The decline of the West

I

Helmholtz observed, in a lecture of 1869 that has become famous, that “the final aim of Natural Science is to discover the motions underlying all alteration, and the motive forces thereof; that is, to resolve itself into Mechanics.” What this resolution into mechanics means is the reference of all qualitative impressions to fixed quantitative base-values, that is, to the extended and to change of place therein. It means, further—if we bear in mind the opposition of becoming and become, form and law, image and notion—the referring of the seen Nature-picture to the imagined picture of a single numerically and structurally measurable Order. The specific tendency of all Western mechanics is towards an intellectual conquest by measurement, and it is therefore obliged to look for the essence of the phenomenon in a system of constant elements that are susceptible of full and inclusive appreciation by measurement, of which Helmholtz distinguishes motion (using the word in its everyday sense) as the most important.

To the physicist this definition appears unambiguous and exhaustive, but to the sceptic who has followed out the history of this scientific conviction, it is very far from being either. To the physicist, present-day mechanics is a logical system of clear, uniquely-significant concepts and of simple, necessary relations; while to the other it is a picture distinctive of the structure of the West-European spirit, though he admits that the picture is consistent in the highest degree and most impressively convincing. It is self-evident that no practical results and discoveries can prove anything as to the “truth” of the theory, the picture.^[463] For most people, indeed, “mechanics” appears as the self-evident synthesis of Nature-impressions. But it merely appears to be so. For what is motion? Is not the postulate that everything qualitative is reducible to the motion of unalterably-alike mass-points, essentially Faustian and not common to humanity? Archimedes, for example, did not feel himself obliged to transpose the mechanics that he saw into a mental picture of motions. Is motion generally a purely mechanical quantity? Is it a word for a visual experience or is it a notion derived from that experience? Is it the number that is found by measurement of experimentally-produced facts, or the picture that is subjected to that number, that is signified by it? And if one day physics should really succeed in reaching its supposed aim, in devising a system of law-governed “motions” and of efficient forces behind them into which everything whatsoever appreciable by the senses could be fitted—would it thereby have achieved “knowledge” of that which occurs, or even made one step towards this achievement? Yet is the form-language of mechanics one whit the less dogmatic on that account? Is it not, on the contrary, a vessel of the myth like the root-words, not proceeding from experience but shaping it and, in this case, shaping it with all possible rigour? What is force? What is a cause? What is a process? Nay, even on the basis of its own definitions, has physics a specific problem at all? Has it an object that counts as such for all the centuries? Has it even one unimpeachable imagination-unit, with reference to which it may express its results?

The answer may be anticipated. Modern physics, as a science, is an immense system of indices in the form of names and numbers whereby we are enabled to work with Nature as with a machine.^[464] As such, it may have an exactly-definable end. But as a piece of history, all made up of destinies and incidents in the lives of the men who have worked in it and in the course of research itself, physics is, in point of object, methods and results alike an expression and actualization of a Culture, an organic and evolving element in the essence of that Culture, and every one of its results is a symbol. That which physics—which exists only in the waking-consciousness of the Culture-man—thinks it finds in its methods and in its results was already there, underlying and implicit in, the choice and manner of its search. Its discoveries, in virtue of their imagined content (as distinguished from their printable formulæ), have been of a purely mythic nature, even in minds so prudent as those of J. B. Mayer, Faraday and Hertz. In every Nature-law, physically exact as it may be, we are called upon to distinguish between the nameless number and the naming of it, between the plain fixation of limits^[465] and their theoretical interpretation. The formulæ represent general logical values, pure numbers—that is to say, objective space—and boundary-elements. But formulæ are dumb. The expression s = ½gt² means nothing at all unless one is able mentally to connect the letters with particular words and their symbolism. But the moment we clothe the dead signs in such words, give them flesh, body and life, and, in sum, a perceptible significance in the world, we have overstepped the limits of a mere order. θεωρία means image, vision, and it is this that makes a Nature-law out of a figure-and-letter formula. Everything exact is in itself meaningless, and every physical observation is so constituted that it proves the basis of a certain number of imaged presuppositions; and the effect of its successful issue is to make these presuppositions more convincing than ever. Apart from these, the result consists merely of empty figures. But in fact we do not and cannot get apart from them. Even if an investigator puts on one side every hypothesis that he knows as such, as soon as he sets his thought to work on the supposedly clear task, he is not controlling but being controlled by the unconscious form of it, for in living activity he is always a man of his Culture, of his age, of his school and of his tradition. Faith and “knowledge” are only two species of inner certitude, but of the two faith is the older and it dominates all the conditions of knowing, be they never so exact. And thus it is theories and not pure numbers that are the support of all natural science. The unconscious longing for that genuine science which (be it repeated) is peculiar to the spirit of Culture-man sets itself to apprehend, to penetrate, and to comprise within its grasp the world-image of Nature. Mere industrious measuring for measuring’s sake is not and never has been more than a delight for little minds. Numbers may only be the key of the secret, no more. No significant man would ever have spent himself on them for their own sake.

Kant, it is true, says in a well-known passage: “I maintain that in each and every discipline of natural philosophy it is only possible to find as much of true science as is to be found of mathematics therein.” What Kant has in mind here is pure delimitation in the field of the become, so far as law and formula, number and system can (at any particular stage) be seen in that field. But a law without words, a law, consisting merely of a series of figures read off an instrument, cannot even as an intellectual operation be completely effective in this pure state. Every savant’s experiment, be it what it may, is at the same time an instance of the kind of symbolism that rules in the savant’s ideation. All Laws formulated in words are Orders that have been activated and vitalized, filled with the very essence of the one—and only the one—Culture. As to the “necessity” which is a postulate in all exact research, here too we have to consider two kinds of necessity, viz., a necessity within the spiritual and living (for it is Destiny that the history of every individual research-act takes its course when, where and how it does) and a necessity within the known (for which the current Western name is Causality). If the pure numbers of a physical formula represent a causal necessity, the existence, the birth and the life-duration of a theory are a Destiny.

