Opening…

I. Origin and Landscape. (A) The Cosmic and The Microcosm 1

Plant and animal, p. 3. Being and waking-being, p. 6. Feeling, understanding, thinking, p. 9. The motion problem, p. 14. Mass-soul, p. 18.

II. Origin and Landscape. (B) The Group of the Higher Cultures 21

History-picture and nature-picture, p. 23. Human and world history, p. 28. Two ages: primitive and high Cultures, p. 33. Survey of the high Cultures, p. 39. Historyless mankind, p. 48.

III. Origin and Landscape. (C) The Relations between the Cultures 53

“Influence,” p. 55. Roman law, p. 60. Magian law, p. 67. Western law, p. 75.

IV. Cities and Peoples. (A) The Soul of the City 85

Mycenæ and Crete, p. 87. The peasant, p. 89. World-history is urban history, p. 90. Figure of the city, p. 92. City and intellect, p. 96. Spirit of the world-city, p. 99. Sterility and disintegration, p. 103.

V. Cities and Peoples. (B) Peoples, Races, Tongues 111

Streams of being and linkages of waking-being, p. 114. Expression-language and communication-language, p. 115. Totem and Taboo, p. 116. Speech and speaking, p. 117. The house as race-expression, p. 120. Castle and cathedral, p. 122. Race, p. 124. Blood and soil, p. 127. Speech, p. 131. Means and meaning, p. 134. Word, grammar, p. 137. Language-history, p. 145. Script, p. 149. Morphology of the Culture-languages, p. 152.

VI. Cities and Peoples. (C) Primitives, Culture-Peoples, Fellaheen 157

People-names, languages, races, p. 159. Migrations, p. 161. People and soul, p. 165. The Persians, p. 166. Morphology of peoples, p. 169. People and nation, p. 170. Classical, Arabian, and Western nations, p. 173.

VII. Problems of the Arabian Culture. (A) Historic Pseudomorphoses 187

“Pseudomorphosis,” p. 189. Actium, p. 191. Russia, p. 192. Arabian chivalry, p. 196. Syncretism, p. 200. Jews, Chaldeans, Persians of the pre-Culture, p. 204. Mission, p. 209. Jesus, p. 212. Paul, p. 220. John, Marcion, p. 225. The pagan and Christian cult-churches, p. 228.

VIII. Problems of the Arabian Culture. (B) The Magian Soul 231

Dualism of the World-cavern, p. 233. Time-feeling (era, world-history, grace), p. 238. Consensus, p. 242. The “Word” as substance, the Koran, p. 244. Secret Torah, commentary, p. 246. The group of the Magian religions, p. 248. The Christological controversy, p. 255. Being as extension (mission), p. 258.

IX. Problems of the Arabian Culture. (C) Pythagoras, Mohammed, Cromwell 263

Essence of religion, p. 265. Myth and cult, p. 268. Moral as sacrifice, p. 271. Morphology of religious history, p. 275. The pre-Culture: Franks, Russians, p. 277. Egyptian early period, p. 279. Classical, p. 281. China, p. 285. Gothic (Mary and Devil, baptism and contrition), p. 288. Reformation, p. 295. Science, p. 300. Rationalism, p. 305. “Second Religiousness,” p. 310. Roman and Chinese emperor-worship, p. 313. Jewry, p. 315.

X. The State. (A) The Problem of the Estates: Nobility and Priesthood 325

Man and woman, p. 327. Stock and estate, p. 329. Peasantry and society, p. 331. Estate, caste, calling, p. 332. Nobility and priesthood as symbols of Time and Space, p. 335. Training and shaping, customary-ethic and moral, p. 340. Property, power, and booty, p. 343. Priest and savant, p. 345. Economics and science, money and intellect, p. 347. History of the estates, early period, p. 348. The Third Estate, City-Freedom, Bourgeoisie, p. 354.

XI. The State. (B) State and History 359

Movement and thing-moved; Being “in form,” p. 361. Right and might, p. 363. Estate and State, p. 366. The feudal State, p. 371. From feudal union to Estate-State, p. 375. Polis and Dynasty, p. 376. The Absolute State, Fronde, and Tyrannis, p. 385. Wallenstein, p. 389. Cabinet politics, p. 391. From First Tyrannis to Second, p. 394. The bourgeois revolution, p. 398. Intellect and money, p. 400. Formless powers (Napoleonism), p. 404. Emancipation of money, p. 410. “Constitution,” p. 412. From Napoleonism to Cæsarism (period of the “Contending States”), p. 416. The great wars, p. 419. Age of the Romans, p. 422. From Caliphate to Sultanate, p. 423. Egypt, p. 427. The present, p. 428. Cæsarism, p. 431.

XII. The State. (C) Philosophy of Politics 437

Life is politics, p. 439. The political instinct, p. 441. The statesman, p. 442. Creation of tradition, p. 444. Physiognomic (diplomatic) pulse, p. 445. Estate and party, p. 448. The bourgeoisie as primary party (liberalism), p. 449. From Estate, through party, to the magnate’s following, p. 452. Theory, from Rousseau to Marx, p. 453. Intellect and money (democracy), p. 455. The press, p. 460. Self-annihilation of democracy through money, p. 464.

XIII. The Form-world of Economic Life. (A) Money 467

National economics, p. 469. Political and economic sides of life, p. 471. Productive and acquisitive economy (agriculture and trade), p. 473. Politics and trade (power and spoil), p. 475. Primitive economy, and economic style of the high Cultures, p. 476. Estate and economic class, p. 477. The cityless land, thinking in goods, p. 480. The city, thinking in money, p. 481. World-economics, mobilization of goods by money, p. 484. The Classical idea of money, the coin, p. 486. The slave as money, p. 487. Faustian thinking in money, the book-value, p. 489. Double-entry book-keeping, p. 490. The coin in the West, p. 490. Money and work, p. 492. Capitalism, p. 493. Economic organization, p. 494. Extinction of money-thought; Diocletian; the economic thought of the Russian, p. 495.

XIV. The Form-world of Economic Life. (B) The Machine 497

Spirit of technics, p. 499. Primitive technics and style of the high Cultures, p. 500. Classical technics, p. 501. The will-to-power over nature, the inventor, p. 501. Intoxication of modern discovery, p. 502. The man as slave of the machine, p. 504. Entrepreneurs, workers, engineers, p. 504. Struggle between money and industry, p. 505. Last battle of money and politics, victory of the blood, p. 507.

Index TO FOLLOW 507

I. ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(A)

THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM

I[1]

Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you--a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadows, this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free--he dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he will.

A plant is nothing on its own account. It forms a part of the landscape in which a chance made it take root. The twilight, the chill, the closing of every flower--these are not cause and effect, not danger and willed answer to danger. They are a single process of nature, which is accomplishing itself near, with, and in the plant. The individual is not free to look out for itself, will for itself, or choose for itself.

An animal, on the contrary, can choose. It is emancipated from the servitude of all the rest of the world. This midget swarm that dances on and on, that solitary bird still flying through the evening, the fox approaching furtively the nest--these are little worlds of their own within another great world. An animalcule in a drop of water, too tiny to be perceived by the human eye, though it lasts but a second and has but a corner of this drop as its field--nevertheless is free and independent in the face of the universe. The giant oak, upon one of whose leaves the droplet hangs, is not.

Servitude and freedom--this is in last and deepest analysis the differentia by which we distinguish vegetable and animal existence. Yet only the plant is wholly and entirely what it is; in the being of the animal there is something dual. A vegetable is only a vegetable; an animal is a vegetable and something more besides. A herd that huddles together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a way into his God--all these are seeking to return out of the life of freedom into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated into individuality and loneliness.

The seeds of a flowering plant show, under the microscope, two sheath-leaves which form and protect the young plant that is presently to turn towards the light, with its organs of the life-cycle and of reproduction, and in addition a third, which contains the future root and tells us that the plant is destined irrevocably to become once again part of a landscape. In the higher animals, on the contrary, we observe that the fertilized egg forms, in the first hours of its individualized existence, an outer sheath by which the inner containers of the cyclic and reproductive components--i.e., the plant element in the animal body--are enclosed and shut off from the mother body and all the rest of the world. This outer sheath symbolizes the essential character of animal existence and distinguishes the two kinds in which the Living has appeared on this earth.

There are noble names for them, found and bequeathed by the Classical world. The plant is something cosmic, and the animal is additionally a microcosm in relation to a macrocosm. When, and not until, the unit has thus separated itself from the All and can define its position with respect to the All, it becomes thereby a microcosm. Even the planets in their great cycles are in servitude, and it is only these tiny worlds that move freely relative to a great one which appears in their consciousness as their world-around (environment). Only through this individualism of the microcosm does that which the light offers to its eyes--our eyes--acquire meaning as “body,” and even to planets we are from some inner motive reluctant to concede the property of bodiliness.

All that is cosmic bears the hall-mark of periodicity; it has “beat” (rhythm, tact). All that is microcosmic possesses polarity; it possesses “tension.”

We speak of tense alertness and tense thought, but all wakeful states are in their essence tensions. Sense and object, I and thou, cause and effect, thing and property--each of these is a tension between discretes, and when the state pregnantly called “détente” appears, then at once fatigue, and presently sleep, set in for the microcosmic side of life. A human being asleep, discharged of all tensions, is leading only a plantlike existence.

Cosmic beat, on the other hand, is everything that can be paraphrased in terms like direction, time, rhythm, destiny, longing--from the hoof-beats of a team of thoroughbreds and the deep tread of proud marching soldiers to the silent fellowship of two lovers, the sensed tact that makes the dignity of a social assembly, and that keen quick judgment of a “judge of men” which I have already, earlier in this work,[2] called physiognomic tact.

This beat of cosmic cycles goes on notwithstanding the freedom of microcosmic movement in space, and from time to time breaks down the tension of the waking individual’s being into the one grand felt harmony. If we have ever followed the flight of a bird in the high air--how, always in the same way, it rises, turns, glides, loses itself in the distance--we must have felt the plantlike certainty of the “it” and the “we” in this ensemble of motion, which needs no bridge of reason to unite your sense of it with mine. This is the meaning of war-dances and love-dances amongst men and beasts. In this wise a regiment mounting to the assault under fire is forged into a unity, in this wise does the crowd collect at some exciting occasion and become a body, capable of thinking and acting pitifully, blindly, and strangely for a moment ere it falls apart again. In such cases the microcosmic wall is obliterated. It jostles and threatens, it pushes and pulls, it flees, swerves, and sways. Limbs intertwine, feet rush, one cry comes from every mouth, one destiny overlies all. Out of a sum of little single worlds comes suddenly a complete whole.

The perception of cosmic beat we call “feel (Fühlen),” that of microcosmic tensions “feeling (Empfinden).” The ambiguity of the word “Sinnlichkeit” has obscured this clear difference between the general and plantlike side and the specifically animal side of life. If we say for the one race- or sex-life, and for the other sense-life, a deep connexion reveals itself between them. The former ever bears the mark of periodicity, beat, even to the extent of harmony with the great cycles of the stars, of relation between female nature and the moon, of this life generally to night, spring, warmth. The latter consists in tensions, polarities of light and object illuminated, of cognition and that which is cognized, of wound and the weapon that has caused it. Each of these sides of life has, in the more highly developed genera, taken shape in special organs, and the higher the development, the clearer the emphasis on each side. We possess two cyclic organs of the cosmic existence, the blood system and the sex-organ, and two differentiating organs of microcosmic mobility, senses and nerves. We have to assume that in its origin the whole body has been both a cyclic and a tactual organ.

The blood is for us the symbol of the living. Its course proceeds without pause, from generation to death, from the mother body in and out of the body of the child, in the waking state and in sleep, never-ending. The blood of the ancestors flows through the chain of the generations and binds them in a great linkage of destiny, beat, and time. Originally this was accomplished only by a process of division, redivision, and ever new division of the cycles, until finally a specific organ of sexual generation appeared and made one moment into a symbol of duration. And how thereafter creatures begat and conceived, how the plantlike in them drove them to reproduce themselves for the maintenance beyond themselves of the eternal cycle, how the one great pulse-beat operates through all the detached souls, filling, driving, checking, and often destroying--that is the deepest of all life’s secrets, the secret that all religious mysteries and all great poems seek to penetrate, the secret whose tragedy stirred Goethe in his “Selige Sehnsucht” and “Wahlverwandtschaften,” where the child has to die because, brought into existence out of discordant cycles of the blood, it is the fruit of a cosmic sin.

To these cosmic organs the microcosm as such adds (in the degree to which it possesses freedom of movement vis-à-vis the macrocosm) the organ “sense,” which is originally touch-sense and nothing else. Even now, at our own high level of development, we use the word “touch” quite generally of contacts by eye, by ear, and even by the understanding, for it is the simplest expression of the mobility of a living creature that needs constantly to be establishing its relation to its world-around. But to “establish” here means to fix place, and thus all senses, however sophisticated and remote from the primitive they may seem, are essentially positive senses; there are no others. Sensation of all kinds distinguishes proper and alien. And for the positional definition of the alien with respect to the proper the scent of the hound serves just as much as the hearing of the stag and the eye of the eagle. Colour, brightness, tones, odours, all conceivable modes of sensation, imply detachment, distance, extension.

Like the cosmic cycle of the blood, the differentiating activity of sense is originally a unity. The active sense is always an understanding sense also. In these simple relations seeking and finding are one--that which we most appositely call “touch.” It is only later, in a stage wherein considerable demands are made upon developed senses, that sensation and understanding of sensation cease to be identical and the latter begins to detach itself more and more clearly from the former. In the outer sheath the critical organ separates itself from the sense-organ (as the sex-organ does from that of blood-circulation). But our use of words like “keen,” “sensitive,” “insight,” “poking our nose,” and “flair,” not to mention the terminology of logic, all taken from the visual world, shows well enough that we regard all understanding as derived from sensation, and that even in the case of man the two still work hand in hand.

We see a dog lying indifferent and then in a moment tense, listening, and scenting--what he merely senses he is seeking to understand as well. He is able, too, to reflect--that is a state in which the understanding is almost alone at work and playing upon mat sensations. The older languages very clearly expressed this graduation, sharply distinguishing each degree as an activity of a specific kind by means of a specific label--e.g., hear, listen, listen for (lauschen); smell, scent, sniff; see, spy, observe. In such series as these the reason-content becomes more and more important relative to the sensation-content.

Finally, however, a supreme sense develops among the rest. A something in the All, which for ever remains inaccessible to our will-to-understand, evokes for itself a bodily organ. The eye comes into existence--and in and with the eye, as its opposite pole, light. Abstract thinking about light may lead (and has led) to an ideal light representable by an ensemble picture of waves and rays, but the significance of this development in actuality was that thenceforward life was embraced and taken in through the light-world of the eye. This is the supreme marvel that makes everything human what it is. Only with this light-world of the eye do distances come into being as colours and brightnesses; only in this world are night and day and things and motions visible in the extension of illumined space, and the universe of infinitely remote stars circling above the earth, and that light-horizon of the individual life which stretches so far beyond the environs of the body.

In the world of this light--not the light which science has deduced indirectly by the aid of mental concepts, themselves derived from visions (“theory” in the Greek sense)--it comes to pass that seeing, human herds wander upon the face of this little earth-star, and that circumstances of light--the full southern flood over Egypt and Mexico, the greyness of the north--contribute to the determination of their entire life. It is for his eye that man develops the magic of his architecture, wherein the constructional elements given by touch are restated in relations generated by light. Religion, art, thought, have all arisen for light’s sake, and all differentiations reduce to the one point of whether it is the bodily eye or the mind’s eye that is addressed.

And with this there emerges in all clarity yet another distinction, which is normally obscured by the use of the ambiguous word “consciousness (Bewusstsein).” I distinguish being or “being there” (Dasein) from waking-being or waking-consciousness (Wachsein).[3] Being possesses beat and direction, while waking-consciousness is tension and extension. In being a destiny rules, while waking-consciousness distinguishes causes and effects. The prime question is for the one “when and wherefore?” for the other “where and how?”

A plant leads an existence that is without waking-consciousness. In sleep all creatures become plants, the tension of polarity to the world-around is extinguished, and the beat of life goes on. A plant knows only a relation to the when and the wherefore. The upthrust of the first green shoots out of the wintry earth, the swelling of the buds, the whole mighty process of blooming, scent, colour glory, and ripening--all this is desire to fulfil a destiny, constant yearning towards a “when?”

“Where?” on the other hand can have no meaning for a plant existence. It is the question with which awakening man daily orients himself afresh with respect to the world. For it is only the pulse-beat of Being that endures throughout the generations, whereas waking-consciousness begins anew for each microcosm. And herein lies the distinction between procreation and birth, the first being a pledge of duration, the second a beginning. A plant, therefore, is bred, but it is not born. It “is there,” but no awakening, no birthday, expands a sense-world around it.

II

With this we are brought face to face with man. In man’s waking-consciousness nothing disturbs the now pure lordship of the eye. The sounds of the night, the wind, the panting of beasts, the odour of flowers, all stimulate in him a “whither” and a “whence” in the world of light. Of the world of scent, in which even our closest comrade the dog still co-ordinates his visual impressions, we have no conception whatever. We know nothing of the world of the butterfly, whose crystalline eye projects no synthetic picture, or of those animals which, while certainly not destitute of senses, are blind. The only space that remains to us is visual space, and in it places have been found for the relics of other sense-worlds (such as sounds, scents, heat and cold) as properties and effects of light-things--it is a seen fire that warmth comes from, it is a seen rose in illumined space that gives off the scent and we speak of a certain tone as violin-tone. As to the stars, our conscious relations with them are limited to seeing them--over our heads they shine, describing their visible path.[4] But of these sense-worlds there is no doubt that animals and even primitive men still have sensations that are wholly different from ours; some of these sensations we are able to figure to ourselves indirectly by the aid of scientific hypotheses, but the rest now escape us altogether.

This impoverishment of the sensual implies, however, an immeasurable deepening. Human waking-consciousness is no longer a mere tension between body and environment. It is now life in a self-contained light-world. The body moves in the space that is seen. The depth-experience[5] is a mighty out-thrust into the visible distance from a light-centre[6]--the point which we call “I.” “I” is a light-concept. From this point onward the life of an “I” becomes essentially a life in the sun, and night is akin to death. And out of it, too, there arises a new feeling of fear which absorbs all others within itself--fear before the invisible, fear of that which one hears or feels, suspects, or observes in its effects without seeing. Animals indeed experience fear in other forms, but man finds these forms puzzling, and even uneasiness in the presence of stillness to which primitive men and children are subject (and which they seek to dispel by noise and loud talking) is disappearing in the higher types of mankind. It is fear of the invisible that is the essence and hall-mark of human religiousness. Gods are surmised, imagined, envisaged light-actualities, and the idea of an “invisible” god is the highest expression of human transcendence. Where the bounds of the light-world are, there lies the beyond, and salvation is emancipation from the spell of the light-world and its facts.

In precisely this resides the ineffable charm and the very real power of emancipation that music possesses for us men. For music is the only art whose means lie outside the light-world that has so long become coextensive with our total world, and music alone, therefore, can take us right out of this world, break up the steely tyranny of light, and let us fondly imagine that we are on the verge of reaching the soul’s final secret--an illusion due to the fact that our waking consciousness is now so dominated by one sense only, so thoroughly adapted to the eye-world, that it is incapable of forming, out of the impressions it receives, a world of the ear.[7]

Man’s thought, then, is visual thought, our concepts are derived from vision, and the whole fabric of our logic is a light-world in the imagination.

This narrowing and consequent deepening, which has led to all our sense-impressions being adapted to and ordered with those of sight, has led also to the replacement of the innumerable methods of thought-communication known to animals by the one single medium of language, which is a bridge in the light-world between two persons present to one another’s bodily or imaginative eyes. The other modes of speaking of which vestiges remain at all have long been absorbed into language in the form of mimicry, gesture, or emphasis. The difference between purely human speech and general animal utterance is that words and word-linkages constitute a domain of inward light-ideas, which has been built up under the sovereignty of the eyes. Every word-meaning has a light-value, even in the case of words like “melody,” “taste,” “cold,” or of perfectly abstract designations.

