CHAPTER III

THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY

I PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC

I

Now, at last, it is possible to take the decisive step of sketching an image of history that is independent of the accident of standpoint, of the period in which this or that observer lives—independent too of the personality of the observer himself, who as an interested member of his own Culture is tempted, by its religious, intellectual, political and social tendencies, to order the material of history according to a perspective that is limited as to both space and time, and to fashion arbitrary forms into which the superficies of history can be forced but which are entirely alien to its inner content.

What has been missing, till now, is _detachment_ from the objects considered (die Distanz vom Gegenstande). In respect of Nature, this detachment has long ago been attained, though of course it was relatively easy of attainment, since the physicist can obviously systematize the mechanical-causal picture of his world as impersonally as though he himself did not exist in it.

It is quite possible, however, to do the same as regards the form-world of History. We have merely been unaware of the possibility. The modern historian, in the very act of priding himself on his “objectivity,” naïvely and unconsciously reveals his prepossessions. For this reason it is quite legitimate to say—and it will infallibly be said some day—that so far a genuinely Faustian treatment of history has been entirely lacking. By such a treatment is meant one that has enough detachment to admit that any “present” is only such with reference to a particular generation of men; that the number of generations is infinite, and that the proper present must therefore be regarded just as something infinitely distant and alien is regarded, and treated as an interval of time neither more nor less significant in the whole picture of History than others. Such a treatment will employ no distorting modulus of personal ideals, set no personal origin of co-ordinates, be influenced by none of the personal hopes and fears and other inward impulses which count for so much in practical life; and such a detachment will—to use the words of Nietzsche (who, be it said, was far from possessing enough of it himself)—enable one to view the whole fact of Man from an immense distance, to regard the individual Cultures, one’s own included, as one regards the range of mountain peaks along a horizon.

Once again, therefore, there was an act like the act of Copernicus to be accomplished, an act of emancipation from the evident present in the name of infinity. This the Western soul achieved in the domain of Nature long ago, when it passed from the Ptolemaic world-system to that which is alone valid for it to-day, and treats the position of the observer on one particular planet as accidental instead of normative.

A similar emancipation of world-history from the accidental standpoint, the perpetually re-defined “modern period,” is both possible and necessary. It is true that the 19th Century A.D. seems to us infinitely fuller and more important than, say, the 19th Century B.C.; but the moon, too, seems to us bigger than Jupiter or Saturn. The physicist has long ago freed himself from prepossessions as to relative distance, the historian not so. We permit ourselves to consider the Culture of the Greeks as an “ancient” related to our own “modern.” Were they in their turn “modern” in relation to the finished and historically mature Egyptians of the court of the great Thuthmosis who lived a millennium before Homer? For us, the events which took place between 1500 and 1800 on the soil of Western Europe constitute the most important third of "world"-history; for the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks back on and judges by 4000 years of Chinese history, those centuries generally are a brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less significant than the centuries of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), which in _his_ "world"-history are epoch-making.

To liberate History, then, from that thraldom to the observers’ prejudices which in our own case has made of it nothing more than a record of a partial past leading up to an accidental present, with the ideals and interests of that present as criteria of the achievement and possibility, is the object of all that follows.

II

_Nature_ and _History_[77] are the opposite extreme terms of man’s range of possibilities, whereby he is enabled to order the actualities about him as a picture of the world. An actuality is Nature in so far as it assigns things-becoming their place as things-become, and History in so far as it orders things-become with reference to their becoming. An actuality as an evocation of mind is contemplated, and as an assurance of the senses is critically comprehended, the first being exemplified in the worlds of Plato, Rembrandt, Goethe and Beethoven, the second in the worlds of Parmenides, Descartes, Kant and Newton. Cognition in the strict sense of the word is that act of experience of which the completed issue is called “Nature.” The cognized and “Nature” are one and the same. The symbol of mathematical number has shown us that the aggregate of things cognized is the same as the world of things mechanically defined, things correct once and for all, things brought under law. _Nature is the sum of the law-imposed necessities._ There are only laws of _Nature_. No physicist who understands his duty would wish to transcend these limits. His task is to establish an ordered code which not only includes all the laws that he can find in the picture of Nature that is proper to himself but, further, represents that picture exhaustively and without remainder.

Contemplation or vision (Anschauen), on the other hand—I may recall Goethe’s words: “vision is to be carefully distinguished from seeing”—, is that act of experience which _is itself history because it is itself a fulfilling_. That which has been lived is that which has happened, and it is history. (Erlebtes ist Geschehenes, ist Geschichte.)

Every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated. It carries the hall-mark of Direction (“Time”), of _irreversibility_. That which has happened is thenceforth counted with the become and not with the becoming, with the stiffened and not the living, and belongs beyond recall to the past. Our feeling of world-fear has its sources here. Everything cognized, on the contrary, is _timeless_, neither past nor future but simply “there,” and consequently permanently valid, as indeed the very constitution of natural law requires that it should be. Law and the domain of law are _anti-historical_. They exclude incident and casuality. The laws of nature are forms of rigorous and therefore inorganic necessity. It becomes easy to see why mathematics, as the ordering of things-become by number, is _always and exclusively_ associated with laws and causality.

Becoming has no number. We can count, measure, dissect only the lifeless and so much of the living as can be dissociated from livingness. Pure becoming, pure life, is in this sense incapable of being bounded. It lies beyond the domain of cause and effect, law and measure. No deep and pure historical research seeks for conformities with causal laws—or, if it does so, it does not understand its own essence.

