The decline of the West

I
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND THE SPACE-PROBLEM

I

The notion of a world-history of physiognomic type expands itself therefore into the wider idea of an all-embracing symbolism. Historical research, in the sense that we postulate here, has simply to investigate the picture of the once-living past and to determine its inner form and logic, and the Destiny-idea is the furthest limit to which it can penetrate. But this research, however comprehensive the new orientation tends to make it, cannot be more than a fragment and a foundation of a still wider treatment. Parallel with it, we have a Nature-investigation that is equally fragmentary and is limited to its own causal system of relations. But neither tragic nor technical “motion” (if we may distinguish by these words the respective bases of the lived and the known) exhausts the living itself. We both live and know when we are awake, but, in addition, we live when mind and senses are asleep. Though night may close every eye, the blood does not sleep. We are moving in the moving (so at least we try to indicate, by a word borrowed from science, the inexpressible that in sleep-hours we feel with inward certainty). But it is only in the waking existence that “here” and “there” appear as an irreducible duality. Every impulse proper to oneself has an expression and every impulse alien to oneself makes an impression. And thus everything of which we are conscious, whatever the form in which it is apprehended—“soul” and “world,” or life and actuality, or History and Nature, or law and feeling, Destiny or God, past and future or present and eternity—has for us a deeper meaning still, a final meaning. And the one and only means of rendering this incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of metaphysics which regards everything whatsoever as having significance as a symbol.

Symbols are sensible signs, final, indivisible and, above all, unsought impressions of definite meaning. A symbol is a trait of actuality that for the sensuously-alert man has an immediate and inwardly-sure significance, and that is incommunicable by process of reason. The detail of a Doric or Early-Arabic or Early-Romanesque ornament; the forms of the cottage and the family, of intercourse, of costume and rite; the aspect, gait and mien of a man and of whole classes of peoples and men; the communication-and community-forms of man and beast; and beyond all this the whole voiceless language of Nature with her woods and pastures, flocks, clouds, stars, moonlight and thunderstorm, bloom and decay, nearness and distance—all this is the emblematical impression of the Cosmos upon us, who are both aware and in our reflective hours quite capable of listening to this language. Vice versa, it is the sense of a homogeneous understanding that raises up the family, the class, the tribe, or finally the Culture, out of the general humanity and assembles it as such.

Here, then, we shall not be concerned with what a world “is,” but with what it signifies to the being that it envelops. When we wake up, at once something extends itself between a “here” and a “there.” We live the “here” as something proper, we experience the “there” as something alien. There is a dualizing of soul and world as poles of actuality; and in the latter there are both resistances which we grasp causally as things and properties, and impulses in which we feel beings, numina (“just like ourselves”) to be operative. But there is in it, further, something which, as it were, eliminates the duality. Actuality—the world in relation to a soul—is for every individual the projection of the Directed upon the domain of the Extended—the Proper mirroring itself on the Alien; one’s actuality then signifies oneself. By an act that is both creative and unconscious—for it is not “I” who actualize the possible, but “it” actualizes itself through me—the bridge of symbol is thrown between the living “here” and “there.” Suddenly, necessarily, and completely “the” world comes into being out of the totality of received and remembered elements: and as it is an individual who apprehends the world, there is for each individual a singular world.

There are therefore as many worlds as there are waking beings and like-living, like-feeling groups of beings. The supposedly single, independent and external world that each believes to be common to all is really an ever-new, uniquely-occurring and non-recurring experience in the existence of each.

A whole series of grades of consciousness leads up from the root-beginnings of obscure childish intuition, in which there is still no clear world for a soul or self-conscious soul within a world, to the highly intellectualized states of which only the men of fully-ripened civilizations are capable. This gradation is at the same time an expansion of symbolism from the stage in which there is an inclusive meaning of all things to one in which separate and specific signs are distinguished. It is not merely when, after the manner of the child, the dreamer and the artist, I am passive to a world full of dark significances; or when I am awake without being in a condition of extreme alertness of thought and act (such a condition is much rarer even in the consciousness of the real thinker and man of action than is generally supposed)—it is continuously and always, for as long as my life can be considered to be a waking life at all, that I am endowing that which is outside me with the whole content that is in me, from the half-dreamy impressions of world-coherence to the rigid world of causal laws and number that overlies and binds them. And even in the domain of pure number the symbolical is not lacking, for we find that refined thought puts inexpressible meanings into signs like the triangle, the circle and the numbers 7 and 12.

This is the idea of the Macrocosm, actuality as the sum total of all symbols in relation to one soul. From this property of being significant nothing is exempt. All that is, symbolizes. From the corporeal phenomena like visage, shape, mien (of individuals and classes and peoples alike), which have always been known to possess meaning, to the supposedly eternal and universally-valid forms of knowledge, mathematics and physics, everything speaks out of the essence of one and only one soul.