Even among the higher animals, the habit of reciprocal understanding by means of a sense-link has brought about a marked difference between mere sensation and understanding sensation. If we distinguish in this wise sense-impressions and sense-judgments (e.g., scent-judgment, taste-judgment, or aural-judgment), we find that very often, even in ants and bees, let alone birds of prey, horses, and dogs, the centre of gravity has palpably shifted towards the judgment side of waking-being. But it is only under the influence of language that there is set up within the waking-consciousness a definite opposition between sensation and understanding, a tension that in animals is quite unthinkable and even in man can hardly have been at first anything more than a rarely actualized possibility. The development of language, then, brought along with it a determination of fundamental significance--the emancipation of understanding from sensation.

More and more often there appears, in lieu of the simple comprehension of the gross intake, a comprehension of the significances of the component sense-impressions, which have hardly been noticed as such before.[8] Finally these impressions themselves are discarded and replaced by the felt connotations of familiar word-sounds. The word, originally the name of a visual thing, changes imperceptibly into the label of a mental thing, the “concept.” We are far from being able to fix exact meanings to such names--that we can do only with wholly new names. We never use a word twice with identical connotation, and no one ever understands exactly as another does. But mutual comprehension is possible, in spite of this, because of the common world-outlook that has been induced in both, with and by the use of a common language; in an ambiance common to the lives and activities of both, mere word-sounds suffice to evoke cognate ideas. It is this mode of comprehending by means of sounds at once derived and detached (abstract) from actual seeing which, however rarely we can find it definitely evidenced at the primitive level, does in fact sharply separate the generic-animal kind of waking-consciousness from the purely human kind which supervenes. Just so, at an earlier stage, the appearance of waking-consciousness as such fixed a frontier between the general plantlike and the specifically animal existence.

Understanding detached from sensation is called thought. Thought has introduced a permanent disunity into the human waking-consciousness. From early times it has rated understanding and sensibility as “higher” and “lower” soul-power. It has created the fateful opposition between the light-world of the eye, described as a figment and an illusion, and the world-imagined (“vorgestellte,” “set before” oneself), in which the concepts, with their faint but ineffaceable tinge of light-coloration, live and do business. And henceforth for man, so long as he “thinks,” this is the true world, the world-in-itself. At the outset the ego was waking-being as such (in so far, that is, as, having sight, it felt itself as the centre of a light-world); now it becomes “spirit”--namely, pure understanding, which “cognizes” itself as such and very soon comes to regard not only the world around itself, but even the remaining component of life, its own body, as qualitatively below itself. This is evidenced not only in the upright carriage of man, but in the thoroughly intellectualized formation of his head, in which the eyes, the brow, and the temples become more and more the vehicles of expression.[9]

Clearly, then, thought, when it became independent, discovered a new mode of activity for itself. To the practical thought which is directed upon the constitution of the light-things in the world-around, with reference to this or that practical end, there is added the theoretical, penetrating, subtilizing thought which sets itself to establish the constitution of these things “in themselves,” the natura rerum. From that which is seen, the light is abstracted, the depth-experience of the eye intensifies itself in a grand and unmistakable course of development into a depth-experience within the tinted realm of word-connotations. Man begins to believe that it is not impossible for his inner eye to see right through into the things that actually are. Concept follows upon concept, and at last there is a mighty thought-architecture made up of buildings that stand out with full clarity under the inner light.

The development of theoretical thought within the human waking-consciousness gives rise to a kind of activity that makes inevitable a fresh conflict--that between Being (existence) and Waking-Being (waking-consciousness). The animal microcosm, in which existence and consciousness are joined in a self-evident unity of living, knows of consciousness only as the servant of existence. The animal “lives” simply and does not reflect upon life. Owing, however, to the unconditional monarchy of the eye, life is presented as the life of a visible entity in the light; understanding, then, when it becomes interlocked with speech, promptly forms a concept of thought and with it a counter-concept[10] of life, and in the end it distinguishes life as it is from that which might be. Instead of straight, uncomplicated living, we have the antithesis represented in the phrase “thought and action.” That which is not possible at all in the beasts becomes in every man not merely a possibility, but a fact and in the end an alternative. The entire history of mature humanity with all its phenomena has been formed by it, and the higher the form that a Culture takes, the more fully this opposition dominates the significant moments of its conscious being.

The plantlike-cosmic, Being heavy with Destiny, blood, sex, possess an immemorial mastery and keep it. They are life. The other only serves life. But this other wills, not to serve, but to rule; moreover, it believes that it does rule, for one of the most determined claims put forward by the human spirit is its claim to possess power over the body, over “nature.” But the question is: Is not this very belief a service to life? Why does our thought think just so? Perhaps because the cosmic, the “it,” wills that it shall? Thought shows off its power when it calls the body a notion, when it establishes the pitifulness of the body and commands the voices of the blood to be silent. But in truth the blood rules, in that silently it commands the activity of thought to begin and to cease. There, too, is a distinction between speech and life--Being can do without consciousness and the life of understanding, but not vice versa. Thought rules, after all, in spite of all, only in the “realm of thought.”

III

It only amounts to a verbal difference whether we say that thought is a creation of man, or higher mankind a creation of thought. But thought itself persistently credits itself with much too high a rank in the ensemble of life, and through its ignorance of, or indifference to, the fact that there are other modes of ascertainment besides itself, forfeits its opportunity of surveying the whole without prejudice. In truth, all professors of thought--and in every Culture they have been almost the only authorized spokesmen--have taken it as self-evident that cold abstract thought is the way of approach to “last things.” Moreover, they have assumed, also as self-evident, that the “truth” which they reach on this line of advance is the same as the truth which they have set before themselves as an aim, and not, as it really is, a sort of imaginary picture which takes the place of the unknowable secrets.

For, although man is a thinking being, it is very far from the fact that his being consists in thinking. This is a difference that the born subtilizer fails to grasp. The aim of thought is called “truth,” and truths are “established”--i.e., brought out of the living impalpability of the light-world into the form of concepts and assigned permanently to places in a system, which means a kind of intellectual space. Truths are absolute and eternal--i.e., they have nothing more to do with life.

But for an animal, not truths, but only facts exist. Here is the difference between practical and theoretical understanding. Facts and truths[11] differ as time and space, destiny and causality. A fact addresses itself to the whole waking-consciousness, for the service of being, and not to that side of the waking-consciousness which imagines it can detach itself from being. Actual life, history, knows only facts; life experience and knowledge of men deal only in facts. The active man who does and wills and fights, daily measuring himself against the power of facts, looks down upon mere truths as unimportant. The real statesman knows only political facts, not political truths. Pilate’s famous question is that of every man of fact.

It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science with the problem of the value of truth and knowledge--cheap and even blasphemous though this seems to the born thinker and savant, who regards his whole raison d’être as impugned by it. Descartes meant to doubt everything, but certainly not the value of his doubting.

It is one thing, however, to pose problems and quite another to believe in solutions of them. The plant lives and knows not that it lives. The animal lives and knows that it lives. Man is astounded by his life and asks questions about it. But even man cannot give an answer to his own questions, he can only believe in the correctness of his answer, and in that respect there is no difference between Aristotle and the meanest savage.

Whence comes it, then, that secrets must be unravelled and questions answered? Is it not from that fear which looks out of even a child’s eyes, that terrible dowry of human waking-consciousness which compels the understanding, free now from sensation and brooding on images, to probe into every deep for solutions that mean release? Can a desperate faith in knowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions?

“Shuddering awe is mankind’s noblest part.” He to whom that gift has been denied by fate must seek to discover secrets, to attack, dissect, and destroy the awe-inspiring, and to extract a booty of knowledge therefrom. The will-to-system is a will to kill something living, to “establish,” stabilize, stiffen it, to bind it in the train of logic. The intellect has conquered when it has completed the business of making rigid.

This distinction that is usually drawn between “reason” (Vernunft) and “understanding” (Verstand) is really that between the divination and flair belonging to our plant side, which merely makes use of the language of eye and word, and the understanding proper, belonging to our animal side, which is deduced from language. “Reason” in this sense is that which calls ideas into life, “understanding” that which finds truths. Truths are lifeless and can be imparted (mitgeteilt); ideas belong to the living self of the author and can only be sympathetically evoked (mitgefühlt). Understanding is essentially critical, reason essentially creative.[12] The latter begets the object of its activity, the former starts from it. In fact, understanding criticism is first practised and developed in association with ordinary sensations--it is in sensation-judgments that the child learns to comprehend and to differentiate. Then, abstracted from this connexion and henceforward busied with itself, criticism needs a substitute for the sensation-activity that had previously served as its object. And this cannot be given it but by an already existing mode of thought, and it is upon this that criticism now works. This, only this, and not something building freely on nothingness, is Thought.

For quite early, before he has begun to think abstractly, primitive man forms for himself a religious world-picture, and this is the object upon which the understanding begins to operate critically. Always science has grown up on a religion and under all the spiritual prepossessions of that religion, and always it signifies nothing more or less than an abstract melioration of these doctrines, considered as false because less abstract. Always it carries along the kernel of a religion in its ensemble of principles, problem-enunciations, and methods. Every new truth that the understanding finds is nothing but a critical judgment upon some other that was already there. The polarity between old and new knowledge involves the consequence that in the world of the understanding there is only the relatively correct--namely, judgments of greater convincingness than other judgments. Critical knowledge rests upon the belief that the understanding of to-day is better than that of yesterday. And that which forces us to this belief, is again, life.

Can criticism then, as criticism, solve the great questions, or can it merely pose them? At the beginning of knowledge we believe the former. But the more we know, the more certain we become of the latter. So long as we hope, we call the secret a problem.

Thus, for mankind aware, there is a double problem, that of Waking-Being and that of Being; or of Space and of Time; or of the world-as-nature[13] and the world as history; or of pulse and tension. The waking consciousness seeks to understand not only itself, but in addition something that is akin to itself. Though an inner voice may tell one that here all possibilities of knowledge are left behind, yet, in spite of it, fear overpersuades--everyone--and one goes on with the search, preferring even the pretence of a solution to the alternative of looking into nothingness.

IV

Waking-consciousness consists of sensation and understanding, and their common essence is a continuous self-adjustment in relation to the macrocosm. To that extent waking-consciousness is identical with ascertainment (Feststellen), whether we consider the touch of an infusorian, or human thinking of the highest order. Feeling, now, for touch with itself in this wise, the waking-consciousness first encounters the epistemological problem. What do we mean by cognition, or by the knowledge of cognition? And what is the relation between the original meanings of these terms and their later formulations in words? Waking and sleep alternate, like day and night, according to the course of the stars, and so, too, cognition alternates with dreams. How do these two differ?

Waking-consciousness, however--whether it be that of sensation or that of understanding--is synonymous with the existence of oppositions, such as that between cognition and the object cognized, or thing and property, or object and event. Wherein consists the essence of these oppositions? And so arises the second problem, that of causality. When we give the names “cause” and “effect” to a pair of sensuous elements, or “premiss” and “consequence” to a pair of intellectual elements, we are fixing between them a relation of power and rank--when one is there, the other must be there also. In these relations, observe, time does not figure at all. We are concerned not with facts of destiny, but with causal truths, not with a “When?” but with a law-fixed dependence. Beyond doubt this is the understanding’s most promising line of activity. Mankind perhaps owes to discoveries of this order his happiest moments; and thus he proceeds, from these oppositions in the near and present things of everyday life that strike him immediately, forward in an endless series of conclusions to the first and final causes in the structure of nature that he calls God and the meaning of the world. He assembles, orders, and reviews his system, his dogma of law-governed connexions, and he finds in it a refuge from the unforeseen. He who can demonstrate, fears no longer. But wherein consists the essence of causality? Does it lie in knowing, in the known, or in a unity of both?

The world of tensions is necessarily in itself stiff and dead--namely, “eternal truth,” something beyond all time, something that is a state. The actual world of waking-consciousness, however, is full of changes. This does not astonish an animal in the least, but it leaves the thought of the thinker powerless, for rest and movement, duration and change, become and becoming,[14] are oppositions denoting something that in its very nature “passeth all understanding” and must therefore (from the point of view of the understanding) contain an absurdity. For is that a fact at all which proves to be incapable of distillation from the sense-world in the form of a truth? On the other hand, though the world is cognized as timeless, a time element nevertheless adheres to it--tensions appear as beat, and direction associates itself with extension. And so all that is problematical for the understanding consciousness somehow gathers itself together in one last and gravest problem, the problem of motion. And on that problem free and abstract thought breaks down, and we begin to discern that the microcosmic is after all as dependent as ever upon the cosmic, just as the individualness of a being from its first moment is constituted not by a body, but by the sheath of a body. Life can exist without thought, but thought is only one mode of life. High as may be the objectives that thought sets before itself, in actuality life makes use of thought for its ends and gives it a living objective quite apart from the solution of abstract problems. For thought the solutions of problems are correct or erroneous--for life they are valuable or valueless, and if the will-to-know breaks down on the motion problem, it may well be because life’s purpose has at that point been achieved. In spite of this, and indeed because of this, the motion problem remains the centre of gravity of all higher thought. All mythology and all natural science has arisen out of man’s wonder in the presence of the mystery of motion.

The problem of motion touches, at once and immediately, the secrets of existence, which are alien to the waking-consciousness and yet inexorably press upon it. In posing motion as a problem we affirm our will to comprehend the incomprehensible, the when and wherefore, Destiny, blood, all that our intuitive processes touch in our depths. Born to see, we strive to set it before our eyes in the light, so that we may in the literal sense grasp it, assure ourselves of it as of something tangible.

For this is the decisive fact, of which the observer is unconscious--his whole effort of seeking is aimed not at life, but at the seeing of life, and not at death, but at the seeing of death. We try to grasp the cosmic as it appears in the macrocosm to the microcosm, as the life of a body in the light-world between birth and death, generation and dissolution, and with that differentiation of body and soul that follows of deepest necessity from our ability to experience[15] the inward-proper as a sensuous alien.

That we do not merely live but know about “living” is a consequence of our bodily existence in the light. But the beast knows only life, not death. Were we pure plantlike beings, we should die unconscious of dying, for to feel death and to die would be identical. But animals, even though they hear the death-cry, see the dead body, and scent putrefaction, behold death without comprehending it. Only when understanding has become, through language, detached from visual awareness and pure, does death appear to man as the great enigma of the light-world about him.

Then, and only then, life becomes the short span of time between birth and death, and it is in relation to death that that other great mystery of generation arises also. Only then does the diffuse animal fear of everything become the definite human fear of death. It is this that makes the love of man and woman, the love of mother and child, the tree of the generations, the family, the people, and so at last world-history itself the infinitely deep facts and problems of destiny that they are. To death, as the common lot of every human being born into the light, adhere the ideas of guilt and punishment, of existence as a penance, of a new life beyond the world of this light, and of a salvation that makes an end of the death-fear. In the knowledge of death is originated that world-outlook which we possess as being men and not beasts.

V

There are born destiny-men and causality-men. A whole world separates the purely living man--peasant and warrior, statesman and general, man of the world and man of business, everyone who wills to prosper, to rule, to fight, and to dare, the organizer or entrepreneur, the adventurer or bravo or gambler--from the man who is destined either by the power of his mind or the defect of his blood to be an “intellectual”--the saint, priest, savant, idealist, or ideologue. Being and waking-being, pulse and tension, motives and ideas, cyclic organs and touch-organs--there has rarely been a man of any significance in whom the one side or the other has not markedly predominated. All that motives and urges, the eye for men and situations, the belief in his star which every born man of action possesses and which is something wholly different from belief in the correctness of a standpoint, the voices of the blood that speak in moments of decision, and the immovably quiet conviction that justifies any aim and any means--all these are denied to the critical, meditative man. Even the footfall of the fact-man sounds different from, sounds more planted than, that of the thinker, in whom the pure microcosmic can acquire no firm relation with earth.

Destiny has made the man so or so--subtle and fact-shy, or active and contemptuous of thought. But the man of the active category is a whole man, whereas in the contemplative a single organ can operate without (and even against) the body. All the worse, then, when this organ tries to master actuality as well as its own world, for then we get all those ethico-politico-social reform-projects which demonstrate, unanswerably, how things ought to be and how to set about making them so--theories that without exception rest upon the hypothesis that all men are as rich in ideas and as poor in motives as the author is (or thinks he is). Such theories, even when they have taken the field armed with the full authority of a religion or the prestige of a famous name, have not in one single instance effected the slightest alteration in life. They have merely caused us to think otherwise than before about life. And this, precisely, is the doom of the “late” ages of a Culture, the ages of much writing and much reading--that they should perpetually confuse the opposition of life and thought with the opposition between thought-about-life and thought-about-thought. All world-improvers, priests, and philosophers are unanimous in holding that life is a fit object for the nicest meditation, but the life of the world goes its own way and cares not in the least what is said about it. And even when a community succeeds in living “according to rule,” all that it achieves is, at best, a note on itself in some future history of the world--if there is space left after the proper and only important subject-matter has been dealt with.

For, in the last resort, only the active man, the man of destiny, lives in the actual world, the world of political, military, and economic decisions, in which concepts and systems do not figure or count. Here a shrewd blow is more than a shrewd conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which statesmen and soldiers of all times have regarded the “ink-slinger” and the “bookworm” who think that world-history exists for the sake of the intellect or science or even art. Let us say it frankly and without ambiguity: the understanding divorced from sensation is only one, and not the decisive, side of life. A history of Western thought may not contain the name of Napoleon, but in the history of actuality Archimedes, for all his scientific discoveries, was possibly less effective than that soldier who killed him at the storming of Syracuse.

Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is at the head and not in the train of great events. They misunderstand completely the rôle played, for example, by the political Sophists in Athens or by Voltaire and Rousseau in France. Often enough a statesman does not “know” what he is doing, but that does not prevent him from following with confidence just the one path that leads to success; the political doctrinaire, on the contrary, always knows what should be done, and yet his activity, once it ceases to be limited to paper, is the least successful and therefore the least valuable in history. These intrusions happen only too frequently in times of uncertainty, like that of the Attic enlightenment, or the French or the German revolutions, when the ideologue of word or pen is eager to be busy with the actual history of the people instead of with systems. He mistakes his place. He belongs with his principles and programs to no history but the history of a literature. Real history passes judgment on him not by controverting the theorist, but by leaving him and all his thoughts to himself. A Plato or a Rousseau--not to mention the smaller intellects--could build up abstract political structures, but for Alexander, Scipio, Cæsar, and Napoleon, with their schemes and battles and settlements, they were entirely without importance. The thinker could discuss destiny if he liked; it was enough for these men to be destiny.

Under all the plurality of microcosmic beings, we are perpetually meeting with the formation of inspired mass-units, beings of a higher order, which, whether they develop slowly or come into existence in a moment, contain all the feelings and passions of the individual, enigmatic in their inward character and inaccessible to reasoning--though the connoisseur can see into and reckon upon their reactions well enough. Here too we distinguish the generic animal unities which are sensed, the unities profoundly dependent upon Being and Destiny--like the way of an eagle in the air or the way of the stormers on the breach--from the purely human associations which depend upon the understanding and cohere on the basis of like opinions, like purposes, or like knowledge. Unity of cosmic pulse one has without willing to have it; unity of common ground is acquired at will. One can join or resign from an intellectual association as one pleases, for only one’s waking-consciousness is involved. But to a cosmic unity one is committed, and committed with one’s entire being. Crowds of this order of unity are seized by storms of enthusiasm or, as readily, of panic. They are noisy and ecstatic at Eleusis or Lourdes, or heroically firm like the Spartans of Thermopylæ and the last Goths in the battle of Vesuvius.[16] They form themselves to the music of chorales, marches, and dances, and are sensitive like human and animal thoroughbreds to the effects of bright colours, decoration, costume, and uniform.

These inspired aggregates are born and die. Intellectual associations are mere sums in the mathematical sense, varying by addition and subtraction, unless and until (as sometimes happens) a mere coincidence of opinion strikes so impressively as to reach the blood and so, suddenly, to create out of the sum a Being. In any political turning-point words may become fates and opinions passions. A chance crowd is herded together in the street and has one consciousness, one sensation, one language--until the short-lived soul flickers out and everyone goes his way again. This happened every day in the Paris of 1789, whenever the cry of “A la lanterne!” fell upon the ear.

