take away from the models of the Renaissance all elements that originated later than the Roman Imperial Age — that is to say, those belonging to the Magian form-world — nothing is left. Even from Late-Roman archi-

2-36 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

tccturc itself all elements derived from the great days of Hellas had one by one vanished. Most conclusive of all, though, is that motive which actually dominates the Renaissance, which because of its Southern-ness we regard as the noblest of the Renaissance characters, viz., the association of round-arch and column. This association, no doubt, is very un-Gothic, but in the Classical style it simply does not exist, and in fact it represents the leitmotif of the Magian architecture that originated in Syria.

But it was just then that the South received from the North those decisive impulses which helped it first of all to emancipate itself entirely from Byzantium and then to step from Gothic into Baroque. In the region comprised between Amsterdam, Koln and Paris ^ — the counter-pole to Tuscany in the style- history of our culture — counterpoint and oil-painting had been created in association with the Gothic architecture. Thence Dufay in 142.8 and Willaert in 1 5 16 came to the Papal Chapel, and in 152.7 the latter founded that Venetian school which was decisive of Baroque music. The successor of Willaert was de Rore of Antwerp. A Florentine commissioned Hugo van der Goes to exe- cute the Portinari altar for Santa Maria Nuova, and Mcmlinc to paint a Last Judgment. And over and above this, numerous pictures (especially Low- Countries portraits) were acquired and exercised an enormous influence. In 1450 Rogier van der Weyden himself came to Florence, where his art was both admired and imitated. In 1470 Justus van Gent introduced oil-painting to Umbria, and Antonello da Messina brought what he had learned in the Nether- lands to Venice. How much "Dutch" and how little "Classical" there is in the pictures of Filippino Lippi, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli and especially in the engravings of Pollaiulo! Or in Leonardo himself. Even to-day critics hardly care to admit the full extent of the influence exercised by the Gothic North upon the architecture, music, painting and plastic of the Renaissance.? It was just then, too, that Nicolaus Cusanus, Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen (1401-1464), brought into mathematics the "infinitesimal" principle, that contrapuntal method of number which he reached by deduction from the idea of God as Infinite Being. It was from Nicholas of Cusa that Leibniz received the decisive impulse that led him to work out his differential calculus; and thus was forged the weapon with which dynamic. Baroque, Newtonian, physics definitely overcame the static idea characteristic of the Southern physics that reaches a hand to Archimedes and is still efl^ective even in Galileo.

The high period of the Renaissance is a moment of apparent expulsion of music from Faustian art. And in fact, for a few decades, in the only area where Classical and Western landscapes touched, Florence did uphold — with one

^ Inclusive of Paris itself. Even as late as the fifteenth century Flemish was as much spoken there as French, and the architectural appearance of the city in its oldest parts connects it with Bruges and Ghent and not with Troycs and Poitiers.

• A. Schmarsow, Gotik in der Renaissance (1911); B. Haendke, Der nitdtrl. Einfluss auf die Malerei

Toskana-Umbriens QAonatshejte jiir Kunstwissenscb. 1912,)'

THE ARTS OF FORM 137

grand effort that was essentially metaphysical and essentially defensive — an image of the Classical so convincing that, although its deeper characters were without exception mere anti-Gothic, it lasted beyond Goethe and, if not for our criticism, yet for our feelings, is valid to this day. The Florence of Lorenzo de* Medici and the Rome of Leo the Tenth — that is what for us the Classical /J", an eternal goal of most secret longing, the only deliverance from our heavy hearts and limit upon our horizon. And it is this because, and only because, it is anti-Gothic. So clean-cut is the opposition of Apollinian and Faustian spirituality.

But let there be no mistake as to the extent of this illusion. In Florence men practiced fresco and relief in contradiction of Gothic glass-painting and Byzan- tine gold-ground mosaic. This was the one moment in the history of the West when sculpture ranked as the paramount art. The dominant elements in the picture are the poised bodies, the ordered groups, the structural side of archi- tecture. The backgrounds possess no intrinsic value, merely serving to fill up between and behind the self-sufficient present of the foreground-figures. For a while here, painting is actually under the domination of plastic; Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo and Botticelli were goldsmiths. Yet, all the same, these frescoes have nothing of the spirit of Polygnotus in them. Examine a collection of Classical painted vases — not in individual specimens or copies (which would give the wrong idea) but in the mass, for this is the one species of Classical art in which originals are plentiful enough to impress us effectively with the will that is behind the art. In the light of such a study, the utter un-Classicalness of the Renaissance-spirit leaps to the eye. The great achievement of Giotto and Masaccio in creating a fresco-art is only a-pparently a revival of the Apollinian way of feeling; but the depth-experience and idea of extension that underlies it is not the Apollinian unspatial and self-contained body but the Gothic field (Bildraum). However recessive the backgrounds are, they exist. Yet here again there was the fullness of light, the clarity of atmosphere, the great noon-calm, of the South; dynamic space was changed in Tuscany, and only in Tuscany, to the static space of which Piero della Francesca was the master. Though fields of space were painted, they were put, not as an existence un- bounded and like music ever striving into the depths, but as sensuously definable. Space was given a sort of bodiliness and order in plane layers, and drawing, sharpness of outline, definition of surface were studied with a care that seem- ingly approached the Hellenic ideal. Yet there was always this difference, that Florence depicted space perspectively as singular in contrast with things as plural, whereas Athens presented things as separate singulars in contrast to general nothingness. And in proportion as the surge of the Renaissance smoothed down, the hardness of this tendency receded, from Masaccio *s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel to Raphael's in the Vatican Stanze, until the sfumato of Leonardo, the melting of the edges into the background, brings a musical

138 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

ideal in place of the relief-ideal into painting. The hidden dynamic is equally unmistakable in the sculpture of Florence — it would be perfectly hopeless to look for an Attic companion for Verrocchio's equestrian statue.^ This art was a masky a mode of the taste of an elite, and sometimes a comedy — though never was comedy more gallantly played out. The indescribable inward purity of Gothic form often causes us to forget what an excess of native strength and depth it possessed. Gothic, it must be repeated again, is the only foundation of the Renaissance. The Renaissance never even touched the real Classical, let alone understood it or "revived" it. The consciousness of the Florentine 61ite, wholly under literary influences, fashioned the deceptive name to posi- tivize the negative element of the movement — thereby demonstrating how little such currents are aware of their own nature. There is not a single one of their great works that the contemporaries of Pericles, or even those of Csesar, would not have rejected as utterly alien. Their palace courtyards are Moorish courtyards, and their round arches on slender pillars are of Syrian origin. Cimabue taught his century to imitate with the brush the art of Byzantine mosaic. Of the two famous domical buildings of the Renaissance, the domed cathedral of Florence is a masterpiece of late Gothic, and St. Peter's is one of early Baroque. When Michelangelo set himself to build the latter as the "Pantheon towering over the Basilica of Maxentius," he was naming two buildings of the purest early Arabian style. And ornament — is there indeed a genuine Renaissance ornamentation? Certainly there is nothing comparable in symbolic force with the ornamentation of Gothic. But what is the prov- enance of that gay and elegant embellishment which has a real inward unity of its own and has captivated all Europe? There is a great difference between the home of a "taste" and the home of the expression-means that it employs: one finds a great deal that is Northern in the early Florentine motives of Pisano, Maiano, Ghiberti and Delia Querela. We have to distinguish in all these chancels, tombs, niches and porches between the outward and transferable forms (the Ionic column itself is doubly a transfer, for it originated in Egypt) and the spirit of the form-language that uses them as means and signs. One Classical element or item is equivalent to another so long as something un- Classical is being expressed — . significance lies not in the thing but in the way in which it is used. But even in Donatello such motives are far fewer than in mature Baroque. As for a strict Classical capital, no such thing is to be found. And yet, at moments, Renaissance art succeeded in achieving something wonderful that music could not reproduce — a feeling for the bliss of perfect nearness y for pure, restful and liberafing space-effects, bright and tidy and free from the passionate movement of Gothic and Baroque. It is not Classical, but it is a dream of Classical existence, the only dream of the Faustian soul in which it was able to forget itself.

^ The colossal statue of Bartolommeo CoUeone at Veaicc. — Tr,

VI

And now, with the i6th Century, the decisive epochal turn begins for West- ern painting. The trusteeship of architecture in the North and that of sculpture in Italy expire, and painting becomes polyphonic, "picturesque," infinity- seeking. The colours become tones. The art of the brush claims kinship with the style of cantata and madrigal. The technique of oils becomes the basis of an art that means to conquer space and to dissolve things in that space. With > Leonardo and Giorgione begins Impressionism.

In the actual picture there is trans valuation of all the elements. The back- ground, hitherto casually put in, regarded as a fill-up and, as space, almost shuffled out of sight, gains a preponderant importance. A development sets in that is paralleled in no other Culture, not even in the Chinese which in many other respects is so near to ours. The background as symbol of the infinite conquers the sense-perceptible foreground, and at last (herein lies the distinc- tion between the depicting and the delineating styles) the depth-experience of the Faustian soul is captured in the kinesis of a picture. The space-relief of Mantegna's plane layers dissolves in Tintoretto into directional energy, and there emerges in the picture the great symbol of an unlimited space-universe which comprises the individual things within itself as incidentals — the hori- Xpn. Now, that a landscape painting should have a horizon has always seemed so self-evident to us that we have never asked ourselves the important question: Is there always a horizon, and if not, when not and why not? In fact, there is not a hint of it, either in Egyptian relief or in Byzantine mosaic or in vase- paintings and frescoes of the Classical age, or even in those of the Hellenistic in spite of its spatial treatment of foregrounds. This line, in the unreal vapour of which heaven and earth melt, the sum and potent symbol of the far, contains the painter's version of the "infinitesimal" principle. It is out of the remote- ness of this horizon that the musk of the picture flows, and for this reason the great landscape-painters of Holland paint only backgrounds and atmospheres, just as for the contrary reason "anti-musical" masters like Signorelli and especially Mantegna, paint only foregrounds and ' ' reliefs. ' ' It is in the horizon, then, that Music triumphs over Plastic, the -passion of extension over its sub- stance. It is not too much to say that no picture by Rembrandt has a foreground at all. In the North, the home of counterpoint, a deep understanding of the meaning of horizons and high-lighted distances is found very early, while in the South the flat conclusive gold-background of the Arabic-Byzantine picture long remained supreme. The first definite emergence of the pure space-feeling is in the Books of Hours of the Duke of Berry (that at Chantilly and that at Turin) about 141 6. Thereafter, slowly and surely, it conquers the Picture.

The same symbolic meaning attaches to clouds. Classical art concerns itself with them no more than with horizons, and the painter of the Renaissance

2jp THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

treats them with a certain playful superficiality. But very early the Gothic looked at its cloud-masses, and through them, with the long sight of mysticism; and the Venetians (Giorgione and Paolo Veronese above all) discovered the full magic of the cloud-world, of the thousand-tinted Being that fills the heavens with its sheets and wisps and mountains. Griinewald and the Nether- landers heightened its significance to the level of tragedy. El Greco brought the grand art of cloud-symbolism to Spain.

It was at the same time that along with oil-painting and counterpoint the art of gardens ripened. Here, expressed on the canvas of Nature itself by ex- tended pools, brick walls, avenues, vistas and galleries, is the same tendency that is represented in painting by the effort towards the linear perspective that the early Flemish artists felt to be the basic problem of their art and Brunel- lesco, Alberti and Piero della Francesca formulated. We may take it that it was not entirely a coincidence that this formulation of perspective, this mathe- matical consecration of the picture (whether landscape or interior) as a field limited at the sides but immensely increased in depth, was propounded just at this particular moment. It was the proclamation of the Prime-Symbol. The point at which the perspective lines coalesce is at infinity. It was just because it avoided infinity and rejected distance that Classical painting pos- sessed no perspective. Consequently the Park, the deliberate manipulation of Nature so as to obtain space and distance effects, is an impossibility in Classical art. Neither in Athens nor in Rome proper was there a garden-art: it was only the Imperial Age that gratified its taste with ground-schemes of Eastern origin, and a glance at any of the plans of those "gardens " that have been preserved ^ is enough to show the shortness of their range and the emphasis of their bounds. And yet the first garden-theorist of the West, L. B. Alberti, was laying down the relation of the surroundings to the house (that is, to the spectators in it) as early as 1450, and from his projects to the parks of the Ludovisi and Albani villas,^ we can see the importance of the perspective view into distance be- coming ever greater and greater. In France, after Francis I (Fontainebleau) the long narrow lake is an additional feature having the same meaning.

The most significant element in the Western garden-art is thus the point de vue of the great Rococo park, upon which all its avenues and clipped-hedge walks open and from which vision may travel out to lose itself in the distances. This element is wanting even in the Chinese garden-art. But it is exactly matched by some of the silver-bright distance-pictures of the pastoral music of that age (in Couperin for example). It is the point de vue that gives us the key to a real understanding of this remarkable mode of making nature itself

• Svoboda, Komische und Komanischt Paldstt (1919); Rostowzcw, Pompeianische Landschaften und

Komiscbe Villen (Kom. mitt., 1904).

• Environs of Rome. They date from the late 17th and the mid-i8th centuries respectively; the

gardens of the V. Ludovisi were laid out by Lc Ndtre. — Tr.

THE ARTS OF FORM 141

speak the form-language of a human symbolism. It is in principle akin to the dissolution of finite number-pictures into infinite series in our mathematic: as the remainder-expression ^ reveals the ultimate meaning of the series, so the glimpse into the boundless is what, in the garden, reveals to a Faustian soul the meaning of Nature. It was we and not the Hellenes or the men of the high Renaissance that prized and sought out high mountain tops for the sake of the limitless range of vision that they afford. This is a Faustian craving — to be alone with endless space. The great achievement of Le Notre and the land- scape-gardeners of Northern France, beginning with Fouquet's epoch-making creation of Vaux-le-Vicomte, was that they were able fo render this symbol with such high emphasis. Compare the Renaissance park of the Medicean age — capable of being taken in, gay, cosy, well-rounded — with these parks in which all the water-works, statue-rows, hedges and labyrinths are instinct with the suggestion of long range. It is the Destiny of Western oil-painting told over again in a bit of garden-history.

But the feeling for long range is at the same time one for history. At a distance, space becomes time and the horizon signifies the future. The Baroque ■park is the park of the Late season, of the approaching end, of the falling leaf. A Renaissance park is meant for the summer and the noonday. It is timeless, and nothing in its form-language reminds us of mortality. It is perspective that begins to awaken a premonition of something passing, fugitive and final. The very words of distance possess, in the lyric poetry of all Western languages, a plaintive autumnal accent that one looks for in vain in the Greek and Latin. It is there in Macpherson's "Ossian" and Holderlin, and in Nietzsche's Dionysus- Dithyrambs, and lastly in Baudelaire, Verlaine, George and Droem. The Late poetry of the withering garden avenues, the unending lines in the streets of a megalopolis, the ranks of pillars in a cathedral, the peak in a distant mountain chain — all tell us that the depth-experience which constitutes our space- world for us is in the last analysis our inward certainty of a Destiny, of a prescribed direction, of time, of the irrevocable. Here, in the experience of horizon as future, we become directly and surely conscious of the identity of Time with the ' ' third dimension ' ' of that experienced space which is living self-extension. And in these last days we are imprinting upon the plan of our megalopolitan streets the same directional-destiny character that the 17th Century imprinted upon the Park of Versailles. We lay our streets as long arrow-flights into remote distance, regardless even of preserving old and historic parts of our towns (for the symbolism of these is not now prepo- tent in us), whereas a megalopolis of the Classical world studiously main- tained in its extension that tangle of crooked lanes that enabled Apollinian man to feel himself a body in the midst of bodies.^ Herein, as always,

^ That Is, the expression for the sum of a convergent series beyond any specified term. — Tr.

• See Vol. II, pp. 117 et seq.

242. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

practical requirements, so called, are merely the mask of a profound inward compulsion.

With the rise of perspective, then, the deeper form and full metaphysical significance of the picture comes to be concentrated upon the horizon. In Renaissance art the painter had stated and the beholder had accepted the con- tents of the picture for what they were, as self-sufficient and co-extensive with the title. But henceforth the contents became a means, the mere vehicle of a meaning that was beyond the possibility of verbal expression. With Mantegna or Signorelli the pencil sketch could have stood as the picture, without being carried out in colour — in some cases, indeed, we can only regret that the artist did not stop at the cartoon. In the statue-like sketch, colour is a mere supple- ment. Titian, on the other hand, could be told by Michelangelo that he did not know how to draw. The "object," i.e., that which could be exactly fixed by the drawn outline, the near and material, had in fact lost its artistic actual- ity; but, as the theory of art was still dominated by Renaissance impressions, there arose thereupon that strange and interminable conflict concerning the "form" and the "content" of an art-work. Mis-enunciation of the question has concealed its real and deep significance from us. The first point for con- sideration should have been whether painting was to be conceived of plastically or musically, as a static of things or as a dynamic of space (for in this lies the essence of the opposition between fresco and oil technique), and the second point, the opposition of Classical and Faustian world-feeling. Outlines define the material, while colour-tones interpret space. ^ But the picture of the first order belongs to directly sensible nature — it narrates. Space, on the contrary, is by its very essence transcendent and addresses itself to our imaginative powers, and in an art that is under its suzerainty, the narrative element enfeebles and obscures the more profound tendency. Hence it is that the theorist, able to feel the secret disharmony but misunderstanding it, clings to the superficial opposi- tion of content and form. The problem is purely a Western one, and reveals most strikingly the complete inversion in the significance of pictorial elements that took place when the Renaissance closed down and instrumental music of the grand style came to the front. For the Classical mind no problem of form and content in this sense could exist; in an Attic statue the two are completely identical and identified in the human body.

The case of Baroque painting is further complicated by the fact that it in- volves an opposition of ordinary popular feeling and the finer sensibility. Everything Euclidean and tangible is also popular, and the genuinely popular art is therefore the Classical. It is very largely the feeling of this popular char-

• Id Classical painting, light and shadow were first consistently employed by Zeuxis, but only

for the shading of the thing itself, for the purpose of freeing the modelling of the body painted from the restriction of the relief-manner, i.e., without any reference to the relation of shadows to the timt of day. But even with the earliest of the Ncthcrlandcrs light and shade are already colour-tones and affected by atmosphere.

THE ARTS OF FORM 143

acter in it that constitutes its indescribable charm for the Faustian intellects that have to fight for self-expression, to win their world by hard wrestling. For us, the contemplation of Classical art and its intention is pure refreshment: here nothing needs to be struggled for, everything offers itself freely. And something of the same sort was achieved by the anti-Gothic tendency of Florence. Raphael is, in many sides of his creativeness, distinctly popular. But Rembrandt is not, cannot be, so. From Titian painting becomes more and more esoteric. So, too, poetry. So, too, music. And the Gothic per se had been esoteric from its very beginnings — witness Dante and Wolfram. The masses of Okeghem and Palestrina, or of Bach for that matter, were never intelligible to the average member of the congregation. Ordinary people are bored by Mozart and Bee- thoven, and regard music generally as something for which one is or is not in the mood. A certain degree of interest in these matters has been induced by concert room and gallery since the age of enlightenment invented the phrase " art for all. " But Faustian art is not, and by very essence cannot be, *' for all. " If modern painting has ceased to appeal to any but a small (and ever decreasing) circle of connoisseurs, it is because it has turned away from the painting of things that the man in the street can understand. It has transferred the prop- erty of actuality from contents to space — the space through which alone, according to Kant, things are. And with that a difficult metaphysical element has entered into painting, and this element does not give itself away to the lay- man. For Phidias, on the contrary, the word "lay" would have had no mean- ing. His sculpture appealed entirely to the bodily and not to the spiritual eye. An art without space is a priori unphilosophical.

VII

With this is connected an important principle of composition. In a picture it is possible to set the things inorganically above one another or side by side or behind one another without any emphasis of perspective or interrelation, i.e., without insisting upon the dependence of their actuality upon the structure of space which does not necessarily mean that this dependence is denied. Primi- tive men and children draw thus, before their depth-experience has brought the sense-impressions of their world more or less into fundamental order. But this order differs in the different Cultures according to the prime symbols of these Cultures. The sort of perspective composition that is so self-evident to us is a particular case, and it is neither recognized nor intended in the painting of any other Culture. Egyptian art chose to represent simultaneous events in super- posed ranks, thereby eliminating the third dimension from the look of the picture. The Apollinian art placed figures and groups separately, with a de- liberate avoidance of space-and-time relations in the plane of representation. Polygnotus's frescoes in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi are a celebrated instance of this. There is no background to connect the individual scenes —

i44 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

for such a background would have been a challenge to the principle that things alone are actual and space non-existent. The pediment of the i^gina temple, the procession of gods on the Frangois Vase and the Frieze of the Giants of Pcrgamum are all composed as meander-syntheses of separate and interchange- able motives, without organic character. It is only with the Hellenistic age (the Telephus Frieze of the altar of Pergamum is the earliest example that has been preserved) that the un-Classical motive of the consistent series comes into existence. In this respect, as in others, the feeling of the Renaissance was truly Gothic. It did indeed carry group-composition to such a pitch of perfection that its work remains the pattern for all following ages. But the order of it all proceeded out of space. In the last analysis, it was a silent music of colour- illumined extension that created within itself light-resistances^ which the under- standing eye could grasp as things and as existence, and could set marching with an invisible swing and rhythm out into the distance. And with this spatial ordering, with its unremarked substitution of air- and light-perspective for line-perspective, the Renaissance was already, in essence, defeated.

And now from the end of the Renaissance in Orlando Lasso and Palestrina right up to Wagner, from Titian right up to Manet and Marees and Leibl, great musicians and great painters followed close upon one another while the plastic art sank into entire insignificance. Oil-painting and instrumental music evolve organically towards aims that were comprehended in the Gothic and achieved in the Baroque. Both arts — Faustian in the highest sense — are with- in those limits prime phenomena. They have a soul, a physiognomy and therefore a history. And in this they are alone. All that sculpture could thenceforward achieve was a few beautiful incidental pieces in the shadow of painting, garden- art, or architecture. The art of the West had no real need of them. There was no longer a style of plastic in the sense that there were styles of painting or music. No consistent tradition or necessary unity links the works of Maderna, Goujon, Puget and Schliiter. Even Leonardo begins to despise the chisel out- right: at most he will admit the bronze cast, and that on account of its pic- torial advantages. Therein he differs from Michelangelo, for whom the marble block was still the true element. And yet even Michelangelo in his old age could no longer succeed with the plastic, and none of the later sculptors are great in the sense that Rembrandt and Bach are great. There were clever and tasteful performances no doubt, but not one single work of the same order as the "Night Watch" or the "Matthew Passion," nothing that expresses, as these express, the whole depth of a whole mankind. This art had fallen out of the destiny of the Culture. Its speech meant nothing now. What there is in a Rembrandt portrait simply cannot be rendered in a bust. Now and then a sculptor of power arises, like Bernini or the masters of the contemporary Spanish school, or Pigalle or Rodin (none of whom, naturally, transcended the decora- tive and attained the level of grand symbolism), but such an artist is always

THE ARTS OF FORM 145

visibly either a belated imitator of the Renaissance like Thorwaldsen, a dis- guised painter like Houdon or Rodin, an architect like Bernini and Schliiter or a decorator like Coysevox. And his very appearance on the scene only shows the more clearly that this art, incapable of carrying the Faustian burden, has no longer a mission — and therefore no longer a soul or a life-history of specific style-development — in the Faustian world. In the Classical world, cor- respondingly, music was the art that failed. Beginning with probably quite important advances in the earliest Doric, it had to give way in the ripe centuries of Ionic (650-350) to the two truly Apollinian arts, sculpture and fresco; re- nouncing harmony and polyphony, it had to renounce therewith any pretensions to organic development as a higher art.

VIII

The strict style in Classical painting limited its palette to yellow, red, black and white. This singular fact was observed long ago, and, since the explanation was only sought for in superficial and definitely material causes, wild hypothe- ses were brought forward to account for it, e.g., a supposed colour-blindness in the Greeks. Even Nietzsche discussed this (Morgenrote, 42.6).

But why did this painting in its great days avoid blue and even blue-green, and only begin the gamut of permissible tones at greenish-yellow and bluish- red? It is not that the ancient artists did not know of blue and its effect. The metopes of many temples had blue backgrounds so that they should appear deep in contrast with the triglyphs; and trade-painting used all the colours that were technically available. There are authentic blue horses in archaic Acropolis work and Etruscan tomb-painting; and a bright blue colouring of the hair was quite common. The ban upon it in the higher art was, without a doubt, imposed upon the Euclidean soul by its prime symbol.

Blue and green are the colours of the heavens, the sea, the fruitful plain, the shadow of the Southern noon, the evening, the remote mountains. They are essentially atmospheric and not substantial colours. They are cold, they disembody, and they evoke impressions of expanse and distance and boundlessness.

For this reason they were kept out of the frescoes of Polygnotus. And for this reason also, an "infinitesimal" blue-to-green is the space-creating element throughout the history of our perspective oil-painting, from the Venetians right into the 19th Century; it is the basic and supremely important tone which supports the ensemble of the intended colour-effect, as the basso continuo supports the orchestra, whereas the warm yellow and red tones are put on sparingly and in dependence upon this basic tone. It is not the full, gorgeous and familiar green that Raphael and Diirer sometimes — and seldom at that — use for draperies, but an indefinite blue-green of a thousand nuances into white and grey and brown; something deeply musical, into which (notably in Gobelin

246 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

tapestry) the whole atmosphere is plunged. That quality which we have named aerial perspective in contrast to linear — and might also have called Baroque perspective in contrast to Renaissance — rests almost exclusively upon this. We find it with more and more intense depth-effect in Leonardo, Guercino, Albani in the case of Italy, and in Ruysdael and Hobbema in that of Holland, . but, above all, in the great French painters, from Poussin and Claude Lorrain and Watteau to Corot. Blue, equally a perspective colour, always stands in relation to the dark, the unillumined, the unactual. It does not press in on us, it pulls us out into the remote. An "enchanting nothingness" Goethe calls it in his Farbenlehre.

Blue and green are transcendent, spiritual, non-sensuous colours. They are missing in the strict Attic fresco and therefore dominant in oil-painting. Yellow and red, the Classical colours, are the colours of the material, the near, the full-blooded. Red is the characteristic colour of sexuality — hence it is the only colour that works upon the beasts. It matches best the Phallus-symbol — and therefore the statue and the Doric column — but it is pure blue that ctherealizes the Madonna's mantle. This relation of the colours has established itself in every great school as a deep-felt necessity. Violet, a red succumb- ing to blue, is the colour of women no longer fruitful and of priests living in • celibacy.

Yellow and red are the popular colours, the colours of the crowd, of children, of women, and of savages. Amongst the Venetians and the Spaniards high personages affected a splendid black or blue, with an unconscious sense of the aloofness inherent in these colours. For red and yellow, the Apollinian, Eucli- dean-polytheistic colours, belong to the foreground even in respect of social life; they are meet for the noisy hearty market-days and holidays, the naive imme- diateness of a life subject to the blind chances of the Classical Fatum, the point- existence. But blue and green — the Faustian, monotheistic colours — arc those of loneliness, of care, of a present that is related to a past and a future, of destiny as the dispensation governing the universe from within.

The relation of Shakespearian destiny to space and of Sophoclean to the in- dividual body has already been stated in an earlier chapter. All the genuinely transcendent Cultures — that is all whose prime-symbol requires the overcoming of the apparent, the life of struggle and not that of acceptance — have the same metaphysical inclination to space as to blues and blacks. There are profound observations on the connexion between ideas of space and the meaning of colour in Goethe's studies of "entoptic colours" in the atmosphere; the symbolism that is enunciated by him in the Farbenlehre and that which we have deduced here from the ideas of Space and Destiny are in complete agreement.

The most significant use of dusky green as the colour of destiny is Griine- wald's. The indescribable power of space in his nights is equalled only by Rem- brandt's. And the thought suggests itself here, is it possible to say that his

THE ARTS OF FORM 147

bluish-green, the colour in which the interior of a great cathedral is so often clothed, is the specifically Catholic colour? — it being understood that we mean by "Catholic" strictly the Faustian Christianity (with the Eucharist as its centre) that was founded in the Lateran Council of 1115 and fulfilled in the Council of Trent. This colour with its silent grandeur is as remote from the resplendent gold-ground of Early Christian-Byzantine pictures as it is from the gay, loquacious "pagan" colours of the painted Hellenic temples and statues. It is to be noted that the effect of this colour, entirely unlike that of yellow and red, depends upon work being exhibited indoors. Classical painting is emphatically a public art, Western just as emphatically a studio-art. The whole of our great oil-painting, from Leonardo to the end of the i8th Century, is not meant for the bright light of day. Here once more we meet the same opposition as that between chamber-music and the free-standing statue. The climatic explanation of the difference is merely superficial; the example of Egyptian painting would suffice to disprove it if disproof were necessary at all. Infinite space meant for Classical feeling complete nothingness, and the use of blue and green, with their powers of dissolving the near and creating the far, would have been a challenge to the absolutism of the foreground and its unit- bodies, and therefore to the very meaning and intent of Apollinian art. To the Apollinian eye, pictures in the colours of Watteau would have been destitute of all essence, things of almost inexpressible emptiness and untruth. By these colours the visually-perceived light-reflecting surface of the picture is made effectively to render, not circumscribed things, but circumambient space. And that is why they are missing in Greece and dominant in the West.

Arabian art brought the Magian world-feeling to expression by means of the gold ground of its mosaics and pictures. Something of the uncanny wizardry of this, and by implication of its symbolic purpose, is known to us through the mosaics of Ravenna, in the work of the Early Rhenish and especially North Italian masters who were still entirely under the influence of Lombardo- Byzantine models, and last but not least in the Gothic book-illustrations of which the archetypes were the Byzantine purple codices.

In this instance we can study the soul of three Cultures working upon very similar tasks in very dissimilar ways. The Apollinian Culture recognized as actual only that which was immediately present in time and place — and thus it repudiated the background as pictorial element. The Faustian strove through all sensuous barriers towards infinity — and it projected the centre of gravity of the pictorial idea into the distance by means of perspective. The Magian felt all happening as an expression of mysterious powers that filled the world- cavern with their spiritual substance — and it shut off" the depicted scene with a gold background, that is, by something that stood beyond and outside all

248 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

nature-colours. Gold is not a colour. As compared with simple yellow, it produces a complicated sense-impression, through the metallic, diffuse reful- gence that is generated by its glowing surface. Colours — whether coloured substance incorporated with the smoothed wall-face (fresco) or pigment ap- plied with the brush — are natural. But the metallic gleam, which is practi- cally never found in natural conditions, is unearthly.^ It recalls impressively the other symbols of the Culture, Alchemy and Kabbala, the Philosophers' Stone, the Holy Scriptures, the Arabesque, the inner form of the tales of the "Thousand and One Nights." The gleaming gold takes away from the scene, the life and the body their substantial being. Everything that was taught in the circle of Plotinus or by the Gnostics as to the nature of things, their in- dependence of space, their accidental causes — notions paradoxical and almost unintelligible to our world-feeling — is implicit also in the symbolism of this mysterious hieratic background. The nature of bodies was a principal subject of controversy amongst Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo-Platonists, as it was later in the schools of Baghdad and Basra. Suhrawardi distinguishes extension, as the primary existence of the body, from width and height and depth as its acci- dents. Nazzam pronounced against the corporeal substantiality and space-fill- ing character of the atom. These and the like were the metaphysical notions that, from Philo and Paul to the last great names of the Islamic philosophy, manifested the Arabian world-feeling. They played a decisive part in the dis- putes of the Councils upon the substantiality of Christ. ^ And thus the gold background possesses, in the iconography of the Western Church, an explicit dogmatic significance. It is an express assertion of the existence and activity of the divine spirit. It represents the Arabian form of the Christian world-con- sciousness, and with such a deep appropriateness that for a thousand years this treatment of the background was held to be the only one metaphysically — and even ethically — possible and seemly in representations of the Christian legend. When "natural" backgrounds, with their blue-green heavens, far horizons and depth perspective, began to appear in early Gothic, they had at first the appear- ance of something profane and worldly. The change of dogma that they implied was, if not acknowledged, at any rate felt, witness the tapestry backgrounds with which the real depth of space was covered up by a pious awe that disguised what it dared not exhibit. We have seen how just at this time, when the Faustian (German-Catholic) Christianity attained to consciousness of itself through the institution of the sacrament of Contrition — a new religion in the old garb — the tendency to perspective, colour, and the mastering of aerial

^ The brilliant polish of the stone in Egyptian art has a deep symbolic significance of much the same kind. Its effect is to dematerialize the statue by causing the eye to glide along its exterior. Hellas on the contrary manifests, by its progress from "Poros" stone, through Naxian, to the translucent Parian and Pentelic marbles, how determined it is that the look shall sink right into the material essence of the body.

« Sec Vol. II, pp. 314 ct scq.

THE ARTS OF FORM 149

space in the art of the Franciscans ^ transformed the whole meaning of painting.

The Christianity of the West is related to that of the East as the symbol of perspective to the symbol of gold-ground — and the final schism took place almost at the same moment in Church and in Art. The landscape-background of the depicted scene and the dynamic infiniteness of God were comprehended at the same moment; and, simultaneously with the gold ground of the sacred picture, there vanished from the Councils of the West that Magian, ontological problem of Godhead which had so passionately agitated Nicasa, Ephesus, Chalcedon and all the Councils of the East.

The Venetians discovered, and introduced into oil-painting as a space- forming and quasi-musical motive, the handwriting of the visihU brush-stroke. The Florentine masters had never at any time challenged the fashion — would- be Classical and yet in Gothic employ — of smoothing out all turns of the brush so as to produce pure, cleanly-outlined and even colour-surfaces. In consequence, their pictures have a certain air of hdng, something felt, un- mistakably, as the opposite of the inherent motion-o^^Wx.j of the Gothic expression-means that were storming in from over the Alps. The 15th-century manner of applying colour is a denial of past and future. It is only in the brushwork, which remains permanently visible and, in a way, perennially fresh, that the historical feeling comes out. Our desire is to see in the work of the painter not merely something that has become but something that is becoming. And this is precisely what the Renaissance wanted to avoid. A piece of Peru- gino drapery tells us nothing of its artistic origin; it is ready-made, given, simply present. But the individual brush-strokes — first met with as a com- plete new form-language in the later work of Titian — are accents of a per- sonal temperament, characteristic in the orchestra-colours of Monteverde, melodically-flowing as a contemporary Venetian madrigal: streaks and dabs, immediately juxtaposed, cross one another, cover one another, entangle one another, and bring unending movement into the plain element of colour. Just so the geometrical Analysis of the time made its objects become instead of being. Every painting has in its execution a history and does not disguise it; and a Faustian who stands before it feels that he too has a spiritual evolution. Before any great landscape by a Baroque master, the one word "historical" is enough to make us feel that there is a meaning in it wholly alien to the meaning of an Attic statue. As other melody, so also this of the restless outlineless brush- stroke is part of the dynamic stability of the universe of eternal Becoming, directional Time, and Destiny. The opposition of painting-style and drawing-

^ The life and teaching of St. Francis were, morally and aesthetically alike, the centres of in- spiration for Cimabue, Giotto and the Italian Gothic generally. — Tr.

150 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

style is but a particular aspect of the general opposition of historical and ahistorical form, of assertion and denial of inner development, of eternity and instantaneity. A Classical art-work is an event, a Western is a deed. The one symbolizes the here-and-now point, the other the living course. And the physiognomy of this script of the brush — an ornamentation that is entirely new, infinitely rich and personal, and peculiar to the Western Culture — is purely and simply musical. It is no mere conceit to compare the allegro feroce of Frans Hals with the andante con moto of Van Dyck, or the minor of Guercino with the major of Velasquez. Henceforward the notion oi tempo is comprised in the execution of a painting and steadily reminds us that this art is the art of a soul which, in contrast to the Classical, forgets nothing and will let nothing be forgotten that once was. The aery web of brush-strokes immediately dissolves the sensible surface of things. Contours melt into chiaroscuro. The beholder has to stand a very long way back to obtain any corporeal impression out of our coloured space values, and even so it is always the chromatic and active air itself that gives birth to the things.

At the same time with this, there appeared in Western painting another sym- bol of highest significance, which subdued more and more the actuality of all colour — the "studio-brown" (atelierbraun). This was unknown to the early Florentines and the older Flemish and Rhenish masters alike. Pacher, Diirer, Holbein, passionately strong as their tendency towards spatial depth seems, are quite without it, and its reign begins only with the last years of the i6th Century. This brown does not repudiate its descent from the "infini- tesimal" greens of Leonardo's, Schongauer's and Griinewald's backgrounds, but it possesses a mightier power over things than they, and it carries the battle of Space against Matter to a decisive close. It even prevails over the more primitive linear perspective, which is unable to shake off its Renaissance asso- ciation with architectural motives. Between it and the Impressionist technique of the visible brush-stroke there is an enduring and deeply suggestive connexion. Both in the end dissolve the tangible existences of the sense-world — the world of moments and foregrounds — into atmospheric semblances. Line disappears from the tone-picture. The Magian gold-ground had only dreamed of a mystic power that controlled and at will could thrust aside the laws governing cor- poreal existence within the world-cavern. But the brown of these pictures opened a prospect into an infinity of pure forms. And therefore its discovery marks for the Western style a culmination in the process of its becoming. As contrasted with the preceding green^ this colour has something Protestant in it. It antic- ipates the hyperbolic ^ Northern pantheism of the i8th Century which the Archangels voice in the Prologue of Goethe's "Faust." ^ The atmosphere of Lear and the atmosphere of Macbeth are akin to it. The contemporary striving

^ Dcr nordischc im Grcnzcnlosc schwcifcndc Panthcismus.

• On the following page is a translation of this chorus. — Tr.

THE ARTS OF FORM 151

of instrumental music towards freer and ever freer chromatics (de Rore, Luca Marenzio) and towards the formation of bodies of tone by means of string and wind choruses corresponds exactly with the new tendency of oil-painting to create pictorial chromatics out of pure colours, by means of these unlimited brown shadings and the contrast-effect of immediately juxtaposed colour-strokes. Thereafter both the arts spread through their worlds of tones and colours — colour-tones and tone-colours — an atmosphere of the purest spatiality, which enveloped and rendered, no longer body — the human being as a shape — but the soul unconfined. And thus was attained the inwardness that in the deepest works of Rembrandt and of Beethoven is able to unlock the last secrets them- selves — the inwardness which Apollinian man had sought with his strictly somatic art to keep at bay.

From now onward, the old foreground-colours yellow and red — the Classical tones — are employed more and more rarely and always as deliberate contrasts to the distances and depths that they are meant to set off and emphasize (Vermeer in particular, besides of course Rembrandt). This atmospheric brown, which was entirely alien to the Renaissance, is the unrealest colour that there is. It is the one major colour that does not exist in the rainbow. There is white light, and yellow and green, and red and other light of the most entire purity. But a pure brown light is outside the possibilities of the Nature that we know. All the greenish-brown, silvery, moist brown, and deep gold tones that appear in their splendid variety with Giorgione, grow bolder and bolder in the great Dutch painters and lose themselves towards the end of the i8th Century, have the common quality that they strip nature of her tangible actuality. They con- tain, therefore, what is almost a religious profession of faith; we feel that here we are not very far from Port Royal, from Leibniz. With Constable on the other hand — who is the founder of the painting of Civilisation — it is a differ- ent will that seeks expression; and the very brown that he had learnt from the Dutch meant to him not what it had meant to them — Destiny, God, the mean- ing of life — but simply romance, sensibility, yearning for something that was gone, memorial of the great past of the dying art. In the last German masters too

Rafhael. The Sun outsings the brother-spheres

in olden rivalry of song, and thunder-girt pursues the years

the preordained path along. Tis from his face the angels gain

their strength; but scan it no one may. Thought is outranged and Works remain

sublime as on Creation-Day.

Gabriel. And, swift beyond description, flies

the circling scene of land and sea, in alternance of Paradise

with dark and awful Mystery. The ocean swings, the billows sway,

back from the cliff the waves are hurled. But cliff and waves alike obey

the mightier movement of the World.

Michael. And storms arise and swell and ebb

o'er sea and mountain, lake and field, in wild contention weave a web

of forces purposed though concealed. The lightning is thy flaming sword,

the thunder veils thee on thy way, yet ever spare thy envoys. Lord,

the gentle changing of thy day.

The Three. Tis from thy face the angels gain

their strength, but scan it no one may,. Beyond all thought thy Works remain sublime as on Creation-Day.

152. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

' — Lessing, Marees, Spitzweg, Diez, Lcibl ^ — whose belated art is a romantic retrospect, an epilogue, the brown tones appear simply as a precious heirloom. Unwilling in their hearts to part with this last relic of the great style, they preferred to set themselves against the evident -tendency of their generation — the soulless and soul-killing generation of plein-air and Haeckel. Rightly understood (as it has never yet been), this battle of Rembrandt-brown and the plein-air of the new school is simply one more case of the hopeless resistance put up by soul against intellect and Culture against Civilization, of the opposition of symbolic necessary art and megalopolitan "applied" art which affects building and painting and sculpture and poetry alike. Regarded thus, the significance of the brown becomes manifest enough. When it dies, an entire Culture dies with it.

It was the masters who were inwardly greatest — Rembrandt above all — who best understood this colour. It is the enigmatic brown of his most telling work, and its origin is in the deep lights of Gothic church-windows and the twilight of the high-vaulted Gothic nave. And the gold tone of the great Venetians — Titian, Veronese, Palma, Giorgione — is always reminding us of that old perished Northern art of glass painting of which they themselves know almost nothing. Here also the Renaissance with its deliberate bodiliness of colour is seen as merely an episode, an event of the very self-conscious surface, and not a product of the underlying Faustian instinct of the Western soul, whereas this luminous gold-brown of the Venetian painting links Gothic and Baroque, the art of the old glass-painting and the dark music of Beethoven. And it coincides precisely in time with the establishment of the Baroque style of colour-music by the work of the Netherlanders Willaert and Cyprian de Rore, the elder Gabrieli, and the Venetian music-school which they founded.

Brown, then, became the characteristic colour of the soul, and more particu- larly of a historically-disposed soul. Nietzsche has, I think, spoken somewhere of the "brown " music of Bizet, but the adjective is far more appropriate to the music which Beethoven wrote for strings ^ and to the orchestration that even as late as Bruckner so often fills space with a browny-golden expanse of tone. All other colours are relegated to ancillary functions — thus the bright yellow

^ His portrait of Frau Gcdon, all steeped in brown, is the last Old-Masttr portrait of the West; it is painted entirely in the style of the past.

• The strings in the Orchestra represent, as a class, the colours of the distance. The bluish green

of Watteau is found already in the Neapolitan bel canto of about 1700, in Couperin, in Mozart and Haydn; and the brown of the Ehitch in Corelli, Handel and Beethoven. The woodwind, too, calls up illumined distances. Yellow and red, on the other hand, the colours of nearness, the popular colours, are associated with the brass timbre, the effect of which is corporeal often to the point of vulgarity. The tone of an old fiddle is entirely bodiless. It is worth remarking that the Greek music, insignificent as it is, underwent an evolution from the Dorian lyre to the Ionian flute (aulos and syrinx) and that even in the time of Pericles strict Dorians blamed this as an enervating and lowering tendency.

(The horn is an exception, and is always treated as an exception, to the brass generally. Its place is with the woodwind, and its colours are those of the distance. — Tr.")

THE ARTS OF FORM 2.53

and the vermilion of Vermeer intrude with the spatial almost as though from another world and with an emphasis that is truly metaphysical, and the yellow-green and blood-red lights of Rembrandt seem at most to play with the symbolism of space. In Rubens, on the contrary — brilliant performer but no thinker — the brown is almost destitute of idea, a shadow-colour. (In him and in Watteau, the "Catholic" blue-green disputes precedence with the brown.) All this shows how any particular means may, in the hands of men of inward depth, become a symbol for the evocation of such high transcendence as that of the Rembrandt landscape, while for other great masters it may be merely a serviceable technical expedient — or in other words that (as we have already seen) technical "form," in the theoretical sense of something opposed to "content," has nothing whatever to do with the real and true form of a great work.

1 have called brown a historical colour. By this is meant that it makes the atmosphere of the pictured space signify directedness and future, and over- powers the assertiveness of any instantaneous element that may be represented. The other colours of distance have also this significance, and they lead to an important, considerable and distinctly bizarre extension of the Western sym- bolism. The Hellenes had in the end come to prefer bronze and even gilt- bronze to the painted marble, the better to express (by the radiance of this phenomenon against a deep blue sky) the idea of the individualness of any and every corporeal thing. ^ Now, when the Renaissance dug these statues up, it found them black and green with the patina of many centuries. The historic spirit, with its piety and longing, fastened on to this — and from that time forth our form-feeling has canonized this black and green of distance. To-day our eye finds it indispensable to the enjoyment of a bronze — an ironical illus- tration of the fact that this whole species of art is something that no longer concerns us as such. What does a cathedral dome or a bronze figure mean to us without the patina which transmutes the short-range brilliance into the tone of remoteness of time and place? Have we not got to the point of arti- ficially producing this patina? ^

But even more than this is involved in the ennoblement of decay to the level of an art-means of independent significance. That a Greek would have regarded the formation of patina as the ruin of the work, we can hardly doubt. It is not merely that the colour green, on account of its "distant" quality, was avoided by him on spiritual grounds. Patina is a symbol of mortality and hence related in a remarkable way to the symbols of time-measurement and the

^ The use of gold in this way, viz., to add brilliancy to bodies standing freely in the open, has nothing in common with its employment in Magian art to provide glittering backgrounds for figures seen in dim interiors.

2 The Chinese also attach enormous importance to the patinas of their old bronzes, which, owing to the different alloys used and the strong chemical characters of the soil, are of infinite variety and natural intricacy. They too, in later phases, have come to the production of artificial patina. — Tr.

154 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

funeral rite. We have already in an earlier chapter discussed the wistful regard of the Faustian soul for ruins and evidences of the distant past, its proneness to the collection of antiquities and manuscripts and coins, to pilgrimages to the Forum Romanum and to Pompeii, to excavations and philological studies, which appears as early as the time of Petrarch. When would it have occurred to a Greek to bother himself with the ruins of Cnossus or Tiryns? ^ Every Greek knew his * * Iliad ' ' but not one ever thought of digging up the hill of Troy. We, on the contrary, are moved by a secret piety to preserve the aqueducts of the Campagna, the Etruscan tombs, the ruins of Luxor and Karnak, the crumbling castles of the Rhine, the Roman Limes, Hersfeld and Paulinzella from becoming mere rubbish — but we keep them as ruinSy feeling in some subtle way that re- construction would deprive them of something, indefinable in terms, that can never be reproduced. ^ Nothing was further from the Classical mind than this reverence for the weather-beaten evidences of a once and a formerly. It cleared out of sight everything that did not speak of the present; never was the old preserved because it was old. After the Persians had destroyed old Athens, the citizens threw columns, statues, reliefs, broken or not, over the Acropolis wall, in order to start afresh with a clean slate — and the resultant scrap-heaps have been our richest sources for the art of the 6th Century. Their action was quite in keeping with the style of a Culture that raised cremation to the rank of a major symbol and refused with scorn to bind daily life to a chronology. Out choice has been, as usual, the opposite. The heroic landscape of the Claude Lorrain type is inconceivable without ruins. The English park with its atmos- pheric suggestion, which supplanted the French about 1750 and abandoned the great perspective idea of the latter in favour of the "Nature" of Addison, Pope and sensibility, introduced into its stock of motives perhaps the most astonishing bizarreric ever perpetrated, the artificial ruin^ in order to deepen the historical character in the presented landscape.' The Egyptian Culture restored the works of its early period, but it would never have ventured to build ruins as the symbols of the past. Again, it is not the Classical statue, but the Classical torso that we really love. It has had a destiny: something suggestive of the past as past envelops it, and our imagination delights to fill the empty

• Pausanias, it should be observed, was neither by date nor by origin a Greek. — Tr.

• "In places, as you stand on it, the great towered and embattled enceinte produces an illusion:

it looks as if it were still equipped and defended. One vivid challenge at any rate it flings down before you; it compels you to make up your mind on the matter of restoration. For myself, I have no hesitation; I prefer in every case the ruined, however ruined, to the reconstructed however splen- did. . . . After that, I am free to say that the restoration of Carcassonne is a splendid achievement." (Henry James, "A Little Tour in France," xxiii.) Yet if ever there was a reconstruction carried out with piety and scholarship as well as skill, it was Viollet-le-Duc's reconstruction of these old town- walls. — Tr.

' Home, an English philosopher of the i8th Centiuy, declared in a lecture on English parks that Gothic ruins represented the triumph of time over power. Classical ruins that of barbarism over taste. It was that age that first discovered the beauty of the ruin-studded Rhine, which was thenceforward the historic river of the Germans.

THE ARTS OF FORM 155

space ot missing limbs with the pulse and swing of invisible lines. A good restoration — and the secret charm of endless possibilities is all gone. I Ven- ture to maintain that it is only by way of this transposition into the musical that the remains of Classical sculpture can really reach us. The green bronze, the blackened marble, the fragments of a figure abolish for our inner eye the limi- tations of time and space. "Picturesque" this has been called — the brand- new statue and building and the too-well-groomed park arc not picturesque — and the word is just to this extent, that the deep meaning of this weather- ing is the same as that of the studio-brown. But, at bottom, what both express is the spirit of instrumental music. Would the Spearman of Polycletus, stand- ing before us in flashing bronze and with enamel eyes and gilded hair, affect us as it does in the state of blackened age? Would not the Vatican torso of Heracles lose its mighty impressiveness ii, one fine day, the missing parts were discovered and replaced? And would not the towers and domes of our old cities lose their deep metaphysical charm if they were sheathed in new copper? Age, for us as for the Egyptian, ennobles all things. For Classical man, it depreciates them.

Lastly, consider Western tragedy; observe how the same feeling leads it to prefer "historical" material — meaning thereby not so much demonstrably actual or even possible, but remote and crusted subjects. That which the Faustian soul wanted, and must have, could not be expressed by any event of purely momentary meaning, lacking in distance of time or place, or by a tragic art of the Classical kind, or by a timeless myth. Our tragedies, consequently, are tragedies of the past and of the future — the latter category, in which men jct to be are shown as carriers of a Destiny, is represented in a certain sense by "Faust," "Peer Gynt" and the " Gotterdammerung. " But tragedies of the present we have not, apart from the trivial social drama of the 19th Century. ^ If Shakespeare wanted on occasion to express anything of importance in the present, he at least removed the scene of it to some foreign land — Italy for preference — in which he had never been, and German poets likewise take England or France — always for the sake of getting rid of that nearness of time and place which the Attic drama emphasized even in the case of a mythological subject.

1 English readers will very likely think of the case of Shaw's "Back to Methuselah," with its extreme contrast of the cheaply-satirical present-day scene and the noble and tragic scenes of far past and far future. — Tr.

CHAPTER VIII MUSIC AND PLASTIC

II ACT AND PORTRAIT

/

CHAPTER VIII

MUSIC AND PLASTIC

II

ACT 1 AND PORTRAIT

The Classical has been characterized as a culture of the Body and the Northern as a culture of the Spirit, and not without a certain arriere-pensee of disprizing the one in favour of the other. Though it was mainly in trivialities that Renaissance taste made its contrasts between Classical and Modern, Pagan and Christian, yet even this might have led to decisive discoveries if only men had seen how to get behind formula to origins.

If the environment of a man (whatever else it may be) is with respect to him a macrocosm with respect to a microcosm, an immense aggregate of symbols, then the man himself, in so far as he belongs to the fabric of actuality, in so far as he is phenomenal, must be comprised in the general symbolism. But, in the impress of him made upon men like himself, what is it that possesses the force of Symbol, viz., the capacity of summing within itself and intelligibly presenting the essence of that man and the signification of his being? Art gives the answer.

But this answer is necessarily different in different Cultures. As each lives differently, so each is differently impressed by Life. For the mode of human imagining — metaphysical, ethical, artistic imagining alike — it is more than important, it is determinant that the individual feels himself as a body amongst bodies or, on the contrary, as a centre in endless space; that he subtilizes his ego into lone distinctness or, on the contrary, regards it as substantially part of the general consensus, that the directional character is asserted or, on the con- trary, denied in the rhythm and course of his life. In all these ways the prime- symbol of the great Culture comes to manifestation: this is indeed a world- feeling, but the life-ideal conforms to it. From the Classical ideal followed unreserved acceptance of the sensuous instant, from the Western a not less passionate wrestle to overcome it. The Apollinian soul, Euclidean and point- formed, felt the empirical visible body as the complete expression of its own way of being; the Faustian, roving into all distances, found this expression not in person, crco/xa, but in personality, character, call it what you will. "Soul" for the real Hellene was in last analysis the form of his body — and thus Aristotle

^ The word Akt means "pose" and, in art language, "nude." In this work h must be understood in a widened connotation — viz., as expressing the instantaneous-become as against the historically- becoming, the presentation in the perfect as against the imperfect sense, the act as against the action. It has therefore been retained, "nude" however being substituted in certain cases.

2-59

i6o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

defined it. "Body" for Faustian man was the vessel of the soul — and thus Goethe felt it.

But the result of this is that Culture and Culture differ very greatly in their selection and formation of their humane arts. While Gluck expresses the woe of Armida by a melody combined with drear gnawing tones in the instrumental accompaniment, the same is achieved in Pergamene sculptures by making every muscle speak. The Hellenistic portraiture tries to draw a spiritual type in the structure of its heads. In China the heads of the Saints of Ling-yan-si tell of a wholly personal inner life by their look and the play of the corners of the mouth.

The Classical tendency towards making the body the sole spokesman is emphatically not the result of any carnal overload in the race (to the man of aQxt)po(rvvT] wantonness was not permitted 0» it was nofy as Nietzsche thought, an orgiastic joy of untrammelled energy and perfervid passion. This sort of thing is much nearer to the ideals of Germanic-Christian or of Indian chivalry. What Apollinian man and Apollinian art can claim as their very own is simply the apotheosis of the bodily phenomenon^ taking the word perfectly literally — the rhythmic proportioning of limbs and harmonious build of muscles. This is not Pagan as against Christian, it is Attic as against Baroque; for it was Baroque mankind (Christian or unbeliever, monk or rationalist) that first utterly put away the cult of the palpable cco/ia, carrying its alienation indeed to the extremes of bodily uncleanliness that prevailed in the entourage of Louis XIV, 2 whose full wigs and lace cuffs and buckled shoes covered up Body with a whole web of ornament.

Thus the Classical plastic art, after liberating the form completely from the actual or imaginary back-wall and setting it up in the open, free and unrelated, to be seen as a body among bodies, moved on logically till the naked body became its only subject. And, moreover, it is unlike every other kind of sculpture recorded in art-history in that its treatment of the bounding surfaces of this body is anatomically convincing. Here is the Euclidean world-principle carried to the extreme; any envelope whatever would have been in contradiction, however slightly, with the Apollinian phenomenon, would have indicated, however timidly, the existence of the circum-space.

In this art, what is ornamental in the high sense resides entirely in the pro- portions of the structure ' and the equivalence of the axes in respect of support and load. Standing, sitting, lying down but always self-secure, the body has,

' One need only contrast the Greek artist with Rubens and Rabelais.

' Of whom one of his mistresses remarked that he "smelt like a carcass " Cqu'il puait commc une charogne). Note also how the musician generally has a reputation for uncleanliness.

• From the solemn canon of Polycletus to the elegance of Lysippus the same process of lightening is going on in the body-build as that which brought the column from the Doric to the G)rinthian order. The Euclidean feeling was beginning to relax.

ACT AND PORTRAIT i6i

like the peripteros, no interior, that is, no "soul." The significance of the muscle-relief, carried out absolutely in the round, is the same as that of the self- closing array of the columns; both contain the whole of the form-language of the work.

It was a strictly metaphysical reason, the need of a supreme life-symbol for themselves, that brought the later Hellenes to this art, which under all the consummate achievement is a narrow one. It is not true that this language of the outer surface is the completest, or the most natural, or even the most obvious mode of representing the human being. Quite the contrary. If the Renaissance, with its ardent theory and its immense misconception of its own tendency, had not continued to dominate our judgment — long after the plastic art itself had become entirely alien to our inner soul — we should not have waited till to-day to observe this distinctive character of the Attic style. No Egyptian or Chinese sculptor ever dreamed of using external anatomy to ex- press his meaning. In Gothic image-work a language of the muscles is unheard of. The human tracery that clothes the mighty Gothic framework with a web of countless figures and reliefs (Chartres cathedral has more than ten thousand such) is not merely ornament; as early as about 12.00 it is employed for the expression of schemes and purposes far grander than even the grandest of Clas- sical plastic. For these masses of figures constitute a tragic unit. Here, by the North even earlier than by Dante, the historical feeling of the Faustian soul — of which the deep sacrament of Contrition is the spiritual expression and the rite of Confession the grave teacher — is intensified to the tragic fullness of a world-drama. That which Joachim of Floris, at this very time, was seeing in his Apulian cell — the picture of the world, not as Cosmos, but as a Divine History and succession of three world-ages ^ — the craftsmen were expressing at Reims, Amiens and Paris in serial presentation of it from the Fall to the Last Judgment. Each of the scenes, each of the great symbolic figures, had its sig- nificant place in the sacred edifice, each its role in the immense world-poem. Then, too, each individual man came to feel how his life-course was fitted as ornament in the plan of Divine history, and to experience this personal connex- ion with it in the forms of Contrition and Confession. And thus these bodies of stone are not mere servants of the architecture. They have a deep and particular meaning of their own, the same meaning as the memorial-tomb brings to expres- sion with ever-increasing intensity from the Royal Tombs of St. Denis onward; they speak of a personality . Just as Classical man properly meant, with his perfected working-out of superficial body (for all the anatomical aspiration of the Greek artist comes to that in the end), to exhaust the whole essence of the living phenomenon in and by the rendering of its bounding surfaces, so Faustian man no less logically found the most genuine, the only exhaustive, expres- sion of his life-feeling in the Portrait. The Hellenic treatment of the nude is

• Sec p. 19. — Tr.

i6i THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the great exceptional case; in this and in this only has it led to an art of the high order. ^

Act and Portrait have never hitherto been felt as constituting an opposition, and consequently the full significance of their appearances in art-history has never been appreciated. And yet it is in the conflict of these two form-ideals that the contrast of two worlds is first manifested in full. There, on the one hand, an existence is made to show itself in the composition of the exterior structure; here, on the other hand, the human interior, the Soul, is made to speak of itself, as the interior of a church speaks to us through its fagade or face. A mosque had no face, and consequently the Iconoclastic movement of the Moslems and the Paulicians — which under Leo III spread to Byzantium and beyond — necessarily drove the portrait-element quite out of the arts of form, so that thenceforward they possessed only a fixed stock of human ara- besques. In Egypt the face of the statue was equivalent to the pylon, the face of the temple-plan; it was a mighty emergence out of the stone-mass of the body, as we see in the " Hyksos Sphinx " of Tanis and the portrait of Amenem- het III. In China the face is like a landscape, full of wrinkles and little signs that mean something. But, for us, the portrait is musical. The look, the play of the mouth, the pose of head and hands — these things are a fugue of the subtlest meaning, a composition of many voices that sounds to the understand- ing beholder.

But in order to grasp the significance of the portraiture of the West more specifically in contrast with that of Egypt and that of China, we have to con- sider the deep change in the language of the West that began in Merovingian times to foreshadow the dawn of a new life-feeling. This change extended equally over the old German and the vulgar Latin, but it affected only the tongues spoken in the countries of the coming Culture (for instance, Norwegian and Spanish, but not Rumanian). The change would be inexplicable if we were to regard merely the spirit of these languages and their ' ' influence * ' of one upon another; the explanation is in the spirit of the mankind that raised a mere way of using words to the level of a symbol. Instead of sum, Gothic im, we say ich bin, I am, je suis; instead oi fecisti, we say tu hahts factum, tu as fait, du babes gitdn; and again, da^. wip, un homme, man hat. This has hitherto been a riddle * because families of languages were considered as beings, but the mystery is solved when we discover in the idiom the reflection of a soul. The Faustian soul is here beginning to remould for its own use grammatical material of the most varied provenance. The coming of this specific " I' * is the first dawning of

^ In other countries, e.g., old Egypt and Japan (to anticipate a particularly foolish and shallow assertion), the sipht of naked men was a far more ordinary and commonplace thing than it was in Athens, but the Japanese art-lover feels emphasized nudity as ridiculous and vulgar. The nude is depicted (as for that matter it is in the "Adam and Eve" of Bamberg Cathedral), but merely as an object without any significance of potential whatsoever.

• Kluge, Deutsche Sprach^esch. (1910), pp. 2.01 et seq.

ACT AND PORTRAIT 163

that personality-idea which was so much later to create the sacrament of Contrition and -personal absolution. This "ego habeo factum," the insertion of the auxiliaries "have" and "be" between a doer and a deed, in lieu of the "feci" which expresses activated body, replaces the world of bodies by one of functions between centres of force, the static syntax by a dynamic. And this "I" and "Thou" is the key to Gothic portraiture. A Hellenistic portrait is the type of an attitude — a confession it is not, either to the creator of it or to the understanding spectator. But our portraits depict something sui generis^ once occurring and never recurring, a life-history expressed in a moment, a world-centre for which everything else is world-around, exactly as the gram- matical subject "I" becomes the centre of force in the Faustian sentence.

It has been shown how the experience of the extended has its origin in the living direction, time, destiny. In the perfected "being" of the all-round nude body the depth-experience has been cut away, but the "look" of a portrait leads this experience into the supersensuous infinite. Therefore the Ancient art is an art of the near and tangible and timeless, it prefers motives of brief, brief- est, pause between two movements, the last moment hejore Myron's athlete throws the discus, or the first moment after Pasonius's Nike has alighted from the air, when the swing of the body is ending and the streaming draperies have not yet fallen — attitudes devoid equally of duration and of direction, disen- gaged from future and from past. " Veni, vidi, vici" is just such another atti- tude. But in "I — came, I — saw, I — conquered" there is a becoming each time in the very build of the sentence.

