IX. SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

I ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL

Every professed philosopher 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 employ 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 unphilosophical. The proposition “there is a soul, the structure of which is scientifically 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” psychology 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, disposition, 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 sensuous-corporeal states and “inward processes” touch that which is in question 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 investigation. It is not for nothing that every language presents a baffling complexity of labels for the spiritual, warning us thereby that it is something not susceptible of theoretical synthesis or systematic ordering. Here there is nothing 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 Numen, just as he knows numina of the outer world, and develops his impressions in mythological form. His words for these things are symbols, sounds, 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, collects into an image of what he understands. This is the World-as-Nature.[369] 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 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[370] 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 moment. 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"-“inward”) 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 processes. 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 derivatives 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 imaginary 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 naïvest 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 difference whether I define some psychic capacity conceptually or the corresponding 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 examination 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;[371] 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, simultaneously in all, in that transformation of the verb[372] 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 different ways by different schools, but the existence is unquestionable.

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 a system without such elements. Associations, apperceptions, affections, motives, 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 remained 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.[373] 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 knowledge 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 formative 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 plurality—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 knowledge 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 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 learning 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 “âtmân” 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 νοῦς, θυμός, ἐπιθυμία 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 see 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 mathematic 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 is y = f(x), and that, because the function 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 Function, 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 psychology reduced to perplexity when confronted with the problem of motion. Classical man, too, had his inward Eleatic difficulty,[374] 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 Apollinian images of the soul are in blunt opposition. Once more all the old contrasts crop up. In the Apollinian 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 λογιστικόν, ἐπιθυμητικόν, θυμοειδές, suggests at once the Laocoön 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 antithesis like Classical and Western number—on the one hand magnitudes, on the other spiritual relations—and the spiritual static of Apollinian existence, the stereometric ideal of σωφροσύνη and ἀταραξία, stands opposed to the soul-dynamic of Faustian.

The Apollinian soul-image—Plato’s biga-team with νοῦς 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 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 Manichæans, 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 1st 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.[375] This “Spirit” it is which evokes the higher world, and through this creation triumphs 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 Constantinian age, with their fixed stare into the infinite—that look stands for the πνεῦμα. It is felt by Plotinus and by Origen. Paul distinguishes, for example in I Cor., xv, 44, between σῶμα ψυχικόν and σῶμα πνευματικόν. The conception 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 psychology of νοῦς and ψυχή, 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.[376] 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. 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[377] and the part played by Jewish philosophers in the so-called mediæval 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.[378] 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[379] method was to be looked for—it is common to the Talmud, the Zend Avesta and the Arabian Kalaam;[380] 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, Görres 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.

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—between 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 Jacobins); 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.[381] Schopenhauer, the last of the great systematists, 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 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 architecture; 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”—fulfilment 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,[382] seeks to grow up—serving, anonymous, self- oblivious—in the brother-world of the plane. To take “I” as 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 Petrinism. But Raskolnikov is only something in a “we.” His fault is the fault of all,[383] and even to regard his sin as special to himself is pride and vanity. Something of the kind underlies the Magian soul-image also. “If any man come to me,” says Jesus (Luke xiv, 26), “and hate not his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, yea, and his own life (τὴν ἑαυτοῦ ψυχήν) also,[384] 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.”[385] 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 directional 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 experiences 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 Marées is impossible in Classical portraiture, for in the Classical soul-image thought (νοῦς), the inner Zeus, is accompanied by the wholly ahistoric entities of animal and vegetative impulse (θυμός and ἐπιθυμία), 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 it, 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.[386] 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 periphrases are. It is entirely impossible to indicate in exact terms the difference 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 distinction is proved by the very different 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 tirelessly striven, implies an assertion of supremacy of soul over the alien; the ego, through the form, is to rule the world.[387]

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 attraction of distance that produces the type of the heroic and historically-felt landscape 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 contains 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 consequence from the Early-Arabian ethos. The connexion is merely a phenomenon 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 connotation 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 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, νοῦς was for the inner world that every Greek was entirely conscious 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 nephesh, pneuma and psyche, is necessarily associated the macrocosmic opposition of God and Devil— Ormuzd and Ahriman for Persians, Yahwe 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 both 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.[388] 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), becomes little by little identical with the notion of infinite space and in becoming so becomes transcendent world- will. And therefore 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, the Ananke immanent in the cosmos of Classical consciousness, is in no sense dependent upon him; on the contrary, the Gods are subordinate to It. Æschylus says so outright in a powerful passage of the “Prometheus,”[389] but it is perceptible 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.[390] 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 σωφροσύνη and ἀταραξία. More than one of the philosophers betrays the connexion by calling νοῦς, the highest part of the soul, Zeus. Aristotle assigns to his deity the single function of θεωρία, contemplation, and this is Diogenes’s ideal also—a completely-matured static of life in contrast to the equally ripe dynamic of our 18th-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 successfully 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 transitory 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 dynamics, force and mass. While Brunelleschi’s chapel of the Pazzi in Florence expresses a bright composedness, Vignola’s façade of the Gesù 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 Vignola and Giacomo Della Porta and the creation by Ignatius Loyola of the Order that stands for the pure and abstract will of the Church,[391] 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, mathematics, and pure physics. The form-language of dynamics, which puts the energetic contrast of capacity and intensity in place of the volitionless somatic contrast of material and form, is one common to all the mind-creations of those centuries.

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 directedness. 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 instrumentation. 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 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, determination, self-control, are postulates. To battle against the comfortable foregrounds 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 systems 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 and Pascal, by Church and Freethinker, as alone possessing value—active, fighting and victorious being.[392]

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 variability in the details—that makes telling biography (such as Goethe’s “Wahrheit 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 compared 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 antithetical 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 προσῶπον, “persona”—namely rôle or mask. In late Greek or Roman speech it means the public aspect and mien of a man, which for Classical man is tantamount to the essence and kernel of him. An orator was described as speaking in the προσῶπον—not the character or the vein as we should say— of a priest or a soldier. The slave was ἀπρόσωπος—that is, he had no attitude or figure in the public life—but not ἀσώματος—that is, he did have a soul. The idea that Destiny had assigned the rôle of king or general to a man was expressed by Romans in the words persona regis, imperatoris.[393] The Apollinian cast of life is manifest enough here. What is indicated is not the personality (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 distinct rôle. However labelled—as σωφροσύνη, καλοκἀγαθία or ἀταραξία—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 ζῶον πολιτίκον—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 σώματα πόλεως, 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 character, 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.[394]

