388. Obviously, atheism is no exception to this. When a Materialist or Darwinian speaks of a “Nature” that orders everything, that effects selections, that produces and destroys anything, he differs only to the extent of one word from the 18th-Century Deist. The world-feeling has undergone no change.
389. Lines 525-534:
390. Iliad, XXII, 208-215.—Tr.
391. The great part played by learned Jesuits in the development of theoretical physics must not be overlooked. Father Boscovich, with his system of atomic forces (1759), made the first serious advance beyond Newton. The idea of the equivalence of God and pure space is even more evident in Jesuit work than it is in that of the Jansenists of Port Royal with whom Descartes and Pascal were associated.
(Boscovich’s atomic theory is discussed by James Clerk Maxwell in Ency. Brit., XI ed., XVIII, 655—a reference that, for more general reasons, no student of the Faustian-as-scientist should fail to follow up.—Tr.)
392. Luther placed practical activity (the day’s demands, as Goethe said) at the very centre of morale, and that is one of the main reasons why it was to the deeper natures that Protestantism appealed most cogently. Works of piety devoid of directional energy (in the sense that we give the words here) fell at once from the high esteem in which they had been sustained (as the Renaissance was sustained) by a relic of Southern feeling. On ethical grounds monasticism thenceforth falls into ever-increasing disrepute. In the Gothic Age entry into the cloister, the renunciation of care, deed and will, had been an act of the loftiest ethical character—the highest sacrifice that it was possible to imagine, that of life. But in the Baroque even Roman Catholics no longer felt thus about it. And the institutions, no longer of renunciation but merely of inactive comfort, went down before the spirit of the Enlightenment.
393. προσῶπον meant in the older Greek “visage,” and later, in Athens, “mask.” As late as Aristotle the word is not yet in use for person. “Persona,” originally also a theatre-mask, came to have a juristic application, and in Roman Imperial times the pregnant Roman sense of this word affected the Greek προσῶπον also. See R. Hirzel, Die Person (1914), pp. 40 et seq.
394. See pp. 127 et seq.
395. W. Creizenach, Gesch. d. neueren Dramas (1918), II, 346 et seq.
397. We too have our anecdote, but it is of our own type and diametrically opposed to the Classical. It is the “short story” (Novelle)—the story of Cervantes, Kleist, Hoffmann and Storm—and we admire it in proportion as we are made to feel that its motive is possible only this once, at this time and with these people, whereas the mythic type of anecdote, the Fable, is judged by precisely opposite criteria.
398. See pp. 143 et seq.
399. The Fates of the Greeks are represented as spinning, measuring out and cutting the thread of a man’s destiny, but not as weaving it into the web of his life. It is a mere dimension.—Tr.
401. The evolution of meaning in the Classical words pathos and passico corresponds with this. The second was formed from the first only in the Imperial period, and carried its original sense in the “Passion” of Christ. It was in the early Gothic times, and particularly in the language of the Franciscan “Zealots” and the disciples of Joachim of Floris, that its meaning underwent the decisive reversal. Expressing thenceforward a condition of profound excitement which strained to discharge itself, it became finally a generic name for all spiritual dynamic; in this sense of strong will and directional energy it was brought into German as Leidenschaft by Zesen in 1647.
402. The Eleusinian mysteries contained no secrets at all. Everyone knew what went on. But upon the believers they exercised a strange and overpowering effect, and the “betrayal” consisted in profaning them by imitating their holy forms outside the temple-precinct. See, further, A. Dieterich, Kleine Schriften (1911), pp. 414 et seq.
403. See Vol. II, pp. 345 et seq.
404. The dancers were goats, Silenus as leader of the dance wore a horsetail, but Aristophanes’s “Birds,” “Frogs” and “Wasps” suggest that there were still other animal disguises.