At the same time, history as positively treated is not pure becoming: it is an image, a world-form radiated from the waking consciousness of the historian, in which the becoming _dominates_ the become. The possibility of extracting results of any sort by scientific methods depends upon the proportion of things-become present in the subject treated, and by hypothesis there is in this case a defect of them; the higher the proportion is, the more mechanical, reasonable, causal, history is made to appear. Even Goethe’s “living nature,” utterly unmathematical world- picture as it was, contained enough of the dead and stiffened to allow him to treat at least his foreground scientifically. But when this content of things-become dwindles to very little, then history becomes approximately pure becoming, and contemplation and vision become an experience which can only be rendered in forms of _art_. That which Dante saw before his spiritual eyes as the destiny of the world, he _could not possibly_ have arrived at by ways of science, any more than Goethe could have attained by these ways to what he saw in the great moments of his “Faust” studies, any more than Plotinus and Giordano Bruno could have distilled their visions from researches. This contrast lies at the root of all dispute regarding the inner form of history. In the presence of the same object or corpus of facts, every observer according to his own disposition has a different _impression_ of the whole, and this impression, _intangible and incommunicable_, underlies his judgment and gives it its personal colour. The degree in which things-become are taken in differs from man to man, which is quite enough in itself to show that they can never agree as to task or method. Each accuses the other of a deficiency of “clear thinking,” and yet the something that is expressed by this phrase is something not built with hands, not implying superiority or a priority of degree but necessary difference of kind. The same applies to all natural sciences.

Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the fact that at bottom the wish to write history _scientifically_ involves a contradiction. True science reaches just as far as the notions of truth and falsity have validity: this applies to mathematics and it applies also to the science of historical spade-work, viz., the collection, ordering and sifting of material. But real historical vision (which only _begins_ at this point) belongs to the domain of significances, in which the crucial words are not “correct” and “erroneous,” but “deep” and “shallow.” The true physicist is not deep, but _keen_: it is only when he leaves the domain of working hypotheses and brushes against the final things that he can be deep, but at this stage he is already a metaphysician. Nature is to be handled scientifically, History poetically. Old Leopold von Ranke is credited with the remark that, after all, Scott’s “Quentin Durward” was the true history-writing. And so it is: the advantage of a good history

## book is that it enables the reader to be his own Scott.

On the other hand, within the very realm of numbers and exact knowledge there is that which Goethe called “living Nature,” an immediate vision of pure becoming and self-shaping, in fact, history as above defined. Goethe’s world was, in the first instance, an organism, an existence, and it is easy therefore to see why his researches, even when superficially of a physical kind, do not make numbers, or laws, or causality captured in formulæ, or dissection of any sort their object, but are morphology in the highest sense of the word; and why his work neither uses nor needs to use the specifically Western and un-Classical means of causal treatment, metrical experiment. His treatment of the Earth’s crust is invariably geology, and never mineralogy, which he called the science of something dead.

Let it be said, once more, that there are no exact boundaries set between the two kinds of world-notion. However great the contrast between becoming and the become, the fact remains that they are jointly present in every kind of understanding. He who looks at the becoming and fulfilling in them, experiences History; he who dissects them as become and fulfilled cognizes Nature.

In every man, in every Culture, in every culture-phase, there is found an inherent disposition, an inherent inclination and vocation to prefer one of the two forms as an ideal of understanding the world. Western man is in a high degree historically disposed,[78] Classical man far from being so. We follow up what is given us with an eye to past and future, whereas Classical man knew only the point-present and an ambiance of myth. We have before us a symbol of becoming in every bar of our music from Palestrina to Wagner, and the Greeks a symbol of the pure present in every one of their statues. The rhythm of a body is based upon a simultaneous relation of the parts, that of a fugue in the succession of elements in time.

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Footnote 77:

See p. 55, also Vol. II, pp. 25 et seq.

Footnote 78:

“Anti-historical,” the expression which we apply to a decidedly systematic valuation, is to be carefully distinguished from “ahistorical.” The beginning of the IV Book (53) of Schopenhauer’s _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_ affords a good illustration of the man who thinks anti-historically, that is, deliberately for theoretical reasons suppresses and rejects the historical in himself— something that is actually there. The ahistoric Greek nature, on the contrary, neither possesses nor understands it.

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III

There emerge, then, as the two basic elements of all world-picturing, the principle of Form (Gestalt) and the principle of Law (Gesetz). The more decidedly a particular world-picture shows the traits of “Nature,” the more unconditionally law and number prevail in it; and the more purely intuitive the picture of the world as eternally becoming, the more alien to numbers its manifold and intangible elements. “Form is something mobile, something becoming, something passing. The doctrine of formation is the doctrine of transformation. Metamorphosis is the key to the whole alphabet of Nature,” so runs a note of Goethe’s, marking already the methodic difference between his famous “exact percipient fancy” which quietly lets itself be worked upon by the living,[79] and the exact killing procedure of modern physics. But whatever the process, a remainder consisting of so much of the alien element as is present is always found. In strict natural sciences this remainder takes the form of the inevitable _theories and hypotheses_ which are imposed on, and leaven, the stiff mass of number and formula. In historical research, it appears as _chronology_, the number-structure of dates and statistics which, alien though number is to the essence of becoming, is so thoroughly woven around and into the world of historical forms that it is never felt to be intrusive. For it is devoid of mathematical import. Chronological number distinguishes uniquely-occurring actualities, mathematical number constant possibilities. The one sharpens the images and works up the outlines of epoch and fact for the understanding eye. But the other _is itself_ the law which it seeks to establish, the end and aim of research. Chronological number is a scientific means of pioneering borrowed from the science of sciences, mathematics, and used as such without regard to its specific properties. Compare, for instance, the meaning of the two symbols 12 × 8 = 96, and 18 October, 1813.[80] It is the same difference, in the use of figures, that prose and poetry present in the use of words.

One other point remains to be noted.[81] As a becoming always lies at the base of the become, and as the world-picture representative of becoming is that which history gives us, therefore history is the _original_ world-form, and Nature—the fully elaborated world-mechanism— is the _late_ world-form that only the men of a mature Culture can completely actualize. In fact, the darkness encompassing the simple soul of primitive mankinds, which we can realize even to-day from their religious customs and myths—that entirely organic world of pure wilfulness, of hostile demons and kindly powers—was through-and-through a living and swaying whole, ununderstandable, indefinable, incalculable. We may call this Nature if we like, but it is not what _we_ mean by “nature,” i.e., the strict image projected by a knowing intellect. Only the souls of children and of great artists can now hear the echoes of this long-forgotten world of nascent humanity, but it echoes still, and not rarely, even in the inelastic "nature"-medium that the city-spirit of the mature Culture is remorselessly building up round the individual. Hence that acute antagonism between the scientific (“modern”) and the artistic (“unpractical”) world-idea which every Late period knows; the man of fact and the poet do not and cannot understand one another. Hence comes, too, that tendency of historical study, which must inevitably contain an element of the childish, the dreamy, the Goethian, to dress up as a science, to be (using its own naïve word) “materialistic,” at the imminent risk of becoming a mere physics of public life.