The depth-experience is a becoming and effects a become, signifies time and evokes space, is at once cosmic and historical. Living direction marches to the horizon as to the future. As early as 12.30 the Madonna of the St. Anne entrance of Notre-Dame dreams of this future: so, later, the Cologne "Madonna with the Bean-blossom" of Meister Wilhelm. Long before the Moses of Michel- angelo, the Moses of Klaus Suter's well in the Chartreuse of Dijon meditates on destiny, and even the Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel are forestalled by those of Giovanni Pisano in Sant' Andrea at Pistoia (1300). And, lastly, there are the figures on the Gothic tombs — how they rest from the long journey of Destiny and how completely they contrast with the timeless grave and gay that is repre- sented on the stelas of Attic cemeteries.^ The Western portraiture is endless in every sense, for it begins to wake out of the stone from about 12.00 and it has become completely music in the 17th Century. It takes its man not as a mere centre of the World-as-Nature which as phenomenon receives shape and signi- ficance from his being, but, above all, as a centre of the World-as-History. The Classical statue is a piece of present "Nature" and nothing besides. The Classical poetry is statuary in verse. Herein is the root of our feeling that ascribes to the Greek an unreserved devotion to Nature. We shall never en-

1 A. Conze, Die Attischtn Grabreliefs (1893 etc.).

2.64 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

tircly shake off the idea that the Gothic style as compared with the Greek is "unnatural." Of course it is, for it is more than Nature; only we are unneces- sarily loath to realize that it is a deficiency in the Greek that our feeling has detected. The Western form-language is richer — portraiture belongs to Na- ture and to history. A tomb by one of those great Netherlanders who worked on the Royal graves of St. Denis from ii6o, a portrait by Holbein or Titian or Rembrandt or Goya, is a biography ^ and a self-portrait is a historical confession. To make one's confession is not to avow an act but to lay before the Judge the inner history of that act. The act is patent, its roots the personal secret. When the Protestant or the Freethinker opposes auricular confession, it never occurs to him that he is rejecting merely the outward form of the idea and not the idea itself. He declines to confess to the priest, but he confesses to himself, to a friend, or to all and sundry. The whole of Northern poetry is one outspoken confession. So are the portrait of Rembrandt and the music of Beethoven. What Raphael and Calderon and Haydn told to the priests, these men put into the language of their works. One who is forced to be silent because the great- ness of form that can take in even the ultimate things has been denied him . . . goes under like Holderlin. Western man lives in the consciousness of his becom- ing and his eyes are constantly upon past and future. The Greek lives point- wise, ahistorically, somatically. No Greek would have been capable of a genuine self-criticism. As the phenomenon of the nude statue is the com- pletely ahistoric copy of a man, so the Western self-portrait is the exact equivalent of the "Werther" or "Tasso" autobiography. To the Classical both are equally and wholly alien. There is nothing so impersonal as Greek art; that Scopas or Polycletus should make an image of himself is something quite inconceivable.

Looking at the work of Phidias, of Polycletus, or of any master later than the Persian Wars, do we not see in the doming of the brow, the lips, the set of the nose, the blind eyes, the expression of entirely non-personal, plantlike, soulless vitality? And may we not ask ourselves whether this is the form- language that is capable even of hinting at an inner experience? Michelangelo devoted himself with all passion to the study of anatomy, but the phenomenal body that he works out is always the expression of the activity of all bones, sinews and organs of the inside; without deliberate intention, the living that is under the skin comes out in the phenomenon. It is a physiognomy, and not a system, of muscles that he calls to life. But this means at once that the per- sonal destiny and not the material body has become the starting-point of the form-feeling. There is more psychology (and less "Nature ' ') in the arm of one of his Slaves * than there is in the whole head of Praxiteles's Hermes. ^ Myron's

• Louvre. Replicas of the pair in the Vict, and Alb. Museum, London. — Tr.

• Olympia — the only unquestioned original that we have from the "great age." References

would be superfluous, for few, if any. Classical works arc better or more widely known. — Tr.

ACT AND PORTRAIT 165

Discobolus/ on the other hand, renders the exterior form purely as itself, with- out relation of any sort to the inner organs, let alone to any "soul." One has only to take the best work of this period and compare it with the old Egyptian statues, say the "Village Sheikh" ^ or King Phiops (Pepi), or again with Donatello's "David," ' to understand at once what it means to recognize a body purely with reference to its material boundaries. Everything in a head that might allow something intimate or spiritual to become phenomenal the Greeks (and markedly this same Myron) most carefully avoid. Once this characteristic has struck us, the best heads of the great age sooner or later begin to pall. Seen in the perspective of our world-feeling, they are stupid and dull, wanting in the biographical element, devoid of any destiny. It was not out of caprice that that age objected so strongly to votive images. The statues of Olympian victors are representatives of a fighting attitude. Right down to Lysippus there is not one single character-head, but only masks. Again, con- sidering the figure as a whole, with what skill the Greeks avoid gWmg any impression that the head is the favoured part of the body! That is why these heads are so small, so un-significant in their pose, so un- thoroughly modelled. Always they are formed as a part of the body like arms and legs, never as the seat and symbol of an "I."

At last, even, we come to regard the feminine (not to say effeminate) look of many of these heads of the 5 th, and still more of the 4th, Centuries * as the

— no doubt unintentional — outcome of an effort to get rid of personal char- acter entirely. We should probably be justified in concluding that the ideal facial type of this art — which was certainly not an art for the people, as the later naturalistic portrait-sculpture at once shows — was arrived at by reject- ing all elements of an individual or historical character; that is, by steadily narrowing down the field of view to the pure Euclidean.

The portraiture of the great age of Baroque, on the contrary, applies to historical distance all those means of pictorial counterpoint that we already know as the fabric of their spatial distance — the brown-dipped atmosphere, the perspective, the dynamic brush-stroke, the quivering colour-tones and lights

— and with their aid succeeds in treating body as something intrinsically non- material, as the highly expressive envelope of a space-commanding ego. (This problem the fresco- technique, Euclidean that it is, is powerless to solve.) The whole painting has only one theme, a soul. Observe the rendering of the hands

^ Of the several copies that have survived, all imperfectly preserved, that in the Palazzo Massimi is accounted the best. The restoration which, once seen, convinces, is Professor Furtwanglcr's (shown in Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article Greek Art, fig. 68). — Tr.

• A cast of this is in the British Museum (illustrated in the Museum Guide to Egypt. Antiq.,

pi. XXI). -Tr.

' In the Bargello, Florence. Replica in Vict, and Alb. Museum, London. — Tr.

• The "Apollo with the lyre" at Munich was admired by Winckelmann and his time as a Muse.

Till quite recently a head of Athene (a copy of Praxiteles) at Bologna passed as that of a general. Such errors would be entirely impossible in dealing with a physiognomic art, e.g., Baroque.

i66 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

and the brow in Rembrandt (e.g., in the etching of Burgomaster Six or the por- trait of an architect at Cassel), and again, even so late, in Marees and Leibl ^ — spiritual to the point of dematerializing them, visionary, lyrical. Compare them with the hand and brow of an Apollo or a Poseidon of the Periclean age!

The Gothic, too, had deeply and sincerely felt this. It had draped body, not for its own sake but for the sake of developing in the ornament of the drapery a form-language consonant with the language of the head and the hands in a fugue of Life. So, too, with the relations of the voices in counterpoint and, in Baroque, those of the "continuo" to the upper voices of the orchestra. In Rembrandt there is always interplay of bass melody in the costume and motives in the head.

Like the Gothic draped figure, the old Egyptian statue denies the intrinsic importance of body. As the former, by treating the clothing in a purely orna- mental fashion, reinforces the expressiveness of head and hands, so the latter, with a grandeur of idea never since equalled (at any rate in sculpture), holds the body — as it holds a pyramid or an obelisk — to a mathematical scheme and confines the personal element to the head. The fall of draperies was meant in Athens to reveal the sense of the body, in the North to conceal it; in the one case the fabric becomes body, in the other it becomes music. And from this deep contrast springs the silent battle that goes on in high-Renaissance work between the consciously-intended and the unconsciously-insistent ideals of the artist, a battle in which the first — anti-Gothic — often wins the superficial, but the second — Gothic becoming Baroque — invariably wins the funda- mental victory.

The opposition of Apollinian and Faustian ideals of Humanity may now be stated concisely. Act and Portrait are to one another as body and space, instant and history, foreground and background, Euclidean and analytical number, proportion and relation. The Statue is rooted in the ground. Music (and the Western portrait is music, soul woven of colour-tones) invades and pervades space without limit. The fresco-painting is tied to the wall, trained on it, but the oil-painting, the "picture" on canvas or board or other table, is free from limitations of place. The Apollinian form-language reveals only the become, the Faustian shows above all a becoming.

It is for this reason that child-portraits and family groups are amongst the finest and most intimately right achievements of the Western art. In the Attic sculpture this motive is entirely absent, and although in Hellenistic times the playful motive of the Cupid or Putto came into favour, it was expressly as a being dijferent from the other beings and not at all as a person growing or be- coming. The child links past and future. In every art of human representation ^ In his portrait of Frau GcdoD, already alluded to, p. X3X.

ACT AND PORTRAIT 167

that has a claim to symbolic import, it signifies duration in the midst of phe- nomenal change, the endlessness of Life. But the Classical Life exhausted it- self in the completeness of the moment. The individual shut his eyes to time- distances; he comprehended in his thought the men like himself whom he saw- around him, but not the coming generations; and therefore there has never been an art that so emphatically ignored the intimate representation of children as the Greek art did. Consider the multitude of child-figures that our own art has produced from early Gothic to dying Rococo — and in the Renaissance above all — and find if you can in Classical art right down to Alexander one work of importance that intentionally sets by the side of the worked-out body of man or woman any child-element with existence still before it.

Endless Becoming is comprehended in the idea of Motherhood^ Woman as Mother is Time and is Destiny. Just as the mysterious act of depth-experience fashions, out of sensation, extension and world, so through motherhood the bodily man is made an individual member of this world, in which thereupon he has a Destiny. All symbols of Time and Distance are also symbols of ma- ternity. Care is the root-feeling of future, and all care is motherly. It expresses itself in the formation and the idea of Family and State and in the principle of Inheritance which underlies both. Care may be either affirmed or denied — one can live care-filled or care-free. Similarly, Time may be looked at in the light of eternity or in the light of the instant; and the drama of begetting and bearing, or the drama of the nursing mother with her child, may be chosen as the symbol of Life to be made apprehensible by all the means of art. India and the Classical took the first alternative, Egypt and the West the second.^ There is something of pure unrelated present in the Phallus and the Lingam, and in the phenomenon of the Doric column and the Attic statue as well. But the nursing Mother points into the future, and she is just the figure that is entirely missing in the Classical art. She could not possibly be rendered in the style of Phidias. One feels that this form is opposed to the sense of the phenomenon.

But in the religious art of the West, the representation of Motherhood is the noblest of all tasks. As Gothic dawns, the Theotokos of the Byzantine changes into the Mater Dolorosa, the Mother of God. In German mythology she ap- pears (doubtless from Carolingian times only) as Frigga and Frau Holle. The same feeling comes out in beautiful Minnesinger fancies like Lady Sun, Lady World, Lady Love. The whole panorama of early Gothic mankind is pervaded by something maternal, something caring and patient, and Germanic-Catholic Christianity — when it had ripened into full consciousness of itself and in one impulse settled its sacraments and created its Gothic Style — placed not the suffering Redeemer but the suffering Mother in the centre of its world-picture. About 1150, in the great epic of statuary of Reims Cathedral, the principal place in the

• See p. 136 and also Vol. II, p. 354.

x68 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

centre of the main porch, which in the cathedrals of Paris and Amiens was still that of Christ, was assigned to the Madonna; and it was about this time, too, that the Tuscan school at Arezzo and Siena (Guido da Siena) began to infuse a suggestion of mother-love into the conventional Byzantine Theotokos. And after that the Madonnas of Raphael led the way to the purely human type of the Baroque, the mother in the sweetheart — Ophelia, Gretchen — whose secret reveals itself in the glorious close of Faust II and in its fusion with the early Gothic Mary.

As against these types, the imagination of the Greeks conceived goddesses who are either Amazons like Athene or hetasras like Aphrodite. In the root- feeling which produced the Classical type of womanhood, fruitfulness has a vegetal character — in this connexion as in others the word <rco/ia exhaustively expresses the meaning of the phenomenon. Think of the masterpieces of this art, the three mighty female bodies of the East Pediment of the Parthenon,^ and compare with them that noblest image of a mother, Raphael's Sistine Madonna. In the latter, all bodiliness has disappeared. She is all distance and space. The Helen of the "Iliad," compared with Kriemhild, the motherly comrade of Siegfried, is a courtesan, while Antigone and Clyta^mnestra are Amazons. How strangely even i^schylus passes over in silence the mother-tragic in Cly- tasmnestra! The figure of Medea is nothing less than the mythic inverse of the Faustian "Mater Dolorosa"; her tragic is not one of future or children, it is with her lover, the symbol of wholly-present life, that her universe collapses. Kriemhild revenges her unborn children — it is this future that has been mur- dered in her — but Medea revenges only a past happiness. When the Classical sculpture, late art that it is,'^ arrives at secularizing ^ the pictures of the god, it creates the antique ideal of female form in a Cnidian Aphrodite — merely a very beautiful object, not a character or an ego but a piece of Nature. And in the end Praxiteles finds the hardihood to represent a goddess entirely naked. This innovation met with severe criticism, for it was felt to be a sign of the decline of the Classical world-feeling; suitable as it was to erotic symbolism, it

• The so-called "Three Fates" in the British Museum. — Tr.

» The Orphic springtime contemplates the Gods and does not see them. See Vol. 11, p. 345.

« There was indeed a beginning of this in the aristocratic epic of Homer — so nearly akin to the courtly narrative art of Boccaccio. But throughout the Classical age strictly religious people felt it as a profanation; the worship that shines through the Homeric poems is quite without idolatry, and a further proof is the anger of thinkers who, like Heraclitus and Plato, were in close touch with the temple tradition. It will occur to the student that the unrestricted handling of even the highest divinities in this very late art is not unlike the theatrical Catholicism of Rossini and Liszt, which is already foreshadowed in Corelli and Handel and had, earlier even, almost led to the condemnation of Church music in 1564.

(The event alluded to in the last line is the dispute in and after the Council of Trent as to the nature and conduct of Church music. If Wagner's suggestion that Pope Marcellus II tried to exclude it altogether is exaggerated, it is certain at least that the complaints were deep and powerful, and that the Council found it necessary to forbid " unworthy music in the house of God " and to bring the subject under the disciplinary control of the Bishops. — Tr.^

ACT AND PORTRAIT 169

was in sharp contradiction with the dignity of the older Greek religion. But exactly then, too, a portrait-art ventured to show itself, simultaneously with the invention of a form that has never since been forgotten, the bust. Un- fortunately (here as elsewhere) art-research has made the mistake of discovering in this the "beginnings" of "the" portrait. In reality, whereas a Gothic visage speaks of an individual destiny, and even an Egyptian — in spite of the rigid formalism of the iigure — has the recognizable traits of the individual person (since otherwise it could not serve as dwelling for the higher soul of the dead, his K^), the Greeks developed a taste for typical representations just as the contemporary comedy produced standard men and situations, to which any names whatever could be affixed. The "portrait" is distinguishable not by personal traits but by the label only. This is the general custom amongst children and primitive men, and it is connected with name-magic. The name serves to capture some essence of what is named and to bind it as an ob- ject which thereupon becomes specific for every beholder. The statues of the Tyrannicides,^ the (Etruscan) statues of Kings in the Capitol and the "iconic" portraits of victors at Olympia must have been portraits of this sort, viz., not likenesses but figures with names. But now, in the later phase, there was an additional factor — the tendency of the time towards genre and applied art, which produced also the Corinthian column. What the sculptors worked out was the types of life's stage, the ridos which we mistranslate by character but which is really the kinds and modes of public behaviour and attitude; thus there is "the" grave Commander, "the" tragic poet, "the" passion-torn actor, "the" absorbed philospher. Here is the real key to the understanding of the celebrated Hellenistic portraiture, for which the quite unjustifiable claim has been set up that its products are expressions of a deep spiritual life. It is not of much moment whether the work bears the name of someone long dead — the Sophocles 2 was sculptured about 340 — or of a living man like the Pericles of Cresilas.^ It was only in the 4th Century that Demetrius of Alopeke began to emphasize individual traits in the external build of the man and Lysistratus the brother of Lysippus to copy (as Pliny tells us) a plaster-of-paris cast of the subject's face without much subsequent modification. And how little such portraiture is portraiture in Rembrandt's sense should surely have been obvious to anyone. The soul is missing. The brilliant fidelity of Roman busts especially has been mistaken for physiognomic depth. But what really distinguishes the higher work from this craftsman's and virtuoso's work is an intention that is the precise opposite of the artistic intention of a Marees or a Leibl. That is, in such work the important and significant is not brought out^ it is -put in. An

^ Harmodius and Aristogiton. At Naples. Illustrated in Ency. Brit. XI ed., article Greek Arf^ fig. 50. Cast in British Museum. — Tr.

2 The famous statue now in the Lateran Museum, Rome. — Tr.

^ See foot-note, p. 130. An antique copy is in the British Museum. — Tr.

-L-jo THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

example of this is seen in the Demosthenes statue,^ the artist of which possibly saw the orator in life. Here the particulars of the body-surface are emphasized, perhaps over-emphasized ("true to Nature," they called this then), but into the disposition so conceived he works the character-type of the Serious Orator which we meet again on different bases in the portraits of i^schines and Lysias at Naples. That is truth to life, undoubtedly, but it is truth to life as Classical man felt it, typical and impersonal. We have contemplated the result with our eyes, and have accordingly misunderstood it.

Ill

In the oil-painting age that followed the end of the Renaissance, the depth of an artist can be accurately measured by the content of his portraits. To this rule there is hardly an exception. All forms in the picture (whether single, or in scenes, groups or masses) ^ are fundamentally felt as portraits; whether they are meant to be so or not is immaterial, for the individual painter has no choice in the matter. Nothing is more instructive than to observe how under the hands of a real Faustian man even the Act transforms itself into a portrait- study.' Take two German masters like Lucas Cranach and Tilmann Riemen- schneider who were untouched by any theory and (in contrast to Diirer, whose inclination to aesthetic subtlety made him pliant before alien tendencies) worked in unqualified naivete. They seldom depict the Act, and when they do so, they show themselves entirely unable to concentrate their expression on the immediately-present plane-specified bodiliness. The meaning of the human phenomenon, and therefore of the representation of it, remains entirely in the head, and is consistently physiognomical rather than anatomical. And the same may be said of Diirer's Lucrezia, notwithstanding his Italian studies and the quite opposite intention. A Faustian act is a contradiction in itself — hence the character-heads that we so often see on feeble act-representations (as far back as the Job of old French cathedral -sculpture) and hence also the labori- ous, forced, equivocal character that arouses our dislike in too manifest efforts to placate the Classical ideal — sacrifices offered up not by the soul but by the cultivated understanding. In the whole of painting after Leonardo there is not one important or distinctive work that derives its meaning from the Euclidean being of the nude body. It is mere incomprehension to quote Rubens here, and to compare his unbridled dynamism of swelling bodies in any respect whatever with the art of Praxiteles and even Scopas. It is owing precisely tx) his splendid sensuality that he is so far from the static of Signorelli's bodies. If there ever was an artist who could put a maximum of "becoming" into the beauty of

• In the Vatican Museum. — Tr.

• Even the landscape of the Baroque develops from composed baclcgroundai to portraits of

definite localities, representations of the soul of these localities which are thus endowed with jacts.

• It could be said of Hellenistic portrait art that it followed exactly the opposite course.

ACT AND PORTRAIT -l-ji

naked bodies, who could treat bodily floridness historically and convey the (utterly un-Hellenic) idea of an inexhaustible outflowing from within, it was Rubens. Compare the horse's head from the Parthenon pediment ^ with his horses' heads in the Battle of the Amazons,^ and the deep metaphysical contrast between the two conceptions of the same phenomenal element is felt at once. In Rubens (recalling once more the characteristic opposition of Apollinian and Faustian mathematics) the body is not magnitude but relation. What matters is not the regimen of its external structure but the fullness of life that streams out of it and the stride of its life along the road from youth to age, where the Last Judgment that turns bodies into flames takes up the motive and intertwines it in the quivering web of active space. Such a synthesis is entirely un-Classical; but even nymphs, when it is Corot who paints them, are likewise shapes ready to dissolve into colour-patches reflecting endless space. Such was not the intention of the Classical artist when he depicted the Act.

At the same time, the Greek form-ideal — the self-contained unit of being expressed in sculpture — has equally to be distinguished from that of the merely beautiful bodies on which painters from Giorgione to Boucher were always exercising their cleverness, which are fleshly still-life, genre-work expressing merely a certain gay sensuousness (e.g., "Rubens's wife in a fur cloak." ^) and in contrast with the high ethical significance of the Classical Act have almost no symbolic force.'* Magnificent as these men's painting is, therefore, they have not succeeded in reaching the highest levels either of portraiture or of space-representation in landscape. Their brown and their green and their perspective lack "religiousness," future, Destiny. They are masters only in the domain of elementary form, and when it has actualized this their art is exhausted. It is they who constitute the substance-element in the development-history of a great art. But when a great artist pressed on beyond them to a form that was to be capable of embracing the whole meaning of the world, he had necessarily to push to perfection the treatment of the nude body if his world was the Classical, and not to do so if it was our North. Rembrandt never once painted an Act, in this foreground sense, and if Leonardo, Titian, Velasquez (and, among moderns, Menzel, Leibl, Marees and Manet) did so at all, it was very rarely; and even then, so to say, they painted bodies as landscapes. The portrait is ever the touchstone.^

But no one would ever judge masters like Signorelli, Mantegna, Botticelli or even Verrocchio, by the quality of their portraits. The equestrian statue of

^ British Museum. — Tr. 2 Pinakothek, Munich. — Tr.

• Art Gallery, Vienna. — Tr.

• Nothing more clearly displays the decadence of Western art since the middle of the 19th cen-

tury than its absurd mass- wise rendering of nudes; the deeper meaning of study of the nude and the importance of the motive have been entirely forgotten.

5 By that test Rubens, and, among moderns, especially Feuerbach and Bocklin, lose, while Goya, Daumier, and, in Germany, Oldach, Wasmann Rayski and many another almost forgotten artist of the earlier 19th Century, gain. And Marees passes to the rank of the very greatest.

-L-j-L THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Can Grande ^ of 1330 is in a far higher sense a portrait than the Bartolommeo Colleoni is; and Raphael's portraits (the best of which e.g., Pope Julius II were done under the influence of the Venetian Sebastian del Piombo), could be ignored altogether in an appreciation of his creative work. It is only with Leonardo that the portrait begins to count seriously. Between fresco-tech- nique and oil-painting there is a subtle opposition. In fact, Giovanni Bellini's "Doge" (Loredano) ' is the first great oil-portrait. Here too the character of the Renaissance as a protest against the Faustian spirit of the West betrays itself. The episode of Florence amounts to an attempt to replace the Portrait of the Gothic style (as distinct from the "ideal" portrait of late-Classical art, which was well known through the Cassar-busts) by the Act as human symbol. Logically, therefore, the entire art of the Renaissance should be wanting in the physiognomic traits. And yet the strong undercurrent of Faustian art-will kept alive, not only in the smaller towns and schools of middle Italy, but also in the instincts of the great masters themselves, a Gothic tradition that was never interrupted. Nay, the physiognomic of Gothic art even made itself master of the Southern nude body, alien as this element was. Its creations are not bodies that speak to us through static definition of their bounding surfaces. What we see is a dumb-show that spreads from the face over all parts of the body, and the appreciative eye detects in this very nudity of Tuscany a deep identity with the drapery of the Gothic. Both are envelopes, neither a limitation. The re- clining nude figures of Michelangelo in the Medici chapel are wholly and entirely the visage and the utterance of a soul. But, above all, every head, painted or modelled, became of itself a portrait, even when the heads were of gods or saints. The whole of the portrait-work of A. Rossellino, Donatello, Benedetto de Maiano, Mino da Fiesole, stands so near in spirit to that of Van Eyck, Memlinc and the Early Rhenish masters as to be often indistinguish- able from theirs. There is not and there cannot be, I maintain, any genuine Renaissance portraiture, that is, a portraiture in which just that artistic senti- ment which differentiates the Court of the Palazzo Strozzi from the Loggia dei Lanzi and Perugino from Cimabue applies itself to the rendering of a visage. In architecture, little as the new work was Apollinian in spirit, it was possible to create anti-Gothically, but in portraiture — no. It was too specifically Faustian a symbol. Michelangelo declined the task: passionately devoted as he was to his pursuit of a plastic ideal, he would have considered it an abdi- cation to busy himself with portraiture. His Brutus bust is as little of a por- trait as his de' Medici, whereas Botticelli's portrait of the latter is actual, and frankly Gothic to boot. Michelangelo's heads are allegories in the style of dawning Baroque, and their resemblance even to Hellenistic work is only superficial. And however highly we may value the Uzzano bust of Donatello "

• Tombs of the Scaligcrs, Verona. — Tr, • National Gallery, London. — Tr.

» Museo Nazionale, Florence. — Tr,

ACT AND PORTRAIT 173

— which is perhaps the most important achievement of that age and that circle — it will be admitted that by the side of the portraits of the Venetians it hardly counts.

It is well worth noting that this overcoming of, or at least this desire to overcome, the Gothic Portrait with the Classical Act — the deeply historical and biographical form by the completely ahistoric — appears simultaneously with, and in association with, a decline in the capacity for self-examination and artistic confession in the Goethian sense. The true Renaissance man did not know what spiritual development meant. He managed to live entirely out- wardly, and this was the great good fortune and success of the Quattrocento. Between Dante's "Vita Nuova" and Michelangelo's sonnets there is no poetic confession, no self-portrait of the high order. The Renaissance artist and humanist is the one single type of Western man for whom the word "loneli- ness" remained unmeaning. His life accomplished its course in the light of a courtly existence. His feelings and impressions were all public, and he had neither secret discontents nor reserves, while the life of the great contemporary Netherlanders, on the contrary, moved on in the shadow of their works. Is it perhaps permissible to add that it was because of this that that other symbol of historic distance, duration, care and ponderation, the State^ also disappeared from the purview of the Renaissance, between Dante and Michelangelo? In "fickle Florence" — whose great men one and all were cruelly maltreated and whose incapacity for political creation seems, by the side of other Western state-forms, to border on sheer bi^arrerie — and, more generally, wherever the anti-Gothic (which in this connexion means anti-dynastic) spirit displayed itself vigorously in art and public life, the State made way for a truly Hellenic sorriness of Medicis, Sforzas, Borgias, Malatestas, and waste republics. Only that city where sculpture gained no foothold, where the Southern music was at home, where Gothic and Baroque joined hands in Giovanni Bellini and the Renaissance remained an affair of occasional dilettantism, had an art of por- traiture and therewith a subtle diplomacy and a will to political duration — Venice.

IV

The Renaissance was born of defiance, and therefore it lacked depth, width and sureness of creative instinct. It is the one and only epoch which was more consistent in theory than in performance and — in sharp contrast to Gothic and Baroque — the only one in which theoretically-formulated intention preceded (often enough surpassed) the ability to perform. But the fact that the individ- ual arts were forced to become satellites of a Classicist sculpture could not in the last analysis alter the essence of them, and could only impoverish their store of inward possibilities. For natures of medium size, the Renaissance theme was not too big; it was attractive indeed from its very plainness, and

174 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

we miss consequently that Gothic wrestling with overpowering imprecise prob- lems which distinguishes the Rhenish and Flemish schools. The seductive ease and clarity of the Renaissance rests very largely upon evasion — the evasion of deeper reluctances by the aid of speciously simple rule. To men of the inward- ness of Memlinc or the power of Griinewald such conditions as those of the Tuscan form-world would have been fatal. They could not have developed their strength in and through it, but only against it. Seeing as we do no weak- ness in the form of the Renaissance masters, we are very prone to overrate their humanity. In Gothic, and again in Baroque, an entirely great artist was ful- filling his art in deepening and completing its language, but in Renaissance he was necessarily only destroying it.

So it was in the cases of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, the only really great men of Italy after Dante. Is it not curious that between the mas- ters of the Gothic — who were nothing but silent workers in their art and yet achieved the very highest that could be achieved within its convention and its field — and the Venetians and Dutch of 1600 — who again were purely workers — there should be these three men who were not "sculptors" or "painters" but thinkers, and thinkers who of necessity busied themselves not merely with all the available means of artistic expression but with a thousand other things besides, ever restless and dissatisfied, in their effort to get at the real essence and aim of their being? Does it not mean — that in the Renaissance they could not "find themselves"? Each in his own fashion, each under his own tragic illusion, these three giants strove to be "Classical" in the Medicean sense; and yet it was they themselves who in one and another way — Raphael in respect of the line, Leonardo in respect of the surface, Michelangelo in respect of the body — shattered the dream. In them the misguided soul is finding its way back to its Faustian starting-points. What they intended w^s to substitute pro- portion for relation, drawing for light-and-air efl^ect, Euclidean body for pure space. But neither they nor others of their time produced a Euclidean-static sculpture — for that was possible once only, in Athens. In all their work one feels a secret music, in all their forms the movement-quality and the tending into distances and depths. They are on the way, not to Phidias but to Palestrina, and they have come thither not from Roman ruins but from the still music of the cathedral. Raphael thawed the Florentine fresco, and Michelangelo the statue, and Leonardo dreamed already of Rembrandt and Bach. The higher and more conscientious the effort to actualize the ideas of the age, the more in- tangible it became.

Gothic and Baroque, however, are something that /j, while Renaissance is only an ideal, unattainable like all ideals, that floats over the will of a period. Giotto ;■/ a Gothic, and Titian is a Baroque, artist. Michelangelo would be a Renaissance artist, but fails. Visibly, the plastic in him, for all its ambitious- ncss, is overpowered by the pictorial spirit — and a pictorial spirit, too, in

ACT AND PORTRAIT 175

which the Northern space-perspective is implicit. Even as soon as 1510 the beautiful proportion, the pure rule — that is, the conscious Classical — ate felt as frigid and formal. The cornice which he put on to Sangallo's purely "Classical" fagade of the Palazzo Farnese was no doubt, from the strictly Renaissance standpoint, a disfigurement, but he himself and many with him felt it to be far superior to the achievements of Greeks and Romans.

As Petrarch was the first, so Michelangelo was the last Florentine who gave himself up passionately to the Antique. But it was no longer an entire devotion. The Franciscan Christianity of Fra Angelico, with its subtle gentleness and its quiet, reflective piety — to which the Southern refinement of ripe Renaissance work owes far more than has been supposed ^ — came now to its end. The majestic spirit of the Counter-Reformation, massive, animated, gorgeous, lives already in Michelangelo. There is something in Renaissance work which at the time passed for being "Classical" but is really only a deliberately noble dress for the Christian-German world-feeling; as we have already mentioned, the combination of round-arch and pillar, that favourite Florentine motive, was of Syrian origin. But compare the pseudo-Corinthian column of the 15th Cen- tury with the columns of a real Roman ruin — remembering that these ruins were known and on the spot! Michelangelo alone would tolerate no half-and- half. Clarity he wanted and he would have. The question of form was for him a religious matter; for him (and only for him) it was all or nothing. And this is the explanation of the lonely fearful wrestlings of this man, surely the un- happiest figure in our art; of the fragmentary, the tortured, the unsatisfied, the terribile in his forms that frightened his contemporaries. The one half of his nature drew him towards the Classical and therefore to sculpture — we all know the effect produced upon him by the recently-discovered Laocoon. No man ever made a more honest effort than he did to find a way with the chisel into a buried world. Everything that he created he meant sculpturally — sculp- turally, that is, in a sense of the word that he and he alone stood for. "The world, presented in the great Pan," the element which Goethe meant to render when he brought Helena into the Second Part of Faust, the Apollinian world in all its powerful sensuous corporal presence — that was what Michelangelo was striving with all his might to capture and to fix in artistic being when he was painting the Sistine ceiling. Every resource of fresco — the big contours, the vast surfaces, the immense nearness of naked shapes, the materiality of colour

^ It is the same "noble simplicity and quiet greatness" — to speak in the language of the German Classicists — that produces such an impression of the antique in the Romanesque of Hilde- sheim, Gcrnrode, Paulinzella and Hersfeld. The ruined cloisters of Paulinzella, in fact, have much of what Brunellesco so many centuries later strove to obtain in his palace-courts. But the basic feel- ing that underlies these creations is not something which we got from the Classical, but something that we projected on to our own notion of Classical being. And our own notion of peace is one of an infinite peace. We feel the "Rest in God" to be an expanse of quietude. All Florentine work, in so far as sureness does not turn into the Gothic challenge of Verrocchio, is characterized by this feel- ing, with which Attic cux^poabvi^ has nothing whatever in common.

176 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

— was here for the last time strained to the utmost to liberate the paganism, the high-Renaissance paganism, that was in him. But his second soul, the soul of Gothic-Christian Dante and of the music of great expanses, is pulling in the opposite sense; his scheme for the ensemble is manifestly metaphysical in spirit.

His was the last effort, repeated again and again, to put the entirety of the artist-personality into the language of stone. But the Euclidean material failed him. His attitude to it was not that of the Greek. In the very character of its being the chiselled statue contradicts the world-feeling that tries to find something by, and not to possess something in, its art-works. For Phidias, marble is the cosmic stuff that is crying for form. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea expresses the very essence of that art. But for Michelangelo marble was the foe to be subdued, the prison out of which he must deliver his idea as Siegfried delivered Brunhilde. Everyone knows his way of setting to work. He did not approach the rough block coolly from every aspect of the intended form, but attacked it with a passionate frontal attack, hewing into it as though into space, cutting away the material layer by layer and driving deeper and deeper until his form emerged, while the members slowly developed themselves out of the quarry. Never perhaps has there been a more open expression of world-dread in the presence of the become — Death — of the will to overpower and capture it in vibrant form. There is no other artist of the West whose rela- tion to the stone has been that of Michelangelo — at once so intimate and so violently masterful. It is his symbol of Death. In it dwells the hostile princi- ple that his daemonic nature is always striving to overpower, whether he is cutting statues or piling great buildings out of it.^ He is the one sculptor of his age who dealt only with marble. Bronze, as cast, allows the modeller to com- promise with pictorial tendencies, and it appealed therefore to other Renaissance artists and to the softer Greeks. The Giant stood aloof from it.

The instantaneous bodily posture was what the Classical sculptor created, and of this Faustian man was incapable. It is here just as it is in the matter of

• It has never been sufficiently noticed that the few sculptors who came after Michelangelo

had no more than a mere workaday relation with marble. But we see at once that it is so when wc think of the deeply intimate relation of great musicians to their favourite instruments. The story of Tartini's violin, which shattered itself to pieces on the death of the master — and there are a hundred such stories — is the Faustian counterpart of the Pygmalion legend. Consider, too, E. T. A. HoflFmann's "Johannes Kreisler the Kapellmeister"; he is a figure worthy to stand by the side of Faust, Werther and Don Juan. To see his symbolic significance and the inward necessity of him, we have only to compare him with the theatrical painter-characters in the works of contemporary Romanticists, who are not in any relation whatever with the idea of Painting. As the fate of 19th- century art-romances shows — a painter cannot be made to stand for the destiny of Faustian art.

(E. T. A. Hoffmann, the strange many-sided genius who was at once musician, caricaturist, novelist, critic, wit, able public official and winebibber, at one time in his career wrote in the char- acter of "Johannes Kreisler." See his Fantasiestucke in Callots Manier and Dtr Kafer Murr, also Thomas Carlyle's " Miscellanies" and the biographical sketches of Hoffmann in Grove's Dictionary of Music aod the Ency. Brit. — Tr.^

ACT AND PORTRAIT 177

love, in which Faustian man discovers, not primarily the act of union between man and woman, but the great love of Dante and beyond that the caring Mother. Michelangelo's erotic — which is that of Beethoven also — is as un- Classical as it is possible to be. It stands sub specie aternitatis and not under that of sense and the moment. He produced acts — a sacrifice to the Hellenic idol — but the soul in them denies or overmasters the visible form. He wills in- finity as the Greek willed proportion and rule, he embraces past and future as the Greek embraced present. The Classical eye absorbs plastic form into itself, but Michelangelo saw with the spiritual eye and broke through the foreground- language of immediate sensuousness. And inevitably, in the long run, he destroyed the conditions for this art. Marble became too trivial for his will- to-form. He ceased to be sculptor and turned architect. In full old age, when he was producing only wild fragments like the Rondanini Madonna and hardly cutting his figures out of the rough at all, the musical tendency of his artistry broke through. In the end the impulse towards contrapuntal form, was no longer to be repressed and, dissatisfied through and through with the art upon which he had spent his life, yet dominated still by the unquenchable will to self-expression, he shattereed the canon of Renaissance architecture and created the Roman Baroque. For relations of material and form he substituted the con- test offeree and mass. He grouped the columns in sheaves or else pushed them away into niches. He broke up the storeys with huge pilasters and gave the fa§ade a sort of surging and thrusting quality. Measure yielded to melody, the static to the dynamic. And thus Faustian music enlisted in its service the chief of all the other arts.

With Michelangelo the history of Western sculpture is at an end. What of it there was after him was mere misunderstandings or reminiscences. His real heir was Palestrina.

Leonardo speaks another language. In essentials his spirit reached forward into the following century, and he was in nowise bound, as Michelangelo was bound by every tie of heart, to the Tuscan ideal. He alone had neither the ambition to be sculptor nor the ambition to be architect. It was a strange illu- sion of the Renaissance that the Hellenic feeling and the Hellenic cult of the exterior structure could be got at by way of anatomical studies. But when Leonardo studied anatomy it was not, as in Michelangelo's case, foreground anatomy, the topgra-phy of human surfaces, studied for the sake of plastic, but physiology studied for the inward secrets. While Michelangelo tried to force the whole meaning of human existence into the language of the living body, Leonardo's studies show the exact opposite. His much-admired sfumato is the first sign of the repudiation of corporeal bounds, in the name of space^ and as such it is the starting-point of Impressionism. Leonardo begins with the inside, the spiritual space within us, and not with the considered definition- line, and when he ends (that is, if he ends at all and does not leave the picture

178 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

unfinished), the substance of colour lies like a mere breathing over the real structure of the picture, which is something incorporeal and indescribable. Raphael's paintings fall into planes in which he disposes his well-ordered groups, and he closes off the whole with a well-proportioned background. But Leonardo knows only one space, wide and eternal, and his figures, as it were, float therein. The one puts inside a frame a sum of individual near things, the other a portion cut out of the infinite.

Leonardo discovered the circulation of the blood. It was no Renaissance spirit that brought him to that — on the contrary, the whole course of his thought took him right outside the conceptions of his age. Neither Michelangelo nor Raphael could have done it, for their painter's anatomy looks only at the form and position, not the function, of the parts. In mathematical language, it is stereometry as against analysis. Did not the Renaissance find it quite sufficient preparation for great painted scenes to study corpses^ suppressing the becoming in favour of the become and calling on the dead to make Classical drapa^la accessible to Northern creative energy? But Leonardo investigated the life in the body as Rubens did, and not the body-in-itself as Signorelli did. His discovery was contemporary with that of Columbus, and the two have a deep affinity, for they signify the victory of the infinite over the material limitcdness of the tangibly present. Would a Greek ever have concerned himself with questions like theirs? The Greeks inquired as little into the interior of their own organization as they sought for the sources of the Nile; these were prob- lems that might have jeopardized the Euclidean constitution of their being. The Baroque, on the other hand, is truly the priod of the great discoveries. The very word ' ' discovery ' ' has something bluntly un-Classical in it. Classical man took good care not to take the cover, the material wrapping, off anything cosmic, but to do just this is the most characteristic impulse of a Faustian na- ture. The discoveries of the New World, the circulation of the blood, and the Copernican universe were achieved almost simultaneously and, at bottom, are completely equivalent; and the discovery of gunpowder (that is, the long-range weapon and of printing (the long-range script^ were little earlier.

Leonardo was a discoverer through-and-through, and discovery was the sum in one word of his whole nature. Brush, chisel, dissecting-knife, pencil for calculating and compasses for drawing — all were for him of equal import- ance. They were for him what the Mariner's Compass was for Columbus. When Raphael completes with colour the sharp-drawn outline he asserts the

• Although gunpowder is much older than the Baroque, its application in real earnest to long-

ranging fire-arms was only accomplished during the i6th Century. It cannot be said that there was any technical reason why ioo years should have elapsed between the first use of powder in European warfare and the first effective soldier's fire-arm. No careful student of this period of military history can fail to be struck with this fact — the significance of which, not being technical, must be cultural. Much the same could be said of printing, which, so far as concerns technical fac- tors, might just as well have been invented in the loth as in the 15th Century. — Tr.

ACT AND PORTRAIT 179

corporeal phenomenon in every brush-stroke, but Leonardo, in his red-chalk sketches and his backgrounds reveals aerial secrets with every line. He was the first, too, who set his mind to work on aviation. To fly, to free one's self from earth, to lose one's self in the expanse of the universe — is not this ambition Faustian in the highest degree? Is it not in fact the fulfilment oi our dreams? Has it never been observed how the Christian legend became in Western painting a glorious transfiguration of this motive? All the pictured ascents into heaven and falls into hell, the divine figures floating above the clouds, the blissful detachment of angels and saints, the insistent emphasis upon freedom from earth's heaviness, are emblems of soul-flight, peculiar to the art of the Faustian, utterly remote from that of the Byzantine.

The transformation of Renaissance fresco-painting into Venetian oil-painting is a matter of spiritual history. We have to appreciate very delicate and subtle traits to discern the process of change. In almost every picture from Masaccio's "Peter and the Tribute Money" in the Brancacci Chapel, through the soaring background that Piero della Francesca gave to the figures of Federigo and Battista of Urbino,^ to Perugino's " Christ Giving the Keys," ^ the fresco manner is contending with the invasive new form, though Raphael's artistic develop- ment in the course of his work on the Vatican " stanze" is almost the only case in which we can see comprehensively the change that is going on. The Floren- tine fresco aims at actuality in individual things and produces a sum of such things in an architectonic setting. Oil-painting, on the other hand, sees and handles with ever-growing sureness extension as a whole, and treats all objects only as representatives thereof. The Faustian world-feeling created the new technique that it wanted. It rejected the drawing style, as, from Oresme's time, ^o-ordinate geometry rejected it. It transformed the linear perspective asso- ciated with the architectural motive into a purely aerial perspective rendered by imponderable gradations of tone. But the condition of Renaissance art generally — its inability either to understand its own deeper tendencies or to make good its anti-Gothic principle — made the transition an obscure and difficult process. Each artist followed the trend in a way of his own. One painted in oils on the bare wall, and thereby condemned his work to perish (Leonardo's "Last Supper"). Another painted pictures as if they were wall- frescoes (Michelangelo). Some ventured, some guessed, some fell by the way, some shied. It was, as always, the struggle between hand and soul, between eye and instrument, between the form willed by the artist and the form willed by time — the struggle between Plastic and Music.

In the light of this, we can at last understand that gigantic effort of Leo- nardo, the cartoon of the "Adoration of the Magi" in the Ufiizi. It is the 1 Uffizi, Florence. — Tr. 2 Sistine Chapel, Rome. — Tr.

i8o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

grandest piece of artistic daring in the Renaissance. Nothing like it was even imagined till Rembrandt. Transcending all optical measures, everything then called drawing, outline, composition and grouping, he pushes fearlessly on to challenge eternal space; everything bodily floats like the planets in the Coper- nican system and the tones of a Bach organ-fugue in the dimness of old churches. In the technical possibilities of the time, so dynamic an image of distance could only remain a torso.

In the Sistine Madonna, which is the very summation of the Renaissance, Raphael causes the outline to draw into itself the entire content of the work. It is the last grand line of Western art. Already (and it is this that makes Ra- phael the least intelligible of Renaissance artists) convention is strained almost to breaking-point by the intensity of inward feeling. He did not indeed wrestle with problems. He had not even an inkling of them. But he brought art to the brink where it could no longer shirk the plunge, and he lived to achieve the utmost possibilities within its form-world. The ordinary person who thinks him flat simply fails to realize what is going on in his scheme. Look again, reader, at the hackneyed Madonna. Have you ever noticed the little dawn-cloudlets, transforming themselves into baby heads, that surround the soaring central figure? — these are the multitudes of the unborn that the Ma- donna is drawing into Life. We meet these light clouds again, with the same meaning, in the wondrous finale of Faust 11.^ It is just that which does not charm in Raphael, his sublime unpopularity, that betrays the inner victory over the Renaissance-feeling in him. We do understand Perugino at a glance, we merely think we understand Raphael. His very line — that drawing-character that at first sight seems so Classical — is something that floats in space, su- pernal, Beethoven-like. In this work Raphael is the least obvious of all artists, less obvious even than Michelangelo, whose intention is manifest through all the fragmentariness of his works. In Fra Bartolommeo the material bounding- line is still entirely dominant. It is all foreground, and the whole sense of the work is exhaustively rendered by the definition of bodies. But in Raphael line has become silent, expectant, veiled, waiting in an extremity of tension for dissolution into the infinite, into space and music.

Leonardo is already over the frontier. The Adoration of the Magi is already music. It is not a casual but a deeply significant circumstance that in this work, as also in his St. Jerome,^ he did not go beyond the brown underpainting, the "Rembrandt" stage, the atmospheric brown of the following century. For him, entire fullness and clearness of intention was attained with the work in that state, and one step into the domain of colour (for that domain was still under the metaphysical limitations of the fresco style) would have destroyed the soul of what he had created. Feeling, in all its depth, the symbolism of which oil-painting was later to be the vehicle, he was afraid of the fresco » " Doctor Marianus." — Tr, ■ Vatican. — Tr,

ACT AND PORTRAIT i8i

"slickness" OFertigkeit) that must have mined his idea. His studies for this painting show how close was his relation to the Rembrandt etching — an art whose home was also that of the art (unknown to Florence) of counterpoint. Only it was reserved for the Venetians, who stood outside the Florentine conventions, to achieve what he strove for here, to fashion a colour-world subserving space instead of things.

For this reason, too, Leonardo (after innumerable attempts) decided to leave the Christ-head in the "Last Supper" unfinished. The men of his time were not even ripe for portraiture as Rembrandt understood the word, the magistral building-up of a soul-history out of dynamic brush-strokes and lights and tones. But only Leonardo was great enough to experience this limitation as a Destiny. Others merely set themselves to paint heads (in the modes pre- scribed by their respective schools) but Leonardo — the first, here, to make the hands also speak, and that with a physiognomic maestria — had an infinitely wider purpose. His soul was lost afar in the future, though his mortal part, his eye and hand, obeyed the spirit of the age. Assuredly he was the freest of the three great ones. From much of that which Michelangelo's powerful nature vainly wrestled with, he was already remote. Problems of chemistry, geometri- cal analysis, physiology (Goethe's "living Nature" was also Leonardo's), the technique of fire-arms — all were familiar to him. Deeper than Diirer, bolder than Titian, more comprehensive than any single man of his time, he was essentially the artist of torsos.^ Michelangelo the belated sculptor was so, too, but in another sense, while in Goethe's day that which had been unattainable for the painter of the Last Supper had already been reached and overpassed. Michelangelo strove to force life once more into a dead form-world, Leonardo felt a new form-world in the future, Goethe divined that there could be no new form-worlds more. Between the first and the last of these men lie the ripe centuries of the Faustian Culture. ^

VI

It remains now to deal with the major characters of Western art during the phase of accomplishment. In this we may observe the deep necessity of all history at work. We have learned to understand arts as prime phenomena. We no longer look to the operations of cause and effect to give unity to the story of development. Instead, we have set up the idea of the Destiny of an art, and admitted arts to be organisms of the Culture, organisms which are born, ripen, age and for ever die.

When the Renaissance — its last illusion — closes, the Western soul has come to the ripe consciousness of its own strength and possibilities. It has chosen its arts. As a "late" period, the Baroque knows, just as the Ionic had

^ In Renaissance work the finished product is often quite depressingly complete. The absence of "infinity" is palpable. No secrets, no discoveries.

2.8i THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

known, what the form-language of its arts has to mean. From being a philo- sophical religion, art has to be a religious philosophy. Great masters come for- ward in the place of anonymous schools. At the culmination of every Culture we have the spectacle of a splendid group of great artSy well-ordered and linked as a unit by the unity of the prime symbol underlying them all. The Apollinian groups to which belong vase-painting, fresco relief, the architecture of ranked columns, the Attic drama and the dance, centres upon the naked statue. The Faustian group forms itself round the ideal of pure spatial infinity and its centre of gravity is instrumental music. From this centre, fine threads radiate out into all spiritual form-languages and weave our infinitesimal mathematic, our dynamic physics, the propaganda of Jesuits and the power of our famous slogan of "progress," the modern machine-technique, credit economics and the dynastic-diplomatic State — all into one immense totality of spiritual expres- sion. Beginning with the inward rhythm of the cathedral and ending with Wagner's "Tristan" and "Parsifal," the artistic conquest of endless space deploys its full forces from about 1550. Plastic is dying with Michelangelo in Rome just when planimetry, dominant hitherto, is becoming the least im- portant branch of our mathematic. At the same time, Venice is producing Zarlino's theories of harmony and counterpoint (1558) and the practical method of the basso continuo — a perspective and an analysis of the world of sound — and this music's sister, the Northern mathematic of the Calculus, is beginning to mount.

Oil-painting and instrumental music, the arts of space, are now entering into their kingdom. So also — constquently ^ we say — the two essentially material and Euclidean arts of the Classical Culture, viz., the all-round statue and the strictly planar fresco, attain to their primacy at the corresponding date of c. 600 B.C. And further, in the one and in the other case, it is the painting that ripens ^rj-/. For in either kind painting on the plane is a less ambitious and more accessible art than modelling in solid or composing in immaterial extension. The period 15 50-1650 belongs as completely to oil-painting as fresco and vase- painting belong to the 6th Century b.c. The symbolism of space and of body, expressed in the one case by perspective and in the other by proportion, are only indicated and not immediately displayed by pictorial arts. These arts, which can only in each case produce their respective prime-symbols (i.e., their possi- bilities in the extended) as illusions on a painted surface, are capable indeed of denoting and evoking the ideal — Classical or Western, as the case may be — but they are not capable oi fulfilling it; they appear therefore in the path of the "late" Culture as the ledges before the last summit. The nearer the grand style comes to its point of fulfilment, the more decisive the tendency to an ornamental language of inexorable clarity of symbolism. The group of great arts is further simplified. About 1670, just when Newton and Leibniz were discovering the Differential Calculus, oil-painting had reached the limit of its

ACT AND PORTRAIT 183

possibilities. Its last great masters were dead or dying — Velasquez 1660, Poussin 1665, Franz Hals 1666, Rembrandt 1669, Vermeer 1675, MuriUo, Ruysdael and Claude Lorrain i68z — and one has only to name the few succes- sors of any importance (Watteau, Hogarth, Tiepolo) to feel at once the descent, the end, of an art. In this time also, the great forms of pictorial music expired. Heinrich Schiitz died in 1672., Carissimi in 1674, and Purcell in 1695 — the last great masters of the Cantata, who had played around image-themes with infinite variety of vocal and instrumental colour and had painted veritable pictures of fine landscape and grand legend-scene. With Lully (1687) the heart of the heroic Baroque opera of Monteverde ceased to beat. It was the same with the old "classical" sonata for orchestra, organ and string trio, which was a development of image-themes in the fugal style. There- after, the forms become those of final maturity, the concerto grosso, the suite, and the three-part sonata for solo instruments. Music frees itself from the relics of bodiliness inherent in the human voice and becomes absolute. The theme is no longer an image but a pregnant junction, existent only in and by its own evolution, for the fugal style as Bach practised it can only be regarded as a ceaseless process of differentiation and integration. The victory of pure music over painting stands recorded in the Passions which Heinrich Schiitz composed in his old age — the visible dawn of the new form- language — in the sonatas of Dall'Abaco and Corelli, the oratorios of Handel and the Baroque polyphony of Bach. Henceforth this music is the Faustian art, and Watteau may fairly be described as a painter-Couperin, Tiepolo as a painter-Handel.

In the Classical world the corresponding change occurred about 460, when Polygnotus, the last of the great fresco-painters, ceded the inheritance of the grand style to Polycletus and free sculpture in the round. Till then — as late even as Polygnotus 's contemporaries Myron and the masters of the Olympia pediment — the form-language of a purely planar art had dominated that of statuary also; for, just as painting had developed its form more and more to- wards the ideal of the silhouette of colour with internal drawing superposed — to such an extent that at last there was almost no difference between the painted relief and the flat picture — so also the sculptor had regarded the frontal outline as it presented itself to the beholder as the true symbol of the Ethos, the cultural type, that he meant his figure to represent. The field of the temple-pediment constitutes a picture; seen from the proper distance, it makes exactly the same impression as its contemporary the red-figure vase-painting. In Polycletus's generation the monumental wall-painting gives place to the board-picture, the "picture" proper, in tempera or wax — a clear indication that the great style has gone to reside elsewhere. The ambition of x\pollodorus's shadow painting was not in any sense what we call chiaroscuro and atmosphere, but sheer modelling in the round in the sculptor's sense; and of Zeuxis

i84 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Aristotle says expressly that his work lacked "Ethos." Thus, this newer Classical painting with its cleverness and human charm is the equivalent of our iSth-Century work. Both lacked the inner greatness and both tried by force of virtuosity to speak in the language of that single and final Art which in each case stood for ornamentation in the higher sense. Hence Polycletus and Phidias aline themselves with Bach and Handel; as the Western masters liberated strict musical form from the executive methods of the Painting, so the Greek masters finally delivered the statue from the asso- ciations of the Relief.

And with this full plastic and this full music the two Cultures reach their respective ends. A pure symbolism of mathematical rigour had become pos- sible. Polycletus could produce his "canon" of the proportions of the human body, and his contemporary Bach the "Kunst der Fuge" and "Wohltem- pcriertes Klavier." In the two arts that ensued, we have the last perfection of achievement that pure form saturated with meaning can give. Compare the tone-body of Faustian instrumental music, and within that system again the body of the strings (in Bach, too, the virtual unity of the winds), with the bodies of Attic statuary. Compare the meaning of the word * ' figure ' * to Haydn with its meaning to Praxiteles. In the one case it is the figure of a rhythmic mo- tive in a web of voices, in the other the figure of an athlete. But in both cases the notion comes from mathematics and it is made plain that the aim thus finally attained is a union of the artistic and the mathematical spirit, for analy- sis like music, and Euclidean geometry like plastic, have both come to full comprehension of their tasks and the ultimate meaning of their respective number-languages. The mathematics of beauty and the beauty of mathematics are henceforth inseparable. The unending space of tone and the all-round body of marble or bronze are immediate interpretations of the extended. They belong to number-as-relation and to number-as-measure. In fresco and in oil-painting, in the laws of proportion and those of perspective, the mathematical is only indicated, but the two final arts are mathematics, and on these peaks Apollinian art and Faustian art are seen entire.

With the exit of fresco and oil-painting, the great masters of absolute plastic and absolute music file on to the stage, man after man. Polycletus is followed by Phidias, Pasonius, Alcamenes, Scopas, Praxiteles, Lysippus. Behind Bach and Handel come Gluck, Stamitz, the younger Bachs, Haydn, Mozart, Bee- thoven — in their hands an armoury of wonderful and now long-forgotten instruments, a whole magician's world created by the discovering and inventing spirit of the West in the hope of getting more and more tones and timbres for the service and enhancement of musical expression — in their winds an abun- dance of grand, solemn, ornate, dainty, ironic, laughing and sobbing forms of perfectly regular structure, forms that no one now understands. In those days, in iSth-Ccntury Germany especially, there was actually and effectively a Cul-

ACT AND PORTRAIT 185

ture of Music that suffused all Life. Its type was Hoffmann's Kapellmeister Krcisler. To-day it is hardly even a memory.

And with the i8th Century, too, architecture died at last, submerged and choked in the music of Rococo. On that last wonderful fragile growth of the Western architecture criticism has blown mercilessly, failing to realize that its origin is in the spirit of the fugue and that its non-proportion and non-form, its evanescence and instability and sparkle, its destruction of surface and visual order, are nothing else than a victory of tones and melodies over lines and walls, the triumph of pure space over material, of absolute becoming over the become. They are no longer buildings, these abbeys and castles and churches with their flowing fagades and porches and "gingerbread" courts and their splendid staircases, galleries, salons and cabinets; they are sonatas, minuets, madrigals in stone, chamber-music in stucco, marble, ivory and fine woods, cantilene of volutes and cartouches, cadences of fliers and copings. The Dresden Zwinger is the most completely musical piece in all the world's architecture, with an ornamentation like the tone of an old violin, an allegro fugitivo for small orchestra.

Germany produced the great musicians and therefore also the great architects of this century (Poppelmann, Schliiter, Bahr, Naumann, Fischer von Erlach, Dinzenhofer). In oil-painting she played no part at all: in instrumental music, on the contrary, hers was the principal r61e.

vn

There is a word, "Impressionism," which only came into general use in Manet's time (and then, originally, as a word of contempt like Baroque and Rococo) but very happily summarizes the special quality of the Faustian way of art that has evolved from oil-painting. But, as we ordinarily speak of it, the idea has neither the width nor the depth of meaning that it ought to have: we regard it as a sequel to or derivative of the old age of an art which, in fact, belongs to it entirely and from first to last. What is the imitation of an "im- pression"? Something purely Western, something related to the idea of Baroque and even to the unconscious purposes of Gothic architecture and diametrically opposed to the deliberate aims of the Renaissance. Does it not signify the tendency — the deeply-necessary tendency of a waking conscious- ness to feel pure endless space as the supreme and unqualified actuality, and all sense-images as secondary and conditioned actualities "within it" ? A tendency that can manifest itself in artistic creations, but has a thousand other outlets besides. Does not Kant's formula "space as a priori form of perception " sound like a slogan for the whole movement that began with Leonardo? Impression- ism is the inverse of the Euclidean world-feeling. It tries to get as far as possible from the language of plastic and as near as possible to that of music. The effect that is made upon us by things that receive and reflect light is made not because

2.S6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the things are there but as though they "in themselves" are not there. The things are not even bodies, but light-resistances in space, and their illusive density is to be unmasked by the brush-stroke. What is received and rendered is the impression of such resistances, which are tacitly evaluated as simple func- tions of a transcendent extension. The artist's inner eye penetrates the body, breaks the spell of its material bounding surfaces and sacrifices it to the majesty of Space. And w^ith this impression, under its influence, he feels an endless movement-quality in the sensuous element that is in utter contrast to the statu- esque "Ataraxia" of the fresco. Therefore, there was not and could not bff any Hellenic impressionism; if there is one art that must exclude it on principle, it is Classical sculpture.

Impressionism is the comprehensive expression of a world-feeling, and it must obviously therefore permeate the whole physiognomy of our "Late" Culture. There is an impressionistic mathematic, which frankly and with in- tent transcends all optical limitations. It is Analysis, as developed after Newton and Leibniz, and to it belong the visionary images of number-" bodies," aggregates, and the multidimensional geometry. There is again an impression- istic physics which "sees" in lieu of bodies systems of mass-points — units that are evidently no more than constant relations between variable efficients. There are impressionistic ethics, tragedy, and logic, and even (in Pietism) an impressionistic Christianity.

Be the artist painter or musician, his art consists in creating with a few strokes or spots or tones an image of inexhaustible content, a microcosm meet for the eyes or ears of Faustian man; that is, in laying the actuality of infinite space under enchantment by fleeting and incorporeal indications of something objective which, so to say, forces that actuality to become phenomenal. The daring of these arts of moving the immobile has no parallel. Right from the later work of Titian to Corot and Menzel, matter quivers and flows like a solu- tion under the mysterious pressure of brush-stroke and broken colours and lights. It was in pursuit of the same object that Baroque music became "the- matic" instead of melodic and — reinforcing the "theme" with every expedi- ent of harmonic charm, instrumental colour, rhythm, and tempo — developed the tone-picture from the imitative piece of Titian's day to the leitmotiv-fabric of Wagner, and captured a whole new world of feeling and experience. When German music was at its culmination, this art penetrated also into lyric poetry (German lyric, that is, for in French it is impossible) and gave rise to a whole scries of tiny masterpieces, from Goethe's "Urfaust" to Holderlin's last poems — passages of a few lines apiece, which have never yet been noticed, let alone collected, but include nevertheless whole worlds of experience and feeling. On a small scale, it continually repeats the achievements of Copernicus and Colum- bus. No other Culture possesses an ornament-language of such dynamical im- pressivencss relatively to the means it employs. Every point or stroke of colour,

ACT AND PORTRAIT 187

every scarce-audible tone releases some surprising charm and continually feeds the imagination with fresh elements of space-creating energy. In Masaccio and Piero della Francesca we have actual bodies bathed in air. Then Leonardo, the first, discovers the transitions of atmospheric light and dark, the soft edges, the outlines that merge in the depth, the domains of light and shade in which the individual figures are inseparably involved. Finally, in Rembrandt, objects dissolve into mere coloured impressions, and forms lose their specific human- ness and become collocations of strokes and patches that tell as elements of a passionate depth-rhythm. Distance, so treated, comes to signify Future, for what Impressionism seizes and holds is by hypothesis a unique and never- recurring instant, not a landscape in being but a fleeting moment of the history thereof. Just as in a Rembrandt portrait it is not the anatomical relief of the head that is rendered, but the second visage in it that is confessed; just as the art of his brush-stroke captures not the eye but the look, not the brow but the experience, not the lips but the sensuousness; so also the impressionist picture in general presents to the beholder not the Nature of the foreground but again a second visage, the look and soul of the landscape. Whether we take the Catholic-heroic landscape of Claude Lorrain, the "paysage intime" of Corot, the sea and river-banks and villages of Cuyp and Van Goyen, we find always a portrait in the physiognomic sense, something uniquely-occurring, unforeseen, brought to light for the first and last time. In this love of the character and physiognomy in landscape — just the motive that was unthinkable in fresco art and permanently barred to the Classical — the art of portraiture widens from the immediately human to the mediately human, to the representation of the world as a part of the ego or the self-world in which the painter paints him- self and the beholder sees himself. For the expansion of Nature into Distance reflects a Destiny. In this art of tragic, daemonic, laughing and weeping land- scapes there is something of which the man of another Culture has no idea and for which he has no organ. Anyone who in the presence of this form-world talks of Hellenistic illusion-painting must be unable to distinguish between an ornamentation of the highest order and a soulless imitation, an ape-mimicry of the obvious. If Lysippus said (as Pliny tells us he said) that he represented men as they appeared to him, his ambition was that of a child, of a layman, of a savage, not that of an artist. The great style, the meaning, the deep necessity, are absent; even the cave-dwellers of the stone age painted thus. In reality, the Hellenistic painters could do more when they chose. Even so late, the wall- paintings of Pompeii and the "Odyssey" landscapes in Rome contain a symbol. In each case it is a group of bodies that is rendered — rocks, trees, even "the Sea" as a body among bodies! There is no depth, but only superposition. Of course, of the objects represented one or several had necessarily to be furthest away (or rather least near') but this is a mere technical servitude without the remotest affinity to the illumined supernal distances of Faustian art.

i88 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

VIII

I have said that oil-painting faded out at the end of the 17th Century, when one after another all its great masters died, and the question will naturally, therefore, be asked — is Impressionism (in the current narrow sense) a creation of the 19th Century? Has painting lived, after all, two centuries more? Is it still existing? But we must not be deceived by appearances. Not only was there a dead space between Rembrandt and Delacroix or Constable — for when we think of the living art of high symbolism that was Rembrandt's the purely decorative artists of the i8th Century do not count — but, further, that which began with Delacroix and Constable was, notwithstanding all technical con- tinuity, something quite different from that which had ended with Rembrandt. The new episode of painting that in the 19th Century (i.e., beyond the 1800 frontier and in "Civilization") has succeeded in awakening some illusion of a great culture of painting, has itself chosen the word Plein-air QFreilichi) to designate its special characteristic. The very designation suffices to show the significance of the fleeting phenomenon that it is. It implies the conscious, intellectual, cold-blooded rejection of that for which a sudden wit invented the name "brown sauce," but which the great masters had, as we know, regarded as the one truly metaphysical colour. On it had been built the painting-culture of the schools, and especially the Dutch school, that had vanished irretrievably in the Rococo. This brown, the symbol of a spatial infinity, which had for Faustian mankind created a spiritual something out of a mere canvas, now came to be regarded, quite suddenly, as an offence to Nature. What had happened? Was it not simply this, that the soul for which this supernal colour was some- thing religious, the sign of wistfulness, the whole meaning of " Living Nature," had quietly slipped away? The materialism of a Western cosmopolis blew into the ashes and rekindled this curious brief flicker — a brief flicker of two genera- tions, for with the generation of Manet all was ended again. I have (as the reader will recall) characterized the noble green of Griinewald and Claude and Giorgione as the Catholic space-colour and the transcendent brown of Rem- brandt as the colour of the Protestant world-feeling. On the other hand, Plein-air and its new colour scale stand for irreligion.^ From the spheres of Beethoven and the stellar expanses of Kant, Impressionism has come down again to the crust of the earth. Its space is cognized, not experienced, seen, not contemplated; there is tunedness in it, but not Destiny. It is the mechanical object of physics and not the felt world of the pastorale that Courbet and Manet give us in their landscapes. Rousseau's tragically correct prophecy of a "return

^ Hence the impossibility of achieving a genuinely religious painting on plein-air principles. The world-feeling that underlies it is so throughly irreligious, so worthless for any but a "religion of reason " so-called, that every one of its efforts in that direction, even with the noblest intentions (Uhde, Puvis de Chavannes), strikes us as hollow and false. One instant of plein-air treatmeac su£Bccs to secularize the interior of a church and deKrade it into a showroom.