Every fact, even the simplest, contains ab initio a theory. A fact is a uniquely-occurring impression upon a waking being, and everything depends on whether that being, the being for whom it occurs or did occur, is or was Classical or Western, Gothic or Baroque. Compare the effect produced by a flash of lightning on a sparrow and on an alert physical investigator, and think how much more is contained in the observer’s “fact” than in the sparrow’s. The modern physicist is too ready to forget that even words like quantity, position, process, change of state and body represent specifically Western images. These words excite and these images mirror a feeling of significances, too subtle for verbal description, incommunicable to Classical or to Magian or to other mankind as like subtleties of their thought and feeling are incommunicable to us. And the character of scientific facts as such—that is, the mode of their becoming known—is completely governed by this feeling; and if so, then also a fortiori such intricate intellectual notions as work, tension, quantity of energy, quantity of heat, probability,^[466] every one of which contains a veritable scientific myth of its own. We think of such conceptual images as ensuing from quite unprejudiced research and, subject to certain conditions, definitively valid. But a first-rate scientist of the time of Archimedes would have declared himself, after a thorough study of our modern theoretical physics, quite unable to comprehend how anyone could assert such arbitrary, grotesque and involved notions to be Science, still less how they could be claimed as necessary consequences from actual facts. “The scientifically-justified conclusions,” he would have said, “are really so-and-so”; and thereupon he would have evolved, on the basis of the same elements made “facts” by his eyes and his mind, theories that our physicists would listen to with amazed ridicule.

For what, after all, are the basic notions that have been evolved with inward certainty of logic in the field of our physics? Polarized light-rays, errant ions, flying and colliding gas-particles, magnetic fields, electric currents and waves—are they not one and all Faustian visions, closely akin to Romanesque ornamentation, the upthrust of Gothic architecture, the Viking’s voyaging into unknown seas, the longings of Columbus and Copernicus? Did not this world of forms and pictures grow up in perfect tune with the contemporary arts of perspective oil-painting and instrumental music? Are they not, in short, our passionate directedness, our passion of the third dimension, coming to symbolic expression in the imagined Nature-picture as in the soul-image?

II

It follows then that all “knowing” of Nature, even the exactest, is based on a religious faith. The pure mechanics that the physicist has set before himself as the end-form to which it is his task (and the purpose of all this imagination-machinery) to reduce Nature, presupposes a dogma—namely, the religious world-picture of the Gothic centuries. For it is from this world-picture that the physics peculiar to the Western intellect is derived. There is no science that is without unconscious presuppositions of this kind, over which the researcher has no control and which can be traced back to the earliest days of the awakening Culture. There is no Natural science without a precedent Religion. In this point there is no distinction between the Catholic and the Materialistic views of the world—both say the same thing in different words. Even atheistic science has religion; modern mechanics exactly reproduces the contemplativeness of Faith.

When the Ionic reaches its height in Thales or the Baroque in Bacon, and man has come to the urban stage of his career, his self-assurance begins to look upon critical science, in contrast to the more primitive religion of the countryside, as the superior attitude towards things, and, holding as he thinks the only key to real knowledge, to explain religion itself empirically and psychologically—in other words, to “conquer” it with the rest. Now, the history of the higher Cultures shows that “science” is a transitory spectacle,^[467] belonging only to the autumn and winter of their life-course, and that in the cases of the Classical, the Indian, the Chinese and the Arabian thought alike a few centuries suffice for the complete exhaustion of its possibilities. Classical science faded out between the battle of Cannæ and that of Actium and made way for the world-outlook of the “second religiousness.”^[468] And from this it is possible to foresee a date at which our Western scientific thought shall have reached the limit of its evolution.

There is no justification for assigning to this intellectual form-world the primacy over others. Every critical science, like every myth and every religious belief, rests upon an inner certitude. Various as the creatures of this certitude may be, both in structure and in sound, they are not different in basic principle. Any reproach, therefore, levelled by Natural science at Religion is a boomerang. We are presumptuous and no less in supposing that we can ever set up “The Truth” in the place of “anthropomorphic” conceptions, for no other conceptions but these exist at all. Every idea that is possible at all is a mirror of the being of its author. The statement that “man created God in his own image,” valid for every historical religion, is not less valid for every physical theory, however firm its reputed basis of fact. Classical scientists conceived of light as consisting in corporeal particles proceeding from the source of light to the eye of the beholder. For the Arabian thought, even at the stage of the Jewish-Persian academies of Edessa, Resaïna and Pombaditha (and for Porphyry too), the colours and forms of things were evidenced without the intervention of a medium, being brought in a magic and “spiritual” way to the seeing-power which was conceived as substantial and resident in the eyeball. This was the doctrine^[469] taught by Ibn-al-Haitan, by Avicenna and by the “Brothers of Sincerity.”^[470] And the idea of light as a force, an impetus, was current even from about 1300 amongst the Paris Occamists who centred on Albert of Saxony, Buridan and Oresme the discoverer of co-ordinate geometry. Each Culture has made its own set of images of processes, which are true only for itself and only alive while it is itself alive and actualizing its possibilities. When a Culture is at its end and the creative element—the imaginative power, the symbolism—is extinct, there are left “empty” formulæ, skeletons of dead systems, which men of another Culture read literally, feel to be without meaning or value and either mechanically store up or else despise and forget. Numbers, formulæ, laws mean nothing and are nothing. They must have a body, and only a living mankind—projecting its livingness into them and through them, expressing itself by them, inwardly making them its own—can endow them with that. And thus there is no absolute science of physics, but only individual sciences that come, flourish and go within the individual Cultures.

The “Nature” of Classical man found its highest artistic emblem in the nude statue, and out of it logically there grew up a static of bodies, a physics of the near. The Arabian Culture owned the arabesque and the cavern-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this world-feeling there issued Alchemy with its ideas of mysterious efficient substantialities like the “philosophical mercury,” which is neither a material nor a property but some thing that underlies the coloured existence of metals and can transmute one metal into another.^[471] And the outcome of Faustian man’s Nature idea was a dynamic of unlimited span, a physics of the distant. To the Classical therefore belong the conceptions of matter and form, to the Arabian (quite Spinozistically) the idea of substances with visible or secret attributes,^[472] and to the Faustian the idea of force and mass. Apollinian theory is a quiet meditation, Magian a silent knowledge of Alchemy the means of Grace (even here the religious source of mechanics is to be discerned), and the Faustian is from the very outset a working hypothesis.^[473] The Greek asked, what is the essence of visible being? We ask, what possibility is there of mastering the invisible motive-forces of becoming? For them, contented absorption in the visible; for us, masterful questioning of Nature and methodical experiment.