At the same time these individuals’ worlds as lived and experienced by men of one Culture or spiritual community are interrelated, and on the greater or less degree of this interrelation depends the greater or less communicability of intuitions, sensations and thoughts from one to another—that is, the possibility of making intelligible what one has created in the style of one’s own being, through expression-media such as language or art or religion, by means of word-sounds or formulæ or signs that are themselves also symbols. The degree of interrelation between one’s world and another’s fixes the limit at which understanding becomes self-deception. Certainly it is only very imperfectly that we can understand the Indian or the Egyptian soul, as manifested in the men, customs, deities, root-words, ideas, buildings and acts of it. The Greeks, ahistoric as they were, could not even guess at the essence of alien spiritualities—witness the naïveté with which they were wont to rediscover their own gods and Culture in those of alien peoples. But in our own case too, the current translations of the ἀρχή, or Atman, or Tao of alien philosophers presuppose our proper world-feeling, which is that from which our “equivalents” claim their significance, as the basis of an alien soul-expression. And similarly we elucidate the characters of early Egyptian and Chinese portraits with reference to our own life-experience. In both cases we deceive ourselves. That the artistic masterpieces of all Cultures are still living for us—“immortal” as we say—is another such fancy, kept alive by the unanimity with which we understand the alien work in the proper sense. Of this tendency of ours the effect of the Laocoön group on Renaissance sculpture and that of Seneca on the Classicist drama of the French are examples.

II

Symbols, as being things actualized, belong to the domain of the extended. They are become and not becoming (although they may stand for a becoming) and they are therefore rigidly limited and subject to the laws of space. There are only sensible-spatial symbols. The very word “form” designates something extended in the extended,—even the inner forms of music are no exception, as we shall see. But extension is the hall-mark of the fact “waking consciousness,” and this constitutes only one side of the individual existence and is intimately bound up with that existence’s destinies. Consequently, every trait of the actual waking-consciousness, whether it be feeling or understanding, is in the moment of our becoming aware of it, already past. We can only reflect upon impressions, “think them over” as our happy phrase goes, but that which for the sensuous life of the animals is past, is for the grammatical (wortgebundene) understanding of man passing, transient. That which happens is, of course, transient, for a happening is irrevocable, but every kind of significance is also transient. Follow out the destiny of the Column, from the Egyptian tomb-temple in which columns are ranked to mark the path for the traveller, through the Doric peripteros in which they are held together by the body of the building, and the Early-Arabian basilica where they support the interior, to the façades of the Renaissance in which they provide the upward-striving element. As we see, an old significance never returns; that which has entered the domain of extension has begun and ended at once. A deep relation, and one which is early felt, exists between space and death. Man is the only being that knows death; all others become old, but with a consciousness wholly limited to the moment which must seem to them eternal. They live, but like children in those first years in which Christianity regards them as still “innocent,” they know nothing of life, and they die and they see death without knowing anything about it. Only fully-awakened man, man proper, whose understanding has been emancipated by the habit of language from dependence on sight, comes to possess (besides sensibility) the notion of transience, that is, a memory of the past as past and an experiential conviction of irrevocability. We are Time,^[178] but we possess also an image of history and in this image death, and with death birth, appear as the two riddles. For all other beings life pursues its course without suspecting its limits, i.e., without conscious knowledge of task, meaning, duration and object. It is because there is this deep and significant identity that we so often find the awakening of the inner life in a child associated with the death of some relation. The child suddenly grasps the lifeless corpse for what it is, something that has become wholly matter, wholly space, and at the same moment it feels itself as an individual being in an alien extended world. “From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance,” said Tolstoi once. Here, in the decisive moments of existence, when man first becomes man and realizes his immense loneliness in the universal, the world-fear reveals itself for the first time as the essentially human fear in the presence of death, the limit of the light-world, rigid space. Here, too, the higher thought originates as meditation upon death. Every religion, every scientific investigation, every philosophy proceeds from it. Every great symbolism attaches its form-language to the cult of the dead, the forms of disposal of the dead, the adornment of the graves of the dead. The Egyptian style begins with the tomb-temples of the Pharaohs, the Classical with the geometrical decoration of the funerary urns, the Arabian with catacomb and sarcophagus, the Western with the cathedral wherein the sacrificial death of Jesus is re-enacted daily under the hands of the priest. From this primitive fear springs, too, historical sensitiveness in all its modes, the Classical with its cleaving to the life-abundant present, the Arabian with its baptismal rite that wins new life and overcomes death, the Faustian with its contrition that makes worthy to receive the Body of Jesus and therewith immortality. Till we have the constantly-wakeful concern for the life that is not yet past, there is no concern for that which is past. The beast has only the future, but man knows also the past. And thus every new Culture is awakened in and with a new view of the world, that is, a sudden glimpse of death as the secret of the perceivable world. It was when the idea of the impending end of the world spread over Western Europe (about the year 1000) that the Faustian soul of this religion was born.