ACT AND PORTRAIT 189

to Nature" fulfils itself in this dying art — the senile, too, return to Nature day by day. The modern artist is a workman, not a creator. He sets unbroken spectrum-colours side by side. The subtle script, the dance of brush-strokes, give way to crude commonplaces, pilings and mixings and daubings of points, squares, broad inorganic masses. The whitewasher's brush and the trowel ap- pear in the painter's equipment; the oil-priming of the canvas is brought into the scheme of execution and in places left bare. It is a risky art, meticulous, cold, diseased — an art for over-developed nerves, but scientific to the last degree, energetic in everything that relates to the conquest of technical ob- stacles, acutely assertive of programme. It is the "satyric pendant" of the great age of oil-painting that stretches from Leonardo to Rembrandt; it could only be at home in the Paris of Baudelaire. Corot's silvern landscapes, with their grey-greens and browns, dream still of the spiritual of the Old Masters; but Courbet and Manet conquer bare physical space, "factual" space. The meditative discoverer represented by Leonardo gives way to the painting experimentalist. Corot, the eternal child, French but not Parisian, finds his transcendent landscapes anywhere and everywhere; Courbet, Manet, Cezanne, portray over and over again, painfully, laboriously, soullessly, the Forest of Fontainebleau, the bank of the Seine at Argenteuil, or that remarkable valley near Aries. Rembrandt's mighty landscapes lie essentially in the universe, Manet's near a railway station. The plein-air painters, true megalopolitans, obtain as it were specimens of the music of space from the least agitated sources^ of Spain and Holland — from Velasquez, Goya, Hobbema, Franz Hals — in order (with the aid of English landscapists and, later, the Japanese, •' highbrows" all) to restate it in empirical and scientific terms. It is natural science as opposed to nature experience, head against heart, knowledge in contrast to faith.

In Germany it was otherwise. Whereas in France it was a matter of closing- off the great school, in Germany it was a case of catching up with it. For in the picturesque style, as practised from Rottmann, Wasmann, K. D. Friedrich and Runge to Marees and Leibl, an unbroken evolution is the very basis of tech- nique, and even a new-style school requires a closed tradition behind it. Herein lies the weakness and the strength of the last German painters. Whereas the French possesised a continuous tradition of their own from early Baroque to Chardin and Corot, whereas there was living connexion between Claude Lor- rain and Corot, Rubens and Delacroix, all the great Germans of the i8th Cen- tury had been musicians. After Beethoven this music, without change of inward essence, was diverted (one of the modalities of the German Romantic move- ment) back into painting. And it was in painting that it flowered longest and bore its kindliest fruits, for the portraits and landscapes of these men are suf- fused with a secret wistful music, and there is a breath of EichendorfF and Morike left even in Thoma and Bocklin. But a foreign teacher had to be asked

Z90 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

to supply that which was lacking in the native tradition, and so these painters one and all went to Paris, where they studied and copied the old masters of 1670. So also did Manet and his circle. But there was this difference, that the Frenchmen found in these studies only reminiscences of something that had been in their art for many generations, whereas the Germans received fresh and wholly different impressions. The result was that, in the 19th Century, the German arts of form (other than music) were a phenomenon out of season — hasty, anxious, confused, puzzled as to both aim and means. There was indeed no time to be lost. The level that German music or French painting had taken centuries to attain had to be made good by German painting in two generations. The expiring art demanded its last phase, and this phase had to be reached by a vertiginous race through the whole past. Hence the unsteadiness, in every- thing pertaining to form, of high Faustian natures like Marees and Bocklin, an unsteadiness that in German music with its sure tradition (think of Bruck- ner) would have been impossible. The art of the French Impressionists was too explicit in its programme and correspondingly too poor in soul to expose them to such a tragedy. German literature, on the contrary, was in the same condi- tion as German painting; from Goethe's time, every major work was intended to found something and obliged to conclude something. Just as Kleist felt in himself both Shakespeare and Stendhal, and laboured desperately, altering and discarding without end and without result, to forge two centuries of psycho- logical art into a unit; just as Hebbel tried to squeeze all the problems from Hamlet to Rosmersholm into one dramatic type; so Menzel, Leibl, and Marees sought to force the old and new models — Rembrandt, Claude, Van Goyen, and Watteau, Delacroix, Courbet and Manet — into a single form. While the little early interiors of Menzel anticipated all the discoveries of the Manet circle and Leibl not seldom succeeded where Courbet tried and failed, their pictures renew the metaphysical browns and greens of the Old Masters and are fully expressive of an inward experience. Menzel actually re-experienced and reawakened some- thing of Prussian Rococo, Marees something of Rubens, Leibl in his "Frau Gedon" something of Rembrandt's protraiture. Moreover, the studio-brown of the 17th Century had had by its side a second art, the intensely Faustian art of etching. In this, as in the other, Rembrandt is the greatest master of all time; this, like the other, has something Protestant in it that puts it in a quite different category from the work of the Southern Catholic painters of blue- green atmospheres and the Gobelin tapestries. And Leibl, the last artist in the brown, was the last great etcher whose plates possess that Rembrandtesquc infinity that contains and reveals secrets without end. In Mar6es, lastly, there was all the mighty intention of the great Baroque style, but, though Gericault and Daumicr were not too belated to capture it in positive form, he — lacking just that strength that a tradition would have given him — was unable to force it into the world of painter's actuality.

1

ACT AND PORTRAIT 191

IX

The last of the Faustian arts died in "Tristan." This work is the giant keystone of Western music. Painting achieved nothing like this as a finale — on the contrary, the effect of Manet, Menzel and Leibl, with their combination of "free light" and resurrected old-master styles, is weak.

"Contemporaneously," in our sense, ApoUinian art came to its end in Per- gamene sculpture. Pergamum is the counterpart of Bayreuth. The famous altar itself,^ indeed, is later, and probably not the most important work of the epoch at that; we have to assume a century (33o-xio b.c.) of development now lost in oblivion. Nevertheless, all Nietzsche's charges against Wagner and Bay- reuth, the "Ring" and "Parsifal" — decadence, theatricalness and the like — could have been levelled in the same words at the Pergamene sculpture. A masterpiece of this sculpture — a veritable ' ' Ring ' ' — has come down to us in the Gigantomachia frieze of the great altar. Here is the same theatrical note, the same use of motives from ancient discredited mythology as points d'appui, the same ruthless bombardment of the nerves, and also (though the lack of inner power cannot altogether be concealed) the same fully self-conscious force and towering greatness. To this art the Farnese Bull and the older model of the Laocoon group certainly belong.

The symptom of decline in creative power is the fact that to produce some- thing round and complete the artist now requires to be emancipated from form and proportion. Its most obvious, though not its most significant, manifesta- tion is the taste for the gigantic. Here size is not, as in the Gothic and the Pyramid styles, the expression of inward greatness, but the dissimulation of its absence. This swaggering in specious dimensions is common to all nascent Civilizations — we find it in the Zeus altar of Pergamum, the Helios of Chares called the "Colossus of Rhodes," the architecture of the Roman Imperial Age, the New Empire work in Egypt, the American skyscraper of to-day. But what is far more indicative is the arbitrariness and immoderateness that tramples on and shatters the conventions of centuries. In Bayreuth and in Pergamum, it was the superpersonal Rule, the absolute mathematic of Form, the Destiny immanent in the quietly-matured language of a great art, that was found to be intolerable. The way from Polycletus to Lysippus and from Lysippus to the sculptors of the groups of Gauls ^ is paralleled by the way from Bach, by Bee- thoven, to Wagner. The earlier artists felt themselves masters, the later uneasy slaves, of the great form. While even Praxiteles and Haydn were able to speak freely and gaily within the limits of the strictest canon, Lysippus and Bee- thoven could only produce by straining their voices. The sign of all living art,

1 State Museum, Berlin. — Tr.

• I.e., the "giants" of the great frieze, who were in fact Galatians playing the part. This

Gigantomachia, a programme-work like the Ring, represented a situation, as the Ring represented characters, under mythological labels. — Tr.

191 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the pure harmony of "will," "must" and "can," the self -evidence of the aim, the un-self-consciousness of the execution, the unity of the art and the Culture — all that is past and gone. In Corot and Tiepolo, Mozart and Cimarosa, there is still a real mastery of the mother- tongue. After them, the process of mutila- tion begins, but no one is conscious of it because no one now can speak it fluently. Once upon a time. Freedom and Necessity were identical; but now what is understood by freedom is in fact indiscipline. In the time of Rembrandt or Bach the "failures" that we know only too well were quite unthinkable. The Destiny of the form lay in the race or the school, not in the private ten- dencies of the individual. Under the spell of a great tradition full achievement is possible even to a minor artist, because the living art brings him in touch with his task and the task with him. To-day, these artists can no longer per- form what they intend, for intellectual operations are a poor substitute for the trained instinct that has died out. All of them have experienced this. Mar6es was unable to complete any of his great schemes. Leibl could not bring him- self to let his late pictures go, and worked over them again and again to such an extent that they became cold and hard. Cezanne and Renoir left work of the best quality unfinished because, strive as they would, they could do no more. Manet was exhausted after he had painted thirty pictures, and his "Shooting of the Emperor Maximilian," in spite of the immense care that is visible in every item of the picture and the studies for it, hardly achieved as much as Goya managed without effort in its prototype the "shootings of the 3rd of May." Bach, Haydn, Mozart and a thousand obscure musicians of the i8th Century could rapidly turn out the most finished work as a matter of routine, but Wag- ner knew full well that he could only reach the heights by concentrating all his energy upon "getting the last ounce" out of the best moments of his artistic endowment.

Between Wagner and Manet there is a deep relationship, which is not, in- deed, obvious to everyone but which Baudelaire with his unerring flair for the decadent detected at once. For the Impressionists, the end and the culmination of art was the conjuring up of a world in space out of strokes and patches of colour, and this was just what Wagner achieved with three bars. A whole world of soul could crowd into these three bars. Colours of starry midnight, of sweeping clouds, of autumn, of the day dawning in fear and sorrow, sudden glimpses of sunlit distances, world-fear, impending doom, despair and its fierce effort, hopeless hope — all these impressions which no composer before him had thought it possible to catch, he could paint with entire distinctness in the few tones of a motive. Here the contrast of Western music with Greek plastic has reached its maximum. Everything merges in bodiless infinity, no longer even does a linear melody wrestle itself clear of the vague tone-masses that in strange surgings challenge an imaginary space. The motive comes up out of dark terrible deeps. It is flooded for an instant by a flash of hard bright sun.

ACT AND PORTRAIT 193

Then, suddenly, it is so close upon us that we shrink. It laughs, it coaxes, it threatens, and anon it vanishes into the domain of the strings, only to return again out of endless distances, faintly modified and in the voice of a single obocr, to pour out a fresh cornucopia of spiritual colours. Whatever this is, it is neither painting nor music, in any sense of these words that attaches to previous work in the strict style. Rossini was asked once what he thought of the music of the "Huguenots"; "Music?" he replied. "1 heard nothing resembling it." Many a time must this judgment have been passed at Athens on the new painting of the Asiatic and Sicyonian schools, and opinions not very different must have been current in Egyptian Thebes with regard to the art of Cnossus and Tell-el-Amarna. /

All that Nietzsche says of Wagner is applicable, also, to Manet. Ostensibly a ret\irn to the elemental, to Nature, as against contemplation-painting (In- haltsmalerei) and abstract music, their art really signifies a concession to the '> barbarism of the Megalopolis, the beginning of dissolution sensibly manifested I ' in a mixture of brutality and refinement. As a step, it is necessarily the last! step, ^vn artificial art has no further organic future, it is the mark of the end.

And the bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the arts of form of the West. The crisis of the 19th Century was the death-struggle. Like the Apollinian, the Egyptian and every other, the Faustian art dies of senility, having actualized its inward possibilities and fulfilled its mission within the course of its Culture.

What is practised as art to-day — be it music after Wagner or painting after Cezanne, Leibl and Menzel — is impotence and falsehood. Look where one will, can one find the great personalities that would justify the claim that there is still an art of determinate necessity? Look where one will, can one find the self-evidently necessary task that awaits such an artist? We go through all the exhibitions, the concerts, the theatres, and find only industrious cobblers and noisy fools, who delight to produce something for the market, something that will ' ' catch on ' ' with a public for whom art and music and drama have long ceased to be spiritual necessities. At what a level of inward and outward dignity stand to-day that which is called art and those who are called artists! In the shareholders' meeting of any limited company, or in the technical staff of any first-rate engineering works there is more intelligence, taste, character and capacity than in the whole music and painting of present-day Europe. There have always been, for one great artist, a hundred superfluities who prac- tised art, but so long as a great tradition (and therefore great art) endured even these achieved something worthy. We can forgive this hundred for existing, for in the ensemble of the tradition they were the footing for the individual great man. But to-day we have only these superfluities, and ten thousand of them, working art "for a living" (as if that were a justification!). One thing is quite certain, that to-day every single art-school could be shut down without

194 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year loo. There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of

• ' the new style," of "unsuspected possibilities," theoretical babble, pretentious

fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells — the "Lit<;rary Man " in the Poet's place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism which th : art- trade has organized as a "phase of art-history," thinking and feeling and form- ing as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-)ffice artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tenden- cies and successfully bluffed their public. What do we possess to-day as " trt"? A faked music, filled with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a raked painting, full of idiotic, exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of the form-wealth of millennia some new "style" which is in fact no style at all since everyone does as he pleases; a lying plastic tha-j steals from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently. Yet this and only this, tie taste of the "man of the world," can be accepted as the expression and sig!i of the age; everything else, everything that "sticks to" old ideals, is for provincial consumption.

The grand Ornamentation of the past has become as truly a dead language as Sanskrit or Church Latin. ^ Instead of its symbolism being honoured and obeyed, its mummy, its legacies of perfected forms, are put into the pot anyhow, and recast in wholly inorganic forms. Every modern age holds change to be development, and puts revivals and fusions of old styles in the place of real be- coming. Alexandria also had its Pre-Raphaelite comedians with their vases, chairs, pictures and theories, its symbolists, naturalists and expressionists. The fashion at Rome was now Grseco-Asiatic, now Graeco-Egyptian, now (after Praxiteles) neo-Attic. The relief of the XlXth Dynasty — the modern age in the Egyptian Culture — that covered the monstrous, meaningless, in- organic walls, statues and columns, seems like a sheer parody of the art of the Old Kingdom. The Ptolemaic Horus-temple of Edfu is quite unsurpassed in the way of vacuous eclecticism — so far, for we are only at the beginning of our own development in this liiic, showy and assertive as the style of our streets and squares already is.

In due course, even the strength to wish for change fades out. Rameses the Great — so soon — appropriated to himself buildings of his predecessors by cutting out their names and inserting his own in the inscriptions. It was the same consciousness of artistic impotence that led Constantine to adorn his triumphal arch in Rome with sculptures taken from other buildings; but Classical craftsmanship had set to work long before Constantine — as early, in fact, as 150 — on the business of copying old masterpieces, not because these

• Sec Vol. II, pp. 138 ct scq.

1

ACT AND PORTRAIT X95

were understood and appreciated in the least, but because no one was any longer capable of producing originals. It must not be forgotten that these copyists were the artists of their time; their work therefore (done in one style or another according to the moment's fashion) represent the maximum of creative power then available. All the Roman portrait statues, male and female, go back for posture and mien to a very few Hellenic types; these, copied more or less true to style, served for torsos, while the heads were executed as "Likenesses" by simple craftsmen who possessed the knack. The famous statue of Augustus in armour, for example, is based on the Spearman of Polycletus, just as — to name the first harbingers of the same phase in our own world — Lenbach rests upon Rembrandt and Makart upon Rubens. For 1500 years (Amasis I to Cleopatra) Egypticism piled portrait on portrait in the same way. Instead of the steady development that the great age had pursued through the Old and Middle King- doms, we find fashions that change according to the taste of this or that dynasty. Amongst the discoveries at Turfan are relics of Indian dramas, contemporary with the birth of Christ, which are similar in all respects to the Kalidasa of a later century. Chinese painting as we know it shows not an evolution but an up-and-down of fashions for more than a thousand years on end; and this unsteadiness must have set in as early as the Han period. The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see to-day in Indian, Chinese, and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions — all is patternwork.* We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation. So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures.

• Sec pp. 197 et scq.

CHAPTER IX SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

I

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL

CHAPTER IX

SOUL -IMAGE AND LIFE -FEELING

I

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL

Every professed philospher is forced to believe, without serious examination, in the existence of a Something that in his opinion is capable of being handled by the reason, for his whole spiritual existence depends on the possibility of such a Something. For every logician and psychologist, therefore, however sceptical he may be, there is a point at which criticism falls silent and faith begins, a point at which even the strictest analytical thinker must cease to em- ploy his method — the point, namely, at which analysis is confronted with itself and with the question of whether its problem is soluble or even exists at all. The proposition "it is possible by thought to establish the forms of thought" was not doubted by Kant, dubious as it may appear to the unphilo- sophical. The proposition "there is a soul, the structure of which is scientif- ically accessible; and that which I determine, by critical dissection of conscious existence-acts into the form of psychic elements, functions, and complexes, is my soul " is a proposition that no psychologist has doubted hitherto. And yet it is just here that his strongest doubts should have arisen. Is an abstract science of the spiritual possible at all? Is that which one finds on this path identical with that which one is seeking? Why has psychology — meaning thereby not knowledge of men and experience of life but scientific psychology — always been the shallowest and most worthless of the disciplines of philosophy, a field so empty that it has been left entirely to mediocre minds and barren systematists? The reason is not far to seek. It is the misfortune of "experimental" psy- chology that it does not even possess an object as the word is understood in any and every scientific technique. Its searches and solutions are fights with shadows and ghosts. What is it — the Soul? If the mere reason could give an answer to that question, the science would be ab initio unnecessary.

Of the thousands of psychologists of to-day not one can give an actual analysis or definition of "the" Will — or of regret, anxiety, jealousy, disposi- tion, artistic intention. Naturally, since only the systematic can be dissected, and we can only define notions by notions. No subtleties of intellectual play with notional distinctions, no plausible observations of connexions between

Z99

300 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

scnsuous<orporcal states and "inward processes" touch that which is in ques- tion here. Will — this is no notion, but a name, a prime-word like God, a sign for something of which we have an immediate inward certainty but which we are for ever unable to describe.

We are dealing here with something eternally inaccessible to learned inves- tigation. It is not for nothing that every language presents a baffling com- plexity of labels for the spiritual, warning us thereby that it is something not susceptible of theoretical synthesis or systematic ordering. Here there is noth- ing for us to order. Critical (i.e., literally, separating) methods apply only to the world-as-Nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting-knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought. Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither aims nor ways in common. The primitive man experiences "soul," first in other men and then in himself, as a Numeriy just as he knows numina of the outer world, and de- velops his impressions in mythological form. His words for these things arc symbols, soimds, not descriptive of the indescribable but indicative of it for him who hath ears to hear. They evoke images, likenesses (in the sense of Faust II) — the only language of spiritual intercourse that man has discovered to this day. Rembrandt can reveal something of his soul, to those who are in inward kinship with him, by way of a self-portrait or a landscape, and to Goethe "a god gave it to say what he suffered." Certain ineffable stirrings of soul can be imparted by one man to the sensibility of another man through a look, two bars of a melody, an almost imperceptible movement. That is the real language of souls, and it remains incomprehensible to the outsider. The word as utterance, as poetic element, may establish the link, but the word as notion, as element of scientific prose, never. \ "Soul," for the man who has advanced from mere living and feeling to the alert and observant state, is an image derived from quite primary experiences of life and death. It is as old as thought, i.e., as the articulate separation of thinking (thinking-over) from seeing. We see the world around us, and since every free-moving being must for its own safety understand that world, the accumulating daily detail of technical and empirical experience becomes a stock of permanent data which man, as soon as he is proficient in speech, col- lects into an image of what he understands. This is the World-as-Nature.^ What is not environment we do not see, but we do divine "its" presence in ourselves and in others, and by virtue of " its" physiognomic impressive power it evokes in us the anxiety and the desire to know; and thus arises the meditated or pondered image of a counterworld which is our mode of visualizing that which remains eternally alien to the physical eye. The image of the soul is mythic and remains objective in the field of spiritual religion so long as the image of Nature is contemplated in the spirit of religion; and it transforms itself into a

• Sec pp. 55 ct scq.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 301

scientific notion and becomes objective in the field of scientific criticism as soon as ' ' Nature ' ' comes to be observed critically. As ' ' Time " is a counter-concept ^ to space, so the "soul" is a counterworld to "Nature" and therefore variable in dependence upon the notion of Nature as this stands from moment to mo- ment. It has been shown how ' ' Time ' ' arose, out of the feeling of the direction- quality possessed by ever-mobile Life, as a conceptual negative to a positive magnitude, as an incarnation of that which is not extension; and that all the "properties" of Time, by the cool analysis of which the philosophers believe they can solve the problem of Time, have been gradually formed and ordered in the intellect as inverses to the properties of space. In exactly the same way, the notion of the spiritual has come into being as the inverse and negative of the notion of the world, the spatial notion of polarity assisting ("outward "-"in- ward") and the terms being suitably transvalued. Every psychology is a counter- physics.

To attempt to get an "exact" science out of the ever-mysterious soul is futile. But the late-period City must needs have abstract thinking and it forces the "physicist of the inner world" to elucidate a fictitious world by ever more fictions, notions by more notions. He transmutes the non-extended into the extended, builds up a system as "cause" for something that is only manifested physiognomically, and comes to believe that in this system he has the structure of "the" soul before his eyes. But the very words that he selects, in all the Cultures, to notify to others the results of his intellectual labours betray him. He talks of functions, feeling-complexes, mainsprings, thresholds of consciousness; course, breadth, intensity and parallelism in spiritual proc- esses. All these are words proper to the mode of representation that Natural Science employs. "The Will is related to objects" is a spatial image pure and simple. "Conscious" and "unconscious" are only too obviously deriv- atives of "above-ground" and "below-ground." In modern theories of the Will we meet with all the vocabulary of electro-dynamics. Will-functions and thought-functions are spoken of in just the same way as the function of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative silhouette in its place and then to treat this silhouette mathematically and by definition, partition, and measurement. All soul-examination of this stamp, however remarkable as a study of cerebral anatomy, is penetrated with the mechanical notion of locality, and works without knowing it under imagi- nary co-ordinates in an imaginary space. The "pure" psychologist is quite unaware that he is copying the physicist, but it is not at all surprising that the naivest methods of experimental psychology give depressingly orthodox results. Brain-paths and association-threads, as modes of representation, conform entirely to an optical scheme — the "course" of the will or the feeling; both deal with cognate spatial phantoms. It does not make much dif-

^ See p. iz6.

30X THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

ference whether I define some psychic capacity conceptually or the correspond- ing brain-region graphically. Scientific psychology has worked out for itself a complete system of images, in which it moves with entire conviction. Every individual pronouncement of every individual psychologist proves on examina- tion to be merely a variation of this system conformable to the style of outer- world science of the day.

Clear thought, emancipated from all connexion with seeing, presupposes as its organ a culture-language, which is created by the soul of the Culture as a part supporting other parts of its expression; ^ and presently this language itself creates a "Nature" of word -meanings, a linguistic cosmos within which abstract notions, judgments and conclusions — representations of number, causality, motion — can lead a mechanically determinate existence. At any particular time, therefore, the current image of the soul is a function of the current language and its inner symbolism. All the Western, Faustian, languages possess the notion of Will. This mythical entity manifested itself, simultane- ously in all, in that transformation of the verb ^ which decisively differentiated our tongues from the Classical tongues and therefore our soul from the Classical soul. When "ego habeo factum" replaced "feci," a new numen of the inner world spoke. And at the same time, under specific label, there appeared in the scientific soul-pictures of all the Western psychologies the figure of the Will, of a well-rounded capacity of which the definition may be formulated in dif- ferent ways by different schools, but the existence is unquestionable.

II

I maintain, then, that scientific psychology (and, it may be added, the psychology of the same kind that we all unconsciously practise when we try to "figure to ourselves" the stirrings of our own or others' souls) has, in its inability to discover or even to approach the essence of the soul, simply added one more to the symbols that collectively make up the Macrocosm of the culture-man. Like everything else that is no longer becoming but become, it has put a mechanism in place of an organism. We miss in its picture that which fills our feeling of life (and should surely be " soul " if anything is) the Destiny- quality, the necessary directedness of existence, the possibility that life in its course actualizes. I do not believe that the word "Destiny" figures in any psychological system whatsoever — and we know that nothing in the world could be more remote from actual life-experience and knowledge of men than

^ Primitive languages afford no foundations for abstract ordered thought. But at the beginning of every Culture an inner change takes place in the language that makes it adequate for carrying the highest symbolic tasks of the ensuing cultural development. Thus it was simultaneously with tbt Romanesque style that English and German arose out of the Teutonic languages of the Prankish period, and French, Italian and Spanish out of the " lingua rustica" of the old Roman provinces — languages of identical metaphysical coaccac though so dissimilar in origin.

«Sccp.i6x.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 303

a system without such elements. Associations, apperceptions, affections, mo- tives, thought, feeling, will — all are dead mechanisms, the mere topography of which constitutes the insignificant total of our "soul-science." One looked for Life and one found an ornamental pattern of notions. And the soul re- mained what it was, something that could neither be thought nor represented, the secret, the ever-becoming, the pure experience.

This imaginary soul-body (let it be called so outright for the first time) is never anything but the exact mirror-image of the form in which the matured culture-man looks on his outer world. In the one as in the other, the depth- experience actualizes the extension-world.^ Alike out of the perception of the outside and the conception of the inside, the secret that is hinted at in the root-word Time creates Space. The soul-image like the world-image has its directional depth, its horizon, and its boundedness or its unboundedness. An "inner eye" sees, an "inner ear" hears. There exists a distinct idea of an inner order, and this inner order like the outer wears the badge of causal necessity.

This being so, everything that has been said in this work regarding the phenomenon of the high Cultures combines to demand an immensely wider and richer sort of soul-study than anything worked upon so far. For everything that our present-day psychologist has to tell us — and here we refer not only to the systematic science but also in the wider sense to the physiognomic knowl- edge of men — relates to the present condition of the Western soul, and not, as hitherto gratuitously assumed, to "the human soul" at large.

A soul-image is never anything but the image of one quite definite soul. No observer can ever step outside the conditions and the limitations of his time and circle, and whatever it may be that he "knows" or "cognizes," the very cognition itself involves in all cases choice, direction and inner form, and is therefore ab initio an expression of his proper soul. The primitive himself appropriates a soul-image out of facts of his own life as subjected to the form- ative working of the basic experiences of waking consciousness (distinction of ego and world, of ego and tu) and those of being (distinction of body and soul, sense-life and reflection, sex-life and sentiment). And as it is thoughtful men who think upon these matters, an inner numen (Spirit, Logos, Ka, Ruach) always arises as an opposite to the rest. But the dispositions and relations of this numen in the individual case, and the conception that is formed of the spiritual elements — layers of forces or substances, unity or polarity or plu- rality — mark the thinker from the outset as a part of his own specific Culture. When, therefore, one convinces one's self that one knows the soul of an alien Culture from its workings in actuality, the soul-image underlying the knowl- edge is really one's own soul-image. In this wise new experiences are readily assimilated into the system that is already there, and it is not surprising

• See p. 172..

304 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

that in the end one comes to believe that one has discovered forms of eternal validity.

In reality, every Culture possesses its own systematic psychology just as it possesses its own style of knowledge of men and experience of life; and just as even each separate stage — the age of Scholasticism, that of the Sophists, that of Enlightenment — forms special ideas of number and thought and Nature that pertain to itself only, so even each separate century mirrors itself in a soul- image of its own. The best judge of men in the Western world goes wrong when he tries to understand a Japanese, and vice versa. But the man of learn- ing goes equally wrong when he tries to translate basic words of Arabic or Greek by basic words of his own tongue. "Nephesh" is not "animus" and "itmin" is not "soul," and what we consistently discover under our label "will" Classical man did not find in his soul-picture at all.

Taking one thing with another, it is no longer possible to doubt the immense importance of the individual soul-images that have severally arisen in the general history of thought. Classical, Apollinian man, the man of Euclidean point-formed being, looked upon his soul as a Cosmos ordered in a group of excellent parts. Plato called it vovs, OvfiSs, kirtdufila and compared it with man, beast and plant, in one place even with Southern, Northern and Hellenic man. What seems to be copied here is Nature as seen by the Classical age, a well- ordered sum of tangible things, in contrast to a space that was felt as the non- existent, the Nonent. Where in this field is "Will"? or the idea of functional connexions? or the other creations of our psychology? Do we really believe that Plato and Aristotle were less sure in analysis than we are, and did not sec what is insistently obvious to every layman amongst us? Or is it that Will is missing here for the same reason as space is missing in the Classical mathe- matic and force in the Classical physics?

Take, on the contrary, any Western psychology that you please, and you will always find a functional and never a bodily ordering. The basic form of all impressions which we receive from within isy = fC^X and that, because the func- tion is the basis of our outer world. Thinking, feeling, willing — no Western psychologist can step outside this trinity, however much he may desire to do so; even in the controversies of Gothic thinkers concerning the primacy of will or reason it already emerges that the question is one of a relation between forces. It matters not at all whether these old philosophers put forward their theories as original or read them into Augustine or Aristotle. Associations, apperceptions, will-processes, call them what you will, the elements of our picture are without exception of the type of the mathematico-physical Func- tion, and in very form radically un-Classical. Now, such psychology examines the soul, not physiognomically to indicate its traits, but physically, as an object, to ascertain its elements, and it is quite natural therefore to find psy- chology reduced to perplexity when confronted with the problem of motion.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 305

Classical man, too, had his inward Eleatic difficulty,^ and the inability of the Schoolmen to agree as to the primacy of Will or Reason foreshadows the dangerous flaw in Baroque physics — its inability to reach an unchallengeable statement of the relation between force and movement. Directional energy, denied in the Classical and also in the Indian soul-image (where all is settled and rounded), is emphatically affirmed in the Faustian and in the Egyptian (wherein all is systems and centres of forces); and yet, precisely because this affirmation cannot but involve the element of time, thought, which is alien to Time, finds itself committed to self-contradictions.

The Faustian and the ApoUinian images of the soul are in blunt opposition. Once more all the old contrasts crop up. In the ApoUinian we have, so to call it, the soul-body, in the Faustian the soul-space, as the imagination-unit. The body possesses parts, while the space is the scene of processes. Classical man conceives of his inner world plastically. Even Homer's idiom betrays it; echoing, we may well believe, immemorial temple-traditions, he shows us, for instance, the dead in Hades as well-recognizable copies of the bodies that had been. The Pre-Socratic philosophy, with its three well-ordered parts \oyi<TTLK6vy kTn6vfn]TLK6vy Ovfioetdes, suggests at once the Laocoon group. In our case the impress is a musical one; the sonata of the inner life has the will as first subject, thought and feeling as themes of the second subject; the movement is bound by the strict rules of a spiritual counterpoint, and psychology's business is to discover this counterpoint. The simplest elements fall into an- tithesis like Classical and Western number — on the one hand magnitudes, on the other spiritual relations — and the s-piritual static of ApoUinian exist- ence, the stereometric ideal of <T03<f>poavvri and drapa^ta, stands opposed to the soul-dynamic of Faustian.

The ApoUinian soul-image — Plato's biga-team with vovs as charioteer — takes to flight at once on the approach of the Magian soul. It is fading out already in the later Stoa, where the principal teachers came predominantly from the Aramaic East, and by the time of the Early Roman Empire, even in the literature of the city itself, it has come to be a mere reminiscence.

The hall-mark of the Magian soul-image is a strict dualism of two mysterious

^ That is, discussion of the doctrines of the Eleatic school regarding unity and plurality, the Ent and Nonent, focussed themselves, in Zeno, down to the famous paradoxes concerning the nature of motion (such as "Achilles and the Tortoise") which within the Greek discipline were unanswer- able. Their general effect was to show that motion depended upon the existence of an indefinitely great plurality, that is, of infinitely small subdivisions as well as infinitely great quantities, and, the denial of this plurality being the essential feature of the Eleatic philosophy, its application to motion was bound to produce "paradoxes."

The enunciations, with a brief but close critique, will be found in the Ency. Brit., XI ed., Article Zeno of Elea. Here it suffices to draw attention to the difficulties that arc caused by the absence (or xmwelcome presence) of time and direction elements, not only in the treatment of plurality itself (which is conceived of indifferently as an augmentation or as a subdivision of the finite magnitude) but especially in the conclusion of the "arrow" paradox and in the very obscure enunciation of Paradox 8. — Tr.

3o6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

substances^ Spirit and Soul. Between these two there is neither the Classical (static) nor the Western (functional) relation, but an altogether differently constituted relation which we are obliged to call merely "Magian" for want of a more helpful term, though we may illustrate it by contrasting the physics of Democritus and the physics of Galileo with Alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone. On this specifically Middle-Eastern soul-image rests, of inward necessity, all the psychology and particularly the theology with which the "Gothic " springtime of the Arabian Culture (0-300 a.d.) is filled. The Gospel of St. John belongs thereto, and the writings of the Gnostics, the Early Fathers, the Neoplatonists, the Manichasans, and the dogmatic texts in the Talmud and the Avesta; so, too, does the tired spirit of the Imperium Romanum, now expressed only in religiosity and drawing the little life that is in its philosophy from the young East, Syria, and Persia. Even in the ist Century b.c. the great Posidonius, a true Semite and young-Arabian in spite of the Classical dress of his immense learning, was inwardly sensible of the complete opposition between the Classical life-feeling and this Magian soul-structure which for him was the true one. There is a patent difference of value between a Substance permeating the body and a Substance which falls from the world-cavern into humanity, abstract and divine, making of all participants a Consensus.^ This "Spirit" it is which evokes the higher world, and through this creation tri- umphs over mere life, "the flesh" and Nature. This is the prime image that underlies all feeling of ego. Sometimes it is seen in religious, sometimes in philosophical, sometimes in artistic guise. Consider the portraits of the Con- stantinian age, with their fixed stare into the infinite — that look stands for the TTvevfjia. It is felt by Plotinus and by Origen. Paul distinguishes, for example in I Cor., xv, 44, between cccfia rfwxf-KSv and o-w/xa irvevfiaTLKSv. The concep- tion of a double, bodily or spiritual, ecstasy and of the partition of men into lower and higher, psychics and pneumatics, was familiar currency amongst the Gnostics. Late-Classical literature (Plutarch) is full of the dualistic psy- chology of vovs and \l/vxv, derived from Oriental sources. It was very soon brought into correlation with the contrast between Christian and Heathen and that between Spirit and Nature, and it issued in that scheme of world-history as man's drama from Creation to Last Judgment (with an intervention of God as means) which is common to Gnostics, Christians, Persians and Jews alike, and has not even now been altogether overcome.

This Magian soul-image received its rigorously scientific completion in the schools of Baghdad and Basra.^ Alfarabi and Alkindi dealt thoroughly with the problems of this Magian psychology, which to us are tangled and largely inaccessible. And we must by no means underrate its influence upon the young and wholly abstract soul-theory (as distinct from the ego-feeling) of the West.

• Sec Vol. II, pp. X96 ct scq.

s De Boer, Gtscb. d. Fbilos. im Islam (1901), pp. 93, 108.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 307

Scholastic and Mystic philosophy, no less than Gothic art, drew upon Moorish Spain, Sicily and the East for many of its forms. It must not be forgotten that the Arabian Culture is the culture of the established revelation-religions, all of which assume a dualistic soul-image. The Kabbala ^ and the part played by Jewish philosophers in the so-called mediaeval philosophy — i.e., late- Arabian followed by early-Gothic — is well known. But I will only refer here to the remarkable and little-appreciated Spinoza.^ Child of the Ghetto, he is, with his contemporary Schirazi, the last belated representative of the Magian, a stranger in the form-world of the Faustian feeling. As a prudent pupil of the Baroque he contrived to clothe his system in the colours of Western thought, but at bottom he stands entirely under the aspect of the Arabian dualism of two soul-substances. And this is the true and inward reason why he lacked the force- concept of Galileo and Descartes. This concept is the centre of gravity of a dynamic universe and ipso facto is alien to the Magian world-feeling. There is no link between the idea of the Philosopher's Stone (which is implicit in Spinoza's idea of Deity as "causa sui") and the causal necessity of our Nature-picture Consequently, his determinism is precisely that which the orthodox wisdom of Baghdad had maintained — "Kismet." It was there that the home of the more geometrico ^ method was to be looked for — it is common to the Talmud, the Zend A vesta and the Arabian Kalaam; ^ but its appearance in Spinoza's "Ethics" is a grotesque freak in our philosophy.

Once more this Magian soul-image was to be conjured up, for a moment. German Romanticism found in magic and the tangled thought-threads of Gothic philosophers the same attractiveness as it found in the Crusade-ideals of cloisters and castles, and even more in Saracenic art and poetry — without of course understanding very much of these remote things. Schelling, Oken, Baader, Gorres and their circle indulged in barren speculations in the Arabic- Jewish style, which they felt with evident self-satisfaction to be "dark" and "deep" — precisely what, for Orientals, they were not — understanding them but partially themselves and hoping for similar quasi-incomprehension in their audiences. The only noteworthy point in the episode is the attractiveness of obscurity. We may venture the conclusion that the clearest and most accessible conceptions of Faustian thought — as we have it, for instance, in Descartes or in Kant's "Prolegomena" — would in the same way have been regarded by an Arabian student as nebulous and abstruse. What for us is true, for them is false, and vice versa; and this is valid for the soul-images of the different Cultures as it is for every other product of their scientific thinking.

• A detailed summary will be found in Ency. Brit., XI ed., article Kabbalah, by Dr. Ginsburg

and Dr. Cook. — Tr.

^ See Windelband, Gessh. d. neueren Philosofhie (1919), I, ro8; also Hinnebcrt, Kulfur der Gegenwartt I, V (1913), p. 484.

' See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article Cartesianism (V, 411). — Tr.

4 See Vol. II, p. 196.

3o8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

III

The separation of its ultimate elements is a task that the Gothic world- outlook and its philosophy leaves to the courage of the future. Just as the ornamentation of the cathedral and the primitive contemporary painting still shirk the decision between gold and wide atmosphere in backgrounds — be- tween the Magian and the Faustian aspects of God in Nature — so this early, timid, immature soul-image as it presents itself in this philosophy mingles characters derived from the Christian-Arabian metaphysic and its dualism of Spirit and Soul with Northern inklings of functional soul -forces not yet avowed. This is the discrepance that underlies the conflict concerning the primacy of will or reason, the basic problem of the Gothic philosophy ^ which men tried to solve now in the old Arabian, now in the new Western sense. It is this myth of the mind — which under ever-changing guises accompanies our philosophy throughout its course — that distinguishes it so sharply from every other. The rationalism of late Baroque, in all the pride of the self-assured city-spirit, decided in favour of the greater power of the Goddess Reason (Kant, the Jaco^ bins); but almost immediately thereafter the 19th Century (Nietzsche above all) went back to the stronger formula Voluntas superior intellectu, and this indeed is in the blood of all of us.^ Schopenhauer, the last of the great system- atists, has brought it down to the formula "World as Will and Idea," and it is only his ethic and not his metaphysic that decides against the Will.

Here we begin to see by direct light the deep foundations and meaning of philosophizing within a Culture. For what we see here is the Faustian soul trying in labour of many centuries to paint a self-portrait, and one, moreover, that is in intimate concordance with its world-portrait. The Gothic world- view with its struggle of will and reason is in fact an expression of the life- feeling of the men of the Crusades, of the Hohenstaufen empire, of the great cathedrals. These men saw the soul thus, because they were thus.

Will and thought in the soul-image correspond to Direction and Extension, History and Nature, Destiny and Causality in the image of the outer world. Both aspects of our basic characters emerge in our prime-symbol which is infinite extension. Will links the future to the present, thought the unlimited to the here. The historic future is distance-becoming, the boundless world-horizon distance-become — this is the meaning of the Faustian depth-experience. The direction-feeling as "Will" and the space-feeling as "Reason" are imagined as entities, almost as legend-figures; and out of them comes the picture that our psychologists of necessity abstract from the inner life.

To call the Faustian Culture a Will-Culture is only another way of expressing

• When, therefore, in the present work also, precedence is consistently given to Time, Direction

and Destiny over Space and Causality, this must not be supposed to be the result of reasoned proofe. It is the outcome of (quite unconscious) tendencies of life-fccling — the only mode of origin of philosophic ideas.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 309

the eminently historical disposition of its soul. Our first-person idiom, our "ego habeo factum" — our dynamic syntax, that is — faithfully renders the "way of doing things " that results from this disposition and, with its positive directional energy, dominates not only our picture of the World-as-History but our own history to boot. This first person towers up in the Gothic architec- ture; the spire is an "I," the flying buttress is an "I." And therefore the entire Faustian ethic, from Thomas Aquinas to Kant, is an excelsior — ful- filment of an "I," ethical work upon an "I," justification of an "I" by faith and works; respect of the neighbour "Thou" for the sake of one's "I" and its happiness; and, lastly and supremely, immortality of the "I."

Now this, precisely this, the genuine Russian regards as contemptible vain- glory. The Russian soul, will-less, having the /limitless plane as its prime- symbol,^ seeks to grow up — serving, anonymous, self-oblivious — in the brother-world of the plane. To take "I" a^ the starting-point of relations with the neighbour, to elevate "I" morally through "I's" love of near and dear, to repent for "I's" own sake, are to him traits of Western vanity as presumptuous as is the upthrusting challenge to heaven of our cathedrals that he compares with his plane church-roof and its sprinkling of cupolas. Tolstoi's hero Nechludov looks after his moral "I" as he does after his finger-nails; this is just what betrays Tolstoi as belonging to the pseudomorphosis of Petrin- ism. But Raskolnikov is only something in a "we." His fault is the fault of all,^ and even to regard his sin as special to himself is pride and vanity. Some- thing of the kind underlies the Magian soul-image also. "If any man come to me," says Jesus (Luke xiv, i6), "and hate not his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, yea, and his own life (rrjv Iomtov ypvx^v) also^ he cannot be my disciple"; and it is the same feeling that makes him call himself by the title that we mistranslate "Son of Man." * The Consensus of the Orthodox too is impersonal and condemns " I " as a sin. So too with the — truly Russian — conception of truth as the anonymous agreement of the elect.

Classical man, belonging wholly to the present, is equally without that di- rectional energy by which our images of world and of soul are dominated, which sums all our sense-impressions as a path towards distance and our inward expe- riences as a feeling of future. He is will-less. The Classical idea of destiny and the symbol of the Doric column leave no doubt as to that. And the contest of thinking and willing that is the hidden theme of every serious portrait from. Jan van Eyck to Marees is impossible in Classical portraiture, for in the Clas-\ sical soul-image thought (vous), the inner Zeus, is accompanied by the wholly ahistoric entities of animal and vegetative impulse (Bviih% and ^irt^uMta),

1 See p. xoi. 2 See Vol. II, p. 363.

^ In the German, " Vor allem aber sein eignes Ich," (But in Luther's Bible, characteristically, " Auch dazu sein eigen Lcben.") — Tr.

• Barnasha. The underlying idea is not the filial relation, but an impersonal coming-up in the

field of mankind.

3IO THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

wholly somatic and wholly destitute of conscious direction and drive towards an end.

The actual designation of the Faustian principle, which belongs to us and to us alone, is a matter of indifference. A name is in itself mere sound. Space, too, is a word that is capable of being employed with a thousand nuances — by mathematicians and philosophers, poets and painters — to express one and the same indescribable; a word that is ostensibly common to all mankind and yet, carrying a metaphysical under-meaning that we gave it and could not but give it, is in that sense valid only for our Culture. It is not the notion of "Will," but the circumstance that we possess it while the Greeks were entirely ignorant of ity that gives it high symbolic import. At the very bottom, there is no distinction between space-as-depth and will. For the one, and therefore for the other also, the Classical languages had no expression.^ The pure space of the Faustian world-picture is not mere extension, but efficient extension into the distance, as an overcoming of the merely sensuous, as a strain and tendency, as a spiritual will-to-power. I am fully aware how inadequate these peri- phrases are. It is entirely impossible to indicate in exact terms the diff"erencc between what we and what the men of the Indian or the Arabian Culture call space, or feel or imagine in the word. But that there is some radical distinc- tion is proved by the very diff'erent fundamentals of the respective mathematics, arts of form, and, above all, immediate utterances of life. We shall see how the identity of space and will comes to expression in the acts of Copernicus and Columbus — as well as in those of the Hohenstaufen and Napoleon — but it underlies also, in another way, the physical notions of fields of force and potential, ideas that it would be impossible to convey to the comprehension of any Greek. "Space as a priori form of perception," the formula in which Kant finally enunciated that for which Baroque philosophy had so long and tire- lessly striven, implies an assertion of supremacy of soul over the alien; the ego, through the form, is to rule the world. ^

• ^^Xa> and 06v\onai imply, to have the intention, or wish, or inclination (fiovXii means counsel,

council, plan, and ^Xa> has no equivalent noun). Voluntas is not a psychological concept but, like fotestas and virtus, a thoroughly Roman and matter-of-fact designation for a practical, visible and outward asset — substantially, the mass of an individual's being. In like case, we use the word energy. The "will" of Napoleon is something very different from the energy of Napoleon, being, as it were, lift in contrast to weight. We must not confuse the outward-directed intelligence, which distinguishes the Romans as civilized men from the Greeks as cultured men, with "will" as under- stood here. Cxsar is net a man of will in the Napoleonic sense. The idioms of Roman law, which represent the root-feeling of the Roman soul far better than those of poetry, are significant in this regard. Intention in the legal sense is animus (animus occidendi^; the wish, directed to some criminal end, is dolus as distinct from the unintended wrongdoing (culpa"). Voluntas is nowhere used as a technical term.

' The Chinese soul " wanders " in its world. This is the meaning of the East-Asiatic perspective, which places the vanishing point in the middle of the picture instead of in the depth as we do. The function of perspective is to subject things to the "I," which in ordering comprehends them; and it is a further indication that " will" — the claim to command the world — is absent from the Classi- cal make-up that its painting denies the perspective background. In Chinese perspective as in Chinese

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 311

This is brought to expression in the depth-perspective of oil-painting which makes the space-field of the picture, conceived as infinite, dependent on the observer, who in choosing his distance asserts his dominion. It is this attrac- tion of distance that produces the type of the heroic and historically-jelt land- scape that we have alike in the picture and the park of the Baroque period, and that is expressed also in the mathematico-physical concept of the vector. For centuries painting fought passionately to reach this symbol, which con- tains all that the words space, will and force are capable of indicating. And correspondingly we find in our metaphysic the steady tendency to formulate pairs of concepts (such as phenomena and things-in-themselves, will and idea, ego and non-ego) all of the same purely dynamic content, and — in utter contrast to Protagoras 's conception of man as the measure, not the creator, of things — to establish a functional dependence of things upon spirit. The \ Classical metaphysic regarded man as a body among bodies, and knowledge as a sort of contact ^ passing from the known to the knower and not vice versa. The optical theories of Anaxagoras and Democritus were far from admitting any active participation of the percipient in sense-perception. Plato never felt, as Kant was driven to feel, the ego as centre of a transcendent sphere of effect. \ The captives in his celebrated cave are really captives, the slaves and not the masters of outer impressions — recipients of light from the common sun and not themselves suns which irradiate the universe.

The relation of our will to our imaginary space is evidenced again in the physical concept of space-energy — that utterly un-Classical idea in which even spatial interval figures as a form, and indeed as prime form thereof, for the notions of "capacity" and "intensity" rest upon it. We feel will and space, the dynamic world-picture of Galileo and Newton and the dynamic soul-picture which has will as its centre of gravity and centre of reference, as of identical significance. Both are Baroque ideas, symbols of the fully-ripened Faustian Culture.

It is wrong, though it may be usual, to regard the cult of the "will" as common, if not to mankind, at any rate to Christendom, and derived in con- sequence from the Early- Arabian ethos. The connexion is merely a phenom- enon of the historical surface, and the deduction fails because it confuses the (formal) history of words and ideas such as "voluntas" with the course of their destiny, thereby missing the profoundly symbolical changes of con- notation that occur in that course. When Arabian psychologists — Murtada for instance — discuss the possibility of several "wills," a will that hangs together with the act, another will that independently precedes the act, another

technique (see Vol. II, p. 6x7), directional energy is wanting, and it would not be illegitimate to call East-Asiatic perspective, in contrast with the powerful thrust into depth of our landscape-painting, a perspective of "Tao"; for the world-feeling indicated by that word is unmistakably the operative element in the picture.

311 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

that has no relation to the act at all, a will that is simply the parent of a willing, they are obviously working in deeper connotations of the Arabic word and on the basis of a soul-image that in structure differs entirely from the Faustian.

For every man, whatever the Culture to which he belongs, the elements of the soul are the deities of an inner mythology. What Zeus was for the outer Olympus, vovs was for the inner world that every Greek was entirely con- scious of possessing — the throned lord of the other soul-elements. What "God" is for us, God as Breadth of the world, the Universal Power, the ever- present doer and provider, that also — reflected from the space of world into the imaginary space of soul and necessarily felt as an actual presence — is "Will." With the microcosmic dualism of the Magian Culture, with ruach and nepheshy pneuma and psyche, is necessarily associated the macrocosmic opposi- tion of God and Devil — Ormuzd and Ahriman for Persians, Yah we and Beelzebub for Jews, Allah and Eblis for Mohammedans — in brief. Absolute Good and Absolute Evil. And note, further, how in the Western world-feeling bofh these oppositions pale together. In proportion as the Will emerges, out of the Gothic struggle for primacy between " intellectus " and "voluntas," as the centre of a spiritual monotheism^ the figure of the Devil fades out of the real world. In the Baroque age the pantheism of the outer world immediately resulted in one of the inner world also; and the word "God" in antithesis to "world" has always — however interpreted in this or that case — implied exactly what is implied in the word "will" with respect to soul, viz., the power that moves all that is within its domain.^ Thought no sooner leaves Religion for Science than we get the double myth of concepts, in physics and psychology. The concepts "force," "mass," "will," "passion" rest not on objective experience but on a life-feeling. Darwinism is nothing but a specially shallow formulation of this feeling. No Greek would have used the word " Nature " as our biology employs it, in the sense of an absolute and methodical activity. "The will of God" for us is a pleonasm — God (or "Nature," as some say) is nothing but will. After the Renaissance the notion of God sheds the old sensuous and personal traits (omnipresence and omnipotence are almost mathematical concepts), becoines little by little identical with the notion of infinite space and in becoming so becomes transcendent world-will. And there- fore it is that about 1700 painting has to yield to instrumental music — the only art that in the end is capable of clearly expressing what we feel about God. Consider, in contrast with this, the gods of Homer. Zeus emphatically does not possess full powers over the world, but is simply "primus inter pares," a body amongst bodies, as the Apollinian world-feeling requires. Blind necessity,

^ Obviously, atheism is no exception to this. When a Materialist or Darwinian speaks of a "Nature" that orders everything, that effects selections, that produces and destroys anything, he differs only to the extent of one word from the i8th-Ccntury Deist. The world-feeling has undergone no change.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 313

the Anankc immanent in the cosmos of Classical consciousness, is in no sense dependent upon him; on the contrary, the Gods are subordinate to It. i^schylus says so outright in a powerful passage of the "Prometheus," ^ but it is per- ceptible enough even in Homer, e.g., in the Strife of the Gods and in that decisive passage in which Zeus takes up the scales of destiny, not to settle, but to learn, the fate of Hector. ^ The Classical soul, therefore, with its parts and its properties, imagines itself as an Olympus of little gods, and to keep these at peace and in harmony with one another is the ideal of the Greek life-ethic of acocfypoavvT] and arapa^ia. More than one of the philosophers betrays the connexion by calling vovs, the highest part of the soul, Zeus. Aristotle as- signs to his deity the single function of deojpla, contemplation, and this is Diogenes 's ideal also — a completely-matured static of life in contrast to the equally ripe dynamic of our i8th-Century ideal.

The enigmatic Something in the soul -image that is called "will," the passion of the third dimension^ is therefore quite specially a creation of the Baroque, like the perspective of oil-painting and the force-idea of modern physics and the tone-world of instrumental music. In every case the Gothic had foreshadowed what these intellectualizing centuries brought to fullness. Here, where we are trying to take in the cast of Faustian life in contradiction to that of all other lives, what we have to do is to keep a firm hold on the fact that the primary words will, space, force, God, upborne by and permeated with connotations of Faustian feeling, are emblems, are the effective framework that sustains the great and kindred form-worlds in which this being expresses itself. It has been believed, hitherto, that in these matters one was holding in one's grip a body of eternal facts, of facts-in-themselves, which sooner or later would be suc- cessfully treated, "known," and proved by the methods of critical research. This illusion of natural science was shared by psychology also. But the view that these "universally-valid" fundamentals belong merely to the Baroque style of apprehension and comprehension^ that as expression-forms they are only of tran- sitory significance, and that they are only "true" for the Western type of intellect, alters the whole meaning of those sciences and leads us to look upon them not only as subjects of systematic cognition but also, and in a far higher degree, as objects of physiognomic study.

Baroque architecture began, as we have seen, when Michelangelo replaced the tectonic elements of the Renaissance, support and load, by those of dyna- mics, force and mass. While Brunelleschi's chapel of the Pazzi in Florence expresses a bright composedness, Vignola's facade of the Gesu in Rome is will become stone. The new style in its ecclesiastical form has been designated the "Jesuit," and indeed there is an inward connexion between the achievement of

1 Lines 52.5-534:

XO. TOVTCjiv &pa Zefis ia-riv kadevkarepos;

nP. ovKovv oLveKipbyoL ye TfjP ireirpoinkvqv, etc. — Tr.

2 Iliad, XXII, Z08-2.I5. — Tr.

314 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Vignola and Giacomo Delia Porta and the creation by Ignatius Loyola of the Order that stands for the pure and abstract will of the Church,^ just as there is between the invisible operations and the unlimited range of the Order and the arts of Calculus and Fugue.

Henceforward, then, the reader will not be shocked if we speak of a Baroque, and even of a Jesuit, style in psychology y mathematics , and pure physics. The form- language of dynamics, which puts the energetic contrast of capacity and inten- sity in place of the volitionless somatic contrast of material and form, is one common to all the mind-creations of those centuries.

IV

The question is now: How far is the man of this Culture himself fulfilling what the soul-image that he has created requires of him? If we can, to-day, state the theme of Western physics quite generally to be efficient space, we have ipso facto defined also the kind of existence, the content of existence as lived by contemporary man. We, as Faustian natures, are accustomed to take note of the individual according to his effective and not according to his plastic-static appearance in the field of our life-experience. We measure what a man is by his activity, which may be directed inwardly or outwardly, and we judge all intentions, reasons, powers, convictions and habits entirely by this directed- ness. The word with which we sum up this aspect is character. We habitually speak of the "character" of heads and landscapes; of ornaments, brush-strokes and scripts; of whole arts and ages and Cultures. The art of the characteristic is, above all. Baroque music — alike in respect of its melody and its instrumen- tation. Here again is a word indicating an indescribable, a something that emphasizes, among all the Cultures, the Faustian in particular. And the deep relation between this word "character" and the word " will " is unmistakable; what will is in the soul-image, character is in the picture of life as we see it, the Western life that is self-evident to Western men. It is the fundamental postulate of all our ethical systems, differ otherwise as they may in their metaphysical or practical precepts, that man has character. Character, which forms itself in the stream of the world — the personality , the relation of living to doing — is a Faustian impression of the man made by the man; and, significantly enough, just as in the physical world-picture it has proved impossible (in spite of the most rigorous theoretical examination) to separate the vectorial idea

• The great part played by learned Jesuits in the development of theoretical physics must not be

overlooked. Father Boscovich, with his system of atomic forces (1759), made the first serious ad- vance beyond Newton. The idea of the equivalence of God and pure space is even more evident in Jesuit work than it is in that of the Jansenists of Port Royal with whom Descartes and Pascal were associated.

(Boscovich's atomic theory is discussed by James Clerk Maxwell in Ency. Brit., XI cd., XVIII, 655 — a reference that, for more general reasons, no student of the Faustian-as-scientist should fail to follow up. — Tr.")

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 315

of forces from the idea of motion (because of the inherent directional quality of the vector), so also it is impossible to draw a strict distinction between will and soul, character and life. At the height of our Culture, certainly since the 17th Century, we feel the word " life " as a pure and simple synonym of willing. Expressions like living force, life-will, active energy, abound in our ethical literature and their import is taken for granted, whereas the Age of Pericles could not even have translated them into its language.

Hitherto the pretension of each and every morale to universal validity has obscured the fact that every Culture, as a homogeneous being of higher order, possesses a moral constitution proper to itself. There are as many morales as there are Cultures. Nietzsche was the first to have an inkling of this; but he never came anywhere near to a really objective morphology of morale "beyond good " (all good) "and evil " (all evil). He evaluated Classical, Indian, Christian and Renaissance morale by his own criteria instead of understanding the style of them as a symbol. And yet if anything could detect the prime-phenomenon of Morale as such, it should have been the historical insight of a Westerner. However, it appears that we are only now ripe enough for such a study. The conception of mankind as an active, fighting, progressing whole is (and has been since Joachim of Floris and the Crusades) so necessary an idea for us that we find it hard indeed to realize that it is an exclusively Western hypothesis, living and valid only for a season. To the Classical spirit mankind appears as a stationary mass, and correspondingly there is that quite dissimilar morale that we can trace from the Homeric dawn to the time of the Roman Empire. And, more generally, we shall find that the immense activity of the Faustian life-feeling is most nearly matched in the Chinese and the Egyptian, and the rigorous passivity of the Classical in the Indian.

If ever there was a group of nations that kept the "struggle for existence" constantly before its eyes, it was the Classical Culture. All the cities, big and little, fought one another to sheer extinction, without plan or purpose, without mercy, body against body, under the stimulus of a completely anti-historical instinct. But Greek ethics, notwithstanding Heraclitus, were far from making struggle an ethical principle. The Stoics and the Epicureans alike preached abstention from it as an ideal. The overcoming of resistances may far more justly be called the typical impulse of the Western soul. Activity, determi- nation, self-control, are postulates. To battle against the comfortable fore- grounds of life, against the impressions of the moment, against what is near, tangible and easy, to win through to that which has generality and duration and links past and future — these are the sum of all Faustian imperatives from earliest Gothic to Kant and Fichte, and far beyond them again to the Ethos of immense power and will exhibited in our States, our economic sys- tems and our technics. The carpe diem, the saturated being, of the Classical standpoint is the most direct contrary of that which is felt by Goethe and Kant

3i6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

and Pascal, by Church and Freethinker, as alone possessing value — activcy fighting and victorious being. ^

As all the forms of Dynamic (whether pictorial, musical, physical, social or political) are concerned with the working-out of infinite relations and deal, not with the individual case and the sum of individual cases as the Classical physics had done, but with the typical course or process and its functional rule, "character" must be understood as that which remains in principle constant in the working-out of life; where there is no such constant we speak of "lack of character." It is character — the form in virtue of which a moving existence can combine the highest constancy in the essential with the maximum varia- bility in the details — that makes telling biography (such as Goethe's " Wahr- heit und Dichtung "), possible at all. Plutarch's truly Classical biographies are by comparison mere collections of anecdotes strung together chronologically and not ordered pictures of historical development, and it will hardly be disputed that only this second kind of biography is imaginable in connexion with Alcibiades or Pericles or, for that matter, any purely Apollinian figure. Their experiences lack, not mass, but relation; there is something atomic about them. Similarly in the field of Science the Greek did not merely forget to look for general laws in the sum of his experiential data; in his cosmos they were simply not there to be found.

It follows that the sciences of character-study, particularly physiognomy and graphology, would not be able to glean much in the Classical field. Its handwriting we do not know, but we do know that its ornament, as com- pared with the Gothic, is of incredible simplicity and feebleness of character- expression — think of the Meander and the Acanthus-shoot. On the other hand, it has never been surpassed in timeless evenness.

