The decline of the West

II
BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM

I

We are now at last in a position to approach the phenomenon of Morale,^[424] the intellectual interpretation of Life by itself, to ascend the height from which it is possible to survey the widest and gravest of all the fields of human thought. At the same time, we shall need for this survey an objectivity such as no one has as yet set himself seriously to gain. Whatever we may take Morale to be, it is no part of Morale to provide its own analysis; and we shall get to grips with the problem, not by considering what should be our acts and aims and standards, but only by diagnosing the Western feeling in the very form of the enunciation.

In this matter of morale, Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. We say “thou shalt” in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable. That, and nothing short of it, is, for us, morale. In the ethics of the West everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. Here Luther is completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with Jesuits; for one and all, the beginning of morale is a claim to general and permanent validity. It is a necessity of the Faustian soul that this should be so. He who thinks or teaches “otherwise” is sinful, a backslider, a foe, and he is fought down without mercy. You “shall,” the State “shall,” society “shall”—this form of morale is to us self-evident; it represents the only real meaning that we can attach to the word. But it was not so either in the Classical, or in India, or in China. Buddha, for instance, gives a pattern to take or to leave, and Epicurus offers counsel. Both undeniably are forms of high morale, and neither contains the will-element.

What we have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral dynamic. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic, sense) is that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on behalf of all, then we are all without exception, willingly or no, wittingly or no, Socialists. Even Nietzsche, that most passionate opponent of “herd morale,” was perfectly incapable of limiting his zeal to himself in the Classical way. He thought only of “mankind,” and he attacked everyone who differed from himself. Epicurus, on the contrary, was heartily indifferent to others’ opinions and acts and never wasted one thought on the “transformation” of mankind. He and his friends were content that they were as they were and not otherwise. The Classical ideal was indifference (ἀπάθεια) to the course of the world—the very thing which it is the whole business of Faustian mankind to master—and an important element both of Stoic and of Epicurean philosophy was the recognition of a category of things neither preferred nor rejected^[425] (ἀδιάφορα). In Hellas there was a pantheon of morales as there was of deities, as the peaceful coexistence of Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics shows, but the Nietzschean Zarathustra—though professedly standing beyond good and evil—breathes from end to end the pain of seeing men to be other than as he would have them be, and the deep and utterly un-Classical desire to devote a life to their reformation—his own sense of the word, naturally, being the only one. It is just this, the general transvaluation, that makes ethical monotheism and—using the word in a novel and deep sense—socialism. All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.

The moral imperative as the form of morale is Faustian and only Faustian. It is wholly without importance that Schopenhauer denies theoretically the will to live, or that Nietzsche will have it affirmed—these are superficial differences, indicative of personal tastes and temperaments. The important thing, that which makes Schopenhauer the progenitor of ethical modernity, is that he too feels the whole world as Will, as movement, force, direction. This basic feeling is not merely the foundation of our ethics, it is itself our whole ethics, and the rest are bye-blows. That which we call not merely activity but action^[426] is a historical conception through-and-through, saturated with directional energy. It is the proof of being, the dedication of being, in that sort of man whose ego possesses the tendency to Future, who feels the momentary present not as saturated being but as epoch, as turning-point, in a great complex of becoming—and, moreover, feels it so of both his personal life and of the life of history as a whole. Strength and distinctness of this consciousness are the marks of higher Faustian man, but it is not wholly absent in the most insignificant of the breed, and it distinguishes his smallest acts from those of any and every Classical man. It is the distinction between character and attitude, between conscious becoming and simple accepted statuesque becomeness, between will and suffering in tragedy.