“Nature,” in the exact sense, is a way of possessing actuality which is special to the few, restricted to the megalopolitans of the late periods of great Cultures, masculine, perhaps even senatorial; while History is the naïve, youthful, more or less instinctive way that is proper to _all_ men alike. At least, that is the position of the number-based, unmystical, dissectable and dissected “Nature” of Aristotle and Kant, the Sophists and the Darwinians, modern physics and chemistry, _vis-à- vis_ the lived, felt and unconfined “Nature” of Homer and the Eddas, of Doric and Gothic man. To overlook this is to miss the whole essence of historical treatment. It is history that is the truly natural, and the exact mechanically-correct “Nature” of the scientist that is the artificial conception of world by soul. Hence the paradox that modern man finds "nature"-study easy and historical study hard.

Tendencies towards a mechanistic idea of the world proceeding wholly from mathematical delimitation and logical differentiation, from law and causality, appear quite early. They are found in the first centuries of all Cultures, still weak, scattered and lost in the full tide of the religious world-conception. The name to be recalled here is that of Roger Bacon. But soon these tendencies acquire a sterner character: like everything that is wrung out of the soul and has to defend itself against human nature, they are not wanting in arrogance and exclusiveness. Quietly the spatial and comprehensible (comprehension is in its essence number, in its structure quantitative) becomes prepotent throughout the outer world of the individual and, aiding and aided by the simple impressions of sensuous-life, effects a mechanical synthesis of the causal and legal sort, so that at long last the sharp consciousness of the megalopolitan—be he of Thebes, Babylon, Benares, Alexandria or a West European cosmopolis—is subjected to so consistent a pressure of natural-law notions that, when scientific and philosophical prejudice (it is no more than that) dictates the proposition that this condition of the soul is _the_ soul and the mechanical world-picture is _the_ world, the assertion is scarcely challenged. It has been made predominant by logicians like Aristotle and Kant. But Plato and Goethe have rejected it and refuted it.

IV

The task of world-knowing—for the man of the higher Cultures a need, seen as a duty, of expressing his own essence—is certainly in every case the same, though its process may be called science or philosophy, and though its affinity to artistic creation and to faith-intuition may for one be something felt and for another something questionable. It is to present, without accretions, that form of the world-picture which to the individual in each case is proper and significant, and for him (so long as he does not _compare_) is in fact “the” world.

The task is necessarily a double one, in view of the distinction between “Nature” and “History.” Each speaks its own form-language which differs utterly from that of the other, and however the two may overlap and confuse one another in an unsifted and ambiguous world-picture such as that of everyday life, they are incapable of any inner unity.

Direction and Extension are the outstanding characters which differentiate the historical and the scientific (naturhaft) kind of impressibility, and it is totally impossible for a man to have both working creatively within him at the same time. The double meaning of the German word “Ferne” (distance, farness) is illuminating. In the one order of ideas it implies futurity, in the other a spatial interval of standing apart, and the reader will not fail to remark that the historical materialist almost necessarily conceives time as a mathematical dimension, while for the born artist, on the contrary,—as the lyrics of every land show us—the distance-impressions made by deep landscapes, clouds, horizon and setting sun attach themselves without an effort to the sense of a future. The Greek poet denies the future, and consequently he neither sees nor sings of the things of the future; he cleaves to the near, as he belongs to the present, entirely.

The natural-science investigator, the productive reasoner in the full sense of the word, whether he be an experimenter like Faraday, a theorist like Galileo, a calculator like Newton, finds in his world only directionless _quantities_ which he measures, tests and arranges. It is only the quantitative that is capable of being grasped through figures, of being causally defined, of being captured in a law or formula, and when it has achieved this, pure nature-knowledge has shot its bolt. All its laws are quantitative connexions, or as the physicist puts it, all physical processes _run a course in space_, an expression which a Greek physicist would have corrected—without altering the fact—into “all physical processes _occur between bodies_” conformably to the space- denying feeling of the Classical soul.

The historical kind of impression-process is alien to everything quantitative, and affects a different organ. To World-as-Nature certain modes of apprehension, as to World-as-History certain other modes, are _proper_. We know them and use them every day, without (as yet) having become aware of their opposition. There is _nature-knowledge_ and there is _man-knowledge_; there is _scientific_ experience and there is _vital_ experience. Let the reader track down this contrast into his own inmost being, and he will understand what I mean.

All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis, be described as Morphology. _The Morphology of the mechanical and the extended, a science which discovers and orders nature-laws and causal relations, is called Systematic. The Morphology of the organic, of history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and destiny, is called Physiognomic._

V

In the West, the Systematic mode of treating the world reached and passed its culminating-point during the last century, while the great days of Physiognomic have still to come. In a hundred years all sciences that are still possible on this soil will be parts of a single vast Physiognomic of all things human. This is what the “Morphology of World- History” means. In every science, and in the aim no less than in the content of it, man tells the story of himself. Scientific experience is spiritual self-knowledge. It is from this standpoint, as a chapter of Physiognomic, that we have just treated of mathematics. We were not concerned with what this or that mathematician _intended_, nor with the savant as such or his results as a contribution to an aggregate of knowledge, but with the mathematician as a human being, with his work as a part of the phenomenon of himself, with his knowledge and purposes as a part of his expression. This alone is of importance to us here. He is the mouthpiece of a Culture which tells us about itself through him, and he belongs, as personality, as soul, as discoverer, thinker and creator, to the physiognomy of that Culture.