Primitive man, in his deep amazement before death, sought with all the forces of his spirit to penetrate and to spellbind this world of the extended with the inexorable and always present limits of its causality, this world filled with dark almightiness that continuously threatened to make an end of him. This energetic defensive lies deep in unconscious existence, but, as being the first impulse that genuinely projects soul and world as parted and opposed, it marks the threshold of personal conduct of life. Ego-feeling and world-feeling begin to work, and all culture, inner or outer, bearing or performance, is as a whole only the intensification of this being-human. Henceforward all that resists our sensations is not mere resistance or thing or impression, as it is for animals and for children also, but an expression as well. Not merely are things actually contained in the world-around but also they possess meaning, as phenomena in the world-view. Originally they possessed only a relationship to men, but now there is also a relationship of men to them. They have become emblems of his existence. And thus the essence of every genuine—unconscious and inwardly necessary—symbolism proceeds from the knowledge of death in which the secret of space reveals itself. All symbolism implies a defensive; it is the expression of a deep Scheu in the old double sense of the word,^[179] and its form-language tells at once of hostility and of reverence.

Every thing-become is mortal. Not only peoples, languages, races and Cultures are transient. In a few centuries from now there will no more be a Western Culture, no more be German, English or French than there were Romans in the time of Justinian. Not that the sequence of human generations failed; it was the inner form of a people, which had put together a number of these generations as a single gesture, that was no longer there. The Civis Romanus, one of the most powerful symbols of Classical being, had nevertheless, as a form, only a duration of some centuries. But the primitive phenomenon of the great Culture will itself have disappeared some day, and with it the drama of world-history; aye, and man himself, and beyond man the phenomenon of plant and animal existence on the earth’s surface, the earth, the sun, the whole world of sun-systems. All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but the arts themselves. One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—though possibly a coloured canvas and a sheet of notes may remain—because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone. Every thought, faith and science dies as soon as the spirits in whose worlds their “eternal truths” were true and necessary are extinguished. Dead, even, are the star-worlds which “appeared,” a proper world to the proper eye, to the astronomers of the Nile and the Euphrates, for our eye is different from theirs; and our eye in its turn is mortal. All this we know. The beast does not know, and what he does not know does not exist in his experienced world-around. But if the image of the past vanishes, the longing to give a deeper meaning to the passing vanishes also. And so it is with reference to the purely human macrocosm that we apply the oft-quoted line, which shall serve as motto for all that follows: Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.

From this we are led, without our noticing it, back to the space-problem, though now it takes on a fresh and surprising form. Indeed, it is as a corollary to these ideas that it appears for the first time as capable of solution—or, to speak more modestly, of enunciation—just as the time-problem was made more comprehensible by way of the Destiny-idea. From the moment of our awakening, the fateful and directed life appears in the phenomenal life as an experienced depth. Everything extends itself, but it is not yet “space,” not something established in itself but a self-extension continued from the moving here to the moving there. World-experience is bound up with the essence of depth (i.e., far-ness or distance). In the abstract system of mathematics, “depth” is taken along with “length” and “breadth” as a “third” dimension; but this trinity of elements of like order is misleading from the outset, for in our impression of the spatial world these elements are unquestionably not equivalents, let alone homogeneous. Length and breadth are no doubt, experientially, a unit and not a mere sum, but they are (the phrase is used deliberately) simply a form of reception; they represent the purely sensuous impression. But depth is a representation of expression, of Nature, and with it begins the “world.”

This discrimination between the “third” and the other two dimensions, so called, which needless to say is wholly alien to mathematics, is inherent also in the opposition of the notions of sensation and contemplation. Extension into depth converts the former into the latter; in fact, depth is the first and genuine dimension in the literal sense of the word.^[180] In it the waking consciousness is active, whereas in the others it is strictly passive. It is the symbolic content of a particular order as understood by one particular Culture that is expressed by this original fundamental and unanalysable element. The experiencing of depth (this is a premiss upon which all that follows is dependent) is an act, as entirely involuntary and necessary as it is creative, whereby the ego keeps its world, so to say, in subordination (zudiktiert erhält). Out of the rain of impressions the ego fashions a formal unit, a cinematic picture, which as soon as it is mastered by the understanding is subjected to law and the causality principle; and therefore, as the projection of an individual spirit it is transient and mortal.