It goes without saying that we, when we turn to look into the Classical life-feeling, must find there some basic element of ethical values that is anti- thetical to "character" in the same way as the statue is antithetical to the fugue. Euclidean geometry to Analysis, and body to space. We find it in the Gesture. It is this that provides the necessary foundation for a spiritual static. The word that stands in the Classical vocabulary where "personality" stands in our own is irpoffcbirovy "persona" — namely r^le or mask. In late Greek or Roman speech it means the public aspect and mien of a man, which for Classical

^ Luther placed practical activity (the day's demands, as Goethe said) at the very centre of morale, and that is one of the main reasons why it was to the deeper natures that Protestantism appealed most cogently. Works of piety devoid of directional energy (in the sense that we give the words here) fell at once from the high esteem in which they had been sustained (as the Renaissance was sustained) by a relic of Southern feeling. On ethical grounds monasticism thenceforth falls into ever-increasing disrepute. In the Gothic Age entry into the cloister, the renunciation of care, deed and will, had been an act of the loftiest ethical character — the highest sacrifice that it was pos- sible to imagine, that of ///*. But in the Baroque even Roman Catholics no longer felt thus about it. And the institutions, no longer of reaunciatioa but merely of inactive comfort, went down before the spirit of the Eolightcnmcnt.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 317

man is tantamount to the essence and kernel of him. An orator was described as speaking in the TrpocruiTrov — not the character or the vein as we should say — of a priest or a soldier. The slave was dLirpdaoiros — that is, he had no attitude or figure in the public life — but not do-cojuaros — that is, he did have a soul. The idea that Destiny had assigned the role of king or general to a man was expressed by Romans in the words persona regis, imperatoris .^ The Apol- linian cast of life is manifest enough here. What is indicated is not the person- ality (that is, an unfolding of inward possibilities in active striving) but a permanent and self-contained posture strictly adapted to a so-to-say plastic ideal of being. It is only in the Classical ethic that Beauty plays a dis- tinct r61e. However labelled — as ao)(f>poavvrj, KoKoKayadla or drapa^ia — it always amounts to the well-ordered group of tangible and publicly evident traits, defined for other men rather than specific to one's self. A man was the object and not the subject of outward life. The pure present, the moment, the foreground were not conquered but worked up. The notion of an inward life is impossible in this connexion. The significance of Aristotle's phrase ^cbov ttoXltLkov — quite untranslatable and habitually translated with a Western connotation — is that it refers to men who are nothing when single and lonely (what could be more preposterous than an Athenian Robinson Crusoe!) and only count for anything when in a plurality, in agora or forum, where each reflects his neighbour and thus, only thus, acquires a genuine reality. It is all implicit in the phrase cufxaTa TroXecos, used for the burghers of the city. And thus we see that the Portrait, the centre of Baroque art, is identical with the representation of a man to the extent that he possesses char- acter, and that in the best age of Attic the representation of a man in respect of his attitude, as persona, necessarily leans to the form-ideal of the nude statue.

This opposition, further, has produced forms of tragedy that differ from one another radically in every respect. The Faustian character-drama and the Apollinian drama of noble gesture have in fact nothing but name in common. ^

Starting, significantly enough, from Seneca and not from i^schylus and Sophocles ^ (just as the contemporary architecture linked itself with Imperial Rome and not with Passtum), the Baroque drama with ever-increasing emphasis makes character instead of occurrence its centre of gravity, the origin of a system of spiritual co-ordinates (so to express it) which gives the scenic facts position, sense, and value in relation to itself. The outcome is a tragedy of

1 irpoadirov meant in the older Greek "visage," and later, in Athens, "mask." As late as Aristotle the word is not yet in use for person. "Persona," originally also a theatre-mask, came to have a juristic application, and in Roman Imperial times the pregnant Roman sense of this word affected the Greek irpoaciirov also. See R. Hirzel, Die Person (1914), pp. 40 et seq.

» See pp. 117 et seq. 3 w. Creizenach, Gesch, d. neueren Dramas (1918), II, 346 et scq.

3i8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

willing, of efficient forces, of inward movement not necessarily exhibited in visible form, whereas Sophocles's method was to employ a minimum of hap- pening and to put it behind the scenes particularly by means of the artifice of the "messenger." The Classical tragedy relates to general situations and not particular personalities. It is specifically described by Aristotle as ixlurjaLs ohK iLvOpcoTTchv dXXd Tpa^ecos Kal ^lov. That which in his Poetica — assuredly the most fateful of all books for our poetry — he calls ij^os, namely the ideal bearing of the ideal Hellene in a painful situation, has as little in common with our notion of character (viz., a constitution of the ego which determines events) as a surface in Euclidean geometry has with the like-named concept in Rie- mann's theory of algebraic equations. It has, unfortunately, been our habit for centuries past to translate rfios as "character" instead of paraphrasing it (exact rendering is almost impossible) by "r61e," "bearing" or "gesture"; to reproduce myth, y.Wos, which is timeless occurrence, by "action"; and to derive 6pa/xa from "doing." It is Othello, Don Quixote, Le Misanthrope, Werther and Hedda Gabler that are characters, and the tragedy consists in the mere existence of human beings thus constituted in their respective milieux. Their struggle — whether against this world or the next, or themselves — is forced on them by their character and not by anything coming from outside; a soul is placed in a web of contradictory relations that admits of no net solution. Classical stage-figures, on the contrary, are r61es and not characters; over and over again the same figures appear — the old man, the slayer, the lover, all slow-moving bodies under masks and on stilts. Thus in Classical drama — even of the Late period — the mask is an element of profound symbolic neces- sity, whereas our pieces would not be regarded as played at all without the play of features. It is no answer to point to the great size of the Greek theatre, for even the strolling player — even the portrait-statue ^ — wore a mask, and had there been any spiritual need of a more intimate setting the required archi- tectural form would have been forthcoming quickly enough.

In the tragedy of a character, what happens is the outcome of a long inner development. But in what befalls Ajax and Philoctetes, Antigone and Electra, their psychological antecedents (even supposing them to have any) play no part. The decisive event comes upon them, brutally, as accident, from with- out, and it might have befallen another in the same way and with the same result. It would not be necessary even for that other to be of the same sex.

It is not enough to distinguish Classical and Western tragedy merely as action-drama and event-drama. Faustian tragedy is biographical. Classical anec- dotal; that is, the one deals with the sense of a whole life and the other with the content of the single moment. ^ What relation, for instance, has the entire

» Sec p. 165.

• Wc too have our anecdote, but it is of our own type and diametrically opposed to the Classical. It is the "short story" (Now//*) — the story of Cervantes, Kleist, Hoffmann and Storm — and wc

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 319

inward past of CEdipus or Orestes to the shattering event that suddenly meets him on his way? ^ There is one sort of destiny, then, that strikes like a flash of lightning, and just as blindly, and another that interweaves itself with the course of a life, an invisible thread ^ that yet distinguishes this particular life from all others. There is not the smallest trait in the past existence of Othello — that masterpiece of psychological analysis — that has not some bearing on the catastrophe. Race-hatred, the isolation of the upstart amongst the patri- cians, the Moor as soldier and as child of Nature, the loneliness of the ageing bachelor — all these things have their significance. Lear, too, and Hamlet — compare the exposition of these characters with that of Sophoclean pieces. They are psychological expositions through-and-through and not summations of outward data. The psychologist, in our sense of the word, namely the fine student (hardly nowadays to be distinguished from the poet) of spiritual turn- ing-points, was entirely unknown to the Greeks. They were no more analytical in the field of soul than in that of number; f/V-^-wj the Classical soul, how could they be so? "Psychology" in fact is the proper designation for the Western way of fashioning men; the word holds good for a portrait by Rembrandt as for the music of "Tristan," for Stendhal's Julian Sorel as for Dante's "Vita Nuova." The like of it is not to be found in any other Culture. If there is anything that the Classical arts scrupulously exclude it is this, for psychology is the form in which art handles man as incarnate will and not as o-co^ia. To call Euripides a psychologist is to betray ignorance of what psychology is. What an abundance of character there is even in the mere mythology of the North with its sly dwarfs, its lumpy giants, its teasing elves, its Loki, Baldr and the rest! Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, Ares are simply "men," Hermes the "youth," Athene a maturer Aphrodite, and the minor gods — as the later plastic shows — distinguishable only by the labels. And the same is true without reservation of the figures of the Attic stage. In Wolfram von Eschenbach, Cer- vantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, the tragic is individual, life develops from within outwards, dynamic, functional, and the life-courses are only fully understand- able with reference to the historical background of the century. But in the great tragedians of Athens it comes from outside, it is static, Euclidean. To repeat a phrase already used in connexion with world-history, the shattering event is epochal in the former and merely episodic in the latter, even the finale of death being only the last bead in the string of sheer accidents that makes up an existence.

A Baroque tragedy is nothing but this same directive character brought

admire it in proportion as we are made to feel that its motive is possible only this once, at this time and with these people, whereas the mythic type of anecdote, the Fable, is judged by precisely opposite criteria.

1 Sec pp. 143 et seq.

' The Fates of the Greeks arc represented as spinning, measuring out and cutting the thread of a maa's destiny, but not as weaving it into the web of his life. It is a mere dimension. — Tr.

310 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

into and developed in the light-world, and shown as a curve instead of as an equation, as kinetic instead of as potential energy. The visible person is the character as potential, the action the character at work. This, under the heap of Classicist reminiscences and misunderstandings that still hides it, is the whole meaning of our idea of Tragedy. The tragic man of the Classical is a Euclidean body that is struck by the Heimarmene in a position that it did not choose and cannot alter, but is seen, in the light that plays from without upon its surfaces, to be indeformable quand mhne. This is the sense in which Aga- memnon is vavapxov aw^ia ^aalXeiov and in which OEdipus's cufxa is subjected to the Oracle.^ Down to Alexander the significant figures of Greek history astonish us with their inelasticity; not one of them, apparently, undergoes in the battle of life any such inward transformation as those which we know took place in Luther and Loyola. What we are prone — too prone — to call "characterization" in Greek drama is nothing but the reflection of events upon the rjdos of the hero, never the reflection of a personality on events.

Of deep necessity, therefore, we Faustians understand drama as a maximum of activity; and, of deep necessity also, the Greek understood it as a maximum of passivity.2 Speaking generally, the Attic tragedy had no "action" at all. The Mysteries were purely dphfiara or Spcb/xeva, i.e., ritual performances, and it was from the Mystery-form with its "peripeteia" that ^schylus (himself an Eleusinian) derived the high drama that he created. Aristotle describes tragedy as the imitation of an occurrence. This imitation is identical with the "profanation" of the mysteries; and we know that i^schylus went further and made the sacral vestments of the Eleusinian priesthood the regular costume of the Attic stage, and was accused on that account.^ For the 5pd/ia proper, with its reversal from lamentation to joy, consisted not in the fable that was narrated but in the ritual action that lay behind it, and was understood and felt by the spectator as deeply symbolic. With this element of the non-Homeric early religion ^ there became associated another, a boorish — the burlesque (whether phallic or dithyrambic) scenes of the spring festivals of Demeter and Dionysus. The beast-dances ^ and the accompanying song were the germ of

' Sec p. 119.

' The evolution of meaning in the Classical words pathos and fassio corresponds with this. The second was formed from the first only in the Imperial period, and carried its original sense in the "Passion" of Christ. It was in the early Gothic times, and particularly in the language of the Franciscan "Zealots" and the disciples of Joachim of Floris, that its meaning underwent the deci- sive reversal. Expressing thenceforward a condition of profound excitement which strained to dis- charge itself, it became finally a generic name for all spiritual dynamic; in this sense of strong will and directional energy it was brought into German as Leidenschaft by Zesen in 1647.

• The Eleusinian mysteries contained no secrets at all. Everyone knew what went on. But upon the believers they exercised a strange and overpowering effect, and the " betrayal " consisted in profaning them by imitating their holy forms outside the temple-precinct. See, further, A. Dieterich, KJtine Schriften (191 1), pp. 414 et seq. < See Vol. II, pp. 345 et seq.

' The dancers were goats, Silcnus as leader of the dance wore a horsetail, but Aristophanes's "Birds," "Frogs" and "Wasps" suggest that there were still other animal disguises.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 311

the tragic Chorus which puts itself before the actor or "answerer" of Thespis

(534)-

The genuine tragedy grew up out of the solemn death-lament (threnos,

nsenia). At some time or other the joyous play of the Dionysus festival (which also was a soul-feast) became a mourners' chorus of men, the Satyr-play being relegated to the end. In 494 Phrynichus produced the "Fall of Miletus" — not a historical drama but a lament of the women of Miletus — and was heavily fined for thus recalling the public calamity. It was i^schylus's in- troduction of the second actor that accomplished the essential of Classical tragedy; the lament as given theme was thenceforward subordinated to the visual presentation of a great human suffering as present motive. The foreground- story (^fiWos) is not "action" but the occasion for the songs of the Chorus, which still constitutes the rpaycpdia proper. It is immaterial whether the occurrence is indicated by narrative or exposition. The spectator was in solemn mood and he felt himself and his own fate to be meant in the words of pathos. It was in him that the Treptx^reta, the central element of the holy pageant, took place. Whatever the environment of message and tale, the liturgical lament for the woe of mankind remained always the centre of gravity of the whole, as we see more particularly in the "Prometheus," the "Agamemnon" and the "(Edipus Rex." But presently — at the very time when in Polycletus the pure plastic was triumphing over the fresco ^ — there emerges high above the lament the grandeur of human endurance, the attitude, the rjOos of the Hero. The theme is, not the heroic Doer whose will surges and breaks against the resistance of alien powers or the demons in his own breast, but the will- less Patient whose somatic existence is — gratuitously — destroyed. The Pro- metheus trilogy of i^schylus begins just where Goethe would in all probability have left off. King Lear's madness is the issue of the tragic action, but Soph- ocles 's Ajax is made mad by Athene before the drama opens — here is the difference between a character and an operated figure. Fear and compassion, in fact, are, as Aristotle says, the necessary effect of Greek tragedy upon the Greek (and only the Greek) spectator, as is evident at once from his choice of the most effective scenes, which are those of piteous crash of fortune (TreptTrereta) and of recognition (^avayvcopLaii). In the first, the ruling impression is </)6i3os (terror) and in the second it is eXeos (pity), and the Kadapats in the spec- tator presupposes his existence-ideal to be that of drapa^ta.^ The Classi-

^ See pp. 183 et seq.

2 As the student of cultural history to-day is not necessarily familiar with technical Greek, it may be helpful to reproduce from Cornish's edition of Smith's "Greek and Roman Antiquities," s.v. "Tragoedia," the following paragraph, as clear as it is succinct:

"Tragedy is described by Aristotle CPoet., VI, 2.) as effecting by means of pity and terror that purgation [of the soul] QKadapais) which belongs to [is proper for] such feelings." . . . Tragedy excites pity and terror by presenting to the mind things which are truly pitiable and terrible. When pity and terror are moved, as tragedy moves them, by a worthy cause, then the mind experiences that sense of relief which comes from finding an outlet for a natural energy. And thus the impressions

32J. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

cal soul is pure "present," pure aw/ua, unmoved and point-formed being. To see this imperilled by the jealousy of the Gods or by that blind chance that may crash upon any man's head without reason and without warning, is the most fearful of all experiences. The very roots of Greek being are struck at by what for the challenging Faustian is the first stimulus to living activity. And then — to find one's self delivered^ to see the sun come out again and the dark thunder clouds huddle themselves away on the remote horizon, to rejoice profoundly in the admired grand gesture, to see the tortured mythical soul breathe again — that is the Kkdapci's. But it presupposes a kind of life-feeling that is entirely alien to us, the very word being hardly translatable into our languages and our sensations. It took all the aesthetic industry and assertiveness of the Baroque and of Classicism, backed by the meekest submissiveness before ancient texts, to persuade us that this is the spiritual basis of our own tragedy as well. And no wonder. For the fact is that the effect of our tragedy is precisely the oppo- site. It does not deliver us from deadweight pressure of events, but evokes active dynamic elements in us, stings us, stimulates us. It awakens the primary feelings of an energetic human being, the fierceness and the joy of tension, danger, violent deed, victory, crime, the triumph of overcoming and destroying — feelings that have slumbered in the depths of every Northern soul since the days of the Vikings, the Hohenstaufen and the Crusades. That is Shakespearian effect. A Greek would not have tolerated Macbeth, nor, generally, would he have comprehended the meaning of this mighty art of directional biography at all. That figures like Richard III, Don Juan, Faust, Michael Kohlhaas, Golo — un-Classical from top to toe — awaken in us not sympathy but a deep and strange envy, not fear but a mysterious desire to suffer, to suffer-with ("com- passion" of quite another sort), is visibly — even to-day when Faustian tragedy in its final form, the German, is dead at last — the standing motive of the literature of our Alexandrian phase. In the "sensational "adventure- and detective-story, and still more recently in the cinema-drama (the equivalent of the Late-Classical mimes), a relic of the unrestrainable Faustian impulse to conquer and discover is still palpable.

There are corresponding differences between the Apollinian and the Faust- ian outlook in the forms of dramatic presentation, which are the complement of the poetic idea. The antique drama is a piece of plastic, a group of pathetic scenes conceived as reliefs, a pageant of gigantic marionettes disposed against the definitive plane of the back-wall.^ Presentation is entirely that of grandly- imagined gestures, the meagre facts of the fable being solemnly recited rather

made by Tragedy leave behind them in the spectator a temperate and harmonious state of the soul. Similarly Aristotle speaks of the enthusiastic worshippers of Dionysus as obtaining a x&Bapcis, a healthful relief, by the "lyric utterance of their sacred frenzy." — Tr.

• The evolution of ideals of stagc-prcscntation in the minds of ^chylus, Sophocles and Euripi-

des successively is perhaps comparable with that of sculptural style which we see in the pediments of ^gina, of Olympia and of the Parthenon.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 313

than presented. The technique of Western drama aims at just the opposite — unbroken movement and strict exclusion of flat static moments. The famous "three unities" of place, time and action, as unconsciously evolved (though not expressly formulated) in Athens, are a paraphrase of the type of the Clas- sical marble statue and, like it, an indication of what classical man, the man of the Polls and the pure present and the gesture, felt about life. The unities are all, effectively, negative^ denials of past and future, repudiation of all spiritual action-at-a-distance. They can be summed in the one word drapa^ta. The postulates of these "unities" must not be confused with the superficially similar postulates in the drama of the Romance peoples. The Spanish theatre of the i6th Century bowed itself to the authority of "Classical" rules, but it is easy to see the influence oi noblesse oblige in this; Castilian dignity responded to the appeal without knowing, or indeed troubling to. find out, the original sense of the rules. The great Spanish dramatists, Tirso da Molina above all, fashioned the "unities" of the Baroque, but not as metaphysical negations, but purely as expressions of the spirit of high courtesy, and it was as such that Corneille, the docile pupil of Spanish "grandezza," borrowed them. It was a fateful step. If Florence threw herself into the imitation of the Classical sculp- ture — at which everyone marvelled and of which no one possessed the final criteria — no harm was done, for there was by then no Northern plastic to suffer thereby. But with tragedy it was another matter. Here there was the possibility of a mighty drama, purely Faustian, of unimagined forms and daring. That this did not appear, that for all the greatness of Shakespeare the Teutonic drama never quite shook off the spell of misunderstood convention, was the consequence of blind faith in the authority of Aristotle. What might not have come out of Baroque drama had it remained under the impression of the knightly epic and the Gothic Easter-play and Mystery, in the near neigh- bourhood of Oratorios and Passions, without ever hearing of the Greek theatre! A tragedy issuing from the spirit of contrapuntal music, free of limitations proper to plastic but here meaningless, a dramatic poetry that from Orlando Lasso and Palestrina could develop — side by side with Heinrich Schiitz, Bach, Handel, Gluck and Beethoven, but entirely free — to a pure form of its own: that was what was possible, and that was what did not happen ;"and it is only to the fortunate circumstance that the whole of the fresco-art of Hellas has been lost that we owe the inward freedom of our oil-painting.

VI

The unities were not sufficient for the Attic drama. It demanded, further, the rigid mask in lieu of facial play, thus forbidding spiritual characterization in the same spirit as Attic sentiment forbade likeness-statuary. It demanded more- than-life-sized figures and got them by means of the cothurnus and by padding and draping the actor till he could scarcely move, thus eliminating all his

314 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

individuality. Lastly, it required monotonous sing-song delivery, which it ensured by means of a mouthpiece fixed in the mask.

The bare text as we read it to-day (not without reading into it the spirit of Goethe and Shakespeare and of our perspective vision) conveys little of the deeper significance of these dramas. Classical art-works were created entirely for the eye, even the physical eye, of Classical man, and the secrets reveal themselves only when put in sensuous forms. And here our attention is drawn to a feature of Greek tragedy that any true tragedy of the Faustian style must find intolerable, the continual presence of the Chorus. The Chorus is the primitive tragedy, for without it the fjdos would be impossible. Character one possesses for one's self, but attitude has meaning only in relation to others.

This Chorus as crowd (the ideal opposite to the lonely or inward man and the monologue of the West), this Chorus which is always there, the witness of every "soliloquy," this Chorus by which, in the stage-life as in the real life, fear before the boundless and the void is banished, is truly Apollinian. Self-review as a public action, pompous public mourning in lieu of the solitary anguish of the bedchamber, the tears and lamentations that fill a whole series of dramas like the " Philoctetes " and the "Trachinias," the impossibility of being alone, the feeling of the Polls, all the feminine of this Culture that we see idealized in the Belvedere Apollo, betrays itself in this symbol of the Chorus. In comparison with this kind of drama, Shakespeare's is a single monologue. Even in the conversations, even in the group-scenes we are sensible of the immense inner distance between the persons, each of whom at bottom is only talking with himself. Nothing can overcome this spiritual remoteness. It is felt in Hamlet as in " Tasso ' * and in Don Quixote as in Werther, but even Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzeval is filled with and stamped by the sense of infinity. The distinction holds for all Western poetry against all Classical. All our lyric verse from Walther von der Vogelweide to Goethe and from Goethe to the poems of our dying world-cities is monologue, while the Classical lyric is a choral lyric, a singing before witnesses. The one is received inwardly, in word- less reading, as soundless music, and the other is publicly recited. The one be- longs to the still chamber and is spread by means of the book, the other belongs to the place where it is voiced.

Thus, although the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Thracian festival of the epiphany of Dionysus had been nocturnal celebrations, the art of Thespis de- veloped, as its inmost nature required, as a scene of the morning and the full sunlight. On the contrary, our Western popular and Passion plays, which originated in the sermon of allocated parts and were produced first by priests in the church, and then by laymen in the open square, on the mornings of high festivals, led almost unnoticed to an art of evening and night. Already in Shakespeare's time performances took place in the late afternoon, and by Goethe's this mystical sense of a proper relation between art-work and light-

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 315

setting had attained its object. In general, every art and every Culture has its significant times of day. The music of the i8th Century is a music of the dark* ness and the inner eye, and the plastic of Athens is an art of cloudless day. That this is no superficial contrast we can see by comparing the Gothic plastic, wrapped eternally in "dim religious light," and the Ionic flute, the instrument of high noon. The candle affirms and the sunlight denies space as the opposite of things. At night the universe of space triumphs over matter, at midday things and nearness assert themselves and space is repudiated. The same con- trast appears in Attic fresco and Northern oil-painting, and in the symbols of Helios and Pan and those of the starry night and red sunset. It is at midnight, too, and particularly in the twelve long nights after Christmas, that the souls of our dead walk abroad. In the Classical world, the souls belong to the day — even the early Church still speaks of the diadeKa-fjfiepoVy the twelve dedicated days; but with the awakening of the Faustian soul these become "Twelfth Night."

The Classical vase-painting and fresco — though the fact has never been remarked — has no time-of-day. No shadow indicates the state of the sun, no heaven shows the stars. There is neither morning nor evening, neither spring nor autumn, but pure timeless brightness.^ For equally obvious reasons our oil- painting developed in the opposite direction, towards an imaginary darkness, also independent of time-of-day, which forms the characteristic atmosphere of the Faustian soul-space. This is all the more significant as the intention is from the outset to treat the field of the picture with reference to a certain time- of-day, that is, historically. There are early mornings, sunset-clouds, the last gleams upon the sky-line of distant mountains, the candle-lighted room, the spring meadows and the autumn woods, the long and short shadows of bushes and furrows. But they are all penetrated through and through with a subdued darkness that is not derived from the motion of the heavenly bodies. In fact, steady brightness and steady twilight are the respective hall-marks of the Classical and the Western, alike in painting and in drama; and may we not also describe Euclidean geometry as a mathematic of the day and Analysis as a mathematic of the night?

Change of scene, undoubtedly regarded by the Greeks as a sort of profana- tion, is for us almost a religious necessity, a postulate of our world-feeling. There seems something pagan in the fixed scene of Tasso. We inwardly need a drama of perspectives and wide backgrounds, a stage that shakes off sensuous limitations and draws the whole world into itself. In Shakespeare, who was born when Michelangelo died and ceased to write when Rembrandt came into

' It must be repeated that the Hellenistic shadow-painting of Zeuxis and Apollodorus is a model- ling of the individual body for the purpose of producing the plastic effect on the eye. There was no idea of rendering space by means of light and shade. The body is "shaded" but it casts no shadow.

(Contrast with this Dante's exact and careful specification of the time-of-day in every episode of the Purgatorio and the Paradisoy sublimely imaginative as these poems are. — Tr.)

32.6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the world, dramatic infinity, the passionate overthrow of all static limitations, attained the maximum. His woods, seas, alleys, gardens, battlefields lie in the afar, the unbounded. Years fly past in the space of minutes. The mad Lear between fool and reckless outcast on the heath, in the night and the storm, the unutterably lonely ego lost in space — here is the Faustian life-feeling! From such a scene as this it is but a step to the inwardly seen and inwardly felt land- scapes of the almost contemporary Venetian music; for on the Elizabethan stage the whole thing was merely indicated, and it was the inner eye that out of a few hints fashioned for itself an image of the world in which the scenes — far-fetched always — played themselves out. Such scenes the Greek stage could not have handled at all. The Greek scene is never a landscape; in general, it is nothing, and at best it may be described as a basis for movable statues. The figures are everything, in drama, as in fresco. It is sometimes said that Classical man lacked the feeling for Nature. Insensitive to Faustian Nature, that of space and of landscape. Classical man certainly was. His Nature was the body, and if once we have let the sentiment of this sink into us, we suddenly compre- hend the eye with which the Greek would follow the mobile muscle-relief of the nude body. This, and not clouds and stars and horizon, was his "Living Nature."

VII

Now, whatever is sensuously-near is understandable for all, and therefore of all the Cultures that have been, the Classical is the most popular, and the Faustian the least popular, in its expressions of life-feeling. A creation is "popular" that gives itself with all its secrets to the first comer at the first glance, that incorporates its meaning in its exterior and surface. In any Culture, that element is "popular" which has come down unaltered from primitive states and imaginings, which a man understands from childhood without having to master by effort any really novel method or standpoint — and, generally, that which is immediately and frankly evident to the senses, as against that which is merely hinted at and has to be dis- covered — by the few, and sometimes the very, very few. There are popular ideas, works, men and landscapes. Every Culture has its own quite definite sort of esoteric or popular character that is immanent in all its doings, so far as these have symbolic importance. The commonplace eliminates difl^er- cnccs of spiritual breadth as well as depth between man and man, while the esoteric emphasizes and strengthens them. Lastly, considered in relation to the primary depth-experience of this and that kind of awakening man — that is, in relation to the prime-symbol of his existence and the cast of his world- around — the purely "popular" and naive associates itself with the symbol of the bodily, while to the symbol of endless Space belongs a frankly ««-populaf relation between the creations and the men of the Culture.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 3x7

The Classical geometry is that of the child, that of any layman — Euclid's Elements are used in England as a school-book to this day. The workaday mind will always regard this as the only true and correct geometry. All other kinds of natural geometry that are possible (and have in fact, by an im- mense effort of overcoming the popular-obvious, been discovered) are under- standable only for the circle of the professional mathematicians. The famous "four elements" of Empedocles are those of every naive man and his "instinc- tive" physics, while the idea of isotopes which has come out of research into radioactivity is hardly comprehensible even to the adept in closely-cognate sciences. Everything that is Classical is comprehensible in one glance, be it the Doric temple, the statue, the Polls, the cults; backgrounds and secrets there are none. But compare a Gothic cathedral-fagade with the Propylasa, an etch- ing with a vase-painting, the policy of the Athenian people with that of the modern Cabinet. Consider what it means that every one of our epoch-making works of poetry, policy and science has called forth a whole literature of explanations, and not indubitably successful explanations at that. While the Parthenon sculptures were "there" for every Hellene, the music of Bach and his contemporaries was only for musicians. We have the types of the Rembrandt expert, the Dante scholar, the expert in contrapuntal music, and it is a reproach — a justifiable reproach — to Wagner that it was possible for far too many people to be Wagnerians, that far too little of his music was for the trained musician. But do we hear of Phidias-experts or even Homer- scholars? Herein lies the explanation of a set of phenomena which we have hitherto been inclined to treat — in a vein of moral philosophy, or, better, of melodrama — as weaknesses common to humanity, but which are in fact symptoms of the Western life-feeling, viz., the "misunderstood" artist, the poet "left to starve," the "derided discoverer," the thinker who is "centuries in advance of his time" and so on. These are types of an esoteric Culture. Destinies of this sort have their basis in the passion of distance in which is concealed the desire-to-infinity and the will-to-power, and they are as necessary in the field of Faustian mankind — at all stages — as they are unthinkable in the Apollinian.

Every high creator in Western history has in reality aimed, from first to last, at something which only the few could comprehend. Michelangelo made the remark that his style was ordained for the correction of fools. Gauss con- cealed his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry for thirty years, for fear of the "clamour of the Boeotians." It is only to-day that we are separating out the masters of Gothic cathedral art from the rank-and-file. But the same applies also to every painter, statesman, philosopher. Think of Giordano Bruno, or Leibniz, or Kant, as against Anaximander, Heraclitus or Protagoras. What does it mean, that no German philosopher worth mentioning can be under- stood by the man in the street, and that the combination of simplicity with

3i8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

majesty that is Homer's is simply not to be found in any Western language? The Nibclungenlied is a hard, reserved utterance, and as for Dante, in Germany at any rate the pretension to understand him is seldom more than a literary pose. We find everywhere in the Western what we find nowhere in the Clas- sical — the exclusive form. Whole periods — for instance, the Provencal Cul- ture and the Rococo — are in the highest degree select and uninviting, their ideas and forms having no existence except for a small class of higher men. Even the Renaissance is no exception, for though it purports to be the rebirth of that Antique which is so utterly w«-exclusive and caters so frankly for all, it is in fact, through-and-through, the creation of a circle or of individual chosen souls, a taste that rejects popularity from the outset — and how deep this sense of detachment goes we can tell from the case of Florence, where the generality of the people viewed the works of the elect with indifference, or with open mouths, or with dislike, and sometimes, as in the case of Savonarola, turned and rent them. On the contrary, every Attic burgher belonged to the Attic Culture, which excluded nobody; and consequently, the distinctions of deeps and shallows, which are so decisively important for us, did not exist at all for it. For us, popular and shallow arc synonymous — in art as in science — but for Classical man it was not so.

Consider our sciences too. Every one of them, without exception, has besides its elementary groundwork certain "higher" regions that are inacces- sible to the layman — symbols, these also, of our will-to-infinity and direc- tional energy. The public for whom the last chapters of up-to-date physics have been written numbers at the utmost a thousand persons, and certain problems of modern mathematics are accessible only to a much smaller circle still — for our "popular" science is without value, ditraquU^ and falsified. We have not only an art for artists, but also a mathematic for mathematicians, a politic for politicians (of which the frofanum vulgus of newspaper-readers has not the smallest inkling,* whereas Classical politics never got beyond the horizon of the Agora), a religion for the "religious genius " and a poetry for philosophers. Indeed, we may take the craving for wide effect as a sufficient index by itself of the commencing and already perceptible decline of Western science. That the severe esoteric of the Baroque Age is felt now as a burden, is a symptom of sinking strength and of the dulling of that distance-sense which confessed the limitation with humility. The few sciences that have kept the old fineness, depth, and energy of conclusion and deduction and have not been tainted with journalism — and few indeed they are, for theoretical physics, mathematics, Catholic dogma, and perhaps jurisprudence exhaust the list — address them- selves to a very narrow and chosen band of experts. And it is this expert, and his opposite the layman , that are totally lacking in the Classical life, wherein everyone

^ The great mass of Socialists would cease to be Socialists if they could understand the Socialism of the nine or ten men who to-day grasp it with the full historical consequences that it involves

i

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 319

knows everything. For us, the polarity of expert and layman has all the signif- icance of a high symbol, and when the tension of this distance is beginning to' slacken, there the Faustian life is fading out.

The conclusion to be argued from this as regards the advances of Western science in its last phase (which will cover, or quite possibly will not cover, the next two centuries) is, that in proportion as megalopolitan shallowness and triviality drive arts and sciences on to the bookstall and into the factory, the posthumous spirit of the Culture will confine itself more and more to very narrow circles; and that there, remote from advertisement, it will work in ideas and forms so abstruse that only a mere handful of superfine intelligences will be capable of attaching meanings to them.

VIII

In no Classical art-work is a relation with the beholder attempted, for that would require the form-language of the individual object to affirm and tomake use of the existence of a relation between that object and ambient unlimited space. An Attic statue is a completely Euclidean body, timeless and relation- less, wholly self-contained. It neither speaks nor looks. // is quite unconscious of the spectator. Unlike the plastic forms of every other Culture, it stands wholly for itself and fits into no architectural order; it is an individual amongst in- dividuals, a body amongst bodies. And the living individuals merely perceive it as a neighbour, and do not feel it as an invasive influence, an efficient capable of traversing space. Thus is expressed the Apollinian life-feeling.

The awakening Magian art at once reversed the meaning of these forms. The eyes of the statues and portraits in the Constantinian style are big and staring and very definitely directed. They represent the Pneuma, the higher of the two soul-substances. The Classical sculptor had fashioned the eyes as blind, but now the pupils are bored, the eye, unnaturally enlarged, looks into the space that in Attic art it had not acknowledged as existing. In the Classical fresco-painting, heads are turned towards one another, but in the mosaics of Ravenna and even in the relief-work of Early-Christian-Late-Roman sarcophagi they are always turned towards the beholder, and their wholly spiritual look is fixed upon him. Mysteriously and quite un-Classically the beholder's sphere is invaded by an action-at-a-distance from the world that is in the art-work. Something of this magic can still be traced in early Florentine and early Rhenish gold-ground pictures.

Consider, now. Western painting as it was after Leonardo, fully conscious of its mission. How does it deal with infinite space as something singular which comprehends both picture and spectator as mere centres of gravity of a spatial dynamic? The full Faustian life-feeling, the passion of the third dimension, takes hold of the form of the picture, the painted plane, and transforms it in an unheard-of way. The picture no longer stands for its/^lf, nor looks at the

330 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

spectator, but takes him into its sphere. The sector defined by the sides of the frame — the peepshow-field, twin with the stage-field — represents universal space itself. Foreground and background lose all tendency to materiality and propinquity and disclose instead of marking off. Far horizons deepen the field to infinity, and the colour-treatment of the close foreground eliminates the ideal plane of separation formed by the canvas and thus expands the field so that the spectator is in it. It is not he, now, who chooses the standpoint from which the picture is most effective; on the contrary, the picture dictates position and distance to him. Lateral limits, too, are done away with — from 1500 on- wards overrunnings of the frame are more and more frequent and daring. The Greek spectator stands before the fresco of Polygnotus. We sink into a picture, that is, we are pulled into it by the power of the space-treatment. Unity of space being thus re-established, the infinity that is expanded in all directions by the picture is ruled by the Western perspective; ^ and from perspective there runs a road straight to the comprehension of our astronomical world- picture and its passionate pioneering into unending farness.

Apollinian man did not want to observe the broad universe, and the philo- sophical systems one and all are silent about it. They know only problems concerned with tangible and actual things, and have never anything positive or significant to say about what is between the ' ' things. * ' The Classical thinker takes the earth-sphere, upon which he stands and which (even in Hipparchus) is enveloped in a fixed celestial sphere, as the complete and given world, and if we probe the depths and secrets of motive here we are almost startled by the persistency with which theory attempted time after time to attach the order of these heavens to that of the earth in some way that would not inpugn the primacy of the latter.^

Compare with this the convulsive vehemence with which the discovery of Copernicus — the "contemporary" of Pythagoras — drove through the soul of the West, and the deep spirit of awe in which Kepler looked upon the laws of planetary orbits which he had discovered as an immediate revelation from God, not daring to doubt that they were circular because any other form would have been too unworthy a symbol. Here the old Northern life-feeling, the Viking infinity-wistfulness, comes into its own. Here, too, is the meaning of the characteristically Faustian discovery of the telescope which, penetrating into spaces hidden from the naked eye and inaccessible to the will-to-power, widens the universe that we possess. The truly religious feeling that seizes us even to-day when we dare to look into the depths of starry space for the first time — the same feeling of power that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies aim at awakening — would to Sophocles appear as the impiety of all impieties.

Our denial of the "vault" of heaven, then, is a resolve and not a sense-ex- perience. The modern ideas as to the nature of starry space — or, to speak

• Sec p. 139 ct scq. * Sec p. 68.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 331

more prudently, of an extension indicated by light-indices that are communi- cated by eye and telescope — most certainly do not rest upon sure knowledge, for what we see in the telescope is small bright disks of different sizes. The photographic plate yields quite another picture — not a sharper one but a different one — and the construction of a consistent world-picture such as wc crave depends upon connecting the two by numerous and often very daring hypotheses (e.g., of distances, magnitudes and movements) that we ourselves frame. The style of this picture corresponds to the style of our own soul. In actual fact we do not know how different the light-powers of one and another star may be, nor whether they vary in different directions. We do not know whether or not light is altered, diminished, or extinguished in the immensities of space. We do not know whether our earthly conceptions of the nature of light, and therefore all the theories and laws deduced from them, have validity beyond the immediate environment of the earth. What we "see" are merely light-indices; what we understand are symbols of ourselves.

The strong upspringing of the Copernican world-idea — which belongs exclusively to our Culture and (to risk an assertion that even now may seem paradoxical) would be and will be deliberately forced into oblivion whenever the soul of a coming Culture shall feel itself endangered by it ^ — was founded on the certainty that the corporeal-static, the imagined preponderance of the plastic earth, was henceforth eliminated from the Cosmos. Till then, the heav- ens which were thought of, or at any rate felt, as a substantial quantity, like the earth, had been regarded as being in polar equilibrium with it. But now it was Sface that ruled the universe. "World" signifies space, and the stars are hardly more than mathematical points, tiny balls in the immense, that as material no longer affect the world-feeling. While Democritus, who tried (as on behalf of the Apollinian Culture he was bound to try) to settle some limit of a bodily kind to it all, imagined a layer of hook-shaped atoms as a skin over the Cosmos, an insatiable hunger drives us ever further and further into the remote. The solar system of Copernicus, already expanded by Giordano Bruno to a thousand such systems, grew immeasurably wider in the Baroque Age; and to-day we "know" that the sum of all the solar systems, about 35,000,000, constitutes a closed (and demonstrably finite stellar system which forms an ellipsoid of rotation and has its equator approximately along the band of the Milky Way. Swarms of solar systems traverse this space, like flights of migrant birds, with the same velocity and direction. One such group, with an apex in the constellation of Hercules, is formed by our sun together with the bright stars Capella, Vega, Altair and Betelgeuse. The axis of this immense system, which has its mid-point not far from the present position of

^ Sec Vol. II, p. 363, note.

• As we increase the powers of the telescope we find that the number of newly appearing stars

falls off rapidly towards the edges of the field.

331 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

our sun, is taken as 47o,cx)o,ooo times as long as the distance from the earth to the sun. Any night, the starry heavens give us at the same moment impres- sions that originated 3,700 years apart in time, for that is the distance in light-years from the extreme outer limit to the earth. In the picture of history as it unfolds before us here, this period corresponds to a duration covering the whole Classical and Magian ages and going back to the zenith of the Egyptian Culture in the Xllth Dynasty. This aspect — an image^ I repeat, and not a matter of experimental knowledge — is for the Faustian a high and noble^ aspect, but for the Apollinian it would have been woeful and terrible, an anni- hilation of the most profound conditions of his being. And he would have felt it as sheer salvation when after all a limit, however remote, had been found. But we, driven by the deep necessity that is in us, must simply ask ourselves the new question: Is there anything outside this system? Are there aggregates of such systems, at such distances that even the dimensions estab- lished by our astronomy ^ are small by comparison? As far as sense-observa- tions are concerned, it seems that an absolute limit has been reached; neither light nor gravitation can give a sign of existence through this outer space, void of mass. But for us it is a simple necessity of thought. Our spiritual passion, our unresting need to actualize our existence-idea in symbols, suffers under this limitation of our sense-perceptions.

DC

So also it was that the old Northern races, in whose primitive souls the Faustian was already awakening, discovered in their grey dawn the art of sailing the seas which emancipated them.* The Egyptians knew the sail, but

• The thrill of big figures is a feeling peculiar to Western mankind. In the Civilization of to-day

this significant passion for gigantic sums, for indefinitely big and indefinitely minute measurements, for "records'* and statistics, is playing a conspicuous part.

(Our very notation of number is ceasing to rest on sense-standards. Science has carried number, as ordinarily written, so high and so low that it now uses a movable base for its numerical state- ments. For example, a number in astronomy is written, not as 3,450,000,000 but as 3.45 X lo', one relating to ordinary experience as 5.45 (i.e., 3.45 X 10°) and one in electromagnetic theory, not as 0.00000345 but as 3 .45 X io~*. Under this system the conceptual unit may be as large or as small, compared with the unit of daily experience, as the region of thought in which the calculation is taking place requires. And different conceptual worlds can be connected as to number [say, a number of kilometres brought into an order of thought that deals with millimetres] by simply changing the ten-power. — Tr!)

2 In stellar calculations even the mean radius of the earth's orbit (1493 X 10*' cm.) hardly suffices as unit, as the distance of a star of one second parallax is already io6,x65 such units away from us; star-distances arc reckoned therefore either in light-years or in terms of the unit distance of a Kar of this standard parallax. — Tr.

• As early as the second millennium before Christ they worked from Iceland and the North Sea

past Finisterre to the Canaries and West Africa. An echo of these voyagings lingers in the Atlantis- laga of the Greeks. The realm of Tartessus (at the mouth of the Guadalquivir) appears to have been a centre of these movements (see Leo Frobcnius, Das unbekannte Afrika, p. 139). Some sort of relation, too, there must have been between them and the movements of the "sea peoples," Viking swarms which after long land-wanderings from North to South built themselves ships again on the

i

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 333

only profited by it as a labour-saving device. They sailed, as they had done before in their oared ships, along the coast to Punt and Syria, but the idea oi the high-seas voyage — what it meant as a liberation, a symbol — was not in them. Sailing, real sailing, is a triumph over Euclidean land. At the be- ginning of our 14th Century, almost coincident with each other (and with the formation-periods of oil-painting and counterpoint!) came gunpowder and the compass, that is, long-range weapons and long-range intercourse (means that the Chinese Culture^ too had, necessarily, discovered for itself). It was the spirit of the Vikings and the Hansa, as of those dim peoples, so unlike the Hellenes with their domestic funerary urns, who heaped up great barrows as memorials of the lonely soul on the wide plains. It was the spirit of those who sent theif dead kings to sea in their burning ships, thrilling manifests of their dark yearning for the boundless. The spirit of the Norsemen drove their cockle- boats — in the Tenth Century that heralded the Faustian birth — to the coasts of America. But to the circumnavigation of Africa, already achieved by Egyp- tians and Carthaginians, Classical mankind was wholly indifferent. How stat- uesque their existence was, even with respect to intercourse, is shown by the fact that the news of the First Punic War — one of the most intense wars of history — penetrated to Athens from Sicily merely as an indefinite report. Even the souls of the Greeks were assembled in Hades as unexcitable shadows (etSwXa) without strength, wish or feeling. But the Northern dead gathered themselves in fierce unresting armies of the cloud and the storm.

The event which stands at the same cultural level as the discoveries of the Spaniards and Portuguese is that of the Hellenic colonizations of the 8th Cen- tury B.C. But, while the Spaniards and the Portuguese were possessed by the adventured-craving for uncharted distances and for everything unknown and dangerous, the Greeks went carefully, point by point, on the known tracks of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Etruscans, and their curiosity in no wise extended to what lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the Isthmus of Suez, easily accessible as both were to them. Athens no doubt heard of the way to the North Sea, to the Congo, to Zanzibar, to India — in Nero's time the posi- tion of the southern extremity of India was known, also that of the islands of

Black Sea or the i€gean and burst out against Egypt from the time of Ramescs II (1x92.-1115). The Egyptian reliefs show their ship-types to have been quite different from the native and the Phoeni- cian; but they may well have been similar to those that Caesar found afterwards among the Veneti of Brittany. A later example of such outbursts is afforded by the Varyags or Varangians in Russia and at Constantinople. No doubt more light will shortly be thrown on the courses of these movement-streams.

1 Here there is no need to postulate firearms (as distinct from gunpowder used in fireworks) in the Chinese Culture. The archery of the Chinese and Japanese was such as only the British 14th-century archery could match in the Western and nothing in the Classical.

It should be noted also that it was in our 14th Century that — quite independently of gun- power — archery and the construction of siege-engines reached their zenith in the West. The

• ' English " bow had long been used by the Welsh, but it was left to Edward I and Edward III to

make it the tactical weapon par excellence. — Tr.

334 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Sunda — but Athens shut its eyes to these things just as it did to the astronomi- cal knowledge of the old East. Even when the lands that we call Morocco and Portugal had become Roman provinces, no Atlantic voyaging ensued, and the Canaries remained forgotten. Apollinian man felt the Columbus-longing as little as he felt the Copernican. Possessed though the Greek merchants were with the desire of gain, a deep metaphysical shyness restrained them from extending the horizon, and in geography as in other matters they stuck to near things and foregrounds. The existence of the Polis, that astonishing ideal of the State as statue, was in truth nothing more nor less than a refuge from the wide world of the sea-peoples — and that though the Classical, alone of all the Cultures so far, had a ring of coasts about a sea of islands, and not a con- tinental expanse, as its motherland. Not even Hellenism, with all its proneness to technical diversions, ^ freed itself from the oared ship which tethered the mariner to the coasts. The naval architects of Alexandria were capable of constructing giant ships of 2.60-ft. length,^ and, for that matter, the steamship was discovered in principle. But there arc some discoveries that have all the pathos of a great and necessary symbol and reveal depths within, and there arc others that are merely play of intellect. The steamship is for Apollinians one of the latter and for Faustians one of the former class. It is prominence or insignificance in the Macrocosm as a whole that gives discovery and the appli- cation thereof the character of depth or shallowness.

The discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama extended the geographical horizon without limit, and the world-sea came into the same relation with land as that of the universe of space with earth. And then first the political tension within the Faustian world-consciousness discharged itself. For the Greeks, Hellas was and remained the important part of the earth's surface, but with the discovery of America West-Europe became a province in a gigantic whole. Thenceforward the history of the Western Culture has a flanetary character.

Every Culture possesses a proper conception of home and fatherland, which is hard to comprehend, scarcely to be expressed in words, full of dark metaphysi- cal relations, but nevertheless unmistakable in its tendency. The Classical home-feeling which tied the individual corporally and Euclidean-ly to the Polis ' is the very antithesis of that enigmatic "Heimweh" of the Northerner which has something musical, soaring and unearthly in it. Classical man felt as "Home" just what he could see from the Acropolis of his native city. Where the horizon of Athens ended, the alien, the hostile, the "fatherland" of another began. Even the Roman of late Republican times understood by "patria" nothing but Urbs Roma, not even Latium, still less Italy. The Classical world,

1 Sec Vol. II, pp. 6r6 ct scq.

' Half as long again as Nelson's Victory and about the same length as the last wooden steam three-deckers (e.g., Duht of Wellington) of the mid-i9th Century. — Tr. • Sec Vol. II, pp. Z07 ct scq., and Chapter IV B.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 335

as it matured, dissolved itself into a large number of point-patrise, and the need of bodily separation between them took the form of hatreds far more intense than any hatred that there was of the Barbarian. And it is therefore the most convincing of all evidences of the victory of the Magian world-feeling that Caracalla ^ in iii a.d. granted Roman citizenship to all provincials. For this grant simply abolished the ancient, statuesque, idea of the citizen. There was now a Realm and consequently a new kind of membership. The Roman notion of an army, too, underwent a significant change. In genuinely Classical times there had been no Roman Army in the sense in which we speak of the Prussian Army, but only "armies," that is, definite formations (as we say) created as corps, limited and visibly present bodies, by the appointment of a Legatus to command — an exercitus Scipionis, Crassi for instance — but never an exercitus Komanus. It was Caracalla, the same who abolished the idea of "civis Romanus" by decree and wiped out the Roman civic deities by making all alien deities equivalent to them, who created the un-Classical and Magian idea of an Imperial Army, something manifested in the separate legions. These now meant something, whereas in Classical times they meant nothing, but simply were. The old "fides exercituum" is replaced by "fides exercitus" in the inscriptions and, instead of individual bodily-conceived deities special to each legion and ritually honoured by its Legatus, we have a spiritual principle common to all. So also, and in the same sense, the " fatherland "-feeling under- goes a change of meaning for Eastern men — and not merely Christians — in Imperial times. Apollinian man, so long as he retained any effective remnant at all of his proper world-feeling, regarded " home " in the genuinely corporeal sense as the ground on which his city was built — a conception that recalls the "unity of place" of Attic tragedy and statuary. But to Magian man, to Christians, Persians, Jews, "Greeks," ^ Manichasans, Nestorians and Moham- medans, it means nothing that has any connexion with geographical actualities. And for ourselves it means an impalpable unity of nature, speech, climate, habits and history — not earth but "country," not point-like presence but historic past and future, not a unit made up of men, houses and gods but an idea, the idea that takes shape in the restless wanderings, the deep loneliness, and that ancient German impulse towards the South which has been the ruin of our best, from the Saxon Emperors to Holderlin and Nietzsche.

The bent of the Faustian Culture, therefore, was overpoweringly towards extension, political, economic or spiritual. It overrode all geographical-material bounds. It sought — without any practical object, merely for the Symbol's own sake — to reach North Pole and South Pole. It ended by transforming the entire surface of the globe into a single colonial and economic system. Every thinker from Meister Eckhardt to Kant willed to subject the "phe-

» Sec Vol. II, p. 80.

» I.e., adherents of the various syncretic cults. See Vol. 11, pp. iii et scq.

336 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

nomeoal" world to the asserted domination of the cognizing ego, and every leader from Otto the Great to Napoleon did it. The genuine object of their ambitions was the boundless, alike for the great Franks and Hohenstaufen with their world-monarchies, for Gregory VII and Innocent III, for the Spanish Habsburgs "on whose empire the sun never set," and for the Imperialism of to-day on behalf of which the World-War was fought and will continue to be fought for many a long day. Classical man, for inward reasons, could not be a conqueror, notwithstanding Alexander's romantic expedition — for we can discern enough of the inner hesitations and unwillingnesses of his companions not to need to explain it as an "exception proving the rule." ^ The never-stilled desire to be liberated from the binding element, to range far and free, which is the essence of the fancy-creatures of the North — the dwarfs, elves and imps — is utterly unknown to the Dryads and Oreads of Greece. Greek daughter- cities were planted by the hundred along the rim of the Mediterranean, but not one of them made the slightest real attempt to conquer and penetrate the hinter- lands. To settle far from the coast would have meant to lose sight of ' ' home," while to settle in loneliness — the ideal life of the trapper and prairie-man of America as it had been of Icelandic saga-heroes long before — was something entirely beyond the possibilities of Classical mankind. Dramas like that of the emigration to America — man by man, each on his own account, driven by deep promptings to loneliness — or the Spanish Conquest, or the Cali- fornian gold-rush, dramas of uncontrollable longings for freedom, solitude, immense independence, and of giantlike contempt of all limitations whatso- ever upon the home-feeling — these dramas are Faustian and only Faustian. No other Culture, not even the Chinese, knows them.

The Hellenic emigrant, on the contrary, clung as a child clings to its mother's lap. To make a new city out of the old one, exactly like it, with the same fellow citizens, the same gods, the same customs, with the linking sea never out of sight, and there to pursue in the Agora the familiar life of the ^i^v iroXiTucSv — this was the limit of change of scene for the Apollinian life. To us, for whom freedom of movement (if not always as a practical, yet in any case as an ideal, right) is indispensable, such a limit would have been the most crying of all slaveries. It is from the Classical point of view that the oft-misunderstood expansion of Rome must be looked at. It was anything rather than an extension of the fatherland; it confined itself exactly within fields that had already been taken up by other culture-men whom they dis- possessed. Never was there a hint of dynamic world-schemes of the Hohen- staufen or Habsburg stamp, or of an imperialism comparable with that of our own times. The Romans made no attempt to penetrate the interior of Africa Their later wars were waged only for the preservation of what they already

1 This applies even more forcibly to the other " long-range " episode, that of the Ten Thou- sand (Xenophon, Anabasit I). — Tr.

ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL 337

possessed, not for the sake of ambition nor under a significant stimulus from within. They could give up Germany and Mesopotamia without regret.

If, in fine, we look at it all together — the expansion of the Copernican world-picture into that aspect of stellar space that we possess to-day; the development of Columbus's discovery into a worldwide command of the earth's surface by the West; the perspective of oil-painting and of tragedy- scene; the sublimed home-feeling; the passion of our Civilization for swift transit, the conquest of the air, the exploration of the Polar regions and the climbing of almost impossible mountain-peaks — we see, emerging everywhere the prime-symbol of the Faustian soul, Limitless Space. And those specially (in form, uniquely) Western creations of the soul-myth called "Will," "Force" and "Deed" must be regarded as derivatives of this prime-symbol.

CHAPTER X SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

11

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM

CHAPTER X

SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

II

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM

I

We are now at last in a position to approach the phenomenon of Morale y^ the intellectual interpretation of Life by itself, to ascend the height from which it is possible to survey the widest and gravest of all the fields of human thought. At the same time, we shall need for this survey an objectivity such as no one has as yet set himself seriously to gain. Whatever we may take Morale to be, it is no part of Morale to provide its own analysis; and we shall get to grips with the problem, not by considering what should be our acts and aims and standards, but only by diagnosing the Western feeling in the very form of the enunciation. In this matter of morale. Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. We say "thou shalt" in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is un- shakable. That, and nothing short of it, />, for us, morale. In the ethics of the West everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. Here Luther is completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with Jesuits; for one and all, the beginning of morale is a claim to general and permanent validity. It is a necessity of the Faustian soul that this should be so. He who thinks or teaches "otherwise" is sinful, a backslider, a foe, and he is fought down without mercy. You "shall," the State "shall," society "shall" — this form of morale is to us self-evident; it represents the only real meaning that we can attach to the word. But it was not so either in the Classical, or in India, or in China. Buddha, for instance, gives a pattern to take or to leave, and Epicurus offers counsel. Both undeniably are forms of high morale, and neither contains the will-element.

^ In this place it is exclusively with the conscious, religio-philosophical morale — the morale which can be known and taught and followed — that we are concerned, and not with the racial rhythm of Life, the habit, Sitte, ^5os, that is unconsciously present. The morale with which we are dealing turns upon intellectual concepts of Virtue and Vice, good and bad; the other, upon ideals in the blood such as honour, loyalty, bravery, the feeling that attributes nobility and vuigarity. Sec Vol. n, 411 et^eq.

341

342. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

What wc have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral dynamic. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic, sense) is that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on behalf of all, then wc arc all without exception, willingly or no, wittingly or no. Socialists. Even Nietzsche, that most passionate opponent of "herd morale," was perfectly incapable of limiting his zeal to himself in the Classical way. He thought only of "mankind," and he attacked everyone who differed from himself. Epicurus, on the contrary, was heartily indifferent to others* opinions and acts and never wasted one thought on the "transformation" of mankind. He and his friends were content that they were as they were and not otherwise. The Classical ideal was indifference (Jiirkdua) to the course of the world — the very thing which it is the whole business of Faustian mankind to master — and an important element both of Stoic and of Epicurean philosophy was the recognition of a category of things neither preferred nor rejected ^ (d5td</>opa). In Hellas there was a pantheon of morales as there was of deities, as the peaceful coexistence of Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics shows, but the Nietzschean Zara- thustra — though professedly standing beyond good and evil — breathes from end to end the pain of seeing men to be other than as he would have them be, and the deep and utterly un-Classical desire to devote a life to their reformation — his own sense of the word, naturally, being the only one. It is just this, the general trans valuation, that makes ethical monotheism and — using the word in a novel and deep sense — socialism. All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.

The moral imperative as the form of morale is Faustian and only Faustian. It is wholly without importance that Schopenhauer denies theoretically the will to live, or that Nietzsche will have it affirmed — these are superficial differences, indicative of personal tastes and temperaments. The important thing, that which makes Schopenhauer the progenitor of ethical modernity, is that he too feels the whole world as Will, as movement, force, direction. This basic feeling is not merely the foundation of our ethics, it is itself our whole ethics^ and the rest are bye-blows. That which we call not merely activity but action * is a historical conception through-and-through, saturated with directional energy. It is the proof of being, the dedication of being, in that sort of man whose ego possesses the tendency to Future, who feels the momentary present not as saturated being but as epoch, as turning-point, in a great complex of becoming — and, moreover, feels it so of both his personal life and of the life of history as a whole. Strength and distinctness of this con- sciousness are the marks of higher Faustian man, but it is not wholly absent in the most insignificant of the breed, and it distinguishes his smallest acts from

• The original is here expanded a little for the sake of clarity. — Tr.

• After what has been said above regarding the absence of pregnant words for "will" and

"space" in the Classical tongues, the reader will not be surprised to hear that neither Greek nor Latin affords exact equivalents for these words action and activity.

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 343

those of any and every Classical man. It is the distinction between character and attitude, between conscious becoming and simple accepted statuesque be-- comeness, between will and suffering in tragedy.

In the world as seen by the Faustian's eyes, everything is motion with an aim. He himself lives only under that condition, for to him life means strug- gling, overcoming, winning through. The struggle for existence as ideal form of existence is implicit even in the Gothic age (of the architecture of which it is visibly the foundation) and the 19th Century has not invented it but merely put it into mechanical-utilitarian form. In the Apollinian world there is no such directional motion — the purposeless and aimless see-saw of Heraclitus's "becoming" (Ji ddds avo3 k6.to}) is irrelevant here — no "Protestantism," no "Sturm und Drang," no ethical, intellectual or artistic "revolution" to fight and destroy the existent. The Ionic and Corinthian styles appear by the side of the Doric without setting up any claim to sole and general validity, but the Renaissance expelled the Gothic and Classicism expelled the Baroque styles, and the history of every European literature is filled with battles over form-problems. Even our monasticism, with its Templars, Franciscans, Domin- icans and the rest, takes shape as an ordcr-movemenf, in sharp contrast to the "askesis" of the Early-Christian hermit.

To go back upon this basic form of his existence, let alone transform it, is entirely beyond the power of Faustian man. It is presupposed even in efforts to resist it. One fights against "advanced" ideas, but all the time he looks on his fight itself as an advance. Another agitates for a "reversal," but what he intends is in fact a continuance of development. ' ' Immoral * * is only a new kind of "moral" and sets up the same claim to primacy. The will-to-power is intolerant — all that is Faustian wills to reign alone. The Apollinian feeling, on the contrary, with its world of coexistent individual things, is tolerant as a matter of course. But, if toleration is in keeping with will-less Ataraxia, it is for the Western world with its oneness of infinite soul-space and the singleness of its fabric of tensions the sign either of self-deception or of fading-out. The Enlightenment of the i8th Century was tolerant towards — that is, careless of — differences between the various Christian creeds, but in respect of its own relation to the Church as a whole, it was anything but tolerant as soon as the power to be otherwise came to it. The Faustian instinct, active, strong- willed, as vertical in tendency as its own Gothic cathedrals, as upstanding as its own "ego habeo factum," looking into distance and Future, demands toleration — fhat is, room, space — for its proper activity, but only for that. Consider, for instance, how much of it the city democracy is prepared to accord to the Church in respect of the latter's management of religious powers, while claiming for itself unlimited freedom to exercise its own and adjusting the "common" law to conform thereto whenever it can. Every "movement" means to win, while every Classical "attitude" only wants to be and troubles

344 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

itself little about the Ethos of the neighbour. To fight for or against the trend of the times, to promote Reform or Reaction, construction, reconstruction or destruction — all this is as un-Classical as it is un-Indian. It is the old anti- thesis of Sophoclean and Shakespearian tragedy, the tragedy of the man who only wants to exist and that of the man who wants to win.

It is quite wrong to bind up Christianity with the moral imperative. It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who trans- formed Christianity — and he not only made it a new religion but also gave it a new moral direction. The "it" became "I," the passion-charged centre of the world, the foundation of the great Sacrament of personal contri- tion. Will-to-power even in ethics, the passionate striving to set up a proper morale as a universal truth, and to enforce it upon humanity, to reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise constituted — nothing is more characteristically our own than this is. And in virtue of it the Gothic spring- time proceeded to a profound — and never yet appreciated — inward transforma- tion of the morale of Jesus. A quiet spiritual morale welling from Magian feeling — a morale or conduct recommended as potent for salvation, a morale the knowledge of which was communicated as a special act of grace ^ — was recast as a morale of imperative command.^

Every ethical system, whether it be of religious or of philosophical origin, has associations with the great arts and especially with that of architecture. It is in fact a structure of propositions of causal character. Every truth that is intended for practical application is propounded with a "because" and a "therefore." There is mathematical logic in them — in Buddha's "Four Truths" as in Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason" ^ and in every popular catechism. What is not in these doctrines of acquired truth is the uncritical logic of the blood, which generates and matures those conduct-standards (Sitten) of social classes and of practical men (e.g., the chivalry-obligations in the time of the Crusades) that we only consciously realize when someone infringes them. A systematic morale is, as it were, an Ornament, and it mani- fests itself not only in precepts but also in the style of drama and even in the

• Sec Vol. 11, pp. X93 ct scq.

' "He who hath ears to hear, let him hear" — there is no claim to power in these words. But the Western Church never conceived its mission thus. The "Glad Tidings" of Jesus, like those of Zoroaster, of Mani, of Mahomet, of the Neo-Platonists and of all the cognate Magian religions were mystic benefits displayed but in nowise imposed. Youthful Christianity, when it had flowed into the Western world, merely imitated the missionarism of the later Stoa, itself by that time thoroughly Magian. Paul may be thought of as urgent; the itinerant preachers of the Stoa were certainly so, as we know from our authorities. But commanding they were not. To illustrate by a somewhat far- fetched parallel — in direct contrast to the physicians of the Magian stamp who merely proclaimed the virtues of their mysterious arcana, the medical men of the West seek to obtain for their knowl- edge the force of civil law, as for instance in the matter of vaccination or the inspection of pork for trichina.

» For the Buddhist Four Truths see Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. IV, p. 741. English translation of Kant's Kritik der prak/iscben Vernunft by T. K. Abbott. — Tr,

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 345'

choice of art-motives. The Meander, for example, is a Stoic motive. The Doric column is the very embodiment of the Antique life-ideal. And just because it was so, it was the one Classical "order" which the Baroque style necessarily and frankly excluded; indeed, even Renaissance art was warned off it by some very deep spiritual instinct. Similarly with the transformation of the Magian dome into the Russian roof-cupola,^ the Chinese landscape- architecture of devious paths, the Gothic cathedral-tower. Each is an image of the particular and unique morale which arose out of the waking-consciousness of the Culture.

The old riddles and perplexities now resolve themselves. There are as many morales as there are Cultures, no more and no fewer. Just as every painter and every musician has something in him which, by force of inward necessity, never emerges into consciousness but dominates a priori the form-language of his work and differentiates that work from the work of every other Culture, so every conception of Life held by a Culture-man possesses a priori (in the very strictest Kantian sense of the phrase) a constitution that is deeper than all momentary judgments and strivings and impresses the style of these with the hall-mark of the particular Culture. The individual may act morally or im- morally, may do "good" or "evil" with respect to the primary feeling of his Culture, but the theory of his actions is not a result but a datum. Each Culture possesses its own standards, the validity of which begins and ends with it. There is no general morale of humanity.