As with the formulation of problems and the methods of dealing with them, so also with the basic concepts. They are symbols in each case of the one and only the one Culture. The Classical root-words ἄπειρον, ἀρχή, μορφή, ὕλη, are not translatable into our speech. To render ἀρχή by “prime-stuff” is to eliminate its Apollinian connotation, to make the hollow shell of the word sound an alien note. That which Classical man saw before him as “motion” in space, he understood as ἀλλοίωσις, change of position of bodies; we, from the way in which we experience motion, have deduced the concept of a process, a “going forward,” thereby expressing and emphasizing that element of directional energy which our thought necessarily predicates in the courses of Nature. The Classical critic of Nature took the visible juxtaposition of states as the original diversity, and specified the famous four elements of Empedocles—namely, earth as the rigid-corporeal, water as the non-rigid-corporeal and air as the incorporeal, together with fire, which is so much the strongest of all optical impressions that the Classical spirit could have no doubt of its bodiliness. The Arabian “elements,” on the contrary, are ideal and implicit in the secret constitutions and constellations which define the phenomenon of things for the eye. If we try to get a little nearer to this feeling, we shall find that the opposition of rigid and fluid means something quite different for the Syrian from what it means for the Aristotelian Greek, the latter seeing in it different degrees of bodiliness and the former different magic attributes. With the former therefore arises the image of the chemical element as a sort of magic substance that a secret causality makes to appear out of things (and to vanish into them again) and which is subject even to the influence of the stars. In Alchemy there is deep scientific doubt as to the plastic actuality of things—of the “somata” of Greek mathematicians, physicists and poets—and it dissolves and destroys the soma in the hope of finding its essence. It is an iconoclastic movement just as truly as those of Islam and the Byzantine Bogomils were so. It reveals a deep disbelief in the tangible figure of phenomenal Nature, the figure of her that to the Greek was sacrosanct. The conflict concerning the person of Christ which manifested itself in all the early Councils and led to the Nestorian and Monophysite secessions is an alchemistic problem.^[474] It would never have occurred to a Classical physicist to investigate things while at the same time denying or annihilating their perceivable form. And for that very reason there was no Classical chemistry, any more than there was any theorizing on the substance as against the manifestations of Apollo.

The rise of a chemical method of the Arabian style betokens a new world-consciousness. The discovery of it, which at one blow made an end of Apollinian natural science, of mechanical statics, is linked with the enigmatic name of Hermes Trismegistus,^[475] who is supposed to have lived in Alexandria at the same time as Plotinus and Diophantus. Similarly it was just at the time of the definite emancipation of the Western mathematic by Newton and Leibniz that the Western chemistry^[476] was freed from Arabic form by Stahl (1660-1734) and his Phlogiston theory. Chemistry and mathematic alike became pure analysis. Already Paracelsus (1493-1541) had transformed the Magian effort to make gold into a pharmaceutical science—a transformation in which one cannot but surmise an altered world-feeling. Then Robert Boyle (1626-1691) devised the analytical method and with it the Western conception of the Element. But the ensuing changes must not be misinterpreted. That which is called the founding of modern chemistry and has Stahl and Lavoisier at its turning-points is anything but a building-up of “chemical” ideas, in so far as chemistry implies the alchemistic outlook on Nature. It is in fact the end of genuine chemistry, its dissolution into the comprehensive system of pure dynamic, its assimilation into the mechanical outlook which the Baroque age had established through Galileo and Newton. The elements of Empedocles designate states of bodiliness (bezeichnen ein körperliches Sichverhalten) but the elements of Lavoisier, whose combustion-theory followed promptly upon the isolation of oxygen in 1771, designate energy-systems accessible to human will, “rigid” and “fluid” becoming mere terms to describe tension-relations between molecules. By our analysis and synthesis, Nature is not merely asked or persuaded but forced. The modern chemistry is a chapter of the modern physics of Deed.

What we call Statics, Chemistry and Dynamics—words that as used in modern science are merely traditional distinctions without deeper meaning—are really the respective physical systems of the Apollinian, Magian and Faustian souls, each of which grew up in its own Culture and was limited as to validity to the same. Corresponding to these sciences, each to each, we have the mathematics of Euclidean geometry, Algebra and Higher Analysis, and the arts of statue, arabesque and fugue. We may differentiate these three kinds of physics (bearing in mind of course that other Cultures may and in fact do give rise to other kinds) by their standpoints towards the problem of motion, and call them mechanical orderings of states, secret forces and processes respectively.

III

Now, the tendency of human thought (which is always causally disposed) to reduce the image of Nature to the simplest possible quantitative form-units that can be got by causal reasoning, measuring and counting—in a word, by mechanical differentiation—leads necessarily in Classical, Western and every other possible physics, to an atomic theory. Of Indian and Chinese science we know hardly more than the fact they once existed, and the Arabian is so complicated that even now it seems to defy presentation. But we do know our own and the Apollinian sciences well enough to observe, here too, a deeply symbolical opposition.

The Classical atoms are miniature forms, the Western minimal quanta, and quanta, too, of energy. On the one hand perceptibility, sensuous nearness, and on the other, abstractness are the basic conditions of the idea. The atomistic notions of modern physics—which include not only the Daltonian or “chemical” atom but also the electrons^[477] and the quanta of thermodynamics—make more and more demands upon that truly Faustian power of inner vision which many branches of higher mathematics (such as the Non-Euclidean geometries and the Theory of Groups) postulate, and which is not at the disposal of laymen. A quantum of action is an extension-element conceived without regard to sensible quality of any kind, which eludes all relation with sight and touch, for which the expression “shape” has no meaning whatever—something therefore which would be utterly inconceivable to a Classical researcher. Such, already, were Leibniz’s “Monads”^[478] and such, superlatively, are the constituents of Rutherford’s picture of the atom as positively-charged nucleus with planetary negative electrons, and of the picture that Niels Bohr has imagined by working these in with the “quanta” of Planck.^[479] The atoms of Leucippus and Democritus were different in form and magnitude, that is to say, they were purely plastic units, “indivisible,” as their name asserts, but only plastically indivisible. The atoms of Western physics, for which “indivisibility” has quite another meaning, resemble the figures and themes of music; their being or essence consisting in vibration and radiation, and their relation to the processes of Nature being that of the “motive” to the “movement.”^[480] Classical physics examines the aspect, Western the working, of these ultimate elements in the picture of the Become; in the one, the basic notions are notions of stuff and form, in the other they are notions of capacity and intensity.