Starting, significantly enough, from Seneca and not from Æschylus and Sophocles[395] (just as the contemporary architecture linked itself with Imperial Rome and not with Pæstum), 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 willing, of efficient forces, of inward movement not necessarily exhibited in visible form, whereas Sophocles’s method was to employ a minimum of happening 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 μίμησίς οὐκ ἀνθρώπων ἀλλὰ πρᾶξεως καὶ βίου. That which in his Poetica— assuredly the most fateful of all books for our poetry—he calls ἦθος, 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 Riemann’s theory of algebraic equations. It has, unfortunately, been our habit for centuries past to translate ἦθος as “character” instead of paraphrasing it (exact rendering is almost impossible) by “rôle,” “bearing” or “gesture”; to reproduce myth, μῦθος, which is timeless occurrence, by “action”; and to derive δρᾶμα 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 rôles 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 necessity, 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[396]—wore a mask, and had there been any spiritual need of a more intimate setting the required architectural 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 without, 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 anecdotal; that is, the one deals with the sense of a whole life and the other with the content of the single moment.[397] What relation, for instance, has the entire inward past of Œdipus or Orestes to the shattering event that suddenly meets him on his way?[398] 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[399] 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 patricians, 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 turning-points, was entirely unknown to the Greeks. They were no more analytical in the field of soul than in that of number; vis-à- vis 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 σῶμα. 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, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, the tragic is individual, life develops from within outwards, dynamic, functional, and the life-courses are only fully understandable 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 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 même. This is the sense in which Agamemnon is ναύαρχον σῶμα βασίλειον and in which Œdipus’s σῶμα is subjected to the Oracle.[400] 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 ἦθος 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.[401] Speaking generally, the Attic tragedy had no “action” at all. The Mysteries were purely δράματα or δρώμενα, i.e., ritual performances, and it was from the Mystery-form with its “peripeteia” that Æschylus (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 Æschylus went further and made the sacral vestments of the Eleusinian priesthood the regular costume of the Attic stage, and was accused on that account.[402] For the δρᾶμα 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[403] there became associated another, a boorish—the burlesque (whether phallic or dithyrambic) scenes of the spring festivals of Demeter and Dionysus. The beast-dances[404] and the accompanying song were the germ of 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, nænia). 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 Æschylus’s introduction 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 (μύθος) is not “action” but the occasion for the songs of the Chorus, which still constitutes the τραγῳδία 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 περιπέτεια, 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 “Œdipus Rex.” But presently—at the very time when in Polycletus the pure plastic was triumphing over the fresco[405]—there emerges high above the lament the grandeur of human endurance, the attitude, the ἦθος 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 Prometheus trilogy of Æschylus begins just where Goethe would in all probability have left off. King Lear’s madness is the issue of the tragic action, but Sophocles’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 (περιπέτεια) and of recognition (ἀναγνώρισις). In the first, the ruling impression is φόβος (terror) and in the second it is ἐλεός (pity), and the καθάρσις in the spectator presupposes his existence-ideal to be that of ἀταραξία.[406] The Classical soul is pure “present,” pure σῶμα, 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 κάθαρσις. 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 æsthetic 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 opposite. 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 (“compassion” 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 Faustian 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.[407] Presentation is entirely that of grandly-imagined gestures, the meagre facts of the fable being solemnly recited rather 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 Classical marble statue and, like it, an indication of what classical man, the man of the Polis 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 ἀταραξία. 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 16th Century bowed itself to the authority of “Classical” rules, but it is easy to see the influence of 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 sculpture—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 neighbourhood 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 Schütz, Bach, Händel, 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.

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 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 ἦθος 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 “Trachiniæ,” the impossibility of being alone, the feeling of the Polis, 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 wordless reading, as soundless music, and the other is publicly recited. The one belongs 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 developed, 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-setting had attained its object. In general, every art and every Culture has its significant times of day. The music of the 18th Century is a music of the darkness 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 contrast 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 δωδεκαήμερον, 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.[408] 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 profanation, 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 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 landscapes 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 comprehend 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 discovered—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 differences 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 naïve associates itself with the symbol of the bodily, while to the symbol of endless Space belongs a frankly un-popular relation between the creations and the men of the Culture.

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 immense effort of overcoming the popular-obvious, been discovered) are understandable only for the circle of the professional mathematicians. The famous “four elements” of Empedocles are those of every naïve man and his “instinctive” 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 Polis, the cults; backgrounds and secrets there are none. But compare a Gothic cathedral-façade with the Propylæa, an etching 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 concealed his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry for thirty years, for fear of the “clamour of the Bœotians.” 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 understood by the man in the street, and that the combination of simplicity with majesty that is Homer’s is simply not to be found in any Western language? The Nibelungenlied 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 Classical—the exclusive form. Whole periods—for instance, the Provençal Culture 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 non-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 are 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 inaccessible to the layman—symbols, these also, of our will-to-infinity and directional 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, détraquée, and falsified. We have not only an art for artists, but also a mathematic for mathematicians, a politic for politicians (of which the profanum vulgus of newspaper-readers has not the smallest inkling,[409] 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 themselves 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 knows everything. For us, the polarity of expert and layman has all the significance 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 to make use of the existence of a relation between that object and ambient unlimited space. An Attic statue is a completely Euclidean body, timeless and relationless, wholly self-contained. It neither speaks nor looks. It 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 individuals, 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 itself, nor looks at the 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 onwards 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;[410] 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 philosophical 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 impugn the primacy of the latter.[411]

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-experience. The modern ideas as to the nature of starry space—or, to speak more prudently, of an extension indicated by light-indices that are communicated 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 we 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[412]—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 heavens 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 Space 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[413]) 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 our sun, is taken as 470,000,000 times as long as the distance from the earth to the sun. Any night, the starry heavens give us at the same moment impressions 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 XIIth Dynasty. This aspect—an image, I repeat, and not a matter of experimental knowledge—is for the Faustian a high and noble[414] aspect, but for the Apollinian it would have been woeful and terrible, an annihilation 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 established by our astronomy[415] are small by comparison? As far as sense-observations 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.

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.[416] The Egyptians knew the sail, but 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 of 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 beginning 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[417] 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 their 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 Egyptians and Carthaginians, Classical mankind was wholly indifferent. How statuesque 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 (εἴδωλα) 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 Century 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 Phœnicians, 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 position of the southern extremity of India was known, also that of the islands of Sunda—but Athens shut its eyes to these things just as it did to the astronomical 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 continental expanse, as its motherland. Not even Hellenism, with all its proneness to technical diversions,[418] 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 260-ft. length,[419] and, for that matter, the steamship was discovered in principle. But there are some discoveries that have all the pathos of a great and necessary symbol and reveal depths within, and there are 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 application 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 planetary 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 metaphysical relations, but nevertheless unmistakable in its tendency. The Classical home-feeling which tied the individual corporally and Euclidean-ly to the Polis[420] 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, as it matured, dissolved itself into a large number of point-patriæ, 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[421] in 212 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 Romanus. 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 undergoes 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,”[422] Manichæans, Nestorians and Mohammedans, 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 Hölderlin 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 “phenomenal” 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.”[423] 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 hinterlands. 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 Californian gold-rush, dramas of uncontrollable longings for freedom, solitude, immense independence, and of giantlike contempt of all limitations whatsoever 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 ζῷον πολιτικόν—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 dispossessed. Never was there a hint of dynamic world-schemes of the Hohenstaufen 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 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.