405. See pp. 283 et seq.
406. As the student of cultural history to-day is not necessarily familiar with technical Greek, it may be helpful to reproduce from Cornish’s edition of Smith’s “Greek and Roman Antiquities,” s.v. “Tragoedia,” the following paragraph, as clear as it is succinct:
“Tragedy is described by Aristotle (Poet., VI, 2) as effecting by means of pity and terror that purgation [of the soul] (κάθαρσις) which belongs to [is proper for] such feelings.”... Tragedy excites pity and terror by presenting to the mind things which are truly pitiable and terrible. When pity and terror are moved, as tragedy moves them, by a worthy cause, then the mind experiences that sense of relief which comes from finding an outlet for a natural energy. And thus the impressions made by Tragedy leave behind them in the spectator a temperate and harmonious state of the soul. Similarly Aristotle speaks of the enthusiastic worshippers of Dionysus as obtaining a κάθαρσις, a healthful relief, by the “lyric utterance of their sacred frenzy.”—Tr.
407. The evolution of ideals of stage-presentation in the minds of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides successively is perhaps comparable with that of sculptural style which we see in the pediments of Ægina, of Olympia and of the Parthenon.
408. It must be repeated that the Hellenistic shadow-painting of Zeuxis and Apollodorus is a modelling of the individual body for the purpose of producing the plastic effect on the eye. There was no idea of rendering space by means of light and shade. The body is “shaded” but it casts no shadow.
(Contrast with this Dante’s exact and careful specification of the time-of-day in every episode of the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, sublimely imaginative as these poems are.—Tr.)
409. The great mass of Socialists would cease to be Socialists if they could understand the Socialism of the nine or ten men who to-day grasp it with the full historical consequences that it involves.
412. See Vol. II, p. 363, note.
413. As we increase the powers of the telescope we find that the number of newly appearing stars falls off rapidly towards the edges of the field.
414. The thrill of big figures is a feeling peculiar to Western mankind. In the Civilization of to-day this significant passion for gigantic sums, for indefinitely big and indefinitely minute measurements, for “records” and statistics, is playing a conspicuous part.
(Our very notation of number is ceasing to rest on sense-standards. Science has carried number, as ordinarily written, so high and so low that it now uses a movable base for its numerical statements. For example, a number in astronomy is written, not as 3,450,000,000 but as 3.45 × 109, one relating to ordinary experience as 3.45 (i.e., 3.45 × 100) and one in electromagnetic theory, not as 0.00000345 but as 3.45 × 10-6. Under this system the conceptual unit may be as large or as small, compared with the unit of daily experience, as the region of thought in which the calculation is taking place requires. And different conceptual worlds can be connected as to number [say, a number of kilometres brought into an order of thought that deals with millimetres] by simply changing the ten-power.—Tr.)
415. In stellar calculations even the mean radius of the earth’s orbit (1.493 × 1013 cm.) hardly suffices as unit, as the distance of a star of one second parallax is already 206,265 such units away from us; star-distances are reckoned therefore either in light-years or in terms of the unit distance of a star of this standard parallax.—Tr.
416. As early as the second millennium before Christ they worked from Iceland and the North Sea past Finisterre to the Canaries and West Africa. An echo of these voyagings lingers in the Atlantis-saga of the Greeks. The realm of Tartessus (at the mouth of the Guadalquivir) appears to have been a centre of these movements (see Leo Frobenius, Das unbekannte Afrika, p. 139). Some sort of relation, too, there must have been between them and the movements of the “sea peoples,” Viking swarms which after long land-wanderings from North to South built themselves ships again on the Black Sea or the Ægean and burst out against Egypt from the time of Rameses II (1292-1225). The Egyptian reliefs show their ship-types to have been quite different from the native and the Phœnician; but they may well have been similar to those that Cæsar found afterwards among the Veneti of Brittany. A later example of such outbursts is afforded by the Varyags or Varangians in Russia and at Constantinople. No doubt more light will shortly be thrown on the courses of these movement-streams.
417. Here there is no need to postulate firearms (as distinct from gunpowder used in fireworks) in the Chinese Culture. The archery of the Chinese and Japanese was such as only the British 14th-century archery could match in the Western and nothing in the Classical.
It should be noted also that it was in our 14th Century that—quite independently of gunpowdergunpowder—archery and the construction of siege-engines reached their zenith in the West. The “English” bow had long been used by the Welsh, but it was left to Edward I and Edward III to make it the tactical weapon par excellence.—Tr.