It follows that there is not and cannot be any true "conversion" in the deeper sense. Conscious behaviour of any kind that rests upon convictions is a primary phenomenon, the basic tendency of an existence developed into a " timeless truth." It matters little what words or pictures are employed to ex- press it, whether it appears as the predication of a deity or as the issue of philo- sophic meditation, as proposition or as symbol, as proclamation of proper or confutation of alien convictions. It is enough that it is there. It can be wak- ened and it can be put theoretically in the form of doctrine, it can change or improve its intellectual vehicle but it cannot be begotten. Just as we are in- capable of altering our world-feeling — so incapable that even in trying to alter it we have to follow the old lines and confirm instead of overthrowing it — so also we are powerless to alter the ethical basis of our waking being. A certain verbal distinction has sometimes been drawn between ethics the science and morale the duty, but, as we understand it, the point of duty does not arise. We are no more capable of converting a man to a morale alien to his being than the Renaissance was capable of reviving the Classical or of mak- ing anything but a Southernized Gothic, an anti-Gothic, out of ApoUinian

1 See p. 2.01.

346 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

motives. We may talk to-day of transvaluing all our values; we may, as Megalopolitans, "go back to" Buddhism or Paganism or a romantic Cath- olicism; we may champion as Anarchists an individualist or as Socialists a col- lectivist ethic — but in spite of all we do, will and feel the same. A conversion to Theosophy or Freethinking or one of the present-day transitions from a supposed Christianity to a supposed Atheism (or vice versa) is an alteration of words and notions, of the religious or intellectual surface, no more. None of our "movements" have changed man.

A strict morphology of all the morales is a task for the future. Here, too, Nietzsche has taken the first and essential step towards the new standpoint. But he has failed to observe his own condition that the thinker shall place himself "beyond good and evil." He tried to be at once sceptic and prophet, moral critic and moral gospeller. It cannot be done. One cannot be a first- class psychologist as long as one is still a Romantic. And so here, as in all his crucial penetrations, he got as far as the door — and stood outside it. And so far, no one has done any better. We have been blind and uncomprehending before the immense wealth that there is in the moral as in other form-languages. Even the sceptic has not understood his task; at bottom he, like others, sets up his own notion of morale, drawn from his particular disposition and private taste, as standard by which to measure others. The modern revolutionaires — Stirner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw — are just the same; they have only managed to hide the facts (from themselves as well as from others) behind new formulas and catchwords.

But a morale, like a sculpture, a music, a painting-art, is a self-contained form-world expressing a life-feeling; it is a datum, fundamentally unalterable, an inward necessity. It is ever true within its historical circle, ever untrue outside it. As we have seen already,^ what his several works are to the poet or musician or painter, that its several art-genera are for the higher individual that we call the Culture, viz., organic units; and that oil-painting as a whole, act-sculpture as a whole and contrapuntal music as a whole, and rhymed lyric and so on are all epoch-making, and as such take rank as major symbols of Life. In the history of the Culture as in that of the individual existence, we arc dealing with the actualization of the possible; it is the story of an inner spir- ituality becoming the stylt of a world. By the side of these great form-units, which grow and fulfil themselves and close down within a predeterminate series of human generations, which endure for a few centuries and pass irrevocably into death, we see the group of Faustian morals and the sum of Apollinian morals also as individuals of the higher order. That they are, is Destiny. They are data, and revelation (or scientific insight, as the case may be) only put them into shape for the consciousness.

There is something, hardly to be described, that assembles all the theories

• Sec p. 105 and xix ct scq.

I

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 347

from Hesiod and Sophocles to Plato and the Stoa and opposes them collectively to all that was taught from Francis of Assisi and Abelard to Ibsen and Nietz- sche, and even the morale of Jesus is only the noblest expression of a general morale that was put into other forms by Marcion and Mani, by Philo and Plotinus, by Epictetus, Augustine and Proclus. All Classical ethic is an ethic of attitude, all Western an ethic of deed. And, likewise, the sum of all Indian and the sum of all Chinese systems forms each a world of its own.

lU

Every Classical ethic that we know or can conceive of constitutes man an individual static entity, a body among bodies, and all Western valuations relate to him as a centre of effect in an infinite generality. Ethical Socialism is neither more nor less than the sentiment of action-at-a-distance, the moral pathos of the third dimension; and the root-feeling of Care — care for those who are with us, and for those who are to follow — is its emblem in the sky. Consequently there is for us something socialistic in the aspect of the Egyptian Culture, while the opposite tendency to immobile attitude, to non-desire, to static self-containedness of the individual, recalls the Indian ethic and the man formed by it. The seated Buddha-statue ("looking at its navel") and Zeno's Ataraxia are not altogether alien to one another. The ethical ideal of Classical man was that which is led up to in his tragedy, and revealed in its Katharsis. This in its last depths means the purgation of the Apollinian soul from its burden of what is not Apollinian, not free from the elements of distance and direction, and to understand it we have to recognize that Stoicism is simply the mature form of it. That which the drama effected in a solemn hour, the Stoa wished to spread over the whole field of life; viz., statuesque steadiness and will-less ethos. Now, is not this conception of KkBapats closely akin to the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana, which as a formula is no doubt very "late" but as an essence is thoroughly Indian and traceable even from Vedic times? And does not this kinship bring ideal Classical man and ideal Indian man very close to one another and separate them both from that man whose ethic is manifested in the Shakespearian tragedy of dynamic evolution and catastrophe? When one thinks of it, there is nothing preposterous in the idea of Socrates, Epicurus, and especially Diogenes, sitting by the Ganges, whereas Diogenes in a Western megalopolis would be an unimportant fool. Nor, on the other hand, is Frederick William I of Prussia, the prototype of the Socialist in the grand sense, unthinkable in the polity of the Nile, whereas in Periclean Athens he is impossible.

Had Nietzsche regarded his own times with fewer prejudices and less dis- position to romantic championship of certain ethical creations, he would have perceived that a specifically Christian morale of compassion in his sense does not exist on West-European soil. We must not let the words of humane for-

348 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

mula; mislead us as to their real significance. Between the morale that one has and the morale that one thinks one has, there is a relation which is very obscure and very unsteady, and it is just here that an incorruptible psychology would be invaluable. Compassion is a dangerous word, and neither Nietzsche him- self — for all his maestria — nor anyone else has yet investigated the meaning — conceptual and effective — of the word at different times. The Christian morale of Origen's time was quite different from the Christian morale of St. Francis's. This is not the place to enquire what Faustian compassion — sacrifice or ebul- lience or again race-instinct in a chivalrous society ^ — means as against the fatalistic Magian-Christian kind, how far it is to be conceived as action-at-a- distance and practical dynamic y or (from another angle) as a proud soul's demand upon itself, or again as the utterance of an imperious distance-feeling. A fixed stock of ethical phrases, such as we have possessed since the Renaissance, has to cover a multitude of different ideas and a still greater multitude of different meanings. When a mankind so historically and retrospectively disposed as we are accepts the superficial as the real sense, and regards ideals as subject-matter for mere knowing, it is really evidencing its veneration for the past — in this particular instance, for religious tradition. The text of a conviction is never a test of its reality ^ for man is rarely conscious of his own beliefs. Catchwords and doctrines are always more or less popular and external as compared with deep spiritual actualities. Our theoretical reverence for the propositions of the New Testament is in fact of the same order as the theoretical reverence of the Renaissance and of Classicism for antique art; the one has no more transformed the spirit of men than the other has transformed the spirit of works. The oft- quoted cases of the Mendicant Orders, the Moravians and the Salvation Army prove by their very rarity, and even more by the slightness of the effects that they have been able to produce, that they are exceptions in a quite different generality — namely, the Faustian-Christian morale. That morale will not in- deed be found formulated, either by Luther or by the Council of Trent, but all Christians of the great style — Innocent III and Calvin, Loyola and Savona- rola, Pascal and St. Theresa — have had it in them, even in unconscious con- tradiction to their own formal teachings.

We have only to compare the purely Western conception of the manly virtue that is designated by Nietzsche's " moralinfrei " virtu^ the grandez^a of Spanish and the grandeur of French Baroque, with that very feminine dperi? of the Hellenic ideal, of which the practical application is presented to us as capac- ity for enjoyment (Jibovii)^ placidity of disposition (ydXiivri, iTrA^cia), absence of wants and demands, and, above all, the so typical drapa^ta. What Nietzsche called the Blond Beast and conceived to be embodied in the type of Renais- sance Man that he so overvalued (for it is really only a jackal counterfeit of the great Hohcnstaufen Germans) is the utter antithesis to the type that is

1 Sec Vol. U, p. 334.

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 349

presented in every Classical ethic without exception and embodied in every Classical man of worth. The Faustian Culture has produced a long series of granite-men, the Classical never a one. For Pericles and Themistocles were soft natures in tune with Attic KaXoK&yadla, and Alexander was a Romantic who never woke up, Cassar a shrewd reckoner. Hannibal, the alien, was the only "Mann" amongst them all. The men of the early time, as Homer pre- sents them to our judgment — the Odysseuses and A j axes — would have cut a queer figure among the chevaliers of the Crusades. Very feminine natures, too, are capable of brutality — a rebound-brutality of their own — and Greek cruelty was of this kind. But in the North the great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen emperors appear on the very threshold of the Culture, surrounded by giant-men like Henry the Lion and Gregory VII. Then come the men of the Renaissance, of the struggle of the two Roses, of the Huguenot Wars, the Spanish Conquistadores, the Prussian electors and kings, Napoleon, Bismarck, Rhodes. What other Culture has exhibited the like of these? Where in all Hellenic history is so powerful a scene as that of 1176 — the Battle of Legnano as foreground, the suddenly-disclosed strife of the great Hohenstaufen and the great Welf as background? The heroes of the Great Migrations, the Spanish chivalry, Prussian discipline, Napoleonic energy — how much of the Classi- cal is there in these men and things? And where, on the heights of Faustian morale, from the Crusades to the World War, do we find anything of the "slave-morale," the meek resignation, the deaconess's Caritas?^ Only in pious and honoured words, nowhere else. The type of the very priesthood is Faustian; think of those magnificent bishops of the old German empire who on horseback led their flocks into the wild battle, ^ or those Popes who could force submission on a Henry IV and a Frederick II, of the Teutonic Knights in the Ostmark, of Luther's challenge in which the old Northern heathendom rose up against old Roman, of the great Cardinals (Richelieu, Mazarin, Fleury) who shaped France. That is Faustian morale, and one must be blind indeed if one does not see it efficient in the whole field of West-European history. And it is only through such grand instances of worldly passion which express the consciousness of a mission that we are able to understand

^ The philosophy and dogma of charity and almsgiving — a subject that English research seems generally to have ignored — is dealt with at length in Dr. C. S. Loch's article Charity and Charities, Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

2 Not only as local sovereigns enforcing order, like the good Bishop Wazo of Liege who fought down his castled robber-barons one by one in the middle of the nth Century, but even as high commanders for the Emperor in distant Italy. The battle of Tusculum in 1167 was won by the Archbishops of Koln and Mainz. English history, too, contains the figures of warlike prelates — not only leaders of national movements like Stephen Langton but strong-handed administrators and fighters. The great Scots invasion of 1346 was met and defeated by the Arch- bishop of York. The Bishops of Durham were for centuries "palatines"; we find one of them serving on pay in the King's army in France, 1348. The line of these warlike Bishops in our history extends from Odo the brother of William the Conqueror to Scrope, archbishop and rebel in Henry IV's time. — Tr.

350 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

those of grand spiritual passion, of the upright and forthright Caritas which nothing can resist, the dynamic charity that is so utterly unlike Classical moderation and Early-Christian mildness. There is a hardness in the sort of com-passion that was practised by the German mystics, the German and Span- ish military Orders, the French and English Calvinists. In the Russian, the Raskolnikov, type of charity a soul melts into the fraternity of souls, in the Faustian it arises out of it. Here too "ego habeo factum" is the formula. Personal charity is the justification before God of the Person, the individual.

This is the reason why "compassion "-morale, in the everyday sense, always respected by us so far as words go, and sometimes hoped for by the thinker, is never actualized. Kant rejected it with decision, and in fact it is in profound contradiction with the Categorical Imperative, which sees the meaning of Life to lie in actions and not in surrender to soft opinions. Nietzsche's "slave- morale " is a phantom, his master-morale is a reality. It does not require formula- tion to be effective — it is there, and has been from of old. Take away his romantic Borgia-mask and his nebulous vision of supermen, and what is left of his man is Faustian man himself, as he is to-day and as he was even in saga- days, the type of an energetic, imperative and dynamic Culture. However it may have been in the Classical world, our great well-doers are the great doers whose forethought and care affects millions, the great statesmen and organizers. "A higher sort of men, who thanks to their preponderance of will, knowledge, wealth and influence make use of democratic Europe as their aptest and most mobile tool, in order to bring into their own hands the destinies of the Earth and as artists to shape ' man ' himself. Enough — the time is coming when men will unlearn and relearn the art of politics." So Nietzsche delivered him- self in one of the unpublished drafts that are so much more concrete than the finished works. "We must either breed political capacities, or else be ruined by the democracy that has been forced upon us by the failure of the older alternatives," ^ says Shaw in Man and Superman. Limited though his philo- sophic horizon is in general, Shaw has the advantage over Nietzsche of more practical schooling and less ideology, and the figure of the multimillionaire Undershaft in Major Barbara translates the Superman-ideal into the unromantic language of the modern age (which in truth is its real source for Nietzsche also, though it reached him indirectly through Malthus and Darwin). It is these fact-men of the grand style who are the representatives to-day of the Will-to-Power over other men's destinies and therefore of the Faustian ethic generally. Men of this sort do not broadcast their millions to dreamers, " art- ists," weaklings and "down-and-outs" to satisfy a boundless benevolence; they employ them for those who like themselves count as material for the Future. They pursue a purpose with them. They make a centre of force for the existence of generations which outlives the single lives. The mere money,

• A paraphrase of the opening of "John Tanner's Revolutionist's Handbook," Ch. V. — Tr,

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 351

too, can develop ideas and make history, and Rhodes — precursor of a type that will be significant indeed in the 2.1st Century — provided, in disposing of his possessions by will, that it should do so. It is a shallow judgment, and one incapable of inwardly understanding history, that cannot distinguish the literary chatter of popular social-moralists and humanity-apostles from the deep ethical instincts of the West-European Civilization.

Socialism — in its highest and not its street-corner sense — is, like every other Faustian ideal, exclusive. It owes its popularity only to the fact that it is completely misunderstood even by its exponents, who present it as a sum of rights instead of as one of duties, an abolition instead of an intensification of the Kantian imperative, a slackening instead of a tautening of directional energy. The trivial and superficial tendency towards ideals of "welfare," "free- dom," "humanity," the doctrine of the "greatest happiness of the greatest number," are mere negations of the Faustian ethic — a very different matter from the tendency of Epicureanism towards the ideal of "happiness," for the condition of happiness was the actual sum and substance of the Classical ethic. Here precisely is an instance of sentiments, to all outward appearance much the same, but meaning in the one case everything and in the other nothing. From this point of view, we might describe the content of the Classical ethic as ■philanthropy y a boon conferred by the individual upon himself, his soma. The view has Aristotle on its side, for it is exactly in this sense that he uses the word <{)L\avdpwTros, which the best heads of the Classicist period, above all Lessing, found so puzzling. Aristotle describes the effect of the Attic tragedy on the Attic spectator as philanthropic. Its Peripeteia relieves him from compassion with himself. A sort of theory of master-morale and slave-morale existed also in the early Hellenism, in Callicles for example — naturally, under strictly corporeal-Euclidean postulates. The ideal of the first class is Alcibiades. He did exactly what at the moment seemed to him best for his own person, and he is felt to be, and admired as, the type of Classical Kalokagathia. But Protag- oras is still more distinct, with his famous proposition — essentially ethical in intention — that man (each man for himself) is the measure of things. That is master-morale in a statuesque soul.

IV

When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase " transvaluation of all values" for the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are living found at last its formula. Transvaluation of all values is the most fundamental character of every civilization. For it is the beginning of a Civilization that it remoulds all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them other- wise, practises them in a different way. It begets no more, but only reinter- prets, and herein lies the negativeness common to all periods of this character. It assumes that the genuine act of creation has already occurred, and merely

351 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

enters upon an inheritance of big actualities. In the Late-Classical, we find the event taking place inside Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism, that is, the long death-struggle of the Apollinian soul. In the interval from Socrates — who was the spiritual father of the Stoa and in whom the first signs of inward impoverishment and city-intellectualism became visible — to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, every existence-ideal of the old Classical underwent trans- valuation. In the case of India, the transvaluation of Brahman life was com- plete by the time of King Asoka (150 b.c), as we can see by comparing the parts of the Vedanta put into writing before and after Buddha. And ourselves? Even now the ethical socialism of the Faustian soul, its fundamental ethic, as we have seen, is being worked upon by the process of transvaluation as that soul is walled up in the stone of the great cities. Rousseau is the ancestor of this socialism; he stands^ like Socrates and Buddha, as the representative spokesman of a great Civilization. Rousseau's rejection of all great Culture-forms and all signif- icant conventions, his famous "Return to the state of Nature," his practical rationalism, are unmistakable evidences. Each of the three buried a millen- nium of spiritual depth. Each proclaimed his gospel to mankind, but it was to the mankind of the city intelligentsia, which was tired of the town and the Late Culture, and whose "pure" (i.e., soulless) reason longed to be free from them and their authoritative form and their hardness, from the symbolism with which it was no longer in living communion and which therefore it detested. The Culture was annihilated by discussion. If we pass in review the great 19th-century names with which we associate the march of this great drama — Schopenhauer, Hebbel, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg — we comprehend in a glance that which Nietzsche, in a fragmentary preface to his incomplete master-work, deliberately and correctly called the Coming of Nihilism. Every one of the great Cultures knows it, for it is of deep necessity inherent in the finale of these mighty organisms. Socrates was a nihilist, and Buddha. There is an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese de-souling of the human being, just as there is a Western. This is a matter not of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and artistic, transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change whatsoever, but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in fall. It is easy, but useless, to point to the bigness of Hellen- istic and of modern European achievement. Mass slavery and mass machine- production, "Progress" and Ataraxia, Alexandrianism and modern Science, Pergamum and Bayreuth, social conditions as assumed in Aristotle and as assumed in Marx, are merely symptoms on the historical surface. Not external life and conduct, not institutions and customs, but deepest and last things arc in question here — the inward finishedness (Fertigsein) of megalopolitan man, and of the provincial as well.^ For the Classical world this condition sets in with the Roman age; for us it will set in from about the year looo.

• Sec Vol. II, pp. 116 ct scq.

\

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 353

Culture and Civilization — the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800 — on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect. Culture and Civiliza- tion — the organism born of Mother Earth, and the mechanism proceeding from hardened fabric. Culture-man lives inwards. Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and "facts." That which the one feels as Destiny the other understands as a linkage of causes and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist — in the sense of the word valid for, and only valid for, Civi- lization — whether he wills it or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist doctrines wear the garb of religion or not.

To Gothic and Doric men, Ionic and Baroque men, the whole vast form- world of art, religion, custom, state, knowledge, social life was easy. They could carry it and actualize it without "knowing" it. They had over the symbolism of the Culture that unstrained mastery that Mozart possessed in music. Culture is the self-evident. The feeling of strangeness in these forms, the idea that they are a burden from which creative freedom requires to be relieved, the impulse to overhaul the stock in order by the light of reason to turn it to better account, the fatal imposition of thought upon the in- scrutable quality of creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is begin- ning to tire. Only the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a "natural law" is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men conceive of the State as an "order of society" which not only can be but must be altered ^ — then it is evident that something has definitely broken down. The Cosmopolis itself, the supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in the midst of the Culture-landscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing into itself and using up.

Scientific worlds are superficial worlds, practical, soulless and purely ex- tensive worlds. The ideas of Buddhism, of Stoicism, and of Socialism alike rest upon them.^ Life is no longer to be lived as something self-evident — hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone choice — or to be accepted as God- willed destiny, but is to be treated as a problem, presented as the intellect sees it, judged by "utilitarian" or "rational" criteria. This, at the back, is what all three mean. The brain rules, because the soul abdicates. Culture-men live unconsciously, Civilization-men consciously. The Megalopolis — sceptical,

^ Rousseau's Contrat Social is paralleled by exactly equivalent productions of Aristotle's time. ' The first on the atheistical system of Sankhya, the second (through Socrates) on the Sophists, the third on English sensualism.

354 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

practical, artificial — alone represents Civilization to-day. The soil-peasantry before its gates does not count. The "People" means the city-people, an in- organic mass, something fluctuating. The peasant is not democratic — this again being a notion belonging to mechanical and urban existence ^ — and he is therefore overlooked, despised, detested. With the vanishing of the old "estates" — gentry and priesthood — he is the only organic man, the sole relic of the Early Culture. There is no place for him either in Stoic or in Socialistic thought.

Thus the Faust of the First Part of the tragedy, the passionate student of solitary midnights, is logically the progenitor of the Faust of the Second Part and the new century, the type of a purely practical, far-seeing, outward- directed activity. In him Goethe presaged, psychologically, the whole future of West Europe. He is Civilization in the place of Culture, external mechanism in place of internal organism, intellect as the petrifact of extinct soul. As the Faust of the beginning is to the Faust of the end, so the Hellene of Pericles's age is to the Roman of Caesar's.

So long as the man of a Culture that is approaching its fulfilment still continues to live straight before him naturally and unquestioningly, his life has a settled conduct. This is the instinctive morale, which may disguise itself in a thousand controversial forms but which he himself does not controvert, because he has it. As soon as Life is fatigued, as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities — which are intellectual worlds to themselves — and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a problem. Culture-morale is that which a man has. Civilization-morale that which he looks for. The one is too deep to be exhaustible by logical means, the other is a function of logic. As late as Plato and as late as Kant ethics are still mere dialectics, a game with concepts, or the rounding-ofF of a metaphysical system, something that at bottom would not be thought really necessary. The Categorical Imperative is merely an abstract statement of what, for Kant, was not in question at all. But with Zeno and with Schopenhauer this is no longer so. It had become necessary to discover, to invent or to squeeze into form, as a rule of being, that which was no longer anchored in instinct; and at this point therefore begin the civilized ethics that are no longer the reflection of Life but the reflection of Knowledge upon Life. One feels that there is something artificial, soulless, half-true in all these considered systems that fill the first centuries of all the Civilizations. They are not those profound and almost unearthly creations that are worthy to rank with the great arts. All metaphysic of the high style, all pure intuition, vanishes before the one need that has suddenly made itself felt, the need of a practical morale for the

' Sec Vol. II, pp. 441 ct scq.

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 355

governance of a Life that can no longer govern itself. Up to Kant, up to Aris- totle, up to the Yoga and Vedanta doctrines, philosophy had been a sequence of grand world-systems in which formal ethics occupied a very modest place. But now it became "moral philosophy" with a metaphysic as background. The enthusiasm of epistemology had to give way to hard practical needs. Socialism, Stoicism and Buddhism are philosophies of this type.

To look at the world, no longer from the heights as i^schylus, Plato, Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualitites is to exchange the bird's perspective for the frogs. This exchange is a fair measure of the fall from Culture to Civilization. Every ethic is a formulation of a soul's view of its destiny — heroic or practical, grand or commonplace, manly or old-manly. I distinguish, therefore, between a tragic and a plebeian morale. The tragic morale of a Culture knows and grasps the heaviness of being, but it draws therefrom the feeling of pride that enables the burden to be borne. So i^schylus, Shakespeare, the thinkers of the Brahman philosophy felt it; so Dante and Ger- man Catholicism. It is heard in the stern battle-hymn of Lutheranism "Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott," and it echoes still in the Marseillaise. The plebeian morale of Epicurus and the Stoa, the sects of Buddha's day and the 19th Century made rather battle-plans for the outmanoeuvring of destiny. What ^schylus did in grand, the Stoa did in little — no more fullness, but poverty, coldness and emptiness of life — and all that Roman bigness achieved was to intensify this same intellectual chill and void. And there is the same relation between the ethical passion of the great Baroque masters — Shakespeare, Bach, Kant, Goethe — the manly will to inward mastery of natural things that it felt to be far below itself, and modern Europe's state-provision, humanity-ideals, world- peace, "greatest happiness of greatest number," etc., which express the will to an outward clearance from the path of things that are on the same level. This, no less than the other, is a manifestation of the will-to-power, as against the Classical endurance of the inevitable, but the fact remains that material bigness is not the same as metaphysical majesty of achievement. The former lacks depth, lacks that which former men had called God. The Faustian world- feeling of deed, which had been efficient in every great man from the Hohen- staufen and the Welf to Frederick the Great, Goethe and Napoleon, smoothes itself down to a philosophy of work. Whether such a philosophy attacks or defends work does not affect its inward value. The Culture-idea of Deed and the Civilization-idea of Work are related as the attitude of i^schylus's Prome- theus and that of Diogenes. The one suffers and bears, the other lolls. It was deeds of science that Galileo, Kepler and Newton performed, but it is scientific work that the modern physicist carries out. And, in spite of all the great words from Schopenhauer to Shaw, it is the plebeian morale of every day and "sound human reason" that is the basis of all our expositions and discussions of Life.

356 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

VI

Each Culture, further, has its own mode of spiritual extinction^ which is that which follows of necessity from its life as a whole. And hence Buddhism, Stoicism and Socialism are morphologically equivalent as end-phenomena.

For even Buddhism is such. Hitherto the deeper meaning of it has always been misunderstood. It was not z Puritan movement like, for instance, Islamism and Jansenism, not a Reformation as the Dionysiac wave was for the Apolliniaa world, and, quite generally, not a religion like the religions of the Vedas or the religion of the Apostle Paul,^ but a final and purely practical world- sentiment of tired megalopolitans who had a closed-ofF Culture behind them and no future before them. It was the basic feeling of the Indian Civilization and as such both equivalent to and ' ' contemporary * ' with Stoicism and Social- ism. The quintessence of this thoroughly worldly and unmetaphysical thought is to be found in the famous sermon near Benares, the Four Noble Truths thatj won the prince-philosopher his first adherents. ^ Its roots lay in the rationalist-' atheistic Sankhya philosophy, the world-view of which it tacitly accepts, just; as the social ethic of the 19th Century comes from the Sensualism and Material- ism of the 1 8th and the Stoa (in spite of its superficial exploitation of Heraclitus) is derived from Protagoras and the Sophists. In each case it is the all-power of Reason that is the starting-point from which to discuss morale, and religion (in the sense of belief in anything metaphysical) does not enter into the matter. Nothing could be more irreligious than these systems in their original forms — and it is these, and not derivatives of them belonging to later stages of the Civilizations, that concern us here.

Buddhism rejects all speculation about God and the cosmic problems; only self and the conduct of actual life are important to it. And it definitely did not recognize a soul. The standpoint of the Indian psychologist of early Buddhism was that of the Western psychologist and the Western "Socialist" of to-day, who reduce the inward man to a bundle of sensations and an aggregation of electrochemical energies. The teacher Nagasena tells King Milinda * that the parts of the car in which he is journeying are not the car itself, that "car" is only a word and that so also is the soul. The spiritual elements are designated Skandhas, groups, and are impermanent. Here is complete correspondence with the ideas of association-psychology, and in fact the doctrines of Buddha contain much materialism.* As the Stoic appropriated Heraclitus's idea of Logos and

1 It was many centuries later that the Buddhist ethic of life gave rise to a religion for simple peasantry, and it was only enabled to do so by reaching back to the long-stifFcncd theology of Brahmanism and, further back still, to very ancient popular cults. See Vol. II, pp. 378, 385.

« The articles Buddha and Buddhism in the Ency. Brit., XI ed., by T. W. Rhys Davids, may be studied in this connexion. — Tr.

» See "The Questions of King Milinda," ed. Rhys Davids. — Tr.

« Of course, each Culture naturally has its own kind of materialism, conditioned in every detail hj its general world-feeling.

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 357

flattened it to a materialist sense, as the Socialism based on Darwin has mechan- icalized (with the aid of Hegel) Goethe's deep idea of development, so Bud- dhism treated the Brahman notion of Karma^ the idea (hardly achievable in our thought) of a being actively completing itself. Often enough it regarded this quite materially as a world-stuff under transformation.

What we have before us is three forms of Nihilism, using the word in Nietzsche's sense. In each case, the ideals of yesterday, the religious and artistic and political forms that have grown up through the centuries, are undone; yet even in this last act, this self-repudiation, each several Culture employs the prime-symbol of its whole existence. The Faustian nihilist — Ibsen or Nietzsche, Marx or Wagner — shatters the ideals. The Apollinian

— Epicurus or Antisthenes or Zeno — watches them crumble before his eyes. And the Indian withdraws from their presence into himself. Stoicism is directed to individual self-management, to statuesque and purely present being, without regard to future or past or neighbour. Socialism is the dynamic treatment of the same theme; it is defensive like Stoicism, but what it defends is not the pose but the working-out of the life; and more, it is offensive-defensive, for with a powerful thrust into distance it spreads itself into all future and over all mankind, which shall be brought under one single regimen. Buddhism, which only a mere dabbler in religious research could compare with Chris- tianity,^ is hardly reproducible in words of the Western languages. But it is permissible to speak of a Stoic Nirvana and point to the figure of Diogenes, and even the notion of a Socialist Nirvana has its justification in so far that European weariness covers its flight from the struggle for existence under catchwords of world-peace. Humanity and brotherhood of Man. Still, none of this comes anywhere near the strange profundity of the Buddhist conception of Nirvana. It would seem as though the soul of an old Culture, when from its last refine- ments it is passing into death, clings, as it were, jealously to the property that is most essentially its own, to its form-content and the innate prime-symbol. There is nothing in Buddhism that could be regarded as "Christian," nothing in Stoicism that is to be found in the Islam of a.d. iooo, nothing that Confucius shares with Socialism. The phrase "si duo faciunt idem, non est idem" — which ought to appear at the head of every historical work that deals with living and uniquely-occurring Becomings and not with logically, causally and numerically comprehensible Becomes — is specially applicable to these final ex- pressions of Culture-movements. In all Civilizations being ceases to be suffused with soul and comes to be suffused with intellect, but in each several Civiliza- tion the intellect is of a particular structure and subject to the form-language of

• To begin with, it would be necessary to specify what Christianity was being compared with it

— that of the Fathers or that of the Crusades. For these are two different religions in the same clothing of dogma and cult. The same want of psychological /<*/> is evident in the parallel that is so fashionable to-day between Socialism and early Christianity.

358 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

a particular symbolism. And just because of all this individualness of the Being which, working in the unconscious, fashions the last-phase creations on the historical surface, relationship of the instances to one another in pint of his- torical position becomes decisively important. What they bring to expression is different in each case, but the fact that they bring it to expression so marks them as "contemporary ' ' with one another. The Buddhistic abnegation of full resolute life has a Stoic flavour, the Stoic abnegation of the same a Buddhistic flavour. Allusion has already been made to the affinity between the Katharsis of the Attic drama and the Nirvana-idea. One's feeling is that ethical So- cialism, although a century has already been given to its development, has not yet reached the clear hard resigned form of its own that it will finally pos- sess. Probably the next decades will impart to it the ripe formulation that Chrysippus imparted to the Stoa. But even now there is a look of the Stoa in Socialism, when it is that of the higher order and the narrower appeal, when its tendency is the Roman-Prussian and entirely unpopular tendency to self-disci- pline and self-renunciation from sense of great duty; and a look of Buddhism in its contempt for momentary ease and carpe diem. And, on the other hand, it has unmistakably the Epicurean look in that mode of it which alone makes it effective downward and outward as a popular ideal, in which it is a hedonism (not indeed of each-for-himself, but) of individuals in the name of all.

Every soul has religion, which is only another word for its existence. All living forms in which it expresses itself — all arts, doctrines, customs, all metaphysical and mathematical form-worlds, all ornament, every column and verse and idea — are ultimately religious, and must be so. But from the setting- in of Civilization they cannot be so any longer. As the essence of every Culture is religion, so — and consequently — the essence of every Civilization is irreli- gion — the two words are synonymous. He who cannot feel this in the cre- ativeness of Manet as against Velasquez, of Wagner as against Haydn, of Lysippus as against Phidias, of Theocritus as against Pindar, knows not what the best means in art. Even Rococo in its worldliest creations is still religious. But the buildings of Rome, even when they are temples, are irreligious; the one touch of religious architecture that there was in old Rome was the intrusive Magian-souled Pantheon, first of the mosques. The megalopolis itself, as against the old Culture-towns — Alexandria as against Athens, Paris as against Bruges, Berlin as against Niirnberg — is irreligious ^ down to the last detail, down to the look of the streets, the dry intelligence of the faces. ^ And, cor- respondingly, the ethical sentiments belonging to the form-language of the megalopolis are irreligious and soulless also. Socialism is the Faustian world-

• The term must not be confused with tf«//-rcligious.

' Note the striking similarity of many Roman portrait-busts to the matter-of-fact modern heads of the American style, and also (though this is not so distinct) to many of the portrait-heads of the Egyptian New Empire.

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 359

feeling become irreligious; "Christianity," so called (and qualified even as "true Christianity"), is always on the lips of the English Socialist, to whom it seems to be something in the nature of a "dogma-less morale." Stoicism also was irreligious as compared with Orphic religion, and Buddhism as com- pared with Vedic, and it is of no importance whatever that the Roman Stoic approved and conformed to Emperor-worship, that the later Buddhist sincerely denied his atheism, or that the Socialist calls himself an earnest Freethinker or even goes on believing in God.

It is this extinction of living inner religiousness, which gradually tells upon even the most insignificant element in a man's being, that becomes phenomenal in the historical world-picture at the turn from the Culture to the Civilization, the Climacteric of the Culture, as I have already called it, the time of change in which a mankind loses its spiritual fruitfulness for ever, and building takes the place of begetting. Unfruitfulness — understanding the word in all its direct seriousness — marks the brain-man of the megalopolis, as the sign of fulfilled destiny, and it is one of the most impressive facts of historical symbolism that the change manifests itself not only in the extinction of great art, of great cour- tesy, of great formal thought, of the great style in all things, but also quite car- nally in the childlessness and ' ' race-suicide ' ' of the civilized and rootless strata, a phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed and deplored — and of course not remedied — in Imperial Rome and Imperial China. ^

VII

As to the living representatives of these new and purely intellectual crea- tions, the men of the "New Order" upon whom every decline- time founds such hopes, we cannot be in any doubt. They are the fluid megalopolitan Populace, the rootless city-mass (oi ttoXXoi, as Athens called it) that has replaced the People, the Culture-folk that was sprung from the soil and peasantlike even when it lived in towns. They are the market-place loungers of Alexandria and Rome, the newspaper-readers of our own corresponding time; the "educated" man who then and now makes a cult of intellectual mediocrity and a church of advertisement; ^ the man of the theatres and places of amusement, of sport and "best-sellers." It is this late-appearing mass and not "mankind" that is the object of Stoic and Socialist propaganda, and one could match it with equiva- lent phenomena in the Egyptian New Empire, Buddhist India and Confucian China.

Correspondingly, there is a characteristic form of public effect, the Dia- tribe.^ First observed as a Hellenistic phenomenon, it is an efficient form in all Civilizations. Dialectical, practical and plebeian through and through, it re-

^ See Vol. II, pp. IZ2. et seq.

• The original is here very obscure; it reads: " . . . cs ist der 'Gebildetc,' jcncr Anhangcr cin« 

Kultus des geistigen Mittelmasses und der Offcntlichkeit als Kultstatte." — Tr. ' See P. Wendland, Die hellenist.-rom. Kultur (1^12.'), pp. 75 ct seq.

36o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

places 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 imperialis- tic 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.^ 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 2 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 yearn- ing in a peasant landscape, and not until the 19th Century, when that land- scape 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 theo- sophical "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 —

• Sec Vol. U, pp. 318 ct scq. ' Sec Vol. II, pp. 169 ct scq.

J

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 361

is particularly manifest in the ethical passion with which men now turn to philosophies of digestion, nutrition and hygiene. Alcohol-questions arid 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 ApoUinian 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 move- ment 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, wil- lingly 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; ^ 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 genetically 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 lat- ter' 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

^ Compare my Preussentum und So%fdismus^ pp. zi. ct scq.

36i THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

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 doy re- gardless 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 "Acfy 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 me- chanicalizing of the organic concept of Deed that leads to the concept of work as commonly understood, the civilized 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 dolcefar nientey its solicitude for health, happi- ness, 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 idealises 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) con- ception of State-Socialism, and in the last terrible stages of evolution it will culminate in the Duty to Work,

I

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 363

Think, lastly, of the Napoleonic in it, the are perenniusy' the will-to- duration. Apollinian man looked back to a Golden Age; this relieved him bf 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 cul- mination, one single Peripeteia — the appearance of the Saviour. Faustian man sees in history a tense unfolding towards an aim; its " ancient-mediasval- 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 destoyed, 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 per- taining to the grand style of Life. Something has come to an end. The North- ern 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 pas- sion yearning to create, the form without the content. This soul was Will and

364 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

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 ques- tions — the choice of them, the inner form of them. For it is the particular wsiy 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 organ-

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 365

isms 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. ^ 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 ^ and the Early- Arabian 3 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 criti- cism. 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 es- tablish 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,^ 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, orna- mental 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 rational- istic 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

^ Sec Vol. II, pp. 324 ct scq., 368 et seq.

' Sec Vol. II, p. 345. It is possible that the peculiar style of Hcraclitus, who came of a priestly family of the temple of Ephesus, is an example of the form in which the old Orphic wisdom was orally transmitted.

' See Vol. II, p. 307.

< Here we are considering only the scholastic side. The mystic side, from which Pythagoras and Leibniz were not very far, reached its culminations in Plato and Goethe, and in our own case it has been extended beyond Goethe by the Romantics, Hegel and Nietzsche, whereas Scholasticism exhausted itself with Kant — and Aristotle — and degenerated thereafter into a routine-profession.

366 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

its deepest chzriLCters 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 ^ 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 sub- ordinate 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, mis- tress yesterday, is handmaid now ; all it is required to do is to provide a foun- dation for practical views. And the foundation becomes more and more superfluous. It becomes the custom to despise and mock at the metaphysi- cal, 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 ^ that Schopenhauer did not proceed to Pessimism from his metaphysic but, on the contrary, was led to develop his system by the pessimism

• Zcno the Stoic, not to be confused with Zcno of Eica, whose mathematical fineness has already

been alluded to. — Tr.

' Ntue Paralipomena, § 656.

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 367

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 accu- rately discriminating between that which makes him th-e 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 defi- nitely 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 West- ern "brain" the will to power, the tyrannical set towards the Future and pur- pose 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 oj 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 Vergangliche 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 prop-

368 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

osition 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 y 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) arc the dramatists. They are the real philosophers of Faustian activism, and com- pared 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 philoso- phy 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 Schopen- hauer 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 modi- fication 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 phe- nomenon. In Schopenhauer this becomes the world as brain-phenomenon (Gehirnphanomen). The change-over from tragic philosophy to philosophi- cal 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, how- ever, 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

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 369

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,^ 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 medi- ocrity. 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 Dar- winism, 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 accord- ing to biological interest. ^

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 pi ant- 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. ^ Proof, to the Darwinian, means the ordering and pictorial presentation of a selection of facts so that they conform to his historico-dynamic basic feeling of "Evolu- tion." 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 i8th 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.

1 Even the modern idea that unconscious and impulsive acts of life are completely efficient, while intellect can only bungle, is to be found in Schopenhauer (Vol. II, cap. 30).

2 In the chapter "Zur Metaphysik der Geschlcchtsliebe " (11, 44) the idea of natural selection for the preservation of the genus is anticipated in full.

8 See Vol. II, pp. 36 et sea.

370 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

The spiritual unity of the century is manifest enough here. From Schopen- hauer 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 sys- tem 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 prob- lems of the "Ring of the Nibelungs." Only, it was with terror that Schopen- hauer, 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 Nietz- sche, 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 catch- words, but his instincts, were Socialistic, practical, directed to that welfare of mankind that Goethe and Kant never spent a thought upon. Materialism, Soci- alism and Darwinism arc only artificially and on the surface separable. It was

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 371

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 re- morseless clarity and full consciousness of the commonplace, what the uncom- pleted portion of the Zarathustra would have said withWagnerian 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 ex- pose poetic ideas to the test of facts, omits to say that his whole doctrine, as a derivative of Darwinism, presupposes Socialism and, moreover, socialistic com- pulsion as the means; that any systematic breeding of a class of higher men re- quires 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 i8th 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

372. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Malthus) treats in his Das Kapifal^ the bible of political (not ethical) Social- ism.^ That is the genealogy of "Herrenmoral." The Will-to-Power, trans- ferred 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 poli- tician reaches up to his level as a thinker. The will-to-power is to-day repre- sented 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 "Fu- ture" (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 Dionys- iac 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 regi- ments 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 Briinhilde 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 i, 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 2.9, 1857), he is equally surprised by the affinity that he finds between the Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and ten- dencies 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 1 83 5- 1845, were (though he did not know it) one of the deepest philosophical eflf"orts 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.

• This began to appear in 1867. But the preliminary work Zmt Kritik der polifiscbm Okonomie

came out in the same year as Darwin's masterpiece.

BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM 373

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-^50 in the Classical.) The rest of the 19th-century philosophy is, to use Schopenhauer's phrase, "pro- fessors' philosophy by philosophy-professors." The real landmarks are these: 1 8 19. 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 Dar- winism, but in metaphysical disguise.

1840. Proud'hon, Qu'est-ce que la Propriete, basis of Anarchism. Comte, Cours de philosophie 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 Nationalokonomie^ foundation of the materialistic conception of history. Hebbel, Maria Magdalena, the first social drama.

1847. Marx, Mis}re de la Philosophie (synthesis of Hegel and Mai thus). 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 revolu- tionary, 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 Okonomie.

1863. J. S. Mill, "Utilitarianism."

1865. Diihring, Wert des Lebens — a work which is rarely heard of, but which exercised the greatest influence upon the succeeding generation.

1867. Ibsen, "Brand." Ma.rx, Das Kapital.

1878. Wagner "Parsifal." First dissolution of materialism into mysti- cism.

1879. Ibsen "Nora."

1881. Nietzsche, Morgenrdthej transition from Schopenhauer to Darwin, morale as biological phenomenon.

1883. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustraj the Will-to-Power, but in Romantic disguise.

1886. Ibsen, "Rosmersholm." Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Bose.

374 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

1887-8. Strindbcrg, "Fadren" and "Frokcn 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 2.0th Century, while keeping the word Socialism, has replaced an ethical philosophy that only Epigoni sup- pose 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 valua- tion 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 impres- sions 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 becom- ing 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 sus- ceptible of full and inclusive appreciation by measurement, of which Helm- holtz 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.^ 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 mo- tion 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

' Vol. II, p. 615. Sec, for example, Leonard, Kelativitdts-Prinxif, Aether, Gravitation (192.0), pp. 10 ct scq.

377

378 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

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 whatso- ever 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 arc enabled to work with Nature as with a machine.^ 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 im- plicit in, the choice and manner of its search. Its discoveries, in virtue of their imagined content (as distinguished from their printable formulas), have been of a purely mythic nature, even in minds so prudent as those of J. B. Mayer, Fara- day 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 ^ and their theoretical interpretation. The formulas represent general logical values, pure numbers — that is to say, objective space — and boundary-elements. But formulas are dumb. The expression s = ^gt"^ 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. d€03pla 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 pre- suppositions more convincing than ever. Apart from these, the result consists

• Sec Vol. II, pp. 369 ct scq., 614 ct scq. « Sec p. 57.

NATURE - KNOWLEDGE 379

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 for- mula, 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 Clas- sical 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

38o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

verbal description, incommunicable to Classical or to Magian or to other man- kind 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 becom- ing 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,^ every one of which contains a veritable scien- tific 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 com- prehend how anyone could assert such arbitrary, grotesque and involved no- tions to be Science, still less how they could be claimed as necessary conse- quences from actual facts. "The scientifically-justified conclusions," he would have said, "arc 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 orna- mentation, 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 gjrow 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 awaken- ing 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

• E.g., in Boltzmann's formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: "the logarithm of

the probability of a state is proportional to the entropy of that state." Every word in this contains ao entire scientific concept, capable only of being sensed and not described.

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 381

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 country- side, 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,^ 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 cen- turies suffice for the complete exhaustion of its possibilities. Classical science faded out between the battle of Cannas and that of Actium and made way for the world-outlook of the "second religiousness." ^ 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 boomer- ang. 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 concep- tions 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, Resaina 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^ taught by Ibn-al-Haitan, by Avicenna and by the "Brothers of Sincerity." * And the idea of light as a force, an imptus^ 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

» See Vol. II, p. 369.

' See Vol. II, pp. 38x ct scq.

• E. Wiedermann, Die Naturwissensch. bet den Arabern (1890). F. Struntz, Gesch. d. Nafurwissen- sch. im Mittelalter (1910), p. 58.

• An order of encyclopsedists and philosophers; sec Ency. Brit,, XI ed.. Vol. II, p. 178a. — Tt.

38i THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

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" formulas, 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, formulas, 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.^ And the out- come 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,^ 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.^ 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,

• M. P, E. Bcrthclot, Die Chemie im Altertum u. Mittelalter (1909), pp. 64 ct scq. (The reference is

evidently to a German version; Berthelot published several works on the subject, viz., Les origines dt V Akhimit [1885]; Introduction ^ I'itudt de la chitnie dts anciens tt du moyen dge [1889]; ColUaion des aruiens alchimistes grecs [1887, translations of texts]; La chimie au moyen dge [1893]. — 7>.

« For the metals, "mercury" is the principle of substantial character (lustre, tensility, fusi- bility), "sulphur" that of the attributive generation (e.g., combustion, transmutation). Sec Struntz, Gesch. d. Naturwissensch. im Mittelalter (1910), pp. 73 et seq.

(It seems desirable to supplement this a little for the non-technical reader, by stating, however roughly and generally, the principle and process of transmutation as the alchemist saw them. All metals consist of mercury and sulphur. Remove "materiality" from common mercury (or from the mercury-content of the metal under treatment) by depriving it (or the metal) of "earthness," "liquidness" and "airiness" (i.e., volatility) and we have a prime, substantial (though not ma- terial) and stable thing. Similarly, remove materiality from sulphur (or the sulphur-content of the metal treated) and it becomes an elixir, efficient for generating attributes. Then, the prime matter and the elixir react upon one another so that the product on reassuming materiality is a different metal, or rather a "metallicity" endowed with different characters and attributes. The production of one metal from another thus depends merely on the modalities of working processes. — Tr.^

> See Vol. U, pp. 370, 617.

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 383

so also with the basic concepts. They are symbols in each case of the one and only the one Culture. The Classical root-words aireLpov, apxh, fJ^op(t>ri, v^rj, are not translatable into our speech. To render apxv 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 dXXotwo-ts, 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 bodili- ness. 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 there- fore 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 Mono- physite secessions is an alchemistic problem.^ 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 Apollin- ian natural science, of mechanical statics, is linked with the enigmatic name of Hermes Trismegistus,^ who is supposed to have lived in Alexandria at the same time as Flotinus and Diophantus. Similarly it was just at the time of the definite

• See Vol. II, pp. 314 et seq.

' See the article under this heading, and also that under Alchemy, Ency. Brit., XI cd. — Tr.

384 "THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

emancipation of the Western mathematic by Newton and Leibniz that the Western chemistry ^ was freed from Arabic form by Stahl (1660-173 4) ^^^ ^^^ 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 (1616-1691) 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 any- thing 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 korperliches 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 mathe- matics 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.

in

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 wc know hardly more than the fact they once existed, and the Arabian is so com- plicated that even now it seems to defy presentation. But we do know our own

• During the Gothic age, in spite of the Spanish Dominican Arnold of Villanova (d. 13 11),

chemistry had had no sort of creative importance in comparison with the mathematical-physical research of that age.

I

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 385

and the Apollinian sciences well enough to observe, here too, a deeply symboli- cal 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 arc the basic conditions of the idea. The atomistic notions of modern physics — which include not only the Daltonian or "chemi- cal" atom but also the electrons ^ 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 lay- men. 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 there- fore which would be utterly inconceivable to a Classical researcher. Such, already, were Leibniz's "Monads" ^ and such, superlatively, are the con- stituents of Rutherford's picture of the atom as positively-charged nucleus with planetary negative electrons, and of the picture that Niels Bohr has ima- gined by working these in with the "quanta" of Planck.^ 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 "indivisi- bility" 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." * 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 \x 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

^ For even Helmholtz had sought to account for the phenomena of electrolysis by the assumption of an atomic structure of electricity.

• Which in their physical aspect are individual centres of force, without parts or extension or

figure. (For their metaphysical aspect, see Ency. Brit., XI edition, Article Leibnix., especially pp. 387-8. - Tr.-)

3 M. Born, Aufbau der Materie (192.0), p. ■vj.

(So many books and papers — strict, semi-popular and frankly popular — have been pub- lished in the last few years that references may seem superfluous, the more so as the formula- tion of this central theory of present-day physics is still somewhat provisional. The article Matter by Rutherford in the Ency. Brit., Xllth edition (192.1), and Bertrand Russell, The A.B.C. of Atoms, arc perhaps the clearest elementary accounts that are possible, having regard to the scientist's necessary reservations of judgment. — Tr.

• See p. 131.

386 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

by the blind chance that he as well as Sophocles called 6Lv6.yKrjy hunted like (Edipus. 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 acci- dental, Empedocles speaks of love and hate, Anaxagoras of meetings and part- ings. 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 wc 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 i8th 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 under- stood by considering the two souls as an opposition. And wc 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 dpxi?, Demo- critus 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 overcom- ing 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 Regime 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 im- plication 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

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 387

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 in- most essence and very self. It is only a preconceived idea of criticism that ex- tension 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 ex- tended is a projection of the cognizing being.

We have already ^ 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 irre- versibility (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 conscious- ness 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 "exist- ence," as Depth, and hence duration (i.e., timelessness) and extension are iden- tical. Only the knowing possesses the mark of direction. The application of

^ Sec p. 172..

388 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

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 arc incompatible; motion "is" not (is only "apparent").

And here, for the second time, Natural science becomes dogmatic and myth- ological. 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 observ- ing 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 Understand- ing is abstracted (by means of words) from feeling and mathematical space from light-resistances ("things" 0» so also physical "time" is abstracted from the impression of motion.

Physics investigates Nature, and consequently it knows time only as a length. But che 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 formulas^ "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 some- thing which gives rise to the consciousness of a succession. The known is time- less and alien to motion; its state of becomencss 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

• Sec p. lii and Vol. II, pp. ii ct scq.

NATURE -KNOWLEDGE 389

the world-as-history. "Nature," then, is an expression of the Culture in each instance.^ 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. ^

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.

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 perplex- ities to system, the result is systematic and not physiognomic, pure exten- sion 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 un- known 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 counter- shock 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 uncon- querably 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 1 Sec p. 169. 2 See p. 166 and Vol. K, p. i8.

390 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

individual moment. Time as magnitude figures in Greek physics as little as it docs 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 efl^ect 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.^ And here a strange inversion seems to have taken place — the Becoming has lost its priority over the Become. When the in- tellect 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 belong- ing 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 formulas 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 ex- tended 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 irre- proachable 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

• Sec p. 151.

NATURE - KNOWLEDGE 391

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 dpxi7> 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 expres- sion 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; ivhat 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 demon- stration; 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 appro- priate 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

392. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

to express it in natural laws. In fact natural laws, which for us arc 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 in- dividual case is morphologically self-contained and never exactly reproduced, in which therefore the acquisitions of knowledge cannot be put into consistently- valid formuljc. 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 calculat- ing motions in advance.

Nature-laws arc 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.^ 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- cvidently 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 lan- guage 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,"^ 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 utter- ances 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 dXXoiwats, &.v6.yKri, IvrcX^x^ia, we look with astonishment into a world-image totally unlike our own. This world-image

• Sec p. ii6 ct scq., pp. 151 ct scq. • Sec Vol. II, pp. 369 ct seq.

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 393

is self-sufficing and therefore, for this definite sort of mankind, uncondition^ ally true. And causality in our sense plays no part therein.

The alchemist or philosopher of the Arabian Culture, too, assumes a neces- sity 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.^ This necessity under- lies 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 ob jectivized and ' ' be- come" 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 intel- lectually, 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 causa- tion-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 expres- sion "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 neces- sity, 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 con- troversy as to whether judgment is necessary or empirical — i.e., in the lan- guage of Kant (who greatly deceived himself about the highly-fluid boundaries between the two), whether it is a -priori or a posteriori certain — are character- istically 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

^ J. Goldziher, Die islam, und jud. Philosofhie ("Kultur der Gegenwart," I, V, 1913), pp. 306 ct scq.

394 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

"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 in- capable 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 formulas 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 ficwpia in the literal sense, the result of passive contemplativeness.

vn

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 Cassar), dis- tinguished 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

1

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 395

the second; and to the third belongs scientific physics, inasmuch as behind its formulas there are images.

Not only primitive man and the child, but also the higher animals spon- taneously 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 emi- nent 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.^

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 princi- ple; 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-feel- ing it was that formed the scientific world-image of the West, its "Nature," its "experience" and therefore its theories and its methods, in direct contradic- tion 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 II Gesu to the climax in the cathedral facades of Delia Porta and Maderna, and from Heinrich Schiitz to the tran- scendent tone-worlds of i8th-Century church music; that is what in Shakespear-

• See Vol. II, pp. 7.J et seq., 417 et seq.

396 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

ian tragedy fills with world-becoming scenes widened to infinity. And that is what Galileo and Newton captured in formulas 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 {orest. 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 clustcred-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 fulfil- ment 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 Ygg- drasil 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

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 397

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 i8th 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 in- describable alien life of unknown powers, and traces the origin of these effects to "numina," to The Other, inasmuch as this Other also possesses Life. As- tonishment at alien motion is the source of religion and of physics both; respec- tively, 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 in- tellectually 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." ^

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

• And it may be asserted that the downright faith that Haeckel, for example, pins to the names

atom, matter, energy, is not essentially different from the fetishism of Neanderthal Man.

398 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

is not a shape, is not at all. On the basis of this feeling (which was of an in- tensity that we can hardly imagine) the Classical spirit created as counter- concept ^ to the form of "The Other" Non-Form viz., stuff, dpxi?, vXrj, 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 Raumerfiillende), 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 aether" 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 Apol- linian world-feeling this ungodly "other" is substance without shape, to the Faustian it is substance without force.

» Sec p. 12.6.

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 599

VIII

Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas arc 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 uni- versal 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.^ Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first forma- tive 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 Egyp- tians of Thinite times, the Jews and Persians before Cyrus, ^ the heroes of the Mycenasan 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 primi- tive 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 Cul- tures 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 (iioo- 800 B.C.) and in the corresponding knightly age of Teutonism (900-1100 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

• Compare Vol. II, pp. 38 ct scq. ' Sec Vol. II, p. 305.

400 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

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 loth and nth 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 1150 — 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 Ragnarok, the Twi- light of the Gods, in the Voluspa 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 contemplation.^

Nowhere is the final meaning of these religious creations more clearly in- | dicated 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 Mycenasan as Valhalla is German in origin. Moveover, 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.^

The deep inward unity of this Faustian world of myth and saga and the complete congruence of its expression-symbolism has never hitherto been

• Sec Vol. II, pp. 343 ct scq., and p. 346.

• E. Mogk, Germ. MythoL, Grundr. d. Germ. Philos., Ill (1900), p. 340.

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 401

realized, and yet Siegfried, Baldur, Roland, Christ the King in the "Heli- and, " 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, mission- aries, 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 corpo- real 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 Cassar and Con- stantine — that fantastic mass of cults, visions and legends that to-day we can hardly even survey,^ 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, Jew- ish, Neoplatonist and Manicha^an 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 child- 1 See Vol. II, p. 141 et seq., 306 et seq.

40L THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

hood and the Acts of the Apostles, and in the Zoroaster-legend that is con- temporary 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 im- possible 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 with- out 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 some- thing atheistic in it. One God, for him, was no God, and to this may be as- cribed 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, cuffiara of the perfectest kind, and plurality was an attribute of bodies alike for mathematicians, lawyers and poets. The concept of f wo?/ -KoKLTiKbv 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 myth- icum 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 fatness, everything that contains a suggestion of unbounded and un- bodied in it and might thereby bring space as Ent and divine into the felt Nature,

NATURE -KNOWLEDGE 403

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 arc 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.^ 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 Acheloiis, who appears as a bull,) is definitely understood as being the river and not as, so to say, dwelling in the river. The Pans ^ and Satyrs are the fields and meadows as noon defines them, well bounded and, as having figure, having also existence. Dryads and Hama- drayads 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 en- chanted 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 KyfF- hauser cavern and Frau Venus in the Horselberg. It is as though the Faustian

1 See p. i68.

2 The pantheistic idea of Pan, familiar in European poetry, is a conception of later Classical ages, acquired in principle from Egypt. — Tr.

404 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

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 arc 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 moun- tains 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 Phoenicians 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 polls, 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 mono- theistic sense at Athens.^ These were gods not known by name to the Greek but worshipped by the foreigners of the great seaports (Piraeus, 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 formulas like, for example, the generalis invocatio.^ As the universe is the sum of things, and as gods arc 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

• Few passages in the Acts of the Apostles have obtained a stronger hold on our imagination

than Paul's meeting with the altar of " the Unknown God" at Phalerum (Acts XVII, 13). And yet we have perfectly definite evidence, later than Paul's time, of the plurality of the gods to whom this altar was dedicated. Pausanias in his guide-book (I, 24) says: "here there are . . . altars of the gods styled Unknowns, of heroes, etc." (fiunol 8e Otuv re bvona^onkvuv ^kyvinTTuv koX ilpiMjtv . . . K.T.^."). Such, however, is the force of our fixed idea that even Sir J. G. Frazer, in his "Pausanias and Other Studies," speaks of "The Altar to the Unknown God which St. Paul, and Pausanias after him, saw." More, he follows this up with a description of a dialogue "attributed to Lucian" (xnd Cent, a.d.) in which the Unknown God of Athens figures in a Christian discussion; but this dialogue (the Philopatris) is almost universally regarded as a much later work, dating at earliest from Julian's time (mid-4th Cent.) and probably from that of Nicephorus Phocas (loth Cent.). — Tr.

• Wissowa, Rili$u*f> und KjUtus dtr Komtr (1911), p. 38.

NATURE - KNOWLEDGE 405

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 nostro- rum 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 ^ 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 su- pervision, and not only Roman citizens but even their slaves were forbidden under penalty to enter this priesthood. The reception of the goddess gave sat- isfaction 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 be- come 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 pred- ecessors as "Divi" — has hitherto been confused with the ceremonial reverence of the Ruler which was customary in Asia Minor (and, above all, in Persia,)^ 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 beennot 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

1 See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article Great Mother of the Gods. — Tr.

2 In Egypt Ptolemy Philadelphus was the first to introduce a ruler-cult. The reverence that had been paid to the Pharaohs was of quite other significance.

4o6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

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<otta statue of the God whose "numen" he for the time being incor- porated.

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.^ 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 Propyla^us 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 Fcretrius (which contained, not a statue of the god, but a holy stone, silex^') 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.' But in Early Christian times Juppiter Dolichenus or Sol Invictus * could be worshipped "wheresoever two or three were gathered to- gether 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 <k so many gods different in body and locality, now they are fitles 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 Cxlestis ^ honoured by Septimius Scverus. The importation of these figures no longer increases as in Classical times the number of concrete

• Sec Vol. n, pp. X41 ct 8cq.

' Significantly enough, the formula of the oath sworn by this stone was not " per Jovis lapidcm '* but "per Jovcm lapidem." — Tr.

• The Erechtheum, similarly, was a group of ctilt-sites, each refraining from interference with

the others. — Tr.

« Juppiter Dolichenus was a local deity of Doliche in G)mmagcnc, whose worship was spread over all parts of the Empire by soldiers recruited from that region; the tablet dedicated to him which is in the British Museum was found, for example, near Franlcfurt-on-Main.

Sol Invictus is the Roman official form of Mithras. Troop-movcraents and trade spread his worship, like that of Juppiter Dolichenus, over the Empire. — TV.

• To whom the inhabitants of "Roman" Carthage managed to attach even Dido. — Tr.

NATURE -KNOWLEDGE '407

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 re- sistance which centred in a few of the very oldest patrician families.^ 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 ziy 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 ^ (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 be- came 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, 41 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 consecra- tions 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

^ Wissowa, K«//. und Relig. d. Romer (igiO* PP- 9^ et seq.

• Wissowa, Relig. u. Kult. der Romer Ci9ii), p. 355'

4o8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

(such as Isis-Magna Matcr-Juno-Astartc-Bellona, or Mithras-Sol Invictus- Helios) come to signify titles of one sole existent Godhead.^

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 any- thing to say about the spcies of atheism; or has treated it analytically as an individual and definite phenomenon, positive and necessary and intensely sym- bolic; 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"? Arc there early atheists, for example in the Doric or the Gothic ages? Are there cases of men insisting on describing themselves as atheists who are in fact not atheists at all? And, on the other hand, 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 ^ — therein resembling Romanticism, which like- wise 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

• The symbolic importance of the Title, and its relation to the concept and idea of the Person,

cannot here be dealt with. It must suffice to draw attention to the fact that the Classical is the only Culture in which the Title is unknown. It would have been in contradiction with the strictly somatic character of their names. Apart from personal and family names, only the technical names of offices actually exercised were in use. "Augustus" became at once a personal name, "Ca:sar" very soon a designation of office. The advance of the Magian feeling can be seen in the way in which courtesy- expressions of the Late-Roman bureaucracy, like "Vir clarissimus," became permanent titles of honour which could be conferred and cancelled. In just the same way, the names of old and foreign deities became titles of the recognized Godhead; e.g., Saviour and Healer (Asklepios) and Good Shepherd (Orpheus) are titles of Christ. In the Classical, on the contrary, we find the secondary names of Roman deities evolving into independent and separate gods.

" Diagoras, who was condemned to death by the Athenians for his "godless" writings, left behind him deeply pious dithyrambs. Read, too, Hebbel's diaries and his letters to Elise. He "did not believe in God," but he prayed.

NATURE - KNOWLEDGE 409

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 fore- fathers 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 ex- tends 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.^ 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 feel- ing, distinguishes wisdom and intelligence — the early and the late, the rural and the megalopolitan conditions of the soul. Intelligence even sounds athe- istic. 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

1 Sec Vol. II, p. 376.

4IO THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

rests upon sclf-dcccption. The degree of piety of which a period is capable is revealed in its attitude tonvards 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.