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

To go back upon this basic form of his existence, let alone transform it, is entirely beyond the power of Faustian man. It is presupposed even in efforts to resist it. One fights against “advanced” ideas, but all the time he looks on his fight itself as an advance. Another agitates for a “reversal,” but what he intends is in fact a continuance of development. “Immoral” is only a new kind of “moral” and sets up the same claim to primacy. The will-to-power is intolerant—all that is Faustian wills to reign alone. The Apollinian feeling, on the contrary, with its world of coexistent individual things, is tolerant as a matter of course. But, if toleration is in keeping with will-less Ataraxia, it is for the Western world with its oneness of infinite soul-space and the singleness of its fabric of tensions the sign either of self-deception or of fading-out. The Enlightenment of the 18th Century was tolerant towards—that is, careless of—differences between the various Christian creeds, but in respect of its own relation to the Church as a whole, it was anything but tolerant as soon as the power to be otherwise came to it. The Faustian instinct, active, strong-willed, as vertical in tendency as its own Gothic cathedrals, as upstanding as its own “ego habeo factum,” looking into distance and Future, demands toleration—that is, room, space—for its proper activity, but only for that. Consider, for instance, how much of it the city democracy is prepared to accord to the Church in respect of the latter’s management of religious powers, while claiming for itself unlimited freedom to exercise its own and adjusting the “common” law to conform thereto whenever it can. Every “movement” means to win, while every Classical “attitude” only wants to be and troubles itself little about the Ethos of the neighbour. To fight for or against the trend of the times, to promote Reform or Reaction, construction, reconstruction or destruction—all this is as un-Classical as it is un-Indian. It is the old antithesis of Sophoclean and Shakespearian tragedy, the tragedy of the man who only wants to exist and that of the man who wants to win.

It is quite wrong to bind up Christianity with the moral imperative. It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity—and he not only made it a new religion but also gave it a new moral direction. The “it” became “I,” the passion-charged centre of the world, the foundation of the great Sacrament of personal contrition. Will-to-power even in ethics, the passionate striving to set up a proper morale as a universal truth, and to enforce it upon humanity, to reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise constituted—nothing is more characteristically our own than this is. And in virtue of it the Gothic springtime proceeded to a profound—and never yet appreciated—inward transformation of the morale of Jesus. A quiet spiritual morale welling from Magian feeling—a morale or conduct recommended as potent for salvation, a morale the knowledge of which was communicated as a special act of grace^[427]—was recast as a morale of imperative command.^[428]

Every ethical system, whether it be of religious or of philosophical origin, has associations with the great arts and especially with that of architecture. It is in fact a structure of propositions of causal character. Every truth that is intended for practical application is propounded with a “because” and a “therefore.” There is mathematical logic in them—in Buddha’s “Four Truths” as in Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason”^[429] and in every popular catechism. What is not in these doctrines of acquired truth is the uncritical logic of the blood, which generates and matures those conduct-standards (Sitten) of social classes and of practical men (e.g., the chivalry-obligations in the time of the Crusades) that we only consciously realize when someone infringes them. A systematic morale is, as it were, an Ornament, and it manifests itself not only in precepts but also in the style of drama and even in the choice of art-motives. The Meander, for example, is a Stoic motive. The Doric column is the very embodiment of the Antique life-ideal. And just because it was so, it was the one Classical “order” which the Baroque style necessarily and frankly excluded; indeed, even Renaissance art was warned off it by some very deep spiritual instinct. Similarly with the transformation of the Magian dome into the Russian roof-cupola,^[430] the Chinese landscape-architecture of devious paths, the Gothic cathedral-tower. Each is an image of the particular and unique morale which arose out of the waking-consciousness of the Culture.

II

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

It follows that there is not and cannot be any true “conversion” in the deeper sense. Conscious behaviour of any kind that rests upon convictions is a primary phenomenon, the basic tendency of an existence developed into a “timeless truth.” It matters little what words or pictures are employed to express it, whether it appears as the predication of a deity or as the issue of philosophic meditation, as proposition or as symbol, as proclamation of proper or confutation of alien convictions. It is enough that it is there. It can be wakened and it can be put theoretically in the form of doctrine, it can change or improve its intellectual vehicle but it cannot be begotten. Just as we are incapable of altering our world-feeling—so incapable that even in trying to alter it we have to follow the old lines and confirm instead of overthrowing it—so also we are powerless to alter the ethical basis of our waking being. A certain verbal distinction has sometimes been drawn between ethics the science and morale the duty, but, as we understand it, the point of duty does not arise. We are no more capable of converting a man to a morale alien to his being than the Renaissance was capable of reviving the Classical or of making anything but a Southernized Gothic, an anti-Gothic, out of Apollinian motives. We may talk to-day of transvaluing all our values; we may, as Megalopolitans, “go back to” Buddhism or Paganism or a romantic Catholicism; we may champion as Anarchists an individualist or as Socialists a collectivist ethic—but in spite of all we do, will and feel the same. A conversion to Theosophy or Freethinking or one of the present-day transitions from a supposed Christianity to a supposed Atheism (or vice versa) is an alteration of words and notions, of the religious or intellectual surface, no more. None of our “movements” have changed man.