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X. SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

II BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM

X. SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

II BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM

We are now at last in a position to approach the phenomenon of Morale,[424] 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 unshakable. That, and nothing short of it, is, 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.

What we 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 we are 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 (ἀπάθεια) 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[425] (ἀδιάφορα). 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 Zarathustra—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 transvaluation, 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[426] 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 consciousness 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 those of any and every Classical man. It is the distinction between character and attitude, between conscious becoming and simple accepted statuesque becomeness, 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 struggling, 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” (ἡ ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω) 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, Dominicans and the rest, takes shape as an order- movement, 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 18th 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— that 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 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 antithesis 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 transformed 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 contrition. 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 springtime proceeded to a profound—and never yet appreciated—inward transformation 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[427]—was recast as a morale of imperative command.[428]

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”[429] 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 manifests itself not only in precepts but also in the style of drama and even in the 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,[430] 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 immorally, 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 express it, whether it appears as the predication of a deity or as the issue of philosophic 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 wakened 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 incapable 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 making anything but a Southernized Gothic, an anti-Gothic, out of Apollinian motives. We may talk to-day of transvaluing all our values; we may, as Megalopolitans, “go back to” Buddhism or Paganism or a romantic Catholicism; we may champion as Anarchists an individualist or as Socialists a collectivist 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 formulæ 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,[431] 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 are dealing with the actualization of the possible; it is the story of an inner spirituality becoming the style 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 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 Nietzsche, 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.

III

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 κάθαρσις 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 disposition 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 formulæ 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 himself—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 ebullience or again race-instinct in a chivalrous society[432]—means as against the fatalistic Magian-Christian kind, how far it is to be conceived as action-at-a-distance and practical dynamic, 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 indeed 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 Savonarola, Pascal and St. Theresa—have had it in them, even in unconscious contradiction 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” virtù, the grandezza of Spanish and the grandeur of French Baroque, with that very feminine ἀρετή of the Hellenic ideal, of which the practical application is presented to us as capacity for enjoyment (ἡδονή), placidity of disposition (γαλήνη, ἀπάθεια), absence of wants and demands, and, above all, the so typical ἀταραξία. What Nietzsche called the Blond Beast and conceived to be embodied in the type of Renaissance Man that he so overvalued (for it is really only a jackal counterfeit of the great Hohenstaufen Germans) is the utter antithesis to the type that is 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 καλοκἀγαθία, and Alexander was a Romantic who never woke up, Cæsar a shrewd reckoner. Hannibal, the alien, was the only “Mann” amongst them all. The men of the early time, as Homer presents them to our judgment—the Odysseuses and Ajaxes—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 Classical 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?[433] 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,[434] 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 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 Spanish 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 formulation 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 himself 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,”[435] says Shaw in Man and Superman. Limited though his philosophic 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, “artists,” 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, too, can develop ideas and make history, and Rhodes—precursor of a type that will be significant indeed in the 21st 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,” “freedom,” “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, 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 φιλάνθρωπος, 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 Protagoras 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.

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 otherwise, practises them in a different way. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, 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 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 transvaluation. In the case of India, the transvaluation of Brahman life was complete by the time of King Asoka (250 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 significant conventions, his famous “Return to the state of Nature,” his practical rationalism, are unmistakable evidences. Each of the three buried a millennium 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 full. It is easy, but useless, to point to the bigness of Hellenistic 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 are in question here—the inward finishedness (Fertigsein) of megalopolitan man, and of the provincial as well.[436] For the Classical world this condition sets in with the Roman age; for us it will set in from about the year 2000.

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 Civilization—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, Civilization— 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 inscrutable quality of creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is beginning 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[437]—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 extensive worlds. The ideas of Buddhism, of Stoicism, and of Socialism alike rest upon them.[438] 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, practical, artificial—alone represents Civilization to-day. The soil-peasantry before its gates does not count. The “People” means the city-people, an inorganic mass, something fluctuating. The peasant is not democratic— this again being a notion belonging to mechanical and urban existence[439]—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 Cæsar’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 governance of a Life that can no longer govern itself. Up to Kant, up to Aristotle, 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 Æschylus, Plato, Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualities is to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s. 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 Æschylus, Shakespeare, the thinkers of the Brahman philosophy felt it; so Dante and German 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 outmanœuvring of destiny. What Æschylus 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 Hohenstaufen 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 Æschylus’s Prometheus 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.

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 a Puritan movement like, for instance, Islamism and Jansenism, not a Reformation as the Dionysiac wave was for the Apollinian world, and, quite generally, not a religion like the religions of the Vedas or the religion of the Apostle Paul,[440] 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 Socialism. The quintessence of this thoroughly worldly and unmetaphysical thought is to be found in the famous sermon near Benares, the Four Noble Truths that won the prince- philosopher his first adherents.[441] 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 Materialism of the 18th 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[442] 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.[443] As the Stoic appropriated Heraclitus’s idea of Logos and flattened it to a materialist sense, as the Socialism based on Darwin has mechanicalized (with the aid of Hegel) Goethe’s deep idea of development, so Buddhism 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 Christianity,[444] 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 refinements 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. 1000, 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 expressions of Culture-movements. In all Civilizations being ceases to be suffused with soul and comes to be suffused with intellect, but in each several Civilization the intellect is of a particular structure and subject to the form-language of 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 point of historical 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 Socialism, 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 possess. 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-discipline 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 irreligion—the two words are synonymous. He who cannot feel this in the creativeness 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 Nürnberg—is irreligious[445] down to the last detail, down to the look of the streets, the dry intelligence of the faces.[446] And, correspondingly, the ethical sentiments belonging to the form-language of the megalopolis are irreligious and soulless also. Socialism is the Faustian world- 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 compared 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 courtesy, of great formal thought, of the great style in all things, but also quite carnally 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.[447]

VII

As to the living representatives of these new and purely intellectual creations, 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 (οἱ πολλοί, 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;[448] 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 equivalent phenomena in the Egyptian New Empire, Buddhist India and Confucian China.