418. See Vol. II, pp. 626 et seq.
419. Half as long again as Nelson’s Victory and about the same length as the last wooden steam three-deckers (e.g., Duke of Wellington) of the mid-19th Century.—Tr.
420. See Vol. II, pp. 207 et seq., and Chapter IV B.
421. See Vol. II, p. 80.
422. I.e., adherents of the various syncretic cults. Sec Vol. II, pp. 212 et seq.
423. This applies even more forcibly to the other “long-range” episode, that of the Ten Thousand (Xenophon, Anabasis I).—Tr.
424. In this place it is exclusively with the conscious, religio-philosophical morale—the morale which can be known and taught and followed—that we are concerned, and not with the racial rhythm of Life, the habit, Sitte, ἦθος, that is unconsciously present. The morale with which we are dealing turns upon intellectual concepts of Virtue and Vice, good and bad; the other, upon ideals in the blood such as honour, loyalty, bravery, the feeling that attributes nobility and vulgarity. See Vol. II, 421 et seq.
425. The original is here expanded a little for the sake of clarity.—Tr.
426. After what has been said above regarding the absence of pregnant words for “will” and “space” in the Classical tongues, the reader will not be surprised to hear that neither Greek nor Latin affords exact equivalents for these words action and activity.
427. See Vol. II, pp. 293 et seq.
428. “He who hath ears to hear, let him hear”—there is no claim to power in these words. But the Western Church never conceived its mission thus. The “Glad Tidings” of Jesus, like those of Zoroaster, of Mani, of Mahomet, of the Neo-Platonists and of all the cognate Magian religions were mystic benefits displayed but in nowise imposed. Youthful Christianity, when it had flowed into the Western world, merely imitated the missionarism of the later Stoa, itself by that time thoroughly Magian. Paul may be thought of as urgent; the itinerant preachers of the Stoa were certainly so, as we know from our authorities. But commanding they were not. To illustrate by a somewhat farfetched parallel—in direct contrast to the physicians of the Magian stamp who merely proclaimed the virtues of their mysterious arcana, the medical men of the West seek to obtain for their knowledge the force of civil law, as for instance in the matter of vaccination or the inspection of pork for trichina.
429. For the Buddhist Four Truths see Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. IV, p. 742. English translation of Kant’s Kritik der praktischen Vernunft by T. K. Abbott.—Tr.
432. See Vol. II, p. 334.
433. The philosophy and dogma of charity and almsgiving—a subject that English research seems generally to have ignored—is dealt with at length in Dr. C. S. Loch’s article Charity and Charities, Ency. Brit., XI ed.—Tr.
434. Not only as local sovereigns enforcing order, like the good Bishop Wazo of Liége who fought down his castled robber-barons one by one in the middle of the 11th Century, but even as high commanders for the Emperor in distant Italy. The battle of Tusculum in 1167 was won by the Archbishops of Köln and Mainz. English history, too, contains the figures of warlike prelates—not only leaders of national movements like Stephen Langton but strong-handed administrators and fighters. The great Scots invasion of 1346 was met and defeated by the Archbishop of York. The Bishops of Durham were for centuries “palatines”; we find one of them serving on pay in the King’s army in France, 1348. The line of these warlike Bishops in our history extends from Odo the brother of William the Conqueror to Scrope, archbishop and rebel in Henry IV’s time.—Tr.
435. A paraphrase of the opening of “John Tanner’s Revolutionist’s Handbook,” Ch. V.—Tr.
436. See Vol. II, pp. 116 et seq.
437. Rousseau’s Contrat Social is paralleled by exactly equivalent productions of Aristotle’s time.
438. The first on the atheistical system of Sankhya, the second (through Socrates) on the Sophists, the third on English sensualism.
439. See Vol. II, pp. 441 et seq.
440. It was many centuries later that the Buddhist ethic of life gave rise to a religion for simple peasantry, and it was only enabled to do so by reaching back to the long-stiffened theology of Brahmanism and, further back still, to very ancient popular cults. See Vol. II, pp. 378, 285.
441. The articles Buddha and Buddhism in the Ency. Brit., XI ed., by T. W. Rhys Davids, may be studied in this connexion.—Tr.