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

But a morale, like a sculpture, a music, a painting-art, is a self-contained form-world expressing a life-feeling; it is a datum, fundamentally unalterable, an inward necessity. It is ever true within its historical circle, ever untrue outside it. As we have seen already,^[431] what his several works are to the poet or musician or painter, that its several art-genera are for the higher individual that we call the Culture, viz., organic units; and that oil-painting as a whole, act-sculpture as a whole and contrapuntal music as a whole, and rhymed lyric and so on are all epoch-making, and as such take rank as major symbols of Life. In the history of the Culture as in that of the individual existence, we are dealing with the actualization of the possible; it is the story of an inner spirituality becoming the style of a world. By the side of these great form-units, which grow and fulfil themselves and close down within a predeterminate series of human generations, which endure for a few centuries and pass irrevocably into death, we see the group of Faustian morals and the sum of Apollinian morals also as individuals of the higher order. That they are, is Destiny. They are data, and revelation (or scientific insight, as the case may be) only put them into shape for the consciousness.

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

III

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

Had Nietzsche regarded his own times with fewer prejudices and less disposition to romantic championship of certain ethical creations, he would have perceived that a specifically Christian morale of compassion in his sense does not exist on West-European soil. We must not let the words of humane formulæ mislead us as to their real significance. Between the morale that one has and the morale that one thinks one has, there is a relation which is very obscure and very unsteady, and it is just here that an incorruptible psychology would be invaluable. Compassion is a dangerous word, and neither Nietzsche himself—for all his maestria—nor anyone else has yet investigated the meaning—conceptual and effective—of the word at different times. The Christian morale of Origen’s time was quite different from the Christian morale of St. Francis’s. This is not the place to enquire what Faustian compassion—sacrifice or ebullience or again race-instinct in a chivalrous society^[432]—means as against the fatalistic Magian-Christian kind, how far it is to be conceived as action-at-a-distance and practical dynamic, or (from another angle) as a proud soul’s demand upon itself, or again as the utterance of an imperious distance-feeling. A fixed stock of ethical phrases, such as we have possessed since the Renaissance, has to cover a multitude of different ideas and a still greater multitude of different meanings. When a mankind so historically and retrospectively disposed as we are accepts the superficial as the real sense, and regards ideals as subject-matter for mere knowing, it is really evidencing its veneration for the past—in this particular instance, for religious tradition. The text of a conviction is never a test of its reality, for man is rarely conscious of his own beliefs. Catchwords and doctrines are always more or less popular and external as compared with deep spiritual actualities. Our theoretical reverence for the propositions of the New Testament is in fact of the same order as the theoretical reverence of the Renaissance and of Classicism for antique art; the one has no more transformed the spirit of men than the other has transformed the spirit of works. The oft-quoted cases of the Mendicant Orders, the Moravians and the Salvation Army prove by their very rarity, and even more by the slightness of the effects that they have been able to produce, that they are exceptions in a quite different generality—namely, the Faustian-Christian morale. That morale will not indeed be found formulated, either by Luther or by the Council of Trent, but all Christians of the great style—Innocent III and Calvin, Loyola and Savonarola, Pascal and St. Theresa—have had it in them, even in unconscious contradiction to their own formal teachings.