Every mathematic, in that it brings out and makes visible to all the idea of number that is proper to itself and inborn in its conscious being, is, whether the expression-form be a scientific system or (as in the case of Egypt) an architecture, the confession of a Soul. If it is true that the intentional accomplishments of a mathematic belong only to the surface of history, it is equally true that its unconscious element, its number-as-such, and the style in which it builds up its self- contained cosmos of forms are an expression of its existence, its blood. Its life-history of ripening and withering, its deep relation to the creative acts, the myths and the cults of the same Culture—such things are the subject-matter of a second or historical morphology, though the possibility of such a morphology is hardly yet admitted.

The visible foregrounds of history, therefore, have the same significance as the outward phenomena of the individual man (his statue, his bearing, his air, his stride, his way of speaking and writing), as distinct from what he says or writes. In the “knowledge of men” these things exist and matter. The body and all its elaborations—defined, “become” and _mortal_ as they are—are an expression of the soul. But henceforth “knowledge of men” implies also knowledge of those superlative human organisms that I call Cultures, and of their mien, their speech, their acts—these terms being meant as we mean them already in the case of the individual.

Descriptive, creative, Physiognomic is the art of portraiture transferred to the spiritual domain. Don Quixote, Werther, Julian Sorel, are portraits of an epoch, Faust the portrait of a whole Culture. For the nature-researcher, the morphologist as systematist, the portrayal of the world is only a business of imitation, and corresponds to the “fidelity to nature” and the “likeness” of the craftsman-painter, who, at bottom, works on purely mathematical lines. But a real portrait in the Rembrandt sense of the word is physiognomic, that is, _history_ captured in a moment. The set of his self-portraits is nothing else but a (truly Goethian) autobiography. So should the biographies of the great Cultures be handled. The “fidelity” part, the work of the professional historian on facts and figures, is only a means, not an end. The countenance of history is made up of all those things which hitherto we have only managed to evaluate according to personal standards, i.e., as beneficial or harmful, good or bad, satisfactory or unsatisfactory— political forms and economic forms, battles and arts, science and gods, mathematics and morals. Everything whatsoever that has _become_ is a symbol, and the expression of a soul. Only to one having the knowledge of men will it unveil itself. The restraint of a law it abhors. What it demands is that its significance should be sensed. And thus research reaches up to a final or superlative truth—Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.[82]

The nature-researcher can be educated, but the man who knows history is born. He seizes and pierces men and facts with one blow, guided by a feeling which cannot be acquired by learning or affected by persuasion, but which only too rarely manifests itself in full intensity. Direction, fixing, ordering, defining by cause and effect, are things that one can do if one likes. These things are work, but the other is creation. Form and law, portrayal and comprehension, symbol and formula, have different organs, and their opposition is that in which life stands to death, production to destruction. Reason, system and comprehension kill as they “cognize.” That which is cognized becomes a rigid object, capable of measurement and subdivision. Intuitive vision, on the other hand, vivifies and incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity. Poetry and historical study are kin. Calculation and cognition also are kin. But, as Hebbel says somewhere, systems are not dreamed, and art- works are not calculated or (what is the same thing) thought out. The artist or the real historian sees the becoming of a thing (schaut, wie etwas wird), and he can re-enact its becoming from its lineaments, whereas the systematist, whether he be physicist, logician, evolutionist or pragmatical historian, learns the thing that has become. The artist’s soul, like the soul of a Culture, is something potential that may actualize itself, something complete and perfect—in the language of an older philosophy, a microcosm. The systematic spirit, narrow and withdrawn “abs-tract”) from the sensual, is an autumnal and passing phenomenon belonging to the ripest conditions of a Culture. Linked with the _city_, into which its life is more and more herded, it comes and goes with the city. In the Classical world, there is science only from the 6th-century Ionians to the Roman period, but there was art in the Classical world for just as long as there was existence.

Once more, a paradigm may help in elucidation.

_Soul_ _World_ Existence { potentiality → fulfilment → actuality { (_Life_)

{ becoming → the become Consciousness { direction extension { organic mechanical { symbol, portrait, number, notion. [Crossed ↓ downward ↓ arrows] { _History_ _Nature_ World-image { Rhythm, form. Tension, law. { Physiognomic. Systematic. { Facts Truths

Seeking thus to obtain a clear idea of the unifying principle out of which each of these two worlds is conceived, we find that mathematically-controlled cognition relates always (and the purer it is, the more directly) to a continuous present. The picture of nature dealt with by the physicist is that which is deployed before his senses at the given moment. It is one of the tacit, but none the less firm, presuppositions of nature-research that “Nature” (_die_ Natur) is the same for every consciousness and for all times. An experiment is decisive for good and all; time being, not precisely denied, but eliminated from the field of investigation. Real history rests on an equally certain sense of the contrary; what it presupposes as its origin is a nearly indescribable sensitive faculty within, which is continuously labile under continuous impressions, and is incapable therefore of possessing what may be called a centre of time.[83] (We shall consider later what the physicist means by “time.”) The picture of history—be it the history of mankind, of the world of organisms, of the earth or of the stellar systems—is a _memory_-picture. “Memory,” in this connexion, is conceived as a higher state (certainly not proper to every consciousness and vouchsafed to many in only a low degree), a perfectly definite kind of imagining power, which enables experience to traverse each particular moment _sub specie æternitatis_ as one point in an integral made up of all the past and all the future, and it forms the necessary basis of all looking-backward, all self-knowledge and all self-confession. In this sense, Classical man has no memory and therefore no history, either in or around himself. “No man can judge history but one who has himself experienced history,” says Goethe. In the Classical world-consciousness all Past was absorbed in the instant Present. Compare the entirely historical heads of the Nürnberg Cathedral sculptures, of Dürer, of Rembrandt, with those of Hellenistic sculpture, for instance the famous Sophocles statue. The former tell the whole history of a soul, whereas the latter rigidly confines itself to expressing the traits of a momentary being, and tells nothing of how this being is the issue of a course of life—if indeed we can speak of “course of life” at all in connexion with a purely Classical man, who is always complete and never becoming.

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Footnote 79:

“There are prime phenomena which in their godlike simplicity we must not disturb or infringe.”