There is no doubt, however reason may contest it, that this extension is capable of infinite variety, and that it operates differently not merely as between child and man, or nature-man and townsman, or Chinese and Romans, but as between individual and individual according as they experience their worlds contemplatively or alertly, actively or placidly. Every artist has rendered “Nature” by line and by tone, every physicist—Greek, Arabian or German—has dissected “Nature” into ultimate elements, and how is it that they have not all discovered the same? Because every one of them has had his own Nature, though—with a naïveté that was really the salvation of his world-idea and of his own self—every one believed that he had it in common with all the rest. Nature is a possession which is saturated through and through with the most personal connotations. Nature is a function of the particular Culture.

III

Kant believed that he had decided the great question of whether this a priori element was pre-existent or obtained by experience, by his celebrated formula that Space is the form of perception which underlies all world impressions. But the “world” of the careless child and the dreamer undeniably possess this form in an insecure and hesitant way,^[181] and it is only the tense, practical, technical treatment of the world-around—imposed on the free-moving being which, unlike the lilies of the fields, must care for its life—that lets sensuous self-extension stiffen into rational tridimensionality. And it is only the city-man of matured Cultures that really lives in this glaring wakefulness, and only for his thought that there is a Space wholly divorced from sensuous life, “absolute,” dead and alien to Time; and it exists not as a form of the intuitively-perceived but as a form of the rationally-comprehended. There is no manner of doubt that the “space” which Kant saw all around him with such unconditional certainty when he was thinking out his theory, did not exist in anything like so rigorous a form for his Carolingian ancestors. Kant’s greatness consists in his having created the idea of a "form a priori," but not in the application that he gave it. We have already seen that Time is not a “form of perception” nor for that matter a form at all—forms exist only in the extended—and that there is no possibility of defining it except as a counter-concept to Space. But there is the further question—does this word “space” exactly cover the formal content of the intuitively-perceived? And beyond all this there is the plain fact that the “form of perception” alters with distance. Every distant mountain range is “perceived” as a scenic plane. No one will pretend that he sees the moon as a body; for the eye it is a pure plane and it is only by the aid of the telescope—i.e. when the distance is artificially reduced—that it progressively obtains a spatial form. Obviously, then, the “form of perception” is a function of distance. Moreover, when we reflect upon anything, we do not exactly remember the impressions that we received at the time, but “represent to ourselves” the picture of a space abstracted from them. But this representation may and does deceive us regarding the living actuality. Kant let himself be misled; he should certainly not have permitted himself to distinguish between forms of perception and forms of ratiocination, for his notion of Space in principle embraced both.^[182]

Just as Kant marred the Time-problem by bringing it into relation with an essentially misunderstood arithmetic and—on that basis—dealing with a phantom sort of time that lacks the life-quality of direction and is therefore a mere spatial scheme, so also he marred the Space-problem by relating it to a common-place geometry.

It befell that a few years after the completion of Kant’s main work Gauss discovered the first of the Non-Euclidean geometries. These, irreproachably demonstrated as regards their own internal validity, enable it to be proved that there are several strictly mathematical kinds of three-dimensional extension, all of which are a priori certain, and none of which can be singled out to rank as the genuine “form of perception.”

It was a grave, and in a contemporary of Euler and Lagrange an unpardonable, error to postulate that the Classical school-geometry (for it was that which Kant always had in mind) was to be found reproduced in the forms of Nature around us. In moments of attentive observation at very short range, and in cases in which the relations considered are sufficiently small, the living impressions and the rules of customary geometry are certainly in approximate agreement. But the exact conformity asserted by philosophy can be demonstrated neither by the eye nor by measuring-instruments. Both these must always stop short at a certain limit of accuracy which is very far indeed below that which would be necessary, say, for determining which of the Non-Euclidean geometries is the geometry of “empirical” Space.^[183] On the large scales and for great distances, where the experience of depth completely dominates the perception-picture (for example, looking on a broad landscape as against a drawing) the form of perception is in fundamental contradiction with mathematics. A glance down any avenue shows us that parallels meet at the horizon. Western perspective and the otherwise quite different perspective of Chinese painting are both alike based on this fact, and the connexion of these perspectives with the root-problems of their respective mathematics is unmistakable.

Experiential Depth, in the infinite variety of its modes, eludes every sort of numerical definition. The whole of lyric poetry and music, the entire painting of Egypt, China and the West by hypothesis deny any strictly mathematical structure in space as felt and seen, and it is only because all modern philosophers have been destitute of the smallest understanding of painting that they have failed to note the contradiction. The “horizon” in and by which every visual image gradually passes into a definitive plane, is incapable of any mathematical treatment. Every stroke of a landscape painter’s brush refutes the assertions of conventional epistemology.