Correspondingly, there is a characteristic form of public effect, the Diatribe.[449] First observed as a Hellenistic phenomenon, it is an efficient form in all Civilizations. Dialectical, practical and plebeian through and through, it replaces the old meaningful and far- ranging Creation of the great man by the unrestrained Agitation of the small and shrewd, ideas by aims, symbols by programs. The expansion- element common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also. Quantity replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening. We must not confuse this hurried and shallow activity with the Faustian will-to-power. All it means is that creative inner life is at an end and intellectual existence can only be kept up materially, by outward effect in the space of the City. Diatribe belongs necessarily to the “religion of the irreligious” and is the characteristic form that the “cure of souls” takes therein. It appears as the Indian preaching, the Classical rhetoric, and the Western journalism. It appeals not to the best but to the most, and it values its means according to the number of successes obtained by them. It substitutes for the old thoughtfulness an intellectual male-prostitution by speech and writing, which fills and dominates the halls and the market-places of the megalopolis. As the whole of Hellenistic philosophy is rhetorical, so the social-ethic system of Zola’s novel and Ibsen’s drama is journalistic. If Christianity in its original expansion became involved with this spiritual prostitution, it must not be confounded with it. The essential point of Christian missionarism has almost always been missed.[450] Primitive Christianity was a Magian religion and the soul of its Founder was utterly incapable of this brutal activity without tact or depth. And it was the Hellenistic practice of Paul[451] that—against the determined opposition of the original community, as we all know— introduced it into the noisy, urban, demagogic publicity of the Imperium Romanum. Slight as his Hellenistic tincture may have been, it sufficed to make him outwardly a part of the Classical Civilization. Jesus had drawn unto himself fishermen and peasants, Paul devoted himself to the market-places of the great cities and the megalopolitan form of propaganda. The word “pagan” (man of the heath or country-side) survives to this day to tell us who it was that this propaganda affected last. What a difference, indeed what diametrical opposition, between Paul and Boniface the passionate Faustian of woods and lone valleys, the joyous cultivating Cistercians, the Teutonic Knights of the Slavonic East! Here was youth once more, blossoming and yearning in a peasant landscape, and not until the 19th Century, when that landscape and all pertaining to it had aged into a world based on the megalopolis and inhabited by the masses, did Diatribe appear in it. A true peasantry enters into the field of view of Socialism as little as it did into those of Buddha and the Stoa. It is only now, in the Western megalopolis, that the equivalent of the Paul-type emerges, to figure in Christian or anti-Christian, social or theosophical “causes,” Free Thought or the making of religious fancy-ware.

This decisive turn towards the one remaining kind of life—that is, life as a fact, seen biologically and under causality-relations instead of as Destiny—is particularly manifest in the ethical passion with which men now turn to philosophies of digestion, nutrition and hygiene. Alcohol- questions and Vegetarianism are treated with religious earnestness—such, apparently, being the gravest problems that the “men of the New Order,” the generations of frog-perspective, are capable of tackling. Religions, as they are when they stand new-born on the threshold of the new Culture—the Vedic, the Orphic, the Christianity of Jesus and the Faustian Christianity of the old Germany of chivalry—would have felt it degradation even to glance at questions of this kind. Nowadays, one rises to them. Buddhism is unthinkable without a bodily diet to match its spiritual diet, and amongst the Sophists, in the circle of Antisthenes, in the Stoa and amongst the Sceptics such questions became ever more and more prominent. Even Aristotle wrote on the alcohol- question, and a whole series of philosophers took up that of vegetarianism. And the only difference between Apollinian and Faustian methods here is that the Cynic theorized about his own digestion while Shaw treats of “everybody’s.” The one disinterests himself, the other dictates. Even Nietzsche, as we know, handled such questions with relish in his Ecce Homo.

VIII

Let us, once more, review Socialism (independently of the economic movement of the same name) as the Faustian example of Civilization- ethics. Its friends regard it as the form of the future, its enemies as a sign of downfall, and both are equally right. We are all Socialists, wittingly or unwittingly, willingly or unwillingly. Even resistance to it wears its form.

Similarly, and equally necessarily, all Classical men of the Late period were Stoics unawares. The whole Roman people, as a body, has a Stoic soul. The genuine Roman, the very man who fought Stoicism hardest, was a Stoic of a stricter sort than ever a Greek was. The Latin language of the last centuries before Christ was the mightiest of Stoic creations.

Ethical Socialism is the maximum possible of attainment to a life- feeling under the aspect of Aims;[452] for the directional movement of Life that is felt as Time and Destiny, when it hardens, takes the form of an intellectual machinery of means and end. Direction is the living, aim the dead. The passionate energy of the advance is generically Faustian, the mechanical remainder—“Progress”—is specifically Socialistic, the two being related as body and skeleton. And of the two it is the generic quality that distinguishes Socialism from Buddhism and Stoicism; these, with their respective ideals of Nirvana and Ataraxia, are no less mechanical in design than Socialism is, but they know nothing of the latter’s dynamic energy of expansion, of its will-to- infinity, of its passion of the third dimension.

In spite of its foreground appearances, ethical Socialism is not a system of compassion, humanity, peace and kindly care, but one of will- to-power. Any other reading of it is illusory. The aim is through and through imperialist; welfare, but welfare in the expansive sense, the welfare not of the diseased but of the energetic man who ought to be given and must be given freedom to do, regardless of obstacles of wealth, birth and tradition. Amongst us, sentimental morale, morale directed to happiness and usefulness, is never the final instinct, however we may persuade ourselves otherwise. The head and front of moral modernity must ever be Kant, who (in this respect Rousseau’s pupil) excludes from his ethics the motive of Compassion and lays down the formula “Act, so that....” All ethic in this style expresses and is meant to express the will-to-infinity, and this will demands conquest of the moment, the present, and the foreground of life. In place of the Socratic formula “Knowledge is Virtue” we have, even in Bacon, the formula “Knowledge is Power.” The Stoic takes the world as he finds it, but the Socialist wants to organize and recast it in form and substance, to fill it with his own spirit. The Stoic adapts himself, the Socialist commands. He would have the whole world bear the form of his view, thus transferring the idea of the “Critique of Pure Reason” into the ethical field. This is the ultimate meaning of the Categorical Imperative, which he brings to bear in political, social and economic matters alike—act as though the maxims that you practise were to become by your will the law for all. And this tyrannical tendency is not absent from even the shallowest phenomena of the time.

It is not attitude and mien, but activity that is to be given form. As in China and in Egypt, life only counts in so far as it is deed. And it is the mechanicalizing of the organic concept of Deed that leads to the concept of work as commonly understood, the civilised form of Faustian effecting. This morale, the insistent tendency to give to Life the most active forms imaginable, is stronger than reason, whose moral programs—be they never so reverenced, inwardly believed or ardently championed—are only effective in so far as they either lie, or are mistakenly supposed to lie, in the direction of this force. Otherwise they remain mere words. We have to distinguish, in all modernism, between the popular side with its dolce far niente, its solicitude for health, happiness, freedom from care, and universal peace—in a word, its supposedly Christian ideals—and the higher Ethos which values deeds only, which (like everything else that is Faustian) is neither understood nor desired by the masses, which grandly idealizes the Aim and therefore Work. If we would set against the Roman “panem et circenses” (the final life-symbol of Epicurean-Stoic existence, and, at bottom, of Indian existence also) some corresponding symbol of the North (and of Old China and Egypt) it would be the “Right to Work.” This was the basis of Fichte’s thoroughly Prussian (and now European) conception of State-Socialism, and in the last terrible stages of evolution it will culminate in the Duty to Work.