These souls have their special psychology,[17] and the knowledge of this psychology is for the public man an essential. A single soul is the mark of every genuine order or class, be it the chivalry and military orders of the Crusades, the Roman Senate or the Jacobin club, polite society under Louis XIV or the Prussian country “Adel,” peasantry or guilds, the masses of the big city or the folk of the secluded valley, the peoples and tribes of the migrations or the adherents of Mohammed and generally, of any new-founded religion or sect, the French of the Revolution or the Germans of the Wars of Liberation. The mightiest beings of this kind that we know are the higher Cultures, which are born in great spiritual upheavals, and in a thousand years of existence weld all aggregates of lower degree--nations, classes, towns, generations--into one unit.

All grand events of history are carried by beings of the cosmic order, by peoples, parties, armies, and classes, while the history of the intellect runs its course in loose associations and circles, schools, levels of education, “tendencies” and “isms.” And here again it is a question of destiny whether such aggregates at the decisive moments of highest effectiveness find a leader or are driven blindly on, whether the chance headmen are men of the first order or men of no real significance tossed up, like Robespierre or Pompey, by the surge of events. It is the hall-mark of the statesman that he has a sure and penetrating eye for these mass-souls that form and dissolve on the tide of the times, their strength and their duration, their direction and purpose. And even so, it is a question of Incident[18] whether he is one who can master them or one who is swept away by them.

II. ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(B)

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES

I

Now, man--no matter whether it is for life or for thought that he is born into the world--so long as he is acting or is thinking, is awake and therefore in focus--i.e., adjusted to the one significance that for the moment his light-world holds for him. Everyone knows that it is almost sharply painful to switch off suddenly in the middle of, say, an experiment in physics, in order to think about some event of the day. I have said earlier that the innumerable settings that take turns in man’s waking consciousness fall into two distinct groups--the worlds of destiny and pulsation, and the worlds of causes and tensions. The two pictures I have called world-as-history and world-as-nature. In the first, life makes use of critical understanding. It has the eye under command, the felt pulsation becomes the inwardly imagined wave-train, and the shattering spiritual experience becomes pictured as the epochal peak. In the second, thought itself rules, and its causal criticism turns life into a rigorous process, the living content of a fact into an abstract truth, and tension into formula.

How is this possible? Each is an eye-picture, but in the one the seer is giving himself up to the never-to-be-repeated facts, and in the other he is striving to catch truths for an ever-valid system. In the history-picture, that in which knowledge is simply an auxiliary, the cosmic makes use of the microcosmic. In the picture which we call memory and recollection, things are present to us as bathed in an inner light and swept by the pulsation of our existence. But the chronological element[19] tells us that history, as soon as it becomes thought history, is no longer immune from the basic conditions of all waking-consciousness. In the nature- (or science-) picture it is the ever-present subjective that is alien and illusive, but in the history-picture it is the equally ineliminable objective, Number, that leads into error.

When we are working in the domain of Nature (science), our settings and self-adjustments should be and can be up to a certain point impersonal--one “forgets oneself”--but every man, class, nation, or family sees the picture of history in relation to itself. The mark of Nature is an extension that is inclusive of everything, but History is that which comes up out of the darkness of the past, presents itself to the seer, and from him sweeps onward into the future. He, as the present, is always its middle point, and it is quite impossible for him to order the facts with any meaning if he ignores their direction--which is an element proper to life and not to thought. Every time, every land, every living aggregate has its own historical horizon, and it is the mark of the genuine historical thinker that he actualizes the picture of history that his time demands.

Thus Nature and History are distinguishable like pure and impure criticism--meaning by “criticism” the opposite of lived experience. Natural science is criticism and nothing else. But in History, criticism can do no more than scientifically prepare the field over which the historian’s eye is to sweep. History is that ranging glance itself, whatever the direction in which it ranges. He who possesses such an eye can understand every fact and every situation “historically.” Nature is a system, and systems can be learnt.

The process of historical self-adjustment begins for everyone with the earliest impressions of childhood. Children’s eyes are keen, and the facts of the nearest environment, the life of the family and the house and the street, are sensed and felt right down to the core, long before the city and its population come into their visual field, and while the words “people,” “country,” “state,” are still quite destitute of tangible meaning to them. Just so, and so thoroughly, primitive man knows all that is presented to his narrow field of view as history, as living--and above all Life itself, the drama of birth and death, sickness and eld; the history of passionate war and passionate love, as experienced in himself or observed in others; the fate of relatives, of the clan, of the village, their actions and their motives; tales of long enmity, of fights, victory, and revenge. The life-horizon widens, and shows not lives, but Life coming and going. The pageant is not now of villages and clans, but of remote races and countries; not of years, but of centuries. The history that is actually lived with and participated in never reaches over more than a grandfather’s span--neither for ancient Germans and present-day Negroes, nor for Pericles and Wallenstein. Here the horizon of living ends, and a new plane begins wherein the picture is based upon hearsay and historical tradition, a plane in which direct sympathies are adapted to a mind-picture that is both distinct and, from long use, stable. The picture so developed shows very different amplitudes for the men of the different Cultures. For us Westerners it is with this secondary picture that genuine history begins, for we live under the aspect of eternity, whereas for the Greeks and Romans it is just then that history ceases. For Thucydides[20] the events of the Persian Wars, for Cæsar those of the Punic Wars, were already devoid of living import.

And beyond this plane again, other historic unit-pictures rise to the view--pictures of the destinies of the plant world and the animal world, the landscape, the stars--which at the last fuse with the last pictures of natural science into mythic images of the creation and the end of the world.

The nature- (science-) picture of the child and the primitive develops out of the petty technique of every day, which perpetually forces both of them to turn away from the fearful contemplation of wide nature to the critique of the facts and situations of their near environment. Like the young animal, the child discovers its first truths through play. Examining the toy, cutting open the doll, turning the mirror round to see what is behind it, the feeling of triumph in having established something as correct for good and all--no nature-research whatsoever has got beyond this. Primitive man applies this critical experience, as he acquires it, to his arms and tools, to the materials for his clothing, food, and housing--i.e., to things in so far as they are dead. He applies it to animals as well when suddenly they cease to have meaning for him as living beings whose movements he watches and divines as pursuer or pursued, and are apprehended mechanically instead of vitally, as aggregates of flesh and bone for which he has a definite use--exactly as he is conscious of an event, now as the act of a dæmon and a moment afterwards as a sequence of cause and effect. The mature man of the Culture transposes in exactly the same way, every day and every hour. Here, too, is a “nature”-horizon, and beyond it lies the secondary plane formed of our impressions of rain, lightning, and tempest, summer and winter, moon-phases and star-courses. But at that plane religiousness, trembling with fear and awe, forces upon man criteria of a far higher kind. Just as in the history-picture he sounds the ultimate facts of life, so here he seeks to establish the ultimate truths of nature. What lies beyond any attainable frontier of knowledge he calls God, and all that lies within that frontier he strives to comprehend--as action, creation, and manifestation of God--causally.

Every group of scientifically established elements, therefore, has a dual tendency, inherent and unchanged since primitive ages. The one tendency urges forwards the completest possible system of technical knowledge, for the service of practical, economical, and warlike ends, which many kinds of animals have developed to a high degree of perfection, and which from them leads, through primitive man and his acquaintance with fire and metals, directly to the machine-technics of our Faustian Culture. The other tendency took shape only with the separation of strictly human thought from physical vision by means of language, and the aim of its effort has been an equally complete theoretical knowledge, which we call in the earlier phases of the Culture religious, and in the later scientific. Fire is for the warrior a weapon, for the craftsman part of his equipment, for the priest a sign from God, and for the scientist a problem. But in all these aspects alike it is proper to the “natural,” the scientific, mode of waking-consciousness. In the world-as-history we do not find fire as such, but the conflagration of Carthage and the flames of the faggots heaped around John Hus and Giordano Bruno.

II

I repeat, every being livingly experiences every other being and its destiny only in relation to itself. A flock of pigeons is regarded by the farmer on whose fields it settles quite otherwise than by the nature-lover in the street or the hawk in the air. The peasant sees in his son the future and the heritage, but what the neighbour sees in him is a peasant, what the officer sees is a soldier, what the visitor sees is a native. Napoleon experienced men and things very differently as Emperor and as lieutenant. Put a man in a new situation, make the revolutionary a minister, the soldier a general, and at once history and the key men of history become for him something other than what they were. Talleyrand saw through the men of his time because he belonged with them, but had he been suddenly plumped down in the company of Crassus, Cæsar, Catiline, and Cicero, his understanding of their measures and views would have been either null or erroneous. There is no history-in-itself. The history of a family is taken differently by each member of it, that of a country differently by each party, that of the age by each nation. The German looks upon the World War otherwise than the Englishman, the workman upon economic history otherwise than the employer, and the historian of the West has a quite other world-history before his eyes than that of the great Arabian and Chinese historians. The history of an era could be handled objectively only if it were very distant in time, and the historian were radically disinterested; and we find that our best historians cannot judge of or describe even the Peloponnesian Wars and Actium without being in some measure influenced by present interests.

It is not incompatible with, rather it is essential to, a profound knowledge of men that the appraiser should see through glasses of his own colour. This knowledge, indeed, is exactly the component that we discern to be wanting in those generalizations that distort or altogether ignore that all-important fact, the uniqueness of the constituent event in history[21]--the worst example of this being the “materialistic” conception of history, about which we have said almost all there is to say when we have described it as physiognomic barrenness. But both in spite of this and on account of this[22] there is for every man, because he belongs to a class and a time and a nation and a Culture, a typical picture of history as it ought to appear in relation to himself, and equally there are typical pictures specific to the time or class or Culture, qua time or class or Culture. The supreme generalization possible to each Culture as a major being is a primary and, for it, symbolical image of its own world-as-history, and all self-attunements of the individual--or of the group livingly effective as individual--are with reference to that image. Whenever we describe another person’s ideas as profound or superficial, original or trivial, mistaken or obsolete, we are unwittingly judging them with reference to a picture which springs up to answer for the value at the moment of a continuous function of our time and our personality.[23]

Obviously, then, every man of the Faustian Culture possesses his own picture of history and, besides, innumerable other pictures from his youth upwards, which fluctuate and alter ceaselessly in response to the experiences of the day and the year. And how different, again, are the typical history-images of men and different eras and classes, the world of Otto the Great and that of Gregory VII, that of a Doge of Venice and that of a poor pilgrim! In what different worlds lived Lorenzo de’ Medici, Wallenstein, Cromwell, Marat, and Bismarck, a serf of the Gothic age, a savant of the Baroque, the army officer of the Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War, and the Wars of Liberation respectively! Or, to consider our own times alone, a Frisian peasant whose life of actuality is limited to his own countryside and its folk, a high merchant of Hamburg, and a professor of physics! And yet to all of these, irrespective of individual age, status, and period, there is a common basis that differentiates the ensemble of these figures, their prime-image, from that of every other Culture.

But, over and above this, there is a distinction of another kind which separates the Classical and the Indian history-pictures from those of the Chinese, the Arabian, and, most of all, the Western Cultures--the narrow horizon of the two first-named. Whatever the Greeks may (and indeed must) have known of ancient Egyptian history, they never allowed it to penetrate into their peculiar history-picture, which for the majority was limited to the field of events that could be related by the oldest surviving participant, and which even for the finer minds stopped at the Trojan War, a frontier beyond which they would not concede that there had been historical life at all.[24]

The Arabian Culture,[25] on the other hand, very early dared the astounding gesture--we see it in the historical thought alike of the Jews and of the Persians from Cyrus’s time--of connecting the legend of creation to the present by means of a genuine chronology; the Persians indeed comprised the future as well in the sweep of the gesture, and predated the last judgment and the coming of the Messiah. This exact and very narrow definition of human history--the Persian reckoning allows twelve millennia from first to last, the Jewish counts less than six up to the present--is a necessary expression of the Magian world-feeling and fundamentally distinguishes the Judæo-Persian creation-sagas from those of the Babylonian Culture, from which so many of their external traits are derived.

Different, again, are the primary feelings which give historical thought in the Chinese and the Egyptian Cultures its characteristically wide and unbounded horizons, represented by chronologically stated sequences of dynasties which stretch over millennia and finally dissolve into a grey remoteness.

The Faustian picture of world-history, again, prepared in advance by the existence of a Christian chronology,[26] came into being suddenly, with an immense extension and deepening of the Magian picture which the Western Church had taken over, an extension and deepening that was to give Joachim of Floris[27] in the high Gothic the basis of his wonderful interpretation of all world-destinies as a sequence of three æons under the aspects of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Parallel with this there was an immense widening of the geographical horizon, which even in Gothic times (thanks to Vikings and Crusaders) came to extend from Iceland to the remotest ends of Asia;[28] and from 1500 onwards, the developed man of the Baroque is able to do what none of his peers in the other Cultures could do and--for the first time in human history--to regard the whole surface of the planet as its field. Thanks to compass and telescope, the savant of that mature age could for the first time not merely posit the sphericity of the earth as a matter of theory, but actually feel that he was living upon a sphere in space. The land-horizon is no more. So, too, time-horizons melt in the double endlessness of the calendar before and after Christ. And to-day, under the influence of this picture, which comprises the whole planet and will eventually embrace all the high Cultures, the old Gothic division of history into “ancient,” “mediæval,” and modern, long become trite and empty, is visibly dissolving.[29]

In all other Cultures the aspects of world-history and of man-history coincide. The beginning of the world is the beginning of man, and the end of man is the end of the world. But the Faustian infinity-craving for the first time separated the two notions during the Baroque, and now it has made human history, for all its immense and still unknown span, a mere episode in world-history, while the Earth--of which other Cultures had seen not even the whole, but only superficial fractions as “the world”--has become a little star amongst millions of solar systems.

The extension of the historical world-picture makes it even more necessary in this Culture than in any other to distinguish between the everyday self-attunements of ordinary people and that extreme self-attunement of which only the highest minds are capable, and which even in them holds only for moments. The difference between the historical view-field of Themistocles and that of an Attic husbandman is probably very small, but this difference is already immense as between Henry VI and a hind of his day,[30] and as the Faustian Culture mounts up and up, the power of self-focusing attains to such heights and depths that the circle of adepts grows ever smaller and smaller. In fact, there is formed a sort of pyramid of possibilities, in which individuals are graded according to their endowments; every individual, according to his constitution, stands at the level which he is capable at his best focus of holding. But it follows from this that between Western men there are limitations to the possibilities of reciprocal understanding of historical life-problems, limitations that do not apply to other Cultures, at any rate in such fateful rigour as they do to ours. Can a workman to-day really understand a peasant? Or a diplomat a craftsman? The historico-geographical horizon that determines for each of them the questions worth asking and the form in which these are asked is so different from the horizons of the others that what they can exchange is not a communication, but passing remarks. It is, of course, the mark of the real appraiser of man that he understands how “the other man” is adjusted and regulates his intercourse with him accordingly (as we all do in talking to children), but the art of appraising in this sense some man of the past (say Henry the Lion or Dante), of living oneself into his history-picture so thoroughly that his thoughts, feelings, and decisions take on a character of self-evidence, is, owing to the vast difference between the one’s and the other’s waking consciousness, so rare that up to the eighteenth century it was not even seen that the historian ought to attempt it. Only since 1800 has it become a desideratum for the writing of history, and it is one very seldom satisfied at that.

The typically Faustian separation of human history, as such, from the far wider history of the world has had the result that since the end of the Baroque our world-picture has contained several horizons disposed one behind the other in as many planes. For the exploration of these, individual sciences, more or less overtly historical in character, have taken shape. Astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, one after the other follow up the destinies of the star-world, the earth’s crust, life, and man, and only then do we come to the “world”-history--as it is still called even to-day--of the higher Cultures, to which, again, are attached the histories of the several cultural elements, family history, and lastly (that highly developed speciality of the West) biography.

Each of these planes demands a particular self-focusing, and the moment the special focus becomes sharp the narrower and the broader planes cease to be live Being and become mere given facts. If we are investigating the battle of the Teutoburger Wald, the growing up of this forest in the plant-world of the North German plain is presupposed. If, on the other hand, we are examining into the history of the German tree-world, the geological stratification of the earth is the presupposition, though it is just a fact whose particular destiny need not be further followed out in this connexion. If, again, our question is the origin of the Cretaceous, the existence of the Earth itself as a planet in the solar system is a datum, not a problem. Or, to express it otherwise, that there is an Earth in the star-world, that the phenomenon “life” occurs in the Earth, that within this “life” there is the form “man,” that within the history of man there exists the organic form of the Culture, is in each case an incident in the picture of the next higher plane.

In Goethe, from his Strassburg period to his first Weimar residence, the inclination to attune himself to “world”-history was very strong--as evidenced in his Cæsar, Mohammed, Socrates, Wandering Jew, and Egmont sketches. And after that painful renunciation of the prospect of high political achievement[31]--the pain which calls to us in Tasso even through the sober resignedness of its final form--this precisely was the attunement that he chose to cut out of his life; and thereafter he limits himself, almost fiercely, to the picture-planes of plant-history, animal-history, and earth-history (his “living nature”) on the one hand and to biography on the other.

All these “pictures,” developed in the same man, have the same structure. Even the history of plants and animals, even that of the earth’s crust or that of the stars, is a fable convenue and mirrors in outward actuality the inward tendency of the ego’s being. The student of the animal world or of stratification is a man, living in a period and having a nationality and a social status, and it is no more possible to eliminate his subjective standpoint from his treatment of these things than it would be to obtain a perfectly abstract account of the French Revolution or the World War. The celebrated theories of Kant, Laplace, Cuvier, Lyell, Darwin, have also a politico-economic tinting, and their very power and impressiveness for the lay public show that the mode of outlook upon all these historical planes proceeds from a single source. And what is accomplishing itself to-day is the final achievement of which Faustian history-thinking is capable--the organic linking and disposition of these historical planes in a single vast world-history of uniform physiognomic that shall enable our glance to range from the life of the individual man without a break to the first and last destinies of the universe. The nineteenth century--in mechanistic (i.e., unhistorical) form--enunciated the problem. It is one of the preordained tasks of the twentieth to solve it.

III

The picture that we possess of the history of the Earth’s crust and of life is at present still dominated by the ideas which civilized[32] English thought has developed, since the Age of Enlightenment, out of the English habit of life--Lyell’s “phlegmatic” theory of the formation of the geological strata, and Darwin’s of the origin of species, are actually but derivatives of the development of England herself. In place of the incalculable catastrophes and metamorphoses such as von Buch and Cuvier[33] admitted, they put a methodical evolution over very long periods of time and recognize as causes only scientifically calculable and indeed mechanical utility-causes.

This “English” type of causality is not only shallow, but also far too narrow. It limits possible causal connexions, in the first place, to those which work out their entire course on the earth’s surface; but this immediately excludes all great cosmic relations between earthly life-phenomena and the events of the solar system and the stellar universe, and assumes the impossible postulate that the exterior face of the earth-ball is a completely insulated region of natural phenomena. And, secondly, it assumes that connexions which are not comprehensible by the means at present available to the human consciousness--namely, sensation refined by instruments and thought precised by theory--do not even exist.

It will be the characteristic task of the twentieth century, as compared with the nineteenth, to get rid of this system of superficial causality, whose roots reach back into the rationalism of the Baroque period, and to put in its place a pure physiognomic. We are sceptics in regard to any and every mode of thought which “explains” causally. We let things speak for themselves, and confine ourselves to sensing the Destiny immanent in them and contemplating the form-manifestations that we shall never penetrate. The extreme to which we can attain is the discovery of causeless, purposeless, purely existent forms underlying the changeful picture of nature. For the nineteenth century the word “evolution” meant progress in the sense of increasing fitness of life to purposes. For Leibniz--whose Protogæa (1691), a work full of significant thought, outlines, on the basis of studies made in the Harz silver-mines, a picture of the world’s infancy that is Goethian through and through--and for Goethe himself it meant fulfilment in the sense of increasing connotation of the form. The two concepts, Goethe’s form-fulfilment and Darwin’s evolution, are in as complete opposition as destiny to causality, and (be it added) as German to English thought, and German to English history.

