VIII
Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture “advances,” this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, and had not the morphology of history remained to this day an almost unexplored field, the supposedly universal mythopoetic power would long ago have been found to be limited to particular periods. It would have been realized that this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes, traits and symbols—like and consistent amongst themselves—belongs most decidedly not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the springtimes of great Cultures.[492] Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found. There—it must be.
I make the assumption that that which a primitive folk—like the Egyptians of Thinite times, the Jews and Persians before Cyrus,[493] the heroes of the Mycenæan burghs and the Germans of the Migrations—possesses in the way of religious ideas is not yet myth in the higher sense. It may well be a sum of scattered and irregular traits, of cults adhering to names, fragmentary saga-pictures, but it is not yet a divine order, a mythic organism, and I no more regard this as myth than I regard the ornament of that stage as art. And, be it said, the greatest caution is necessary in dealing with the symbols and sagas current to-day, or even those current centuries ago, amongst ostensibly primitive peoples, for in those thousands of years every country in the world has been more or less affected by some high Culture alien to it.
There are, therefore, as many form-worlds of great myth as there are Cultures and early architectures. The antecedents—that chaos of undeveloped imagery in which modern folk-lore research, for want of a guiding principle, loses itself—do not, on this hypothesis, concern us; but we are concerned, on the other hand, with certain cultural manifestations that have never yet been thought of as belonging to this category. It was in the Homeric age (1100-800 B.C.) and in the corresponding knightly age of Teutonism (900-1200 A.D.), that is, the epic ages, and neither before nor after them, that the great world-image of a new religion came into being. The corresponding ages in India and Egypt are the Vedic and the Pyramid periods; one day it will be discovered that Egyptian mythology did in fact ripen into depth during the Third and Fourth Dynasties.
Only in this way can we understand the immense wealth of religious-intuitive creations that fills the three centuries of the Imperial Age in Germany. What came into existence then was the Faustian mythology. Hitherto, owing to religious and learned preconceptions, either the Catholic element has been treated to the exclusion of the Northern-Heathen or vice versa, and consequently we have been blind to the breadth and the unity of this form-world. In reality there is no such difference. The deep change of meaning in the Christian circle of ideas is identical, as a creative act, with the consolidation of the old heathen cults of the Migrations. It was in this age that the folk-lore of Western Europe became an entirety; if the bulk of its material was far older, and if, far later again, it came to be linked with new outer experiences and enriched by more conscious treatment, yet it was then and neither earlier nor later that it was vitalized with its symbolic meaning. To this lore belong the great God-legends of the Edda and many motives in the gospel-poetry of learned monks; the German hero-tales of Siegfried and Gudrun, Dietrich and Wayland; the vast wealth of chivalry-tales, derived from ancient Celtic fables, that was simultaneously coming to harvest on French soil, concerning King Arthur and the Round Table, the Holy Grail, Tristan, Percival and Roland. And with these are to be counted—beside the spiritual transvaluation, unremarked but all the deeper for that, of the Passion-Story—the Catholic hagiology of which the richest floraison was in the 10th and 11th Centuries and which produced the Lives of the Virgin and the histories of SS. Roch, Sebald, Severin, Francis, Bernard, Odilia. The Legenda Aurea was composed about 1250—this was the blossoming-time of courtly epic and Icelandic skald-poetry alike. The great Valhalla Gods of the North and the mythic group of the “Fourteen Helpers” in South Germany are contemporary, and by the side of Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, in the Völuspa we have a Christian form in the South German Muspilli. This great myth develops, like heroic poetry, at the climax of the early Culture. They both belong to the two primary estates, priesthood and nobility; they are at home in the cathedral and the castle and not in the village below, where amongst the people the simple saga-world lives on for centuries, called “fairy-tale,” “popular beliefs” or “superstition” and yet inseparable from the world of high centemplation.[494]
Nowhere is the final meaning of these religious creations more clearly indicated than in the history of Valhalla. It was not an original German idea, and even the tribes of the Migrations were totally without it. It took shape just at this time, instantly and as an inward necessity, in the consciousness of the peoples newly-arisen on the soil of the West. Thus it is “contemporary” with Olympus, which we know from the Homeric epos and which is as little Mycenæan as Valhalla is German in origin. MoreoverMoreover, it is only for the two higher estates that Valhalla emerges from the notion of Hel; in the beliefs of the people Hel remained the realm of the dead.[495]
The deep inward unity of this Faustian world of myth and saga and the complete congruence of its expression-symbolism has never hitherto been realized, and yet Siegfried, Baldur, Roland, Christ the King in the “Heliand,” are different names for one and the same figure. Valhalla and Avalon, the Round Table and the communion of the Grail-templars, Mary, Frigga and Frau Holle mean the same. On the other hand, the external provenance of the material motives and elements, on which mythological research has wasted an excessive zeal, is a matter of which the importance does not go deeper than the surface. As to the meaning of a myth, its provenance proves nothing. The “numen” itself, the primary form of the world-feeling, is a pure, necessary and unconscious creation, and it is not transferable. What one people takes over from another—in “conversion” or in admiring imitation—is a name, dress and mask for its own feeling, never the feeling of that other. The old Celtic and old Germanic myth-motives have to be treated, like the repertory of Classical forms possessed by the learned monk, and like the entire body of Christian-Eastern faith taken over by the Western Church, simply as the material out of which the Faustian soul in these centuries created a mythic architecture of its own. It mattered little whether the persons through whose minds and mouths the myth came to life were individual skalds, missionaries, priests or “the people,” nor did the circumstance that the Christian ideas dictated its forms affect the inward independence of that which had come to life.
In the Classical, Arabian and Western Cultures, the myth of the springtime is in each case that which we should expect; in the first static, in the second Magian, in the third dynamic. Examine every detail of form, and see how in the Classical it is an attitude and in the West a deed, there a being and here a will that underlies them; how in the Classical the bodily and tangible, the sensuously-saturated, prevails and how therefore in the mode of worshipping the centre of gravity lies in the sense-impressive cult, whereas in the North it is space, force and therefore a religiousness that is predominantly dogmatic in colouring that rule. These very earliest creations of the young soul tell us that there is relationship between the Olympian figures, the statue and the corporeal Doric temple; between the domical basilica, the “Spirit” of God and the arabesque; between Valhalla and the Mary myth, the soaring nave and instrumental music.