We have only to compare the purely Western conception of the manly virtue that is designated by Nietzsche’s “moralinfrei” virtù, the grandezza of Spanish and the grandeur of French Baroque, with that very feminine ἀρετή of the Hellenic ideal, of which the practical application is presented to us as capacity for enjoyment (ἡδονή), placidity of disposition (γαλήνη, ἀπάθεια), absence of wants and demands, and, above all, the so typical ἀταραξία. What Nietzsche called the Blond Beast and conceived to be embodied in the type of Renaissance Man that he so overvalued (for it is really only a jackal counterfeit of the great Hohenstaufen Germans) is the utter antithesis to the type that is presented in every Classical ethic without exception and embodied in every Classical man of worth. The Faustian Culture has produced a long series of granite-men, the Classical never a one. For Pericles and Themistocles were soft natures in tune with Attic καλοκἀγαθία, and Alexander was a Romantic who never woke up, Cæsar a shrewd reckoner. Hannibal, the alien, was the only “Mann” amongst them all. The men of the early time, as Homer presents them to our judgment—the Odysseuses and Ajaxes—would have cut a queer figure among the chevaliers of the Crusades. Very feminine natures, too, are capable of brutality—a rebound-brutality of their own—and Greek cruelty was of this kind. But in the North the great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen emperors appear on the very threshold of the Culture, surrounded by giant-men like Henry the Lion and Gregory VII. Then come the men of the Renaissance, of the struggle of the two Roses, of the Huguenot Wars, the Spanish Conquistadores, the Prussian electors and kings, Napoleon, Bismarck, Rhodes. What other Culture has exhibited the like of these? Where in all Hellenic history is so powerful a scene as that of 1176—the Battle of Legnano as foreground, the suddenly-disclosed strife of the great Hohenstaufen and the great Welf as background? The heroes of the Great Migrations, the Spanish chivalry, Prussian discipline, Napoleonic energy—how much of the Classical is there in these men and things? And where, on the heights of Faustian morale, from the Crusades to the World War, do we find anything of the “slave-morale,” the meek resignation, the deaconess’s Caritas?^[433] Only in pious and honoured words, nowhere else. The type of the very priesthood is Faustian; think of those magnificent bishops of the old German empire who on horseback led their flocks into the wild battle,^[434] or those Popes who could force submission on a Henry IV and a Frederick II, of the Teutonic Knights in the Ostmark, of Luther’s challenge in which the old Northern heathendom rose up against old Roman, of the great Cardinals (Richelieu, Mazarin, Fleury) who shaped France. That is Faustian morale, and one must be blind indeed if one does not see it efficient in the whole field of West-European history. And it is only through such grand instances of worldly passion which express the consciousness of a mission that we are able to understand those of grand spiritual passion, of the upright and forthright Caritas which nothing can resist, the dynamic charity that is so utterly unlike Classical moderation and Early-Christian mildness. There is a hardness in the sort of com-passion that was practised by the German mystics, the German and Spanish military Orders, the French and English Calvinists. In the Russian, the Raskolnikov, type of charity a soul melts into the fraternity of souls, in the Faustian it arises out of it. Here too “ego habeo factum” is the formula. Personal charity is the justification before God of the Person, the individual.

This is the reason why "compassion"-morale, in the everyday sense, always respected by us so far as words go, and sometimes hoped for by the thinker, is never actualized. Kant rejected it with decision, and in fact it is in profound contradiction with the Categorical Imperative, which sees the meaning of Life to lie in actions and not in surrender to soft opinions. Nietzsche’s “slave-morale” is a phantom, his master-morale is a reality. It does not require formulation to be effective—it is there, and has been from of old. Take away his romantic Borgia-mask and his nebulous vision of supermen, and what is left of his man is Faustian man himself, as he is to-day and as he was even in saga-days, the type of an energetic, imperative and dynamic Culture. However it may have been in the Classical world, our great well-doers are the great doers whose forethought and care affects millions, the great statesmen and organizers. "A higher sort of men, who thanks to their preponderance of will, knowledge, wealth and influence make use of democratic Europe as their aptest and most mobile tool, in order to bring into their own hands the destinies of the Earth and as artists to shape ‘man’ himself. Enough—the time is coming when men will unlearn and relearn the art of politics." So Nietzsche delivered himself in one of the unpublished drafts that are so much more concrete than the finished works. “We must either breed political capacities, or else be ruined by the democracy that has been forced upon us by the failure of the older alternatives,”^[435] says Shaw in Man and Superman. Limited though his philosophic horizon is in general, Shaw has the advantage over Nietzsche of more practical schooling and less ideology, and the figure of the multimillionaire Undershaft in Major Barbara translates the Superman-ideal into the unromantic language of the modern age (which in truth is its real source for Nietzsche also, though it reached him indirectly through Malthus and Darwin). It is these fact-men of the grand style who are the representatives to-day of the Will-to-Power over other men’s destinies and therefore of the Faustian ethic generally. Men of this sort do not broadcast their millions to dreamers, “artists,” weaklings and “down-and-outs” to satisfy a boundless benevolence; they employ them for those who like themselves count as material for the Future. They pursue a purpose with them. They make a centre of force for the existence of generations which outlives the single lives. The mere money, too, can develop ideas and make history, and Rhodes—precursor of a type that will be significant indeed in the 21st Century—provided, in disposing of his possessions by will, that it should do so. It is a shallow judgment, and one incapable of inwardly understanding history, that cannot distinguish the literary chatter of popular social-moralists and humanity-apostles from the deep ethical instincts of the West-European Civilization.