Think, lastly, of the Napoleonic in it, the "ære perennius," the will- to-duration. Apollinian man looked back to a Golden Age; this relieved him of the trouble of thinking upon what was still to come. The Socialist—the dying Faust of Part II—is the man of historical care, who feels the Future as his task and aim, and accounts the happiness of the moment as worthless in comparison. The Classical spirit, with its oracles and its omens, wants only to know the future, but the Westerner would shape it. The Third Kingdom is the Germanic ideal. From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen—arrows of yearning to the other bank, as the Zarathustra says—every great man has linked his life to an eternal morning. Alexander’s life was a wondrous paroxysm, a dream which conjured up the Homeric ages from the grave. Napoleon’s life was an immense toil, not for himself nor for France, but for the Future.

It is well, at this point, to recall once more that each of the different great Cultures has pictured world-history in its own special way. Classical man only saw himself and his fortunes as statically present with himself, and did not ask “whence” or “whither.” Universal history was for him an impossible notion. This is the static way of looking at history. Magian man sees it as the great cosmic drama of creation and foundering, the struggle between Soul and Spirit, Good and Evil, God and Devil—a strictly-defined happening with, as its culmination, one single Peripeteia—the appearance of the Saviour. Faustian man sees in history a tense unfolding towards an aim; its “ancient-mediæval-modern” sequence is a dynamic image. He cannot picture history to himself in any other way. This scheme of three parts is not indeed world-history as such, general world-history. But it is the image of world-history as it is conceived in the Faustian style. It begins to be true and consistent with the beginning of the Western Culture and ceases with its ceasing; and Socialism in the highest sense is logically the crown of it, the form of its conclusive state that has been implicit in it from Gothic onwards.

And here Socialism—in contrast to Stoicism and Buddhism—becomes tragic. It is of the deepest significance that Nietzsche, so completely clear and sure in dealing with what should be destroyed, what transvalued, loses himself in nebulous generalities as soon as he comes to discuss the Whither, the Aim. His criticism of decadence is unanswerable, but his theory of the Superman is a castle in the air. It is the same with Ibsen—“Brand” and “Rosmersholm,” “Emperor and Galilean” and “Master- builder”—and with Hebbel, with Wagner and with everyone else. And therein lies a deep necessity; for, from Rousseau onwards, Faustian man has nothing more to hope for in anything pertaining to the grand style of Life. Something has come to an end. The Northern soul has exhausted its inner possibilities, and of the dynamic force and insistence that had expressed itself in world-historical visions of the future—visions of millennial scope—nothing remains but the mere pressure, the passion yearning to create, the form without the content. This soul was Will and nothing but Will. It needed an aim for its Columbus-longing; it had to give its inherent activity at least the illusion of a meaning and an object. And so the keener critic will find a trace of Hjalmar Ekdal in all modernity, even its highest phenomena. Ibsen called it the lie of life. There is something of this lie in the entire intellect of the Western Civilization, so far as this applies itself to the future of religion, of art or of philosophy, to a social-ethical aim, a Third Kingdom. For deep down beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be repressed, that all this hectic zeal is the effort of a soul that may not and cannot rest to deceive itself. This is the tragic situation—the inversion of the Hamlet motive—that produced Nietzsche’s strained conception of a “return,” which nobody really believed but he himself clutched fast lest the feeling of a mission should slip out of him. This Life’s lie is the foundation of Bayreuth—which would be something whereas Pergamum was something—and a thread of it runs through the entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical necessity of its own existence.

It remains, now, to say a word as to the morphology of a history of philosophy.

There is no such thing as Philosophy “in itself.” Every Culture has its own philosophy, which is a part of its total symbolic expression and forms with its posing of problems and methods of thought an intellectual ornamentation that is closely related to that of architecture and the arts of form. From the high and distant standpoint it matters very little what “truths” thinkers have managed to formulate in words within their respective schools, for, here as in every great art, it is the schools, conventions and repertory of forms that are the basic elements. Infinitely more important than the answers are the questions—the choice of them, the inner form of them. For it is the particular way in which a macrocosm presents itself to the understanding man of a particular Culture that determines a priori the whole necessity of asking them, and the way in which they are asked.

The Classical and the Faustian Cultures, and equally the Indian and the Chinese, have each their proper ways of asking, and further, in each case, all the great questions have been posed at the very outset. There is no modern problem that the Gothic did not see and bring into form, no Hellenistic problem that did not of necessity come up for the old Orphic temple-teachings.

It is of no importance whether the subtilizing turn of mind expresses itself here in oral tradition and there in books, whether such books are personal creations of an “I” as they are amongst ourselves or anonymous fluid masses of texts as in India, and whether the result is a set of comprehensible systems or, as in Egypt, glimpses of the last secrets are veiled in expressions of art and ritual. Whatever the variations, the general course of philosophies as organisms is the same. At the beginning of every springtime period, philosophy, intimately related to great architecture and religion, is the intellectual echo of a mighty metaphysical living, and its task is to establish critically the sacred causality in the world-image seen with the eye of faith.[453] The basic distinctions, not only of science but also of philosophy, are dependent on, not divorced from, the elements of the corresponding religion. In this springtime, thinkers are, not merely in spirit but actually in status, priests. Such were the Schoolmen and the Mystics of the Gothic and the Vedic as of the Homeric[454] and the Early-Arabian[455] centuries. With the setting-in of the Late period, and not earlier, philosophy becomes urban and worldly, frees itself from subservience to religion and even dares to make that religion itself the object of epistemological criticism. The great theme of Brahman, Ionic and Baroque philosophies is the problem of knowing. The urban spirit turns to look at itself, in order to establish the proposition that there is no higher judgment-seat of knowing beyond itself, and with that thought draws nearer to higher mathematics and instead of priests we have men of the world, statesmen and merchants and discoverers, tested in high places and by high tasks, whose ideas about thought rest upon deep experience of life. Of such are the series of great thinkers from Thales to Protagoras and from Bacon to Hume, and the series of pre-Confucian and pre-Buddha thinkers of whom we hardly know more than the fact that they existed.

At the end of such series stand Kant and Aristotle,[456] and after them there set in the Civilization-philosophies. In every Culture, thought mounts to a climax, setting the questions at the outset and answering them with ever-increasing force of intellectual expression—and, as we have said before, ornamental significance—until exhausted; and then it passes into a decline in which the problems of knowing are in every respect stale repetitions of no significance. There is a metaphysical period, originally of a religious and finally of a rationalistic cast—in which thought and life still contain something of chaos, an unexploited fund that enables them effectively to create—and an ethical period in which life itself, now become megalopolitan, appears to call for inquiry and has to turn the still available remainder of philosophical creative- power on to its own conduct and maintenance. In the one period life reveals itself, the other has life as its object. The one is “theoretical” (contemplative) in the grand sense, the other perforce practical. Even the Kantian system is in its deepest characters contemplated in the first instance and only afterwards logically and systematically formulated and ordered.