There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by palæontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely “transitional” types, no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings which exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types, in the grouping of to-day. We see how, amongst fish, the Selachians, with their simple form, appear first in the foreground of history and then slowly fade out again, while the Teleostians slowly bring a more perfected fish-type to predominance. The same applies to the plant-world of the ferns and horsetails, of which only the last species now linger in the fully developed kingdom of the flowering plants. But the assumption of utility-causes or other visible causes for these phenomena has no support of actuality.[34] It is a Destiny that evoked into the world life as life, the ever-sharper opposition between plant and animal, each single type, each genus, and each species. And along with this existence there is given also a definite energy of the form--by virtue of which in the course of its self-fulfilment it keeps itself pure or, on the contrary, becomes dull and unclear or evasively splits into numerous varieties--and finally a life-duration of this form, which (unless, again, incident intervenes to shorten it) leads naturally to a senility of the species and finally to its disappearance.

As for mankind, discoveries of the Diluvial age indicate more and more pointedly that the man-forms existing then correspond to those living now; there is not the slightest trace of evolution towards a race of greater utilitarian “fitness.” And the continued failure to find man in the Tertiary discoveries indicates more and more clearly that the human life-form, like every other, originates in a sudden mutation (Wandlung) of which the “whence,” “how,” and “why” remain an impenetrable secret. If, indeed, there were evolution in the English sense of the word, there could be neither defined earth-strata nor specific animal-classes, but only a single geological mass and a chaos of living singular forms which we may suppose to have been left over from the struggle for existence. But all that we see about us impels us to the conviction that again and again profound and very sudden changes take place in the being of plants and animals, changes which are of a cosmic kind and nowise restricted to the earth’s surface, which are beyond the ken of human sense and understanding in respect of causes, if not indeed in all respects.[35] So, too, we observe that swift and deep changes assert themselves in the history of the great Cultures, without assignable causes, influences, or purposes of any kind. The Gothic and the Pyramid styles come into full being as suddenly as do the Chinese imperialism of Shi-hwang-ti and the Roman of Augustus, as Hellenism and Buddhism and Islam. It is exactly the same with the events in the individual life of every person who counts at all, and he who is ignorant of this knows nothing of men and still less of children. Every being, active or contemplative, strides on to its fulfilment by epochs and we have to assume just such epochs in the history of solar systems and the world of the fixed stars. The origins of the earth, of life, of the free-moving animal are such epochs, and, therefore, mysteries that we can do no more than accept.[36]

IV

That which we know of man divides clearly into two great ages of his being. The first is, as far as our view is concerned, limited on the one side by that profound fugue of planetary Destiny which we call the beginning of the Ice Age--and about which we can (within the picture of world-history) say no more than that a cosmic change took place--and on the other by the beginnings of high cultures on Nile and Euphrates, with which the whole meaning of human existence became suddenly different. We discover everywhere the sharp frontier of Tertiary and Diluvial, and on the hither side of it we see man as a completely formed type, familiar with custom, myth, wit, ornament, and technique and endowed with a bodily structure that has not materially altered up to the present day.

We will consider the first age as that of the primitive Culture. The only field in which this Culture endured throughout the second age (though certainly in a very “late” form) and is found alive and fairly intact to-day is north-west Africa. It is the great merit of Leo Frobenius[37] that he recognized this quite clearly, beginning with the assumption that in this field a whole world of primitive life (and not merely a greater or less number of primitive tribes) remained remote from the influences of the high Cultures. The ethnologist-psychologist, on the contrary, delights in collecting, from all over the five continents, fragments of peoples who really have nothing in common but the negative fact of living a subordinate existence in the middle of one or another of the high Cultures, without participation in its inner life. The result is a congeries of tribes, some stationary, some inferior, and some decadent, whose respective modes of expression, moreover, are indiscriminately lumped together.

But the primitive Culture is not fragmentary, but something strong and integral, something highly vital and effectual. Only, this Culture is so different from everything that we men of a higher Culture possess in the way of spiritual potentialities that we may question whether even those people which have carried the first age very deep into the second are good evidence, in their present modes of being and waking-being, for the condition of the old time.

For some thousands of years now the waking-consciousness of man has had the impression of constant mutual touch between the tribes and peoples as an obvious everyday fact. But in dealing with the first age we must not forget that in it man, cohering in a very few small groups, is completely lost in the immensity of the landscape, the ruling element therein being the mighty masses of the great animal-herds. The rarity of our finds sufficiently proves this. At the time of Aurignacian Man there were perhaps a dozen hordes, each a few hundred strong, wandering in the whole area of France, and such hordes must have regarded it as a deeply impressive and puzzling event when (if ever) they became aware that fellow men existed. Can we imagine even in the least degree what it was to live in a world almost empty of men--we for whom all nature has long since become a background for the human multitude? How man’s world-consciousness must have changed when, besides the forests and the herds of beasts, other men “just like himself” began to be met with, more and more frequently, in the country-side. The increase of man’s numbers--this, too, doubtless took place very suddenly--made experience of “fellow men” habitual, and replaced the impression of astonishment by the feelings of pleasure or hostility, and these again evoked a whole new world of experiences and of involuntary and inevitable relations. It was for the history of the human soul perhaps the deepest and most pregnant of all events. It was in relation to alien life-forms that man first became conscious of his own, and now the interior organization of the clan was enriched by a wealth of intertribal forms of relation, which thereafter completely dominated primitive life and thought. For it was then that, out of very simple modes of sensuous understanding, the rudiments of verbal language (and, therefore, of abstract thought) came into being, amongst them the particularly fortunate few, which--though we can form no idea of their structure--we may assume as the origins of the later Indogermanic and Semitic language-groups.

Then, out of this general primitive Culture of a humanity linked by intertribal relations, there shot up suddenly (about 3000 B.C.[38]) the Culture of Egypt and Babylonia. Probably for a millennium before that date both these fields had been nursing something that differed radically from every primitive Culture in kind and in intent, something having an inward unity common to all its forms of expression and directional in all its life. To me it seems highly probable that, if not indeed all over the earth’s surface, at any rate in man’s essence a change was accomplished at that time; and if so, then any primitive Culture worthy of the name that is still found living later, ever dwindling, in the midst of higher Cultures, should itself be something different from the Culture of the first Age. But, with reference to primitive Culture of any sort, that which I call the pre-Culture (and which can be shown to occur as a uniform process in the beginning of every high Culture) is something different in kind, something entirely new.

In all primitive existence the “it,” the Cosmic, is at work with such immediacy of force that all microcosmic utterances, whether in myth, custom, technique, or ornament, obey only the pressures of the very instant. For us, there are no ascertainable rules for the duration, tempo, and course of development of these utterances. We observe, say, an ornamental form-language--not to be called a style[39]--ruling over the population of a wide area, spreading, changing, and at last dying out. Alongside this, and perhaps with quite different fields of extension, we may find modes of fashioning and using weapons, tribal organizations, religious practices, each developing in a special way of its own, with epochal points of its own, beginnings and ends of its own, completely influenced by other form-domains. When in some prehistoric stratum we have identified an accurately known type of pottery, we cannot safely argue from it to the customs and religion of the population to which it belonged. And if by chance the same area does hold for a particular form of marriage and, say, a certain type of tattooing, this never signifies a common basic idea such as is indicated, for example, by the discovery of gunpowder and that of perspective in painting. No necessary connexions come to light between ornament and organization by age-classes, or between the cult of a god and the kind of agriculture practised. Development in these cases means always some development of one or another individual aspect or trait of the primitive Culture, never of that Culture itself. This, as I have said before, is essentially chaotic; the primitive Culture is neither an organism nor a sum of organisms.

But with the type of the higher Culture this “it” gives way to a strong and undiffused tendency. Within the primitive Culture tribes and clans are the only quickened beings--other than the individual men of course. Here, however, the Culture itself is such a being. Everything primitive is a sum--a sum of the expression-forms of primitive groupings. The high Culture, on the contrary, is the waking-being of a single huge organism which makes not only custom, myths, technique, and art, but the very peoples and classes incorporated in itself the vessels of one single form-language and one single history. The oldest speech that we know of belongs to the primitive Culture, and has lawless destinies of its own which cannot be deduced from those of, say, Ornament or Marriage. But the history of script belongs integrally with the expression-history of the several higher Cultures. That the Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, and Mexican each formed a special script in its pre-Cultural age--that the Indian and the Classical on the other hand did not do so, but took over (and very late) the highly developed writing of a neighbouring Civilization--that in the Arabian, again, every new religion and sect immediately formed its particular script--all these are facts that stand in a deeply intimate relation to the generic form-history of these Cultures and its inner significance.

To these two ages our knowledge of man is restricted, and they certainly do not suffice to justify conclusions of any sort about possible or certain new eras or about their “when” and “how”--quite apart from the fact that in any case the cosmic connexions that govern the history of man as a genus are entirely inaccessible to our measures.

My kind of thought and observation is limited to the physiognomy of the actual. At the point when the experience of the “judge of men” vis-à-vis his environment, and that of the “man of action” vis-à-vis his facts, become ineffective, there also this insight finds its limit. The existence of these two ages is a fact of historical experience; more, our experiencing of the primitive Culture consists not only in surveying, in its relics, a self-contained and closed-off thing, but also in reacting to its deeper meaning by virtue of an inward relation to it which persists in us. But the second age opens to us another and quite different kind of experience. It was an incident, the sense of which cannot now be scrutinized, that the type of the higher Culture appeared suddenly in the field of human history. Quite possibly, indeed, it was some sudden event in the domain of earth-history that brought forth a new and different form into phenomenal existence. But the fact that we have before us eight such Cultures, all of the same build, the same development, and the same duration, justifies us in looking at them comparatively, and therefore justifies our treating them as comparable, studying them comparatively, and obtaining from our study a knowledge which we can extend backwards over lost periods and forwards over the future--provided always that a Destiny of a different order does not replace this form-world, suddenly and basically, by another. Our licence to proceed thus comes from general experience of organic being. As in the history of the Raptores or the Coniferæ we cannot prophesy whether and when a new species will arise, so in that of Cultural history we cannot say whether and when a new Culture shall be. But from the moment when a new being is conceived in the womb, or a seed sinks into the earth, we do know the inner form of this new life-course; and we know that the quiet course of its development and fulfilment may be disturbed by the pressure of external powers, but never altered.

This experience teaches, further, that the Civilization which at this present time has gripped the earth’s whole surface is not a third age, but a stage--a necessary stage--of the Western Culture, distinguished from its analogues only by the forcefulness of its extension-tendency. Here experience ends, and all speculation on what new forms will govern the life of future mankind (or, for that matter, whether there will be any such new forms) all building of majestic card-houses on the foundation of “it should be, it shall be” is mere trifling--far too futile, it seems to me, to justify one single life of any value being expended on it.

The group of the high Cultures is not, as a group, an organic unit. That they have happened in just this number, at just these places and times, is, for the human eye, an incident without deeper intelligibility. The ordering of the individual Cultures, on the contrary, has stood out so distinctly that the historical technique of the Chinese, the Magian, and the Western worlds--often, indeed, the mere common consent of the educated in these Cultures--has been able to fashion a set of names upon which it would be impossible to improve.[40]

Historical thought, therefore, has the double task of dealing comparatively with the individual life-courses of the Cultures, and of examining the incidental and irregular relations of the Cultures amongst themselves in respect of their meaning. The necessity of the first of these tasks, obvious enough, has yet been overlooked hitherto. The second has been handled, but only by the lazy and shallow method of imposing causality over the whole tangle and laying it out tidily along the “course” of a hypothetical “world”-history, thereby making it impossible to discover either the psychology of these difficult, but richly suggestive, relations or to discover that of the inner life of any particular Culture. In truth, the condition for solving the first problem is that the second has been solved already. The relations are very different, even under the simple aspect of time and space. The Crusades brought a Springtime face to face with an old and ripe Civilization; in the Cretan-Mycenæan world seed-time and golden autumn are seen together. A Civilization may stream over from immense remoteness, as the Indian streamed into the Arabian from the East, or lie senile and stifling over an infancy, as the Classical lay upon its other side. But there are differences, too, of kind and strength; the Western Culture seeks out relations, the Egyptian tries to avoid them; the former is beaten by them again and again in tragic crises, while the Classical gets all it can out of them, without suffering. But all these tendencies have their roots in the spirituality of the Culture itself--and sometimes they tell us more of this Culture than does its own language, which often hides more than it communicates.

V

A glance over the group of the Cultures discloses task after task. The nineteenth century, in which historical research was guided by natural science, and historical thought by the ideas of the Baroque, has simply brought us to a pinnacle whence we see the new world at our feet. Shall we ever take possession of that new world?

Even to-day uniform treatment of these grand life-courses is immensely difficult, because the more remote fields have not been seriously worked up at all. Once more, it is the lordly outlook of the West European--he will only notice that which approaches him from one or another antiquity by the proper and respectful route of a Middle Age, and that which goes its own ways will get but little of his attention. Thus, of the things of the Chinese and the Indian worlds, certain kinds are now beginning to be tackled--art, religion, philosophy--but the political history is dealt with, if at all, “chattily.” It does not occur to anyone to treat the great constitutional problems of Chinese history--the Hohenstaufen-destiny of the Li-Wang (842), the first Congress of Princes (659), the struggle of principle between the imperialism (Lien-heng) of the “Roman” state of Tsin and the League-of-Nations idea (Ho-tsung) between 500 and 300, the rise of the Chinese Augustus, Hwang-ti (221)--with anything of the thoroughness that Mommsen devoted to the principate of Augustus. India, again; however completely the Indians themselves have forgotten their state-history, we have after all more available material for Buddha’s time than we have for history of the Classical ninth and eighth centuries, and yet even to-day we act as though “the” Indian had lived entirely in his philosophy, just as the Athenians (so our classicists would have us believe) spent their lives in beauty-philosophizing on the banks of the Ilissus. But even Egyptian politics receive little reflective attention. The later Egyptian historian concealed under the name “Hyksos period” the same crisis which the Chinese treat of under the name “Period of the Contending States”--here, too, is something never yet investigated. And interest in the Arabian world has reached to the frontier of the Classical tongues and no further. With what endless assiduity we have described the constitution of Diocletian, and assembled material for the entirely unimportant administrative history of the provinces of Asia Minor--because it is written in Greek. But the Sassanid state, the precedent and in every respect the model of Diocletian’s, comes into the picture only occasionally, and then as Rome’s opponent in war. What about its own administrative and juristic history? What is the poor sum-total of material that we have assembled for the law and economics of Egypt, India, and China[41] in comparison with the work that has been done on Greek and Roman law.

About 3000[42] after a long “Merovingian” period, which is still distinctly perceptible in Egypt, the two oldest Cultures began, in exceedingly limited areas on the lower Nile and the lower Euphrates. In these cases the distinctions between early and late periods have long ago been labelled as Old and Middle Kingdom, Sumer and Akkad. The outcome of the Egyptian feudal period marked by the establishment of a hereditary nobility and the decline (from Dynasty VI) of the older Kingship, presents so astounding a similarity with the course of events in the Chinese springtime from I-Wang (934-909) and that in the Western from the Emperor Henry IV (1056-1106) that a unified comparative study of all three might well be risked. At the beginning of the Babylonian “Baroque” we see the figure of the great Sargon (2500), who pushed out to the Mediterranean coast, conquered Cyprus, and styled himself, like Justinian I and Charles V, “lord of the four parts of the earth.” And in due course, about 1800 on the Nile and rather earlier in Sumer-Akkad, we perceive the beginnings of the first Civilizations. Of these the Asiatic displayed immense expansive power. The “achievements of the Babylonian Civilization” (as the books say), many things and notions connected with measuring, numbering, and accounting, travelled probably as far as the North and the Yellow Seas. Many a Babylonian trademark upon a tool may have come to be honoured, out there in the Germanic wild, as a magic symbol, and so may have originated some “Early-German” ornament. But meantime the Babylonian realm itself passed from hand to hand. Kassites, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Medes, Persians, Macedonians--all of these small[43] warrior-hosts under energetic leaders--successively replaced one another in the capital city without any serious resistance on the part of its people.

It is a first example--soon paralleled in Egypt--of the Roman Empire style. Under the Kassites rulers were set up and displaced by prætorians; the Assyrians, like the later soldier-emperors of Rome (after Commodus), maintained the old constitutional forms; the Persian Cyrus and the Ostrogoth Theodoric regarded themselves as managers of the Empire, and the warrior bands, Mede and Lombard, as master-peoples in alien surroundings. But these are constitutional rather than factual distinctions; in intent and purpose the legions of Septimius Severus, the African, did not differ from the Visigoths of Alaric, and by the battle of Adrianople[44] “Romans” and “barbarians” have become almost indistinguishable.

After 1500 three new Cultures begin--first, the Indian, in the upper Punjab; then, a hundred years later, the Chinese on the middle Hwang-Ho; and then, about 1100, the Classical, on the Ægean Sea. The Chinese historians speak of the three great dynasties of Hsia, Shang, and Chóu in much the same way as Napoleon regarded himself as a fourth dynasty following the Merovingians, the Carolingians, and the Capetians--in reality, the third coexisted with the Culture right through its course in each case. When in 441 B.C. the titular Emperor of the Chóu dynasty became a state pensioner of the “Eastern Duke” and when in A.D. 1793 “Louis Capet” was executed, the Culture in each case passed into the Civilization. There are some bronzes of very great antiquity preserved from late Chang times, which stand towards the later art in exactly the same relation as Mycenæan to Early Classical pottery and Carolingian to Romanesque art. In the Vedic, Homeric, and Chinese springtimes, with their “Pfalzen” and “Burgen,” their knighthood and feudal rulership, can be seen the whole image of our Gothic, and the “period of the Great Protectors” (Ming-Chu, 685-691) corresponds precisely to the time of Cromwell, Wallenstein, and Richelieu and to the First Tyrannis of the Greek world.

The period 480-230 is called by the Chinese historians the “Period of the Contending States”; it culminated in a century of unbroken warfare between mass-armies with frightful social upheavals, and out of it came the “Roman” state of Tsin as founder of a Chinese Imperium. This phase Egypt experienced between 1780 and 1580, of which the last century was the “Hyksos” time. The Classical experienced it from Chæronea (338), and, at the high pitch of horror, from the Gracchi (133) to Actium (31 B.C.). And it is the destiny of the West-European-American world for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

During this period the centre of gravity changes--as from Attica to Latium, so from the Hwang-ho (at Ho-nan-fu) to the Yang-tse (modern province of Hu-pei). The Si-Kiang was as vague for the Chinese savants of those days as the Elbe for the Alexandrian geographer, and of the existence of India they had as yet no notion.

As on the other side of the globe there arose the principes of the Julian-Claudian house, so here in China there arose the mighty figure of Wang-Cheng, who led Tsin through the decisive struggle to sole supremacy and in 221 assumed the title of Shi (literally equivalent to “Augustus”) and the Cæsar-name Hwang-ti. He founded the “Pax Serica,” as we may call it, carried out a grand social reform in the exhausted Empire, and--as promptly as Rome[45]--began to build his “Limes,” the famous Great Wall, for which in 214 he annexed a part of Mongolia. He was the first, too, to subdue the barbarians south of the Yang-tse, in a series of large-scale campaigns followed and confirmed by military roads, castles, and colonies. But “Roman,” too, was his family history--a Tacitean drama with Lui-Shi (Chancellor and stepfather of the Emperor) and Li-Szu, the great statesman (the Agrippa of his day, and unifier of the Chinese script), playing parts, and one that quickly closed in Neronic horrors. Followed then the two Han dynasties (Western, 206 B.C.-A.D. 23; Eastern, A.D. 25-220), under which the frontiers extended more and more, while in the capital eunuch-ministers, generals, and soldiery made and unmade the rulers at their pleasure. At certain rare moments, as under Wu-ti (140-86) and Ming-ti (58-76), the Chinese-Confucian, the Indian-Buddhist, and the Classical-Stoic world-forces approached one another so closely in the region of the Caspian that they might easily have come into actual touch.[46]

Chance decreed that the heavy attacks of the Huns should break themselves in vain upon the Chinese “Limes,” which at each crisis found a strong emperor to defend it. The decisive repulse of the Huns took place in 124-119 under the Chinese Trajan, Wu-ti; and it was he, too, who finally incorporated Southern China in the Empire, with the object of obtaining a route into India, and built a grand embattled road to the Tarim. And so the Huns turned westward, and in due course they appear, impelling a swarm of Germanic tribes, in face of the Limes of the Roman world. This time they succeeded. The Roman Imperium collapsed, and thus two only of the three empires continued, and still continue, as desirable spoil for a succession of different powers. To-day it is the “red-haired barbarian” of the West who is playing before the highly civilized eyes of Brahman and Mandarin the rôle once played by Mogul and Manchu, playing it neither better nor worse than they, and certain like them to be superseded in due course by other actors. But in the colonization-field of foundering Rome, on the other hand, the future Western Culture was ripening underground in the north-west, while in the east the Arabian Culture had flowered already.