The Arabian soul built up its myth in the centuries between Cæsar and Constantine—that fantastic mass of cults, visions and legends that to-day we can hardly even survey,[496] syncretic cults like that of the Syrian Baal and of Isis and Mithras not only transported to but transformed in Syrian soil; Gospels, Acts of Apostles and Apocalypses in astonishing profusion; Christian, Persian, Jewish, Neoplatonist and Manichæan legends, and the heavenly hierarchy of angels and spirits of the Fathers and the Gnostics. In the suffering-story of the Gospels, the very epic of the Christian nation, set between the story of Jesus’s childhood and the Acts of the Apostles, and in the Zoroaster-legend that is contemporary with it, we are looking upon the hero-figures of Early Arabian epic as we see Achilles in the Classical and Siegfried and Percival in the Faustian. The scenes of Gethsemane and Golgotha stand beside the noblest pictures of Greek and Germanic saga. These Magian visions, almost without exception, grew up under the pressure of the dying Classical which, in the nature of things unable to communicate its spirit, the more insistently lent its forms. It is almost impossible now to estimate the extent to which given Apollinian elements had to be accepted and transvalued before the old Christian myth assumed the firmness that it possessed in the time of Augustine.
IX
The Classical polytheism, consequently, has a style of its own which puts it in a different category from the conceptions of any other world-feelings, whatever the superficial affinities may be. This mode of possessing gods without godhead has only existed once, and it was in the one Culture that made the statue of naked Man the whole sum of its art.
Nature, as Classical man felt and knew it about him, viz., a sum of well-formed bodily things, could not be deified in any other form but this. The Roman felt that the claim of Yahweh to be recognized as sole God had something atheistic in it. One God, for him, was no God, and to this may be ascribed the strong dislike of popular feeling, both Greek and Roman, for the philosophers in so far as they were pantheists and godless. Gods are bodies, σώματα of the perfectest kind, and plurality was an attribute of bodies alike for mathematicians, lawyers and poets. The concept of ζῷον πολιτικόν was valid for gods as well as for men; nothing was more alien to them than oneness, solitariness and self-adequacy; and no existence therefore was possible to them save under the aspect of eternal propinquity. It is a deeply significant fact that in Hellas of all countries star-gods, the numina of the Far, are wanting. Helios was worshipped only in half-Oriental Rhodes and Selene had no cult at all. Both are merely artistic modes of expression (it is as such only that they figure in the courtly epos of Homer), elements that Varro would class in the genus mythicum and not in the genus civile. The old Roman religion, in which the Classical world-feeling was expressed with special purity, knew neither sun nor moon, neither storm nor cloud as deities. The forest stirrings and the forest solitude, the tempest and the surf, which completely dominated the Nature of Faustian man (even that of pre-Faustian Celts and Teutons) and imparted to their mythology its peculiar character, left Classical man unmoved. Only concretes—hearth and door, the coppice and the plot-field, this particular river and that particular hill—condensed into Being for him. We observe that everything that has farness, everything that contains a suggestion of unbounded and unbodied in it and might thereby bring space as Ent and divine into the felt Nature, is excluded and remains excluded from Classical myth; how should it surprise, then, if clouds and horizons, that are the very meaning and soul of Baroque landscapes, are totally wanting in the Classical backgroundless frescoes? The unlimited multitude of antique gods—every tree, every spring, every house, nay every part of a house is a god—means that every tangible thing is an independent existence, and therefore that none is functionally subordinate to any other.
The bases of the Apollinian and the Faustian Nature-images respectively are in all contexts the two opposite symbols of individual thing and unitary space. Olympus and Hades are perfectly sense-definite places, while the kingdom of the dwarfs, elves and goblins, and Valhalla and Niflheim are all somewhere or other in the universe of space. In the old Roman religion “Tellus Mater” is not the all-mother but the visible ploughable field itself. Faunus is the wood and Vulturnus is the river, the name of the seed is Ceres and that of the harvest is Consus. Horace is a true Roman when he speaks of “sub Jove frigido,” under the cold sky. In these cases there is not even the attempt to reproduce the God in any sort of image at the places of worship, for that would be tantamount to duplicating him. Even in very late times the instinct not only of the Romans but of the Greeks also is opposed to idols, as is shown by the fact that plastic art, as it became more and more profane, came into conflict more and more with popular beliefs and the devout philosophy.[497] In the house, Janus is the door as god, Vesta the hearth as goddess, the two functions of the house are objectivized and deified at once. A Hellenic river-god (like Acheloüs, who appears as a bull,) is definitely understood as being the river and not as, so to say, dwelling in the river. The Pans[498] and Satyrs are the fields and meadows as noon defines them, well bounded and, as having figure, having also existence. Dryads and Hamadrayads are trees; in many places, indeed, individual trees of great stature were honoured with garlands and votive offerings without even the formality of a name. On the contrary, not a trace of this localized materiality clings to the elves, dwarfs, witches, Valkyries and their kindred the armies of departed souls that sweep round o’nights. Whereas Naiads are sources, nixies and hags, and tree-spirits and brownies are souls that are only bound to sources, trees and houses, from which they long to be released into the freedom of roaming. This is the very opposite of the plastic Nature-feeling, for here things are experienced merely as spaces of another kind. A nymph—a spring, that is—assumes human form when she would visit a handsome shepherd, but a nixy is an enchanted princess with nenuphars in her hair who comes up at midnight from the depths of the pool wherein she dwells. Kaiser Barbarossa sits in the Kyffhäuser cavern and Frau Venus in the Hörselberg. It is as though the Faustian universe abhorred anything material and impenetrable. In things, we suspect other worlds. Their hardness and thickness is merely appearance, and—a trait that would be impossible in Classical myth, because fatal to it—some favoured mortals are accorded the power to see through cliffs and crags into the depths. But is not just this the secret intent of our physical theories, of each new hypothesis? No other Culture knows so many fables of treasures lying in mountains and pools, of secret subterranean realms, palaces, gardens wherein other beings dwell. The whole substantiality of the visible world is denied by the Faustian Nature-feeling, for which in the end nothing is of earth and the only actual is Space. The fairy-tale dissolves the matter of Nature as the Gothic style dissolves the stone-mass of our cathedrals, into a ghostly wealth of forms and lines that have shed all weight and acknowledge no bounds.