Footnote 80:

The date of Napoleon’s defeat, and the liberation of Germany, on the field of Leipzig.—_Tr._

Footnote 81:

See Vol. II, pp. 25 et seq., 327 et seq.

Footnote 82:

“All we see before us passing Sign and symbol is alone.”

From the final stanza of Faust II (Anster’s translation).—_Tr._

Footnote 83:

This phrase, derived by analogy from the centre of gravity of mechanics, is offered as a translation of “mithin in einim Zeitpunkte ger nicht zusammengefasst werden können.”—_Tr._

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VI

And now it is possible to discover the ultimate elements of the historical form-world.

Countless shapes that emerge and vanish, pile up and melt again, a thousand-hued glittering tumult, it seems, of perfectly wilful chance— such is the picture of world-history when first it deploys before our inner eye. But through this seeming anarchy, the keener glance can detect those pure forms which underlie all human becoming, penetrate their cloud-mantle, and bring them unwillingly to unveil.

But of the whole picture of world-becoming, of that cumulus of grand planes that the Faust-eye[84] sees piled one beyond another—the becoming of the heavens, of the earth’s crust, of life, of man—we shall deal here only with that very small morphological unit that we are accustomed to call “world-history,” that history which Goethe ended by despising, the history of higher mankind during 6000 years or so, without going into the deep problem of the inward homogeneity of all these aspects. What gives this fleeting form-world meaning and substance, and what has hitherto lain buried deep under a mass of tangible “facts” and “dates” that has hardly yet been bored through, is the _phenomenon of the Great Cultures_. Only after these prime forms shall have been seen and felt and worked out in respect of their physiognomic meaning will it be possible to say that the essence and inner form of human History as opposed to the essence of Nature are understood—or rather, that we understand them. Only after this inlook and this outlook will a serious philosophy of history become feasible. Only then will it be possible to see each fact in the historical picture—each idea, art, war, personality, epoch—according to its symbolic content, and to regard history not as a mere sum of past things without intrinsic order or inner necessity, but as an organism of rigorous structure and significant articulation, an organism that does not suddenly dissolve into a formless and ambiguous future when it reaches the accidental present of the observer.

_Cultures are organisms_, and world-history is their collective biography. Morphologically, the immense history of the Chinese or of the Classical Culture is the exact equivalent of the petty history of the individual man, or of the animal, or the tree, or the flower. For the Faustian vision, this is not a postulate but an experience; if we want to learn to recognize inward forms that constantly and everywhere repeat themselves, the comparative morphology[85] of plants and animals has long ago given us the methods. In the destinies of the several Cultures that follow upon one another, grow up with one another, touch, overshadow, and suppress one another, is compressed the whole content of human history. And if we set free their shapes, till now hidden all too deep under the surface of a trite “history of human progress,” and let them march past us in the spirit, it cannot but be that we shall succeed in distinguishing, amidst all that is special or unessential, the primitive culture-form, _the_ Culture that underlies as ideal all the individual Cultures.

I distinguish the _idea_ of a Culture, which is the sum total of its inner possibilities, from its sensible _phenomenon_ or appearance upon the canvas of history as a fulfilled actuality. It is the relation of the soul to the living body, to its expression in the light-world perceptible to our eyes. This history of a Culture is the progressive actualizing of its possible, and the fulfilment is equivalent to the end. In this way the Apollinian soul, which some of us can perhaps understand and share in, is related to its unfolding in the realm of actuality, to the “Classical” or “antique” as we call it, of which the tangible and understandable relics are investigated by the archæologist, the philologist, the æsthetic and the historian.

Culture is the _prime phenomenon_ of all past and future world-history. The deep, and scarcely appreciated, idea of Goethe, which he discovered in his “living nature” and always made the basis of his morphological researches, we shall here apply—in its most precise sense—to all the formations of man’s history, whether fully matured, cut off in the prime, half opened or stifled in the seed. It is the method of living into (erfühlen) the object, as opposed to dissecting it. “The highest to which man can attain, is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.” The prime phenomenon is that in which the idea of becoming is presented net. To the spiritual eye of Goethe the idea of the prime plant was clearly visible in the form of every individual plant that happened to come up, or even that could possibly come up. In his investigation of the “os intermaxillare” his starting-point was the _prime phenomenon of the vertebrate type_; and in other fields it was geological stratification, or the leaf as the prime form of the plant-organism, or the metamorphosis of the plants as the prime form of all organic becoming. “The same law will apply to everything else that lives,” he wrote, in announcing his discovery to Herder. It was a look into the heart of things that Leibniz would have understood, but the century of Darwin is as remote from such a vision as it is possible to be.

At present, however, we look in vain for any treatment of history that is entirely free from the methods of Darwinism—that is, of systematic natural science based on causality. A physiognomic that is precise, clear and sure of itself and its limits has never yet arisen, and it can only arise through the discoveries of method that we have yet to make. Herein lies the great problem set for the 20th Century to solve—to explore carefully the inner structure of the organic units through and in which world-history fulfils itself, to separate the morphologically necessary from the accidental, and, by seizing the _purport_ of events, to ascertain the languages in which they speak.

VII

A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; up- stream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally-unsolvable riddle; down-stream, a future even so dark and timeless—such is the groundwork of the Faustian picture of human history.

Over the expanse of the water passes the endless uniform wave-train of the generations. Here and there bright shafts of light broaden out, everywhere dancing flashes confuse and disturb the clear mirror, changing, sparkling, vanishing. These are what we call the clans, tribes, peoples, races which unify a series of generations within this or that limited area of the historical surface. As widely as these differ in creative power, so widely do the images that they create vary in duration and plasticity, and when the creative power dies out, the physiognomic, linguistic and spiritual identification-marks vanish also and the phenomenon subsides again into the ruck of the generations. Aryans, Mongols, Germans, Kelts, Parthians, Franks, Carthaginians, Berbers, Bantus are names by which we specify some very heterogeneous images of this order.

But over this surface, too, the great Cultures[86] accomplish their majestic wave-cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, flatten again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste.