442. See “The Questions of King Milinda,” ed. Rhys Davids.—Tr.
443. Of course, each Culture naturally has its own kind of materialism, conditioned in every detail by its general world-feeling.
444. To begin with, it would be necessary to specify what Christianity was being compared with it—that of the Fathers or that of the Crusades. For these are two different religions in the same clothing of dogma and cult. The same want of psychological flair is evident in the parallel that is so fashionable to-day between Socialism and early Christianity.
445. The term must not be confused with anti-religious.
446. Note the striking similarity of many Roman portrait-busts to the matter-of-fact modern heads of the American style, and also (though this is not so distinct) to many of the portrait-heads of the Egyptian New Empire.
447. See Vol. II, pp. 122 et seq.
448. The original is here very obscure; it reads: “... es ist der ‘Gebildete,’ jener Anhänger eines Kultus des geistigen Mittelmasses und der Offentlichkeit als Kultstätte.”—Tr.
449. See P. Wendland, Die hellenist.-röm. Kultur (1912), pp. 75 et seq.
450. See Vol. II, pp. 318 et seq.
451. See Vol. II, pp. 269 et seq.
452. Compare my Preussentum und Sozialismus, pp. 22 et seq.
453. See Vol. II, pp. 324 et seq., 368 et seq.
454. See Vol. II, p. 345. It is possible that the peculiar style of Heraclitus, who came of a priestly family of the temple of Ephesus, is an example of the form in which the old Orphic wisdom was orally transmitted.
455. See Vol. II, p. 307.
456. Here we are considering only the scholastic side. The mystic side, from which Pythagoras and Leibniz were not very far, reached its culminations in Plato and Goethe, and in our own case it has been extended beyond Goethe by the Romantics, Hegel and Nietzsche, whereas Scholasticism exhausted itself with Kant—and Aristotle—and degenerated thereafter into a routine-profession.
457. Zeno the Stoic, not to be confused with Zeno of Elea, whose mathematical fineness has already been alluded to.—Tr.
458. Neue Paralipomena, § 656.
459. Even the modern idea that unconscious and impulsive acts of life are completely efficient, while intellect can only bungle, is to be found in Schopenhauer (Vol. II, cap. 30).
460. In the chapter “Zur Metaphysik der Geschlechtsliebe” (II, 44) the idea of natural selection for the preservation of the genus is anticipated in full.
461. See Vol. II, pp. 36 et seq.
462. This began to appear in 1867. But the preliminary work Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie came out in the same year as Darwin’s masterpiece.
463. Vol. II, p. 625. See, for example, Leonard, Relativitäts-Prinzip, Aether, Gravitation (1920), pp. 20 et seq.
464. See Vol. II, pp. 369 et seq., 624 et seq.
466. E.g., in Boltzmann’s formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: “the logarithm of the probability of a state is proportional to the entropy of that state.” Every word in this contains an entire scientific concept, capable only of being sensed and not described.
467. See Vol. II, p. 369.
468. See Vol. II, pp. 382 et seq.
469. E. Wiedermann, Die Naturwissensch. bei den Arabern (1890). F. Struntz, Gesch. d. Naturwissensch. im Mittelalter (1910), p. 58.
470. An order of encyclopædists and philosophers; see Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. II, p. 278a.—Tr.
471. M. P. E. Berthelot, Die Chemie im Altertum u. Mittelalter (1909), pp. 64 et seq. (The reference is evidently to a German version; Berthelot published several works on the subject, viz., Les origines de l’Alchémie [1885]; Introduction à l’étude de la chimie des anciens et du moyen âge [1889]; Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs [1887, translations of texts]; La chimie au moyen âge [1893].—Tr.
472. For the metals, “mercury” is the principle of substantial character (lustre, tensility, fusibility), “sulphur” that of the attributive generation (e.g., combustion, transmutation). See Struntz, Gesch. d. Naturwissensch. im Mittelalter (1910), pp. 73 et seq.