The ever-increasing emphasis with which Classical polytheism somatically individualized its deities is peculiarly evident in its attitude to “strange gods.” For Classical man the gods of the Egyptians, the Phœnicians and the Germans, in so far as they could be imagined as figures, were as real as his own gods. Within his world-feeling the statement that such other gods “do not exist” would have no meaning. When he came into contact with the countries of these deities he did them reverence. The gods were, like a statue or a polis, Euclidean bodies having locality. They were beings of the near and not the general space. If a man were sojourning in Babylon, for instance, and Zeus and Apollo were far away, all the more reason for particularly honouring the local gods. This is the meaning of the altars dedicated “to the unknown gods,” such as that which Paul so significantly misunderstood in a Magian monotheistic sense at Athens.[499] These were gods not known by name to the Greek but worshipped by the foreigners of the great seaports (Piræus, Corinth or other) and therefore entitled to their due of respect from him. Rome expressed this with Classical clearness in her religious law and in carefully-preserved formulæ like, for example, the generalis invocatio.[500] As the universe is the sum of things, and as gods are things, recognition had to be accorded even to those gods with whom the Roman had not yet practically and historically come into relations. He did not know them, or he knew them as the gods of his enemies, but they were gods, for it was impossible for him to conceive the opposite. This is the meaning of the sacral phrase in Livy, VIII, 9, 6: “di quibus est potestas nostrorum hostiumque.” The Roman people admits that the circle of its own gods is only momentarily bounded, and after reciting these by name it ends the prayer thus so as not to infringe the rights of others. According to its sacral law, the annexation of foreign territory involves the transfer to Urbs Roma of all the religious obligations pertaining to this territory and its gods—which of course logically follows from the additive god-feeling of the Classical. Recognition of a deity was very far from being the same as acceptance of the forms of its cult; thus in the Second Punic War the Great Mother of Pessinus[501] was received in Rome as the Sibyl commanded, but the priests who had come in with her cult, which was of a highly un-Classical complexion, practised under strict police supervision, and not only Roman citizens but even their slaves were forbidden under penalty to enter this priesthood. The reception of the goddess gave satisfaction to the Classical world-feeling, but the personal performance of her despised ritual would have infringed it. The attitude of the Senate in such cases is unmistakable, though the people, with its ever-increasing admixture of Eastern elements, had a liking for these cults and in Imperial times the army became in virtue of its composition a vehicle (and even the chief vehicle) of the Magian world-feeling.
This makes it the easier to understand how the cult of deified men could become a necessary element in this religious form-world. But here it is necessary to distinguish sharply between Classical phenomena and Oriental phenomena that have a superficial similarity thereto. Roman emperor-worship—i.e., the reverence of the “genius” of the living Princes and that of the dead predecessors as “Divi”—has hitherto been confused with the ceremonial reverence of the Ruler which was customary in Asia Minor (and, above all, in Persia,)[502] and also with the later and quite differently meant Caliph-deification which is seen in full process of formation in Diocletian and Constantine. Actually, these are all very unlike things. However intimately these symbolic forms were interfused in the East of the Empire, in Rome itself the Classical type was actualized unequivocally and without adulteration. Long before this certain Greeks (e.g., Sophocles, Lysander and, above all, Alexander) had been not merely hailed as gods by their flatterers but felt as gods in a perfectly definite sense by the people. It is only a step, after all, from the deification of a thing—such as a copse or a well or, in the limit, a statue which represented a god—to the deification of an outstanding man who became first hero and then god. In this case as in the rest, what was reverenced was the perfect shape in which the world-stuff, the un-divine, had actualized itself. In Rome the consul on the day of his triumph wore the armour of Jupiter Capitolinus, and in early days his face and arms were even painted red, in order to enhance his similarity to the terra-cotta statue of the God whose “numen” he for the time being incorporated.
X
In the first generations of the Imperial age, the antique polytheism gradually dissolved, often without any alteration of outward ritual and mythic form, into the Magian monotheism.[503] A new soul had come up, and it lived the old forms in a new mode. The names continued, but they covered other numina.
In all Late-Classical cults, those of Isis and Cybele, of Mithras and Sol and Serapis, the divinity is no longer felt as a localized and formable being. In old times, Hermes Propylæus had been worshipped at the entrance of the Acropolis of Athens, while a few yards away, at the point where later the Erechtheum was built, was the cult-site of Hermes as the husband of Aglaure. At the South extremity of the Roman Capitol, close to the sanctuary of Juppiter Feretrius (which contained, not a statue of the god, but a holy stone, silex[504]) was that of Juppiter Optimus Maximus, and when Augustus was laying down the huge temple of the latter he was careful to avoid the ground to which the numen of the former adhered.[505] But in Early Christian times Juppiter Dolichenus or Sol Invictus[506] could be worshipped “wheresoever two or three were gathered together in his name.” All these deities more and more came to be felt as a single numen, though the adherents of a particular cult would believe that they in particular knew the numen in its true shape. Hence it is that Isis could be spoken of as the “million-named.” Hitherto, names had been the designations of so many gods different in body and locality, now they are titles of the One whom every man has in mind.
This Magian monotheism reveals itself in all the religious creations that flooded the Empire from the East—the Alexandrian Isis, the Sun-god favoured by Aurelian (the Baal of Palmyra), the Mithras protected by Diocletian (whose Persian form had been completely recast in Syria), the Baalath of Carthage (Tanit, Dea Cælestis[507]) honoured by Septimius Severus. The importation of these figures no longer increases as in Classical times the number of concrete gods. On the contrary, they absorb the old gods into themselves, and do so in such a way as to deprive them more and more of picturable shape. Alchemy is replacing statics. Correspondingly, instead of the image we more and more find symbols—e.g., the Bull, the Lamb, the Fish, the Triangle, the Cross—coming to the front. In Constantine’s “in hoc signo vinces” scarcely an echo of the Classical remains. Already there is setting in that aversion to human representation that ended in the Islamic and Byzantine prohibitions of images.
Right down to Trajan—long after the last trait of Apollinian world-feeling had departed from the soil of Greece—the Roman state-worship had strength enough to hold to the Euclidean tendency and to augment its world of deities. The gods of the subject lands and peoples were accorded recognized places of worship, with priesthood and ritual, in Rome, and were themselves associated as perfectly definite individuals with the older gods. But from that point the Magian spirit began to gain ground even here, in spite of an honourable resistance which centred in a few of the very oldest patrician families.[508] The god-figures as such, as bodies, vanished from the consciousness of men, to make way for a transcendental god-feeling which no longer depended on sense-evidences; and the usages, festivals and legends melted into one another. When in 217 Caracalla put an end to all sacral-legal distinctions between Roman and foreign deities and Isis, absorbing all older female numina, became actually the first goddess of Rome[509] (and thereby the most dangerous opponent of Christianity and the most obnoxious target for the hatred of the Fathers), then Rome became a piece of the East, a religious diocese of Syria. Then the Baals of Doliche, Petra, Palmyra and Edessa began to melt into the monotheism of Sol, who became and remained (till his representative Licinius fell before Constantine) God of the Empire. By now, the question was not between Classical and Magian—Christianity was in so little danger from the old gods that it could offer them a sort of sympathy—but it was, which of the Magian religions should dictate religious form to the world of the Classical Empire? The decline of the old plastic feeling is very clearly discernible in the stages through which Emperor-worship passed—first, the dead emperor taken into the circle of State gods by resolution of the Senate (Divus Julius, 42 B.C.), a priesthood provided for him and his image removed from amongst the ancestor-images that were carried in purely domestic celebrations; then, from Marcus Aurelius, no further consecrations of priests (and, presently, no further building of temples) for the service of deified emperors, for the reason that religious sentiment was now satisfied by a general “templum divorum”; finally, the epithet Divus used simply as a title of members of the Imperial family. This end to the evolution marks the victory of the Magian feeling. It will be found that multiple names in the inscriptions (such as Isis-Magna Mater-Juno-Astarte-Bellona, or Mithras-Sol Invictus-Helios) come to signify titles of one sole existent Godhead.[510]
XI
Atheism is a subject that the psychologist and the student of religion have hitherto regarded as scarcely worth careful investigation. Much has been written and argued about it, and very roundly, by the free-thought martyr on the one hand and the religious zealot on the other. But no one has had anything to say about the species of atheism; or has treated it analytically as an individual and definite phenomenon, positive and necessary and intensely symbolic; or has realized how it is limited in time.