As mathematical magnitudes abstract from life, the “three dimensions” have no natural limits. But when this proposition becomes entangled with the surface-and-depth of experienced impression, the original epistemological error leads to another, viz., that apprehended extension is also without limits, although in fact our vision only comprises the illuminated portion of space and stops at the light-limit of the particular moment, which may be the star-heavens or merely the bright atmosphere. The “visual” world is the totality of light-resistances, since vision depends on the presence of radiated or reflected light. The Greeks took their stand on this and stayed there. It is the Western world-feeling that has produced the idea of a limitless universe of space—a space of infinite star-systems and distances that far transcends all optical possibilities—and this was a creation of the inner vision, incapable of all actualization through the eye, and, even as an idea, alien to and unachievable by the men of a differently-disposed Culture.

IV

The outcome, then, of Gauss’s discovery, which completely altered the course of modern mathematics,^[184] was the statement that there are severally equally valid structures of three-dimensional extension. That it should even be asked which of them corresponds to actual perception shows that the problem was not in the least comprehended. Mathematics, whether or not it employs visible images and representations as working conveniences, concerns itself with systems that are entirely emancipated from life, time and distance, with form-worlds of pure numbers whose validity—not fact-foundation—is timeless and like everything else that is “known” is known by causal logic and not experienced.

With this, the difference between the living intuition-way and the mathematical form-language became manifest and the secret of spatial becoming opened out.

As becoming is the foundation of the become, continuous living history that of fulfilled dead nature, the organic that of the mechanical, destiny that of causal law and the causally-settled, so too direction is the origin of extension. The secret of Life accomplishing itself which is touched upon by the word Time forms the foundation of that which, as accomplished, is understood by (or rather indicated to an inner feeling in us by) the word Space. Every extension that is actual has first been accomplished in and with an experience of depth, and what is primarily indicated by the word Time is just this process of extending, first sensuously (in the main, visually) and only later intellectually, into depth and distance, i.e., the step from the planar semi-impression to the macrocosmically ordered world-picture with its mysterious-manifest kinesis. We feel—and the feeling is what constitutes the state of all-round awareness in us—that we are in an extension that encircles us; and it is only necessary to follow out this original impression that we have of the worldly to see that in reality there is only one true “dimension” of space, which is direction from one’s self outwards into the distance, the “there” and the future, and that the abstract system of three dimensions is a mechanical representation and not a fact of life. By the depth-experience sensation is expanded into the world. We have seen already that the directedness that is in life wears the badge of irreversibility, and there is something of this same hall-mark of Time in our instinctive tendency to feel the depth that is in the world uni-directionally also—viz., from ourselves outwards, and never from the horizon inwards. The bodily mobility of man and beast is disposed in this sense. We move forward—towards the Future, nearing with every step not merely our aim but our old age—and we feel every backward look as a glance at something that is past, that has already become history.^[185]

If we can describe the basic form of the understood, viz., causality, as destiny become rigid, we may similarly speak of spatial depth as a time become rigid. That which not only man but even the beast feels operative around him as destiny, he perceives by touching, looking, listening, scenting as movement, and under his intense scrutiny it stiffens and becomes causal. We feel that it is drawing towards spring and we feel in advance how the spring landscape expands around us; but we know that the earth as it moves in space revolves and that the duration of spring consists of ninety such revolutions of the earth, or days. Time gives birth to Space, but Space gives death to Time.

Had Kant been more precise, he would, instead of speaking of the “two forms of perception,” have called time the form of perception and space the form of the perceived, and then the connexion of the two would probably have revealed itself to him. The logician, mathematician, or scientist in his moments of intense thought, knows only the Become—which has been detached from the singular event by the very act of meditating upon it—and true systematic space—in which everything possesses the property of a mathematically-expressible “duration.” But it is just this that indicates to us how space is continuously “becoming.” While we gaze into the distance with our senses, it floats around us, but when we are startled, the alert eye sees a tense and rigid space. This space is; the principle of its existing at all is that it is, outside time and detached from it and from life. In it duration, a piece of perished time, resides as a known property of things. And, as we know ourselves too as being in this space, we know that we also have a duration and a limit, of which the moving finger of our clock ceaselessly warns us. But the rigid Space itself is transient too—at the first relaxation of our intellectual tension it vanishes from the many-coloured spread of our world-around—and so it is a sign and symbol of the most elemental and powerful symbol, of life itself.