There is a Stoicism and there is a Socialism of the atom, the words describing the static-plastic and the dynamic-contrapuntal ideas of it respectively. The relations of these ideas to the images of the corresponding ethics is such that every law and every definition takes these into account. On the one hand—Democritus’s multitude of confused atoms, put there, patient, knocked about by the blind chance that he as well as Sophocles called ἀνάγκη, hunted like Œdipus. On the other hand—systems of abstract force-points working in unison, aggressive, energetically dominating space (as “field”), overcoming resistances like Macbeth. The opposition of basic feelings makes that of the mechanical Nature-pictures. According to Leucippus the atoms fly about in the void “of themselves”; Democritus merely regards shock and countershock as a form of change of place. Aristotle explains individual movements as accidental, Empedocles speaks of love and hate, Anaxagoras of meetings and partings. All these are elements also of Classical tragedy; the figures on the Attic stage are related to one another just so. Further, and logically, they are the elements of Classical politics. There we have minute cities, political atoms ranged along coasts and on islands, each jealously standing for itself, yet ever needing support, shut-in and shy to the point of absurdity, buffeted hither and thither by the planless orderless happenings of Classical history, rising to-day and ruined to-morrow. And in contrast—the dynastic states of our 17th and 18th Centuries, political fields of force, with cabinets and great diplomats as effective centres of purposeful direction and comprehensive vision. The spirit of Classical history and the spirit of Western history can only be really understood by considering the two souls as an opposition. And we can say the same of the atom-idea, regarded as the basis of the respective physics. Galileo who created the concept of force and the Milesians who created that of ἀρχή, Democritus and Leibniz, Archimedes and Helmholtz, are “contemporaries,” members of the same intellectual phases of quite different Cultures.

But the inner relationship between atom-theory and ethic goes further. It has been shown how the Faustian soul—whose being consists in the overcoming of presence, whose feeling is loneliness and whose yearning is infinity—puts its need of solitude, distance and abstraction into all its actualities, into its public life, its spiritual and its artistic form-worlds alike. This pathos of distance (to use Nietzsche’s expression) is peculiarly alien to the Classical, in which everything human demanded nearness, support and community. It is this that distinguishes the spirit of the Baroque from that of the Ionic, the culture of the Ancien Régime from that of Periclean Athens. And this pathos, which distinguishes the heroic doer from the heroic sufferer, appears also in the picture of Western physics as tension. It is tension that is missing in the science of Democritus; for in the principle of shock and countershock it is denied by implication that there is a force commanding space and identical with space. And, correspondingly, the element of Will is absent from the Classical soul-image. Between Classical men, or states, or views of the world, there was—for all the quarrelling and envy and hatred—no inner tension, no deep and urging need of distance, solitude, ascendancy; and consequently there was none between the atoms of the Cosmos either. The principle of tension (developed in the potential theory), which is wholly untranslatable into Classical tongues and incommunicable to Classical minds, has become for Western physics fundamental. Its content follows from the notion of energy, the Will-to-Power in Nature, and therefore it is for us just as necessary as for the Classical thought it is impossible.

IV

Every atomic theory, therefore, is a myth and not an experience. In it the Culture, through the contemplative-creative power of its great physicists, reveals its inmost essence and very self. It is only a preconceived idea of criticism that extension exists in itself and independently of the form-feeling and world-feeling of the knower. The thinker, in imagining that he can cut out the factor of Life, forgets that knowing is related to the known as direction is to extension and that it is only through the living quality of direction that what is felt extends into distance and depth and becomes space. The cognized structure of the extended is a projection of the cognizing being.

We have already^[481] shown the decisive importance of the depth-experience, which is identical with the awakening of a soul and therefore with the creation of the outer world belonging to that soul. The mere sense-impression contains only length and breadth, and it is the living and necessary act of interpretation—which, like everything else living, possesses direction, motion and irreversibility (the qualities that our consciousness synthesizes in the word Time)—that adds depth and thereby fashions actuality and world. Life itself enters into the experiences as third dimension. The double meaning of the word “far,” which refers both to future and to horizon, betrays the deeper meaning of this dimension, through which extension as such is evoked. The Becoming stiffens and passes and is at once the Become; Life stiffens and passes and is at once the three-dimensional Space of the known. It is common ground for Descartes and Parmenides that thinking and being, i.e., imagined and extended, are identical. “Cogito, ergo sum” is simply the formulation of the depth-experience—I cognize, and therefore I am in space. But in the style of this cognizing, and therefore of the cognition-product, the prime-symbol of the particular Culture comes into play. The perfected extension of the Classical consciousness is one of sensuous and bodily presence. The Western consciousness achieves extension, after its own fashion, as transcendental space, and as it thinks its space more and more transcendentally it develops by degrees the abstract polarity of Capacity and Intensity that so completely contrasts with the Classical visual polarity of Matter and Form.

But it follows from this that in the known there can be no reappearance of living time. For this has already passed into the known, into constant “existence,” as Depth, and hence duration (i.e., timelessness) and extension are identical. Only the knowing possesses the mark of direction. The application of the word “time” to the imaginary and measurable time-dimension of physics is a mistake. The only question is whether it is possible or not to avoid the mistake. If one substitutes the word “Destiny” for “time” in any physical enunciation, one feels at once that pure Nature does not contain Time. The form-world of physics extends just as far as the cognate form-world of number and notion extend, and we have seen that (notwithstanding Kant) there is not and cannot be the slightest relation of any sort between mathematical number and Time. And yet this is controverted by the fact of motion in the picture of the world-around. It is the unsolved and unsolvable problem of the Eleatics—being (or thinking) and motion are incompatible; motion “is” not (is only “apparent”).