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality (_dem urseelenhaften Zustande_) of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that sequence of great epochs which define and display the stages of fulfilment, is an inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and the stifling of the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply- symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes _Civilization_, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such they may, like a worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust their decaying branches towards the sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic world. It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose gigantic, in the Imperial age, with a false semblance of youth and strength and fullness, and robbed the young Arabian Culture of the East of light and air.[87]

This—the inward and outward fulfilment, the finality, that awaits every living Culture—is the purport of all the historic “declines,” amongst them that decline of the Classical which we know so well and fully, and another decline, entirely comparable to it in course and duration, which will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium but is heralded already and sensible in and around us to-day—the decline of the West.[88] Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age. It is a young and trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, that reveals itself in the morning of Romanesque and Gothic. It fills the Faustian landscape from the Provence of the troubadours to the Hildesheim cathedral of Bishop Bernward.[89] The spring wind blows over it. “In the works of the old- German architecture,” says Goethe, “one sees the blossoming of an extraordinary state. Anyone immediately confronted with such a blossoming can do no more than wonder; but one who can see into the secret inner life of the plant and its rain of forces, who can observe how the bud expands, little by little, sees the thing with quite other eyes and knows what he is seeing.” Childhood speaks to us also—and in the same tones—out of early-Homeric Doric, out of early-Christian (which is really early-Arabian) art and out of the works of the Old Kingdom in Egypt that began with the Fourth Dynasty. There a mythic world- consciousness is fighting like a harassed debtor against all the dark and daemonic in itself and in Nature, while slowly ripening itself for the pure, day-bright expression of the existence that it will at last achieve and know. The more nearly a Culture approaches the noon culmination of its being, the more virile, austere, controlled, intense the form-language it has secured for itself, the more assured its sense of its own power, the clearer its lineaments. In the spring all this had still been dim and confused, tentative, filled with childish yearning and fears—witness the ornament of Romanesque-Gothic church porches of Saxony[90] and southern France, the early-Christian catacombs, the Dipylon[91] vases. But there is now the full consciousness of ripened creative power that we see in the time of the early Middle Kingdom of Egypt, in the Athens of the Pisistratidæ, in the age of Justinian, in that of the Counter-Reformation, and we find every individual trait of expression deliberate, strict, measured, marvellous in its ease and self-confidence. And we find, too, that everywhere, at moments, the coming fulfilment suggested itself; in such moments were created the head of Amenemhet III (the so-called “Hyksos Sphinx” of Tanis), the domes of Hagia Sophia, the paintings of Titian. Still later, tender to the point of fragility, fragrant with the sweetness of late October days, come the Cnidian Aphrodite and the Hall of the Maidens in the Erechtheum, the arabesques on Saracen horseshoe-arches, the Zwinger of Dresden, Watteau, Mozart. At last, in the grey dawn of Civilization, the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half- successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism, in the womb of the mother, in the grave. The spell of a “second religiousness”[92] comes upon it, and Late-Classical man turns to the practice of the cults of Mithras, of Isis, of the Sun—those very cults into which a soul just born in the East has been pouring a new wine of dreams and fears and loneliness.

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Footnote 84:

Cf. Vol. II, p. 33 et seq.

Footnote 85:

Not the dissecting morphology of the Darwinian’s pragmatic zoology with its hunt for causal connexions, but the seeing and overseeing morphology of Goethe.

Footnote 86:

See Vol. II, pp. 41 et seq.

Footnote 87:

See Vol. II, pp. 227 et seq.

Footnote 88:

See Vol. II, pp. 116 et seq. What constitutes the downfall is not, e.g., the catastrophe of the Great Migrations, which like the annihilation of the Maya Culture by the Spaniards (see Vol. II, p. 51 et seq.) was a coincidence without any deep necessity, but the inward undoing that began from the time of Hadrian, as in China from the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220).

Footnote 89:

St. Bernward was Bishop of Hildesheim from 993 to 1022, and himself architect and metal-worker. Three other churches besides the cathedral survive in the city from his time or that of his immediate successors, and Hildesheim of all North German cities is richest in monuments of the Romanesque.—_Tr._

Footnote 90:

By “Saxony,” a German historian means not the present-day state of Saxony (which was a small and comparatively late accretion), but the whole region of the Weser and the lower Elbe, with Westphalia and Holstein.—_Tr._

Footnote 91:

Vases from the cemetery adjoining the Dipylon Gate of Athens, the most representative relics that we possess of the Doric or primitive age of the Hellenic Culture (about 900 to 600 B.C.).—_Tr._

Footnote 92:

See Vol. II, pp. 381 et seq.

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VIII

The term “habit” (Habitus) is used of a plant to signify the special way, proper to itself, in which it manifests itself, i.e., the character, course and duration of its appearance in the light-world where we can see it. By its habit each kind is distinguished, in respect of each part and each phase of its existence, from all examples of other species. We may apply this useful notion of “habit” in our physiognomic of the grand organisms and speak of the habit of the Indian, Egyptian or Classical Culture, history or spirituality. Some vague inkling of it has always, for that matter, underlain the notion of _style_, and we shall not be forcing but merely clearing and deepening that word if we speak of the religious, intellectual, political, social or economic style[93] of a Culture. This “habit” of existence in space, which covers in the case of the individual man action and thought and conduct and disposition, embraces in the case or the existence of whole Cultures the totality of life-expressions of the higher order. The choice of