For the involuntary and unqualified realization of depth, which dominates the consciousness with the force of an elemental event (simultaneously with the awakening of the inner life), marks the frontier between child and ... Man. The symbolic experience of depth is what is lacking in the child, who grasps at the moon and knows as yet no meaning in the outer world but, like the soul of primitive man, dawns in a dreamlike continuum of sensations (in traumhafter Verbundenheit mit allem Empfindungshaften hindämmert). Of course the child is not without experience of the extended, of a very simple kind, but there is no world-perception; distance is felt, but it does not yet speak to the soul. And with the soul’s awakening, direction, too, first reaches living expression—Classical expression in steady adherence to the near-present and exclusion of the distant and future; Faustian in direction-energy which has an eye only for the most distant horizons; Chinese, in free hither-and-thither wandering that nevertheless goes to the goal; Egyptian in resolute march down the path once entered. Thus the Destiny-idea manifests itself in every line of a life. With it alone do we become members of a particular Culture, whose members are connected by a common world-feeling and a common world-form derived from it. A deep identity unites the awakening of the soul, its birth into clear existence in the name of a Culture, with the sudden realization of distance and time, the birth of its outer world through the symbol of extension; and thenceforth this symbol is and remains the prime symbol of that life, imparting to it its specific style and the historical form in which it progressively actualizes its inward possibilities. From the specific directedness is derived the specific prime-symbol of extension, namely, for the Classical world-view the near, strictly limited, self-contained Body, for the Western infinitely wide and infinitely profound three-dimensional Space, for the Arabian the world as a Cavern. And therewith an old philosophical problem dissolves into nothing: this prime form of the world is innate in so far as it is an original possession of the soul of that Culture which is expressed by our life as a whole, and acquired in so far that every individual soul re-enacts for itself that creative act and unfolds in early childhood the symbol of depth to which its existence is predestined, as the emerging butterfly unfolds its wings. The first comprehension of depth is an act of birth—the spiritual complement of the bodily.^[186] In it the Culture is born out of its mother-landscape, and the act is repeated by every one of its individual souls throughout its life-course. This is what Plato—connecting it with an early Hellenic belief—called anamnesis. The definiteness of the world-form, which for each dawning soul suddenly is, derives meaning from Becoming. Kant the systematic, however, with his conception of the form a priori, would approach the interpretation of this very riddle from a dead result instead of along a living way.

From now on, we shall consider the kind of extension as the prime symbol of a Culture. From it we are to deduce the entire form-language of its actuality, its physiognomy as contrasted with the physiognomy of every other Culture and still more with the almost entire lack of physiognomy in primitive man’s world-around. For now the interpretation of depth rises to acts, to formative expression in works, to the trans-forming of actuality, not now merely in order to subserve necessities of life (as in the case of the animals) but above all to create a picture out of extensional elements of all sorts (material, line, colour, tone, motion)—a picture, often, that re-emerges with power to charm after lost centuries in the world-picture of another Culture and tells new men of the way in which its authors understood the world.

But the prime symbol does not actualize itself; it is operative through the form-sense of every man, every community, age and epoch and dictates the style of every life-expression. It is inherent in the form of the state, the religious myths and cults, the ethical ideals, the forms of painting and music and poetry, the fundamental notions of each science—but it is not presented by these. Consequently, it is not presentable by words, for language and words are themselves derived symbols. Every individual symbol tells of it, but only to the inner feelings, not to the understanding. And when we say, as henceforth we shall say, that the prime-symbol of the Classical soul is the material and individual body, that of the Western pure infinite space, it must always be with the reservation that concepts cannot represent the inconceivable, and thus at the most a significative feeling may be evoked by the sound of words.

Infinite space is the ideal that the Western soul has always striven to find, and to see immediately actualized, in its world-around; and hence it is that the countless space-theories of the last centuries possess—over and above all ostensible “results”—a deep import as symptoms of a world-feeling. In how far does unlimited extension underlie all objective things? There is hardly a single problem that has been more earnestly pondered than this; it would almost seem as if every other world-question was dependent upon the one problem of the nature of space. And is it not in fact so—for us? And how, then, has it escaped notice that the whole Classical world never expended one word on it, and indeed did not even possess a word^[187] by which the problem could be exactly outlined? Why had the great pre-Socratics nothing to say on it? Did they overlook in their world just that which appears to us the problem of all problems? Ought we not, in fact, to have seen long ago that the answer is in the very fact of their silence? How is it that according to our deepest feeling the “world” is nothing but that world-of-space which is the true offspring of our depth-experience, and whose grand emptiness is corroborated by the star-systems lost in it? Could a “world” of this sense have been made even comprehensible to a Classical thinker? In short, we suddenly discover that the “eternal problem” that Kant, in the name of humanity, tackled with a passion that itself is symbolic, is a purely Western problem that simply does not arise in the intellects of other Cultures.