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

IV

When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase “transvaluation of all values” for the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are living found at last its formula. Transvaluation of all values is the most fundamental character of every civilization. For it is the beginning of a Civilization that it remoulds all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practises them in a different way. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, and herein lies the negativeness common to all periods of this character. It assumes that the genuine act of creation has already occurred, and merely enters upon an inheritance of big actualities. In the Late-Classical, we find the event taking place inside Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism, that is, the long death-struggle of the Apollinian soul. In the interval from Socrates—who was the spiritual father of the Stoa and in whom the first signs of inward impoverishment and city-intellectualism became visible—to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, every existence-ideal of the old Classical underwent transvaluation. In the case of India, the transvaluation of Brahman life was complete by the time of King Asoka (250 B.C.), as we can see by comparing the parts of the Vedanta put into writing before and after Buddha. And ourselves? Even now the ethical socialism of the Faustian soul, its fundamental ethic, as we have seen, is being worked upon by the process of transvaluation as that soul is walled up in the stone of the great cities. Rousseau is the ancestor of this socialism; he stands, like Socrates and Buddha, as the representative spokesman of a great Civilization. Rousseau’s rejection of all great Culture-forms and all significant conventions, his famous “Return to the state of Nature,” his practical rationalism, are unmistakable evidences. Each of the three buried a millennium of spiritual depth. Each proclaimed his gospel to mankind, but it was to the mankind of the city intelligentsia, which was tired of the town and the Late Culture, and whose “pure” (i.e., soulless) reason longed to be free from them and their authoritative form and their hardness, from the symbolism with which it was no longer in living communion and which therefore it detested. The Culture was annihilated by discussion. If we pass in review the great 19th-Century names with which we associate the march of this great drama—Schopenhauer, Hebbel, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg—we comprehend in a glance that which Nietzsche, in a fragmentary preface to his incomplete master-work, deliberately and correctly called the Coming of Nihilism. Every one of the great Cultures knows it, for it is of deep necessity inherent in the finale of these mighty organisms. Socrates was a nihilist, and Buddha. There is an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese de-souling of the human being, just as there is a Western. This is a matter not of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and artistic, transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change whatsoever, but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in full. It is easy, but useless, to point to the bigness of Hellenistic and of modern European achievement. Mass slavery and mass machine-production, “Progress” and Ataraxia, Alexandrianism and modern Science, Pergamum and Bayreuth, social conditions as assumed in Aristotle and as assumed in Marx, are merely symptoms on the historical surface. Not external life and conduct, not institutions and customs, but deepest and last things are in question here—the inward finishedness (Fertigsein) of megalopolitan man, and of the provincial as well.^[436] For the Classical world this condition sets in with the Roman age; for us it will set in from about the year 2000.

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

To Gothic and Doric men, Ionic and Baroque men, the whole vast form-world of art, religion, custom, state, knowledge, social life was easy. They could carry it and actualize it without “knowing” it. They had over the symbolism of the Culture that unstrained mastery that Mozart possessed in music. Culture is the self-evident. The feeling of strangeness in these forms, the idea that they are a burden from which creative freedom requires to be relieved, the impulse to overhaul the stock in order by the light of reason to turn it to better account, the fatal imposition of thought upon the inscrutable quality of creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is beginning to tire. Only the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a “natural law” is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men conceive of the State as an “order of society” which not only can be but must be altered^[437]—then it is evident that something has definitely broken down. The Cosmopolis itself, the supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in the midst of the Culture-landscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing into itself and using up.

Scientific worlds are superficial worlds, practical, soulless and purely extensive worlds. The ideas of Buddhism, of Stoicism, and of Socialism alike rest upon them.^[438] Life is no longer to be lived as something self-evident—hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone choice—or to be accepted as God-willed destiny, but is to be treated as a problem, presented as the intellect sees it, judged by “utilitarian” or “rational” criteria. This, at the back, is what all three mean. The brain rules, because the soul abdicates. Culture-men live unconsciously, Civilization-men consciously. The Megalopolis—sceptical, practical, artificial—alone represents Civilization to-day. The soil-peasantry before its gates does not count. The “People” means the city-people, an inorganic mass, something fluctuating. The peasant is not democratic—this again being a notion belonging to mechanical and urban existence^[439]—and he is therefore overlooked, despised, detested. With the vanishing of the old “estates”—gentry and priesthood—he is the only organic man, the sole relic of the Early Culture. There is no place for him either in Stoic or in Socialistic thought.