The Arabian Culture[47] is a discovery. Its unity was suspected by late Arabians, but it has so entirely escaped Western historical research that not even a satisfactory name can be found for it. Conformably to the dominant languages, the seed-time and the spring might be called the Aramaic and the later time the Arabian, but there is no really effectual name. In this field the Cultures were close to one another, and the extension of the corresponding Civilizations led to much overlaying. The pre-Cultural period of the Arabian, which we can follow out in Persian and Jewish history, lay completely within the area of the old Babylonian world, but the springtime was under the mighty spell of the Classical Civilization, which invaded from the West with all the power of a just-attained maturity, and the Egyptian and Indian Civilizations also made themselves distinctly felt. And then in turn the Arabian spirit--under Late Classical disguises for the most part--cast its spell over the nascent Culture of the West. The Arabian Civilization stratified over a still surviving Classical in the popular soul of south Spain, Provence, and Sicily, and became the model upon which the Gothic soul educated itself. The proper landscape of this Culture is remarkably extended and singularly fragmented. Let one put oneself at Palmyra or Ctesiphon, and, musing, look outwards all round. In the north is Osrhoene; Edessa became the Florence of the Arabian spring. To the west are Syria and Palestine--the home of the New Testament and of the Jewish Mishna, with Alexandria as a standing outpost. To the east Mazdaism experienced a mighty regeneration, which corresponded to the birth of Jesus in Jewry and about which the fragmentary state of Avesta literature enables us to say only that it happened.[48] Here, too, were born the Talmud and the religion of Mani. Deep in the south, the future home of Islam, an age of chivalry was able to develop as fully as in the realm of the Sassanids; even to-day there survive, unexplored, the ruins of castles and strongholds whence the decisive wars were waged between the Christian state of Axum and the Jewish state of the Himyarites on the two shores of the Red Sea, with Roman and Persian diplomacy poking the fire. In the extreme north was Byzantium, that strange mixture of sere, civilized, Classical, with vernal and chevaleresque which is manifested above all in the bewildering history of the Byzantine army system. Into this world Islam at last--and far too late--brought a consciousness of unity, and this accounts for the self-evident character of its victorious progress and the almost unresisting adhesion of Christians, Jews, and Persians alike. Out of Islam in due course arose the Arabian Civilization which was at the peak of its intellectual completeness when the barbarians from the West broke in for a moment, marching on Jerusalem. How, we may ask ourselves, did this inroad appear in the eyes of cultivated Arabians of the time? Somewhat like Bolshevism, perhaps? For the statecraft of the Arabian World the political relations of “Frankistan” were something on a lower plane. Even in our Thirty Years’ War--from that point of view a drama of the “Far West”--when an English envoy[49] strove to stir up the Porte against the house of Habsburg, the statesman who handled policy over a field stretching from Morocco to India, evidently judged that the little predatory states on the horizon were of no real interest. And even when Napoleon landed in Egypt, there were still many without an inkling of the future.

Meantime yet another new Culture developed in Mexico. This lay so remote from the rest that no word even passed between them. All the more astonishing, therefore, is the similarity of its development to that of the Classical. No doubt the archæologist standing before a teocalli would be horrified to think of his Doric temple in such a connexion; yet it was a thoroughly Classical trait--feebleness of the will-to-power in the matter of technics--that kept the Aztecs ill armed and so made possible their catastrophe.

For, as it happens, this is the one example of a Culture ended by violent death. It was not starved, suppressed, or thwarted, but murdered in the full glory of its unfolding, destroyed like a sunflower whose head is struck off by one passing. All these states--including a world-power and more than one federation--with an extent and resources far superior to those of the Greek and Roman states of Hannibal’s day; with a comprehensive policy, a carefully ordered financial system, and a highly developed legislation; with administrative ideas and economic tradition such as the ministers of Charles V could never have imagined; with a wealth of literature in several languages, an intellectually brilliant and polite society in great cities to which the West could not show one single parallel--all this was not broken down in some desperate war, but washed out by a handful of bandits in a few years, and so entirely that the relics of the population retained not even a memory of it all. Of the giant city Tenochtitlan[50] not a stone remains above ground. The cluster of great Mayan cities in the virgin forests of Yucatan succumbed swiftly to the attack of vegetation, and we do not know the old name of any one of them. Of the literature three books survive, but no one can read them.

The most appalling feature of the tragedy was that it was not in the least a necessity of the Western Culture that it should happen. It was a private affair of adventurers, and at the time no one in Germany, France, or England had any idea of what was taking place. This instance shows, as no other shows, that the history of humanity has no meaning whatever and that deep significances reside only in the life-courses of the separate Cultures. Their inter-relations are unimportant and accidental. In this case the accident was so cruelly banal, so supremely absurd, that it would not be tolerated in the wildest farce. A few cannon and handguns began and ended the drama.[51]

A sure knowledge of even the most general history of this world is now for ever impossible. Events as important as our Crusades and Reformation have vanished without leaving a trace. Only in recent years has research managed to settle the outline, at any rate, of the later course of development, and with the help of these data comparative morphology may attempt to widen and deepen the picture by means of those of other Cultures.[52] On this basis the epochal points of this Culture lie about two hundred years later than those of the Arabian and seven hundred years before those of our own. There was a pre-Cultural period which, as in China and Egypt, developed script and calendar, but of this we now know nothing. The time-reckoning began with an initial date which lies far behind the birth of Christ, but it is impossible now to fix it with certainty relative to that event.[53] In any case, it shows an extraordinarily strongly developed history-sense in Mexican mankind.

The springtime of the “Hellenic” Maya states is evidenced by the dated relief-pillars of the old cities of Copan (in the south), Tikal, and somewhat later Chichen Itza (in the north), Naranjo, and Seibal[54]--about 160-450. At the end of this period Chichen Itza was a model of architecture that was followed for centuries. The full glory of Palenque and Piedras Negras (in the west) may correspond to our Late Gothic and Renaissance (450-600 = European 1250-1400?). In the Baroque or Late period Champutun appears as the centre of style-formation, and now the “Italic” Nahua peoples of the high plateau of Anahuac began to come under the cultural influence. Artistically and spiritually these peoples were mere recipients, but in their political instincts they were far superior to the Maya (about 600-960, = Classical 750-400 = Western 1400-1750?). And now Maya entered on the “Hellenistic” phase. About 960 Uxmal was founded, soon to be a cosmopolis of the first rank, an Alexandria or Baghdad, founded like these on the threshold of the Civilization. With it we find a series of brilliant cities like Labna, Mayapan, Chacmultun, and a revived Chichen Itza. These places mark the culminating point of a grandiose architecture, which thereafter produced no new style, but applies the old motives with taste and discrimination to mighty masses. Politically this is the age of the celebrated League of Mayapan, an alliance of three leading states, which appears to have maintained the position successfully--if somewhat artificially and arbitrarily--in spite of great wars and repeated revolutions (960-1165 = Classical 350-150 = Western 1800-2000).

The end of this period was marked by a great revolution, and with it the definitive intervention of the (“Roman”) Nahua powers in the Maya affair. With their aid Hunac Ceel brought about a general overthrow and destroyed Mayapan (about 1190 = Classical 150). The sequel was typical of the history of the over-ripened Civilization in which different peoples contend for military lordship. The great Maya cities sink into the same bland contentment as Roman Athens and Alexandria, but out on the horizon of the Nahua lands was developing the last of these peoples, the Aztecs--young, vigorous, barbaric, and filled with an insatiable will-to-power. In 1325 (= the Age of Augustus) they founded Tenochtitlan, which soon became the paramount and capital city of the whole Mexican world. About 1400 military expansion began on the grand scale. Conquered regions were secured by military colonies and a network of military roads, and a superior diplomacy kept the dependent states in check and separated. Imperial Tenochtitlan grew enormous and housed a cosmopolitan population speaking every tongue of this world-empire.[55] The Nahua provinces were politically and militarily secure, the southward thrust was developing rapidly, and a hand was about to be laid on the Maya states; there is no telling what the course of the next centuries would have been. And suddenly--the end.

At that date the West was at a level which the Maya had already overpassed by 700; nothing short of the age of Frederick the Great would have been ripe enough to comprehend the politics of the Mayapan League, and what the Aztecs of A.D. 1500 were organizing lies for us well in the future. But that which distinguished Faustian man, even then, from the man of any other Culture was his irrepressible urge into distance. It was this, in the last resort, that killed and even annihilated the Mexican and Peruvian Culture--the unparalleled drive that was ready for service in any and every domain. Certainly the Ionic style was imitated in Carthage and in Persepolis, and Hellenistic taste in the Gandara art of India found admirers. Future investigation will probably find some Chinese in the primitive German wood-architecture. The Mosque style ruled from Farther India to North Russia, to West Africa, and to Spain. But all that amounts to nothing as compared with the expansion-power of the Western Soul. The true style-history of that soul, it need hardly be said, accomplished itself only on the mother soil, but its resultant effects knew no bounds. On the spot where Tenochtitlan had stood, the Spaniards erected a Baroque cathedral adorned with masterpieces of Spanish painting and plastic. Already at that date the Portuguese had got to work in Hither India and Late-Baroque architects from Spain and Italy in the heart of Poland and Russia. The English Rococo, and especially Empire, made for themselves a broad province in the Plantation States of North America, whose wonderful rooms and furniture are far less well known in Germany than they ought to be. Classicism was at work already in Canada and at the Cape, and presently there were no limits at all. It was just the same in every other domain of form; the relation between this forceful young Civilization and the still remaining old ones--is that it covers them, all alike, with ever-thickening layers of West-European-American life-forms under which, slowly, the ancient native form disappears.

VI

In the presence of this picture of the world of man--which is destined to displace the older one of “Ancient-Mediæval-Modern” that is still firmly established even in the best minds--it will become possible, too, to give a new answer (and for our Civilization, I think, a final answer) to the old question: What is History?

Ranke, in the preface of his World History says: “History only begins when the monuments become intelligible, and trustworthy written evidences are available.” This is the answer of a collector and arranger of data; obviously, it confuses that which has happened with that which happened within the field of view open at the particular time to the particular student. Mardonius was defeated at Platæa--has this ceased to be history if two thousand years later it has somehow dropped out of the ken of the historians? For a fact to be a fact, must it be mentioned in books?

The weightiest historian since Ranke, Eduard Meyer,[56] says: “Historic is that which is, or has been, effective.... Only through historical treatment does the individual process, lifted by history from among the infinite mass of contemporary processes, become the historical event.” The remark is thoroughly in the manner and spirit of Hegel. Firstly, its starting-point is the fact and not any accidental knowledge or ignorance of the fact, and if there is any mode of picturing history which necessarily imposes such a starting-point, it is that presented in these pages, since it compels us to assume the existence of facts of the first order in majestic sequences, even when we do not (and never will) know them in the scientific sense. We have to learn to handle the unknown in the most comprehensive way. Secondly, truths exist for the mind, facts only in relation to life. Historical treatment--in my terminology, physiognomic fact--is decided by the blood, the gift of judging men broadened out into past and future, the innate flair for persons and situations, for the event, for that which had to be, must have been. It does not consist in bare scientific criticism and knowing of data. The scientific mode of experience is, for every true historian, something additional or subordinate. It addresses to the waking-consciousness, by the way of understanding and imparting, laborious and repetitive proof of that which one moment of illumination has already, and instantly, demonstrated to Being.

Just because the force of our Faustian being has by now worked up about us a circumcircle of inner experiences such as no other men and no other time could acquire--just because for us the remotest events become increasingly significant and disclose relationships that no one else, not even the closest contemporaries of these events, could perceive--much has now become history (i.e., life in tune with our life) that centuries ago was not history. Tacitus probably “knew” the data concerning Tiberius Gracchus’s revolution, but for him it no longer meant anything effectively, whereas for us it is full of meaning. The history of the Monophysites and their relation to Mohammed’s milieu signify nothing whatever to the Islamic believer, but for us it is recognizably the story of English Puritanism in another setting. For the world-view of a Civilization which has made the whole earth its stage, nothing is in the last resort quite unhistorical. The scheme of ancient-mediæval-modern history, as understood by the nineteenth century, contained only a selection of the more obvious relations. But the influence that old Chinese and Mexican history are beginning to exercise on us to-day is of a subtler and more intellectual kind. There we are sounding the last necessities of life itself. We are learning out of another life-course to know ourselves what we are, what we must be, what we shall be. It is the great school of our future. We who have history still, are making history still, find here on the extreme frontiers of historical humanity what history is.

A battle between two Negro tribes in the Sudan, or between the Cherusci and Chatti of Cæsar’s time, or--what is substantially the same--between ant-communities, is merely a drama of “living Nature.” But when the Cherusci beat the Romans, as in the year 9,[57] or the Aztecs the Tlascalans, it is history. Here the “when” is of importance and each decade, or even year, matters, for here one is dealing with the march of a grand life-course, in which every decision takes rank as an epoch. Here there is an object towards which every happening impels, a being that strives to fulfil its predestination, a tempo, an organic duration--and not the disorderly ups and downs of Scythians, Gauls, or Caribs, of which the particular detail is as unimportant as that of doings in a colony of beavers or a steppe-herd of gazelles. These are zoölogical happenings and have their place in an altogether different orientation of our outlook, that in which we are concerned not with the destiny of individual peoples or herds, but with that of “man,” or “the” gazelle, or “the” ants, as species. Primitive man has history only in the biological sense, and all prehistoric study boils down to the investigation of this sense. The increasing familiarity of men with fire, stone tools, and the mechanical laws which make weapons effective, characterizes only the development of the type and of its latent possibilities. The objects for which one tribe employed these weapons against another tribe are of no importance in this plane of history. Stone Age and Baroque are age-grades in the existence of respectively a genus and a Culture--i.e., two organisms belonging to two fundamentally different settings. And here I would protest against two assumptions that have so far vitiated all historical thought: the assertion of an ultimate aim of mankind as a whole and the denial of there being ultimate aims at all. The life has an aim. It is the fulfilment of that which was ordained at its conception. But the individual belongs by birth to the particular high Culture on the one hand and to the type Man on the other--there is no third unit of being for him. His destiny must lie either in the zoölogical or in the world-historical field. “Historical” man, as I understand the word and as all great historians have meant it to be taken, is the man of a Culture that is in full march towards self-fulfilment. Before this, after this, outside this, man is historyless; and the destinies of the people to which he belongs matter as little as the Earth’s destiny matters when the plane of attention is the astronomical and not the geological.

From this there follows a fact of the most decisive importance, and one that has never before been established: that man is not only historyless before the birth of the Culture, but again becomes so as soon as a Civilization has worked itself out fully to the definitive form which betokens the end of the living development of the Culture and the exhaustion of the last potentialities of its significant existence. That which we see in the Egyptian Civilization after Seti I (1300) and in the Chinese, the Indian, the Arabian to this day is--notwithstanding all the cleverness of the religious, philosophical and, especially, political forms in which it is wrapped--just the old zoölogical up-and-down of the primitive age again. Whether the lords sitting in Babylon were wild war-hordes like the Kassites or refined inheritors like the Persians, when, for how long, and with what success they kept their seats, signified nothing from the standpoint of Babylon. The comfort of the population was affected by such things, naturally, but they made no difference either way to the fact that the soul of this world was extinct and its events, therefore, void of any deep meaning. A new dynasty, native or foreign, in Egypt, a revolution or a conquest in China, a new Germanic people in the Roman Empire, were elements in the history of the landscape like a change in the fauna or the migration of a flock of birds.

In the history, the genuine history, of higher men the stake fought for and the basis of the animal struggle to prevail is ever--even when driver and driven are completely unconscious of the symbolic force of their doings, purposes, and fortunes--the actualization of something that is essentially spiritual, the translation of an idea into a living historical form. This applies equally to the struggle of big style-tendencies in art (Gothic and Renaissance), of philosophy (Stoics and Epicureans), of political ideals (Oligarchy and Tyrannis), and of economic forms (Capitalism and Socialism). But the post-history is void of all this. All that remains is the struggle for mere power, for animal advantage per se. Whereas previously power, even when to all appearance destitute of any inspiration, was always serving the Idea somehow or other, in the late Civilization even the most convincing illusion of an idea is only the mask for purely zoölogical strivings.

The distinction between Indian philosophy before and after Buddha is that the former is a grand movement towards attaining the aim of Indian thought by and in the Indian soul, and the latter the perpetual turning-up of new facets of a now crystallized and undevelopable thought-stock. The solutions are there, for good, though the fashions of expressing them change. The same is true of Chinese painting before and after the Han dynasties--whether we know it or not--and of Egyptian architecture before and after the beginning of the New Empire. So also with technics. The West’s discoveries of the steam-engine and of electricity are accepted by the Chinese to-day in just the same way--and with just the same religious awe--as bronze and the plough were accepted four thousand years ago, and fire in a still remoter age. Both, spiritually, differ in toto from the discoveries which the Chinese made for themselves in the Chóu period and which in each instance signified an epoch in their inner history.[58] Before and after that time, centuries play a vastly less important rôle than decades and even years within the Culture, for the spans of time are gradually returning to the biological order. This it is that confers upon these very Late conditions--which to the people living in them seem almost self-evident--that character of changeless pageantry which the genuine Culture-man--e.g., Herodotus in Egypt and the Western successors of Marco Polo in China--has found so astonishing in comparison with his own vigorous pulse of development. It is the changelessness of non-history.

Is not Classical history at an end with Actium and the Pax Romana? There are no more of those great decisions which concentrate the inner meaning of a whole Culture. Unreason, biology, is beginning to dominate, and it is becoming a matter of indifference for the world--though not for the actions of the private individual--whether an event turns out thus or thus. All great political questions are solved, as they are solved sooner or later in every Civilization, inasmuch as questions are no longer felt as questions and are not asked. Yet a little while, and man will cease to understand what problems were really involved in the earlier catastrophes; what is not livingly experienced of oneself cannot be livingly experienced of another. When the later Egyptians speak of the Hyksos time, or the later Chinese of the corresponding period of the “Contending States,” they are judging the outward picture according to the criteria of their own ways of life, in which there are no riddles more. They see in these things merely struggles for power, and they do not see that those desperate wars, external and internal, wars in which men stirred up the alien against their own kin, were fought for an idea. To-day we understand what was taking place, in fearful alternations of tension and discharge, round the murder of Tiberius Gracchus and that of Clodius. In 1700 we could not have done so, and in 2200 we shall again be unable to do so. It is just the same with that of Chian, a Napoleonic figure, in whom later Egyptian historians could discover nothing more characterized than a “Hyksos king.” Had it not been for the coming of the Germans, Roman historians a thousand years later might have put the Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, and Cicero together as a dynasty which was overthrown by Cæsar.

Compare the death of Tiberius Gracchus with the death of Nero, when Rome received the news of Galba’s rising, or the victory of Sulla over the Marian party with that of Septimius Severus over Pescennius Niger. If in these later cases the event had gone otherwise, would the course of the Imperial Age have been altered in any way? The distinction so carefully drawn by Mommsen and Eduard Meyer[59] between the “principate” of Pompey and Augustus and the “monarchy” of Cæsar misses the mark completely. At that stage, the point is merely a constitutional one, though fifty years before it would still have signified an opposition between ideas. When Vindex and Galba in 68 set out to restore “the Republic,” they were gambling on a notion in days when notions having genuine symbolic force had ceased to be, and the only question was who should have the plain material power. The struggle for the Cæsar-title became steadily more and more negroid, and might have gone on century after century in increasingly primitive and, therefore, “eternal” forms.