And here, for the second time, Natural science becomes dogmatic and mythological. The words Time and Destiny, for anyone who uses them instinctively, touch Life itself in its deepest depths—life as a whole, which is not to be separated from lived-experience. Physics, on the other hand—i.e., the observing Reason—must separate them. The livingly-experienced “in-itself,” mentally emancipated from the act of the observer and become object, dead, inorganic, rigid, is now “Nature,” something open to exhaustive mathematical treatment. In this sense the knowledge of Nature is an activity of measurement. All the same, we live even when we are observing and therefore the thing we are observing lives with us. The element in the Nature-picture in virtue of which it not merely from moment to moment is, but in a continuous flow with and around us becomes, is the copula of the waking-consciousness and its world. This element is called movement, and it contradicts Nature as a picture, but it represents the history of this picture. And therefore, as precisely as Understanding is abstracted (by means of words) from feeling and mathematical space from light-resistances (“things”^[482]), so also physical “time” is abstracted from the impression of motion.

Physics investigates Nature, and consequently it knows time only as a length. But the physicist lives in the midst of the history of this Nature, and therefore he is forced to conceive motion as a mathematically determinable magnitude, as a concretion of the pure numbers obtained in the experiment and written down in formulæ. “Physics,” says Kirchhoff, “is the complete and simple description of motions.” That indeed has always been its object. But the question is one not of motions in the picture but of motions of the picture. Motion, in the Nature of physics, is nothing else but that metaphysical something which gives rise to the consciousness of a succession. The known is timeless and alien to motion; its state of becomeness implies this. It is the organic sequence of knowns that gives the impression of a motion. The physicist receives the word as an impression not upon “reason” but upon the whole man, and the function of that man is not “Nature” only but the whole world. And that is the world-as-history. “Nature,” then, is an expression of the Culture in each instance.^[483] All physics is treatment of the motion-problem—in which the life-problem itself is implicit—not as though it could one day be solved, but in spite of, nay because of, the fact that it is insoluble. The secret of motion awakens in man the apprehension of death.^[484]

If, then, Nature-knowledge is a subtle kind of self-knowledge—Nature understood as picture, as mirror of man—the attempt to solve the motion-problem is an attempt of knowledge to get on the track of its own secret, its own Destiny.

V

Only physiognomic tact can, if creative, succeed in this, and in fact it has done so from time immemorial in the arts, particularly tragic poetry. It is the thinking man who is perplexed by movement; for the contemplative it is self-evident. And however completely the former can reduce his perplexities to system, the result is systematic and not physiognomic, pure extension logically and numerically ordered, nothing living but something become and dead.

It is this that led Goethe, who was a poet and not a computer, to observe that “Nature has no system. It has Life, it is Life and succession from an unknown centre to an unknowable bourne.” For one who does not live it but knows it, Nature has a system. But it is only a system and nothing more, and motion is a contradiction in it. The contradiction may be covered up by adroit formulation, but it lives on in the fundamental concepts. The shock and countershock of Democritus, the entelechy of Aristotle, the notions of force from the “impetus” of 14th-Century Occamists to the quantum-theory of radiation, all contain it. Let the reader conceive of the motion within a physical system as the ageing of that system (as in fact it is, as lived-experience of the observer), and he will feel at once and distinctly the fatefulness immanent in, the unconquerably organic content of, the word “motion” and all its derivative ideas. But Mechanics, having nothing to do with ageing, should have nothing to do with motion either, and consequently, since no scientific system is conceivable without a motion-problem in it, a complete and self-contained mechanics is an impossibility. Somewhere or other there is always an organic starting-point in the system where immediate Life enters it—an umbilical cord that connects the mind-child with the life-mother, the thought with the thinker.

This puts the fundamentals of Faustian and Apollinian Nature-science in quite another light. No “Nature” is pure—there is always something of history in it. If the man is ahistorical, like the Greek, so that the totality of his impressions of the world is absorbed in a pure point-formed present, his Nature-image is static, self-contained (that is, walled against past and future) in every individual moment. Time as magnitude figures in Greek physics as little as it does in Aristotle’s entelechy-idea. If, on the other hand, the Man is historically constituted, the image formed is dynamic. Number, the definitive evaluation of the become, is in the case of ahistoric man Measure, and in that of the historical man Function. One measures only what is present and one follows up only what has a past and a future, a course. And the effect of this difference is that the inner inconsistencies of the motion-problem are covered up in Classical theories and forced into the foreground in Western.

History is eternal becoming and therefore eternal future; Nature is become and therefore eternally past.^[485] And here a strange inversion seems to have taken place—the Becoming has lost its priority over the Become. When the intellect looks back from its sphere, the Become, the aspect of life is reversed, the idea of Destiny which carries aim and future in it having turned into the mechanical principle of cause-and-effect of which the centre of gravity lies in the past. The spatially-experienced is promoted to rank above the temporal living, and time is replaced by a length in a spatial world-system. And, since in the creative experience extension follows from direction, the spatial from life, the human understanding imports life as a process into the inorganic space of its imagination. While life looks on space as something functionally belonging to itself, intellect looks upon life as something in space. Destiny asks: “Whither?”, Causality asks: “Whence?” To establish scientifically means, starting from the become and actualized, to search for “causes” by going back along a mechanically-conceived course, that is to say, by treating becoming as a length. But it is not possible to live backwards, only to think backwards. Not Time and Destiny are reversible, but only that which the physicist calls “time” and admits into his formulæ as divisible, and preferably as negative or imaginary quantities.

The perplexity is always there, though it has rarely been seen to be originally and necessarily inherent. In the Classical science the Eleatics, declining to admit the necessity of thinking of Nature as in motion, set up against it the logical view that thinking is a being, with the corollary that known and extended are identical and knowledge and becoming therefore irreconcilable. Their criticisms have not been, and cannot be, refuted. But they did not hinder the evolution of Classical physics, which was a necessary expression of the Apollinian soul and as such superior to logical difficulties. In the “classical” mechanics so-called of the Baroque, founded by Galileo and Newton, an irreproachable solution of the motion-problem on dynamic lines has been sought again and again. The history of the concept of force, which has been stated and restated with all the tireless passion of a thought that feels its own self endangered by a difficulty, is nothing but the history of endeavours to find a form that is unimpeachable, mathematically and conceptually, for motion. The last serious attempt—which failed like the rest, and of necessity—was Hertz’s.