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

V

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

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

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

For even Buddhism is such. Hitherto the deeper meaning of it has always been misunderstood. It was not a Puritan movement like, for instance, Islamism and Jansenism, not a Reformation as the Dionysiac wave was for the Apollinian world, and, quite generally, not a religion like the religions of the Vedas or the religion of the Apostle Paul,^[440] but a final and purely practical world-sentiment of tired megalopolitans who had a closed-off Culture behind them and no future before them. It was the basic feeling of the Indian Civilization and as such both equivalent to and “contemporary” with Stoicism and Socialism. The quintessence of this thoroughly worldly and unmetaphysical thought is to be found in the famous sermon near Benares, the Four Noble Truths that won the prince-philosopher his first adherents.^[441] Its roots lay in the rationalist-atheistic Sankhya philosophy, the world-view of which it tacitly accepts, just as the social ethic of the 19th Century comes from the Sensualism and Materialism of the 18th and the Stoa (in spite of its superficial exploitation of Heraclitus) is derived from Protagoras and the Sophists. In each case it is the all-power of Reason that is the starting-point from which to discuss morale, and religion (in the sense of belief in anything metaphysical) does not enter into the matter. Nothing could be more irreligious than these systems in their original forms—and it is these, and not derivatives of them belonging to later stages of the Civilizations, that concern us here.

Buddhism rejects all speculation about God and the cosmic problems; only self and the conduct of actual life are important to it. And it definitely did not recognize a soul. The standpoint of the Indian psychologist of early Buddhism was that of the Western psychologist and the Western “Socialist” of to-day, who reduce the inward man to a bundle of sensations and an aggregation of electrochemical energies. The teacher Nagasena tells King Milinda^[442] that the parts of the car in which he is journeying are not the car itself, that “car” is only a word and that so also is the soul. The spiritual elements are designated Skandhas, groups, and are impermanent. Here is complete correspondence with the ideas of association-psychology, and in fact the doctrines of Buddha contain much materialism.^[443] As the Stoic appropriated Heraclitus’s idea of Logos and flattened it to a materialist sense, as the Socialism based on Darwin has mechanicalized (with the aid of Hegel) Goethe’s deep idea of development, so Buddhism treated the Brahman notion of Karma, the idea (hardly achievable in our thought) of a being actively completing itself. Often enough it regarded this quite materially as a world-stuff under transformation.

What we have before us is three forms of Nihilism, using the word in Nietzsche’s sense. In each case, the ideals of yesterday, the religious and artistic and political forms that have grown up through the centuries, are undone; yet even in this last act, this self-repudiation, each several Culture employs the prime-symbol of its whole existence. The Faustian nihilist—Ibsen or Nietzsche, Marx or Wagner—shatters the ideals. The Apollinian—Epicurus or Antisthenes or Zeno—watches them crumble before his eyes. And the Indian withdraws from their presence into himself. Stoicism is directed to individual self-management, to statuesque and purely present being, without regard to future or past or neighbour. Socialism is the dynamic treatment of the same theme; it is defensive like Stoicism, but what it defends is not the pose but the working-out of the life; and more, it is offensive-defensive, for with a powerful thrust into distance it spreads itself into all future and over all mankind, which shall be brought under one single regimen. Buddhism, which only a mere dabbler in religious research could compare with Christianity,^[444] is hardly reproducible in words of the Western languages. But it is permissible to speak of a Stoic Nirvana and point to the figure of Diogenes, and even the notion of a Socialist Nirvana has its justification in so far that European weariness covers its flight from the struggle for existence under catchwords of world-peace, Humanity and brotherhood of Man. Still, none of this comes anywhere near the strange profundity of the Buddhist conception of Nirvana. It would seem as though the soul of an old Culture, when from its last refinements it is passing into death, clings, as it were, jealously to the property that is most essentially its own, to its form-content and the innate prime-symbol. There is nothing in Buddhism that could be regarded as “Christian,” nothing in Stoicism that is to be found in the Islam of A.D. 1000, nothing that Confucius shares with Socialism. The phrase “si duo faciunt idem, non est idem”—which ought to appear at the head of every historical work that deals with living and uniquely-occurring Becomings and not with logically, causally and numerically comprehensible Becomes—is specially applicable to these final expressions of Culture-movements. In all Civilizations being ceases to be suffused with soul and comes to be suffused with intellect, but in each several Civilization the intellect is of a particular structure and subject to the form-language of a particular symbolism. And just because of all this individualness of the Being which, working in the unconscious, fashions the last-phase creations on the historical surface, relationship of the instances to one another in point of historical position becomes decisively important. What they bring to expression is different in each case, but the fact that they bring it to expression so marks them as “contemporary” with one another. The Buddhistic abnegation of full resolute life has a Stoic flavour, the Stoic abnegation of the same a Buddhistic flavour. Allusion has already been made to the affinity between the Katharsis of the Attic drama and the Nirvana-idea. One’s feeling is that ethical Socialism, although a century has already been given to its development, has not yet reached the clear hard resigned form of its own that it will finally possess. Probably the next decades will impart to it the ripe formulation that Chrysippus imparted to the Stoa. But even now there is a look of the Stoa in Socialism, when it is that of the higher order and the narrower appeal, when its tendency is the Roman-Prussian and entirely unpopular tendency to self-discipline and self-renunciation from sense of great duty; and a look of Buddhism in its contempt for momentary ease and carpe diem. And, on the other hand, it has unmistakably the Epicurean look in that mode of it which alone makes it effective downward and outward as a popular ideal, in which it is a hedonism (not indeed of each-for-himself, but) of individuals in the name of all.