We see this evidenced in Kant’s attitude to mathematics. No one is a genuine metaphysician who has not penetrated into the form-world of numbers, who has not lived them into himself as a symbolism. And in fact it was the great thinkers of the Baroque who created the analytical mathematic, and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the great pre- Socratics and Plato. Descartes and Leibniz stand beside Newton and Gauss, Pythagoras and Plato by Archytas and Archimedes, at the summits of mathematical development. But already in Kant the philosopher has become, as mathematician, negligible. Kant no more penetrated to the last subtleties of the Calculus as it stood in his own day than he absorbed the axiomatic of Leibniz. The same may be said of Aristotle. And thenceforward there is no philosopher who is counted as a mathematician. Fichte, Hegel and the Romantics were entirely unmathematical, and so were Zeno[457] and Epicurus. Schopenhauer in this field is weak to the point of crudity, and of Nietzsche the less said the better. When the form-world of numbers passed out of its ken, philosophy lost a great convention, and since then it has lacked not only structural strength but also what may be called the grand style of thinking. Schopenhauer himself admitted that he was a hand-to-mouth thinker (Gelegenheitsdenker).

With the decline of metaphysics, ethics has outgrown its status as a subordinate element in abstract theory. Henceforth it is philosophy, the other divisions being absorbed into it and practical living becoming the centre of consideration. The passion of pure thought sinks down. Metaphysics, mistress yesterday, is handmaid now; all it is required to do is to provide a foundation for practical views. And the foundation becomes more and more superfluous. It becomes the custom to despise and mock at the metaphysical, the unpractical, the philosophy of “stone for bread.” In Schopenhauer it is for the sake of the fourth book that the first three exist at all. Kant merely thought that it was the same with him; in reality, pure and not applied reason is still his centre of creation. There is exactly the same difference in Classical philosophy before and after Aristotle—on the one hand, a grandly conceived Cosmos to which a formal ethic adds almost nothing, and, on the other, ethics as such, as programme, as necessity with a desultory ad hoc metaphysic for basis. And the entire absence of logical scruple with which Nietzsche, for instance, dashes off such theories makes no difference whatever to our appreciation of his philosophy proper.

It is well known[458] that Schopenhauer did not proceed to Pessimism from his metaphysic but, on the contrary, was led to develop his system by the pessimism that fell upon him in his seventeenth year. Shaw, a most significant witness, observes in his “Quintessence of Ibsenism” that one may quite well accept Schopenhauer’s philosophy and reject his metaphysics—therein quite accurately discriminating between that which makes him the first thinker of the new age and that which is included because an obsolete tradition held it to be indispensable in a complete philosophy. No one would undertake to divide Kant thus, and the attempt would not succeed if it were made. But with Nietzsche one has no difficulty in perceiving that his “philosophy” was through-and-through an inner and very early experience, while he covered his metaphysical requirements rapidly and often imperfectly by the aid of a few books, and never managed to state even his ethical theory with any exactitude. Just the same overlay of living seasonable ethical thought on a stratum of metaphysics required by convention (but in fact superfluous) is to be found in Epicurus and the Stoics. We need have no doubt after this as to what is the essence of a Civilization-philosophy.

Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities. The world-city has definitely overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory proper to itself, directed of necessity outward, soulless. Henceforward, we might with some justice replace the word “soul” by the word “brain.” And, since in the Western “brain” the will to power, the tyrannical set towards the Future and purpose to organize everybody and everything, demands practical expression, ethics, as it loses touch more and more with its metaphysical past, steadily assumes a social-ethical and social-economic character. The philosophy of the present that starts from Hegel and Schopenhauer is, so far as it represents the spirit of the age (which, e.g., Lotze and Herbart do not), a critique of society.

The attention that the Stoic gave to his own body, the Westerner devotes to the body social. It is not chance that Hegelian philosophy has given rise to Socialism (Marx, Engels), to Anarchism (Stirner) and to the problem-posing social drama (Hebbel). Socialism is political economy converted into the ethical and, moreover, the imperative mood. So long as a metaphysic existed (that is, till Kant) political economy remained a science. But as soon as “philosophy” became synonymous with practical ethics, it replaced mathematics as the basis of thought about the world—hence the importance of Cousin, Bentham, Comte, Mill and Spencer.

To choose his material at will is not given to the philosopher, neither is the material of philosophy always and everywhere the same. There are no eternal questions, but only questions arising out of the feelings of a particular being and posed by it. Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis applies also to every genuine philosophy as the intellectual expression of this being, as the actualization of spiritual possibilities in a form-world of concepts, judgments and thought- structures comprised in the living phenomenon of its author. Any and every such philosophy is, from the first word to the last, from its most abstract proposition to its most telltale trait of personality, a thing- become, mirrored over from soul into world, from the realm of freedom into that of necessity, from the immediate-living into the dimensional- logical; and on that very account it is mortal, and its life has prescribed rhythm and duration. The choice of them, therefore, is subject to strict necessity. Each epoch has its own, important for itself and for no other epoch. It is the mark of the born philosopher that he sees his epoch and his theme with a sure eye. Apart from this, there is nothing of any importance in philosophical production—merely technical knowledge and the industry requisite for the building up of systematic and conceptual subtleties.

Consequently, the distinctive philosophy of the 19th Century is only Ethics and social critique in the productive sense—nothing more. And consequently, again, its most important representatives (apart from actual practitioners) are the dramatists. They are the real philosophers of Faustian activism, and compared with them not one of the lecture-room philosophers and systematics counts at all. All that these unimportant pedants have done for us is, so to write and rewrite the history of philosophy (and what history!—collections of dates and “results”) that no one to-day knows what the history of philosophy is or what it might be.

Thanks to this, the deep organic unity in the thought of this epoch has never yet been perceived. The essence of it, from the philosophical point of view, can be precised by asking the question: In how far is Shaw the pupil and fulfiller of Nietzsche? The question is put in no ironic spirit. Shaw is the one thinker of eminence who has consistently advanced in the same direction as that of the true Nietzsche—namely, productive criticism of the Western morale—while following out as poet the last implications of Ibsen and devoting the balance of the artistic creativeness that is in him to practical discussions.