These populations no longer possessed a soul. Consequently they could no longer have a history proper to themselves. At best they might acquire some significance as an object in the history of an alien Culture, and whatever deeper meaning this relation possessed would be derived entirely from the will of the alien Life. Any effective historical happening that does take place on the soil of an old Civilization acquires its consistency as a course of events from elsewhere and never from any part played in it by the man of that soil. And so once again we find ourselves regarding the phenomenon of “world-history” under the two aspects--life-courses of the great Cultures and relations between them.

III. ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(C)

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES

I

Although consideration of the Cultures themselves should logically precede that of the relations between them, modern historical thought generally reverses the order. The less it really knows of the life-courses which together make up a seeming unity of world-happenings, the more zealously it searches for life in the web of relations, and the less it understands even of these. What a wealth of psychology there is in the probings, rejections, choices, transvaluations, errors, penetrations, and welcomings!--and not only between Cultures which immediately touch one another, wonder at one another, fight one another, but also as between a living Culture and the form-world of a dead one whose remains still stand visible in the landscape. And how narrow and poor, on the other hand, are the conceptions which the historians label “influence,” “continuity,” and “permanent effects”!

This is pure nineteenth century. What is sought is just a chain of causes and effects. Everything follows and nothing is prime. Since every young Culture superficially shows form-elements of older Cultures, these elements are supposed to have had continuing effect (fortgewirkt), and when a set of such effects has been strung together, the historian regards it with satisfaction as a sound piece of work.

At bottom, this mode of treatment rests upon that idea which inspired the great Gothics long ago, the idea of a significant singleness in the history of all mankind. They saw how, on earth, men and peoples changed, but ideas stayed, and the powerful impressiveness of the picture has not worn itself out even to-day. Originally it was seen as a plan that God was working out by means of the human instrument. And it could still be regarded as such at a far later stage, in fact so long as the spell of the “ancient-mediæval-modern” scheme lasted and its parade of permanence prevented us from noting that actuality was ever changing. But meantime our outlook also has altered and become cooler and wider. Our knowledge has long overpassed the limits of this chart, and those who are still trying to sail by it are beating about in vain. It is not products that “influence,” but creators that absorb. Being has been confused with waking-being, life with the means by which it expresses itself. The critical thought, or even simple waking-consciousness, sees everywhere theoretical units subjected to motion. That is truly dynamic and Faustian, for in no other Culture have men imagined history thus. The Greek, with his thoroughly corporeal understanding of the world, would never have traced “effects” of pure expression-units like “Attic drama” or “Egyptian art.”

Originally what happens is that a name is given to a system of expression-forms conjuring up in our minds a particular complex of relations. But this does not last long, and soon one is suppositing {sic} under the name a being, and under the relation an effect. When we speak to-day of Greek philosophy, or Buddhism, or Scholasticism, we mean something that is somehow living, a power-unit that has grown and grown until it is mighty enough to take possession of men, to subject their waking-consciousness and even their being, and in the end to force them into an active conformity, which prolongs the direction followed by its own “life.” It is a whole mythology, and, significantly, it is only men of the Western Culture--the only mankind that lives with and in this picture is the Western--whose myth contains plenty of dæmons of this sort--“electricity” and “positional energy,” for example.

In reality these systems only exist in the human waking-consciousness, and they exist as modes of activity. Religion, science, art, are activities of waking-consciousness that are based on a being. Faith, meditation, creation, and whatever of visible activity is required as outcome of these invisibles--as sacrifice, prayer, the physical experiment, the carving of a statue, the statement of an experience in communicable words--are activities of the waking-consciousness and nothing else. Other men see only the visible and hear only words. In so doing they experience something in themselves, but they cannot give any account of the relation between this experience and that which the creator lived in himself. We see a form, but we do not know what in the other’s soul begat that form; we can only have some belief about the matter, and we believe by putting in our own soul. However definitely and distinctly a religion may express itself in words, they are words, and the hearer puts his own sense into them. However impressive the artist’s notes or colours, the beholder sees and hears in them only himself, and if he cannot do so, the work is for him meaningless. (The extremely rare and highly modern gift, possessed by a few intensely historical men, of “putting oneself in the other’s place” need not be considered in this connexion.) The German whom Boniface converted did not transfer himself into the missionary’s soul. It was a springtide quiver that passed in those days through the whole young world of the North, and what it meant was that each man found suddenly in conversion a language wherein to express his own religiousness. Just so the eyes of a child light up when we tell it the name of the object in its hand.

It is not, then, microcosmic units that move, but cosmic entities that pick amongst them and appropriate them. Were it otherwise--were these systems very beings that could exercise an activity (for “influence” is an organic activity)--the picture of history would be quite other than what it is. Consider how every maturing man and every living Culture is continuously bathed in innumerable potential influences. Out of all these, only some few are admitted as such--the great majority are not. Is choice concerned with the works, or with the men?

The historian who is intent upon establishing causal series counts only the influences that are present, and the other side of the reckoning--those that are not--does not appear. With the psychology of the “positive” influences is associated that of the “negative.” This is a domain into which no one has yet ventured, but here, if anywhere, there are fruits to be reaped, and it must be tackled unless the answer to the whole question is to be left indeterminate; for if we try to evade it, we are driven into illusory visions of world-historical happening as a continuous process in which everything is properly accounted for. Two Cultures may touch between man and man, or the man of one Culture may be confronted by the dead form-world of another as presented in its communicable relics. In both cases the agent is the man himself. The closed-off act of A can be vivified by B only out of his own being, and eo ipso it becomes B’s, his inward property, his work, and part of himself. There was no movement of “Buddhism” from India to China, but an acceptance of part of the Indian Buddhists’ store of images by Chinese of a certain spiritual tendency, who fashioned out a new mode of religious expression having meaning for Chinese, and only Chinese, Buddhists. What matters in all such cases is not the original meanings of the forms, but the forms themselves, as disclosing to the active sensibility and understanding of the observer potential modes of his own creativeness. Connotations are not transferable. Men of two different kinds are parted, each in his own spiritual loneliness, by an impassable gulf. Even though Indians and Chinese in those days both felt as Buddhists, they were spiritually as far apart as ever. The same words, the same rites, the same symbol--but two different souls, each going its own way.

Searching through all Cultures, then, one will always find that the continuation of earlier creations into a later Culture is only apparent, and that in fact the younger being has set up a few (very few) relations to the older being, always without regard to the original meanings of that which it makes its own. What becomes, then, of the “permanent conquests” of philosophy and science? We are told again and again how much of Greek philosophy still lives on to-day, but this is only a figure of speech without real content, for first Magian and then Faustian humanity, each with the deep wisdom of its unimpaired instincts, rejected that philosophy, or passed unregarding by it, or retained its formulæ under radically new interpretations. The naïve credulity of erudite enthusiasm deceives itself here--Greek philosophic notions would make a long catalogue, and the further it is taken, the more vanishingly small becomes the proportion of the alleged survivals. Our custom is simply to overlook as incidental “errors” such conceptions as Democritus’s theory of atomic images,[60] the very corporeal world of Plato’s “ideas,” and the fifty-two hollow spheres of Aristotle’s universe, as though we could presume to know what the dead meant better than they knew themselves! These things are truths and essential--only, not for us. The sum total of the Greek philosophy that we possess, actually and not merely superficially, is practically nil. Let us be honest and take the old philosophers at their word; not one proposition of Heraclitus or Democritus or Plato is true for us unless and until we have accommodated it to ourselves. And how much, after all, have we taken over of the methods, the concepts, the intentions, and the means of Greek science, let alone its basically incomprehensible terms? The Renaissance, men say, was completely under the “influence” of Classical art. But what about the form of the Doric temple, the Ionic column, the relation of column to architrave, the choice of colour, the treatment of background and perspective in painting, the principles of figure-grouping, vase-painting, mosaic, encaustic, the structural element in statuary, the proportions of Lysippus? Why did all this exercise no “influence?”

Because that which one (here, the Renaissance artist) wills to express is in him a priori. Of the stock of dead forms that he had in front of him, he really saw only the few that he wanted to see, and saw them as he wanted them--namely, in line with his own intention and not with the intention of the original creator, for no living art ever seriously considers that. Try to follow, element by element, the “influence” of Egyptian plastic upon early Greek, and you will find in the end that there is none at all, but that the Greek will-to-form took out of the older art-stock some few characteristics that it would in any case have discovered in some shape for itself. All round the Classical landscape there were working, or had worked, Egyptians, Cretans, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, and Phœnicians, and the works of these peoples--their buildings, ornaments, art-works, cults, state-forms, scripts, and sciences--were known to the Greeks in profusion. But how much out of all this mass did the Classical soul extract as its own means of expression? I repeat, it is only the relations that are accepted that we observe. But what of those that were not accepted? Why, for example, do we fail to find in the former category the pyramid, pylon, and obelisk of Egypt, or hieroglyphic, or cuneiform? What of the stock of Byzantium and of the Moorish East was not accepted by Gothic art and thought in Spain and Sicily? It is impossible to overpraise the wisdom (quite unconscious) that governed the choice and the unhesitating transvaluation of what was chosen. Every relation that was accepted was not only an exception, but also a misunderstanding, and the inner force of a Being is never so clearly evidenced as it is in this art of deliberate misunderstanding. The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in truth we have denatured it. Only consider the praises addressed by the West to Plato! From Bernard of Chartres and Marsilius Ficinus to Goethe and Schelling! And the more humble our acceptance of an alien religion, the more certain it is that that religion has already assumed the form of the new soul. Truly, someone ought to have written the history of the “three Aristotles”--Greek, Arabian, and Gothic--who had not one concept or thought in common. Or the history of the transformation of Magian Christianity into Faustian! We are told in sermon and book that this religion extended from the old Church into and over the Western field without change of essence. Actually, Magian man evolved out of the deepest depths of his dualistic world-consciousness a language of his own religious awareness that we call “the” Christian religion. So much of this experience as was communicable--words, formulæ, rites--was accepted by the man of the Late-Classical Civilization as a means of expression for his religious need; then it passed from man to man, even to the Germans of the Western pre-Culture, in words always the same and in sense always altering. Men would never have dared to improve upon the original meanings of the holy words--it was simply that they did not know these meanings. If this be doubted, let the doubter study “the” idea of Grace, as it appears under the dualistic interpretation of Augustine affecting a substance in man, and under the dynamic interpretation of Calvin, affecting a will in man. Or that Magian idea, which we can hardly grasp at all, of the consensus (Arabic ijma)[61] wherein, as a consequence of the presence in each man of a pneuma emanating from the divine pneuma, the unanimous opinion of the elect is held to be immediate divine Truth. It was this that gave the decisions of the early Church Councils their authoritative character, and it underlies the scientific methods that rule in the world of Islam to this day. And it was because Western men did not understand this that the Church Councils of later Gothic times amounted, for him, to nothing more than a kind of parliament for limiting the spiritual mobility of the Papacy. This idea of what a Council meant prevailed even in the fifteenth century--think of Constance and Basel, Savonarola and Luther--and in the end it disappeared, as futile and meaningless, before the conception of Papal Infallibility. Or, again, the idea, universal in the Early Arabian world, of the resurrection of the flesh, which again presupposed that of divine and human pneuma. Classical man assumed that the soul, as the form and meaning of the body, was somehow co-created herewith, and Greek thought scarcely mentions it. Silence on a matter of such gravity may be due to one or the other of two reasons--the idea’s not being there at all, or being so self-evident as not to emerge into consciousness as a problem. With Arabian man it was the latter. But just as self-evident for him was the notion that his pneuma was an emanation from God that had taken up residence in his body. Necessarily, therefore, there had to be something from which the human soul should rise again on the Day of Judgment, and hence resurrection was thought of as ἔκ νεκρῶν, “out of the corpses.” This, in its deeper meaning, is utterly incomprehensible for the West. The words of Holy Scripture were not indeed doubted, but unconsciously another meaning was substituted by the finer minds amongst Catholics; this other meaning, unmistakable already in Luther and to-day quite general, is the conception of immortality as the continued existence to all eternity of the soul as a centre of force. Were Paul or Augustine to become acquainted with our ideas of Christianity, they would reject all our dogmas, all our books, and all our concepts as utterly erroneous and heretical.

As the strongest example of a system that to all appearance has travelled unaltered through two millennia, and yet actually has passed through three whole courses of evolution in three Cultures, with completely different meanings in each, we may take Roman law.

II

Law, in the Classical world, is law made by citizens for citizens and presupposes that the state-form is that of the Polis. It was this basic form of public life that led--and self-evidently--to the notion of the person as identical with the man who, added to others like him, made up the body (σῶμα)[62] of the State. From this formal fact of Classical world-feeling grew up the whole structure of Classical law.

“Persona” then is a specifically Classical notion, possessing meaning and valency only in the Classical Culture. The individual person is a body which belongs to the stock of the Polis. It is with reference to him that the law of the Polis is ordered, downwards into the law of Things--with, as a marginal case, the slave who was body, but not person--and upward into the law of Gods--with, as a marginal case, the hero who from being person had attained godhead and the legal right to a cult, like Lysander and Alexander in the Greek cities and Divus Julius and his successors in Rome. This tendency, becoming more and more definite in the development of Classical jurisprudence, explains also the notion of capitis deminutio media, which is so alien to our Western ideas; for we can imagine a person (in our sense of the word) as deprived of certain rights and even of all rights, but the Classical man under this punishment ceased to be a person although living on as a body. And the specifically Classical idea of the thing, res, is only intelligible in contrast to and as the object of persona.

As Classical religion was State religion through and through, there is no distinction made as to the fount of law; real law and divine law were made, like personal law, by the citizen, and the relations of things and of gods to persons were precise and definite. Now, it was a fact of decisive significance for the Classical jurisprudence that it was always the product of immediate public experience--and, moreover, not the professional experience of the jurists, but the practical everyday experience of men who counted in political and economic life generally. The man who followed the public career in Rome had necessarily to be jurist, general, administrator, and financial manager. When he gave judgment as prætor, he had behind him a wide experience of many fields other than law. A judicial class, professionally (let alone theoretically) specialized in law as its sole activity, was entirely unknown to the Classical. The whole outlook of the later jurisprudence was determined by this fact. The Romans were here neither systematists nor historians nor theorists, but just splendidly practical. Their jurisprudence is an empirical science of individual cases, a refined technique, and not in the least a structure of abstractions.[63]

It would give an incorrect idea to oppose Greek and Roman law to one another as quantities of the same order. Roman law in its whole development is an individual city law, one amongst hundreds of such, and Greek law as a unity never existed at all. Although Greek-speaking cities very often had similar laws, this did not alter the fact that the law of each was its own and no other’s. Never did the idea of a general Doric, still less a general Hellenic, legislation arise. Such notions were wholly alien to Classical thought. The jus civile applied only to Quirites--foreigners, slaves and the whole world outside the city[64] simply did not count in the eyes of the law, whereas even the Sachsenspiegel[65] evidences already our own deep-felt idea that there can only really be one law. Until far into Imperial times the strict distinction was maintained between the jus civile of citizens and the jus gentium for “other people” who came within the cognizance of Rome’s jurisdiction as sojourners.[66] (It need hardly be added that this “law of nations” has no sort of resemblance to that which we call by the same name.) It was only because Rome as a unit-city attained--as under other conditions Alexandria might have attained--to “Imperium” over the Classical world that Roman law became pre-eminent, not because of its intrinsic superiority, but firstly through Rome’s political success and afterwards because of Rome’s monopoly of practical experience on the large scale. The formation of a general Classical jurisprudence of Hellenistic cast--if we are entitled to call by that name an affinity of spirit in a large number of separate legal systems--falls in a period when Rome was still politically a third-rate power. And when Roman law began to assume bigger forms, this was only one aspect of the fact that Roman intellect had subjugated Hellenism. The work of forming later Classical law passed from Hellenism to Rome--i.e., from a sum of city-states, which one and all had been impressively made aware of their individual impotence, to one single city whose whole activity was in the end devoted to the upholding and exploitation of an effective primacy. Thus it came about that Hellenism never formed a jurisprudence in the Greek tongue. When the Classical world entered upon a stage in which it was ripe for this science (the latest of all), there was but one lawgiving city that counted in the matter.

In reality, insufficient regard has been paid to the fact that Greek and Roman law are not parallel in time but successive. Roman law is the younger and presupposes the long experience of the elder;[67] it was built up, in fact, late and, with this exemplar before it, very swiftly. It is not without significance that the flowering-time of the Stoic philosophy, which deeply affected juridical ideas, followed that of Greek, but preceded that of Roman, law.

III

This jurisprudence, however, was built up by the mind of an intensely ahistorical species of man. Classical law, consequently, is law of the day and even the moment; it was in its very idea occasional legislation for particular cases, and when the case was settled, it ceased to be law. To extend its validity over subsequent cases would have been in contradiction to the Classical sense of the present.

The Roman prætor, at the beginning of his year of office, issued an edict in which he set forth the rules that he intended to follow, but his successor next year was in nowise bound to them. And even this limitation of a year on the validity of the rules did not mean that this was actually the duration of the rules. On the contrary (particularly after the Lex Æbutia) the prætor formulated in each individual case the concrete rule of law for the judges[68] to whom he remitted the matter for judgment, which had to be according to this rule and no other. That is, the prætor produced, and indeed generated, a present law without duration.[69]

Similar in appearance, but so profoundly different in meaning as to leave no doubt as to the great gap which is set between Classical and Western Law, is that inspired and truly Germanic notion of English jurisprudence, the creative power of the judge who “declares” the law. His business is to apply a law which in principle possesses eternal validity. Even the application of the existing body of laws he can regulate, according to the situations disclosed in the course of the case, by means of his “rules” (which have nothing in common with the prætor’s). And if he should conclude in the presence of a particular set of facts that current law is defective in respect of these, he can fill the gap at once, and thus in the very middle of a trial create new law, which (if concurred in by the judicial body in the due forms) becomes thereafter part and parcel of the permanent stock of law. This is what makes it so completely un-Classical. In the old jurisprudence, the gradual formation of a stock of rules was due purely to the fact that public life followed a substantially homogeneous course throughout a particular period, and produced again and again the same situations to be dealt with--rules not deliberately invested with validity for the future, but more or less recreated again and again as empirical rulings ad hoc. The sum of these rulings--not a system, but a collection--came to constitute “the law” as we find it in the later legislation by prætor’s edict, each successive prætor having found it practically convenient to take over substantial portions of his predecessor’s work.

Experience, then, means for the ancient lawgiver something different from what it means to us. It means, not the comprehensive outlook over a consistent mass of law that contains implicitly every possible case, associated with practical skill in applying it, but the experimental knowledge that certain jural situations are for ever recurring, so that one can save oneself the trouble of forming new law on every occasion.

The genuine Classical form for the slow accretion of legal material is an almost automatic summation of individual νομοί leges, edicta, as we find it in the heyday of the Roman prætor. All the so-called legislations of Solon, Charondas, and the Twelve Tables are nothing but occasional collections of such edicts as had been found to be useful. The Law of Gortyn,[70] which is more or less contemporary with the Twelve, is a supplement to some older collection. A newly-founded city would promptly provide itself with such a collection, and in the process a certain amount of dilettantism would slip in (cf. the lawmakers satirized by Aristophanes in The Birds). But there is never system in them, still less any intention of establishing enduring law thereby.

In the West it is conspicuously the other way about. The tendency is from the first to bring the entire living body of law into a general code, ordered for ever and exhaustively complete, containing in advance the decision of every conceivable future problem.[71] All Western law bears the stamp of the future, all Classical the stamp of the moment.