Every soul has religion, which is only another word for its existence. All living forms in which it expresses itself—all arts, doctrines, customs, all metaphysical and mathematical form-worlds, all ornament, every column and verse and idea—are ultimately religious, and must be so. But from the setting-in of Civilization they cannot be so any longer. As the essence of every Culture is religion, so—and consequently—the essence of every Civilization is irreligion—the two words are synonymous. He who cannot feel this in the creativeness of Manet as against Velasquez, of Wagner as against Haydn, of Lysippus as against Phidias, of Theocritus as against Pindar, knows not what the best means in art. Even Rococo in its worldliest creations is still religious. But the buildings of Rome, even when they are temples, are irreligious; the one touch of religious architecture that there was in old Rome was the intrusive Magian-souled Pantheon, first of the mosques. The megalopolis itself, as against the old Culture-towns—Alexandria as against Athens, Paris as against Bruges, Berlin as against Nürnberg—is irreligious^[445] down to the last detail, down to the look of the streets, the dry intelligence of the faces.^[446] And, correspondingly, the ethical sentiments belonging to the form-language of the megalopolis are irreligious and soulless also. Socialism is the Faustian world-feeling become irreligious; “Christianity,” so called (and qualified even as “true Christianity”), is always on the lips of the English Socialist, to whom it seems to be something in the nature of a “dogma-less morale.” Stoicism also was irreligious as compared with Orphic religion, and Buddhism as compared with Vedic, and it is of no importance whatever that the Roman Stoic approved and conformed to Emperor-worship, that the later Buddhist sincerely denied his atheism, or that the Socialist calls himself an earnest Freethinker or even goes on believing in God.

It is this extinction of living inner religiousness, which gradually tells upon even the most insignificant element in a man’s being, that becomes phenomenal in the historical world-picture at the turn from the Culture to the Civilization, the Climacteric of the Culture, as I have already called it, the time of change in which a mankind loses its spiritual fruitfulness for ever, and building takes the place of begetting. Unfruitfulness—understanding the word in all its direct seriousness—marks the brain-man of the megalopolis, as the sign of fulfilled destiny, and it is one of the most impressive facts of historical symbolism that the change manifests itself not only in the extinction of great art, of great courtesy, of great formal thought, of the great style in all things, but also quite carnally in the childlessness and “race-suicide” of the civilized and rootless strata, a phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed and deplored—and of course not remedied—in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.^[447]

VII

As to the living representatives of these new and purely intellectual creations, the men of the “New Order” upon whom every decline-time founds such hopes, we cannot be in any doubt. They are the fluid megalopolitan Populace, the rootless city-mass (οἱ πολλοί, as Athens called it) that has replaced the People, the Culture-folk that was sprung from the soil and peasantlike even when it lived in towns. They are the market-place loungers of Alexandria and Rome, the newspaper-readers of our own corresponding time; the “educated” man who then and now makes a cult of intellectual mediocrity and a church of advertisement;^[448] the man of the theatres and places of amusement, of sport and “best-sellers.” It is this late-appearing mass and not “mankind” that is the object of Stoic and Socialist propaganda, and one could match it with equivalent phenomena in the Egyptian New Empire, Buddhist India and Confucian China.

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

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

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