What then was it that Classical man, whose insight into his own world-around was certainly not less piercing than ours, regarded as the prime problem of all being? It was the problem of ἀρχή, the material origin and foundation of all sensuously-perceptible things. If we grasp this we shall get close to the significance of the fact—not the fact of space, but the fact that made it a necessity of destiny for the space-problem to become the problem of the Western, and only the Western, soul.^[188] This very spatiality (Räumlichkeit) that is the truest and sublimest element in the aspect of our universe, that absorbs into itself and begets out of itself the substantiality of all things, Classical humanity (which knows no word for, and therefore has no idea of, space) with one accord cuts out as the nonent, τὸ μὴ ὄν, that which is not. The pathos of this denial can scarcely be exaggerated. The whole passion of the Classical soul is in this act of excluding by symbolic negation that which it would not feel as actual, that in which its own existence could not be expressed. A world of other colour suddenly confronts us here. The Classical statue in its splendid bodiliness—all structure and expressive surfaces and no incorporeal arrière-pensée whatsoever—contains without remainder all that Actuality is for the Classical eye. The material, the optically definite, the comprehensible, the immediately present—this list exhausts the characteristics of this kind of extension. The Classical universe, the Cosmos or well-ordered aggregate of all near and completely viewable things, is concluded by the corporeal vault of heaven. More there is not. The need that is in us to think of “space” as being behind as well as before this shell was wholly absent from the Classical world-feeling. The Stoics went so far as to treat even properties and relations of things as “bodies.” For Chrysippus, the Divine Pneuma is a “body,” for Democritus seeing consists in our being penetrated by material particles of the things seen. The State is a body which is made up of all the bodies of its citizens, the law knows only corporeal persons and material things. And the feeling finds its last and noblest expression in the stone body of the Classical temple. The windowless interior is carefully concealed by the array of columns; but outside there is not one truly straight line to be found. Every flight of steps has a slight sweep outward, every step relatively to the next. The pediment, the roof-ridge, the sides are all curved. Every column has a slight swell and none stand truly vertical or truly equidistant from one another. But swell and inclination and distance vary from the corners to the centres of the sides in a carefully toned-off ratio, and so the whole corpus is given a something that swings mysterious about a centre. The curvatures are so fine that to a certain extent they are invisible to the eye and only to be “sensed.” But it is just by these means that direction in depth is eliminated. While the Gothic style soars, the Ionic swings. The interior of the cathedral pulls up with primeval force, but the temple is laid down in majestic rest. All this is equally true as relating to the Faustian and Apollinian Deity, and likewise of the fundamental ideas of the respective physics. To the principles of position, material and form we have opposed those of straining movement, force and mass, and we have defined the last-named as a constant ratio between force and acceleration, nay, finally volatilized both in the purely spatial elements of capacity and intensity. It was an obligatory consequence also of this way of conceiving actuality that the instrumental music of the great 18th-Century masters should emerge as a master-art—for it is the only one of the arts whose form-world is inwardly related to the contemplative vision of pure space. In it, as opposed to the statues of Classical temple and forum, we have bodiless realms of tone, tone-intervals, tone-seas. The orchestra swells, breaks, and ebbs, it depicts distances, lights, shadows, storms, driving clouds, lightning flashes, colours etherealized and transcendent—think of the instrumentation of Gluck and Beethoven. “Contemporary,” in our sense, with the Canon of Polycletus, the treatise in which the great sculptor laid down the strict rules of human body-build which remained authoritative till beyond Lysippus, we find the strict canon (completed by Stamitz about 1740) of the sonata-movement of four elements which begins to relax in late-Beethoven quartets and symphonies and, finally, in the lonely, utterly infinitesimal tone-world of the “Tristan” music, frees itself from all earthly comprehensibleness. This prime feeling of a loosing, Erlösung, solution, of the Soul in the Infinite, of a liberation from all material heaviness which the highest moments of our music always awaken, sets free also the energy of depth that is in the Faustian soul: whereas the effect of the Classical art-work is to bind and to bound, and the body-feeling secures, brings back the eye from distance to a Near and Still that is saturated with beauty.

V

Each of the great Cultures, then, has arrived at a secret language of world-feeling that is only fully comprehensible by him whose soul belongs to that Culture. We must not deceive ourselves. Perhaps we can read a little way into the Classical soul, because its form-language is almost the exact inversion of the Western; how far we have succeeded or can ever succeed is a question which necessarily forms the starting-point of all criticism of the Renaissance, and it is a very difficult one. But when we are told that probably (it is at best a doubtful venture to meditate upon so alien an expression of Being) the Indians conceived numbers which according to our ideas possessed neither value nor magnitude nor relativity, and which only became positive and negative, great or small units in virtue of position, we have to admit that it is impossible for us exactly to re-experience what spiritually underlies this kind of number. For us, 3 is always something, be it positive or negative; for the Greeks it was unconditionally a positive magnitude, +3; but for the Indian it indicates a possibility without existence, to which the word “something” is not yet applicable, outside both existence and non-existence which are properties to be introduced into it. +3, -3, ⅓, are thus emanating actualities of subordinate rank which reside in the mysterious substance (3) in some way that is entirely hidden from us. It takes a Brahmanic soul to perceive these numbers as self-evident, as ideal emblems of a self-complete world-form; to us they are as unintelligible as is the Brahman Nirvana, for which, as lying beyond life and death, sleep and waking, passion, compassion and dispassion and yet somehow actual, words entirely fail us. Only this spirituality could originate the grand conception of nothingness as a true number, zero, and even then this zero is the Indian zero for which existent and non-existent are equally external designations.^[189]