IV

But this, it may be said, is contradicted by the fact that there actually were Classical law-works compiled by professional jurists for permanent use. Undoubtedly so. But we must remember that we are completely ignorant of Early Classical law (1100-700) and it is pretty certain that the customary law of the country-side and the nascent town was never noted down as that of the Gothic age was set forth in the Sachsenspiegel or that of the Early Arabian in the Syrian Law-book.[72] The earliest stratification that we can now detect consists of the collections (from 700 B.C.) ascribed to mythical or semi-mythical personages like Lycurgus, Zaleucus, Charondas, and Dracon,[73] and certain Roman kings.[74] That these existed the form of the saga shows, but of their real authors, the actual process of their codification, and their original contents even the Greeks of the Persian War period were ignorant.

A second stratification, corresponding to Justinian’s code and to the “Reception” of Roman Law in Germany, is connected with the names of Solon (600), Pittacus (550), and others. Here the laws have already attained to a structure and are inspired by the city; they are described as “politeiai,” “nomoi,” in contrast to old “thesmai” and “rhetrai.”[75] In reality, therefore, we only know the history of late Classical law. Now, why these sudden codifications? A mere look at these names shows that at bottom they were not processes of putting down the results of pure experience, but decisions of political power problems.

It is a grave error to suppose that a law that surveys all things evenly and without being influenced by political and economic interests can exist at all. Such a state of things can be pictured, and is always being pictured, by those who suppose that the imagining of political possibilities is a political activity. But nothing alters the fact that such a law, born of abstractions, does not exist in real history. Always the law contains in abstract form the world-picture of its author, and every historical world-picture contains a political-economic tendency dependent, not upon what this man or that thinks, but upon what is practically intended by the class which in fact commands the power and, with it, the legislation. Every law is established by a class in the name of the generality. Anatole France once said that “our law in majestic equality forbids the rich no less than the poor to steal bread and to beg in the street.”[76] A one-sided justice no doubt. But equally the other side will always try to win sole authority for laws derived from its outlook upon life. These legislative codes are one and all political acts, and party-political acts at that--in the case of Solon a democratic constitution (πολιτεία) combined with private laws (νομοί) of the same stamp, in that of Dracon and the Decemvirs[77] an oligarchic constitution fortified by private law. It was left to Western historians, accustomed to their own durable law, to undervalue the importance of this connexion; Classical man was under no misapprehension as to what really happened in these cases. The product of the Decemvirs was in Rome the last code of purely patrician character. Tacitus calls it the end of right law (“finis æqui juris,” Annals, III, 27). For, just as the fall of the Decemvirs was followed very significantly by the rise of another Ten, the Tribunes, so immediately the jus of the Twelve Tables and the constitution on which it was founded began to be attacked by the undermining process of the lex rogata (people’s law), which set itself with Roman constancy to do what Solon had achieved in one act in the case of Dracon’s work, the πατρίος πολιτεία which was the law-ideal of the Attic oligarchy. Thenceforward Dracon and Solon were the “slogans” in the long battle between Oligarchy and Demos, which in Rome meant Senate and Tribunate. The Spartan constitution associated with the name “Lycurgus” not only stood for the ideal of Dracon and the Twelve Tables, but concreted it. We can see, parallel with the closely related course of events in Rome, the tendency of the two Spartan kings to evolve from the condition of Tarquinian tyrants to that of tribunes of the Gracchan kind; the fall of the last Tarquins or the institution of the Decemvirs--a coup d’état of one kind or another against the tribunician tendency[78]--corresponds more or less to the fall of Cleomenes (488) and of Pausanias (470); and the revolution of Agis III and Cleomenes III (about 240) aligns itself with the political activity of C. Flaminius, which began only a few years later. But never in Sparta were the kings able to achieve any thorough-going success over the senatorial element represented by the Ephors.

In the period of these struggles, Rome had become a megalopolis of the late-Classical type. The rustic instincts were more and more pushed back by the intelligence of the city.[79] Consequently from about 350 we find side by side with the lex rogata of the people the lex data, the administrative law, of the prætor. With this the Twelve Tables idea drops out of the contest and it is the prætor’s edict that becomes the football of the party battle.

It did not take long for the prætor to become the centre of both legislation and judicial practice. And presently, corresponding to the political extension of the city’s power, the jurisdiction of the prætor and the field of his jus civile--the law of the citizens--begin to diminish in significance and the peregrin prætor with his jus gentium--the law of the alien--steps into the foreground. And when finally the whole population of the Classical world, save the small part possessing Roman citizenship, was comprised in the field of this alien law, the jus peregrinum of the city of Rome became practically an imperial law. All other cities--and even Alpine tribes and migrant Bedouin clans were civitates from the administrative point of view--retained their local laws only as supplements, not alternatives, to the peregrin law of Rome.

It marked the close of Classical law-making, therefore, when Hadrian (about A.D. 130) introduced the Edictum perpetuum, which gave final form to the well-established corpus of the annual pronouncements of the prætors and forbade further modifications thereof. It was still, as before, the prætor’s duty to publish the “law of his year,” but, even though this law had no greater degree of validity than corresponded to his administrative powers and was not the law of the Empire, he was obliged thenceforth to stick to the established text.[80] It is the very symbol of the petrified “Late” Civilization.[81]

With the Hellenistic age began jurisprudence, the science of law, the systematic comprehension of the law which men actually apply. Since legal thought presupposes a substance of political and economic relations, in the same way as mathematical thought presupposes physical and technical elements of knowledge,[82] Rome very soon became the home of Classical jurisprudence. Similarly in the Mexican world it was the conquering Aztecs whose academies (e.g., Tezcuco) made law the chief subject of study. Classical jurisprudence was the Roman’s science, and his only one. At the very moment when the creative mathematic closes off with Archimedes, juristic literature begins with Ælius’s Tripertita, a commentary on the Twelve (198 B.C.).[83] The first systematic private law was written by M. Scævola about 100. The genuine maturity of Classical law is in the two centuries 200-0--although we to-day, with quaint perversity, apply the time to a period which was really that of Early Arabian law. And from the relics of these two literatures we can measure the greatness of the gap that separates the thought of two Cultures. The Romans treat only of cases and their classification; they never analyse a basic idea such as, for instance, judicial error. They distinguish carefully the sorts of contracts, but they have no conception of Contract as an idea, or of any theories as to invalidity or unsoundness. “Taking everything into account,” says Lenel,[84] “it is clear that the Romans cannot possibly be regarded as exemplars of scientific method.”

The last phase is that of the schools of the Sabiniani and Proculiani (Augustus to about 160 A.D.). They are scientific schools like the philosophical schools in Athens, and in them, possibly, the expiring stages of the conflict between the senatorial and the tribunician (Cæsarian) conceptions of law were fought, for amongst the best of the Sabiniani were two descendants of Cæsar’s slayers and one of the Proculiani was picked upon by Trajan as his potential successor. While the method was to all intents and purposes settled and concluded, the practical fusion of the citizen’s statute-law (jus civile) and the prætor’s edict (jus honorarium) was carried out here.

The last landmark of Classical jurisprudence, so far as we know, was the Institutes of Gaius (about 161).

Classical law is a law of bodies. In the general stock composing the world it distinguishes bodily Persons and bodily Things and, like a sort of Euclidean mathematic of public life, establishes ratios between them. The affinity between mathematical and legal thought is very close. The intention, in both, is to take the prima facie data, to separate out the sensuous-incidental, and to find the intellectually basic principle--the pure form of the object, the pure type of the situation, the pure connexity of cause and effect. Life, in the Classical, presents itself to the critical waking-consciousness of the Classical man in a form penetrated with Euclidean character, and the image that is generated in the legal mind is one of bodies, of positional relations between bodies, and of reciprocal effects of bodies by contact and reaction--just as with Democritus’s atoms. It is juristic statics.[85]

V

The first creation of “Arabian” law was the concept of the incorporeal person.

Here is an element entirely absent in Classical law,[86] and appearing quite suddenly in the “Classical” jurists (who were all Aramæans), which cannot be estimated at its full value, or in its symbolic importance as an index of the new world-feeling, unless we realize the full extent of the field that this Arabian law covered.

The new landscape embraces Syria and northern Mesopotamia, southern Arabia and Byzantium. In all these regions a new law was coming into being, an oral or written customary law of the same “early” type as that met with in the Sachsenspiegel. Wonderfully, the law of individual cities which is so self-evident on Classical ground is here silently transmuted into a law of creed-communities. It is Magian, magic, through and through. Always one Pneuma, one like spirit, one identical knowledge and comprehension of whole and sole truth, welds the believers of the same religion into a unit of will and action, into one juristic person. A juristic person is thus a collective entity which has intentions, resolutions, and responsibilities as an entity. In Christianity we see the idea already actual and effective in the primitive community at Jerusalem,[87] and presently it soars to the conception of a triune Godhead of three Persons.[88]

Before Constantine, even, the Late Classical law of imperial decrees (constitutiones, placita) though the Roman form of city law was strictly kept, was genuinely a law for the believers of the “Syncretic Church,”[89] that mass of cults perfused by one single religiousness. In Rome itself, it is true, law was conceived of by a large part of the population as city-state law, but this feeling became weaker and weaker with every step towards the East. The fusion of the faithful into a single jural community was effected in express form by the Emperor-cult, which was religious law through and through. In relation to this law Jews and Christians[90] were infidels who ensconced themselves with their own laws in another field of law. When in 212 the Aramæan Caracalla, by the Constitutio Antoniana, gave Roman citizenship to all inhabitants except dediticii peregrins,[91] the form of his act was purely Classical, and no doubt there were plenty of people who understood it in the Classical spirit--i.e., as literally an incorporation of the citizens of every other city in the city of Rome. But the Emperor himself conceived it quite otherwise. It made everyone subject to the “Ruler of the Faithful,” the head of the cult-religion venerated as Divus. With Constantine came the great change; he turned Imperial Caliph law on to the creed-community of Christianity in lieu of that of Syncretism, and thereby constituted the Christian Nation. The labels “devout” and “unbeliever” changed places. From Constantine onwards the quiet transformation of “Roman” law into orthodox Christian law proceeded more and more decisively, and it was as such that converted Asiatics and Germans received and adopted it. Thus a perfectly new law came into being in old forms. According to the old marriage-law it was impossible for a Roman burgher to marry the daughter of, say, a Capuan burgher if legal community, connubium, was not in force between the two cities.[92] But now the question was whether a Christian or a Jew--irrespective of whether he was Roman, Syrian, or Moor--could legally marry an infidel. For in the Magian law-world there was no connubium between those of different faiths. There was not the slightest difficulty about an Irishman in Constantinople marrying a Negress if both were Christians, but how could a Monophysite Christian marry a Nestorian maiden who was his neighbour in their Syrian village? Racially they were probably indistinguishable, but they belonged to legally different nations.

This Arabian concept of nationality is a new and wholly decisive fact. The frontiers between “home” and “abroad” lay in the Apollinian world between every two towns, and in the Magian between every two creed-communities. What the “enemy,” the peregrin, was to the Roman, the Pagan was to the Christian, the Amhaarez to the Jew. What the acquisition of Roman citizenship meant for the Gaul or the Greek in Cæsar’s time, Christian baptism meant for him now--entry into the leading nation of the leading Culture.[93] The Persians of the Sassanid period no longer conceived of themselves, as their predecessors of Achæmenid times had done, as a unit by virtue of origin and speech, but as a unit of Mazdaist believers, vis-à-vis unbelievers, irrespective of the fact that the latter might be of pure Persian origin (as indeed the bulk of the Nestorians were). So also with the Jews, and later the Mandæans and Manichæans, and later again the Monophysite and the Nestorian Christians--each body felt itself a nation, a legal community, a juristic person in a new sense.

Thus there arises a group of Early Arabian laws, differentiated according to religions as decisively as Classical laws are differentiated according to cities. In the realm of the Sassanids schools arose for the teaching the Zoroastrian law proper to them; the Jews, who formed an exceedingly large portion of the population from Armenia to Sabæa, created their proper law in the Talmud, which was completed and closed some few years before the Corpus Juris. Each one of these Churches had its peculiar jurisdiction, independent of the geographical frontiers of the moment--as in the East to-day--and the judge representing the ground-lord judged only cases between parties of different faiths. The self-jurisdiction of the Jews within the Empire had never been contested by anyone, but the Nestorians and the Monophysites also began, very soon after their separation, to create and to apply laws of their own, and thus by a negative process--i.e., by the gradual withdrawal of all heterodox communities--Roman imperial law came to be the law of the Christians who confessed the same creed as the Emperor. Hence the importance of the Roman-Syrian law-book, which has been preserved in several languages. It was probably[94] pre-Constantinian and written in the chancery of the Patriarch of Antioch; it is quite unmistakably Early Arabian law in Late Classical form, and, as its many translations indicate, it owed its currency to the opposition to the orthodox Imperial Church. It was without doubt the basis of Monophysite law, and it reigned till the coming of Islam over a field far larger than that of the Corpus Juris.

The question arises, what in such a tapestry of laws could have been the real practical value of the part of them which was written in Latin? The law historians, with all the one-sidedness of the expert, have hitherto looked at this part alone and therefore have not yet realized that there is a problem here at all. Their texts were “Law” unqualified, the law that descended from Rome to us, and they were concerned only to investigate the history of these texts and not their real significance in the lives of the Eastern peoples. What in reality we have here is the highly civilized law of an aged Culture forced upon the springtime of a young one.[95] It came over as learned literature, and in the train of political developments which were quite other than they would have been had Alexander or Cæsar lived longer or had Antony won at Actium. We must look at Early Arabian law from the standpoint of Ctesiphon and not from that of Rome. The law of the distant West had long before reached inward fulfilment--could it be here more than a mere literature? What part did it play, if any, in the active law-study, law-making, and law-practice of this landscape? And, indeed we must further ask how much of Roman--or for that matter of Classical generally--is contained in this literature itself.[96]

The history of this Latin-written law belongs after 160 to the Arabian East, and it says a great deal that it can be traced in exactly parallel courses into the history of Jewish, Christian, and Persian literature.[97] The “Classical” jurists (160-220), Papinian, Ulpian, and Paul, were Aramæans, and Ulpian described himself with pride as a Phœnician from Tyre. They came, therefore, from the same population as the Tannaim who perfected the Mishnah shortly after 200, and most of the Christian Apologists (Tertullian 160-223). Contemporary with them is the fixation of canon and text for the New Testament by Christian, for the Hebrew Old Testament by Jewish,[98] and for the Avesta by Persian, scholars. It is the high Scholasticism of the Arabian Springtime. The digests and commentaries of these jurists stand towards the petrified legal store of the Classical in exactly the same relation as the Mishnah to the Torah of Moses (and as, much later, the Hadith to the Koran)--they are “Halakhoth”[99]--a new customary law grasped in the forms of an authoritative and traditional law-material. The casuistic method is everywhere the same. The Babylonian Jews possessed a well-developed civil law which was taught in the academies of Sura and Pumbeditha. Everywhere a class of law-men formed itself--the prudentes of the Christians, the rabbis of the Jews, later the ulemas (in Persian, mollahs) of the Islamic nation--who enunciated opinions, responsa (Arabic, Fetwa). If the Ulema was acknowledged by the State, he was called “Mufti” (Byzantine, ex auctoritate principis). Everywhere the forms are exactly the same.

About 200 the Apologists pass into the Fathers proper, the Tannaim into the Amoraim, the great casuists of juridical law (jus) into the exegetes and codifiers of constitutional law (lex). The constitutions of the Emperors, from 200 the sole source of new “Roman” law, are again a new “Halakhah” laid down over that in the jurists’ writings, and therefore correspond exactly to the Gemara, which rapidly evolved as an outlier of the Mishnah. The new tendencies reached fulfilment simultaneously in the Corpus Juris and the Talmud.

The opposition between jus and lex in Arabian-Latin usage comes to expression very clearly in the work of Justinian. Institutes and Digests are jus; they have essentially the significance of canonical texts. Constitutions and Novels are leges, new law in the form of elucidations. The canonical books of the New Testament and the traditions of the Fathers are related to one another in the same way.

As to the Oriental character of the thousands of constitutions, no one now has any doubts. It is pure customary law of the Arabian world that the living pressure of evolution forced under the texts of the learned.[100] The innumerable decrees of the Christian rulers of Byzantium, of the Persian of Ctesiphon, of the Jewish (the Resh-Galuta[101]) in Babylonia, and finally of the Caliphs of Islam have all exactly the same significance.

But what significance had the other part of pseudo-Classical, the old jurists’, law? Here it is not enough to explain texts, and we must know what was the relation between texts, jurisprudence, and court decisions. It can happen that one and the same law-book is, in the waking-consciousness of two groups of peoples, equivalent to two fundamentally different works.

It was not long before it became the habit, not to apply the old laws of the city of Rome to the fact-material of the given case, but to quote the jurists’ texts like the Bible.[102] What does this signify? For our Romanists it is a sign of decadence, but looked at from the view-point of the Arabian world, it is just the reverse--a proof that Arabian man did eventually succeed in making an alien and imposed literature inwardly his own, in the form admissible for his own world-feeling. With this the completeness of the opposition between the Classical and the Arabian world-feeling becomes manifest.

VI

Whereas the Classical law was made by burghers on the basis of practical experience, the Arabian came from God, who manifested it through the intellect of chosen and enlightened men. The Roman distinction between jus and fas (such as it was, for the content even of fas had proceeded from human reflection) became meaningless. The law, of whatever kind, spiritual or secular, came into being, as stated in the first words of Justinian’s Digests, Deo auctore. The authoritativeness of Classical laws rests upon their success, that of the Arabian on the majesty of the name that they bear.[103] But it matters very considerably indeed in a man’s feelings whether he regards law as an expression of some fellow man’s will or as an element of the divine dispensation. In the one case he either sees for himself that the law is right or else yields to force, but in the other he devoutly acknowledges (“Islam” = to commit, devote). The Oriental does not ask to see either the practical object of the law that is applied to him or the logical grounds of its judgments. The relation of the cadi to the people, therefore, has nothing in common with that of the prætor to the citizens. The latter bases his decisions upon an insight trained and tested in high positions, the former upon a spirit that is effective and immanent in him and speaks through his mouth. But it follows from this that their respective relations to written law--the prætor’s to his edict, the cadi’s to the jurists’ texts--must be entirely different. It is a quintessence of concentrated experience that the prætor makes his own, but the texts are a sort of oracle that the cadi esoterically questions. It does not matter in the least to the cadi what a passage originally meant or why it was framed. He consults the words--even the letters--and he does so not at all for their everyday meanings, but for the magic relations in which they must stand towards the case before him. We know this relation of the “spirit” to the “letter” from the Gnosis, from the early-Christian, Jewish, and Persian apocalyptic and mystical literature, from the Neopythagorean philosophy, from the Kabbalah; and there is not the slightest doubt that the Latin codices were used in exactly the same way in the minor judicial practice of the Aramæan world. The conviction that the letters contain secret meanings, penetrated with the Spirit of God, finds imaginative expression in the fact (mentioned above) that all religions of the Arabian world formed scripts of their own, in which the holy books had to be written and which maintained themselves with astounding tenacity as badges of the respective “nations” even after changes of language.[104]

But even in law the basis of determining the truth by a majority of texts is the fact of the consensus of the spiritual elect, the ijma.[105] This theory Islamic science worked out to its logical conclusions. We seek to find the truth, each for himself, by personal pondering, but the Arabian savant feels for and ascertains the general conviction of his associates, which cannot err because the mind of God and the mind of the community are the same. If consensus is found, truth is established. “Ijma” is the key of all Early Christian, Jewish, and Persian Councils, but it is the key, too, of the famous Law of Citations of Valentinian III (426), which the law-men have universally ridiculed without in the least understanding its spiritual foundations. The law limits the number of great jurists whose texts were allowed to be cited to five, and thus set up a canon--in the same sense as the Old and New Testaments, both of which also were summations of texts which might be cited as canonical. If opinions differed, the law of Valentinian laid it down that a majority should prevail, or if the texts were equally divided, the authority of Papinian.[106] The interpolation method, used on a large scale by Tribonian for the Digest of Justinian, is a product of this same outlook. A canonical text is in its very idea true and incapable of improvement. But the actual needs of the spirit alter, and so there grew up a technique of secret modifications which outwardly kept up the fiction of inalterability and which is employed very freely indeed in all religious writings of the Arabian world, the Bible included.