Without discovering the true source of all perplexities (no physicist as yet has done that), Hertz tried to eliminate the notion of force entirely—rightly feeling that error in all mechanical systems has to be looked for in one or another of the basic concepts—and to build up the whole picture of physics on the quantities of time, space and mass. But he did not observe that it is Time itself (which as direction-factor is present in the force-concept) that is the organic element without which a dynamic theory cannot be expressed and with which a clean solution cannot be got. Moreover, quite apart from this, the concepts force, mass and motion constitute a dogmatic unit. They so condition one another that the application of one of them tacitly involves both the others from the outset. The whole Apollinian conception of the motion-problem is implicit in the root-word ἀρχή, the whole Western conception of it in the force-idea. The notion of mass is only the complement of that of force. Newton, a deeply religious nature, was only bringing the Faustian world-feeling to expression when, to elucidate the words “force” and “motion,” he said that masses are points of attack for force and carriers for motion. So the 13th-Century Mystics had conceived of God and his relation to world. Newton no doubt rejected the metaphysical element in his famous saying “hypotheses non fingo,” but all the same he was metaphysical through and through in the founding of his mechanics. Force is the mechanical Nature-picture of western man; what Will is to his soul-picture and infinite Godhead in his world-picture. The primary ideas of this physics stood firm long before the first physicist was born, for they lay in the earliest religious world-consciousness of our Culture.

VI

With this it becomes manifest that the physical notion of Necessity, too, has a religious origin. It must not be forgotten that the mechanical necessity that rules in what our intellects comprehend as Nature is founded upon another necessity which is organic and fateful in Life itself. The latter creates, the former restricts. One follows from inward certitude, the other from demonstration; that is the distinction between tragic and technical, historical and physical logic.

There are, further, differences within the necessity postulated and assumed by science (that of cause-and-effect) which have so far eluded the keenest sight. We are confronted here with a question at once of very great difficulty and of superlative importance. A Nature-knowledge is (however philosophy may express the relation) a function of knowing, which is in each case knowing in a particular style. A scientific necessity therefore has the style of the appropriate intellect, and this brings morphological differences into the field at once. It is possible to see a strict necessity in Nature even where it may be impossible to express it in natural laws. In fact natural laws, which for us are self-evidently the proper expression-form in science, are not by any means so for the men of other Cultures. They presuppose a quite special form, the distinctively Faustian form, of understanding and therefore of Nature-knowing. There is nothing inherently absurd in the conception of a mechanical necessity wherein each individual case is morphologically self-contained and never exactly reproduced, in which therefore the acquisitions of knowledge cannot be put into consistently-valid formulæ. In such a case Nature would appear (to put it metaphorically) as an unending decimal that was also non-recurring, destitute of periodicity. And so, undoubtedly, it was conceived by Classical minds—the feeling of it manifestly underlies their primary physical concepts. For example, the proper motion of Democritus’s atoms is such as to exclude any possibility of calculating motions in advance.

Nature-laws are forms of the known in which an aggregate of individual cases are brought together as a unit of higher degree. Living Time is ignored—that is, it does not matter whether, when or how often the case arises, for the question is not of chronological sequence but of mathematical consequence.^[486] But in the consciousness that no power in the world can shake this calculation lies our will to command over Nature. That is Faustian. It is only from this standpoint that miracles appear as breaches of the laws of Nature. Magian man saw in them merely the exercise of a power that was not common to all, not in any way a contradiction of the laws of Nature. And Classical man, according to Protagoras, was only the measure and not the creator of things—a view that unconsciously forgoes all conquest of Nature through the discovery and application of laws.

We see, then, that the causality-principle, in the form in which it is self-evidently necessary for us—the agreed basis of truth for our mathematics, physics and philosophy—is a Western and, more strictly speaking, a Baroque phenomenon. It cannot be proved, for every proof set forth in a Western language and every experiment conducted by a Western mind presupposes itself. In every problem, the enunciation contains the proof in germ. The method of a science is the science itself. Beyond question, the notion of laws of Nature and the conception of physics as “scientia experimentalis,”^[487] which has held ever since Roger Bacon, contains a priori this specific kind of necessity. The Classical mode of regarding Nature—the alter ego of the Classical mode of being—on the contrary, does not contain it, and yet it does not appear that the scientific position is weakened in logic thereby. If we work carefully through the utterances of Democritus, Anaxagoras, and Aristotle (in whom is contained the whole sum of Classical Nature-speculation), and, above all, if we examine the connotations of key-terms like ἀλλοίωσις, ἀνάγκη, ἐντελέχεια, we look with astonishment into a world-image totally unlike our own. This world-image is self-sufficing and therefore, for this definite sort of mankind, unconditionally true. And causality in our sense plays no part therein.

The alchemist or philosopher of the Arabian Culture, too, assumes a necessity within his world-cavern that is utterly and completely different from the necessity of dynamics. There is no causal nexus of law-form but only one cause, God, immediately underlying every effect. To believe in Nature-laws would, from this standpoint, be to doubt the almightiness of God. If a rule seems to emerge, it is because it pleases God so; but to suppose that this rule was a necessity would be to yield to a temptation of the Devil. This was the attitude also of Carneades, Plotinus and the Neo-Pythagoreans.^[488] This necessity underlies the Gospels as it does the Talmud and the Avesta, and upon it rests the technique of alchemy.

The conception of number as function is related to the dynamic principle of cause-and-effect. Both are creations of the same intellect, expression-forms of the same spirituality, formative principles of the same objectivized and “become” Nature. In fact the physics of Democritus differs from the physics of Newton in that the chosen starting-point of the one is the optically-given while that of the other is abstract relations that have been deduced from it. The “facts” of Apollinian Nature-knowledge are things, and they lie on the surface of the known, but the facts of Faustian science are relations, which in general are invisible to lay eyes, which have to be mastered intellectually, which require for their communication a code-language that only the expert researcher can fully understand. The Classical, static, necessity is immediately evident in the changing phenomena, while the dynamic causation-principle prevails beyond things and its tendency is to weaken, or to abolish even, their sensible actuality. Consider, for example, the world of significance that is connected, under present-day hypotheses, with the expression “a magnet.”