Is “Atheism” the a priori constitution of a certain world-consciousness or is it a voluntary self-expression? Is one born with it or converted to it? Does the unconscious feeling that the cosmos has become godless bring in its train the consciousness that it is so, the realization that "Great Pan is dead"? Are there early atheists, for example in the Doric or the Gothic ages? Has this thinker or that been denounced as atheist with injustice as well as with passion? And can there be civilized men who are not wholly or at any rate partially atheist?
It is not in dispute (the word itself shows it in all languages) that atheism is essentially a negation, that it signifies the foregoing of a spiritual idea and therefore the precedence of such an idea, and that it is not the creative act of an unimpaired formative power. But what is it that it denies? In what way? And who is the denier?
Atheism, rightly understood, is the necessary expression of a spirituality that has accomplished itself and exhausted its religious possibilities, and is declining into the inorganic. It is entirely compatible with a living wistful desire for real religiousness[511]—therein resembling Romanticism, which likewise would recall that which has irrevocably gone, namely, the Culture—and it may quite well be in a man as a creation of his feeling without his being aware of it, without its ever interfering with the habits of his thought or challenging his convictions. We can understand this if we can see what it was that made the devout Haydn call Beethoven an atheist after he had heard some of his music. Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture but with the dawn of the Civilization. It belongs to the great city, to the “educated man” of the great city who acquires mechanistically what his forefathers the creators of the Culture had lived organically. In respect of the Classical feeling of God, Aristotle is an atheist unawares. The Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism is atheistic like the Socialism of Western and the Buddhism of Indian modernity, reverently though they may and do use the word “God.”
But, if this late form of world-feeling and world-image which preludes our “second religiousness” is universally a negation of the religious in us, the structure of it is different in each of the Civilizations. There is no religiousness that is without an atheistic opposition belonging uniquely to itself and directed uniquely against itself. Men continue to experience the outer world that extends around them as a cosmos of well-ordered bodies or a world-cavern or efficient space, as the case may be, but they no longer livingly experience the sacred causality in it. They only learn to know it in a profane causality that is, or is desired to be, inclusively mechanical.[512] There are atheisms of Classical, Arabian and Western kinds and these differ from one another in meaning and in matter. Nietzsche formulated the dynamic atheism on the basis that “God is dead,” and a Classical philosopher would have expressed the static and Euclidean by saying that the “gods who dwell in the holy places are dead,” the one indicating that boundless space has, the other that countless bodies have, become godless. But dead space and dead things are the “facts” of physics. The atheist is unable to experience any difference between the Nature-picture of physics and that of religion. Language, with a fine feeling, distinguishes wisdom and intelligence—the early and the late, the rural and the megalopolitan conditions of the soul. Intelligence even sounds atheistic. No one would describe Heraclitus or Meister Eckart as an intelligence, but Socrates and Rousseau were intelligent and not “wise” men. There is something root-less in the word. It is only from the standpoint of the Stoic and of the Socialist, of the typical irreligious man, that want of intelligence is a matter for contempt.
The spiritual in every living Culture is religious, has religion, whether it be conscious of it or not. That it exists, becomes, develops, fulfils itself, is its religion. It is not open to a spirituality to be irreligious; at most it can play with the idea of irreligion as Medicean Florentines did. But the megalopolitan is irreligious; this is part of his being, a mark of his historical position. Bitterly as he may feel the inner emptiness and poverty, earnestly as he may long to be religious, it is out of his power to be so. All religiousness in the Megalopolis rests upon self-deception. The degree of piety of which a period is capable is revealed in its attitude towardstowards toleration. One tolerates, either because the form-language appears to be expressing something of that which in one’s own lived experience is felt as divine, or else because that experience no longer contains anything so felt.
What we moderns have called “Toleration” in the Classical world[513] is an expression of the contrary of atheism. Plurality of numina and cults is inherent in the conception of Classical religion, and it was not toleration but the self-evident expression of antique piety that allowed validity to them all. Conversely, anyone who demanded exceptions showed himself ipso facto as godless. Christians and Jews counted, and necessarily counted, as atheists in the eyes of anyone whose world-picture was an aggregate of individual bodies; and when in Imperial times they ceased to be regarded in this light, the old Classical god-feeling had itself come to an end. On the other hand, respect for the form of the local cult whatever this might be, for images of the gods, for sacrifices and festivals was always expected, and anyone who mocked or profaned them very soon learned the limits of Classical toleration—witness the scandal of the Mutilation of the Hermae at Athens and trials for the desecration of the Eleusinian mysteries, that is, impious travestying of the sensuous element. But to the Faustian soul (again we see opposition of space and body, of conquest and acceptance of presence) dogma and not visible ritual constitutes the essence. What is regarded as godless is opposition to doctrine. Here begins the spatial-spiritual conception of heresy. A Faustian religion by its very nature cannot allow any freedom of conscience; it would be in contradiction with its space-invasive dynamic. Even free thinking itself is no exception to the rule. After the stake, the guillotine; after the burning of the books, their suppression; after the power of the pulpit, the power of the Press. Amongst us there is no faith without leanings to an Inquisition of some sort. Expressed in appropriate electrodynamic imagery, the field of force of a conviction adjusts all the minds within it according to its own intensity. Failure to do so means absence of conviction—in ecclesiastical language, ungodliness. For the Apollinian soul, on the contrary, it was contempt of the cult—ἀσέβεια in the literal sense—that was ungodly, and here its religion admitted no freedom of attitude. In both cases there was a line drawn between the toleration demanded by the god-feeling and that forbidden by it.