Arabian thinkers of the ripest period—and they included minds of the very first order like Alfarabi and Alkabi—in controverting the ontology of Aristotle, proved that the body as such did not necessarily assume space for existence, and deduced the essence of this space—the Arabian kind of extension, that is—from the characteristic of “one’s being in a position.”

But this does not prove that as against Aristotle and Kant they were in error or that their thinking was muddled (as we so readily say of what our own brains cannot take in). It shows that the Arabian spirit possessed other world-categories than our own. They could have rebutted Kant, or Kant them, with the same subtlety of proof—and both disputants would have remained convinced of the correctness of their respective standpoints.

When we talk of space to-day, we are all thinking more or less in the same style, just as we are all using the same languages and word-signs, whether we are considering mathematical space or physical space or the space of painting or that of actuality, although all philosophizing that insists (as it must) upon putting an identity of understanding in the place of such kinship of significance-feeling must remain somewhat questionable. But no Hellene or Egyptian or Chinaman could re-experience any part of those feelings of ours, and no artwork or thought-system could possibly convey to him unequivocally what “space” means for us. Again, the prime conceptions originated in the quite differently constituted soul of the Greek, like ἀρχή, ὕλη, μορφἠ, comprise the whole content of his world. But this world is differently constituted from ours. It is, for us, alien and remote. We may take these words of Greek and translate them by words of our own like “origin,” “matter” and “form,” but it is mere imitation, a feeble effort to penetrate into a world of feeling in which the finest and deepest elements, in spite of all we can do, remain dumb; it is as though one tried to set the Parthenon sculptures for a string quartet, or cast Voltaire’s God in bronze. The master-traits of thought, life and world-consciousness are as manifold and different as the features of individual men; in those respects as in others there are distinctions of “races” and “peoples,” and men are as unconscious of these distinctions as they are ignorant of whether “red” and “yellow” do or do not mean the same for others as for themselves. It is particularly the common symbolic of language that nourishes the illusion of a homogeneous constitution of human inner-life and an identical world-form; in this respect the great thinkers of one and another Culture resemble the colour-blind in that each is unaware of his own condition and smiles at the errors of the rest.

And now I draw the conclusions. There is a plurality of prime symbols. It is the depth-experience through which the world becomes, through which perception extends itself to world. Its signification is for the soul to which it belongs and only for that soul, and it is different in waking and dreaming, acceptance and scrutiny, as between young and old, townsmen and peasant, man and woman. It actualizes for every high Culture the possibility of form upon which that Culture’s existence rests and it does so of deep necessity. All fundamentals words like our mass, substance, material, thing, body, extension (and multitudes of words of the like order in other culture-tongues) are emblems, obligatory and determined by destiny, that out of the infinite abundance of world-possibilities evoke in the name of the individual Culture those possibilities that alone are significant and therefore necessary for it. None of them is exactly transferable just as it is into the experiential living and knowing of another Culture. And none of these prime words ever recurs. The choice of prime symbol in the moment of the Culture-soul’s awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil—a moment that for one who can read world-history thus contains something catastrophic—decides all.

Culture, as the soul’s total expression “become” and perceptible in gestures and works, as its mortal transient body, obnoxious to law, number and causality:

As the historical drama, a picture in the whole picture of world-history:

As the sum of grand emblems of life, feeling and understanding:

—this is the language through which alone a soul can tell of what it undergoes.

The macrocosm, too, is a property of the individual soul; we can never know how it stands with the soul of another. That which is implied by “infinite space,” the space that “passeth all understanding,” which is the creative interpretation of depth-experience proper and peculiar to us men of the West—the kind of extension that is nothingness to the Greeks, the Universe to us—dyes our world in a colour that the Classical, the Indian and the Egyptian souls had not on their palettes. One soul listens to the world-experience in A flat major, another in F minor; one apprehends it in the Euclidean spirit, another in the contrapuntal, a third in the Magian spirit. From the purest analytical Space and from Nirvana to the most somatic reality of Athens, there is a series of prime symbols each of which is capable of forming a complete world out of itself. And, as the idea of the Babylonian or that of the Indian world was remote, strange and elusive for the men of the five or six Cultures that followed, so also the Western world will be incomprehensible to the men of Cultures yet unborn.