Save in so far as the belated Romanticist in him has determined the style, sound and attitude of his philosophy, Nietzsche is in every respect a disciple of the materialistic decades. That which drew him with such passion to Schopenhauer was (not that he himself or anyone else was conscious of it) that element of Schopenhauer’s doctrine by which he destroyed the great metaphysic and (without meaning to do so) parodied his master Kant; that is to say, the modification of all deep ideas of the Baroque age into tangible and mechanistic notions. Kant speaks in inadequate words, which hide a mighty and scarcely apprehensible intuition, an intuition of the world as appearance or phenomenon. In Schopenhauer this becomes the world as brain-phenomenon (Gehirnphänomen). The change-over from tragic philosophy to philosophical plebeianism is complete. It will be enough to cite one passage. In “The World as Will and Idea” Schopenhauer says: “The will, as thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner, true and indestructible essence of the man; in itself, however, it is without consciousness. For the consciousness is conditioned by the intellect and this is a mere accident of our being, since it is a function of the brain, and that again (with its dependent nerves and spinal cord) is a mere fruit, a product, nay, even a parasite of the rest of the organism, inasmuch as it does not intervene directly in the latter’s activities but only serves a purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the outer world.” Here we have exactly the fundamental position of the flattest materialism. It was not for nothing that Schopenhauer, like Rousseau before him, studied the English sensualists. From them he learned to misread Kant in the spirit of megalopolitan utilitarian modernity. The intellect as instrument of the will-to-life,[459] as weapon in the struggle for existence, the ideas brought to grotesque expression by Shaw in “Man and Superman”—it was because this was his view of the world that Schopenhauer became the fashionable philosopher when Darwin’s main work was published in 1859. In contrast to Schelling, Hegel and Fichte, he was a philosopher, and the only philosopher, whose metaphysical propositions could be absorbed with ease by intellectual mediocrity. The clarity of which he was so proud threatened at every moment to reveal itself as triviality. While retaining enough of formula to produce an atmosphere of profundity and exclusiveness, he presented the civilized view of the world complete and assimilable. His system is anticipated Darwinism, and the speech of Kant and the concepts of the Indians are simply clothing. In his book “Ueber den Willen in der Natur” (1835) we find already the struggle for self-preservation in Nature, the human intellect as master-weapon in that struggle and sexual love as unconscious selection according to biological interest.[460]

It is the view that Darwin (via Malthus) brought to bear with irresistible success in the field of zoology. The economic origin of Darwinism is shown by the fact that the system deduced from the similarities between men and the higher animals ceases to fit even at the level of the plant-world and becomes positively absurd as soon as it is seriously attempted to apply it with its will-tendency (natural selection, mimicry) to primitive organic forms.[461] Proof, to the Darwinian, means to the ordering and pictorial presentation of a selection of facts so that they conform to his historico-dynamic basic feeling of “Evolution.” Darwinism—that is to say, that totality of very varied and discrepant ideas, in which the common factor is merely the application of the causality principle to living things, which therefore is a method and not a result—was known in all details to the 18th Century. Rousseau was championing the ape-man theory as early as 1754. What Darwin originated is only the “Manchester School” system, and it is this latent political element in it that accounts for its popularity.

The spiritual unity of the century is manifest enough here. From Schopenhauer to Shaw, everyone has been, without being aware of it, bringing the same principle into form. Everyone (including even those who, like Hebbel, knew nothing of Darwin) is a derivative of the evolution-idea—and of the shallow civilized and not the deep Goethian form of it at that—whether he issues it with a biological or an economic imprint. There is evolution, too, in the evolution-idea itself, which is Faustian through and through, which displays (in sharpest contrast to Aristotle’s timeless entelechy-idea) all our passionate urgency towards infinite future, our will and sense of aim which is so immanent in, so specific to, the Faustian spirit as to be the a priori form rather than the discovered principle of our Nature-picture. And in the evolution of evolution we find the same change taking place as elsewhere, the turn of the Culture to the Civilization. In Goethe evolution is upright, in Darwin it is flat; in Goethe organic, in Darwin mechanical; in Goethe an experience and emblem, in Darwin a matter of cognition and law. To Goethe evolution meant inward fulfilment, to Darwin it meant “Progress.” Darwin’s struggle for existence, which he read into Nature and not out of it, is only the plebeian form of that primary feeling which in Shakespeare’s tragedies moves the great realities against one another; but what Shakespeare inwardly saw, felt and actualized in his figures as destiny, Darwinism comprehends as causal connexion and formulates as a superficial system of utilities. And it is this system and not this primary feeling that is the basis of the utterances of “Zarathustra,” the tragedy of “Ghosts,” the problems of the “Ring of the Nibelungs.” Only, it was with terror that Schopenhauer, the first of his line, perceived what his own knowledge meant—that is the root of his pessimism, and the “Tristan” music of his adherent Wagner is its highest expression—whereas the late men, and foremost among them Nietzsche, face it with enthusiasm, though it is true, the enthusiasm is sometimes rather forced.

Nietzsche’s breach with Wagner—that last product of the German spirit over which greatness broods—marks his silent change of school- allegiance, his unconscious step from Schopenhauer to Darwin, from the metaphysical to the physiological formulation of the same world-feeling, from the denial to the affirmation of the aspect that in fact is common to both, the one seeing as will-to-life what the other regards as struggle for existence. In his “Schopenhauer als Erzieher” he still means by evolution an inner ripening, but the Superman is the product of evolution as machinery. And “Zarathustra” is ethically the outcome of an unconscious protest against “Parsifal”—which artistically entirely governs it—of the rivalry of one evangelist for another.

But Nietzsche was also a Socialist without knowing it. Not his catchwords, but his instincts, were Socialistic, practical, directed to that welfare of mankind that Goethe and Kant never spent a thought upon. Materialism, Socialism and Darwinism are only artificially and on the surface separable. It was this that made it possible for Shaw in the third act of “Man and Superman” (one of the most important and significant of the works that issued from the transition) to obtain, by giving just a small and indeed perfectly logical turn to the tendencies of “master-morale” and the production of the Superman, the specific maxims of his own Socialism. Here Shaw was only expressing with remorseless clarity and full consciousness of the commonplace, what the uncompleted portion of the Zarathustra would have said with Wagnerian theatricality and woolly romanticism. All that we are concerned to discover in Nietzsche’s reasoning is its practical bases and consequences, which proceed of necessity from the structure of modern public life. He moves amongst vague ideas like “new values,” “Superman,” “Sinn der Erde,” and declines or fears to shape them more precisely. Shaw does it. Nietzsche observes that the Darwinian idea of the Superman evokes the notion of breeding, and stops there, leaves it at a sounding phrase. Shaw pursues the question—for there is no object in talking about it if nothing is going to be done about it—asks how it is to be achieved, and from that comes to demand the transformation of mankind into a stud-farm. But this is merely the conclusion implicit in the Zarathustra, which Nietzsche was not bold enough, or was too fastidious, to draw. If we do talk of systematic breeding—a completely materialistic and utilitarian notion—we must be prepared to answer the questions, who shall breed what, where and how? But Nietzsche, too romantic to face the very prosaic social consequences and to expose poetic ideas to the test of facts, omits to say that his whole doctrine, as a derivative of Darwinism, presupposes Socialism and, moreover, socialistic compulsion as the means; that any systematic breeding of a class of higher men requires as condition precedent a strictly socialistic ordering of society; and that this “Dionysiac” idea, as it involves a common action and is not simply the private affair of detached thinkers, is democratic, turn it how you may. It is the climax of the ethical force of “Thou shalt”; to impose upon the world the form of his will, Faustian man sacrifices even himself.