Now, here the Late-Classical philosophy of Sophist-Stoic speculation (as distinct from the general Stoic disposition) was in opposition to religious feeling. And accordingly we find the people of Athens—that Athens which could build altars to “unknown gods”—persecuting as pitilessly as the Spanish Inquisition. We have only to review the list of Classical thinkers and historical personages who were sacrificed to the integrity of the cult. Socrates and Diagoras were executed for ἀσέβεια; Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Aristotle, Alcibiades only saved themselves by flight. The number of executions for cult-impiety, in Athens alone and during the few decades of the Peloponnesian War, ran into hundreds. After the condemnation of Protagoras, a house-to-house search was made for the destruction of his writings. In Rome, acts of this sort began (so far as history enables us to trace them) in 181 B.C. when the Senate ordered the public burning of the Pythagorean “Books of Numa.”[514] This was followed by an uninterrupted series of expulsions, both of individual philosophers and of whole schools, and later by executions and by public burnings of books regarded as subversive of religion. For instance, in the time of Cæsar alone, the places of worship of Isis were five times destroyed by order of the Consuls, and Tiberius had her image thrown into the Tiber. The refusal to perform sacrifice before the image of the Emperor was made a penal offence. All these were measures against “atheism,” in the Classical sense of the word, manifested in theoretical or practical contempt of the visible cult. Unless we can put our Western feeling of these matters out of action we shall never penetrate into the essence of the world-image that underlay the Classical attitude to them. Poets and philosophers might spin myths and transform god-figures as much as they pleased. The dogmatic interpretation of the sensuous data was everyone’s liberty. The histories of the gods could be made fun of in Satyric drama and comedy—even that did not impugn their Euclidean existence. But the statue of the god, the cult, the plastic embodiment of piety—it was not permitted to any man to touch these. It was not out of hypocrisy that the fine minds of the earlier Empire, who had ceased to take a myth of any kind seriously, punctiliously conformed to the public cults and, above all, to the cult—deeply real for all classes—of the Emperor. And, on the other hand, the poets and thinkers of the mature Faustian Culture were at liberty “not to go to Church,” to avoid Confession, to stay at home on procession-days and (in Protestant surroundings) to live without any relations with the church whatever. But they were not free to touch points of dogma, for that would have been dangerous within any confession and any sect, including, once more and expressly, free-thought. The Roman Stoic, who without faith in the mythology piously observed the ritual forms, has his counterpart in those men of the Age of Enlightenment, like Lessing and Goethe, who disregarded the rites of the Church but never doubted the “fundamental truths of faith.”
XII
If we turn back from Nature-feeling become form to Nature-knowledge become system, we know God or the gods as the origin of the images by which the intellect seeks to make the world-around comprehensible to itself. Goethe once remarked (to Riemer): “The Reason is as old as the World; even the child has reason. But it is not applied in all times in the same way or to the same objects. The earlier centuries had their ideas in intuitions of the fancy, but ours bring them into notions. The great views of Life were brought into shapes, into Gods; to-day they are brought into notions. Then the productive force was greater, now the destructive force or art of separation.” The strong religiousness of Newton’s mechanics[515] and the almost complete atheism of the formulations of modern dynamics are of like colour, positive and negative of the same primary feeling. A physical system of necessity has all the characters of the soul to whose world-form it belongs. The Deism of the Baroque belongs with its dynamics and its analytical geometry; its three basic principles, God, Freedom and Immortality, are in the language of mechanics the principles of inertia (Galileo), least action (D’Alembert) and the conservation of energy (J. R. Mayer).
That which nowadays we call quite generally physics is in reality an artifact of the Baroque. At this stage the reader will not feel it as paradoxical to associate the mode of representation which rests on the assumption of distant forces and the (wholly un-Classical and anything but naïve) idea of action-at-a-distance, attraction and repulsion of masses, specially with the Jesuit style of architecture founded by Vignola, and to call it accordingly the Jesuit style of physics; and I would likewise call the Infinitesimal Calculus, which of necessity came into being just when and where it did, the Jesuit style of mathematic. Within this style, a working hypothesis that deepens the technique of experimentation is “correct”; for Loyola’s concern, like Newton’s, was not description of Nature but method.
Western physics is by its inward form dogmatic and not ritualistic (kultisch). Its content is the dogma of Force as identical with space and distance, the theory of the mechanical Act (as against the mechanical Posture) in space. Consequently its tendency is persistently to overcome the apparent. Beginning with a still quite Apollinian-sensuous classification of physics into the physics of the eye (optics), of the ear (acoustics) and of the skin-sense (heat), it by degrees eliminated all sense-impressions and replaced them by abstract systems of relations; thus, under the influence of ideas concerning dynamical motion in an æther, radiant heat is nowadays dealt with under the heading of “optics,” a word which has ceased to have anything to do with the eye.
“Force” is a mythical quantity, which does not arise out of scientific experimentation but, on the contrary, defines the structure thereof a priori. It is only the Faustian conception of Nature that instead of a magnet thinks of a magnetism whose field of force includes a piece of iron, and instead of luminous bodies thinks of radiant energy, and that imagines personifications like “electricity,” “temperature” and “radioactivity.”[516]
That this “force” or “energy” is really a numen stiffened into a concept (and in nowise the result of scientific experience) is shown by the often overlooked fact that the basic principle known as the First Law of Thermodynamics[517] says nothing whatever about the nature of energy, and it is properly speaking an incorrect (though psychologically most significant) assumption that the idea of the “Conservation of Energy” is fixed in it. Experimental measurement can in the nature of things only establish a number, which number we have (significantly, again) named work. But the dynamical cast of our thought demanded that this should be conceived as a difference of energy, although the absolute value of energy is only a figment and can never be rendered by a definite number. There always remains, therefore, an undefined additive constant, as we call it; in other words, we always strive to maintain the image of an energy that our inner eye has formed, although actual scientific practice is not concerned with it.
This being the provenance of the force-concept, it follows that we can no more define it than we can define those other un-Classical words Will and Space. There remains always a felt and intuitively-perceived remainder which makes every personal definition an almost religious creed of its author. Every Baroque scientist in this matter has his personal inner experience which he is trying to clothe in words. Goethe, for instance, could never have defined his idea of a world-force, but to himself it was a certainty. Kant called force the phenomenon of an ent-in-itself: “we know substance in space, the body, only through forces.” Laplace called it an unknown of which the workings are all that we know, and Newton imagined immaterial forces at a distance. Leibniz spoke of Vis viva as a quantum which together with matter formed the unit that he called the monad, and Descartes, with certain thinkers of the 18th Century, was equally unwilling to draw fundamental distinctions between motion and the moved. Beside potentia, virtus, impetus we find even in Gothic times peri-phrases such as conatus and nisus, in which the force and the releasing cause are obviously not separated. We can, indeed, quite well differentiate between Catholic, Protestant and Atheistic notions of force. But Spinoza, a Jew and therefore, spiritually, a member of the Magian Culture, could not absorb the Faustian force-concept at all, and it has no place in his system.[518] And it is an astounding proof of the secret power of root-ideas that Heinrich Hertz, the only Jew amongst the great physicists of the recent past, was also the only one of them who tried to resolve the dilemma of mechanics by eliminating the idea of force.