## particular branches of art (e.g., the round and fresco by the Hellenes,

counterpoint and oil-painting by the West) and the out-and-out rejection of others (e.g., of plastic by the Arabs); inclination to the esoteric (India) or the popular (Greece and Rome); preference for oratory (Classical) or for writing (China, the West) as the form of spiritual communication, are all style-manifestations, and so also are the various types of costume, of administration, of transport, of social courtesies. All great personalities of the Classical world form a self-contained group, whose spiritual habit is definitely different from that of all great men of the Arabian or the Western groups. Compare even Goethe and Raphael with Classical men, and Heraclitus, Sophocles, Plato, Alcibiades, Themistocles, Horace and Tiberius rank themselves together instantly as members of one family. Every Classical Cosmopolis—from Hiero’s Syracuse to Imperial Rome the embodiment and sense-picture of one and the same life-feeling—differs radically in lay-out and street- plan, in the language of its public and private architecture, in the type of its squares, alleys, courts, façades, in its colour, noises, street-life and night-life, from the group of Indian or that of Arabian or that of Western world-cities. Baghdad and Cairo could be felt in Granada long after the conquest; even Philip II’s Madrid had all the physiognomic hall-marks of modern London and Paris. There is a high symbolism in every dissimilarity of this sort. Contrast the Western tendency to straight-lined perspectives and street-alignments (such as the grand tract of the Champs-Elysées from the Louvre, or the Piazza before St. Peter’s) with the almost deliberate complexity and narrowness of the Via Sacra, the Forum Romanum and the Acropolis, whose parts are arranged without symmetry and with no perspective. Even the town- planning—whether darkly as in the Gothic or consciously as in the ages of Alexander and Napoleon—reflects the same principle as the mathematic— in the one case the Leibnizian mathematic of infinite space, in the other the Euclidean mathematic of separate bodies.[94] But to the “habit” of a group belong, further, its definite _life-duration_ and its definite tempo of development. Both of these are properties which we must not fail to take into account in a historical theory of structure. The rhythm (Takt) of Classical existence was different from that of Egyptian or Arabian; and we can fairly speak of the _andante_ of Greece and Rome and the _allegro con brio_ of the Faustian spirit.

The notion of life-duration as applied to a man, a butterfly, an oak, a blade of grass, comprises a specific time-value, which is quite independent of all the accidents of the individual case. Ten years are a slice of life which is approximately equivalent for all men, and the metamorphosis of insects is associated with a number of days exactly known and predictable in individual cases. For the Romans the notions of _pueritia_, _adolescentia_, _iuventus_, _virilitas_, _senectus_ possessed an almost mathematically precise meaning. Without doubt the biology of the future will—in opposition to Darwinism and to the exclusion in principle of causal fitness-motives for the origins of species—take these _pre-ordained_ life durations as the starting-point for a new enunciation of its problem.[95] The duration of a generation— whatever may be its nature—is a fact of almost mystical significance.

Now, such relations are valid also, and to an extent never hitherto imagined, for all the higher Cultures. _Every Culture, every adolescence and maturing and decay of a Culture, every one of its intrinsically necessary stages and periods, has a definite duration, always the same, always recurring with the emphasis of a symbol._ In the present work we cannot attempt to open up this world of most mysterious connexions, but the facts that will emerge again and again as we go on will tell us of themselves how much lies hidden here. What is the meaning of that striking fifty-year period, the rhythm of the political, intellectual and artistic “becoming” of all Cultures?[96] Of the 300-year period of the Baroque, of the Ionic, of the great mathematics, of Attic sculpture, of mosaic painting, of counterpoint, of Galileian mechanics? What does the _ideal_ life of one millennium for each Culture mean in comparison with the individual man’s "three-score years and ten"? As the plant’s being is brought to expression in form, dress and carriage by leaves, blossoms, twigs and fruit, so also is the being of a Culture manifested by its religious, intellectual, political and economic formations. Just as, say, Goethe’s individuality discourses of itself in such widely- different forms as the _Faust_, the _Farbenlehre_, the _Reineke Fuchs_, _Tasso_, _Werther_, the journey to Italy and the Friederike love, the _Westöstliche Diwan_ and the _Römische Elegien_; so the individuality of the Classical world displays itself in the Persian wars, the Attic drama, the City-State, the Dionysia and not less in the Tyrannis, the Ionic column, the geometry of Euclid, the Roman legion, and the gladiatorial contests and “panem et circenses” of the Imperial age.

In this sense, too, every individual being that has any sort of importance recapitulates,[97] of intrinsic necessity, all the epochs of the Culture to which it belongs. In each one of us, at that decisive moment when he begins to know that he is an ego, the inner life wakens just where and just how that of the Culture wakened long ago. Each of us men of the West, in his child’s day-dreams and child’s play, lives again its Gothic—the cathedrals, the castles, the hero-sagas, the crusader’s “Dieu le veult,” the soul’s oath of young Parzival. Every young Greek had his Homeric age and his Marathon. In Goethe’s Werther, the image of a tropic youth that every Faustian (but no Classical) man knows, the springtime of Petrarch and the Minnesänger reappears. When Goethe blocked out the _Urfaust_,[98] he was Parzival; when he finished _Faust I_, he was Hamlet, and only with _Faust II_ did he become the world-man of the 19th Century whom Byron could understand. Even the senility of the Classical—the faddy and unfruitful centuries of very late Hellenism, the second-childhood of a weary and blasé intelligence—can be studied in more than one of its grand old men. Thus, much of Euripides’ _Bacchæ_ anticipates the life-outlook, and much of Plato’s _Timæus_ the religious syncretism of the Imperial age; and Goethe’s _Faust II_ and Wagner’s _Parsifal_ disclose to us in advance the shape that _our_ spirituality will assume in our next (_in point of creative power our last_) centuries.

Biology employs the term _homology_ of organs to signify morphological equivalence in contradistinction to the term _analogy_ which relates to functional equivalence. This important, and in the sequel most fruitful, notion was conceived by Goethe (who was led thereby to the discovery of the “os intermaxillare” in man) and put into strict scientific shape by Owen;[99] this notion also we shall incorporate in our historical method.