What we moderns have called "Toleration" in the Classical world * is an expression of the contrary of atheism. Plurality of numina and cults is inherent in the conception of Classical religion, and it was not toleration but the self- evident expression of antique piety that allowed validity to them all. Con- versely, anyone who demanded exceptions showed himself ipso facto as godless. Christians and Jews counted, and necessarily counted, as atheists in the eyes of anyone whose world-picture was an aggregate of individual bodies; and when in Imperial times they ceased to be regarded in this light, the old Classical god-feeling had itself come to an end. On the other hand, respect for the form of the local cult whatever this might be, for images of the gods, for sacrifices and festivals was always expected, and anyone who mocked or profaned them very soon learned the limits of Classical toleration — witness the scandal of the Mutilation of the Hermae at Athens and trials for the desecra- tion of the Eleusinian mysteries, that is, impious travestying of the sensuous element. But to the Faustian soul (again we see opposition of space and body, of conquest and acceptance of presence) dogma and not visible ritual constitutes the essence. What is regarded as godless is opposition to doctrine. Here begins the spatial-spiritual conception of heresy. A Faustian religion by its very nature cannot allow any freedom of conscience; it would be in contradiction with its space-invasive dynamic. Even free thinking itself is no exception to the rule. After the stake, the guillotine; after the burning of the books, their suppression; after the power of the pulpit, the power of the Press. Amongst us there is no faith without leanings to an Inquisition of some sort. Expressed in appropriate electrodynamic imagery, the field of force of a conviction adjusts all the minds within it according to its own intensity. Failure to do so means absence of conviction — in ecclesiastical language, ungodliness. For the Apol- linian soul, on the contrary, it was contempt of the cult — iak^eia in the literal sense — that was ungodly, and here its religion admitted no freedom o{ attitude. In both cases there was a line drawn between the toleration demanded by the god-feeling and that forbidden by it.

Now, here the Late-Classical philosophy of Sophist-Stoic speculation (as distinct from the general Stoic disposition) was in opposition to religious feeling. And accordingly we find the people of Athens — that Athens which could build altars to "unknown gods" — persecuting as pitilessly as the Spanish Inquisition. We have only to review the list of Classical thinkers and historical personages who were sacrificed to the integrity of the cult. Socrates

» Sec Vol. n, p. 144.

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 411

and Diagoras were executed for da^/3eta; Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Aristotle, Alcibiades only saved themselves by flight. The number of executions for cult- impiety, in Athens alone and during the few decades of the Peloponnesian War, ran into hundreds. After the condemnation of Protagoras, a house-to-house search was made for the destruction of his writings. In Rome, acts of this sort began (so far as history enables us to trace them) in 181 b.c. when the Senate ordered the public burning of the Pythagorean "Books of Numa." ^ This was followed by an uninterrupted series of expulsions, both of individual philoso- phers and of whole schools, and later by executions and by public burnings of books regarded as subversive of religion. For instance, in the time of Cassar alone, the places of worship of Isis were five times destroyed by order of the Consuls, and Tiberius had her image thrown into the Tiber. The refusal to perform sacrifice before the image of the Emperor was made a penal offence. All these were measures against " atheism," in the Classical sense of the word, manifested in theoretical or practical contempt of the visible cult. Unless wc can put our Western feeling of these matters out of action we shall never penetrate into the essence of the world-image that underlay the Classical attitude to them. Poets and philosophers might spin myths and transform god-figures as much as they pleased. The dogmatic interpretation of the sensu- ous data was everyone's liberty. The histories of the gods could be made fun of in Satyric drama and comedy — even that did not impugn their Euclidean existence. But the statue of the god, the cult, the plastic embodiment of piety — it was not permitted to any man to touch these. It was not out of hypocrisy that the fine minds of the earlier Empire, who had ceased to take a myth of any kind seriously, punctiliously conformed to the public cults and, above all, to the cuJt — deeply real for all classes — of the Emperor. And, on the other hand, the poets and thinkers of the mature Faustian Culture were at liberty "not to go to Church," to avoid Confession, to stay at home on procession- days and (in Protestant surroundings) to live without any relations with the church whatever. But they were not free to touch points of dogma, for that would have been dangerous within any confession and any sect, including, once more and expressly, free-thought. The Roman Stoic, who without faith in the mythology piously observed the ritual forms, has his counterpart in those men of the Age of Enlightenment, like Lessing and Goethe, who disre- garded the rites of the Church but never doubted the * * fundamental truths of faith."

xii

If we turn back from Nature-feeling become form to Nature-knowledge become system, we know God or the gods as the oiigin of the images by which the intellect seeks to make the world-around comprehensible to itself. Goethe

1 Livy XL, Z9. — Tr.

411 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

once remarked (to Ricmer): '* The Reason is as old as the World; even the child has reason. But it is not applied in all times in the same way or to the same objects. The earlier centuries had their ideas in intuitions of the fancy, but ours bring them into notions. The great views of Life were brought into shapes, into Gods; to-day they are brought into notions. Then the productive force was greater, now the destructive force or art of separation." The strong religiousness of Newton's mechanics ^ and the almost complete atheism of the formulations of modern dynamics are of like colour, positive and negative of the same primary feeling. A physical system of necessity has all the characters of the soul to whose world-form it belongs. The Deism of the Baroque belongs with its dynamics and its analytical geometry; its three basic principles, God, Freedom and Immortality, are in the language of mechanics the principles of inertia (Galileo), least action (D'Alembert) and the conservation of energy Q. R. Mayer).

That which nowadays we call quite generally physics is in reality an artifact of the Baroque. At this stage the reader will not feel it as paradoxical to asso- ciate the mode of representation which rests on the assumption of distant forces and the (wholly un-Classical and anything but naive) idea of action-at-a- distance, attraction and repulsion of masses, specially with the Jesuit style of architecture founded by Vignola, and to call it accordingly the Jesuit style of physics; and I would likewise call the Infinitesimal Calculus, which of neces- sity came into being just when and where it did, the Jesuit style of mathematic. Within this style, a working hypothesis that deepens the technique of experi- mentation is "correct"; for Loyola's concern, like Newton's, was not de- scription of Nature but method.

Western physics is by its inward form dogmatic and not ritualistic (kul- tisch). Its content is the dogma of Force as identical with space and distance, the theory of the mechanical Act (as against the mechanical Posture) in space. Consequently its tendency is persistently to overcome the apparent. Beginning with a still quite Apollinian-sensuous classification of physics into the physics of the eye (optics), of the ear (acoustics) and of the skin-sense (heat), it by degrees eliminated all sense-impressions and replaced them by abstract systems of relations; thus, under the influence of ideas concerning dynamical motion in an xther, radiant heat is nowadays dealt with under the heading of "optics," a word which has ceased to have anything to do with the eye.

"Force" is a mythical quantity, which does not arise out of scientific experimentation but, on the contrary, defines the structure thereof a priori. It is only the Faustian conception of Nature that instead of a magnet thinks

• In the famous conclusion of his "Optics" (1706) which made a powerful impression and

became the starting-point of quite new enunciations of theological problems, Newton limits the domain of mechanical causes as against the Divine First Cause, whose perception-organ is neces- sarily infinite space itself.

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 413

of a magnetism whose field of force includes a piece of iron, and instead of luminous bodies thinks of radiant energy, and that imagines personifications like "electricity," "temperature" and "radioactivity." ^

That this "force" or "energy" is really a numen stiffened into a concept (and in nowise the result of scientific experience) is shown by the often over- looked fact that the basic principle known as the First Law of Thermody- namics ^ says nothing whatever about the nature of energy, and it is properly speaking an incorrect (though psychologically most significant) assumption that the idea of the "Conservation of Energy" is fixed in it. Experimental measurement can in the nature of things only establish a number^ which number we have (significantly, again) named work. But the dynamical cast of our thought demanded that this should be conceived as a difference of energy, al- though the absolute value of energy is only a figment and can never be rendered by a definite number. There always remains, therefore, an undefined additive constant, as we call it; in other words, we always strive to maintain the image of an energy that our inner eye has formed, although actual scientific practice is not concerned with it.

This being the provenance of the force-concept, it follows that we can no more define it than we can define those other un-Classical words Will and Space. There remains always a felt and intuitively-perceived remainder which makes every personal definition an almost religious creed of its author. Every Baroque scientist in this matter has his personal inner experience which he is trying to clothe in words. Goethe, for instance, could never have defined his idea of a world-force, but to himself it was a certainty. Kant called force the phenome- non of an ent-in-itself: "we know substance in space, the body, only through forces." Laplace called it an unknown of which the workings are all that we know, and Newton imagined immaterial forces at a distance. Leibniz spoke of Vis viva as a quantum which together with matter formed the unit that he called the monad, and Descartes, with certain thinkers of the i8th Cen- tury, was equally unwilling to draw fundamental distinctions between motion and the moved. Beside fotentia, virtus, impetus we find even in Gothic times peri-phrases such as conatus and nisus, in which the force and the releasing cause are obviously not separated. We can, indeed, quite well differentiate between Catholic, Protestant and Atheistic notions of force. But Spinoza, a Jew and therefore, spiritually, a member of the Magian Culture, could not

• As has been shown already, the dynamic structure of our thought was manifested first of all

when Western languages changed " feci " to " ego habeo factum," and thereafter we have increasingly emphasized the dynamic in the phrases with which we fix our phenomena. We say, for instance, that industry "finds outlets for itself" and that Rationalism "has come into power. " No Classical language allows of such expressions. No Greek would have spoken of Stoicism, but only of the Stoics. There is an essential difference, too, between the imagery of Classical and that of Western poetry in this respect.

2 The law of the equivalence of heat and work. — Tr.

414 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

absorb the Faustian force-concept at all, and it has no place in his system.^ And it is an astounding proof of the secret power of root-ideas that Heinrich Hertz, the only Jew amongst the great physicists of the recent past, was also the only one of them who tried to resolve the dilemma of mechanics by eliminating the idea of force.

The force-dogma is the one and only theme of Faustian physics. That branch of science which under the name of Statics has been passed from system to system and century to century is a fiction. "Modern Statics" is in the same position as "arithmetic" and "geometry," which, if the literal and original senses of the words be kept to, are void of meaning in modern analysis, empty names bequeathed by Classical science and only preserved because our reverence for all things Classical has hitherto debarred us from getting rid of them or even recognizing their hollowness. There is no Western statics — that is, no interpretation of mechanical facts that is natural to the Western spirit bases itself on the ideas of form and substance, or even, for that matter, on the ideas of space and mass otherwise than in connexion with those of time and force.* The reader can test this in any department that he pleases. Even "tempera- ture," which of all our physical magnitudes has the most plausible look of being static, Classical and passive, only falls into its place in our system when it is brought into a force-picture, viz., the picture of a quantity of heat made up of ultra-swift subtle irregular motions of the atoms of a body, with temperature as the mean vis viva of these atoms.

The Late Renaissance imagined that it had revived the Archimedean physics just as it believed that it was continuing the Classical sculpture. But in the one case as in the other it was merely preparing for the forms of the Baroque, and doing so out of the spirit of the Gothic. To this Statics belongs the picture- subject as it is in Mantegna's work and also in that of Signorelli, whose line and attitude later generations regarded as stiff and cold. With Leonardo, dynamics begins and in Rubens the movement of swelling bodies is already at a maximum.

As late as 1619 the spirit of Renaissance physics appears in the theory of magnetism formulated by the Jesuit Nicolaus Cabeo. Conceived in the mould of an Aristotelian idea of the world, it was (like Palladio's work on architec- ture) foredoomed to lead to nothing — not because it was "wrong" in itself but because it was in contradiction with the Faustian Nature-feeling which, freed from Magian leading-strings by the thinkers and researchers of the 14th Century, now required forms of its very own for the expression of its world- knowledge. Cabeo avoided the notions of force and mass and confined himself

> Sec p. 307.^

' Original: "Keioe dem abendlandischeo Geist natOrliche Art der Deutung mcchanischcr Tatsachcn, wclchc die Bcgriffe Gcstalt und Substanz (allcnfalls Rauffl und Masse) statt Raum, Zcit, Masse, und Kraft zugrunde liegt."

NATURE -KNOWLEDGE 415

to the Classical concepts of form and substance — in other words, he went back from the architecture of Michelangelo's last phase and of Vignola to that of Michelozzo and Raphael — and the system which he formed was complete and self-contained but without importance for the future. A magnetism con- ceived as a state of individual bodies and not as a force in unbounded space was incapable of symbolically satisfying the inner eye of Faustian man. What we need is a theory of the Far, not one of the Near. Newton's mathematical- mechanical principles required to be made explicit as a dynamics pure and entire, and this another Jesuit, Boscovich,^ was the first to achieve in 1758.

Even Galileo was still under the influence of the Renaissance feeling, to which the opposition of force and mass, that was to produce, in architecture and painting and music alike the element of grand movement, was something strange and uncomfortable. He therefore limited the idea of force to contact-force (impact) and his formulation did not go beyond conservation of momentum (quantity of motion). He held fast to mere moved-ness and fought shy of any passion of space, and it was left to Leibniz to develop — first in the course of controversy and then positively by the application of his mathematical dis- coveries — the idea of genuine free and directional forces (living force, activum thema). The notion of conservation of momentum then gave way to that of conservation of living forces, as quantitative number gave way to functional number.

The concept of mass, too, did not become definite until somewhat later. In Galileo and Kepler its place is occupied by volume, and it was Newton who distinctly conceived it as functional — the world as function of God. That mass (defined nowadays as the constant relation between force and acceleration in respect of a system of material points) should have no proportionate relation whatever to volume was, in spite of the evidence of the planets, a conclusion inacceptable to Renaissance feeling.

But, even so, Galileo was forced to inquire into the causes of motion. In a genuine Statics, working only with the notions of material and form, this question would have had no meaning. For Archimedes displacement was a matter of insignificance compared with form, which was the essence of all corporeal existence; for, if space be Nonent, what efficient can there be external to the body concerned? Things are not functions of motion, but they move themselves. Newton it was who first got completely away from Renaissance feeling and formed the notion of distant forces, the attraction and repulsion of bodies across space itself. Distance is already in itself a force. The very idea of it is so free from all sense-perceptible content that Newton himself felt uncomfortable with it — in fact it mastered him and not he it. It was the spirit of Baroque itself, with its bent towards infinite space, that had evoked this contrapuntal and utterly un-plastic notion. And in it withal there was a contradic-

• Sec foot-note, p. 314. — Tr.

4i6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

tion. To this day no one has produced an adequate definition of these forces- at-a-distance. No one has ever yet understood what centrifugal force really is. Is the force of the earth rotating on its axis the cause of this motion or vice versa? Or are the two identical? Is such a cause, considered per se, a force or another motion? What is the difference between force and motion? Suppose the alterations in the planetary system to be workings of a centrifugal force; that being so, the bodies ought to be slung out of their path [tangentially], and as in fact they are not so, we must assume a centripetal force as well. What do all these words mean? It is just the impossibility of arriving at order and clarity here that led Hertz to do away with the force-notion altogether and (by highly artificial assumptions of rigid couplings between positions and velocities) to reduce his system of mechanics to the principle of contact (im- pact). But this merely conceals and does not remove the perplexities, which are of intrinsically Faustian character and rooted in the very essence of dynamics. "Can we speak of forces which owe their origin to motion?" Certainly not; but can we get rid oi primary notiot\s that are inborn in the Western spirit though indefinable? Hertz himself made no attempt to apply his system practically.

This symbolic difficulty of modern mechanics is in no way removed by the potential theory that was founded by Faraday when the centre of gravity of physical thought had passed from the dynamics of matter to the electro- dynamics of the jcther. The famous experimenter, who was a visionary through and through — alone amongst the modern masters of physics he was not a mathematician — observed in 1846: "I assume nothing to be true in any part of space (whether this be empty as is commonly said, or filled with matter) except forces and the lines in which they are exercised." Here, plain enough, is the directional tendency with its intimately organic and historic content, the tendency in the knower to live the process of his knowing. Here Faraday is metaphysically at one with Newton, whose forces-at-a-distance point to a mythic background that the devout physicist declined to examine. The pos- sible alternative way of reaching an unequivocal definition of force — viz., that which starts from World and not God, from the object and not the subject of natural motion-state — was leading at the very same time to the formulation of the concept of Energy. Now, this concept represents, as distinct from that of force, a quantum of directedness and not a direction, and is in so far akin to Leibniz's conception of "living force" unalterable in quantity. It will not escape notice that essential features of the mass-concept have been taken over here; indeed, even the bizarre notion of an atomic structure of energy has been seriously discussed.

This rearrangement of the basic words has not, however, altered the feeling that a world-force with its substratum does exist. The motion-problem is as insoluble as ever. All that has happened on the way from Newton to Faraday — or from Berkeley to Mill — is that the religious deed-idea has been replaced

NATURE -KNOWLEDGE ,417

by the irreligious work-idea.^ In the Nature-picture of Bruno, Newton and Goethe something divine is working itself out in acts, in that of modern physics Nature is doing work; for every ' ' process ' ' within the meaning of the First Law of Thermodynamics is or should be measurable by the expenditure of energy to which a quantity of work corresponds in the form of "bound energy."

Naturally, therefore, we find the decisive discovery of J. R. Mayer coin- ciding in time with the birth of the Socialist theory. Even economic systems wield the same concepts; the value-problem has been in relation with quantity of work ^ ever since Adam Smith, who vis-h-vis Quesney and Turgot marks the change from an organic to a mechanical structure of the economic field. The "work" which is the foundation of modern economic theory has purely dynamic meaning, and phrases could be found in the language of eco- nomists which correspond exactly to the physical propositions of conservation of energy, entropy and least action.

If, then, we review the successive stages through which the central idea of force has passed since its birth in the Baroque, and its intimate relations with the form-worlds of the great arts and of mathematics, we find that (i) in the 17th Century (Galileo, Newton, Leibniz) it is pictorially formed and in unison with the great art of oil-painting that died out about 1630; (2.) in the i8th Century (the "classical" mechanics of Laplace and Lagrange) it acquires the abstract character of the fugue-style and is in unison with Bach; and (3) with the Culture at its end and the civilized intelligence victorious over the spiritual, it appears in the domain of pure analysis, and in particular in the theory of functions of several complex variables, without which it is, in its most modern form, scarcely understandable.

ZIII

But with this, it cannot be denied, the Western physics is drawing near to the limit of its possibilities. At bottom, its mission as a historical phenomenon has been to transform the Faustian Nature-feeling into an intellectual knowl- edge, the faith-forms of springtime into the machine-forms of exact science. And, though for the time being it will continue to quarry more and more practical and even "purely theoretical" results, results as such, whatever their kind, belong to the superficial history of a science. To its deeps belong only the history of its symbolism and its style, and it is almost too evident to be worth the saying that in those deeps the essence and nucleus of our science is in rapid disintegration. Up to the end of the 19th Century every step was in the direction of an inward fulfilment, an increasing purity, rigour and fullness of the dynamic Nature-picture — and then, that which has brought it to an optimum of theoretical clarity, suddenly becomes a solvent. This is not happening in- tentionally — the high intelligences of modern physics are, in fact, unconscious 1 Sec p. 355. 2 See Vol. II, p. 618.

4i8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

that it is happening at all — but from an inherent historic necessity. Just so, at the same relative stage, the Classical science inwardly fulfilled itself about 2.00 B.C. Analysis reached its goal with Gauss, Cauchy and Riemann, and to-day it is only filling up the gaps in its structure.

This is the origin of the sudden and annihilating doubt that has arisen about things that even yesterday were the unchallenged foundation of physical theory, about the meaning of the energy-principle, the concepts of mass, space, absolute time, and causality-laws generally. This doubt is no longer the fruitful doubt of the Baroque, which brought the knower and the object of his knowledge together; it is a doubt affecting the very possibility of a Nature-science. To take one instance alone, what a depth of unconscious Skepsis there is in the rapidly-increasing use of enumerative and statistical methods, which aim only at probability of results and forgo in advance the absolute scientific exactitude that was a creed to the hopeful earlier generations.

The moment is at hand now, when the possibility of a self-contained and self-consistent mechanics will be given up for good. Every physics, as I have shown, must break down over the motion-problem, in which the living person of the knower methodically intrudes into the inorganic form-world of the known. But to-day, not only is this dilemma still inherent in all the newest theories but three centuries of intellectual work have brought it so sharply to focus that there is no possibility more of ignoring it. The theory of gravita- tion, which since Newton has been an impregnable truth, has now been rec- ognized as a temporally limited and shaky hypothesis. The principle of the Conservation of Energy has no meaning if energy is supposed to be infinite in an infinite space. The acceptance of the principle is incompatible with any three-dimensional structure of space, whether infinite or Euclidean or (as the Non-Euclidean geometries present it) spherical and of "finite, yet unbounded" volume. Its validity therefore is restricted to " a system of bodies self-contained and not externally influenced" and such a limitation does not and cannot exist in actuality. But symbolic infinity was just what the Faustian world-feeling had meant to express in this basic idea, which was simply the mechanical and extensional re-ideation of the idea of immortality and world-soul. In fact it was a feel- ing out of which knowledge could never succeed in forming a pure system. The luminiferous scthcr, again, was an ideal postulate of modern dynamics whereby every motion required a something-to-be-moved, but every conceivable hy- pothesis concerning the constitution of this lether has broken down under inner contradictions; more, Lord Kelvin has proved mathematically that there can be no structure of this light-transmitter that is not open to objections. As, according to the interpretation of Fresnel's experiments, the light-waves are transversal, the jcther would have to be a rigid body (with truly quaint proper- ties), but then the laws of elasticity would have to apply to it and in that case the waves would be longitudinal. The Maxwell-Hertz equations of the Electro-

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 419

magnetic Theory of Light, which in fact are pure nameless numbers of indubi- table validity, exclude the explanation of the aether by any mechanics whatso- ever. Therefore, and having regard also to the consequences of the Relativity theory, physicists now regard the asther as pure vacuum. But that, after all, is not very different from demolishing the dynamic picture itself.

Since Newton, the assumption of constant mass — the counterpart of con- stant force — has had uncontested validity. But the Quantum theory of Planck, and the conclusions of Niels Bohr therefrom as to the fine structure of atoms, which experimental experience had rendered necessary, have destroyed this assumption. Every self-contained system possesses, besides kinetic energy, an energy of radiant heat which is inseparable from it and therefore cannot be represented purely by the concept of mass. For if mass is defined by living energy it is ipso facto no longer constant with reference to thermodynamic state. Nevertheless, it is impossible to fit the theory of quanta into the group of hy- potheses constituting the "classical" mechanics of the Baroque; moreover, along with the principle of causal continuity, the basis of the Infinitesimal Cal- culus founded by Newton and Leibniz is threatened.^ But, if these are serious enough doubts, the ruthlessly cynical hypothesis of the Relativity theory strikes to the very heart of dynamics. Supported by the experiments of A. A. Michelson, which showed that the velocity of light remains unaffected by the motion of the medium, and prepared mathematically by Lorentz and Minkowski, its specific tendency is to destroy the notion of absolute time. Astronomical dis- coveries (and here present-day scientists are seriously deceiving themselves) can neither establish nor refute it. "Correct" and "incorrect" are not the criteria whereby such assumptions are to be tested; the question is whether, in the chaos of involved and artificial ideas that has been produced by the innumerable hy- potheses of Radioactivity and Thermodynamics, it can hold its own as a useable hypothesis or not. But however this may be, it has abolished the constancy of those ■physical quantities into the definition of which time has entered, and unlike the antique statics, the Western dynamics knows only such quantities. Absolute measures of length and rigid bodies are no more. And with this the possibility of absolute quantitative delimitations and therefore the "classical" concept of mass as the constant ratio between force and acceleration fall to the ground — just after the quantum of action, a product of energy and time, had been set up as a new constant.

If we make it clear to ourselves that the atomic ideas of Rutherford and Bohr 2 signify nothing but this, that the numerical results of observations have suddenly been provided with a picture of a planetary world within the atom, instead of that of atom-swarms hitherto favoured; if we observe how

^ See M. Planck, Entstehung undbisherige Entwkklung der Quantenthcorie (192.0), pp. 17-2.5. 2 Which in many cases have led to the supposition that the "actual existence" of atoms has now at last been proved — a singular throw-back to the materialism of the preceding generation.

410 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

rapidly card-houses of hypothesis are run up nowadays, every contradiction being immediately covered up by a new hurried hypothesis; if we reflect on how little heed is paid to the fact that these images contradict one another and the "classical" Baroque mechanics alike, we cannot but realize that the grtat style of ideation is at an end and that, as in architecture and the arts of form, a sort of craft-art of hypothesis-building has taken its place. Only our extreme maestria in experimental technique — true child of its century — hides the collapse of the symbolism.

XIV

Amongst these symbols of decline, the most conspicuous is the notion of Entropy, which forms the subject of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The first law, that of the conservation of energy, is the plain formulation of the essence of dynamics — not to say of the constitution of the West-European soul, to which Nature is necessarily visible only in the form of a contrapuntal- dynamic causality (as against the static-plastic causality of Aristotle). The basic element of the Faustian world-picture is not the Attitude but the Deed and, mechanically considered, the Process, and this law merely puts the mathematical character of these processes into form as variables and constants. But the Second Law goes deeper, and shows a bias in Nature-happenings which is in no wise imposed a priori by the conceptual fundamentals of dynamics.

Mathematically, Entropy is represented by a quantity which is fixed by the momentary state of a self-contained system of bodies and under all physical and chemical alterations can only increase, never diminish; in the most favourable conditions it remains unchanged. Entropy, like Force and Will, is something which (to anyone for whom this form-world is accessible at all) is inwardly clear and meaningful, but is formulated differently by every different authority and never satisfactorily by any. Here again, the intellect breaks down where the world-feeling demands expression.

Nature-processes in general have been classified as irreversible and reversible, according as entropy is increased or not. In any process of the first kind, free energy is converted into bound energy, and if this dead energy is to be turned once more into living, this can only occur through the simultaneous binding of a further quantum of living energy in some second process; the best-known example is the combustion of coal — that is, the conversion of the living energy stored up in it into heat bound by the gas form of the carbon dioxide, if the latent energy of water is to be translated into steam-pressure and thereafter into motion.^ It follows that in the world as a whole entropy continually

• This sentence follows the original word for word and phrase for phrase. Its significance

depends wholly on the precise meaning to be attached to such words as "dead," "free," "latent," and to attempt any sharper formulation of the processes in English would require not only the definition of these (or other) basic terms but also extended description of what they imply.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is something which is absorbed by, rather than specified for,

NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 411

increases; that is, the dynamic system is manifestly approaching to some final state, whatever this may be. Examples of the irreversible processes are con- duction of heat, diffusion, friction, emission of light and chemical reactions; of reversible, gravitation, electric oscillations, electromagnetic waves and sound-waves.

What has never hitherto been fully felt, and what leads me to regard the Entropy theory (18 50) as the beginning of the destruction of that masterpiece of Western intelligence, the old dynamic physics, is the deep opposition of theory and actuality which is here for the first time introduced into theory itself. The First Law had drawn the strict picture of a causal Nature-happening, but the Second Law by introducing irreversibility has for the first time brought into the mechanical-logical domain a tendency belonging to immediate life and thus in fundamental contradiction with the very essence of that domain.

If the Entropy theory is followed out to its conclusion, it results, firstly^ that in theory all processes must be reversible — which is one of the basic postulates of dynamics and is reasserted with all rigour in the law of the Conservation of Energy — but, secondly, that in actuality processes of Nature in their entirety are irreversible. Not even under the artificial conditions of laboratory experiment can the simplest process be exactly reversed, that is, a state once passed cannot be re-established. Nothing is more significant of the present condition of systematics than the introduction of the hypotheses of "elementary disorder" for the purpose of smoothing-out the contradiction between intellectual postulate and actual experience. The "smallest particles" of a body (an image, no more) throughout perform reversible processes, but in actual things the smallest particles are in disorder and mutually interfere; and so the irreversible process that alone is experienced by the observer is linked with increase of entropy by taking the mean probabilities of occurrences. And thus theory becomes a chapter of the Calculus of Probabilities, and in lieu of exact we have statistical methods.

Evidently, the significance of this has passed unnoticed. Statistics belong, like chronology, to the domain of the organic, to fluctuating Life, to Destiny and Incident and not to the world of laws and timeless causality. As everyone knows, statistics serve above all to characterize political and economic, that is, historical, developments. In the "classical" mechanics of Galileo and Newton there would have been no room for them. And if, now, suddenly the contents of that field are supposed to be understood and understandable only statistically

the student. Elsewhere in this English edition, indications have been frequently given to enable the ordinary student to follow up matters referred to more allusively in the text. But in this difficult domain such minor aids would be worthless. All that is possible is to recommend such students to make a very careful study of some plain statement of the subject like Professor Soddy's "Matter and Energy" (especially chapters 4 and 5) and to follow this up — to the extent that his mathematical knowledge permits — in the articles Enenj/, Energetics and Thermodynamics in the Ency. Brit., XI cd. - Tr.

4LL THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

and under the aspect of Probability — instead of under that of the a priori exactitude which the Baroque thinkers unanimously demanded — what does it mean? It means that the object of understanding is ourselves. The Nature

• ' known" in this wise is the Nature that we know by way of living experience,

that we live in ourselves. What theory asserts (and, being itself, must assert) — to wit, this ideal irreversibility that never happens in actuality — represents a relic of the old severe intellectual form, the great Baroque tradition that had contrapuntal music for twin sister. But the resort to statistics shows that the force that that tradition regulated and made effective is exhausted. Becoming and Become, Destiny and Causality, historical and natural-science elements are beginning to be confused. Formula: of life, growth, age, direction and death are crowding up.

That is what, from this point of view, irreversibility in world-processes has to mean. It is the expression, no longer of the physical "t" but of genuine historical, inwardly-experienced Time, which is identical with Destiny.

Baroque physics was, root and branch, a strict systematic and remained so for as long as its structure was not racked by theories like these, as long as its field was absolutely free from anything that expressed accident and mere proba- bility. But directly these theories come up, it becomes physiognomic. "The course of the world * ' is followed out. The idea of the end of the world appears, under the veil of formulas that are no longer in their essence formulas at all. Something Goethian has entered into physics — and if we understand the deeper significance of Goethe's passionate polemic against Newton in the "Far- benlehre" ^ we shall realize the full weight of what this means. For therein intuitive vision was arguing against reason, life against death, creative image against normative law. The critical form-world of NsLtnre-knowledge came out of NztuTc-feelingy God-feeling, as the evoked contrary. Here, at the end of the Late period, it has reached the maximal distance and is turning to come home.

So, once more, the imaging-power that is the eflicient in dynamics conjures up the old great symbol of Faustian man's historical passion. Care — the out- look into the farthest far of past and future, the back-looking study of history, the foreseeing state, the confessions and introspections, the bells that sounded over all our country-sides and measured the passing of Life. The ethos of the word Time, as we alone feel it, as instrumental music alone and no statue- plastic can carry it, is directed upon an aim. This aim has been figured in every life-image that the West has conceived — as the Third Kingdom, as the New Age, as the task of mankind, as the issue of evolution. And it is figured, as the destined end-state of all Faustian "Nature," in Entropy.

Directional feeling, a relation of past and future, is implicit already in the mythic concept of force on which the whole of this dogmatic form-world

• Sec foot-note, p. 157.

NATURE -KNOWLEDGE 415

rests, and in the description of natural processes it emerges distinct. It would not be too much, therefore, to say that entropy, as the intellectual form in which the infinite sum of nature-events is assembled as a historical and physi- ognomic unit, tacitly underlay all physical concept-formation from the outset, so that when it came out (as one day it was bound to come out) it was as a "discovery" of scientific induction claiming "support" from all the other theoretical elements of the system. The more dynamics exhausts its inner possibilities as it nears the goal, the more decidedly the historical characters in the picture come to the front and the more insistently the organic necessity of Destiny asserts itself side by side with the inorganic necessity of Causality, and Direction makes itself felt along with capacity and intensity, the factors of pure extension. The course of this process is marked by the appearance of whole series of daring hypotheses, all of like sort, which are only apparently lemanded by experimental results and which in fact world-feeling and myth- ology imagined as long ago as the Gothic age.

Above all, this is manifested in the bizarre hypotheses of atomic disintegra- tion which elucidate the phenomena of radioactivity, and according to which uranium atoms that have kept their essence unaltered, in spite of all external influences, for millions of years, quite suddenly without assignable cause explode, scattering their smallest particles over space with velocities of thou- sands of kilometres per second. Only a few individuals in an aggregate of radioactive atoms are struck by Destiny thus, the neighbours being entirely unaffected. Here too, then, is a picture of history and not "Nature," and although statistical methods here also prove to be necessary, one might almost say that in them mathematical number has been replaced by chronological.'

With ideas like these, the mythopoetic force of the Faustian soul is returning to its origins. It was at the outset of the Gothic, just at the time when the first mechanical clocks were being built, that the myth cf the world's end, Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, arose. It may be that, like all the re- putedly old-German myths Ragnarok (whether in the Voluspa form or as the Christian Muspilli) was modelled more or less on Classical and particularly Christian-Apocalyptic motives. Nevertheless, it is the expression and symbol of the Faustian and of no other soul. The Olympian college is historyless, it knows no becoming, no epochal moments, no aim. But the passionate thrust into distance is Faustian. Force, Will, has an aim, and where there is an aim there is for the inquiring eye an end. That which the perspective of oil-painting expressed by means of the vanishing point, the Baroque park by its -point de vue, and analysis by the «th term of an infinite series — the conclusion, that is, of a willed directedness — assumes here the form of the concept. The Faust of the Second Part is dying, for he has reached his goal. What the myth of

^ The application of the idea of "lifetime" to elements has in fact produced the conception of "half-transformation times" [such as 3.85 days for Radium Emanation. — Tr.'\.

414 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Gottcrdammcning signified of old, the irreligious form of it, the theory of Entropy, signifies to-day — world's end as completion of an inwardly necessary evolution.

XV

It remains now to sketch the last stage of Western science. From our stand- point of to-day, the gently-sloping route of decline is clearly visible.

This too, the power of looking ahead to inevitable Destiny, is part of the historical capacity that is the peculiar endowment of the Faustian. The Clas- sical died, as we shall die, but it died unknowing. It believed in an eternal Being and to the last it lived its days with frank satisfaction, each day spent as a gift of the gods. But we know our history. Before us there stands a last spiritual crisis that will involve all Europe and America. What its course will be. Late Hellenism tells us. The tyranny of the Reason — of which we are not conscious, for we are ourselves its apex — is in every Culture an epoch between man and old-man, and no more. Its most distinct expression is the cult of exact sciences, of dialectic, of demonstration, of causality. Of old the Ionic, and in our case the Baroque were its rising limb, and now the question is what form will the down-curve assume?

In this very century, I prophesy, the century of scientific-critical Alexandri- anism, of the great harvests, of the final formulations, a new element of inward- ness will arise to overthrow the will-to-victory of science. Exact science must presently fall upon its own keen sword. First, in the i8th Century, its methods were tried out, then, in the 19th, its powers, and now its historical r61e is critically reviewed. But from Skepsis there is a path to ' ' second religiousness," which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture. Men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect.

The individual renounces by laying aside books. The Culture renounces by ceasing to manifest itself in high scientific intellects. But science exists only in the living thought of great savant-generations, and books are nothing if they are not living and effective in men worthy of them. Scientific results are merely items of an intellectual tradition. It constitutes the death of a science that no one any longer regards it as an event, and an orgy of two centuries of exact scientific-ness brings satiety. Not the individual, the soul of the Culture itself has had enough, and it expresses this by putting into the field of the day ever smaller, narrower and more unfruitful investigators. The great century of the Classical science was the third, after the death of Aristotle; when Archime- des died and the Romans came, it was already almost at its end. Our great cen- tury has been the 19th. Savants of the calibre of Gauss and Humboldt and Helmholtz were already no more by 1900. In physics as in chemistry, in biol- ogy as in mathematics, the great masters are dead, and we are now experiencing the decrescendo of brilliant gleaners who arrange, collect and finish-off like the

NATURE -KNOWLEDGE 415

Alexandrian scholars of the Roman age. Everything that docs not belong to the matter-of-fact side of life — to politics, technics or economics — exhibits the common symptom. After Lysippus no great sculptor, no artist as man-of- destiny, appears, and after the Impressionists no painter, and after Wagner no musician. The age of Cassarism needed neither art nor philosophy. To Eratos- thenes and Archimedes, true creators, succeed Posidonius and Pliny, collectors of taste, and finally Ptolemy and Galen, mere copyists. And, just as oil-painting and instrumental music ran through their possibilities in a few centuries, so also dynamics, which began to bud about 1600, is to-day in the grip of decay.

But before the curtain falls, there is one more task for the historical Faustian spirit, a task not yet specified, hitherto not even imagined as possible. There has still to be written a morphology of the exact sciences y which shall discover how all laws, concepts and theories inwardly hang together as forms and what they have meant as such in the life-course of the Faustian Culture. The re-treatment of theoretical physics, of chemistry, of mathematics as a sum of symbols — this will be the definitive conquest of the mechanical world-aspect by an intui- tive, once more religious, world-outlook, a last master-effort of physiognomic to break down even systematic and to absorb it, as expression and symbol, into its own domain. One day we shall no longer ask, as the 19th Century asked, what are the valid laws underlying chemical affinity or diamagnetism — rather, we shall be amazed indeed that minds of the first order could ever have been completely preoccupied by questions such as these. We shall inquire whence came these forms that were prescribed for the Faustian spirit, why they had to come to our kind of humanity particularly and exclusively, and what deep meaning there is in the fact that the numbers that we have won became phe- nomenal in just this picture-like disguise. And, be it said, we have to-day hardly yet an inkling of how much in our reputedly objective values and experiences is only disguise, only image and expression.

The separate sciences — epistemology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, as- tronomy — are approaching one another with acceleration, converging towards a complete identity of results. The issue will be a fusion of the form-worlds, which will present on the one hand a system of numbers, functional in nature and reduced to a few ground-formulas, and on the other a small group of theo- ries, denominators to those numerators, which in the end will be seen to be myths of the springtime under modern veils, reducible therefore — and at once of necessity reduced — to picturable and physiognomically significant characters that are the fundamentals. This convergence has not yet been observed, for the reason that since Kant — indeed, since Leibniz — there has been no philosopher who commanded the problems of all the exact sciences.

Even a century ago, physics and chemistry were foreign to one another, but to-day they cannot be handled separately — witness spectrum analysis, radio-

4i6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

activity, radiation of heat. While fifty years ago the essence of chemistry could still be described almost without mathematics, to-day the chemical elements are in course of volatilizing themselves into the mathematical constants of variable relation-complexes, and with the sense-comprehensibility of the ele- ments goes the last trace of magnitude as the term is Classically and plastically understood. Physiology is becoming a chapter of organic chemistry and is making use of the methods of the Infinitesimal Calculus. The branch of the older physics — distinguished, according to the bodily senses concerned in each, as acoustics, optics and heat — have melted into a dynamic of matter and a dynamic of the asther, and these again can no longer keep their frontiers mathe- matically clear. The last discussions of epistemology are now uniting with those of higher analysis and theoretical physics to occupy an almost inac- cessible domain, the domain to which, for example, the theory of Relativity belongs or ought to belong. The sign-language in which the emanation-theory of radioactivity expresses itself is completely de-sensualized.

Chemistry, once concerned with defining as sharply as possible the qualities of elements, such as valency, weight, affinity and reactivity, is setting to work to get rid of these sensible traits. The elements are held to differ in character according to their derivation from this or that compound. They are represented to be complexes of different units which indeed behave ("actually") as units of a higher order and are not practically separable but show deep differences in point of radioactivity. Through the emanation of radiant energy degrada- tion is always going on, so that we can speak of the lifetime of an element, in formal contradiction with the original concept of the element and the spirit of modern chemistry as created by Lavoisier. All these tendencies are bringing the ideas of chemistry very close to the theory of Entropy, with its suggestive opposition of causality and destiny. Nature and History. And they indicate the paths that our science is pursuing — on the one hand, towards the dis- covery that its logical and numerical results are identical with the structure of the reason itself, and, on the other, towards the revelation that the whole theory which clothes these numbers merely represents the symbolic expression of Faustian life.

And here, as our study draws to its conclusion, we must mention the truly Faustian theory of "aggregates," one of the weightiest in all this form-world of our science. In sharpest antithesis to the older mathematic, it deals, not with singular quantities but with the aggregates constituted by all quantities [or objects] having this or that specified morphological similarity — for in- stance all square numbers or all differential equations of a given type. Such an aggregate it conceives as a new unit, a new number of higher order, and subjecting it to criteria of new and hitherto quite unsuspected kinds such as "potency,"

• 'order," "equivalence," "countableness," and devising laws and operative

methods for it in respect of these criteria. Thus is being actualized a last

NATURE -KNOWLEDGE 417

extension of the function-theory. ^ Little by little this absorbed the whole of our mathematic, and now it is dealing with variables by the principles of the Theory of Groups in respect of the character of the function and by those of the Theory of Aggregates in respect of the values of the variables. Mathe- matical philosophy is well aware that these ultimate meditations on the nature of number are fusing with those upon pure logic, and an algebra of logic is talked of. The study of geometrical axioms has become a chapter of epistemology.

The aim to which all this is striving, and which in particular every Nature- researcher feels in himself as an impulse, is the achievement of a pure numerical transcendence, the complete and inclusive conquest of the visibly apparent and its replacement by a language of imagery unintelligible to the layman and impossible of sensuous realization — but a language that the great Faustian symbol of Infinite space endows with the dignity of inward necessity. The deep scepticism of these final judgments links the soul anew to the forms of early Gothic religiousness. The inorganic, known and dissected world-around, the World as Nature and System, has deepened itself until it is a pure sphere of functional numbers. But, as we have seen, number is one of the most primary symbols in every Culture; and consequently the way to pure number is the return of the waking consciousness to its own secret, the revelation of its own formal necessity. The goal reached, the vast and ever more meaningless and threadbare fabric woven around natural science falls apart. It was, after all, nothing but the inner structure of the "Reason," the grammar by which it believed it could overcome the Visible and extract therefrom the True. But what appears under the fabric is once again the earliest and deepest, the Myth, the immediate Becoming, Life itself. The less anthropomorphic science believes itself to be, the more anthropomorphic it is. One by one it gets rid of the separate human traits in the Nature-picture, only to find at the end that the supposed pure Nature which it holds in its hand is — humanity itself, pure and complete. Out of the Gothic soul grew up, till it overshadowed the religious world-picture, the spirit of the City, the alter ego of irreligious Nature-science. But now, in the sunset of the scientific epoch and the rise of victorious Skepsis, the clouds dissolve and the quiet landscape of the morning reappears in all distinctness.

The final issue to which the Faustian wisdom tends — though it is only in the highest moments that it has seen it — is the dissolution of all knowledge into avast system of morphological relationships. Dynamics and Analysis are in respect of meaning, form-language and substance, identical with Romanesque ornament, Gothic cathedrals, Christian-German dogma and the dynastic state.

1 The text of this paragraph has been slightly condensed, as in such a field as this of philosophi- cal mathematics partial indications would serve no useful purpose. The mathematical reader may refer to the articles Function, 'Number, and Group in the Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.

42.8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

One and the same world-feeling speaks in all of them. They were bom with, and they aged with, the Faustian Culture, and they present that Culture in the world of day and space as a historical drama. The uniting of the several scien- tific aspects into one will bear all the marks of the great art of counterpoint. An infinitesimal music of the boundless world-space — that is the deep unresting longing of this soul, as the orderly statuesque and Euclidean Cosmos was the satisfaction of the Classical. That — formulated by a logical necessity of Faust- ian reason as a dynamic-imperative causality, then developed into a dictato- rial, hard-working, world- transforming science — is the grand legacy of the Faustian soul to the souls of Cultures yet to be, a bequest of immensely transcendent forms that the heirs will possibly ignore. And then, weary after its striving, the Western science returns to its spiritual home.

i

bj ON

11

c/5

X

u

o

p-i

w

1-1

1 « 

<!

H

KH

P^

l-H

CL,

C>0

>H

P^

^?

<

^-

PiJ

^ a

^ o

O

!i*

P-(

s

w

H

s:;

o

u

^\

^ 8

'<<3 >/>

►^ M

.

Q 6

H-4

^ 2

•-< vb

s^

w

1-1

pq

<

H

i 1

I— t w

O

i

H-i

i

g

C/3

ill

^ 2 ^ -a ,R-

e rt 2 v^ 3

,1^ -a o ^ o O w m Oi

•5! O

6^

a.

<

f^"." -TJ CO

So

a

^ s i i s

I ii

•a .S « "

.2 a

w O ."J W)

8

I

s

lliil

i

<

U

O

o

.a

00

vo

PT 3 TS «^

W o q o ^

f^ -y -I ^ 3

H

O 4J

Si 30

^ -S .2 ^ ^ U 3 2 2 "^

a s .2 .2

o ^:3)

P^ J'S

•-1 . 2

o _- .

a?'|;

o ^s •— < *j _

< 2 2

^ °^ ^ .'SO

f^ S-a 3

CO

.s -M •§

2 en H

1 1 -I S5I

r3

CO

D U

8

§ .1

a: ^

•I ^

5

ill

.2

O

J2-

'|i

X

S5&

• ff-f

au

If*

ss-e

^

8.— »

B«iii

<

III

±=i

s

i ■=< « 

{>HI

^^i

<

&

■ -S C-JS

^

iii^

p

i iftV

Pu

i

.Jill

O

xg

g

CO

> SIS' s5

O

1

u c S

XMN

i I

J,

<

3

d

z

I

1-3

OUoC

i

<

<

i« i

It.

< —

« -^ ? =: ^

N -

r-\ .■^ _;

22-;

^ X <fi< ^ ^

s -

s

i

< £

J-

<

R

_ w

r

u« 

•0

• -

^

S?l

< ~

i X

g

^ •

-a

—

? -«>*« 

u

<

<

/

"**

t^

pj

.

,_4

z

« 

cu

c

tr

1

1

5

i

<

g

.a

3

a

j

/^

. 3

^

S

B

^

^3

X

. X

X

•* »

111 h

?§-2 =

o .««»5 -

e.5 s

•J So 6

•ft*

i

-1

o 8

e if V C

•« .tic c I S HO ctf

o

M

_: 3

o3

,0

o S

•^ Sj J> ^

r.s ^ "

- ^s S ? - 5 >< liS I ^

2 .^i4 2 -5 XO eg

^

1

H

&s

"Z

ax

^>

t^

g

p

u

?

^•3

ffi-o

a -!,

f Si

6U

^-■

»%.

1

<

^

2

J^

§

3

rt

a

a.

<>i

8

S

^

c

INDEX

Prepared by David M. Matteson

Aachen Minster, and style, xoo

Abaca, Evaristo F. dall', sonatas, xS}

Abel, Niels H., mathematic problem, 85

Absolutism, contemporary periods, table iii

Abydos, 58«.; contemporaries, table ii

Abyssinia, cult-buildings, xo^

Academy, contemporaries, table i

Acanthus motive, history, 2.15

Acheloiis, as god, 403

Achilles, archetype, io3, 401

Acre, battle, 150

Acropolis, contemporaries, table ii. See also

Parthenon Act, and portrait, z6x, !.€€, -vjo Action, in Western morale, 341 Actium, battle, 381 Activity, as Western trait, 315, 3x0; as quality

of Socialism, 361-364 Actuality, as test of philosophy, 41; significance,

164 Adam de la Hale. See La Hale Addison, Joseph, type, 154 Adolescence, initiation-rites as symbol, i74«. Adrastos, cult, 33«. Mgms. temple, sculpture, ii6, 244 /Eschines, portrait statue, 2.70 ^schylus, tragic form and method, 119, 3x0,

311; and architecture, xo6; and motherhood,

2.68; and deity, 313; morale, 355 /Esthetics, and genius in art, ii8 vEther, contradictory theories, 418 Agamemnon, contemporaries, table iii Aggregates, theory, 4x6 Aglaure, cult 406 Ahmes, arithmetic, 58 Ahriman, Persian Devil, 312. Aim, and direction, 361; nebulousness, 363 Aksakov, Sergei, and Europe, i6«. Albani, Francesco, linear perspective, 140;

colour, 146 Albani villa, garden, 2.40 Albert of Saxony, Occamist, 381 Alberti, Leone B., gardening, 140 Alcamenes, contemporary mathematic, 78;

period, 184 Alchemy, as symbol, 148; as Arabian physics,

382., 383; process of transmutation, 38x«.; and

substance, 383; and mechanical necessity, 393

Alcibiades, and Napoleon, 4; and Classical morale, 351; condemnation, 411

Alcman, music, 1x3

Alembert, Jean B. le R. d', mathematic, €S, 78; and time, 12.6; mechanics and deism, 411

Alexander the Great, analogies, 4; and Dionysus legend, 8; romantic, 38; and economic or- ganization, 138; expedition as episode, 147; himself as epoch, 149; as conqueror, 336; morale, 349; as paradox, 363; deification, 405; contemporaries, table iii

Alexander I of Russia, and Napoleon, 150

Alexandria, as a cultural left-over, 33, 73«., 79; contemporaries, 112.; collections of University, i^6n.; as irreligious, 358

Alfarabi, and extension, 178; and dualism, 306; contemporaries, table i

Algebra, defined, significance of letter-notation, 71; Diophantus and Arabian Culture, 71-73; Western liberation, 86; contemporaries, table i. See also Mathematics

Algiers, origin of French war, i44«.

Alhambra, courtyard, 135

Alien, and "proper", 53

Alkabi, and extension, 178

Alkarchi, contemporaries, table i

Al-Khwarizmi, mathematic, 71; contemporaries, table i

Alkindi, and dualism, 307; contemporaries, table i

Allegory, motive and word, xi9«.

Almighty, philosophical attitude toward, 12.3. See also Religion

Alphabet, and historical consciousness, xxn. See also Language

Alsidzshi, mathematic, 71

Altar of the Unknown God, Paul's error, 404

Amarna art, contemporaries, table ii

Ambrosian chants, and Jewish psalmody, xi8

Amenemhet III, pyramid, 13; portrait, 108, ^Jo^.

Amida, and Arabian art, 109

Analogies, superficial and real historical, 4, 6, 17, 38, 39; necessity of technique, 5

Analysis, and Classical mathematic, 69; in Western mathematic, 74, 75; inadequacy as term, 81; and earlier mathematics, 84; con- temporaries, table i. See also Mathematics

Anamnesis, and comprehension of depth, 174

INDEX

Anankc, and Tyche, 146

Anarchism, basis, 367, 373

Anatomy, in Classical and Western art, 164; Michelangelo and Leonardo, 177

Anaxagoras, and ego, 311; on atoms, 386; and mechanical necessity, 391, 394; condenma- tion, 411

Anaximander, and chaos, 64; popularity, 317

Ancestral worship, cultural basis, 134, i35«.

Ancient History, as term, 16

Anecdote, and Classical tragedy, 318; Western, 3i8«.

Angelico, Fra, and the antique, 175

Anthesteria, i35«.

Antigone, and Kriemhild, 168

Antiphons, and Jewish psalmody, 12.8

Antisthenes, character of Nihilism, 357; and diet, 361

Antoncllo da Messina, Dutch influence, 136

Apclles, contemporaries, table ii

Aphrodisias Temple in Caria, as pseudomorphic, no

Aphrodite, as goddess, x68; in Classical art, i68

Apocalypses, and world-history, i8«.; contem- poraries, table i

Apollinian soul, explained, 183. See also Classi- cal Culture

Apollo Didymxus Temple, form-type, 104

Apollo of Tcnea, contemporaries, table ii

Apollodorus of Athens, unpopularity, 35; paint- ing, 2.83, 3i5«.

Apollodorus of Damascus, Roman architecture, III

Apollonius Pergjcus, and infinity, 69; mathc- matic, 90

Appius Claudius, contemporaries, table iii

Arabesque, algebraic analogy, 71; period, 108; spun surface, 196; character, Z03, zix; as symbol, 115, 148; end-art, 113; contempo- raries, table ii

Arabian Culture, and polar idea of history, 18; mathematic, significance of algebra, 63, 71- 73; expressions, 71; and Late-Classical, 73, 109, XII, 114; and Marycult, 137; prime symbol, cavern, 174, 109, zi5; soul and dual- ism, 183, 305-307, 363; "inside" architectural expression, 184, 199, loo, 1x4; religious ex- pression, 187, 188, 311, 401; and Russian art, 101; autumn of style, 107; art as single phe- nomenon, ro7-xo9; art research, xo<); dome space-symbolism, iio-xix; ornamentation, 112.; fetters, 111; emancipation, hurry, 113; and mosaic, 114; arch-column, 114; Acanthus motive, 115; and portraiture, 113, i6i; archi-

' lecture in Italy, 135; music, 2.18; and Ren- aissance, 135; gold as symbol, 247; political

concept, 333; will-lessness, 309, 311; art and spectator, 319; and world-history, 363; na- ture idea, chemistry, 381-384, 393; religion in Late-Classical, 407; spiritual epochs, table i; art epochs, table ii

Arabian Nights, as symbol, 148

Arbcla, battle, 151

Arcadians, provided history, 11

Arch, and column, 114, 136

Archscology, and historical repetition, 4; cul- tural attitude, 14, 131, 154; significance, 134.

Archery, Eastern and Western, 333«.

Archimedes, style, 59; and infinity, 69; mathe- matical limitation, 84, 90; contemporaries, III, 386; and metaphysics, 366; and motion, 377; as creator, 415

Architecture, ahistoric symbolism of Classical, 9, ii«.; symbolism of Egyptian, 69, 189, 101; transition to and from Arabian, 71, 73; Rococo as music, 87, 131, 185; as early art of a Cul- ture, mother-art, 118, 114; undurablc basis of Classical, 131, 198; column, and arch, 166, 184, 104, 114, 136, i6o«., 345; dimension and direc- tion, cultural relation, i69«., 177, 184, 105, 114; symbolism in Chinese, 190, 196; imitation and ornament, becoming and become, 194-198, 101; history of techniques and ideas, 195; of Civilization period, 197; stage of Russian, 101; Classical, feeble development of style, 104; pseudo-morphic Late-Classical, basilica, 109, 111, 114; Arabian, dome type, 108, iio-iii; Western fagadc and visage, 114; cathedral and infinite space, forest character, 198-10x3, 114, 396; Arabian in Italy, 135; place of Renais- sance, 135; Michelangelo and Baroque, 177; and cultural morale, 345; contemporary cul- tural epochs, table ii. See also Art; Baroque; Egyptian Culture; Doric; Gothic; Roman- esque

Archytas, irrational numbers and fate, 65 w.; and higher powers, 66; contemporaries, 78, 90, III, table i; and metaphysics, 366

Arezzo, school of art, 168

Aristarchus of Samos, and Eastern thought, 9; and heliocentric system, 68, 69, 139

Aristogiton, statue, i69».

Aristophanes, and burlesque, 30, 3io«.

Aristotle, ahistoric consciousness, 9; entelechy, 15; contemporaries, 17, table i; and philoso- phy of being, 49«.; mechanistic world-con- ception, 99, 391; and deity, 114, 313; tabula- tion of categories, 115; as collector, i36«.; as Plato's opposite, 159; on tragedy, 103, 318, 310, 311, 351; on body and soul, 159; on Zeuxis, 184; and inward life, 317; and phi- lanthropy, 351; and Civilization, 351; and

diet, 361; culmination of Classical philosophy, 365, 366 J and mathematics, 366; on atoms, 386, as atheist, 409; condemnation, 411

Arithmetic, Kant's error, 6«.; and time, 115, ii6. See also Mathematics

Army, Roman notion, 335

Arnold of Villanova, and chemistry, 384«.

Art and arts, irrational polar idea, lo; as sport, 35; and future of Western Culture, 40; ^_ i^athematjcal expressio n, 57, 58, 61, 6i, 70; AraHianTrclation to algebra, 71; and vision, 96; causal and destiny sides, 12.7, ii8; West- ern, and "memory," i32.».; mortality, 167; religious character of early periods, 185; lack of early Chinese survivals, i9o«.; as expre s- sion2lan£uage4.i9i; and w^itnesses, 191; imita- tion and ornament, 191-194; their opposition, becoming and become, 194-196; typism, 193; so-called, of Civilization, copyists, 197, Z93- ^95; meaning of style, xoo, 2.01; forms and cultural spirituality, xi4-zi6; as symbolic expression of Culture, 119, ^59; expression- methods of wordless, ii9«.; sense-impression and classification, izo, iii; historical bound- aries, organism, xii; species within a Culture, no rebirths, ^11-2.14; early period architec- ture as mother, i2.4; Western philosophical

• association, 1x9; secularization of Western, Z3o; dominance of Western music, x.},i; out- ward forms and cultural meaning, 138; and

• popularity, 141; space and philosophy, 2.43;. cultural basis of composition, ^43; symptom of decline, striving, 191, 191; trained instinct

' and minor artists, 191, i93 ; cultural asso- ciation with morale, 344; contemporary cul- tural epochs, table ii. See also Imitation; Ornament; Science; Style; arts by name

Aryan hero-tales, contemporaries, table i

Asklepios, as Christian title, 4o8«.

Astrology, cultural attitude, 132., 147

Astronomy, Classical Culture and, 9; heliocen- tric system, 68, 139; dimensional figures, 83; cultural significance, 330-331

Ataraxia, Stoic ideal, 343, 347, 351, 361

Atheism, and "God", 3ii«.; as definite phe- nomenon, position, 408, 409; cultural basis of structure, 409; and toleration, 410, 411

Athene, as goddess, i68

Athens, and Paris, 2.7; culture city, 31; as religious, 358

Athtar, temples, xio

Atlantis, and voyages of Northmen, 33i».

Atmosphere, in painting, 2.87

Atomic theories, Boscovich's, 3i4«.; cultural basis, 384-387, 419; disintegration hypoth- eses, 4x3

INDEX iii

Augustan Age, Atticism, i8».

Augustine, Saint, and time, 124, 140; and Jesus,

347; contemporaries, table i Augustus, as epoch, 140; statue, 195 Aurelian, favourite god, 406; contemporaries,

table iii Avalon, and Valhalla, 401 Avesta. See Zend Avesta Aviation, Leonardo's interest, 179 Avicenna, on light, 381; contemporaries, table i Axum, empire, and world-history, 16, 108, 2.o9«.,

2-2-3

Baader, Franz X. von, and dualism, 307

Baal, shrines as basilicas, xo9«.; cults, 406, 407; contemporaries, table i

Baalbek, basilica, 2.o9«. ; Sun Temple' as pscudo- morphic, zio

Babylon, and time, 9, 15; geographical science, 10; place in history, 17; autumnal city, 79

Baccio della Porta. See Bartholommeo

Bach, John Sebastian, contemporaries, 17, iix, 417, table ii; as analysist, 6i; contemporary mathematic, 78; fugue, 130; and dominance of music, 131; and popularity, 243; pure music, 183; ease, 191; ethical passion, 355; God-feeling, 394

Bachofen, Johann J., Classical ideology, 2.8; on stone, 188

Backgrounds, in Renaissance art, 137; in Western painting, 139; in Western gardening, 140. See also Depth-experience

Bacon, Francis, Shakespeare controversy, i35«.

Bacon, Roger, world-conception, 99; and mechan- ical necessity, 391; contemporaries, table i

Bahr, Georg, architecture, 185

Baghdad, autumnal city, 79; contemporary cities, 112.; philosophy of school, 148, 306, 307; contemporaries of school, table i

Ballade, origin, 1x9

Bamberg Cathedral, sculpture, 2.35

Barbarossa, symbolism, 403

Baroque, mathematic, 58, 77; musical associa- tion, 87, 2.x8«., 130; as stage of style, xox; sculpture as allegory, zi9«.; origin, 2.36; depth- experience in painting, 139; in gardening, 140; portraits, 2.65; Michelangelo's relation, 2.77; philosophy, reason and will, 308; soul, 313, 314; contemporaries, table ii. See also Art

Bartolommeo, Fra (Baccio della Porta), and line, 2.80; dynamic God-feeling, 394

Basilica, as pseudomorphic type, 2.09, xio; and Western cathedral, xii, 124; contemporaries, table ii

Basilica of Maxentius (Constantine), Arabian influences, 2.12.

IV

INDEX

Basra School, philosophy, 148, 306; contempo- raries, table i

Basso continuo. See Thoroughbass.

Baths of Caracalla, Syrian workmen, 11 1, iix

Battista of Urbino, portrait, 179

Baudelaire, Pierre Charles, sensuousness, 35; autumnal accent, Z4i; and the decadent, 191

Bayle, Pierre, and imperialism, 150

Bayreuth. See Wagner

Beauty, transience, cultural basis, 194; as Classi- cal rdle, 317

Become, Civilization as, 31, 46; philosophers, 49«.; explained, relationships, 53; and learn- ing, 56; and extension, 36; and mathematical number, 70, 95 ; relation to nature and history, 94-98, loi, 103; and symbolism, loi; and causality and destiny, 119; and problem of time, in; and mortality, 167; in art, 194. See also Bccomiag; Causality; Nature; Space

Becoming, and history, 15, 94-98, loi, 103; philosophers, 49«.; explained, relationships, 53; intuition, 56; and direction, 56; and chronological number, 70; relation to nature and destiny and causality, 119, 138, 139; and mathematics, 115, ii6; in art, 194. See also Become; Destiny; History; Time

Beech, as symbol, 396

Beethoven, Ludwig van, contemporary mathe- matic, 78, 90; and pure reason, 110; and imagination, rio; orchestration, x}i; in- wardness, "brown" music, 151, x^z, ^.^^».; music as confession, 164; period, z84; strain- ing, 191; contemporaries, table ii

Bell, as Western symbol, i34«.

Bellini, Giovanni, and portrait, vp., 173

Benares, autumnal city, 99

Benedetto da Maiano, and ornament, 138; and portrait, xjz

Bentham, Jeremy, and imperialism, 150; and economic ascendency, 367; contemporaries, table i

Berengar of Tours, controrversy, 185

Berkeley, George, on mathematics and faith, 78«.

Berlin, megalopolitanism, 33; as irreligious, 79, 358

Berlioz, Hector, contemporaries, table ii

Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, contemporaries, 400, table i

Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo, architecture, 87, 131, r44, 145; contemporaries, table ii

Bcmward, Saint, as architect, io7«., io6

Berry, EHike of, Books of Hours, 139

Beyle, Henri. See Stendhal

Bible, and periodic history, 18; as Arabian symbol, 148. See also Christianity

Biederraeyer, contemporaries, table ii

Binchois, figide, music, 2.30

Binomial theorem, discovery, 75

Biography, and portraiture, 11; Cultures and, 13, 14; and character, 316; and Western tragedy, 318. See also Portraiture

Biology, and preordained life-duration, 108; in politics, 156; as weakest science, 157; and Civilization, 360

Bismarck, Fiirst von, wars and cultural rhythm, iicOT.; and destiny, 145; morale, 349

Bizet, Georges, "brown" music, 151

Blood, Leonardo's discovery of circulation, Z78

Blue, symbolism, Z45, 246

Boccaccio, Giovanni, and Homer, i68«.

Body, as symbol of Classical Culture, 174; and geometrical systems, iy6n.; in Arabian phi- losophy, X48; and soul. Classical expression, 159-161. See also Sculpture; Spirit

Bocklin, Arnold, act and portrait, ryin.; paint- ing, 189, 190

Boehme, Jakob, contemporaries, table i

Bogomils, iconoclasts, 383

Bohr, Niels, and mass, 385, 419

Boltzmann, Ludwig, on probability, 38o».

Boniface, Saint, as missionary, 360

Book, and cult-building, i97«.

Books of Hours, Berry's, 139

Books of Numa, burning, 411

Boomerang, and mathematical instinct, 58

Borgias, Hellenic sorriness, 173

Boscovich, Ruggiero Giuseppe, and physics, 3i4»., 415

Botticelli, Sandro, Dutch influence, 136; gold- smith, 137; and portrait, 171, 171

Boucher, Frangois, and body, 171

Boullc, Andr6 C, Chippendale's ascendency, 1 5 o«.