The principle of the Conservation of Energy, which since its enunciation by J. R. Mayer has been regarded in all seriousness as a plain conceptual necessity, is in fact a redescription of the dynamic principle of causality by means of the physical concept of force. The appeal to “experience,” and the controversy as to whether judgment is necessary or empirical—i.e., in the language of Kant (who greatly deceived himself about the highly-fluid boundaries between the two), whether it is a priori or a posteriori certain—are characteristically Western. Nothing seems to us more self-evident and unambiguous than “experience” as the source of exact science. The Faustian experiment, based on working hypotheses and employing the methods of measurement, is nothing but the systematic and exhaustive exploitation of this “experience.” But no one has noticed that a whole world-view is implicit in such a concept of “experience” with its aggressive dynamic connotation, and that there is not and cannot be “experience” in this pregnant sense for men of other Cultures. When we decline to recognize the scientific results of Anaxagoras or Democritus as experiential results, it does not mean that these Classical thinkers were incapable of interpreting and merely threw off fancies, but that we miss in their generalizations that causal element which for us constitutes experience in our sense of the word. Manifestly, we have never yet given adequate thought to the singularity of this, the pure Faustian, conception of experience. The contrast between it and faith is obvious—and entirely superficial. For indeed exact sensuous-intellectual experience is in point of structure completely congruent with that heart-experience (as we may well call it), that illumination which deep religious natures of the West (Pascal, for instance, whom one and the same necessity made mathematician and Jansenist) have known in the significant moments of their being. Experience means to us an activity of the intellect, which does not resignedly confine itself to receiving, acknowledging and arranging momentary and purely present impressions, but seeks them out and calls them up in order to overcome them in their sensuous presence and to bring them into an unbounded unity in which their sensuous discreteness is dissolved. Experience in our sense possesses the tendency from particular to infinite. And for that very reason it is in contradiction with the feeling of Classical science. What for us is the way to acquire experience is for the Greek the way to lose it. And therefore he kept away from the drastic method of experiment; therefore his physics, instead of being a mighty system of worked-out laws and formulæ that strong-handedly override the sense-present (“only knowledge is power”), is an aggregate of impressions—well ordered, intensified by sensuous imagery, clean-edged—which leaves Nature intact in its self-completeness. Our exact Natural science is imperative, the Classical is θεωρία in the literal sense, the result of passive contemplativeness.

VII

We can now say without any hesitation that the form-world of a Natural science corresponds to those of the appropriate mathematic, the appropriate religion, the appropriate art. A deep mathematician—by which is meant not a master-computer but a man, any man, who feels the spirit of numbers living within him—realizes that through it he “knows God.” Pythagoras and Plato knew this as well as Pascal and Leibniz did so. Terentius Varro, in his examination of the old Roman religion (dedicated to Julius Cæsar), distinguished with Roman seriousness between the theologia civilis, the sum of officially-recognized belief, the theologia mythica, the imagination-world of poets and artists, and the theologia physica of philosophical speculation. Applying this to the Faustian Culture, that which Thomas Aquinas and Luther, Calvin and Loyola taught belongs to the first category, Dante and Goethe belong to the second; and to the third belongs scientific physics, inasmuch as behind its formulæ there are images.

Not only primitive man and the child, but also the higher animals spontaneously evolve from the small everyday experiences an image of Nature which contains the sum of technical indications observed as recurrent. The eagle “knows” the moment at which to swoop down on the prey; the singing-bird sitting on the eggs “knows” the approach of the marten; the deer “finds” the place where there is food. In man, this experience of all the senses has narrowed and deepened itself into experience of the eye. But, as the habit of verbal speech has now been superadded, understanding comes to be abstracted from seeing, and thenceforward develops independently as reasoning; to the instantly-comprehending technique is added the reflective theory. Technique applies itself to visible near things and plain needs, theory to the distance and the terrors of the invisible. By the side of the petty knowledge of everyday life it sets up belief. And still they evolve, there is a new knowledge and a new and higher technique, and to the myth there is added the cult. The one teaches how to know the “numina,” the other how to conquer them. For theory in the eminent sense is religious through and through. It is only in quite late states that scientific theory evolves out of religious, through men having become aware of methods. Apart from this there is little alteration. The image-world of physics remains mythic, its procedure remains a cult of conjuring the powers in things, and the images that it forms and the methods that it uses remain generically dependent upon those of the appropriate religion.^[489]

From the later days of the Renaissance onward, the notion of God has steadily approximated, in the spirit of every man of high significance, to the idea of pure endless Space. The God of Ignatius Loyola’s exercitia spiritualis is the God also of Luther’s “ein’ feste Burg,” of the Improperia of Palestrina and the Cantatas of Bach. He is no longer the Father of St. Francis of Assisi and the high-vaulted cathedrals, the personally-present, caring and mild God felt by Gothic painters like Giotto and Stephen Lochner, but an impersonal principle; unimaginable, intangible, working mysteriously in the Infinite. Every relic of personality dissolves into insensible abstraction, such a divinity as only instrumental music of the grand style is capable of representing, a divinity before which painting breaks down and drops into the background. This God-feeling it was that formed the scientific world-image of the West, its “Nature,” its “experience” and therefore its theories and its methods, in direct contradiction to those of the Classical. The force which moves the mass—that is what Michelangelo painted in the Sistine Chapel; that is what we feel growing more and more intense from the archetype of Il Gesù to the climax in the cathedral façades of Della Porta and Maderna, and from Heinrich Schütz to the transcendent tone-worlds of 18th-Century church music; that is what in Shakespearian tragedy fills with world-becoming scenes widened to infinity. And that is what Galileo and Newton captured in formulæ and concepts.

The word “God” rings otherwise under the vaulting of Gothic cathedrals or in the cloisters of Maulbronn and St. Gallen than in the basilicas of Syria and the temples of Republican Rome. The character of the Faustian cathedral is that of the forest. The mighty elevation of the nave above the flanking aisles, in contrast to the flat roof of the basilica; the transformation of the columns, which with base and capital had been set as self-contained individuals in space, into pillars and clustered-pillars that grow up out of the earth and spread on high into an infinite subdivision and interlacing of lines and branches; the giant windows by which the wall is dissolved and the interior filled with mysterious light—these are the architectural actualizing of a world-feeling that had found the first of all its symbols in the high forest of the Northern plains, the deciduous forest with its mysterious tracery, its whispering of ever-mobile foliage over men’s heads, its branches straining through the trunks to be free of earth. Think of Romanesque ornamentation and its deep affinity to the sense of the woods. The endless, lonely, twilight wood became and remained the secret wistfulness in all Western building-forms, so that when the form-energy of the style died down—in late Gothic as in closing Baroque—the controlled abstract line-language resolved itself immediately into naturalistic branches, shoots, twigs and leaves.