It is known that for every part of the bone-structure of the human head an exactly corresponding part is found in all vertebrated animals right down to the fish, and that the pectoral fins of fish and the feet, wings and hands of terrestrial vertebrates are homologous organs, even though they have lost every trace of similarity. The lungs of terrestrial, and the swim-bladders of aquatic animals are homologous, while lungs and gills on the other hand are analogous—that is, similar in point of use.[100] And the trained and deepened morphological insight that is required to establish such distinctions is an utterly different thing from the present method of historical research, with its shallow comparisons of Christ and Buddha, Archimedes and Galileo, Cæsar and Wallenstein, parcelled Germany and parcelled Greece. More and more clearly as we go on, we shall realize what immense views will offer themselves to the historical eye as soon as the rigorous morphological method has been understood and cultivated. To name but a few examples, _homologous_ forms are: Classical sculpture and West European orchestration, the Fourth Dynasty pyramids and the Gothic cathedrals, Indian Buddhism and Roman Stoicism (Buddhism and Christianity are _not even analogous_); the periods of “the Contending States” in China, the Hyksos in Egypt and the Punic Wars; the age of Pericles and the age of the Ommayads; the epochs of the Rigveda, of Plotinus and of Dante. The Dionysiac movement is homologous with the Renaissance, analogous to the Reformation. For us, "Wagner is the _résumé_ of modernity," as Nietzsche rightly saw; and the equivalent that logically _must_ exist in the Classical modernity we find in Pergamene art. (Some preliminary notion of the fruitfulness of this way of regarding history, may be gathered from studying the tables included in this volume.)

The application of the “homology” principle to historical phenomena brings with it an entirely new connotation for the word “contemporary.” I designate as contemporary two historical facts that occur in exactly the same—relative—positions in their respective Cultures, and therefore possess exactly equivalent importance. It has already been shown how the development of the Classical and that of the Western mathematic proceeded in complete congruence, and we might have ventured to describe Pythagoras as the contemporary of Descartes, Archytas of Laplace, Archimedes of Gauss. The Ionic and the Baroque, again, ran their course _contemporaneously_. Polygnotus pairs in time with Rembrandt, Polycletus with Bach. The Reformation, Puritanism and, above all, the turn to Civilization appear simultaneously in all Cultures; in the Classical this last epoch bears the names of Philip and Alexander, in our West those of the Revolution and Napoleon. Contemporary, too, are the building of Alexandria, of Baghdad, and of Washington; Classical coinage and our double-entry book-keeping; the first Tyrannis and the Fronde; Augustus and Shih-huang-ti;[101] Hannibal and the World War.

I hope to show that without exception all great creations and forms in religion, art, politics, social life, economy and science appear, fulfil themselves and die down _contemporaneously_ in all the Cultures; that the inner structure of one corresponds strictly with that of all the others; that there is not a single phenomenon of deep physiognomic importance in the record of one for which we could not find a counterpart in the record of every other; and that this counterpart is to be found under a characteristic form and in a perfectly definite chronological position. At the same time, if we are to grasp such homologies of facts, we shall need to have a far deeper insight and a far more critical attitude towards the visible foreground of things than historians have hitherto been wont to display; who amongst them, for instance, would have allowed himself to dream that the counterpart of Protestantism was to be found in the Dionysiac movement, and that English Puritanism was for the West what Islam was for the Arabian world?

Seen from this angle, history offers possibilities far beyond the ambitions of all previous research, which has contented itself in the main with arranging the facts of the past so far as these were known (and that according to a one-line scheme)—the possibilities, namely, of

Overpassing the present as a research-limit, and predetermining the spiritual form, duration, rhythm, meaning and product of the _still unaccomplished_ stages of our western history; and

Reconstructing long-vanished and unknown epochs, even whole Cultures of the past, by means of morphological connexions, in much the same way as modern palæontology deduces far-reaching and trustworthy conclusions as to skeletal structure and species from a single unearthed skull-fragment.

It is possible, given the physiognomic rhythm, to recover from scattered details of ornament, building, script, or from odd political, economic and religious data, the organic characters of whole centuries of history, and from known elements on the scale of art-expression, to find corresponding elements on the scale of political forms, or from that of mathematical forms to read that of economic. This is a truly Goethian method—rooted in fact in Goethe’s conception of the _prime phenomenon_— which is already to a limited extent current in comparative zoology, but can be extended, to a degree hitherto undreamed of, over the whole field of history.

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Footnote 93:

In English the word “cast” will evidently satisfy the sense better on occasion. The word “stil” will therefore not necessarily be always rendered “style.”—_Tr._

Footnote 94:

See Vol. II, pp. 109 et seq.

Footnote 95:

See Vol. II, pp. 36 et seq.

Footnote 96:

I will only mention here the distances apart of the three Punic Wars, and the series—likewise comprehensible only as rhythmic—Spanish Succession War, Silesian wars, Napoleonic Wars, Bismarck’s wars, and the World War (cf. Vol. II, p. 488). Connected with this is the spiritual relation of grandfather and grandson, a relation which produces in the mind of primitive peoples the conviction that the soul of the grandfather returns in the grandson, and has originated the widespread custom of giving the grandson the grandfather’s _name_, which by its mystic spell binds his soul afresh to the corporeal world.

Footnote 97:

The word is used in the sense in which biology employs it, viz., to describe the process by which the embryo traverses all the phases which its species has undergone.—_Tr._

Footnote 98:

The first draft of _Faust I_, discovered only comparatively recently.— _Tr._

Footnote 99:

See Ency. Brit., XIth Ed., articles _Owen, Sir Richard; Morphology and Zoology_ (p. 1029).—_Tr._

Footnote 100:

It is not superfluous to add that there is nothing of the causal kind in these _pure phenomena_ of “Living Nature.” Materialism, in order to get a system for the pedestrian reasoner, has had to adulterate the picture of them with fitness-causes. But Goethe—who anticipated just about as much of Darwinism as there will be left of it in fifty years from Darwin—_absolutely_ excluded the causality-principle. And the very fact that the Darwinians quite failed to notice its absence is a clear indication that Goethe’s “Living Nature” belongs to actual life, "cause"-less and "aim"-less; for the idea of the prime-phenomenon does not involve causal assumptions of any sort unless it has been misunderstood in advance in a mechanistic sense.

Footnote 101:

Reigned 246-210 B.C. He styled himself “first universal emperor” and intended a position for himself and his successors akin to that of “Divus” in Rome. For a brief account of his energetic and comprehensive work see Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article _China_, p. 194.— _Tr._

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## CHAPTER IV THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY

II

THE IDEA OF DESTINY AND THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSALITY

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