(It seems desirable to supplement this a little for the non-technical reader, by stating, however roughly and generally, the principle and process of transmutation as the alchemist saw them. All metals consist of mercury and sulphur. Remove “materiality” from common mercury (or from the mercury-content of the metal under treatment) by depriving it (or the metal) of “earthness,” “liquidness” and “airiness” (i.e., volatility) and we have a prime, substantial (though not material) and stable thing. Similarly, remove materiality from sulphur (or the sulphur-content of the metal treated) and it becomes an elixir, efficient for generating attributes. Then, the prime matter and the elixir react upon one another so that the product on reassuming materiality is a different metal, or rather a “metallicity” endowed with different characters and attributes. The production of one metal from another thus depends merely on the modalities of working processes.—Tr.)
473. See Vol. II, pp. 370, 627.
474. See Vol. II, pp. 314 et seq.
475. See the article under this heading, and also that under Alchemy, Ency. Brit., XI ed.—Tr.
476. During the Gothic age, in spite of the Spanish Dominican Arnold of Villanova (d. 1311), chemistry had had no sort of creative importance in comparison with the mathematical-physical research of that age.
477. For even Helmholtz had sought to account for the phenomena of electrolysis by the assumption of an atomic structure of electricity.
478. Which in their physical aspect are individual centres of force, without parts or extension or figure. (For their metaphysical aspect, see Ency. Brit., XI edition. Article Leibniz, especially pp. 387-8.—Tr.)
479. M. Born, Aufbau der Materie (1920), p. 27.
(So many books and papers—strict, semi-popular and frankly popular—have been published in the last few years that references may seem superfluous, the more so as the formulation of this central theory of present-day physics. The article Matter by Rutherford in the Ency. Brit., XIIth edition (1922), and Bertrand Russell, The A.B.C. of Atoms, are perhaps the clearest elementary accounts that are possible, having regard to the scientist’s necessary reservations of judgment.—Tr.
486. See p. 116 et seq., pp. 151 et seq.
487. See Vol. II, pp. 369 et seq.
488. J. Goldziher, Die islam. und jüd. Philosophie (“Kultur der Gegenwart,” I, V, 1913), pp. 306 et seq.
489. See Vol. II, pp. 27 et seq., 427 et seq.
490. And it may be asserted that the downright faith that Haeckel, for example, pins to the names atom, matter, energy, is not essentially different from the fetishism of Neanderthal Man.
492. Compare Vol. II, pp. 38 et seq.
493. See Vol. II, p. 305.
494. See Vol. II, pp. 343 et seq., and p. 346.
495. E. Mogk, Germ. Mythol., Grundr. d. Germ. Philos., III (1900), p. 340.
496. See Vol. II, p. 241 et seq., 306 et seq.
498. The pantheistic idea of Pan, familiar in European poetry, is a conception of later Classical ages, acquired in principle from Egypt.—Tr.
499. Few passages in the Acts of the Apostles have obtained a stronger hold on our imagination than Paul’s meeting with the altar of “the Unknown God” at Phalerum (Acts XVII, 23). And yet we have perfectly definite evidence, later than Paul’s time, of the plurality of the gods to whom this altar was dedicated. Pausanias in his guide-book (I, 24) says: “here there are ... altars of the gods styled Unknowns, of heroes, etc.” (βωμοί δε θεῶν τε ὀνομαζομένων Ἀγνώστων καὶ ἡρῴων ... κ.τ.λ.). Such, however, is the force of our fixed idea that even Sir J. G. Frazer, in his “Pausanias and Other Studies,” speaks of “The Altar to the Unknown God which St. Paul, and Pausanias after him, saw.” More, he follows this up with a description of a dialogue “attributed to Lucian” (2nd Cent. A.D.) in which the Unknown God of Athens figures in a Christian discussion; but this dialogue (the Philopatris) is almost universally regarded as a much later work, dating at earliest from Julian’s time (mid-4th Cent.) and probably from that of Nicephorus Phocas (10th Cent.).—Tr.
500. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer (1912), p. 38.
501. See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article Great Mother of the Gods.—Tr.
502. In Egypt Ptolemy Philadelphus was the first to introduce a ruler-cult. The reverence that had been paid to the Pharaohs was of quite other significance.
503. See Vol. II, pp. 241 et seq.