Bourbons, analogy, 39

Boyle, Robert, and element, 384

Brahmanism, transvaluation, 351; Buddhist in- terpretation of Karma, 357; contemporaries of Brahmanas, table i. See also Indian Culture

Brain, and soul, 367

Bramante, Donato d' Angnolo, plan of St. Peter's, 184

Brancacci Chapel, 137, 179

Brass musical instruments, colour expression, 15 1«.

Bronze, and Classical expression, 153; patina, 153; Michelangelo and, 176

Brothers of Sincerity, on light, 381; contem- poraries, table i

Brown, symbolism of studio, 130, i88; Leonardo and, 180

Bruckner, Anton, end-art, 113, "brown" music, 131

Bruges, loss of prestige, 33; as religious, 358

INDEX

Brunelleschi, Filippo, linear perspective, x4o;

and antique, 2.75«.; architecture, 313 Bruno, Giordano, world, 56; martyrdom, 68; and vision, 96; esoteric, 32.6; astronomy, 331; contemporaries, table i Brutus, M. Junius, character, 5 Buckle, Henry T., and evolution, 371 Buddhism, and Civilization, end-phenomenon, materialism, 3z, 351, 356, 357, 359, 409; and state, 138; Nirvana, 178, 357, 361; morale, 341, 347; scientific basis of ideas, 353; moral philosophy, 355; as peasant religion, 356«.; and Christianity, 357; and contemporaries, 357. 358, 361, table i; and diet, 361. See also Religion Burckhardt, Jacob, Classical ideology, z8; on

Renaissance, 2.34 Buridan, Jean, Occamist, 381 Burlesque, Classical, 30, 3x0 Busts, Classical, as portraits, i.€^, tji. Buxtehude, Dietrich, organ works, iio Byron, George, Lord, and Civilization, no Byzantinism, as Civilization, 106; and portrai- ture, i3o«.; style, 2.06; Acanthus motive, 2.15; allegorical painting, ii9«.; contemporaries, tables ii, iii. See also Arabian Culture Byzantium, tenement houses, 34«.

Cabeo, Nicolaus, theory of magnetism, 414

Caccias, character, 1x9

Caesar, C. Julius, analogies, 4, 38; and news- paper, 5; and democracy, 5; conquest of Gaul, 36«.; practicality, 38; and calendar and duration, 133; and economic organization, 138; and destiny, 139; bust, isji.; morale, 349; Divus Julius, 407; contemporaries, table iii

Ca;sarism, and money, 36; contemporary periods, table iii

Calchas, cult, 185

Calculus, and Classical astromony, 69; limit- idea, 86; Newtonian and Leibnizian, ii6«.; and religion, 170; as Jesuit style, 4iz; basis threatened, 419. See also Mathematics

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, plays as confession, 164

Calendar, Cassar's, 133

Caliphate, Diocletian's government, 7Z, zi2.; deification of caliph, 405

Callicles, ethic, 351

Calvin, John, predestination and evolution, i4o«., 141; and Western morale, 348; variety of religion, 394; contemporaries, table i

Can Grande, statue, i.-j'l

Cannas, as climax, 36

Canning, George, and imperialism, i49«.

Cantata, and orchestra, 130

Canzoni, character, iZ9

Caracalla, and citizenship and army, 335, 407

Carcassonne, restoration, Z54«.

Cardano, Girolamo, and numbers, 75

Care, and distance, iz; cultural attitude, relation to state, 136, 137; and maternity, Z67

Carissimi, Giacomo, music, pictorial character, Z30, Z83

Carneades, and mechanical necessity, 393

Carstens, Armus J., naturalism, ziz

Carthage. See Punic Wars

Carthaginians, and geography, io«., 333

Castle, and cathedral, 195, ZZ9

Catacombs, art, i37«., ZZ4

Categories, tabulation, 1Z5

Catharine of Siena, Saint, and Gothic, Z35

Cathedral, as ornament, 195; and castle, ZZ9; forest-character, 396; contemporaries, table ii. See also Gothic; Romanesque

Cato, M. Porcius, Stoicism and income, 33

Cauchy, Augustin Louis, notation, 77; mathe- matic problem, 85; and infinitesimal calculus, 86; mathematical position, 90; goal of analy- sis, 418; contemporaries, table i

Causality, history and Kantian, 7; and histori- ography, z8; and number, 56; and pure phe- nomenon, iii«.; and destiny and history, limited domain, 117-izi, 151, 156-159; and space and time, 119, izo, 14Z; and principle, izi; and grace, 141; and reason, 308; and Civilization, 360; and destiny in natural science, 379; and mechanical necessity, 39Z- 394. See also Become; Destiny; Nature; Space

Cavern, as symbol, zoo, Z09, Z15, ZZ4

Celtic art, as Arabian, Z15

Centre of time, and history, 103

Ceres, materiality, 403

Cervantes, Miguel de, tragic method, 319

Ceylon, Mahavansa, iz

Cezanne, Paul, landscapes, Z89; striving, Z9Z

Cha^ronea, issue at battle, 35

Chalcedon, Council of, and Godhead, Z09, Z49

Chaldeans, astronomy. Classical reaction, 147

Chamber-music, as summit of Western art, Z31

Chan-Kwo period, contemporaries, table iii

Character, and person, Z59; and will. Western ego, 314, 335; Cultures and study, 316; gesture as Classical substitute, 316; in Western tragedy. Classical contrast, 317-3Z6. See also Morale; Soul

Chardin, Jean B. S., and French tradition, Z89

Chares, Helios and gigantomachia, Z91

Charity. See Compassion

Charlemagne, analogies, 4, 38; contemporaries, table iii

Charles XII of Sweden, analogy, 4

vi INDEX

Chartrcs Cathedral, sculpture, 135, i6i

Chemistry, thoughtless hypotheses, i^6n.; no Classical, 383; Western so-called, 384; as Arabian system, 384, 393; new essence, en- tropy, 416. See also Natural science

Cheops, dynasty, 58«.

Chephrcn, dynasty, 58«.; tomb-pyramid, 196,103

Chian, contemporaries, table iii

Children, Western portraiture, i66-2.68. See also Motherland.

Chinese Culture, historic feeling, 14; imperial- ism, 37; philosophers, 41, 45; time-measure- ment, i34«.; ancestoral worship, i35«.; and care, 136; attitude toward state, 137; economic organization, 138; destiny-idea, landscape as prime symbol, 190, 196, 103; lack of early art survivals, 1900.; and tutelage, 113; music, xi8; gardening, 140; bronzes, patina, 15 3».; por- traiture, x6o, 161; Civilization, 195; soul, per- spective as expression, 3io».; passive morale, 315, 341, 347; and discovery, 333, 336; polit- ical epochs, table iii. See also Cultures

Chippendale, Thomas, position, I'yon.

Chivalry, southern type, 13 3«.

Chorus, in art-history, 191; in Classical tragedy,

324

Chosrocs-Nushirvan, art of period, 103

Ch6u Li, on Ch6u dynasty, 137

Ch6u Period, and care, 137; contemporaries, table iii

Christianity, comparisons, 4; Eastern, and his- torical-periods, 2.i«.; and poor Stoics, 33».; as Arabian, jl, 402.; Mary-cult, Madonna in art, 136, 167, x68; destiny in Western, 140; architectural expression of early, io8-xii; col- our and gold as symbols, 147-150; in Western art, spiritual space, 2.79; dualism in early, 306; "passion", 32.o«.; Eastern, and home, 335; Western transformation of morale, 344, 347, 348; and Buddhism, 357; of Fathers and Cru-" sades, 357».; missionarism, 360; God-man problem as alchemistic, 383; and mechanical necessity, miracles, 391, 393; elements of Western, 399-401; foreign gods as titles, 4o8». See also Religion

Chronology, relation of Classical Culture, 9, 10; as number, 97, i53«.; and the when, ii6; and archxology, 134. See also History

Chrysippus, and Stoicism, 33, 358; and corpo- reality, 177

Chuang-tsii, practical philosophy, 45

Chun-Chiu Period, contemporaries, tabic iii

Cicero, M. Tullius, analogy, 4

Cimabue, Giovanni, and nature, 191; and Byz- antine art, 138; and Francis of Assisi, i49n.; and portraiture, 173

Cimarosa, Domcnico, ease, 191

Cistercians, soul, 360

Citizenship, Classical concept, 334. See also Politics

Civilization, defined, as destiny of a Culture, 31- 34, 106, 151, 353, 354, and the "become", 31, 46; and megalopolitanism, 31, 35; money as symbol, 34-36; and economic motives, 35; imperialism, 36; destiny of Western, 37, 38; and scepticism, 46, 409; Alexander-idea, 150; English basis of Western, 151, 371; Western, effect on history, 151; so-called art, 197, 193- 195; style histories, 107; Western painting, plein-air, 151, 2.88, 189; and gigantomachia, Z91; Manet and Wagner, 193; transvaluation of values, striving, 351, 353; Nihilism and in- ward finishcdness, 351; manifestations, 353, 354; problematic and plebeian morale, 354, 355; and irreligion, 358; diatribe as phenome- non, 359; and biological philosophies, philo- sophical essence, 361, 367; natural science, 417; contemporary spiritual epochs, table i; con- temporary art epochs, table ii; contemporary political epochs, table iii. See also Cultures

Clarke, Samuel, and imperialism, 150

Classical Culture, philosophy, culmination, 3, 45; ahistoric basis, 8-10, izn., 97, 103, 131- 135, 154, 155, 164, 363; and chronology, 9, io«.; and geography, ion.; religious expres- sion, bodied pantheon, later monotheistic tendencies, 10, ii, 13, 187, 311, 397, 398, 402.- 408; and mortality, funeral customs, 13, 134; portraiture, 13, 130, 164, 2.65, 169, xjt; and archjcology, 14; and measurement of time, 15; mathematic, 15, 63-65, 69, 77, 83, 84, 90; contemporary Western periods, z6; Western views, ideology, 2.7-31, 76, 81, 2.37, 138, 143, 154, 170, 313; "Classical" and "antikc", z8».; civilization, Rome, Stoicism, 31-34, 36, 44, 194, 351; cosmology, astronomy, 63, 68, 69, 147, 330; cultural significance of mathe- matic, 65-67, 70; and algebra, 71; surviving forms under Arabian Culture, 71, 73, 108; op- position to Western soul, 78; and space, 81-

84, 88, i75«.; "smallness", 83; relation to proportion and function, 84, 85; popularity,

85, 154, 316-318; and destiny-idea, dramatic illustration, 119, 130, 143, 146, 147, 317-316, 414; care and sex attitude, family and home, 136, 166-168, 334-337; attitude toward state, 137, 147; and economic organization, 138; actualization of the corporeal only, sculpture, 176-178, 115, 159-161; soul, attributes, 183, 304, 305; architectural expression, 184, 198, 114; weak style, 103; art-work and sense- organ, no; and music, 113, 117; and form

INDEX

vii

and content, Z4i; and composition, 143 ; colour, 2.45-147; nature idea, statics, 163, 382.-384, 391; and discovery, 178; painting, 2.87; will- less-ness, 309, 310; lack of character, gesture as substitute, 316; art and time of day, 32.5; morale, ethic of attitude, 341, 341, 347, 351; and "action", 342.«.; cult and dogma, 401, 410; and strange gods, 404; scientific periods, 414; spiritual epochs, table i; art epochs, table ii; political epochs, table iii. See also Art; Cultures; Renaissance; Science

Classicism, and dying Culture, 108; defined, 197; period in style, 107

Claude Lorrain, landscape as space, 184; "sing- ing" picture, 2.19; and ruins, 154; colour, 146, i88; period, 2.83; landscape as portrait, 187

Cleanliness, cultural attitude, 2.60

Cleisthenes, contemporaries, table iii

Cleomenes III, contemporaries, table iii

Cleon, and economic organization, 138

Clepsydra, Plato's, 15

Clock, and historic consciousness, 14; religious aspect, i5«.; cultural attitude, 131, 134

Clouds, in paintings, 139

Cluniac reform, and architecture, 185

Clytsemnestra, and Helen, i68

Cnidian Aphrodite, 108, 2.68

Cnossosart, X2.4«., 193; contemporaries, table ii

Cobbett, William, population theory, i85«.

Cognition, and nature, 94, lox, 103

Colleoni, Bartolommeo, statue, 138, 171

Colosseum, and real Rome, 44; form type, 104; contemporaries, table ii

Colossus of Rhodes, and gigantomachia, 191

Colour, Goethe's theory, i57«., i58«.; and depth-experience, 2.41; Classical and Western use, symbolism, 145-147; Western blue and green, 145; Arabian Culture and gold, 147- 149; brushwork and motion-quality, 149; studio-brown, as symbol, 150, 188; Leonardo's sense, 180; f kin-air, 188. See also Painting

Columbus, Christopher, and Spanish ascendency, 148; and Leonardo, 178; and space and will, 310, 337; spiritual result, 334

Column, as symbol, 166, 184, 114, 2.6o«., 345; Classical orders, 104; and arch, 114, 136

Compass, symbolism, 333

Compassion, times and meaning, 347-351; and Socialism, 361

Composition in art, cultural basis, 143

Comprehension, qualities, 99

Comte, Auguste, provincialism, 14; and eco- nomic ascendency, 367, 373; contemporaries, table i

Confession, as Western symbol, 131, 140, 2.61, 164; absence in Renaissance art, 173

Confucius, and actuality, 41; and analogies, 357 Conic sections, contemporaries, tabic i Conquest, as Western concept, 336 Consciousness, phases, 154 Consecutives in church music, 188 Conservation of energy, and causality, 393; and

first law of thermodynamics, 413 ; and concept

of infinity, 418; and entropy, 410-414 Constable, John, significance of colour, 151; and

impressionism, 188 Constantine the Great, and artistic impotence,

2.94; as caliph, 405; religion, 407 Constantinople. See Byzantium; Haggia Sophia Consus, materiality, 403 Contemplation, defined, 95 Contemporaneity, intercultural, 16, iii«., 177,

ioi«., 110; number paradigm, 90; Classical

sculpture and Western music, 116, 183, 184,

191; in physical theories, 386; spiritual epochs,

table i; culture epochs, table ii; political

epochs, table iii Contending States, period in China, homology,

III Content, and form, 141, 170 Contrition, sacrament as Western symbol, 161,

163 Conversion, impossibility, 345 Copernicus, Classical anticipation of system, 68,

139; and destiny, 94; discovery and Western

soul, 310, 330, 331 Corelli, Arcangelo, sonatas, 116, 183; and domi- nance of music, 131; colour expression, i5i«.;

Catholicism, i68«. Corinth, and unknown gods, 404 Corinthian column, contemporaries, table ii.

See also Column Corneille, Pierre, and unities, 313 Corot, Jean B. C, colour, 146, 189; and nude,

171; impressionism, 186; landscape as portrait,

187; ease, 191 Cosmogonies, contemporaries, table i Cosmology, cultural attitude, 63, 68, 69, 147,

330-331. See also Astronomy Counterpoint, and Gothic, 119; and fugue, 130.

See also Music Counter-Reformation, Michelangelo and spirit,

175 Couperin, Frangois, pastoral music, 140; colour

expression, i5i«. Courbet, Gustave, landscapes, 188-190 Courtyards, Renaissance, 135 Cousin, Victor, and economic ascendency, 367 Coysevox, Antoine, sculpture, 131; decoration,

2-45 Cranach, Lucas, and portraiture, 170 Crassus Dives, M. Licinius, and city of Rome, 34

VIU

Cremation, as cultural symbol, 134

Q-csilas, and portraiture, i^oa., 1.6^

Crete, inscriptions, ii«.; Minoan art, 198

Cromwell, Oliver, and imperialism, 149; con- temporaries, table iii

Crusades, symbolism, i^n., 198; and Trojan War, 17; Christianity, 35 7».; contemporaries, table iii

Ctesiphon, school, 63

Cult and dogma, cultural attitudes, 401, 410, 411; in natural science, 411

Cultures, Spengler's morphological theory, xi; obligatory stages, symbols, 3, 4, 6, 38, 39; superficial and real analogies, 4, 6, 17, 38; _ theory of distinct cycles, xi, xx, 31, 78; di- vergent viewpoints, X3, 46, 131; as organisms, mortality, x6, 104, 109, 167; contemporary periods, x6, iixn., 177, xox«., xxo; Civiliza- tion as destiny, 31-34, 106, X5X, 353, 354; symmetry, 47; and notion of the world, lan- guage, 55; physiognomic meaning as essence of history, 55, loi, 104, 105; mathematical aspects, separation, 57-63, 67, 70; and uni- versal validity, 60, 146, 178-180, xox, X87; number-thought and world-idea, 70; stages, 106, 107; application of term "habit" or "style", 108, X05; recapitulation in life of individuals, no; homologous forms, in; separate destiny-ideas, 1x9, 145; comparative study, i45«.; as interpretation of soul, 159, 180, 30X-304, 307, 313, 314; cultural and in- tcrcultural macrocosm, 165; particular, and nature, 169; kind of extension as symbol, 173- 175; actualization of depth-experience, 175; plurality of prime symbols, 179, 180; tutelage, X13; art forms and spiritualities, X14-X16; arts of form as symbolic expression, X19; signifi- cance of species of art, XXX-XX4; as bases of morale, 315, 345-347; and times of day, 3x5; and nature-law, 377-380, 38X, 387; scientific period, 381; religious springtimes, 399-40X; renunciation, second religiousness, 4x4; charac- teristics of seasons, table i; contemporary art epochs, table ii; contemporary political epochs, table iii. See also Arabian; Art; Chinese; Classical; Egyptian; History; In- dian; Macrocosm; Morphology; Nature; Spirit; Western

Cupid, as art motive, z66

Cupola. Set Dome

Curtius Rufus, Quintus, biography of Alexan- der, 4

Cusanus, Nikolaus. See Nicholas of Cusa

Cuyp, Albert, landscape as portrait, X87

Cyaxares, and Henry the Fowler, 4

Cybcle, cult, 406

INDEX

Cynics, practicality, 45; morale, X03, 34X; and digestion, 361; contemporaries, table i

Cypress, as symbol, 396

Cyrenaics, practicality, 45; contemporaries, table i

Dante Alighieri, historical consciousness, 14, 56, 14X, 159; influence of Joachim of Floris, xo; and vision, 96; homology, in; and popularity, X43; and confession, X73; and psychology, 319; and time of day, 3X5«.; esoteric, 3x8; morale, 355; variety of religion, 394; contem- poraries, table i

Dan ton, Georges, adventurer, 149

Darwinism and evolution, and Socialism, 35, 370-37X; and practical philosophy, 45; mor- phology and vision, io4«., 105; Goethe and, iii«.; and teleology, ixo; and destiny, 140; and cultural art-theory, i4i».; and useful- ness, 155; and biological politics, 156; nature and God, 31X; anticipation, Darwin's politi- cal-economic application, 369-373; contempo- raries, table i

Daumicr, Honor6, act and portrait, rjin.; and grand style, X90

David, Pierre Jean, naturalism, xix

Dea Carlestis, 406

Death, and historical consciousness, 13; and become, 54, 167; Cultures and funeral customs, 134, 135, 185; and space, 166; and world-fear and symbolism, 166; stone as emblem, 188; and ornament, 195

Decoration, architectural, 196; Gothic, and bodilessncss, 199; Arabian, xo8, xix; mosaic, X14; Acanthus motive, X15. See also Ornament

Dedekind, Richard, notation, 77, 95

Definitions, and destiny, xiv; fundamental, 53-56

Deism, cause, 187, 41X; concept, 3ix«.; Baroque, and mechanics, 41X. See also Religion

Deities, cultural basis, 31X. See also Religion

Delacroix, Ferdinand V. E., and impressionism, x88; contemporaries, table ii

Delphi, Polygnotus's frescos, X43

Demeter cult, 83; spring festivals, 3x0; con- temporaries, table i

Demeter of Knidos, statue, 136

Demetrius of Alopcke, and portraiture, 130, X69

Democracy, decay by formalism, 35; contempo- rary periods, table iii. See also Politics

Dcmocritus, and corporeality, 177; and ego, 311; cosmology, 331; atoms, 385; Leibniz as con- temporary, 386; and motion, 389; and me- chanical necessity, 39X-394; contemporaries, table i

Demosthenes, statue, X70

INDEX

Depth-experience, significance, i68, 169, 171- 174; and number, 171; and time, 171, 173; realization as cultural symbol, 173-175; in Western painting, ^39, 146; in Western garden- ing, r4o; and destiny, 2.41; and philosophy in art, 2.43; in portrait, ^63, z66; and impres- sionism, 2.85-^87; and will, 311; in Socialism, 361; and natural science, 380, 386, 394; Western God-feeling, 395; cathedral and organ, 396. See also Destiny; Space

Desargues, Girard, mathematic, 75

Descartes, Rene, civic world-outlook, 33; and actuality, 42.; style, 61; mathematics and re- ligion, 66; relation to Classical mathematic, 69; and new number-idea, 74, 75, 81, 88, 90, 12.6, 188; contemporaries, iii, table i; and Jansenists, 3i4«.; as thinker, 366; thinking and being, 387; on force, 413

Des Pres, Josquin, music, 130

Destiny, and pessimism, xiv; historical, 3, 4, 6, 38-41; as logic of time, 7; acceptance, 40, 44; in World War, 47; fulfilment of Western mathematic, 90; of a Culture, 106, 145; and causality, 117-111; soul and predestination, 117; organic logic, 117; and time and space, 119, iio; and idea, iii; in art, revolts, 1x7, iz8, Z33; separate cultural ideas, illustrations, 1x9-131, 145-149, 189, 190, 4x4; in Western Christianity, 140, 141; and incident, 138-141, 144; and nature, 141; Classical "fate", body and personality, 143, 147; youth, 151; and Western depth-experience, 141; patina as symbol, 153; and motherhood, 2.67; Western, and painting, Z76«.; ethic and soul's view, 3021, 346, 355; and will, 308; and Civilization, 360; and causality in natural science, 379; and decay of exact science, 412.-42.4. See also Becom- ing; Causality; Civilization; History; Time

Devil, disappearance, 187; and Arabian dualism, 312., 363

Diadochi, period as episode, 149, 151

Diagoras, character of atheism, 4o8«. ; condem- nation, 411

Diatribe, as phenomenon of Civilization, 359

Dido, cult, 4o6«.

Diet, and Civilization, 361

Diez, Feodor, significance of colour, 151

Differential calculus, as symbol, 15. See also Calculus

Dimension, abstract notion, 89; significance of depth, 168; singularity, i69«.

Dinzenhofer, Kilian I., architecture, 185

Diocletian, as caliph, 721, 2.12., 405; as epoch, 149; and Mithras 406

Diogenes, morale, 103; and deity, 313; Indian kinship, 347, 357

, IX

Dionysiac movement, Alexander and legend, 8;

contemporaries, homology, 17, no, table i;

as revolt, Z33, 356; spring festival, 310, 32.1, 314 Dionysius I, contemporaries, table iii Diophantus, algebra, and Arabian Culture, 63,

71-73 > 383

Dipylon vases, 73, 107, 196

Direction, and time and becoming, 54, 56; and extension, 99, 172.; and dimension, i69«.; and will, 308; and aim, 361. See also Time

Discant, music, 2.2.9

Discobolus, Myron's, 163, 165

Discovery, as Western trait, 178, 179, 331; and space and will, 310, 337; spiritual results, 334

Divinities. See Religion

Dogma and cult, cultural attitude, 401, 410, 411; in natural science, 41Z

Doliche, Baal, 407

Dome, as Arabian art expression, zio

Dome of the Rock, characteristics, zoo

Dominicans, influence of Joachim of Floris, zo

Domitian, contemporaries, table iii

Donatello, and Gothic, zz5«.; "David", Z65; and portrait, Z7Z

Doric, column as symbol, 9, 195; and Gothic, Z7; timber style, 13Z; and Ionic, Z05; and Egyptian, Z13; Western exclusion, 345; con- temporaries, table ii, iii. See also Architecture; Column

Dostoyevski, Feodor M., and Europe, i6«.; Raskolnikov's philosophy, 309; and compas- sion, 350

Drama, cultural basis. Classical and Western, 1Z8-131, i4i»., 143, 147, 148, Z03, Z55, 317- 3ZZ, 347; German, Z90; development of Clas- sical, 3Z0, 3Z1; cultural basis of form, unities, 3ZZ, 3Z3; undeveloped Western, 3Z3; Classi- cal elimination of individuality, 3Z3; chorus, 3Z4; and time of day, 3x4; attitude toward scene, 3x5; and cultural basis of morale, 347; and philosophy of Western activism, 368, 37Z; Classical, and atomic theory, 386

Dresden, architecture, Z07, Z85 ; chamber music, Z3Z

Droem, autumnal accent, Z41

Dryads, passivity, 336; materiality, 403

Dschang Yi, and imperialism, 37

Dualism, in Arabian Culture, 305-307, 363; and will and reason, 309; in religion, 31Z

Diihring, Eugen Karl, position in Western ethics,

373 Diirer, Albrecht, historical heads, io3«.; colour,

Z45, Z50; and act and portrait, Z70 Dufay, Guillaume, music, in Italy, Z30, Z36 Duns Scotus, historical place, 71; contempo- raries, table i

INDEX

Dunstaplc, John, music, 2.yo Duration. See Life Durham, palatinate, 349n. Dyck, Anthony van. See Van Dyck Dynamics, as Western system, 384, 393. See also Natural science

Eckhardt, Meistcr, on imitation, 191; mysticism, 113; egoism, 335; wisdom and intellect, 409; contemporaries, table i

Economic motives. See Money

Economic organization, cultural attitude toward care, 138

Economics, and Western practical ethics, 367- 369. See also Politics; Socialism

Eddas, space-expression, 185, 187; and Western religion, 400, 413; contemporaries, table i

Edessa, school, 63, 381; and Arabian art, zo9; Baal, 407

Edfu, temple, 194

Edward I of England, and archery, 333«.

Edward III of England, and archery, 3330.

Egoism, in Western Culture, x6i, 302., 309, 335

Egyptian Culture, historic aspect, 12.; and im- mortality, 13; and pure number, 69; historical basis, funeral custom, 135; and care, 136; and Mary-cult, 137; attitude toward state, 137; economic organization, 138; stone as symbol, 188; destiny-idea, path as prime symbol, 188, 189; architectural expression, 189, lox; brave style, 10I-X03; and tutelage, xiy, streets, Z24; art composition, i43; sculpture, X48«., x66; and portrait, z6i; Civilization, X94, 195; view of soul, 305; morale, 315; and dis- covery, 331; and Socialism, 347; and man- deification, 405«.; art epochs, table ii; political epochs, table iii. See also Cultures; arts by name, especially Architecture

Egyptianism, contemporary periods, table iii

Eichendorff, Joseph von, poetry, 189

Elcatic philosophy, and motion, 305«., 388, 390

Elements, cultural concepts of physical, 383, 384. See also Atomic theories; Natural science

Eleusinian mysteries, dramatic imitation, 32x»

Elis, treaty, ion.

Emigration, cultural attitude, 336

Empedocles, elements, 317, 383, 384; on atoms, 386

Emperor- worship, 405, 407, 411

Empire style, as Classicism, 107; contemporaries, table ii

Encyclopedists, contemporaries, table i

Energy, and voluntas, 3io«.

Engels, Fricdrich, and Hegelianism, 367; posi- tion in Western ethics, 373

England, Manchester system and Western Civili-

zation, X9, 151, 371; imperialism and Napole- onic epoch, 149-151

Enlightenment, Age of, and movement, 155; effect on monasticism, 3i6«.; and tolerance, 343; and cult and dogma, 411

Entelechy, ahistoric aspect, 15

Entropy, theory, formulations, 410; effect, 411-

4M

Epaminondas, and invented history, 11

Ephesus, Council of, and Godhead, 109

Epic, and religion, 399-40X

Epictetus, and Jesus, 347

Epicureanism, practicality, 45; morale, 315; and will, 341, 341; contemporaries, table i

Epicurus, Indian kinship, 347; character of Nihilism, 357; and Socialism, 358; and mathematics, 366; and ethics, 367; contem- poraries, table i

Epigoni, and Socialism, 374

Epistemology, and history, 119, 355

Epochs, personal and impersonal, 148. Set also Incident; Destiny

Epos, contemporaries of popular, table i

Erastosthencs, as creator, 4x5

Erechtheum, in style history, 108, X07

Eroticism. See Sex

Esoterics, in Western Culture, 3x6-3x9. See also Popularity

Etching, Leonardo's relation, x8i; as Western art, X90

Ethics, relation to Culture, 354; period in phil- osophy, 365-367; socio-economic character of Western, 367-369; dramatical presentation of Western, 368, 37X; evolution theory, as- pects, 369-37X; landmarks of Western, 373, 374; exhaustion of period, 374. See also Metaphysics; Morale; Philosophy

Etruscan, round-buildings, xii«.; contemporaries of discipline, table i

Eucharist, cultural significance, 185, 186; as centre of Western Christianity, X47

Euclid, mathematical style, 59, 64, 65; limita- tion of geometry, 67, 88; mathematical posi- tion, 90; parallel axiom, i76». See also Geometry

Eudoxus, and higher powers, 66; and infinity, 69, 69».; and mathematic, 78, 90

Euler, Lconhard, mathematic, 78, 90; and dif- ferentials, 86; and time, 1x6; contemporaries, X31, table i

Euripides, unpopularity, 35; foreshadowing by, iii; end-art, XX3; tragic method, 319

Europe, as historical term, i6».

Evolution. See Darwinism

Exhaustion-method of Archimedes, 69

Experience, and historical sense, 10; lived and

learned, 55; in Western concept of nature, 393; and faith, 394; and theory, 395 Experiment, and experience, 393 Exploration. See Discovery- Expressionism, farce, 194 Extension, and direction, 99, 171; and reason,

308. See also Space Eyck, Jan van, portraits, 171, 309; contempo- raries, table ii Eye, in sculpture, 319

Fagades, cultural significance, X2.4; Renaissance,

2-35

Fact, and theory, 378

Fairies, cultural attitude, 336, 403

Faith, and Western mathematic, 78. See also Religion

Family, Western portraits, i66; Civilization and race-suicide, 359. See also Motherhood

Faraday, Michael, and theory, 100, 378, 416

Farnese Bull, theatrical note, ^91

Fate, cultural attitude, 1x9. See also Destiny

Faunus, materiality, 403

Faustian soul, explained, 183. See also Western Culture

Fauxbourdon, music, 119

Fayum, 58«.

Fear, and Classical and Western tragedy, 311

Federigo of Urbino, portrait, X79

Feeling, and "proper," 53

Fermat, Pierre de, relation to Classical mathe- matic, 69; mathematic style, 74, 75, 90; prob- lem, 76, 77; contemporaries, table i

Feudalism, contemporary periods, table iii

Feuerbach, Anselm von, act and portrait, rjin.

Feuerbach, Ludwig A., provincialism, 2.4; posi- tion in Western ethics, 373; contemporaries, table i

Fichte, Johann G., basis of Socialism, 362., 374; esoteric, 369; and mathematics, 374; contem- poraries, table i

Fifty-year period, cultural rhythm, no

Fischer von Erlach, Johann B., architecture, 185

Flaminius, C, and economic motive, 36; and imperialism, 37

Fleury, Andre, Cardinal de, policy, 4, 349

Florence, culture city, loss of prestige 2.9, 33; cathedral, 184, 138; and Arabian Culture, in; and Renaissance, 2.33-138; and Northern art, 2.36; character as state, 173. See also Renais- sance; Savonarola

Fluxions, significance of Newton's designation, i5«.

Fontainebleau, park, 2.40

Force, as undefinable Western concept, numen, 390, 391, 398, 401, 411-417; stages of concept.

INDEX .xi

417; contradictions, 418. See also Natural

science Forest, and Western cathedrals, 396 Form, and law, 97; and music, 2.19; and con- tent, 141, 170 Forum of Nerva, craft-art, 198, 115 Forum of Trajan, ornament, 115 Fouquet, Nicolas, and gardening, 141 Four-part .movement, 2.31 Fourteen Helpers, 400 Fourth dimension, and Classical mathematic,

66y and time and space, 114 Fox, Charles James, contemporaries, table iii Fragonard, Jean H., and music, 131 France, and maturity of Western Culture, 148,

150; flein-air painting, 188, 189 Francesca, Piero della, and static space, 137;

perspective, 140; and artistic change, 179, 187 Francis of Assisi, art influence, Z49«.; morale,

348; God-feeling, 395; contemporaries, table i Francis I of France, and imperial crown, 148 Franciscans, influence of Joachim of Floris, 10 Francois Vase, composition, 2.44 Frau Holle, and Mary-cult, 167 Frau Venus, symbolism, 403 Frazer, Sir J. G., error on "Unknown God",

4o4«. Frederick the Great, and analogy, 4; on chance,

ip.n.; contemporaries, table iii Frederick William I of Prussia, and Socialism,

138; Egyptian kinship, 347 Frederick William IV of Prussia, and German

unity, 145 Free will, and destiny, 140, 141. See also Will Freedom, and historical destiny, 39 Freiburg Minster, Viking Gothic, 113 French Revolution, incident and destiny in, 148,

149 Frescobaldi, Girolamo, music, 2.30 Frescos, Classical, and time of day, i2.5«., 2.83,

3x5; Renaissance, 137, 175; displacement by

oil, Z79. See also Painting Fresnel, Augustin J., light theory, 418 Friedrich, Kaspar D., and grand style, 189 Frigga, and Mary-cult, 167 Fronde, contemporaries, table iii Front, cultural basis of architectural, 124 Fugue, style and theme, 130, 2.31 Function, as symbol of Western Culture, 74-78-

and proportion, 84; contrast with Classical

construction, 85; basis of Western number;

thought, 86, 87; Goethe's definition, 86«.;

expansion in groups, aggregates, 89, 90, 416.

See also Mathematics Funeral customs, as cultural symbol, 134, 135, 158 Future, youth as, 151; cultural relation, 363

xii INDEX

Gabricli, Andrea, music, z^i.

Gabricli, Giovanni, music, zi.6

Galen, as copyist, 415

Galileo, and natural philosophy, 7; on nature and mathematics, 57; and static idea, 136, 411; dynamic world-picture, 311; deeds of science, 355; concept of force, 386, 415, 417; and motion-problem, 390; God-feeling, 396; contemporaries, table i

Gama, Vasco da, spiritual result, 334

Gardening, as Chinese religious art, 190; West- cm, perspective, z^o, 141; Renaissance, 141; English, and ruins, 154

Gaugamela, battle, 131

Gaul, Cxsar's conquest, ^6tt.

Gauss, Karl F., style, 59; artist-nature, 61; mathematical position, 78, 85, 90, lySn.; and nonperceptual geometry, 88; contemporaries, III, table i; and dimension, 170, 172.; and popularity, 317; and metaphysics, 366; goal of analysis, 418

Gaza, temple, rii

Gedon, Frau, Lcibl's portrait, z^rn., x66n.

Generations, spiritual relation, iion.

Geography, Classical Culture and, io».; in- fluence on historical terms, i6». See also Discovery

Geology, and mineralogy, 96

Geometry, Kant's error, 6«., 170, 171; art ex- pression, 61; limitation of Classical, 67, 83, 88; Descartes and infinite, 74; Western math- matic and term, 81; Western liberation, 86, i7o«.; and arithmetic, 115, ii6; systems and corporeality, iy(>n.\ and popularity, cultural basis, 317. See also Mathematics

George, Henry, autumnal accent, 241

Gerbcrt. See Sylvester II

G6ricault, Jean L. A. T., and grand style, 190

Germany, union as destiny, 144; and music and architecture, 185; diversion from music to painting, 189

Gcrmigny des Pris, church as mosque, loi

Gcrnrodc Cathedral, simplicity, 196; and an- tique, 2.75».

Gesture, as Classical symbol, 316; in Classical tragedy, 317

Gcsu, II, church at Rome, facade, 313; God- feeling, 395

Ghassanid Kingdom, 115

Ghibcrti, Lorenzo, and Gothic, xi5«., 135, 138

Ghirlandaio, II, Dutch influence, 136

Giacomo della Porta, architecture, 314; God- feeling, 395

Gigantomachia, and decline of art, 191

Giorgione, II, and impressionism, 139; clouds, 140; colour, 151, 151; and body, 171

Giotto, childlike feeling, iii; technique, 111; and fresco- art, 137; and Francis of Assisi, X49n.; Gothic, 135, 174; God-feeling, 395; contem- poraries, table ii

Giovanni Pisano, sculpture, iiz, 2.35, 138, 163

Glass painting, Gothic and Venetian, 151; con- temporaries, table ii

Gluck, Christopher W., contemporary mathe- matics, 78, 90; character of arias, 2.i9».; music, x6o; period, 184

Gnostics, music, ix8; dualism, Z48, 306; con- temporaries, table i

Gobelins, and music, xyi.

God, Western, and will, 311. See also Religion

Gorres, Jakob J. von, and dualism, 307

Goes, Hugo van der, in Italy, 136

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, and living nature and vision, vii, 95, 96, 105, iii«., 113, 140, 154, 389; influence on Spengler, xiv; historic consciousness, 14, 141, 159; on life, lo; on mankind, ii; and world-as-history, 15, 99, 104; as Classicist, 30; and Darwinism, 35, iii»., 370; and actuality, 41, 43; as philoso- pher, 49«., 365«.; on becoming and become, 49«., 53; and intuition, 56; on vision and observation, 61; and mathematics, 61, 65, 75; and Plato's Ideas, 70; on function, 86«.; on form and law, 97; on symbols, iox«.; on historiography, 103; and morphology, io4«.. Ill; on blossoming of art, 107; display of individuality, no; foreshadowing by, in; and causal effort, nature-studies, 118, 155- 157, 4x1; on reasonable order, 113; and the Almighty, 124; dramatic form, 119, 318; des- tiny in life, 139, 145, 146, i8i; and imperi- alism, 149; theory of colour, i57«., i58«., 246; as Kant's opposite, 159; and style as organism, 2.05; and imagination, iio; North- ern pantheism, 150, 15 1«.; on soul and body, 2.59; lyrics, i86; and confession, 300; as biographer, 316; and time of day, 314; Faust as symbol of Civilization, 354; ethical passion, 355; variety of religion, 394; and cult and dogma, 411; on application of reason, 412.; and world-force, 413, 417; contemporaries, table i

Gotterdammerung, Christian form, 400

Gold, and Arabian Culture, 2.47; contrasting Classical use, i53«.

Golden Age, cultural basis of concept, 363

Golden Legend, contemporaries, 400

Gorgias, autumnal accent, 107

Gospels, contemporaries, table i

Gothic, and Doric, 17; architecture, and depth- experience, 177, 184, 185, 187, 198-2.00; ca- thedrals as ornament, 195; sculpture, nude.

INDEX

cathedral groups, 196, 197, 1x7, 2.31, i6i, z66, 171; as stage of style, xoi; and Arabian, borrowings, iii, 113; musical association, 119,130; aliveness, 133; in Italy, and Renais- sance, 134-138; esoteric, 143; Italian, and Francis of Assisi, i49«.; and later Western expression, 151; and nature, 164; philosophy, will and reason, 308; God-feeling, 395; forest, cathedral, and organ, 396; contemporaries, tables ii, iii. Set also Art; Western Culture

Goujon, Jean, sculpture, 144

Government. See Politics

Goya y Lucientes, Francisco, technique, 111; act and portrait, i7i«., 164; ease, 191; con- temporaries, table ii

Goyen, Jan van, landscape as portrait, 187

Gracchi, and economic organization, 138; as incident, 139

Grace, and destiny, 140, 141

Granada, and Arabian Culture, 116

Grassmann, Hermann G., religion and mathe- matic, 70

Gravitation, shaky hypothesis, 418

Great Mother of Pessinus, Rome and cult, 405

Greco, El, clouds, 140

Greece, and Europe, i6«. See also Classical Culture

Green, symbolism, 145, 146

Gregory VII, pope, morale, 349

Grote, George, narrow Classicalism, 19

Groups, as culmination of Western mathematic, 89, 90, 417

Griinewald, Matthias, clouds, 140; colour, 146, 150, 188; and Renaissance, 174

Guardi, Francesco, painting, 107, 110

Guercino, Giovanni F. B., colour, 146; and musical expression, 150

Guido d' Arezzo, music, 118

Guido da Siena, and Madonna, 167

Guilhem of Poitiers, professionalism, ii9«.

Gundisapora, school, 63

Gunpowder, relation to Baroque, 178«., 333

Gymnastics, and sport, 35

Habit, applied to a Culture, 108

Hadrian, analogy, 4; Pantheon as Arabian, iii

Hadrian's Villa, type, 11 1«.

Haeckel, Ernst H., and Civilization, 151; faith

in names, 397«- Hageladas, contemporaries, table ii Hagia Sophia, period, 108; miracle, i3o«.;

character, 184, 100; mosque as resumption,

II I ; acanthus motive, 115 Halo, history, i3o«.

Hals, Frans, musical expression, 150; period, 183 Hamadryads, materiality, 403

XUl

Han Dynasty, importance, 94; contemporaries, table iii

Handel, George F., and dominance of music, 131; colour expression, i5i«.; Catholicism, i68«.; oratorios, 183

Hannibal, contemporaries, iii, table iii, histori- cal position, 144; ethical exception, 349

Happiness, and Classical ethic, 351

Harakiri, and Greek suicide, io4«.

Hardenberg, Karl A. von, reorganization of Prussia, i5o«.

Harmodius, statue, i69«.

Haroun-al-Raschid, analogies, 38; contempo- raries, table ii

Hauran, basilica type, 110, now.

Haydn, Joseph, contemporary mathematic, 78, 90; orchestration, 131; colour expression, i5i«.; and Praxiteles, 184; period, 184; ease, 191; as religious, 358

Hebbel, Friedrich, provincialism, 14; and practi- cal philosophy, 45; on research and vision, 101; and cultural contrasts, 118; as dramatist, 143, 190; causal effort, 156; and Civilization, 351; nebulous aim, 363; and Hegelianism, 367; and economic ethics, 370, 371, 373; character of atheism, 4o8«.

Hegel, Georg W. F., and history, 19, 11; and mystic philosophy, 365«.; and mathematics, 366; and critique of society, 367, 374; esoteric, 369; contemporaries, table i

Heimarmene, in Classical tragedy, 310

Hel, and Valhalla, 400

Helen, and Kriemhild, 168

Helios, as god, i47«., 401

Hellenism, contemporaries, tables i, ii

Hellenistic art period, contemporaries, table ii

Helmholtz, Hermann L. F. von, time and mathe- matic, 64; on natural science and mechanics, 377; on electrolysis, 385s.; Archimedes as contemporary, 386

Henry the Fowler, and Cyaxares, 4

Henry the Lion, morale, 349

Hera, Samian temple, ii5«.

Heracles, Vatican torso, 155

Heracles legends, contemporaries, table i

Heraclitus, morale, i68«., 315, 343; popularity, 317; and Stoicism, 356; widsom and intellect, 409

Hersea, treaty, io».

Hera^um of Olympia, timber construction, 131

Herbart, Johann F., ethics, 367

Herder, Johann G. von, and history, 19

Hermes, cults, 406

Hermes Trismegistus, and chemistry, 383

Herodotus, ahistoric consciousness, 9, 146

Hersfeld, and antique, i75«.

xiv INDEX

Hcrtt, Hcinrich, and theory, 378; and motion- problem, 391, 414, 416

Hesiod, contemporaries, tabic i

Hilda, Saint, passing-bell, 134^.

Hildesheim Cathedral, simplicity, 196; and an- tique, i75«.

Hipparchus, as scientist, 9, 330

Hippasus, irrational numbers and fate, 6'^n.

History, Spengler and morphology, xi; and destiny and causality, experiencing and think- ing, 3, 118, 12.1, 151; repetitions of expression- forms, 4, xj; needed technique of analogies, 5; consciousness, 8; historic and ahistoric Cultures, 8-ii, 97, 103, I3x-i36, X54, X55, 164, 363; consciousness and attitude toward mor- tality, 13; concept of morphology, 5-8, z6, 39, 100, loi; form and form feeling, 15, 16; irrational culminative division scheme, 16-18, ix; origin of the scheme, 18; Western develop- ment of it, 19, 1.0, 94; theory of distinct Cul- tures, II, ix; provincialism of Western thinkers, 2J.-15; world-as-history, thing-be- coming, ^5, 95; single riddle, 48; time es- sence, 49; and intuition, 56; definite sense and nature, 55, 57, 94; and Culture, 55; detached view, 93; research and vision, 96, loz, 105, i4x; anti-historical and ahistorical, 97«.; chronology, 97; as original world-form, 98; "scientific", possibility, 98, 153, 154; and mechanistic world-conception, 99; and direc- tion and extension, 99, 100; portraiture of Cultures, loi, 104, 105; memory-picture, 103; elements of form-world, 103, 104; phenomena, 105, 106; future task, organic culture-history, 105, 159; stages of a Culture, 106-108; preor- dained durations, 109; homology, iii; cultural contemporaneousness, iii; enlarged possibili- ties, restoration and prediction, 111,113; teleol- ogy and materialistic conception, iii; cultural basis of viewpoint,i3i ; cultural symbols.clock; bell, funeral customs, museums, 131, 134-136, cultural feeling of care, 136-138; judgment and life, 139; incident and destiny, Western examples, 143, 148; grandiose demand of Western, 145; incidental character of Classi- cal, 146, 147; as actualizing of a soul, 147; impersonal and personal epochs, 148; effect of Civilization-period, 151; and happening, 153; causal harmonies, 153, 154, 158; con- fusion in causal method, 155-157; physiog- nomic investigation, 157; symbolism, 163; of styles, 105; and cultural art expression, 149, Z53; and portrait, 164; and will, 308; and action, 343; cultural opposition, 386; in natural science, 389. See also Becoming; Des- tiny; Nature; Politics; Spirit; Time

Hittites, inscriptions, itn.

Hobbema, Meyndert, colour, 146

Hobbes, Thomas, and actuality, 41

Holderlin, Johann C. F., narrow Classicalism,

i8«., autumnal accent, 141; and confession,

164; lyrics, z86; and fatherland, 335 Hoffmann, Ernst T. A., "Johannes Kreisler",

Z76«., 185 Hogarth, William, position, i5o»., 183 Holbein, Hans, colour, Z50; contemporaries,

table ii Holy Grail legend, cultural significance, 186,

198; elements, 113 Holy Roman Empire, contemporaries, table iii Home, Henry, on ruins, 2.54«. Home, significance of term, 33«.; cultural basis

of conception, 83, 334-337. See also Politics Homer, contemporaries, 17, table i; soul, 103, 305;

religion, x68«.; gods, 311, 313; popularity,

318; and Classical ethics, 349 Homology, historical application, iii, iii Horace, and duration, 65«., 131 Horizon, and mathematics, 171; in Western

landscape painting, 139, 2.41 Horn, Georg, and term Middle Age, 2.1. Horoscopes, cultural attitude, 147 Houdon, Jean A., sculpture as painting, 143 Hucbald, music, 2J.8 Hugo van dcr Goes. See Goes Huguenot wars, character, 33 Humboldt, Alexander von. Ethical Socialism,

374 Hus, John, contemporaries, table i Hwang-Ti, contemporaries, table iii Hygiene, as phenomenon of Civilization, 361 Hyksos Period, contemporaries, iii, tables ii,

iii; feebleness, 149 Hyksos Sphinx, 108, i6i Hypsicles, as Arabian thinker, 63

lamblichus, on statues of gods, ii6; contempo- raries, table i

Ibn-al-Haitan, on light, 381

Ibn Kurra, contemporaries, table i

Ibsen, Henrik, world-conception, 10; provincial^ ism, 2.4, 33«.; sex problem, 35; unpopularity, 35; and practical philosophy, 45; causal effort, 156; tragic method, 318; and morale, 346; and Civilization, 351; character of Nihil- ism, 357; journalism, 360; nebulous aim, 363, 364; and socio-economic ethics, 371-374

Iconoclasts, Arabian principle, 161; contempo- raries, table i

Idea, and destiny, iii

Idolatry, Arabian iconoclasm, 161; Classical attitude, 403

INDEX

XV

Iliad, spatial aspect, 198

Ilya Murometz, Russian saga, xoi».

Image, cultural basis of idea, xi6

Imagination, music as channel, lio

Imitation, qualities and aim, 191-194; opposi- tion to ornament, 194-196; period in archi- tecture, 197; in music, iz8. See also Orna- ment

Imperialism, negative character of Roman, 36; and Civilization, 36; Western destiny, 37, 38; origin of Western, Napoleon's relation, 148; cultural attitude, 336; cultural contempora- ries, table iii

Impressionism, as space, 184; beginning, 139; Leonardo's relation, 2.77; full meaning, 185- 187; later plein-air, i88; in Wagner's music, ^9^

Improvisation, as manifestation, 195

Incident, world, 142.; and destiny, 138-144, and cause, 141; and style of existence, 141-147; as basis of Western tragedy, 143; historical use, 143. See also Destiny

India, Napoleon and, 150

Indian Culture, ahistorical basis, 11, 12., 133; anonymous philosophy, ii; mathematic, 84, 178; sex attitude, 136; attitude toward state, 137; morale, passive, 315, 341, 347; Buddhism and Civilization, 351; spiritual epochs, table i. See also Buddhism; Cultures

ludo-Iranian art period, contemporaries, table ii

Infinity, and Classical mathematic, 69; in West- ern Culture, 74-76, 81-84; and new notation, 76-78; limit as a relation, 86; and Western science, 418, 417. See also Depth-experience; Space

Innocent III, pope, and Western morale, 348

Inquisition, and Western faith, 410

Integral calculus. See Calculus

Intellect, and nature, 157. See also Will

Intelligence, and atheism, 409

Interregnum, Germanic, period as episode, 149

Intuition, and learning, 55, 56

Ionic, and Doric, 105; contemporaries, tables ii, iii. See also Axchitcctmc; Column

Irak, synagogue music, 2.18

Irrationalism, cultural attitude, 64-66, 68, 83

Isis, motherhood, 137; cult, 406, 407

Islam, analogy to Mohammed, 39; Mohammed as epoch, 149; architectural expression, io8, 109, iii; iconoclasm, x62.; and home, 335; Mohammed's unimposed mystic benefits, 344«; Puritanism, 356; Mohammed's contemporaries, table i; fatalism period, table i. See also Arabian Culture; Religion

Issus, battle, mosaic, 2.14

Italy, liberation as episode, 151; and music, 130

I- Wang, contemporaries, table iii

Jacobins, and reason and will, 308

Jacopo della Quercia, and ornament, 138

Jahn, Friedrich L., and gymnastics, 35«.

James, Henry, on ruins, i54«.

Jansenism, and theoretical science, €€, 3i4ff.;

Puritanism, 356; contemporaries, tabic i Janus, materiality, 403

Japan, harakiri, io4«.; art and the nude, i6i«. Jason of Pheraj, contemporaries, table iii Jesuitism, and Baroque architecture, 313; style

in science, 412.. See also Loyola Jesus, as Son of Man, 309; and Arabian morale,

344,' 347; unimposed glad tidings, 344«. See

also Christianity Joachim of Floris, world-conception, 19, 119,

i6i; and "passion", 3xo«.; contemporaries,

table i John, Saint, and world-history, i'8«.; dualism

in Gospel, 306 Journalism, as phenomenon of Civilization,

360 Judaism, architectural expression, 109, xiin.\

psalmody, ii8; Kabbala, dualism, 148, 307,

311; and home 335. See also Arabian Culture Judgment, and necessity, 393 Julius II, pope, Raphael's portrait, xrj-L Juppiter Dolichenus, cult, 4o6«. Juppiter Feretrius, temple and oath, 406 Juppiter Optimus Maximus, cult, 406 Jurisprudence, esoteric Western, 32.8 Justinian, period of fulfilment, 107; and Hagia

Sophia, i3o«. Justus van Gent, in Italy, i36

Kabbala, dualism, 148, 307

Kalaam, determinism, 307

Kant, Emmanuel, and space and time, 6«., 7, 64, 12.2., 12.4-116, 143, 169, 170, 173-175; and history, 19; provincialism, 2.3; contempora- ries, 17, table i; final Western systematic phil- osophy, 45, 365-367; as philosopher of Being, 49«.; and nature and mathematics, 57, 64, 68, 78, 366, 379; a priori error, 59; mecha- nistic world-conception, 99; and causality and destiny, ii8-iro, 151; and the Almighty, 114; and incident, 143; as Goethe's opposite, 159; on knowledge of thought, 2.99; egoism, 310, 335; esoteric, 32.7; and compassion, 350, 362.; and ethics, 354, 355; and materialism, 368; on judgment, 393; on force, 413

Karlstadt, Andreas R., contemporaries, table i

Karma, Buddhist interpretation, 357

Karnak, contemporaries, table ii

Katharsis, Classical, 311, 347. See also Drama

Kelvin, Lord, and sether, 418

Kepler, Johan. mathematic and religion. 71,

ZVl

INDEX

330; horoscope for Wallcnstcin, 147; deeds

of science, 333; and mass, 413 Kirchhoff, Guscav R., on physics and motions,

388 Kishi, church architecture, xoi«. Kismet, 119, 307. See also Destiny Klein, Felix, and groups, 90 Kleist, Heinrich B. W. von, as dramatist, 190 Kleisthenes of Sikyon, tyranny, 33 Knowledge, comparative forms, 39, 60; virtue

and power, 361; and feeling, 363; as naming

of numina, 397 Kriemhild, and Helen, ^68 Krishna worship, and sex, lySn. Kwan-tsi, and actuality, 41

Lagrange, Comte, mathematic, €G, 78, 90; on mechanics, 114; and force, 417; contempora- ries, table i

La Hale, Adam de, operetta, ix<)

Landscape, as Chinese prime symbol, 174, 190, 196, 103; horizon in painting, 139; Western gardening, 240; Baroque, as portrait Z70»., 187; pUin-air, x88, x89; and dramatic scene, 3x6

Lanfranc, controversy, 183

Langton, Stephen, as warrior, 349«.

Language, of Culture, 33; word and number, 37; beginning of word-sense, 37; paired root- words, 117; personality-idea in Western, 1.62., 301, 309, 310, 4i3«.; as cultural function, 3oz». See also Names; Writing

Laocoon group, theatrical note, X9i; and Pre- Socratic philosophy, 303

Lao-tse, and imperialism, 37; and actuality, 41

Laplace, Marquis Pierre de, mathematic, 78, 90; contemporaries, iii, table i; and force,

413.417

Lasso, Orlando, style, 130

Lateran Council, and Western Christianity, 147

Latin, as Stoic creation, 361

Lavoisier, Antoine L., chemistry, 384, 42.6

Law, and form, 97

League of Nations, Chinese ideas, 37

Learning, and intuition, 35, 56

Legends, contemporary, table i

Legnano, battle, a symbol, 349

Lcibl, Wilhelm, significance of colour, 151; por- traiture, i66; and body, X7i; and grand style, 189-^91; etching, 190; striving, i9x

Leibniz, Baron von, and actuality, 41; mathe- matics, metaphysics, and religion, 56, 66, 70, 116, 366, 394; relation to Classical mathe- matic, 69; calculus, 73, 78, 82., 84, 90; and vision, 103; and Nicholas of Cusa, 136; esoteric, 32.7; and mystic philosophy, 363».;

monads as quanta of action, 383; Dcmocritus as contemporary, 386; and force, 413, 413-417; contemporaries, table i

Leipzig, battle, issue, 33

Lenbach, Franz von, copyist, 193

Lc N6tre, Andr6, gardening, 24o«., 141

Leo III, pope, and iconoclasm, i£x

Lcochares, contemporary mathematic, 90

Leonardo da Vinci, astronomical theory, 69; spirituality, ir8; Dutch influence, ^36; and background, X37; and impressionism, 139, x87; and sculpture, 244; colour, 146; and body, X7i; and portrait, xyi.; as dissatisfied thinker, X74; discovery as basis of art, 177-^ X79; and circulation of the blood, 178; and aviation, 179; Western soul and technical limitation, x79-i8i; and dynamics, 414

Lessing, Gotthold E., world-conception, xo; and cultural contrasts, 1x8; and Aristotle's philanthropy, 331; and cult and dogma, 411

Lessing, Karl F., colour, i3x

Leucippus, atoms, 133, 383, 386

Li, contemporaries, table iii

Licinian Laws, myth, 11

Life, and soul and world, 54; duration, specific time- value, 108; duration applied to Culture, 109; Classical Culture and duration, 13X; and willing, 313. See also Death

Light and shadow, cultural art attitude, x4Xff., X83, 3X3«.

Light theories, electro-magnetic, i36«.; New- ton's, and Goethe's theory of colour, i37«., i38».; cultural basis, 381; contradictory, 418

Limit, as a relation, 86

Linden, as symbol, 396

Lingam. See Phallus

Lingayats, sect, i36«.

Ling-yan-si, Saints, x6o

Linois, Comte de, and India, i3o«.

Lippi, Filippino, Dutch influence, X36

Liszt, Franz, Catholicism, x68«.; contempora- ries, table ii

Literature. See Art; Drama; History; Poetry; writers by name, especially Dante; Goethe; Ibsen

Livy, on strange gods, 405

Lochncr, Stephen, God-feeling, 395

Locke, John, and imperialism, 150; contem- poraries, table i

Loggia dci Lanzi, artistic sentiment, X7X

Logarithms, liberation, 88

Logic, organic and inorganic, 3, 117; of time and space, 7; and mathematics, convergence, 37, 417; and morale, 334. See also Causality

Logicians, contemporaries, table i

Lokoyata, contemporaries, table i

INDEX

xvii

London, culture city, 33

Loredano, doge, portrait, 1.JI.

Lorentz, Hendrik A., and Relativity, 419

Lorenzo de' Medici, and music, x3o

Lotze, Rudolf H., ethics, 367

Louis XIV, uncleanliness, z6o; contemporaries, table iii

Louisiana, Napoleon's project, 150

Loyola, Ignatius, and style of the Church, 148; architectural parallel, 314; and Western mor- ale, 348; God-feeling, 394, 395 ; and method, 412-

Lucca, and Arabian Culture, ii6

Lucian, and Philopatris dialogue, 4o4«.

Lucullus, L., army, 36

Ludovisi Villa, garden, x4o

Lully, Raymond, music, 2.83

Luther, Martin, and "know", 1x3; and des- tiny, 141; as epoch, 149; and works, 3i6«; and Western morale, 348, 349, 355; God- feeling, 394, 395; contemporaries, table i

Luxor, contemporaries, table ii

Lycurgus, myth, ii

Lysander, deification, 405

Lysias, portrait, 170

Lysicrates, Monument of, acanthus motive, 115

Lysippus, contemporary mathematic, 90; sculp- ture, 1x6, z6o«.; period, 184; canon, 187; straining, 191; irreligion, 358; contempora- ries, table ii

Lysistratus, and portraiture, 2.69

Machault, Guillaume de, and counterpoint,

2.19«.

Machiavellism, and mimicry, 371 Macpherson, James, autumnal accent, 141 Macrocosm, idea, 163-165; cultural and inter- cultural, 165; expression, 180; and style- problem, 2.14-2.16. See also History; Mor- phology; Nature; Symbolism; World-con- ceptions Maderna, Stefano, sculpture, 144; God-feeling,

395

Madonna, in Western art, 136, 167, xSo, Set also Marycult; Motherhood

Madrid, culture city, 31, 109

Madrigals, character, XX9

Maecenas, park, 34

Magdeburg Cathedral, Viking Gothic, 113

Magian soul, explained, 183. See also Arabian Culture

Magnetism, Cabeo's theory, 414

Magnitude, emancipation of Western mathe- matic, 74-78; and relations, 84, 86

Mahavansa, as historical work, 12.

Mainz Cathedral, and styles, 103

Makart, Hans, copyist, 195

Malatestas, Hellenic sorriness, i73

Malthus, Thomas R., and Darwinism, 350, 369, 371

Manchester system, and Western Civilization, 151, 371; and Darwinism, 369

Manda:ans, as Arabian, 71; music, xi8; con- temporaries, table i

Manet, ^douard, unpopularity, 35; and body, 171; landscapes, i88; plein-air painting, i88- 2.90; weak style, 2.91; striving, X92.; and Wagner, X9x; irreligion, 358

Mani, and mystic benefits, 344«.; and Jesus, 347; contemporaries, table i

Manichasanism, as Arabian, 71; architectural expression, 109, zii; music, izS; dualism, 306; and home, 335

Mankind, as abstraction, xi, 46

Mantegna, Andrea, technique, xxi, X39; and colour, x4x; and portrait, X71; and statics, 414

Marble, and later Western sculpture, X3X, X76«.; Greek use, x48»., X53; Michelangelo's atti- tude, x.j6. See also Stone

Marcellus II, pope, and Church music, x68».

Marcion, and Jesus, 347; contemporaries, table i

Marcus Aurelius, and monotheistic tendency,

407

Marees, Hans, significance of colour, X5X; por- traiture, x66, X71, X7i«., 309; and grand style, X89, X90; striving, X9X

Marenzio, Luca, music, X51

Marius, C, and economic motive, 36; contem- poraries, table iii

Mars Ultor, temple, ornament, X15

Marseillaise, morale, 355

Marsyas, Myron's, lack of depth, xx6

Marwitz, Friedrich A. L. von der, and Hardcn- berg, i5o«.