Cypresses and pines, with their corporeal and Euclidean effect, could never have become symbols of unending space. But the oaks, beeches and lindens with the fitful light-flecks playing in their shadow-filled volume are felt as bodiless, boundless, spiritual. The stem of the cypress finds conclusive fulfilment of its vertical tendency in the defined columniation of its cone-masses, but that of an oak seems, ever restless and unsatisfied, to strain beyond its summit. In the ash, the victory of the upstriving branches over the unity of the crown seems actually to be won. Its aspect is of something dissolving, something expanding into space, and it was for this probably that the World-Ash Yggdrasil became a symbol in the Northern mythology. The rustle of the woods, a charm that no Classical poet ever felt—for it lies beyond the possibilities of Apollinian Nature-feeling—stands with its secret questions “whence? whither?” its merging of presence into eternity, in a deep relation with Destiny, with the feeling of History and Duration, with the quality of Direction that impels the anxious, caring, Faustian soul towards infinitely-distant Future. And for that reason the organ, that roars deep and high through our churches in tones which, compared with the plain solid notes of aulos and cithara, seem to know neither limit nor restraint, is the instrument of instruments in Western devotions. Cathedral and organ form a symbolic unity like temple and statue. The history of organ-building, one of the most profound and moving chapters of our musical history, is a history of a longing for the forest, a longing to speak in the language of that true temple of Western God-fearing. From the verse of Wolfram von Eschenbach to the music of “Tristan” this longing has borne fruit unceasingly. Orchestra-tone strove tirelessly in the 18th Century towards a nearer kinship with the organ-tone. The word “schwebend”—meaningless as applied to Classical things—is important alike in the theory of music, in oil-painting, in architecture and in the dynamic physics of the Baroque. Stand in a high wood of mighty stems while the storm is tearing above, and you will comprehend instantly the full meaning of the concept of a force which moves mass.

Out of such a primary feeling in the existence that has become thoughtful there arises, then, an idea of the Divine immanent in the world-around, and this idea becomes steadily more definite. The thoughtful percipient takes in the impression of motion in outer Nature. He feels about him an almost indescribable alien life of unknown powers, and traces the origin of these effects to “numina,” to The Other, inasmuch as this Other also possesses Life. Astonishment at alien motion is the source of religion and of physics both; respectively, they are the elucidations of Nature (world-around) by the soul and by the reason. The “powers” are the first object both of fearful or loving reverence and of critical investigation. There is a religious experience and a scientific experience.

Now it is important to observe how the consciousness of the Culture intellectually concretes its primary “numina.” It imposes significant words—names—on them and there conjures (seizes or bounds) them. By virtue of the Name they are subject to the intellectual power of the man who possesses the Name, and (as has been shown already) the whole of philosophy, the whole of science, and everything that is related in any way to “knowing” is at the very bottom nothing but an infinitely-refined mode of applying the name-magic of the primitive to the “alien.” The pronouncement of the right name (in physics, the right concept) is an incantation. Deities and basic notions of science alike come into being first as vocable names, with which is linked an idea that tends to become more and more sensuously definite. The outcome of a Numen is a Deus, the outcome of a notion is an idea. In the mere naming of “thing-in-itself,” “atom,” “energy,” “gravitation,” “cause,” “evolution” and the like is for most learned men the same sense of deliverance as there was for the peasant of Latium in the words “Ceres,” “Consus,” “Janus,” “Vesta.”^[490]

For the Classical world-feeling, conformably to the Apollinian depth-experience and its symbolism, the individual body was “Being.” Logically therefore the form of this body, as it presented itself in the light, was felt as its essence, as the true purport of the word “being.” What has not shape, what is not a shape, is not at all. On the basis of this feeling (which was of an intensity that we can hardly imagine) the Classical spirit created as counter-concept^[491] to the form of “The Other” Non-Form viz., stuff, ἀρχή, ὕλη, that which in itself possesses no being and is merely complement to the actual “Ent,” representing a secondary and corollary necessity. In these conditions, it is easy to see how the Classical pantheon inevitably shaped itself, as a higher mankind side by side with the common mankind, as a set of perfectly-formed bodies, of high possibilities incarnate and present, but in the unessential of stuff not distinguished and therefore subject to the same cosmic and tragic necessity.

It is otherwise that the Faustian world-feeling experiences depth. Here the sum of true Being appears as pure efficient Space, which is being. And therefore what is sensuously felt, what is very significantly designated the plenum (das Raumerfüllende), is felt as a fact of the second order, as something questionable or specious, as a resistance that must be overcome by philosopher or physicist before the true content of Being can be discovered. Western scepticism has never been directed against Space, always against tangible things only. Space is the higher idea—force is only a less abstract expression for it—and it is only as a counter-concept to space that mass arises. For mass is what is in space and is logically and physically dependent upon space. From the assumption of a wave-motion of light, which underlies the conception of light as a form of energy, the assumption of a corresponding mass, the “luminiferous æther” necessarily followed. A definition of mass and ascription of properties to mass follows from the definition of force (and not vice versa) with all the necessity of a symbol. All Classical notions of substantiality, however they differed amongst themselves as realist or idealist, distinguish a “to-be-formed,” that is, a Nonent, which only receives closer definition from the basic concept of form, whatever this form may be in the particular philosophical system. All Western notions of substantiality distinguish a “to-be-moved,” which also is a negative, no doubt, but one polar to a different positive. Form and non-form, force and non-force—these words render as clearly as may be the polarities that in the two Cultures underlie the world-impression and contain all its modes. That which comparative philosophy has hitherto rendered inaccurately and misleadingly by the one word “matter” signifies in the one case the substratum of shape, in the other the substratum of force. No two notions could differ more completely. For here it is the feeling of God, a sense of values, that is speaking. The Classical deity is superlative shape, the Faustian superlative force. The “Other” is the Ungodly to which the spirit will not accord the dignity of Being; to the Apollinian world-feeling this ungodly “other” is substance without shape, to the Faustian it is substance without force.