The breeding of the Superman follows from the notion of “selection.” Nietzsche was an unconscious pupil of Darwin from the time that he wrote aphorisms, but Darwin himself had remoulded the evolution-ideas of the 18th Century according to the Malthusian tendencies of political economy, which he projected on the higher animal-world. Malthus had studied the cotton industry in Lancashire, and already in 1857 we have the whole system, only applied to men instead of to beasts, in Buckle’s History of English Civilization.

In other words, the “master-morale” of this last of the Romantics is derived—strangely perhaps but very significantly—from that source of all intellectual modernity, the atmosphere of the English factory. The Machiavellism that commended itself to Nietzsche as a Renaissance phenomenon is something closely (one would have supposed, obviously) akin to Darwin’s notion of “mimicry.” It is in fact that of which Marx (that other famous disciple of Malthus) treats in his Das Kapital, the bible of political (not ethical) Socialism.[462] That is the genealogy of “Herrenmoral.” The Will-to-Power, transferred to the realistic, political and economic domain, finds its expression in Shaw’s “Major Barbara.” No doubt Nietzsche, as a personality, stands at the culmination of this series of ethical philosophers, but here Shaw the party politician reaches up to his level as a thinker. The will-to-power is to-day represented by the two poles of public life—the worker-class and the big money-and-brain men—far more effectually than it ever was by a Borgia. The millionaire Undershaft of Shaw’s best comedy is a Superman, though Nietzsche the Romanticist would not have recognized his ideal in such a figure. Nietzsche is for ever speaking of transvaluations of all values, of a philosophy of the “Future” (which, incidentally, is merely the Western, and not the Chinese or the African future), but when the mists of his thought do come in from the Dionysiac distance and condense into any tangible form, the will-to-power appears to him in the guise of dagger-and-poison and never in that of strike and “deal.” And yet he says that the idea first came to him when he saw the Prussian regiments marching to battle in 1870.

The drama, in this epoch, is no longer poetry in the old sense of the Culture days, but a form of agitation, debate and demonstration. The stage has become a moralizing institution. Nietzsche himself often thought of putting his ideas in the dramatic form. Wagner’s Nibelung poetry, more especially the first draft of it (1850), expresses his social-revolutionary ideas, and even when, after a circuitous course under influences artistic and non-artistic, he has completed the “Ring,” his Siegfried is still a symbol of the Fourth Estate, his Brünhilde still the “free woman.” The sexual selection of which the “Origin of Species” enunciated the theory in 1859, was finding its musical expression at the very same time in the third act of “Siegfried” and in “Tristan.” It is no accident that Wagner, Hebbel and Ibsen, all practically simultaneously, set to work to dramatize the Nibelung material. Hebbel, making the acquaintance in Paris of Engels’s writings, expresses (in a letter of April 2, 1844) his surprise at finding that his own conceptions of the social principle of his age, which he was then intending to exemplify in a drama Zu irgend einer Zeit, coincided precisely with those of the future “Communist Manifesto.” And, upon first making the acquaintance of Schopenhauer (letter of March 19, 1857), he is equally surprised by the affinity that he finds between the Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and tendencies upon which he had based his Holofernes and his Herodes und Mariamne. Hebbel’s diaries, of which the most important portion belongs to the years 1835-1845, were (though he did not know it) one of the deepest philosophical efforts of the century. It would be no surprise to find whole sentences of it in Nietzsche, who never knew him and did not always come up to his level.

The actual and effective philosophy of the 19th Century, then, has as its one genuine theme the Will-to-Power. It considers this Will-to-Power in civilized-intellectual, ethical, or social forms and presents it as will-to-life, as life-force, as practical-dynamical principle, as idea, and as dramatic figure. (The period that is closed by Shaw corresponds to the period 350-250 in the Classical.) The rest of the 19th-Century philosophy is, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase, “professors’ philosophy by philosophy-professors.” The real landmarks are these:

1819. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. The will to life is for the first time put as the only reality (original force, Urkraft); but, older idealist influences still being potent, it is put there to be negatived (zur Verneinung empfohlen).

1836. Schopenhauer, Ueber den Willen in der Natur. Anticipation of Darwinism, but in metaphysical disguise.

1840. Proud’hon, Qu’est-ce que la Propriété, basis of Anarchism. Comte, Cours de philosophic positive; the formula “order and progress.”

1841. Hebbel, “Judith,” first dramatic conception of the “New Woman” and the “Superman.” Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christenthums.

1844. Engels, Umriss einer Kritik des Nationalökonomie, foundation of the materialistic conception of history. Hebbel, Maria Magdalena, the first social drama.

1847. Marx, Misère de la Philosophie (synthesis of Hegel and Malthus). These are the epochal years in which economics begins to dominate social ethic and biology.

1848. Wagner’s “Death of Siegfried”; Siegfried as social-ethical revolutionary, the Fafnir hoard as symbol of Capitalism.

1850. Wagner’s Kunst und Klima; the sexual problem.

1850-1858. Wagner’s, Hebbel’s and Ibsen’s Nibelung poetry.

1859 (year of symbolic coincidences). Darwin, “Origin of Species” (application of economics to biology). Wagner’s “Tristan.” Marx, _Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie_.

1863. J. S. Mill, “Utilitarianism.”

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

1867. Ibsen, “Brand.” Marx, Das Kapital.

1878. Wagner “Parsifal.” First dissolution of materialism into mysticism.

1879. Ibsen “Nora.”

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

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

1886. Ibsen, “Rosmersholm.” Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse.

1887-8. Strindberg, “Fadren” and “Fröken Julie.”

From 1890 the conclusion of the epoch approaches. The religious works of Strindberg and the symbolical of Ibsen.

1896. Ibsen, “John Gabriel Borkman.” Nietzsche, Uebermensch. 1898. Strindberg, “Till Damascus.”

From 1900 the last phenomena.

1903. Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter; the only serious attempt to revive Kant within this epoch, by referring him to Wagner and Ibsen.

1903. Shaw, “Man and Superman”; final synthesis of Darwin and Nietzsche.

1905. Shaw, “Major Barbara”; the type of the Superman referred back to its economic origins.

With this, the ethical period exhausts itself as the metaphysical had done. Ethical Socialism, prepared by Fichte, Hegel, and Humboldt, was at its zenith of passionate greatness about the middle of the 19th Century, and at the end thereof it had reached the stage of repetitions. The 20th Century, while keeping the word Socialism, has replaced an ethical philosophy that only Epigoni suppose to be capable of further development, by a praxis of economic everyday questions. The ethical disposition of the West will remain “socialistic” but its theory has ceased to be a problem. And there remains the possibility of a third and last stage of Western philosophy, that of a physiognomic scepticism. The secret of the world appears successively as a knowledge problem, a valuation problem and a form problem. Kant saw Ethics as an object of knowledge, the 19th Century saw it as an object of valuation. The Sceptic would deal with both simply as the historical expression of a Culture.

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IX. SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING…

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