Marx, Karl, and practical philosophy, 45; and earlier and final Socialism, 138; and super- ficially incidental, 144; character of Nihilism, 35X, 357; and Hegelianism, 367; socio-eco- nomic ethics, 37X, 373; contemporaries, table i

Mary-cult, as symbol, 136; Madonna in West- ern art, X67, x8o

Masaccio, and artistic change, X37, X79, X87

Mashetta, castle, fagade, X15

Mask, and Classical drama, 316, 3i7«., 318,

32-3 Mass, Western functional concept, 415; effect

of quantum theory, 419 Materialism, and Goethe's living nature, xii».;

Buddhism as, 356; in Western ethics, 368;

and Socialism, 370

xviii INDEX

Mathematics, spatial concept, 6ff., 7; pjurality, cultural basis, 15, 59-63, 67, 70, loi, 314; position, 56; and extension, 56; and nature, 57; wider-culture vision and analogy, 57, 58; beginning of number-sense, 59; as art, 61, 62., 70; vision, 61; of Classical Culture, positive, measurable numbers, 63-65, 69, 77; and time and becoming, 64, 115, ii6; symbolism in Classical, 65-67, 70; religious analogy, 66, 70, 394; and empirical observation, 67; character of Arabian, 71-73; primitive levels, 73; Wes- tern, and infinite functions, 74-76; Western need of new notation, 76; as expression of world-fear, 79-81; and Western meaning of space, 81-84, 88; and proportion and func- tion, 84; construction versus function, 85; virtuosity, 85; and physiognomic morphol- ogy> 85; Western, and limit as a relation, 86; Western abstraction, 86, 87; Western con- flict with perception limitations, 87, 170, 171; culmination of Western, groups, 89, 90, 42.6; paradigm of Classical and Western, 90; and the how, what, and when, 12.6; cultural re- lation to art, 119, 130; Classical sculpture and Western music as, 184; impressionism, x86; vector and Baroque art, 311; esoteric Western, 318; and philosophy, 366; replace- ment by economics, 367; theory of aggregates, and logic, 42.6; cultural contemporary epochs, table i. See also Nature; Number; branches by name

Matter. See Body; Natural science

Matthew Passion. See Schiitz, Hcinrich

Maxwell-Hertz equations, 418

Maya Culture, See Mexican

Mayer, Julius Robert, and theory, 378; and conservation of energy, 393, 411, 417

Mazarin, Jules, Cardinal, morale, 349

Mazdaism, as Arabian, xo9; architectural ex- pression, XI I ; and pncuma, ii6; music, xx8; contemporaries, table i

Mazdak, contemporaries, table i

Meander, motive, 316, 345

Mechanics, and fourth dimension, 114. Set also Motion; Natural science

Medizval History, as term, 16, ix

Medicis, Hellenic sorriness, X73

Megalopolitanism, and Civilization of a Culture, 3X-35, 38; and systemacism, lox. See also Civilization

Melody, Classical and Western, XX7

Mcmlinc, Hans, in Italy, X36; and Renaissance,

Memory, cooception, 103; as organ of history,

13X; as term, 13X Mcncius, practical philosophy, 45

Mendicant Orders, as exception, 348

Mcnes, contemporaries, table iii

Mcnzel, Adolf F. E., and body, X71; impres- sionism, x86; and grand style, X90, X91

Merovingian-Carolingian Era, contemporary art epochs, table ii

Mesopotamia, synagogues, xio

Messenians, provided history, 11

Metaphysics, and scientific research, 154; and symbolism, 163; Western and pairs of con- cepts, 311; basis of Classical, 311; period in philosophy, 365-367. See also Ethics; Phi- losophy.

Mexican (Maya) Culture, and historical scheme, 16, 18; and time measurement, i34».; orna- ment, 196; and tutelage, X13

Meyer, Eduard, on Spengler, x; on Classical Culture and geography, ion.

Meyerbeer, Giacomo, Rossini on Huguenots,

Michelangelo, liberation of architecture, begin- ning of Baroque, 87, xo6, xx5»., 313; mate- riality, obsession by the architectural, 1x8; St. Peter's, xo6, X38; and passing of sculp- ture, XX3, X44; anticipations, X63; and phys- iognomy of muscles, X64; nude, and portrait, X7X; sonnets, X73; as dissatisfied thinker, X74; unsuccessful quest of the Classical, X75- X77, x8i; and marble, X76; architecture as final expression, X77; and popularity, 3x7; God-feeling, 395; contemporaries, table ii

Michelozzo, Bartolommco di, and Classical, 415

Michelson, Albert A., experiments, 419

Middle Kingdom, contemporaries, tables i-iii

Milesians, physical theory, 386

Miletus, form-type of Didyma:um, X04; and Egypt, XX5

Milinda, King, and Nagasena, 356

Military art, Western, 333W.

Mill, John Stuart, and economic ascendency,

367, 373 Millcnnianism, as Western phenomenon, 363,

42-3 Mineralogy, and geology, 96 Minerva Medica, Syrian workmen, xii Ming-Chu, contemporaries, table iii Ming-ti, contemporaries, table iii Minkowski, Hermann, imaginary time, ix4i».;

and Relativity, 419 Minnesanger, rules, 193; imitative music, XX9 Mino da Fiesole, and portrait, X7X Minoan art, character, 198; contemporaries,

X41 Minstrels, imitative music, XX9 Mirabeau, Comte de, and imperialism, 149;

contemporaries, table iii

INDEX

Miracles, cultural attitude toward, 391, 393

Missionarism, Stoic, 344«.; and diatribe, 360

Mithraists, and pneuma, zi6; form-language of mithrasa, 2.z4; music, 12.8; cult in Rome, 406, 4o6«.

Mitylene, episode and Classical time-sense, i33«.

Moab, Castle of Mashetta, 115

Modern History, as irrational term, 16-18

Morike, Eduard, poetry, 189

Mohammed. See Islam

Moissac, church ornamentation, 199

Moliere, tragic method, 318

Mommsen, Theodor, on Classical historians, 11; narrow Classicalism, 2.8

Monasticism, and Western morale, 3i6«.; order- movement, 343; mendicant orders, 348

Money, Roman conception, 33; as hall-mark of Civilization, 34-36

Monophysites, Islam as heir, iii; as alchemistic problem, 383; contemporaries, table i

Monteverde, Claudio, music, ii6, 2.30, 2.49, 2.83

Morale, plurality, cultural basis, no conversions, 315,345-347; Western, and activity, 315; and analysis, 341; Western moral imperative, 341, 34z; intellectual and unconscious concepts, 34i«.; Western purposeful motion, ethic of deed, 341-344, 347; Western Christian, 344, 348; and art, 344; morphology, 346; com- passion, cultural types of manly virtue, 347- 351; real and presumed, phrases and meanings, 348; Classical, and happiness, 351; instinctive and problematic, tragic and plebeian, 354, 355; end phenomena, cultural basis, 356-359; Civi- lization and diatribe, 359, 360; and diet, 361; qualities and aim of Socialism, 361-364; and cultural atomic theories, 386. See also Ethics; Spirit

Moravians, as exception, 348

Morphology, Spengler and historical, xi; con- cept of historical, 5-8, i6, 39; historical, and symbolism, 46; historical, ignored, 47, sym- metry, 47; historical and natural, 48; histor- ical. Western study of comparative, 50, 159; comparative, knowledge forms, 60; of mathe- matical operations, 85; systematic and phy- siognomic, 100, loi, 12.1; of world-history explained, loi; of Cultures, 104; historical homology, 11 1, iiz; element of causal and destiny, 12.1; of morales, 346; of history of philosophy, 364-374; of exact sciences, 42.5

Mortality. See Death

Mosaic, as cultural expression, 114; and Arabian gold background, 147; eyes, 319; contempo- raries, table ii

Mosque, architectural characteristics, xoo, xio; contemporaries, table ii

XIX

Motherhood, cultural attitude, meaning, 136, 137; and destiny, portraiture, 167

Mo-ti, practical philosophy, 45

Motion, and fourth dimension, 1x4; Eleatic diffi- culty, 305«.; and natural science, 377, 387-391. See also Natural science

Motion pictures, and Western character, 32.1

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, contemporary mathematic, 78, 90; period, 108, i84; or- chestration, ^31; colour expression, z^im.; ease, 2.92.; contemporaries, table ii

Mummies, as symbol, ii, 13, 135

Murillo, Bartolome, period, 183

Murtada, and will, 311

Museums, as historical symbols, 135; change in meaning of word, 136

Music, thoroughbass and geometry, 61; mathe- matical relation, 6z, 63; of Baroque period, 78; and proportion and function, 84; bodi- lessness of Western, development, 97, 177, x3o, X3I, Z83; history of instruments, 195; Western church, as architectural ornament, 196, 199; as art of form, 119, zxi«.; and allegory, zi9«.; as channel for imagination, zzo; Classical, ZZ3, ZZ7, Z5Z«.; form-ideal of Western, ZZ5; technical contrast of Classical and Western, ZZ7«. ; word and organism, cultural basis, ZZ7, zz8; Arabian, zz8; Chinese, zz8; imitation and ornament, zz8; ornamental and imitative Western, ZZ9; secularization, thoroughbass, Z30; of Renaissance, 134; Flemish influence in Italy, Z36; and horizon in painting, Z39; pastoral, and gardening, Z40; esoteric West- ern, Z43; as Western prime phenomenon, 244, Z81-Z84; and Western painting, Z50, Z51; in- struments and colour expression, Z5Z; instru- mental as historical expression, Z55; and uncleanliness, z6o«.; and portrait, z6z, z66; Catholic, z68«.; Michelangelo's tendency, Z77; Western, and Classical free sculpture, Z83, Z84; climacteric instruments, Z84; and Rococo architecture, Z85; impressionism, Z85, z86; and later German school of painting, Z89; Wagner and death of Western, Z91, Z93; his impressionism, Z9Z; and Western soul, 305; and Western concept of God, 31Z; and charac- ter, 314; place of organ, 396; Western con- temporary natural science, 417; contemporary cultural epochs, table ii. See also Art

Muspilli, and Northern myths, 400, 4Z3

Mutazilites, contemporaries, table i

Mycena:, funeral customs, 135; contemporaries, tables, ii, iii

Mycerinus, dynasty, 58«.

Myron, sculpture as planar art, ZZ5, zz6, Z83; Discobolus, Z63, Z64

XX INDEX

Mysteries, Classical, 310. See also Religion Mysticism, art association, 119; and dualism,

307; cultural culmination, 365».; and concept

of force, 391; contemporaries, table i Myth, natural science as, 378, 387 Mythology, significance in Classical Culture, 10,

II, 13; origin, 57. See also Religion

Nagascna, materialism, 356

Names, as overcoming fear, 113; concretion of numina, 397

Napoleon I, analogies, 4, 5; romantic, 38; im- perialism, 41, 149-15 1 ; as destiny and epoch, 141, 144, 149; egoism, 336; morale, 349; and toil for future, 363; contemporaries, tabic iii

Napoleonic Wars, and cultural rhythm, iio».

Nardini, Pictro, orchestration, 131

Natural science, mechanics and motion, cultural basis of postulate, 377, 378; fact and theory, cultural images, 378-380; Western, and depth- experience, tension, 380, 386, 387; and religion, cultural basis, 380-381, 391, 411, 411, 416; scientific period of a Culture, 381; cultural relativity, 381; cultural nature ideas and elements, 381-384; statics, chemistry, dynam- ics, cultural systems, 384; cultural atomic theories, 384-387; thinking-motion problem, system and life, 387-389; mechanical and organic necessity, 391; cultural attitude on mechanical necessity, 392.-394; things and re- lations, 393; conservation of energy and Western concept of experience, 393; theory and religion. Western God-feeling, 395 ; naming of notions, 397; and atheism, 409; Western dogma of undefinable force, provenance, stages, 411-417; as to Western statics, 414, 415; mass concept of Civilization, work-idea, 416, 417; disintegration of exact, contradictions, 417- 410; physiognomic effect of irreversibility theory, 410-414; effect of radioactivity, 413; decay, 414; morphology, convergence of sepa- rate sciences, 415-417; anthropomorphic re- turn, 417. See also Nature

Natural selection, and Western ethics, Superman, 371. See also Yizvwxmsra

Naturalism, antiquity, 33, 107, 188; in art, 191

Nature, contrast of historical morphology, 5, 7, 8; definite sense, and history, 55, 57, 94- 98, 101, 103; and learning, 56; mathematics as expression, 57; as late world-form, 98; mechanistic world-conception, 99, 100; sys- tematic morphology, 100; and causality and destiny, 119, iii, 141; cultural viewpoints, 131, 163; timelessness, 141, 158; historical overlapping, living harmonics, 153, 154, 158; and intellect, 157; personal connotations, 169;

soul as counter-world, 301; and reason, 308. See also Causality; History; Mathematics; Natural science; Space; Spirit Naucratis, and Miletus, ii5«. Naumann, Johann C, architecture, 185 Nazzam, on body, 148; contemporaries, table i Necessity, mechanical and organic, 391 Nemesis, character of Classical, 119, 310. Set

also Destiny Neo-Platonists, as Arabian, 71; and pneuma, 116; and body, 148; dualism, 306; unimposed mystic benefits, 344«. Neo-Pythagoreans, and body, 148; and mechani- cal necessity, 393 Nerva, forum, 198, 115

Ncstorianism, and art, 109, 11 1; music, 118; and home, 334; as alchemistic problem, 383; con- temporaries, table i Neumann, Karl J., on Roman myths, 11 New York City, and mcgalopolitanism, 33 Newton, Sir Isaac, and "fluxions", i5«.; artist- nature, 61; mathcmatic and religion, 70, 396, 411; mathematical discoveries, 75, 78, 90; and time and space, 114, 116; light theory, and Goethe's theory, i57«., i58«.; 411; dy- namic world-picture, 311; deeds of science, 355; and motion-problem, 390, 391; and metaphysics, 366; and force and mass, 415, 417; contemporaries, table i Nibclungenlied, and Homer, 17; esoteric, 318;

and Western Christianity, 400-401 Nicara, Council of, and Godhead, 149 Nicephorus Phocas, and Philopatris dialogue,

404«. Nicholas of Cusa, astronomical theory, 69; re- ligion and mathematic, 70: musical associa- tion, 136; contemporaries, table i Nicholas of Oresme, and beginning of Western mathematic, 73, 74, 179; art association, 119; Occarnist, 381 Niese, Benedictus, on Roman myths, a Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, influence on Spengler, xiv, 49«.; provincialism, 14; Clas- sical ideology, 18, i8«.; on city life, 30; un- popularity, 35; practical philosophy, 45; and historical unity, 48; and detachment, 93; and Wagner, 1 11, 191, 370; on history and defini- tion, 158; on art witnesses, 191; autumnal accent, 141; on Greeks and colour, 145; on "brown" music, 152; on Greeks and body, 160; will and reason, 308; and morale, 315, 341, 346; and home, 335; actuality of "Mann", 347, 350; and Civilization, 351; character of Nihilism, 357; and diet, 361; nebulous aim, 363, 364; and mystic philoso- phy, 365,7.; and mathematics, 366; ethics and

INDEX

metaphysics, 367; materialism, 368; and evo- lution and Socialism, 370-371; position in Western ethics, 373, 374; on pathos of dis- tance, 386; dynamic atheism, 409; contempo- raries, table i

Niflheim, lack of materiality, 403

Nihilism, and finale of a Culture, 351; cultural manifestations, 357

Nirvana, ahistoric expression, 11, 133; and zero, 178; conception, 347, 357, 361. See also Buddhism

Nisibis, and Arabian art, 109

Northmen, discoveries, 330

Norwich Cathedral, simplicity, 196

Notre-Dame, Madonna of the St. Anne, 163

Nude, in Classical art, necessity, 130, 2.60-162., 317; cultural basis of feeling, ii6, 170, 7.jt; as element of Classical Culture only, 1x5

Niirnberg, loss of prestige, 33; church statuary, 103; church and styles, 2.05; as religious, 358

Numa, cult, 185; contemporaries, table i

Number, chronological and mathematical, 6, 7, 70, 97; defined, 67; numbers and mortality, 70; Arabian indeterminate, 71; Western Cul- ture and functional, 74, 75, 90; Western at- titude and notation, 76, 332.«.; symbolism, 82., 165; astronomical, 83, 33i«.; cultural atti- tudes, 88; and the become, 95; and number- ing, 115; Indian conception, 178; functional, and causality, 393. See also Mathematics

Numina, naming, 397. See also Religion

Nyaya, contemporaries, table i

Oak, as symbol, 396

Occamists, physical theory, 381, 389

Odo, Bishop, as warrior, 349«.

Odysseus, as enduring, 103

Okeghem, Joannes, music, 130; and popularity,

M3

Oken, Lorenz, and dualism, 307

Old Kingdom, and care, 137; contemporaries, tables ii, iii

Old Nordic art, as Arabian, 2.15

Oldach, Julius, act and portrait, 2.7i«.

Omar, Mosque of, characteristics, ioo».

Ommayad period, homology, iii

Opera, and orchestra, 130

Oracle, Classical, 147

Oratorio, and orchestra, 130

Orchomenos, funeral customs, 135

Oreads, passivity, 336

Oresme. See Nicholas of Oresme

Organ, and Western devotions, 396

Origen, and dualism, 306; morale, 348; con- temporaries, table i

Ormuzd, Persian God, 311

XXI

Ornament, qualities and aim, 191-194; opposi- tion to imitation, 194-196; building and its symbolic decoration, 196; pictorial period, 197; and Civilization, 197, 2.94; in music, xi8, 130, 131; Renaissance, 2.33«,, 138. See also Decoration; Imitation

Orpheus, cult, 185; as Christian title, 4o8«.; con- temporaries of discipline and movement, table i

Otto the Great, egoism, 336

Owen, Sir Richard, and morphology, m

Pachelbel, Johann, organ works, xio Pacher, Michael, colour, z<5o Paderborn Cathedral, simplicity, 196 Pseonius, Nike, 2.63; period, 2.84 Pa^stum, temple, 124, 2.35

Painting, perspective and geometry, 61 ; allegori- cal, ii9«.; and form-ideal of Classical sculp- ture and Western music, 1x6, 131; word and organism, 117; Flemish influence in Italy, 2.36; Renaissance fresco to Venetian oil, line to space, 137, 179-2.81; development of back- ground in Western, 139; form and content, outline and colour, 141; cultural expression and popularity, 143; oil, as Western prime phenomenon, period, 144, 181-183; Classical and Western colours, 145-147; outdoor and indoor, 147; symbolism in brushwork, 149; of Western Civilization, 15 1 ; Baroque portraits, 165; and destiny of Western art, i76«.; Leo- nardo and discovery, spiritual space, 177-180; Western studio-brown, pictorial chromatics, 150, 188; Classical limitation, 183, 187; full meaning of Impressionism, 1S5-187; 19th Century episode, plein-air, 188; German school • and grand style, 189; Baroque and concept of vector, 311; and time of day, 315; Western, and spectator, 319; Western, and contempor- ary natural science, 417; contemporary cultural epochs, table ii. See also Art; Portraiture

Palazzo Farnese, style, 105; Michelangelo's cornice, 175

Palazzo Strozzi, style, 134; and artistic senti- ment, 171

Palermo, and Arabian Culture, 11 1, 116

Palestrina, Giovanni da, style, 110, 130, 313; and popularity, 143; Michelangelo's heir, 174, 177; God-feeling, 395

Palladio, Andrea, style, 30, 414

Palma, Jacopo, colour, 151

Palmyra, basilica, io9«.; Baal, 407

Pan, idea, 403

Panama Canal, Goethe's prophecy, 41

"Panem et circenses", as symbol, 361

Pantheon, as mosque, 71, m

Paolo Veronese, clouds, 140; colour, 151

XXll

INDEX

Papacy, contemporaries, table iii

Paracelsus, Philippus, and chemistry, 384

Parallel axiom, 83, 88, i76«.

Paris, and Athens, 17; culture city, 33; autumnal city, 79; Flemish influence, zySn.; as irreli- gious, 358

Paris, Peace of (1763), and imperialism, 150

Park. See Gardening

Parmenidcs, civic^ world-outlook, 33; thinking and being, 387

Parthenon, Three Fates as type, i68; horse's head, Rubens contrast, 2.71; popularity, 317

Parwati worshippers, sect. i^Gn.

Pascal, Blaise, and actuality, ^x; faith and ex- perience, 66, 394; mathcmatic, and Archimedes, 69, 75, 90, 116; and predestination, 141; and Janscnists, 3i4«.; and Western morale, 348; contemporaries, table i

Passion, in Christian cult, 3io«.

Passivity, as Classical trait, 313, 310; and pathos, 3io«.

Past, and passing, 166

Pastels, and music, 131

Paterculus, C. Velleius, view of art, 105

Path. SeeVJay

Pathos, and passion, 3io«.

Patina, symbolism, Z53

Patriotism, cultural concept, 334-337

Patristic literature, contemporaries, table i

Paul, Saint, and world-history, i8«.; and dual- ism, 306; and will, 344; and diatribe, 360; error on "Unknown God", 404

Paulicians, and art, 109, zii; iconoclasm, i6x; contemporaries, table i

Paulinzella Monastery, simplicity, 196; and antique, X75«.

Pausanias, culture, i54«.; on altars to unknown gods, 404«.

Pazzi, chapel, 313

Peace, Classical and Western conception, zj^n.

Peasant, as Culture relic, 354

Peloponnesian War, as epoch, 149

Pcpi. See Phiops

Perception, and " alien ", 53; Western transcend- ency, 87-89; space and time as forms, 169-171,

173 Percival, archetype, 402. Pergamcnc art, modernity, iii; composition,

244,2.60; gigantomachia, X9i,352.; actuality,

364; contemporaries, table ii Pericles, homology, iii; portrait, i}on., 169;

and economic organization, 138; morale, 349 Peripatos, contemporaries, table i Persians, architectural expression, 109; and home,

335; contemporary art periods, table ii. See

also Arabian Culture

Perspective, Classical attitude, 109; Western painting and gardening, 240-241; as soul-ex- pression, 3io«.; Western, and astronomy, 330

Perugino, technique, 249; and portraiture, 171; and artistic change, 179; simplicity, 180

Pessimism, and Spcnglcr's theories, xiv, 40

Peter the Great, and Europe, i6«.

Peterborough Cathedral, simplicity, 196

Petra, Baal, 407

Petrarch, Francesco, analogy, 4; historic con- sciousness, 14; narrow Classicalism, 19, 175

Petrinism, Tolstoi's connection, 309

Phallus, as symbol, cult, 136, 167, 3x0

Phidias, contemporary mathcmatic, 78, 90; and portraiture, i3o«.; and soulless body, Z15, 167; popularity, 143; and self-criticism, 164; and marble, Z76; and Handel, 184; period, 184; as religious, 358; contemporaries, table ii

Philanthropy, Aristotle's, 351

Philippe de Vitry, and counterpoint, xi9«.

Philo, and body, 248; and Jesus, 347

Philopatris dialogue, source, 404«.

Philosopher's Stone, as symbol, 248, 307

Philosophy, truth and individual attitude, xv; natural and historical, 7, 8; anonymous Indian, 12.; provincialism, i.x, 13; epochal limitations, cultural boundaries, 41, 46, 364, 367; test of value, actuality, 41-43; present- day Western, and cultural destiny, 43-45; de- velopment of Western practical, 45; scepticism as final Western, 45, 374; of becoming and become, 49«.; and mathematics, 56, 64, 366; Kant's postulates, 59; comparative forms of knowledge, 60; and names, 12.3; scientific, of time, 12.4; tabulation of categories, 115; and death, 166; Western art association, 119; of Culture and Civilization, 354, 355; cultural questions, early posing, 364; course within each Culture, 364; metaphysical and ethical periods, 365-367. See also Ethics; Metaphy- sics; Spirit

Phiops, Western contemporary, xoui.; statue, 165

Phlogiston theory, Stahl's, 384

Phoenicians, and discovery, 65, 333

Phrynichus, fine, 311

Physics, cautious hypotheses, 156; Jesuits and theoretical, 3i4«.; and popularity, cultural basis, 317, 3x8. See also Natural science

Physiognomy. See Destiny; Portraiture

Picturesqueness, and historical expression, 15 5

Piero della Francesca. See Francesca

Pigalle, Jean B., sculpture, 244

Pindar, as religious, 358

Pine, as symbol, 396

Piombo, Scbastiano del. Set Sebastiano

INDEX

XXlll

Pirxus, and unknown gods, 404

Pisano, Giovanni. See Giovanni

Pisistratidx, as period of fulfilment, 107

Planck, Max, atomic theory, 385, 419

Plane, significance in Egyptian architecture, 189

Plastic. See Sculpture

Plato, ahistoric consciousness, 9, 14; and clepsy- dra, 15; provincialism, ix; and actuality, 41; philosopher of the becoming, 49«.; metaphysics and mathematics, 56, 67, 69, 71, 84, 90, 366; and the irrational, 66; and Goethe's "mothers", 70; and mechanistic world-conception, 99; foreshadowing by, iii; and the Almighty, 124; Kant on, 12.5; as Aristotle's opposite, 159; anamnesis, 174; and idolatry i68«.; on soul, 304, 305; and ego, 311; and ethics, 354; and mystic philoso- phy, 365«.; and science and religion, 394; contemporaries, table i

Plein-air, as Civilization painting, x-^i.; charac- terized, z88

Pliny, on Mesopotamian temples, xio«.; on Lysistratus, i69; on Lysippus, z&j; as col- lector, 415

Plotinus, world, 56; and philosophical transi- tion, 7^; and vision, 96; homology, iii; and body, X48; and dualism, 306; and Jesus, 347; and Arabian Culture, 383; and mechani- cal necessity, 393; contemporaries, table i

Plutarch, as biographer, 14, 316; and dualism, 306

Pneuma, as Arabian principle, zi6, 3x9; and eyes in Arabian art, 3x9. See also Dualism

Poppelmann, Daniel, architecture, 2.85

Poetry, infinite space in Western, 185; Western, as confession, 164, X73 ; Western and Classical lyric, i86, 32.4. See also Drama; Literature

Poincare, Henri, on mathematical vision, 6i«.

Point, and Western geometry, 74, 8z, 89

Point de vue, in Rococo parks, ^40

Polar discovery, as symbol, 335

Polis, as Classical symbol, 83, 147, 334

Polish, as symbol in art, i48«.

Politics, inadequate basis for historical deduc- tions, 46; under Classical Culture, 83, 147, 334; meaning of the state, 137; spatial aspect of Western, 198; origin of Arabian state, zix; Renaissance attitude, 173 ; cultural conception, 334-337; and atomic theories, 386; con- temporary cultural epochs, table iii. See also Imperialism; Philosophy; Socialism

Pollaiuolo, Antonio, Dutch influence, 136; goldsmith, i37

Polybius, ahistoric consciousness, 10

Polycletus, contemporary Western music, 2.7,

iiz, 177, 2.84; contemporary mathcmatic, 78; sculpture, canon, 177, zzj, iz6, 13 1, z6o«., x83, 184; present-day appeal, Z55; and self-criticism, 164; and statue of Augus- tus, Z95; and fresco, 311

Polycrates, contemporaries, table iii

Polygnotus, contemporaries, iii, table ii; frescoes, background, colour, 147, 183, iii, M3. M5, 2.83, 330

Pombaditha, academy, 381

Pompeii, wall-paintings, 187

Pompey the Great, army, 36

Pope, Alexander, type, 2.54

Popularity, cultural basis, 85, 143, 316-318, 36xi in colour, 146

Porcelain, and Western music, 131

Porphyry, and "antique", io«.; academy, 181

Port Royal, contemporaries, table- i. See also Jansenism

Porta, Baccio della. See Bartolommeo

Porta, Giacomo della. See Giacomo

Portinari altar, 136

Portraiture, and biography, 11; character of Classical, nude sculpture, 13, i6o, 161, 164, 165, 169, 171; cultural basis and expression, character and attitude, loi, 104, 116, z6o, 317; portrait as Western expression, 130, 161-166; and Arabian Culture, 113; and Gothic, 161, 166; and confession, 164; con- trast of act and portrait, 161, 166, 170, 171; depth-experience, impressionism, 166, 187; child and group portraits, motherhood, 166- 168; Renaissance, 121-173; Leonardo's re- lation, 181; landscape s^-rjon., 187; Roman statues, 195; and will, 309; American, as irreligious, 358^. See also Soul

Portuguese, and discovery, 333

Poseidon, temple of, as model, 114

Posidonius, and dualism, 306; as collector, 415

Potsdam, architecture, 107

Poussin, Nicolas, musical analogy, 110; colour, 146; period, 183

Prag, loss of prestige, 33

Praxiteles, contemporary mathematic, 90; sculpture, 116, 170; Hermes, 164; and womanhood, 168; and Haydn, 184; period, 184; ease, 191

Predestination. See Destiny

Present, and becoming, 54; significance in Classi- cal Culture, 63, 65-67

Pre-Socratics, philosophy, 41, 175, 305; and mathematics, 366; contemporaries, table i

Prime phenomena, Goethe's living nature, vii, 95, 96, 105, iii«., 113, 140, 154, 389; in history, 105; and destiny, iii; of Western Culture, 144. See also Symbols

xxiv INDEX

Principle, and causality, iii

Proclus, and Jesus, 347

Procopius, courtier, roj

Progress, as phenomenon of Civilization, 351,

361 Prohibition, and Civilization, 361 Proper, and alien, 53 Proportion, and ftinction, 84 Propylara, popularity, 317 Protagoras, conception of man, 311, 391,

popularity, 317; and Classical morale, 351;

and Stoicism, 356; problem, 365; condem- nation, 411 Protestantism, colour symbolism, z5o; of

etching, 190; and works, 3i6«.; as symbol,

343. See also Reformation. Proud'hon, Pierre Joseph, position in Western

ethics, 373 Providence, and destiny, 141 Provinces, defined, 33 Provincialism, philosophical and historical,

Prussia, great periods, 36; English basis of reorganization, 15COT.

Psalmody, Jewish, ix8

Pseudomorphosis, Late-Classical style, 109-112., 114; and image, 2.16; music, iiS

Psychologists, period, contemporaries, table i

Psychology, "scientific", and soul, 199-303, 313; as counter-physics, 301; and will and soma, 319

Ptolemy II Philadclphus, and ruler-cult, 405

Ptolemy, L. Claudius, relation of Copernicus, i39».; as copyist, 415

Pugct, Pierre, sculpture, 144

Punic Wars, as classic, 36; and cultural rhythm, iio«.; homology, iii; intensity, 333

Purcell, Henry, pictorial music, 183

Pure reason, and destiny, 110

Puritanism, as common cultural feature, iii; and destiny, 141; and imperialism, 148; cultural contemporary epochs, table i

Putto, as art motive, 166

Puvis de Chavanncs, Pierre, and religious paint- ing, i88».

Pygmalion and Galatea, and marble, 176

Pyramids, period, 58«., 103

Pyrrho, contemporaries, table i

Pyrrhus, Roman war, 36

Pythagoras and Pythagoreans, analogy, 39; and actuality, 41; mathematical vision, 57, 58; and Classical mathematic, 61, 61, 64; new number, and fate, 65«., 81, 90; math- ematic and religion, 70, 394; contemporaries, III, table i; and Copernicus, 330; and mystic philosophy, 365».; and metaphysics, 366

Quadratures, and Archimedes' method, 69 Quantum theory, effect, 419 Quattrocento, and Gothic, 111. Ste also Renais- sance Quercia, Jacopo della. See Jacopo Quesnay, Francois, economic theory, 417

Race-suicide, as phenomenon of Civilization, 359

Radioactivity, effect on natural science, 413

Ragnarok, Muspilli as contemporary, 400; and world's end, 400

Ramescs II, analogy, 39; and artistic impotence, 44, 194; contemporaries, table iii

Ranke, Leopold von, and analogy, 4, 5; and historical tact, 11; on historical vision, 56

Raphael Sanzio, Madonnas, 136, 168, 180; technique, 111, 178; and Titian, 117; and background, 137; popularity, 143; colour, 145; and confession, 164; and portrait, 171; as dissatisfied thinker, 174; and fresco and oil, line and space, 179, 180

Raskolnikov. See Dostoevsky

Rationalism, and chance, 141W.; contemporaries of English, table i

Ravenna, and Arabian Culture, 106, 11 1, 116, 135; mosaics, 111, 147, 319

Rayski, Louis F. vcn, art and portrait, i7i«.

Reason, and will, 308

Red, symbolism, 146

Reformation, ccnflicts in Germany, 33; and Dionysiac movement, iiii as common cul- tural epoch, III; class-opposition to Renais- sance, 119; contemporaries, table i

Reims Cathedral, 114; statuary, 167

Relations, and msgnitudes, 84, 86

Relativity theory, and time, i24«.; effect on natural science, 19^4 domain, 416

Relief, Egyptian, 189, 201; and Classical round sculpture, 115. See also Sculpture

Religion, reality of Classical, 10, 11, 13; re- lation of clock and bell, i5«., i34«., and number, 56; mathematical cultural analogy, €6^ 70; stage in a Culture, 108, 399-401; second period, sequel to Civilization, 108, 414-418; Western, and "memory", i3i«.; and death, 166; birth of Western soul, 167; and early art periods, 185 ; cultural expression, 185-188, 399, 401; Egyptian, 188; Chinese, 190; and imitation, 191; architecture as ornament, 195; Russian, ioi«.; Arabian architecture, 108; Classical, and art, 168; and plein-air painting, i88«.; revelation and dualism, 307; cultural soul-elements, and dei- ties, 311; and Classical drama, 3:0; and astronomy, 330; relation to Civilization,

INDEX

XXV

358; and hygiene, 361; and philosophy, 365; and natural science, 380-381, 391, 411, 416; Western experience and faith, 394; varieties, 394; and theory, 395; God-feelings, 395; depth-experience in Western, cathedral, or- gan, 395-397; naming of numina, 397; Classical bodied pantheon, 398, 401; Western deity as force, unitary-space symbol, 398, 403, 413; of primitive folk, 399; elements of Western, 399-401; Classical, and strange gods, 404; late Classical, dislocation and mono- theism, Arabian ascendency, 406-408; cult of deified men, 405, 407, 411; atheism as phe- nomenon, 408-411; cult and dogma, cultural attitude, 410, 411; contemporary cultural epochs, table i. See also Death; Soul; Spirit; creeds and sects by name

Rembrandt, portraiture, and confession, loi, 103, 130, 140, 164, 2.66, 169, i&i, 300; contem- poraries, 112., table ii; inwardness, colour, 183, 151-2.53; etchings, nights, 187, 146, 190; musical counterpart, 12.0; and horizon, 139; esoteric, 2.43; depth, 144; and body, 171; period, 183; impressionism, 187, 2.88; and psychology, 319

Renaissance, contemporaries, 17, table ii; mathematic, 71; relation to Classical, as revolt, illusion, 2.8«., iT,i.n., 131-134, 137, 138, 151, 166, 171-174,179,313; homology, iii; and beautiful, 194; and Western style, 101, 105, 106, 111, 113, 115, 144; and Arabian and Gothic, 111, 134-138; and polychrome sculpture, 116; class-opposition to Refor- mation, 119; ornament, X33«., 2.38; fagades and courtyards, 135; arch and column, 136; park, 141; and popularity, 143, 318; and patina, 153; and child-figures, 166; and por- trait, 171-173; and spiritual development, 173; leaders as dissatisfied thinkers, 174, 181; Michelangelo, 175-177, 181; Raphael, 179, 180; Leonardo, 177-181; and background, 137; and statics, 414

Renoir, Pierre A., striving, 191

Resaina, academy, 381

Research, and vision, 95, 96, 101, 105, 141; historical and scientific data, 154; meta- physical, 163

Restorations, Western attitude toward, 154

Resurrection, change in meaning, i35«.

Rhine River, as historic, 2.54«.

Rhodes, Cecil, analogy, 4; and imperialism, 37, 38; morale, 349, 351

Rhodes, as "Venice of Antiquity", 49; and Helios, 401

Richelieu, Cardinal, morale, 349; contempo- raries, table iii

Riegl, Alois, on Arabian art, io8, 115

Riemann, Georg F. B., artist-nature, 61; re- lation to Archimedes, 69; religion and math- ematic, 70; notation, 77; and boundlessness, 88; mathematical position, 90; goal of analysis, 418; contemporaries, table i

Riemenschneider, Tilmann, and portraiture, 170

Robespierre, Maximilicn, adventurer, 149; con- temporaries, table iii

Rococo, as stage of style, 101; architecture and music, 131, 131, 185; parks, 140; contempo- raries, table ii. See also Baroque

Rodin, Auguste, sculpture as painting, 144, 145

Rogier van der Weyden, in Italy, 136

Roman Catholicism, colour symbolism, 147- 7.49; and music, i68«.; monasticism, 3i6«., 343, 348; esoteric dogma, 318; prelates and manly virtue, 349. See also Christianity; Jesuitism

Roman law, and cultural-language, 3io«.

Romanesque, simplicity, 196; as stage of style, 101, 101; and Classical, i75«.

Romanticism, defined, 197; and mysticism, 365/;.; and mathematics, 366

Rome, city, megalopolitanism, 31, 34

Rome, empire, and Classical Culture, 8; im- perialism, 36-38, 336; and Arabian Culture, 71, 107, 108; army and citizenship, 315; emperor- worship, 405, 407, 411; and tolera- tion, 411. See also Classical Culture

Rondanini Madonna, as music, 177

Rondeau, origin, 119

Roof, as Arabian expression, 110

Rore, Cyprian de, in Italy, 136; music, 151, 152.

Rossellino, Antonio, and portrait, 171

Rossini, Gioachino, Catholicism, i68«.; on Meyerbeer, 193

Rottmann, Karl, and grand style, 189

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, and naturalism, 33, 107, 188; and superficially incidental, 144; and imperialism, 149, 150; autumnal accent, 107; and Civilization, 351; contemporaries, 353«., table i; and compassion, 361; and Darwinism, 369; intellect and widsom, 409

Rubens, Peter Paul, colour, 153; and body, 170, i7i«., 178; and dynamics, 414

Ruins, as Western expression, 154

Ruler-cult, 405, 411

Runge, Otto P., and grand style, 189

Russia, and the West, i6«.; stage of art, 101; architecture, 11 1; ignored art, 113; will-less soul, 309; culture and charity, 350

Rutherford, Sir Ernest, atoms as quanta of action, 385, 419

Ruysdael, Jakob, colour, 146; period, 183

xxvi INDEX

Sabscans, and early Christian designs, rzn., io9«.; temple-form, 7.ion.; art, 12.3; art contemporaries, table ii

Sahu-r6, pyramid, 103

St. Denis, royal tombs, i6i, 164

St. Lorenz Church, Niirnberg, and styles, 105

St. Mark, Venice, origins, xii

St. Patroclus, Soest, arcade-porch, 105

St. Paul without the Walls, as Pseudomorphic,

no, 2.IO«. St. Peter's, Rome, as Baroque, xo6, 138 St Pierre et St Paul, Moissac, ornamentation, 199 St. Priscilla, catacombs, paintings, 137 St. Vitale, Ravenna, characteristics, loo Sainte-Chapclle, Paris, boundlessness, 199 Saints, contemporary legends, 400, table i Saivas, Lingayats, i^Gn. Saktas, i36».

Salamanca, loss of prestige, 33 Salvation Army, as exception, 348 Samarra, contemporaries, table ii Samnites, Roman war as classic, 36, 15 1«. Samos, Hera of Chcramues, ix^n. Sangallo, Antonio da, Palazzo Farnese fagade,

2-75

Sankhya, and Buddhism, 353«., 356; contempo- raries, table i

Sant' Andrea, Pistora, Pisano's Sibyls, 163

Santa Maria Novella, Florence, style, X34; Flemish paintings, 136

Sassanids, and Arabian state, xii; art zx3; music, xi8

Satyrs, materiality, 403

Savonarola, Girolamo, and art tendencies, 133; and Renaissance, 318; and Western morale, 348; contemporaries, table i

Scarlatti, Alessandro, character of arias, xi9«.

Scene, dramatic, cultural basis, 315

Scepticism, as last stage of Western philosophy,

45. 374 Scharnhorst, Gerhard von, army reforms, i$on. Schelling, Fricdrich von, and dualism, 307;

esoteric, 369; contemporaries, table i Schiller, Johann C. F., tragic form, 147; banality,

155

Schirazi, and dualism, 307

Schliiter, Andreas, architecture, 144, 145, 185

Schongauer, Martin, colour, Z50

Scholasticism, art association, 2.19; will and reason, 305; and dualism, 307; cultural culmination, 365^.; contemporaries, table i

Schopenhauer, Arthur, and history, 7, 19, 97«.; provincialism, 13, 14; practical philosophy, 45, 368; and mathematics, 67, 115,366; will, and reason, 308, 342.; and Civilization, 331; and ethics, 354, 373; pessimism and system,

366, 370; and critique of society, 367; and Darwinism, 369, 371, 373; contemporaries, table i

Schroeter, Manfred, on criticism of Spcnglcr, x

Schvitz, Heinrich. Matthew Passion, 199, 244; and imagination, 11.0; pictorial music, 183; God-feeling, 395

Science, of history, 153, 154; esoteric Western, 318. See also Art; Mathematics; Natural science; Nature

Scipio, P. Cornelius, and economic organization, 138; contemporaries, table iii

Scopas, and self-criticism, 164; and body, 170; period, 184

Scott, Sir Walter, as historian, 96

Scrope, Richard, as warrior, 349^.

Sculpture, and proportion and function, 84; Classical, as become, 97; cultural basis, 116, 12.5; form-ideal of Classical, picture-origin, XX5; polychrome, zx6; music-origin of Rococo, 131; Gothic, 131, z6i; use of marble, X3Z, 249«., 153, 176; Renaissance, 135, 137, 138, Z53; position in Western Culture, 144; Egyptian, polish, Z48«., i66; bronze, 2.53, 2.j6; Classical expression of body as soul, 160, x6i, 305; Michelangelo's attitude, 175-177, 181; free Classical, and Western music, 183, 184; Classical, and time of day, 315; Classical, and spectator, 319; contemporary cultural periods, table ii. See also Art; Portraiture

Sebastiano del Piombo, and Raphael, 171

Second religiousness, period in a Culture, xi, 108, 414-418; of Rome, 306

Selene, as goddess, i47«., 401

Selcucus, astronomical theory, 68

Seljuk art, contemporaries, table ii

Semper, Gottfried, on style, 111

Seneca, L. Annarus, Stoicism and income, 33; and Baroque drama, 317

Sentinum, battle, 151

Septimius Severus, favourite god, 406

Serapis, cult, 406

Serenus, as Arabian thinker, 63

Servius Tullius, myth, 11

Sesostris, court, 81; as name, 106; autumn of Culture, 107

Sethos I, contemporaries, table iii

Sivres ware, and Wedgwood, i5o«.

Sex, naturalism, 14, 33, 107, 188; problem of Civilization, 35; cultural attitude, 136; his- torical aspects, 137

Sforzas, Hellenic sorriness, 173

Shaftesbury, Earl of, and imperialism, 150

Shakespeare, William, tragic form and method, vision, 119, 130, i4i«., 141, 143, 12.0, 319; Bacon controversy, i35«.; and motive, 156;

INDEX

as dramatist of the incidental, i^x, 146; and historical material, X55; and Classical drama, 313; and time of day, 3x4; scenes, 315; God-feeling, 330, 395; ethical passion, 347, 355; and evolution, 370

Shang Period, contemporaries, table iii

Shaw, George Bernard, sex problem, 35; and history, 2.5 5«.; and morale, 346, 368, 369, 373. 374J superman, 350; and diet, 361; on Schopenhauer, 367; and Socialism and Darwinism, 371, 372.

Shih-huang-ti, career, iizn.

Shiva, cult, i^6n.

Short story. Western, 3i8«.

Siegfried, archtype, 402.; contemporaries, table i

Siena, and counter-Renaissance, Z34; school, i68

Signorelli, Luca de', and Classicism, zxi; and body and colour, 139, 2.41, 2.78; act and por- trait, 170, 171; and statics, 414

Sikyon, Adrastos cult, 33«.

Silesian wars, and cultural rhythm, iion.

Simone Martini, and Gothic, 2.35

Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's frescos, x63,

2-75. 395

Sistine Madonna, 2.68, 2.80

Six Classical Systems, contemporaries, table i

Skyscraper, and gigantomachia, 191

Sluter, Klaus, sculpture, Z63

Smith, Adam, economic theory, 417

Soaring, as Western term, 397

Socialism, and Civilization, 32.; and Darwin- ism, 35, 370-371; and economic motives, 36, 355; and imperialism, 37; Frederick William I's practice, 138; ethical, defined, esoteric, 32.8«., 34X, 347, 351, 355, 374; scientific basis of ideas, 353; as end-phenomenon, 356, 357; and contemporaries, immaturity, 357, 358, 361; irreligion, 359, 409; necessity, 361; dy- namic qualities, and compassion, 361; and work, 36^; and future, 363; tragedy of neb- ulous aim, 363; and lie of life, 364; and politi- cal economy, 367; contemporaries, table i

Sociology, biological, 155; and Western ethics, 367,368

Socrates, ahistoric consciousness, 14; ethic, 347; and Civilization, 351; and Stoicism, 353«.; intellect and wisdom 409; condem- nation, 410; contemporaries, table i

Soest, church, 105

Sol Invictus, cult, 406, ^o6n., 407

Sonata, movement, 131

Sophists, scientific basis, 353«., 356; and diet, 361; contemporaries, table i

Sophocles, ahistoric consciousness, 9; tragic form and method, 12.9, 130, i^in., 143, 146, 318, 311, 330, 386; statue, 2.69; deification, 405

xxyii

Soul, and world and life, 54; mathcmatic ex- pression, loi; of Cultures, inner image, 106, 303; and predestination, 117; individual, and macrocosm, 165, 2.59; cultural designations and attributes, 183; man as phenomenon, cultural expression, 159; Classical "body" expression, 2.59-2.61; Western expression in portrait, 2.61-166; knowledge and faith, 199, 300; as image of counter-world, 300; and "exact" science, 301, 301, 313; culture- language, 301; cultural basis of systematic psychology, 303, 304, 307, 313, 314; Classical static and Western dynamic, 304, 305 ; Arabian dualism, 305; will and reason, outer world parallels, 308; Western will-culture, egoism, 308-3 IX, 314; and cultural religious concepts, 311, 358; cultural basis of morale, 315; dy- namic, and biography, 315, 316;- Classical gesture, beauty, 316; and cultural forms of tragedy, 317-32.6; popularity, cultural basis, 316-319; cultural relation to universe, 330- 331; and to discovery, 331-337; and brain, 367. See also Morale; Portraiture; Spirit

Space, and natural morphology, 6, 7; and the become, 56; relation to Classical and Western Cultures, 64, 81-84, 88; world-fear and creative expression, 79-81; multi-dimensional, symbolism, 88, 89, 165; direction and ex- tension, 99, 171; and causality and destiny, 119, 110; awareness, 111; and scientific time, 114, 115; time as counter-concept, 116, 170, 171; and death, 166; world-experience and depth, 168, 169, 171; perception or com- prehension, 169-171; cultural symbolism in depth-experience, 173-175; cultural prime symbols, 174-178, 337; Classical use of term, 175 «.; cultural basis of concepts, 179, 310; and architectural and religious expression of Culture, 183-188, 198-100; Egyptian and Chinese experiencing, 189-191, 101-103; Western arts and prime phenomenon, 181, 181; extension and reason, 308. See also Become; Causality; Depth-experience; Na- ture; Time

Spain, period of ascendency, incident and des- tiny, 148, 150

Spaniards, and discovery, 333

Spanish-Sicilian art, contemporaries, table ii

Spanish Succession War, and cultural rhythm, now.; as epoch 149

Sparta, myth, 11; and music, 113

Spencer, Herbert, and economic ascendency, 367; contemporaries, table i

Spengler, Oswald, reception of book, ix; basis of philosophy, xiii-xv, 49«.

Speyer Cathedral, 185, 114

xxviii INDEX

Spinoza, Baruch, and dualism, 307; and force,

413

Spirit, and soul in Arabian dualism, 306. See also Body; History; Morale; Nature; Phi- losophy; Religion; Soul

Spirit land, cultural conception, 333

Spirit-wall, zo3

Spitzweg, Karl, significance of colour, 151

Sport, and Civilization, 35

Stahl, Georg Ernst, chemical theory, 384

Stained glass. See Glass painting

Stamitz, Johann K., Classical contemporary, 177; and four-part movement, 131; period, z84

State. See Politics

Statics, as Classical system, 384, 393; no Western concept, 414. See also Natural science

Statistics, and probability, 411

Steamship, Classical anticipation, 334

Stendhal, and psychology, 319

Stipcl, and zero, i78«.

Stirner, Max, and morale, 346; and Hegelian- ism, 367; contemporaries, table i

Stoicism, and Civilization, 3Z, 351; and money, 33, 36; practicality, 45; homology, iii; and state, 138; and corporeality, 177; weak soul, 103; ethic, 315, 347, 355, 367; and will, 344«., 347; scientific basis of ideas, 353; as end-phenomenon, 356, 357; and con- temporaries, 357, 358, 361, table i; irreligion, 359, 409; and diet, 361

Stone, as symbol, 188, 195, io6; polish, 2.48«. See also Architecture; Marble; Sculpture

Strassburg Minister, Arabian influence, 113

Streets, cultural attitude, 109; Western aspect and depth-experience, ixj\, 2.41; Egyptian aspect, i24«.

Strindberg, August, provincialism, 14, 33».; sex problem, 35; and morale, 346, 374; and Civilization, 35X

String music, in Western Culture, 131, fyxn.

Strzy go wski, Josef, on Arabian art, 184, 109

Style, as cultural emanation, 108, zoo, zoi; brave Egyptian, 101-103; Chinese, 103; weak Classical, 103-105; history as organism, cultural basis, 105; stages of each style, 106; history of Arabian, 107-114; and technical form of arts, 110; in natural science, 387, 391

Suez Canal, Goethe's prophecy, 41

Sufism, contemporaries, table i

Suhrawardi, on body, 148

Suicide, cultural attitude, 104

Sulla, incident, 139; contemporaries, table iii

Sunda, islands of, Roman knowledge, 334

Superman, in Nietzsche and Shaw, 350, 369, 370; natural selection, 371

Sutras, contemporaries, table i

Sylvester II, pope, and clock, i^n.

Symbolism, in living thought, xiii; symbols of a culture, 4, 13, 31; in historical morphology, 7, 46; clock and bell, 14, 131, i34«.; money and Civilization, 34; in the become, 101; actuality, 101, 168; symbols (names) and fear, 113, 193, 397; of funeral customs, 134, 135; of museums, 135; of world-history, 163; symbols defined, 163; spatiality, 165; and knowledge of death, 166; kind of ex- tension as cultural symbol, 173-175; cultural prime symbols, plurality, 174, 179, 180, 189, 190, 196, 103, 337; writing as cultural sym- bol, i97».; window, 199, 110, 114; in colour and gold, 145-149; as replacing images, 407

Synagogues, patterns, 11 in.

Syncretism, architectural expression, 109; cults, 118; contemporaries, table i

Syracuse, culture city, 31; and Plato, 41

Syria, music of sun-worship, 118; contempo- raries of art, table ii. See also Arabian Culture

Taboo, idea, 80; effect of naming, 113; side

of art, 117. See also Religion Tacitus, Cornelius, ahistoric consciousness, 10,

11; limited background, 131, 133 Talleyrand-P6rigord, Charles de, on life before

1789, 107 Talmud, dualism, 306; determinism, 307; and

nature, 393; contemporaries, table i Tanis, Hyksos Sphinx, 108, 161 Tanit, as deity, 406 Tao, principle, 14, 190, 103, 118; perspective,

3ii«. Tarquins, myth, 11; contemporaries, table iii Tartcssus, realm, 33i«. Tartini, Guiseppe, orchestration, 131; violin

story, 1760. Tasso, Tcrquato, and fixed scene, 315*;. Taygctus, Mount, Lycurgus as local god, 11 Technics, and future of Western Culture, 41, 44 Technique, and theory, 395 Teleology, as caricature, 110 Telephus Fricre. See Pergamcne Telescope, as Western symbol, 331 TcIl-el-Amarna, art, i93«., 2.93 Tellcz, Gabriel. See Tirso dc Molina Tellus Mater, materiality, 403 Temperature, and dynamics, 414 Templum, as cult-plan, 185 Tension, as Western principle, 386 Ten Thousand, expedition, as episode, 147,

336«. Terpandcr, music, 113 Thales, and problem of knowing, 365, 381

INDEX

XlflX

Thalcstas, music, vl-^

Thebes, autumnal city, 99

Themistocles, ahistoric consciousness, 9; morale,

349

Theocritus, irreligion, 358

Theory, and fact, 378; and religion, 395

Theosophy, conversion, 346

Theotokos, and Mary-cult, i37«., 1.67, z68

Theresa, Saint, and Western morale, 348

Thermodynamics, first law and energy, 413; second law, entropy, 4x0

Theseus legends, contemporaries, table i

Thing-become. See Become

Thing-becoming. See Becoming

Thinite Period, contemporaries, tables ii, iii

Thinker, defined, xiii

Third Kingdom, as Western conception, 363; and lie of life, 364

Thirty Years' War, as epoch, 149

Thoma, Hans, painting, 189

Thomas Aquinas, influence of Joachim of Floris, io; and destiny, 141; ethic, 309; religion, 394; contemporaries, table i

Thoroughbass, and geometry, 61; rise, ^30

Thorwaldsen, Albert, sculpture, 2.45

Thothmes, workshop, i93«.

Thucydides, ahistoric consciousness, 9; limited background, 10, 132., i33«.

Thunder-pattern, 196

Thuthmosis III, maturity of culture, 94; con- temporaries, table iii

Tiberius, as episode, 140; contemporaries, table iii

Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, painting, z83; ease, 191.

Time, and historical morphology, 6; and his- tory, problems, 49, 95, 103, 158; and direc- tion, 54, 56; and mathematics, 64, 115, 1x6; enigma, as word, effect of naming, 79, iii- 12.3; direction and extension, 99, 172.; and destiny and causality, 119, 12.0; unawareness, IZ2.; mechanical conception, iiz; 'space of time", ixtn.; and Relativity, i2.4«., 419; and space, scientific explanation, counter- concept, 1x4-1x6, 170; ahistoric and historic drama, cultural basis, 130; cultural symbol- ism of clock, 131, 134; and cause and incident, 14X; as feeling, 154; and nature, 158, 387- 391; past and transience, 166; direction and dimension, i6^n.; and depth, 17X, 173; and imitation and ornament, 193-195, 197; direc- tion and will, 308; direction and aim, 361. See also Becoming; Destiny; History; Space

Time of day, cultural attitude, 3x4, 3x5

Tintoretto, background, X39

Tiresias, cult, 185

Tirso dc Molina, and unities, 3x3

llryns, funeral customs, 135

Titian, period, 108; technique, brushwork, xxi,

X49; and Raphael, zzy; and colour, X4X,

X5x; and popularity, 243; portraits as

biography, X64; and body, X71; Baroque, X74;

impressionism, x86; contemporaries, table ii Title, symbolic importance, 4o8«. Toleration, cultural attitude, 343, 404, 410,

411 Tolstoi, Leo, and Europe, i6n.; provincialism,

X4; on notion of death, 166; philosophy,

309 Totem, side of art, iiS. See also Religion;

Taboo Tragedy. See Drama Trajan, analogy, 39; and Arabian art, xii;

forum, X15; contemporaries, table iii Transcendentalism, Western, 311 Transience, notion, 166 Trecento, so-called Renaissance, X33». Trent, Council of, Jesuit domination, 148; and

Western Christianity, 247; and church

music, x68«.; and Western mcralej 348 Trigonometry, contemporaries, table i. See also

Mathematics Trinity, as physical problem, 383 Trojan War, and Crusades, io«., X7 Troubadours, imitative music, XX9 Truth, relativity, cultural basis, xiii, 41, 46,

60, 146, 178-180, 304, 313, 345 Tscharvaka, contemporaries, table i Tsin, contemporaries, 37, table iii Turfan, Indian dramas, X95 Turgor, Anne R. J., economic theory, 417 Tuscany. See Florence; Renaissance Tusculum, battle, 349«. Twelfth Night, 3x5

Twilight of the Gods, Christian form, 400 Tyche, as deity, 146 Tzigane music, improvisation, 195

Uhde, Fritz K. H, von, and religious painting, x88».

Ulm Minster, as model, XX4

Unities, dramatic. Classical and Western at- titude, 3x3

Universe, cultural attitude, 330-33X

Upanishads, contemporaries, table i

Usefulness, cult, 155, 156

Uzzano bust, Donatello's, X7X

Vaishnavism, i36«. Valcashika, contemporaries, table i Valhalla, conception, 186, 187; history, 400; and unitary space, 403

XXX INDEX

Valkyries, and unitary space, 403

Valmy, battle, Goethe and significance, 149

Van Dyck, Anthony, musical expression, 2.50

Varangians, movement-stream, mn.

Varro, M. Tcrentius, classification of gods, 11;

on religions, 394 Varyags, movement-stream, 333«. Vasari, Giorgio, on imitation, 191 Vase-painting, Classical, and time of day, zi6,

32.5; Renaissance, 137 Vatican, Raphael's frescoes, 137, 179; Michel- angelo's, 163, 175, 395 Vaux-le-Vicomte, park, 241 Vector, concept and Baroque art, 311; and

motion, 314 Vedanta doctrine, 351, 355; contemporaries,

table i Vedas, homology, m; contemporaries, table i Vegetarianism, and Civilization, 361 Velasquez, Diego, musical expression, 150; and

body, 171; period, 1.8}; as religious, 358 Venice, and Arabian Culture, iii, 2.16, x^y, art

ascendency, 1x4; school of painting, xx-j,

x8i; music, 130, 136, x8x; and Renaissance,

Z73. See also Titia.n Venus and Rome, temple, xii Verlaine, Paul, autumnal accent, 241 Vermcer, Jan, technique, xxi; colour, 151, x^^;

period, 183 Veronese, Paolo. See Paolo Verrocchio, Andrea, sculpture, Colleone statue,

Z35, 138, xjx; goldsmith, 137; and portrait,

xji; anti-Gothic, xj^n. Versailles, park, 241 Vesta, materiality, 403 Viadana, Lodovico, music, 130 Vienna, master-builders, xoy; chamber music,

2-32- Vieta, Frangois, significance of algebraic no- tation, 71 Vignola, Giacomo, architecture, liberation,

87, 313, 411 Village Sheikh, statue, x6$ Violin, as Western symbol, 131, x^xn. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene E., and restorations,

Z54». Virtue, cultural concepts of manly, 348. See

also Truth Vishnu, and Krishna, i^Sn. Vision, and history and art, 95, 96, 101, 142. Vitruvius, and arch and column, 104 Voluspi, unitary space, 185. See also Eddas Voltaire, contemporary mathematics, 66; and

imperialism, 150; contemporaries, table i Voluntas, meaning, 3io«. Vulturnus, materiality, 403

Wagner, Richard, sensuousness, 35; and popu- larity, 35, 32.7; foreshadowing by, in; moder- nity, in; and imagination, 2J.0; end-art, 2J.3, 415; impressionism, and endless space, 182., i86, Z9z; and form and size, X9i, 351; striving, 192.; and psychology, 319; and Civ- ilization, 351; character of Nihilism, 357; irreligion, 358; nebulous aim, 363, 364; and lie of life, 364; and Nietzsche, 370; and socio- economic ethics, 370, 37X, 373; forest-longing, 397

Wallenstein, Albrecht von, horoscope, 147; con- temporaries, table iii

Walther von der Vogelweide, lyrics, 3x4

Wang-Cheng, contemporaries, table iii

Wang Hii, imperialism, 37

Washington, George, contemporaries, table iii

Washington, D. C, contemporaries, iiz

Wasmann, Rudolf F., act and portrait, xym.; and grand style, 189

Watteau, Jean A., period, 108; "singing" picture, 119, x^x, 183; colour, 246, 247, 153; contemporaries, table ii

Way, as Egyptian prime symbol, 174, 189, 101

Wazo of Li6ge, Bishop, as warrior, 349«.

Wedgwood ware, and Sivrcs, 150W.

Weierstrass, Karl T. W., on poetry in math- ematics, 61; and time, 116

Weimar, culture city, 19, 139

Weininger, Otto, position in Western ethics,

374 Western Culture, clock and bell as symbols, 14, i5«., 131, 134; mathcmatic, function, 15, 6z, 68, 74-78, 87-90; irrational idea of his- torical culmination in, 16-2.0, 39; provincial- ism, 2JL-X5, 39; Classical contemporary of present period, z6; destiny, acceptance, 32., 37-41, 44, 336; philosophy of decline, 45, 46; World War as type of change, 46-48; infinite space as prime symbol, art expression, 81, 86, 87, 89, 174-178, 184-187, 198-ioi, 124, xx^-x^x, Z39-X41, z8i-x85, 337; and popu- larity, 85, 243, 316-318, 361; historic basis, destiny-idea, 97, 12.9, 130, 133-135, 143, 145, 363; morphological aspect, 100; dramatic form, 1x9; expression of soul, portrait, 130, x6o- x66, 304; and care and sex, 136; attitude toward state, X37; economic organization, 138; religious expression, 140, 185-188, 31X, 398-401; Franco-Spanish period of maturity, 148, i5o«.; English basis of Civilization, 151, 371; final test of foreseeing destiny, 159; birth of soul, attributes, 167, 183; literary expression, 185-188; art- work and sense- organ, imagination, xxo; secularization of arts, 130; form and content, 24X; position

INDEX

of sculpture, X44; colour symbol, 145-2.47, 150; brushwork as symbol, 2.49; unity, z^z; and motherhood, 2.66-2.68; languages, 302.«.; as will-culture, 308-312.; and time of day, 314; significance of astronomy, 330-331; and discovery, 332.-337; aspects of ethics, 367- 369; culture and dogma, 410; spiritual epochs, table i; art epochs, table ii; political epochs, table iii. See also Art; Civilization; Cultures; History; Nature; Politics; Spirit

Wey den,Rogier van der. See Rogier

Wilhelm, Meister, painting, 2.63

Will, free will and destiny, 140, 141; unex- plainable, 2.99; as Western concept, 302., 304, 308-313; and reason, 308; and Western con- cept of God, 311; and character, 314; and life, 315; and Western morale, 341-345, 373

Willaert, Adrian, music, in Italy, 2.36, 152.

Winckelmann, Johann J., narrow Classicalism, i8«.

Wind instruments, colour expression, z^xn.

Window, cultural significance, 199, iio, 2.24

Woermann, Karl, on catacomb Madonna, i37«.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, world-outlook, 141; forest-longing, 186, 397; and Grail, 2.i3«.; and popularity, 143; tragic method, 319,

3M • Woodwind instruments, colour expression, z^zn. Word, relation to number, 57. See also Language;

Names Work, Protestant works, 3i6«.; and deed, 355;

and Socialism, 361; Western concept, 413 World, and soul and life, 54 World-Ash Yggdrasil, as symbol, 396 World conceptions, historical and natural, over- lapping, 98-100, loi, 103, 119, 153, 154, 158; (diagram), 154; symbolic, 163-165; hap- pening and history, 153. See also History; Macrocosm; Nature World-end, as symbol of Western soul, 363, 413 World-fear, creative expression, 79-81

XXXI

World-longing, development, and world-fear, 78-81

World War, and Spcngler's theories, ix, xv; as type of historical change of phase, 46-48, iio«.; contemporaries, table iii

Writing, alphabet and historical consciousness, \zn.\ as ornament, 194s., i97«. See also Language

Wiirzburg, Marienkirchc and style, xoo; master- builders, zcrj

Wu-ti, contemporaries, table iii

Yahweh, dualism, 312., 40Z

Yang-chu, practical philosophy, 45

Yellow, symbolism, 146

Yggdrasil, as symbol, 396

Yoga doctrine, 355; contemporaries, table i

Youth, and future, 151

Zama, as marking a period, 36

Zarathustra. See Zoroaster

Zarlino, Giuseppe, music, 130, z%z

Zend Avesta, dualism, 306, 307; and nature, 393; contemporaries, table i

Zeno, of Elea. See Eleatic philosophy

Zeno, the Stoic, ethic, 347, 354; character of Nihilism, 357; and mathematics, 366; con- temporaries, table i

Zenodorus, as Arabian thinker, 63

Zero, Classical mathematic and, 66-68; and theory of the limit, 86; cultural conception, 178

Zeuxis, painting, light and shadow, 107, 242^7., x83,3X5«.

Zola, Emile, journalism, 360

Zoroaster, Nietzsche's "Zarathustra", 30, 342., 363, 370, 371; unimposed mystic benefits, 344«.; Arabian epic, 4ox. See also Zend Avesta

Zwinger, of Dresden, in style history, 108, 107,