The force-dogma is the one and only theme of Faustian physics. That branch of science which under the name of Statics has been passed from system to system and century to century is a fiction. “Modern Statics” is in the same position as “arithmetic” and “geometry,” which, if the literal and original senses of the words be kept to, are void of meaning in modern analysis, empty names bequeathed by Classical science and only preserved because our reverence for all things Classical has hitherto debarred us from getting rid of them or even recognizing their hollowness. There is no Western statics—that is, no interpretation of mechanical facts that is natural to the Western spirit bases itself on the ideas of form and substance, or even, for that matter, on the ideas of space and mass otherwise than in connexion with those of time and force.[519] The reader can test this in any department that he pleases. Even “temperature,” which of all our physical magnitudes has the most plausible look of being static, Classical and passive, only falls into its place in our system when it is brought into a force-picture, viz., the picture of a quantity of heat made up of ultra-swift subtle irregular motions of the atoms of a body, with temperature as the mean vis viva of these atoms.
The Late Renaissance imagined that it had revived the Archimedean physics just as it believed that it was continuing the Classical sculpture. But in the one case as in the other it was merely preparing for the forms of the Baroque, and doing so out of the spirit of the Gothic. To this Statics belongs the picture-subject as it is in Mantegna’s work and also in that of Signorelli, whose line and attitude later generations regarded as stiff and cold. With Leonardo, dynamics begins and in Rubens the movement of swelling bodies is already at a maximum.
As late as 1629 the spirit of Renaissance physics appears in the theory of magnetism formulated by the Jesuit Nicolaus Cabeo. Conceived in the mould of an Aristotelian idea of the world, it was (like Palladio’s work on architecture) foredoomed to lead to nothing—not because it was “wrong” in itself but because it was in contradiction with the Faustian Nature-feeling which, freed from Magian leading-strings by the thinkers and researchers of the 14th Century, now required forms of its very own for the expression of its world-knowledge. Cabeo avoided the notions of force and mass and confined himself to the Classical concepts of form and substance—in other words, he went back from the architecture of Michelangelo’s last phase and of Vignola to that of Michelozzo and Raphael—and the system which he formed was complete and self-contained but without importance for the future. A magnetism conceived as a state of individual bodies and not as a force in unbounded space was incapable of symbolically satisfying the inner eye of Faustian man. What we need is a theory of the Far, not one of the Near. Newton’s mathematical-mechanical principles required to be made explicit as a dynamics pure and entire, and this another Jesuit, Boscovich,[520] was the first to achieve in 1758.
Even Galileo was still under the influence of the Renaissance feeling, to which the opposition of force and mass, that was to produce, in architecture and painting and music alike the element of grand movement, was something strange and uncomfortable. He therefore limited the idea of force to contact-force (impact) and his formulation did not go beyond conservation of momentum (quantity of motion). He held fast to mere moved-ness and fought shy of any passion of space, and it was left to Leibniz to develop—first in the course of controversy and then positively by the application of his mathematical discoveries—the idea of genuine free and directional forces (living force, activum thema). The notion of conservation of momentum then gave way to that of conservation of living forces, as quantitative number gave way to functional number.
The concept of mass, too, did not become definite until somewhat later. In Galileo and Kepler its place is occupied by volume, and it was Newton who distinctly conceived it as functional—the world as function of God. That mass (defined nowadays as the constant relation between force and acceleration in respect of a system of material points) should have no proportionate relation whatever to volume was, in spite of the evidence of the planets, a conclusion inacceptable to Renaissance feeling.
But, even so, Galileo was forced to inquire into the causes of motion. In a genuine Statics, working only with the notions of material and form, this question would have had no meaning. For Archimedes displacement was a matter of insignificance compared with form, which was the essence of all corporeal existence; for, if space be Nonent, what efficient can there be external to the body concerned? Things are not functions of motion, but they move themselves. Newton it was who first got completely away from Renaissance feeling and formed the notion of distant forces, the attraction and repulsion of bodies across space itself. Distance is already in itself a force. The very idea of it is so free from all sense-perceptible content that Newton himself felt uncomfortable with it—in fact it mastered him and not he it. It was the spirit of Baroque itself, with its bent towards infinite space, that had evoked this contrapuntal and utterly un-plastic notion. And in it withal there was a contradiction. To this day no one has produced an adequate definition of these forces-at-a-distance. No one has ever yet understood what centrifugal force really is. Is the force of the earth rotating on its axis the cause of this motion or vice versa? Or are the two identical? Is such a cause, considered per se, a force or another motion? What is the difference between force and motion? Suppose the alterations in the planetary system to be workings of a centrifugal force; that being so, the bodies ought to be slung out of their path [tangentially], and as in fact they are not so, we must assume a centrifugal force as well. What do all these words mean? It is just the impossibility of arriving at order and clarity here that led Hertz to do away with the force-notion altogether and (by highly artificial assumptions of rigid couplings between positions and velocities) to reduce his system of mechanics to the principle of contact (impact). But this merely conceals and does not remove the perplexities, which are of intrinsically Faustian character and rooted in the very essence of dynamics. “Can we speak of forces which owe their origin to motion?” Certainly not; but can we get rid of primary notions that are inborn in the Western spirit though indefinable? Hertz himself made no attempt to apply his system practically.
This symbolic difficulty of modern mechanics is in no way removed by the potential theory that was founded by Faraday when the centre of gravity of physical thought had passed from the dynamics of matter to the electrodynamics of the æther. The famous experimenter, who was a visionary through and through—alone amongst the modern masters of physics he was not a mathematician—observed in 1846: “I assume nothing to be true in any part of space (whether this be empty as is commonly said, or filled with matter) except forces and the lines in which they are exercised.” Here, plain enough, is the directional tendency with its intimately organic and historic content, the tendency in the knower to live the process of his knowing. Here Faraday is metaphysically at one with Newton, whose forces-at-a-distance point to a mythic background that the devout physicist declined to examine. The possible alternative way of reaching an unequivocal definition of force—viz., that which starts from World and not God, from the object and not the subject of natural motion-state—was leading at the very same time to the formulation of the concept of Energy. Now, this concept represents, as distinct from that of force, a quantum of directedness and not a direction, and is in so far akin to Leibniz’s conception of “living force” unalterable in quantity. It will not escape notice that essential features of the mass-concept have been taken over here; indeed, even the bizarre notion of an atomic structure of energy has been seriously discussed.
This rearrangement of the basic words has not, however, altered the feeling that a world-force with its substratum does exist. The motion-problem is as insoluble as ever. All that has happened on the way from Newton to Faraday—or from Berkeley to Mill—is that the religious deed-idea has been replaced by the irreligious work-idea.[521] In the Nature-picture of Bruno, Newton and Goethe something divine is working itself out in acts, in that of modern physics Nature is doing work; for every “process” within the meaning of the First Law of Thermodynamics is or should be measurable by the expenditure of energy to which a quantity of work corresponds in the form of “bound energy.”
Naturally, therefore, we find the decisive discovery of J. R. Mayer coinciding in time with the birth of the Socialist theory. Even economic systems wield the same concepts; the value-problem has been in relation with quantity of work[522]] ever since Adam Smith, who vis-à-vis Quesney and Turgot marks the change from an organic to a mechanical structure of the economic field. The “work” which is the foundation of modern economic theory has purely dynamic meaning, and phrases could be found in the language of economists which correspond exactly to the physical propositions of conservation of energy, entropy and least action.