After Mark Antony, Justinian is the most fateful personality of the Arabian world. Like his “contemporary” Charles V he ruined everything for which he was invoked. Just as in the West the Faustian dream of a resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire runs through all the political romanticism that darkened the sense of fact during and beyond the age of Napoleon--and even that of the princely fools of 1848--so also Justinian was possessed with a Quixotic urgency to recover the entire Imperium. It was always upon distant Rome instead of upon his proper world, the Eastern, that his eyes were fixed. Even before he ascended the throne, he was already in negotiation with the Pope of Rome, who was still subordinate to the great Patriarch of Christendom and not yet generally recognized even as primus inter pares. It was at the Pope’s instance that the dual-nature symbol was introduced at Chalcedon,[107] a step which lost the Monophysite countries wholly and for ever. The consequence of Actium was that Christianity in its first two decisive and formative centuries was pulled over into the West, into Classical territories, where the higher intellectual stratum held aloof. Then the Early Christian spirit rose afresh with the Monophysites and Nestorians. But Justinian thrust this revival back upon itself, and the result was that in the realms of Eastern Christianity the reformist movement, when in due course it appeared, was not a Puritanism but the new religion of Islam. And in the same way, at the very moment when the Eastern customary law had become ripe for codification, he framed a Latin codex which, for language reasons in the East and for political reasons in the West, was condemned from the first to remain a literary product.

The work itself, like the corresponding codes of Dracon and Solon, came into being at the threshold of a “Late” period, and with political intentions. In the West, where the fiction of a continuing Imperium Romanum produced the utterly meaningless campaigns of Belisarius and Narses, Latin codes had been put together (about A.D. 500) by Visigoths, Burgundians and Ostrogoths for subjugated Romans, and so Byzantium must needs get out a genuine Roman code in opposition. In the East the Jewish nation has already settled its code, the Talmud, while, for the immense numbers of people who were subject to the Emperor’s law, a code proper for the Emperor’s own nation, the Christian, had become a necessity.

For the Corpus Juris with its topsy-turviness and its technical faults is, in spite of everything, an Arabic--in other words, a religious--creation, as evidenced in the Christian tendency of many interpolations;[108] in the fact that the constitutions relative to ecclesiastical law, which had been put at the end even in the Theodosian codex, were now placed at the beginning; and very markedly in the preambles of many of the Novels. Yet the book is not a beginning, but an end. Latin, which had long become valueless, now disappears completely from legal life (even the Novels are mostly in Greek), and with it the work so misguidedly written in that language. But the history of the law pursues the way that the Syrian-Roman law-book had indicated to it, and in the eighth century arrives at works in the mode of our eighteenth, such as the Ecloga of the Emperor Leo[109] and the Corpus of the great Persian jurist Archbishop Jesubocht.[110] In that time, too, came the greatest figure of Islamic jurisprudence, Abu Hanifah.

VII

The law-history of the West begins in total independence of Justinian’s creation. At that time it was in complete oblivion, so thoroughly unimportant, in fact, that of its main element, the Pandects (Digest), there was but one manuscript, which by accident (an unfortunate one) was discovered about 1050.

The pre-Cultural phase, from about A.D. 500, had thrown up a series of Germanic tribal codes--the Visigothic, Ostrogothic, Burgundian, Frankish, and Lombard--which correspond to those of the Arabian pre-Culture that survives for us only in the Jewish[111] Deuteronomy (c. 621, more or less our Deuteronomy xii-xxvi) and Priestly History (c. 450, now represented by the second, third, and fourth books of the Pentateuch). Both are concerned with the values of basic significance for a primitive existence--family and chattels--and both make use, crudely, yet shrewdly, of an old and civilized law--the Jews (and no doubt the Persians and others) working upon the late Babylonian,[112] and the Germans upon some few relics of Urbs Roma.

The political life of the Gothic springtime, with its peasant, feudal, and simple burgher laws, leads very soon to particular development in three great branches of law which have remained distinct to this day--and there has been no unifying comparative history of law in the West to probe the deep meaning of this development.

The most important by far, owing to the political destinies in which it was involved, was the Norman law, which was borrowed from the Frankish. After the Conquest of England in 1066, this drove out the native Saxon, and since that day in England “the law of the great men has become the law of the whole people.” Its purely German spirit has developed it, without a catastrophe, from a feudal régime of unparalleled stringency into the institutions of the present day which have become law in Canada, India, Australia, South Africa, and the United States. Even apart from the extent of its power, it is the most instructive in West Europe. Its development, unlike that of the rest, did not lie in the hands of theoretical jurists. The study of Roman law at Oxford was not allowed to touch practice; and at Merton in 1236 the higher nobility expressly rejected it. The Bench itself continued to develop the old law-material by means of creative precedents, and it was these practical decisions (“Reports”) that formed the basis of law-books such as that of Bracton.[113] Since then, and to this day, a statute law, kept living and progressive by the court decisions, and a common law, which always vividly underlies the legislation, exist side by side, without its ever becoming necessary for the representatives of the people to make single large efforts at codification.

In the South, the law of the German-Roman codices above mentioned prevailed--in southern France the Visigothic (called the droit écrit in contrast to the Frankish droit coutumier of the north), and in Italy the Lombard (which was the most important of them, was almost purely Germanic, and held its own till well into the Renaissance). Pavia became a study-centre for German law and produced about 1070 the “Expositio,” by far the greatest achievement of juridical science in the age, and immediately after it a code, the “Lombarda.”[114] The legal evolution of the entire South was broken off by Napoleon’s Code Civil, which took its place. But this in turn has become in all Latin lands and far beyond them the basis for further creative work--and hence, after the English, it is the most important.

In Germany, the movement that set in so powerfully with the Gothic tribal laws (Sachsenspiegel, 1230; Schwabenspiegel, 1274) frittered itself away to nullity. A host of petty civic and territorial rights went on springing up until indignation with the facts induced an unreal political romanticism in dreamers and enthusiasts, the Emperor Maximilian among them, and law came under attack with the rest. The Diet of Worms in 1495 framed its “Kammergerichtsordnung”[115] after an Italian model. Now there was not only the “Holy Roman Empire” on German ground, but “Roman law” as German common-law. The old German procedures were exchanged for Italian. The judges had to study their law beyond the Alps, and obtained their experience not from the ambient life, but from a logic-chopping philology. In this country alone are to be found, later, the ideologues for whom the Corpus Juris is an ark to be defended against the profanation of realities.

What, in fact, was it that under the high-sounding name passed into the intellectual keeping of a handful of Gothic men? About 1100, at the University of Bologna, a German, Irnerius, had made that unique manuscript of the Pandects the object of a veritable Scholasticism. He transferred the Lombard method to the new text, “the truth of which, as a ratio scripta, was believed in as implicitly as the Bible and Aristotle.”[116] Truth!--but the Gothic understanding, tied to the Gothic life-content, was incapable even of distantly guessing at the spirit of these texts, for the principles fixed in them were the principles of a civilized and megalopolitan life. This school of the glossators, like Scholasticism in general, stood under the spell of concept-realism; as they held the genuine real, the substance of the world, to be not in things, but in universal concepts, so they maintained that the law was to be found not in custom and usage as displayed in the despised[117] Lombarda, but in the manipulation of abstract notions. Their interest in the book was purely dialectical[118]--never was it in their minds to apply their work to life. It was only after 1300, and then slowly, that their anti-Lombard glosses and summæ made their way into the cities of the Renaissance. The jurists of the Late Gothic, above all Bartolus, had fused canon and Germanic law into one whole with a definitely practical intention, and into it they brought ideas of actuality--here, as in Dracon’s code and the Imperial Edicts from Theodosius to Justinian, the actuality of a Culture that is on the threshold of its “Late” stage. It was the creation of Bartolus that became effective in Spain and Germany as “Roman law”; only in France did the jurists of the Baroque, after Cujacius and Donellus, get back from the Scholastic to the Byzantine text.

But Bologna witnessed, besides Irnerius’s achievement in abstraction, an event of quite other and decisive import--the famous Decretum of Gratian, written about 1140.[119] This created the Western science of spiritual law. For by bringing the old-Catholic, Magian, church-law,[120] founded in the Early-Arabian sacrament of baptism,[121] into a system, it provided the very form that the new-Catholic, Faustian Christianity needed for the jural expression of its own being, which reached back to the prime sacrament of an altar and a consecrated priesthood. With the Liber extra of 1234 the main body of the Corpus Juris Canonici is complete. What the Empire had failed to accomplish--the creation, out of the immense undeveloped profusion of tribal laws, of a general Western “Corpus Juris Germanici”--the Papacy achieved. There came into existence a complete private law, with sanctions and processes, produced with German method out of the ecclesiastical and secular law-material of the Gothic. This is the law called “Roman” which presently, after Bartolus, was infused into all study of the texts of Justinian themselves. And it shows us, in the domain of jurisprudence as elsewhere, that great dissidence, inherent in the Faustian, which produced the gigantic conflict between the Papacy and the Empire. The destruction between fas and jus, impossible in the Arabian world, was inevitable in the Western. They are two expressions of a will-to-power over the infinite, but the will behind “temporal” legislation is rooted in custom and lays hands on the generations of the future, while that of “spiritual” originates in mystical certainty and pronounces a timeless and eternal law.[122] This battle between equally matched opponents has never yet been ended, and it is visible even to-day in our law of marriage, with its opposition of the ecclesiastical and the civil wedding.

With the dawn of the Baroque, life, having by that time assumed urban and money-economic forms, begins to demand a law like that of the Classical city-states after Solon. The purpose of the prevailing law was now perfectly clear. But it was a fateful legacy from the Gothic that the creation of “the law inborn in us” was looked upon as the privilege of a learned class, and this privilege no one succeeded in shaking.

Urban rationalism turned, as in the case of the Sophists and the Stoics, to busy itself with the “law of nature,” from its foundation by Oldendorp and Bodinus to its destruction by Hegel. In England the great Coke successfully defended Germanic self-developing practical law against the last attempts of the Tudors to introduce Pandect law. But on the Continent the systems of the learned evolved in Roman forms right down to the state codes of Germany and the schemes of the Ancien Régime in France on which the Code Napoléon was based. And therefore Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) is the one purely Germanic Code, and it appeared when the Faustian Culture had already reached the threshold of its Civilization.

VIII

With this I reach the objective and look around me. I see three law-histories, connected merely by the elements of verbal and syntactical form, taken over by one from another, voluntarily or perforce, but never revealing to the new user the nature of the alien being which underlay them. Two of these histories are complete. The third is that in which we ourselves are standing--standing, too, at a decisive point where we embark in our turn upon the big constructive task that Rome and Islam, each for itself and in its season, have accomplished before us.

What has “Roman” law been for us hitherto? What has it spoilt? What can it be for us in the future?

All through our legal history runs, as basic motive, the conflict between book and life. The Western book is not an oracle or magician’s text with Magian under-sense, but a piece of preserved history. It is compressed Past that wants to become Future, through us who read it and in whom its content lives anew. Faustian man does not aim, like Classical man, at bringing his life to a self-contained perfection, but at carrying on a life that emerged long before him and will draw to its end long after him. For Gothic man--so far as he reflected about himself at all--the question was not whether he should look for linkages of his being and history, but in what direction to look for them. He required a past in order to find meaning and depth in the present. On the spiritual side the past which presented itself to him was ancient Israel; on the mundane it was ancient Rome, whose relics he saw all about him. What was revered was revered not because it was great, but because it was old and distant. If these men had known Egypt, they would hardly have noticed Rome, and the language of our Culture would have developed differently.

As it was a Culture of books and readers, Classical texts were “received” in any and every field as Roman law was “received” in Germany, and their further development assumed the form of a slow and unwilling self-emancipation. “Reception” of Aristotle, of Euclid, of the Corpus Juris, means in this Culture (in the Magian East it was different) discovering a ready-made vessel for our own thought a great deal too soon, with the result of making a historically built kind of man into a slave of concepts. The alien life-feeling, of course, did not and could not enter into his thought, but it was a hindrance to his own life-feeling’s development of an unconstrained speech of its own.

Now, legal thought is forced to attach itself to something tangible--there must be something before it can abstract its concepts; it must have something from which to abstract. And it was the misfortune of Western jurisprudence that, instead of quarrying in strong, firm custom of social and economic life, it abstracted prematurely and in a hurry from Latin writings. The Western jurist became a philologist, and practical experience of life was replaced by scholarly experience in the purely logical separation and disposition of legal concepts on self-contained foundations.

Owing to this, we have been completely cut off from touch with the fact that private law is meant to represent the social and economic existence of its period. Neither the Code Napoléon nor the Prussian Landrecht, neither Grotius nor Mommsen, was definitely conscious of this fact. Neither in the training of the legal profession nor in its literature do we detect the slightest inkling of this--the genuine--“source” of valid law.

And consequently we possess a private law that rests on the shadowy foundations of the Late Classical economy. The intense embitterment which, in these beginnings of our Civilization’s economy, opposes the name of Capitalism to the name of Socialism comes very largely from the fact that scholarly jurisprudence, and under its influence educated thought generally, have tied up such all-important notions as person, thing, and property to the conditions and the dispositions of Classical life. The book puts itself between the facts and the perception of them. The learned--meaning thereby the book-learned--weigh up everything to this day in scales that are essentially Classical. The man who is merely active and not trained to judgment feels himself misunderstood. He sees the contradiction between the life of the times and the law’s outlook upon it, and calls for the heads of those who--to gain their private ends, as he thinks--have promoted this opposition.

Again the question is: By whom and for whom is Western law made? The Roman prætor was a landowner, a military officer, a man experienced in administrative and financial questions; and it was just this experience that was held to qualify him for the inseparable functions of expounder and maker of the law. The peregrin prætor developed his aliens’ law as a law of commercial intercourse adapted to the Late Classical megalopolis--without plan, without tendency, out of the cases that came before him and nothing else.

But the Faustian will-to-duration demands a book, something valid “for evermore,”[123] a system that is intended to provide in advance for every possible case, and this book, a work of learning, necessarily called for a scholarly class of jurists and judges--the doctors of the faculties, the old German legal families, and the French “noblesse de robe.” The English judges, who number hardly over a hundred,[124] are drawn indeed from an upper class of advocates (the “barristers”), but they actually rank above many members of the Government.

A scholar-class is alien to the world, and despises experience that does not originate in thought. Inevitably conflict arises between the “state of knowledge” as the scholar will accept it and the flowing custom of practical life. That manuscript of the Pandect of Irnerius became, and for centuries remained, the “world” in which learned jurists lived. Even in England, where there are no law faculties (in the European sense), it was exclusively the legal profession that controlled further growth, so that even here the development of legal ideas diverged from the development of general life.

Thus what we have hitherto called juristic science is in fact either the philology of law-language, or the scholarship of law-ideas. It is now the only science that still continues to deduce the meaning of life from “eternally valid” principles. “The German jurisprudence of to-day,” says Sohm,[125] “represents very largely indeed an inheritance from mediæval Scholasticism. We have not yet begun to consider in deep earnest the bearing of the basic values of the actual life about us upon legal theory. We do not even yet know what these values are.”

Here, then, is the task that German thought of the future has to perform. From the practical life of the present it has to develop the deepest principles of that life and elevate them into basic law-ideas. If our great arts lie behind us, our great jurisprudence is yet to come.

For the work of the nineteenth century--however creative that century believed itself to be--was merely preparatory. It freed us from the book of Justinian, but not from the concepts. The ideologues of Roman law among scholars no longer count, but scholarship of the old cast remains. It is another kind of jurisprudence that is needed now to free us from the schematism of these concepts. Philological expertness must give place to social and economic.

A glance at German civil and penal law will make the position clear. They are systems ringed with a chaplet of minor laws--it was impossible to embody the material of these in the main law. Conceptually, and therefore syntactically, that which could not be understood in terms of the Classical scheme separates itself from that which can be so understood.

How was it that in 1900 the theft of electric power--after grotesque discussions as to whether the matter in dispute was a corporeal thing[126]--had to be dealt with under an ad hoc statute? Why was it impossible to work the substance of patent law into the ensemble of the law about things? Why was copyright law unable conceptually to differentiate the intellectual creation, its communicable form the manuscript, and the objective product in print? Why, in contradiction with the law of things, had the artistic and the material property in a picture to be distinguished by separating acquisition of the original from acquisition of the right to reproduce it? Why is the misappropriation of a business idea or a scheme of organization unpunishable, and theft of the piece of paper on which it is set forth punishable? Because even to-day we are dominated by the Classical idea of the material thing.[127] We live otherwise. Our instinctive experience is subject to functional concepts, such as working power, inventiveness, enterprise, such as intellectual and bodily, artistic and organizing, energies and capacities and talents. In our physics (of which the theory, advanced though it is, is but a copy of our present mode of life) the old idea of a body has in principle ceased to exist--as in this very instance of electrical power. Why is our law conceptually helpless in the presence of the great facts of modern economics? Because persons, too, are known to it only as bodies.[128]

If the Western jurisprudence took over ancient words, yet only the most superficial elements of the ancient meanings still adhered to them. The consistency of the text disclosed only the logical use of the words, not the life that underlay them. No practice can reawaken the silent metaphysic of old jural ideas. No laws in the world make this last and deepest element explicit, because--just because--it is self-evident. In all of them the essential is tacitly presupposed; in application it is not only the formula but also, and primarily, the inexpressible element beneath it that the people inwardly understands and can practise. Every law is, to the extent that it would be impossible to exaggerate, customary law. Let the statute define the words; it is life that explains them.

If, however, a scholars’ law-language of alien origin and alien scheme tries to bind the native and proper law, the ideas remain void and the life remains dumb. Law becomes, not a tool, but a burden, and actuality marches on, not with, but apart from legal history.

And thus it is that the law-material that our Civilization needs fits only in externals, or even not at all, with the Classical scheme of the law-books, and for the purposes of our proper jurisprudence and our educated thought generally is still formless and therefore unavailable.

Are persons and things, in the sense of present-day legislation, law-concepts at all? No! They merely serve to draw the ordinary distinction, the zoölogical distinction, so to say, between man and the rest. But of old the whole metaphysic of Classical being adhered to the notion of “persona.” The distinction between man and deity, the essence of the Polis, of the hero, of the slave, the Cosmos of stuff and form, the life-ideal of Ataraxia, were the self-evident premisses, and these premisses have for us completely perished. In our thought the word “property” is tied up with the Classical static definition, and consequently, in every application to the dynamism of our way of living it falsifies. We leave such definitions to the world-shy abstract professors of ethics, jurists, and philosophers and to the unintelligent debate of political doctrinaires--and this although the whole understanding of the economic history of this day rests upon the metaphysic of this one notion.

It must be emphasized then--and with all rigour--that Classical law was a law of bodies, while ours is a law of functions. The Romans created a juristic statics; our task is juristic dynamics. For us persons are not bodies, but units of force and will; and things are not bodies, but aims, means, and creations of these units. The Classical relation between bodies was positional, but the relation between forces is called action. For a Roman the slave was a thing which produced new things. A writer like Cicero could never have conceived of “intellectual property,” let alone property in a practical notion or in the potentialities of talent; for us, on the contrary, the organizer or inventor or promoter is a generative force which works upon other, executive, forces, by giving direction, aim, and means to their action.[129] Both belong to economic life, not as possessors of things, but as carriers of energies.

The future will be called upon to transpose our entire legal thought into alignment with our higher physics and mathematics. Our whole social, economic, and technical life is waiting to be understood, at long last, in this wise. We shall need a century and more of keenest and deepest thought to arrive at the goal. And the prerequisite is a wholly new kind of preparatory training in the jurist. It demands:

1. An immediate, extended, and practical experience in the economic life of the present.

2. An exact knowledge of the legal history of the West, with constant comparison of German, English, and “Roman” development.

3. Knowledge of Classical jurisprudence, not as a model for principles of present-day validity, but as a brilliant example of how a law can develop strong and pure out of the practical life of its time.

Roman law has ceased to be our source for principles of eternal validity. But the relation between Roman existence and Roman law-ideas gives it a renewed value for us. We can learn from it how we have to build up our law out of our experiences.