If, then, we review the successive stages through which the central idea of force has passed since its birth in the Baroque, and its intimate relations with the form-worlds of the great arts and of mathematics, we find that (1) in the 17th Century (Galileo, Newton, Leibniz) it is pictorially formed and in unison with the great art of oil-painting that died out about 1630; (2) in the 18th Century (the “classical” mechanics of Laplace and Lagrange) it acquires the abstract character of the fugue-style and is in unison with Bach; and (3) with the Culture at its end and the civilized intelligence victorious over the spiritual, it appears in the domain of pure analysis, and in particular in the theory of functions of several complex variables, without which it is, in its most modern form, scarcely understandable.
XIII
But with this, it cannot be denied, the Western physics is drawing near to the limit of its possibilities. At bottom, its mission as a historical phenomenon has been to transform the Faustian Nature-feeling into an intellectual knowledge, the faith-forms of springtime into the machine-forms of exact science. And, though for the time being it will continue to quarry more and more practical and even “purely theoretical” results, results as such, whatever their kind, belong to the superficial history of a science. To its deeps belong only the history of its symbolism and its style, and it is almost too evident to be worth the saying that in those deeps the essence and nucleus of our science is in rapid disintegration. Up to the end of the 19th Century every step was in the direction of an inward fulfilment, an increasing purity, rigour and fullness of the dynamic Nature-picture—and then, that which has brought it to an optimum of theoretical clarity, suddenly becomes a solvent. This is not happening intentionally—the high intelligences of modern physics are, in fact, unconscious that it is happening at all—but from an inherent historic necessity. Just so, at the same relative stage, the Classical science inwardly fulfilled itself about 200 B.C. Analysis reached its goal with Gauss, Cauchy and Riemann, and to-day it is only filling up the gaps in its structure.
This is the origin of the sudden and annihilating doubt that has arisen about things that even yesterday were the unchallenged foundation of physical theory, about the meaning of the energy-principle, the concepts of mass, space, absolute time, and causality-laws generally. This doubt is no longer the fruitful doubt of the Baroque, which brought the knower and the object of his knowledge together; it is a doubt affecting the very possibility of a Nature-science. To take one instance alone, what a depth of unconscious Skepsis there is in the rapidly-increasing use of enumerative and statistical methods, which aim only at probability of results and forgo in advance the absolute scientific exactitude that was a creed to the hopeful earlier generations.
The moment is at hand now, when the possibility of a self-contained and self-consistent mechanics will be given up for good. Every physics, as I have shown, must break down over the motion-problem, in which the living person of the knower methodically intrudes into the inorganic form-world of the known. But to-day, not only is this dilemma still inherent in all the newest theories but three centuries of intellectual work have brought it so sharply to focus that there is no possibility more of ignoring it. The theory of gravitation, which since Newton has been an impregnable truth, has now been recognized as a temporally limited and shaky hypothesis. The principle of the Conservation of Energy has no meaning if energy is supposed to be infinite in an infinite space. The acceptance of the principle is incompatible with any three-dimensional structure of space, whether infinite or Euclidean or (as the Non-Euclidean geometries present it) spherical and of “finite, yet unbounded” volume. Its validity therefore is restricted to “a system of bodies self-contained and not externally influenced” and such a limitation does not and cannot exist in actuality. But symbolic infinity was just what the Faustian world-feeling had meant to express in this basic idea, which was simply the mechanical and extensional re-ideation of the idea of immortality and world-soul. In fact it was a feeling out of which knowledge could never succeed in forming a pure system. The luminiferous æther, again, was an ideal postulate of modern dynamics whereby every motion required a something-to-be-moved, but every conceivable hypothesis concerning the constitution of this æther has broken down under inner contradictions; more, Lord Kelvin has proved mathematically that there can be no structure of this light-transmitter that is not open to objections. As, according to the interpretation of Fresnel’s experiments, the light-waves are transversal, the æther would have to be a rigid body (with truly quaint properties), but then the laws of elasticity would have to apply to it and in that case the waves would be longitudinal. The Maxwell-Hertz equations of the Electro-magnetic Theory of Light, which in fact are pure nameless numbers of indubitable validity, exclude the explanation of the æther by any mechanics whatsoever. Therefore, and having regard also to the consequences of the Relativity theory, physicists now regard the æther as pure vacuum. But that, after all, is not very different from demolishing the dynamic picture itself.
Since Newton, the assumption of constant mass—the counterpart of constant force—has had uncontested validity. But the Quantum theory of Planck, and the conclusions of Niels Bohr therefrom as to the fine structure of atoms, which experimental experience had rendered necessary, have destroyed this assumption. Every self-contained system possesses, besides kinetic energy, an energy of radiant heat which is inseparable from it and therefore cannot be represented purely by the concept of mass. For if mass is defined by living energy it is ipso facto no longer constant with reference to thermodynamic state. Nevertheless, it is impossible to fit the theory of quanta into the group of hypotheses constituting the “classical” mechanics of the Baroque; moreover, along with the principle of causal continuity, the basis of the Infinitesimal Calculus founded by Newton and Leibniz is threatened.[523] But, if these are serious enough doubts, the ruthlessly cynical hypothesis of the Relativity theory strikes to the very heart of dynamics. Supported by the experiments of A. A. Michelson, which showed that the velocity of light remains unaffected by the motion of the medium, and prepared mathematically by Lorentz and Minkowski, its specific tendency is to destroy the notion of absolute time. Astronomical discoveries (and here present-day scientists are seriously deceiving themselves) can neither establish nor refute it. “Correct” and “incorrect” are not the criteria whereby such assumptions are to be tested; the question is whether, in the chaos of involved and artificial ideas that has been produced by the innumerable hypotheses of Radioactivity and Thermodynamics, it can hold its own as a useable hypothesis or not. But however this may be, it has abolished the constancy of those physical quantities into the definition of which time has entered, and unlike the antique statics, the Western dynamics knows only such quantities. Absolute measures of length and rigid bodies are no more. And with this the possibility of absolute quantitative delimitations and therefore the “classical” concept of mass as the constant ratio between force and acceleration fall to the ground—just after the quantum of action, a product of energy and time, had been set up as a new constant.
If we make it clear to ourselves that the atomic ideas of Rutherford and Bohr[524] signify nothing but this, that the numerical results of observations have suddenly been provided with a picture of a planetary world within the atom, instead of that of atom-swarms hitherto favoured; if we observe how rapidly card-houses of hypothesis are run up nowadays, every contradiction being immediately covered up by a new hurried hypothesis; if we reflect on how little heed is paid to the fact that these images contradict one another and the “classical” Baroque mechanics alike, we cannot but realize that the great style of ideation is at an end and that, as in architecture and the arts of form, a sort of craft-art of hypothesis-building has taken its place. Only our extreme maestria in experimental technique—true child of its century—hides the collapse of the symbolism.
XIV
Amongst these symbols of decline, the most conspicuous is the notion of Entropy, which forms the subject of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The first law, that of the conservation of energy, is the plain formulation of the essence of dynamics—not to say of the constitution of the West-European soul, to which Nature is necessarily visible only in the form of a contrapuntal-dynamic causality (as against the static-plastic causality of Aristotle). The basic element of the Faustian world-picture is not the Attitude but the Deed and, mechanically considered, the Process, and this law merely puts the mathematical character of these processes into form as variables and constants. But the Second Law goes deeper, and shows a bias in Nature-happenings which is in no wise imposed a priori by the conceptual fundamentals of dynamics.
Mathematically, Entropy is represented by a quantity which is fixed by the momentary state of a self-contained system of bodies and under all physical and chemical alterations can only increase, never diminish; in the most favourable conditions it remains unchanged. Entropy, like Force and Will, is something which (to anyone for whom this form-world is accessible at all) is inwardly clear and meaningful, but is formulated differently by every different authority and never satisfactorily by any. Here again, the intellect breaks down where the world-feeling demands expression.
Nature-processes in general have been classified as irreversible and reversible, according as entropy is increased or not. In any process of the first kind, free energy is converted into bound energy, and if this dead energy is to be turned once more into living, this can only occur through the simultaneous binding of a further quantum of living energy in some second process; the best-known example is the combustion of coal—that is, the conversion of the living energy stored up in it into heat bound by the gas form of the carbon dioxide, if the latent energy of water is to be translated into steam-pressure and thereafter into motion.[525] It follows that in the world as a whole entropy continually increases; that is, the dynamic system is manifestly approaching to some final state, whatever this may be. Examples of the irreversible processes are conduction of heat, diffusion, friction, emission of light and chemical reactions; of reversible, gravitation, electric oscillations, electromagnetic waves and sound-waves.
What has never hitherto been fully felt, and what leads me to regard the Entropy theory (1850) as the beginning of the destruction of that masterpiece of Western intelligence, the old dynamic physics, is the deep opposition of theory and actuality which is here for the first time introduced into theory itself. The First Law had drawn the strict picture of a causal Nature-happening, but the Second Law by introducing irreversibility has for the first time brought into the mechanical-logical domain a tendency belonging to immediate life and thus in fundamental contradiction with the very essence of that domain.
If the Entropy theory is followed out to its conclusion, it results, firstly, that in theory all processes must be reversible—which is one of the basic postulates of dynamics and is reasserted with all rigour in the law of the Conservation of Energy—but, secondly, that in actuality processes of Nature in their entirety are irreversible. Not even under the artificial conditions of laboratory experiment can the simplest process be exactly reversed, that is, a state once passed cannot be re-established. Nothing is more significant of the present condition of systematics than the introduction of the hypotheses of “elementary disorder” for the purpose of smoothing-out the contradiction between intellectual postulate and actual experience. The “smallest particles” of a body (an image, no more) throughout perform reversible processes, but in actual things the smallest particles are in disorder and mutually interfere; and so the irreversible process that alone is experienced by the observer is linked with increase of entropy by taking the mean probabilities of occurrences. And thus theory becomes a chapter of the Calculus of Probabilities, and in lieu of exact we have statistical methods.
Evidently, the significance of this has passed unnoticed. Statistics belong, like chronology, to the domain of the organic, to fluctuating Life, to Destiny and Incident and not to the world of laws and timeless causality. As everyone knows, statistics serve above all to characterize political and economic, that is, historical, developments. In the “classical” mechanics of Galileo and Newton there would have been no room for them. And if, now, suddenly the contents of that field are supposed to be understood and understandable only statistically and under the aspect of Probability—instead of under that of the a priori exactitude which the Baroque thinkers unanimously demanded—what does it mean? It means that the object of understanding is ourselves. The Nature “known” in this wise is the Nature that we know by way of living experience, that we live in ourselves. What theory asserts (and, being itself, must assert)—to wit, this ideal irreversibility that never happens in actuality—represents a relic of the old severe intellectual form, the great Baroque tradition that had contrapuntal music for twin sister. But the resort to statistics shows that the force that that tradition regulated and made effective is exhausted. Becoming and Become, Destiny and Causality, historical and natural-science elements are beginning to be confused. Formulæ of life, growth, age, direction and death are crowding up.
That is what, from this point of view, irreversibility in world-processes has to mean. It is the expression, no longer of the physical “t” but of genuine historical, inwardly-experienced Time, which is identical with Destiny.
Baroque physics was, root and branch, a strict systematic and remained so for as long as its structure was not racked by theories like these, as long as its field was absolutely free from anything that expressed accident and mere probability. But directly these theories come up, it becomes physiognomic. “The course of the world” is followed out. The idea of the end of the world appears, under the veil of formulæ that are no longer in their essence formulæ at all. Something Goethian has entered into physics—and if we understand the deeper significance of Goethe’s passionate polemic against Newton in the “Farbenlehre”[526] we shall realize the full weight of what this means. For therein intuitive vision was arguing against reason, life against death, creative image against normative law. The critical form-world of Nature-knowledge came out of Nature-feeling, God-feeling, as the evoked contrary. Here, at the end of the Late period, it has reached the maximal distance and is turning to come home.
So, once more, the imaging-power that is the efficient in dynamics conjures up the old great symbol of Faustian man’s historical passion, Care—the outlook into the farthest far of past and future, the back-looking study of history, the foreseeing state, the confessions and introspections, the bells that sounded over all our country-sides and measured the passing of Life. The ethos of the word Time, as we alone feel it, as instrumental music alone and no statue-plastic can carry it, is directed upon an aim. This aim has been figured in every life-image that the West has conceived—as the Third Kingdom, as the New Age, as the task of mankind, as the issue of evolution. And it is figured, as the destined end-state of all Faustian “Nature,” in Entropy.
Directional feeling, a relation of past and future, is implicit already in the mythic concept of force on which the whole of this dogmatic form-world rests, and in the description of natural processes it emerges distinct. It would not be too much, therefore, to say that entropy, as the intellectual form in which the infinite sum of nature-events is assembled as a historical and physiognomic unit, tacitly underlay all physical concept-formation from the outset, so that when it came out (as one day it was bound to come out) it was as a “discovery” of scientific induction claiming “support” from all the other theoretical elements of the system. The more dynamics exhausts its inner possibilities as it nears the goal, the more decidedly the historical characters in the picture come to the front and the more insistently the organic necessity of Destiny asserts itself side by side with the inorganic necessity of Causality, and Direction makes itself felt along with capacity and intensity, the factors of pure extension. The course of this process is marked by the appearance of whole series of daring hypotheses, all of like sort, which are only apparently demanded by experimental results and which in fact world-feeling and mythology imagined as long ago as the Gothic age.