The Problem of World-history (2): The Destiny-idea and the Causality-principle

Following out this train of thought to the end, we come into the presence of an opposition in which we perceive the key—the only key—wherewith to approach, and (so far as the word has any meaning at all) to solve, one of the oldest and gravest of man’s riddles. This is the opposition of the Destiny Idea and the Causality Principle—an opposition which, it is safe to say, has never hitherto been recognized for what it is, the necessary foundation of world-building.

Anyone who understands at all what is meant by saying that the soul is the idea of an existence, will also divine a near relationship between it and the sure sense of a destiny and must regard Life itself (our name for the form in which the actualizing of the possible is accomplished) as directed, irrevocable in every line, fate-laden. Primitive man feels this dimly and anxiously, while for the man of a higher Culture it is definite enough to become his vision of the world—though this vision is communicable only through religion and art, never through notions and proofs.

Every higher language possesses a number of words such as luck, doom, conjuncture, vocation, about which there is, as it were, a veil. No hypothesis, no science, can ever get into touch with that which we feel when we let ourselves sink into the meaning and sound of these words. They are symbols, not notions. In them is the centre of gravity of that world-picture that I have called the World-as-history as opposed to the World-as-nature. The Destiny-idea demands life-experience and not scientific experience, the power of seeing and not that of calculating, depth and not intellect. There is an organic logic, an instinctive, dream-sure logic of all existence as opposed to the logic of the inorganic, the logic of understanding and of things understood—a logic of direction as against a logic of extension—and no systematist, no Aristotle or Kant, has known how to deal with it. They are on their own ground when they tell us about “judgment,” “perception,” “awareness,” and “recollection,” but as to what is in the words “hope,” “happiness,” “despair,” “repentance,” 118“devotion,” and “consolation” they are silent. He who expects here, in the domain of the living, to find reasons and consequences, or imagines that an inward certainty as to the meaning of life is the same thing as “Fatalism” or “Predestination,” simply knows nothing of the matters in question, confusing experience lived with experience acquired or acquirable. Causality is the reasonable, the law-bound, the describable, the badge of our whole waking and reasoning existence. But destiny is the word for an inner certainty that is not describable. We bring out that which is in the causal by means of a physical or an epistemological system, through numbers, by reasoned classification; but the idea of destiny can be imparted only by the artist working through media like portraiture, tragedy and music. The one requires us to distinguish and in distinguishing to dissect and destroy, whereas the other is creative through and through, and thus destiny is related to life and causality to death.

In the Destiny-idea the soul reveals its world-longing, its desire to rise into the light, to accomplish and actualize its vocation. To no man is it entirely alien, and not before one has become the unanchored “late” man of the megalopolis is original vision quite overpowered by matter-of-fact feeling and mechanizing thought. Even then, in some intense hour, the lost vision comes back to one with terrible clearness, shattering in a moment all the causality of the world’s surface. For the world as a system of causal connexions is not only a “late” but also a highly rarefied conception and only the energetic intellects of high Cultures are capable of possessing it—or perhaps we should say, devising it—with conviction. The notion of causality is coterminous with the notion of law: the only laws that are, are causal laws. But just as there lies in the causal, according to Kant, a necessity of the thinking consciousness and the basic form of its relation to the essence of things, so also, designated by the words destiny, dispensation, vocation, there is a something that is an inevitable necessity of life. Real history is heavy with fate but free of laws. One can divine the future (there is, indeed, a certain insight that can penetrate its secrets deeply) but one cannot reckon it. The physiognomic flair which enables one to read a whole life in a face or to sum up whole peoples from the picture of an epoch—and to do so without deliberate effort or “system”—is utterly remote from all “cause and effect.”

He who comprehends the light-world that is before his eyes not physiognomically but systematically, and makes it intellectually his own by the methods of causal experience, must necessarily in the end come to believe that every living thing can be understood by reference to cause and effect—that there is no secret and no inner directedness. He, on the other hand, who as Goethe did—and for that matter as everyone does in nine out of ten of his waking moments—lets the impressions of the world about him work merely upon his senses, absorbs these impressions as a whole, feels the become in its becoming. The stiff mask of causality is lifted by mere ceasing to think. Suddenly, Time is no more a riddle, a notion, a “form” or “dimension” but becomes an inner certainty, destiny itself; and in its directedness, its irreversibility, its livingness, is disclosed the very meaning of the historical world-picture. Destiny and Causality are related as Time and Space.

In the two possible world-forms then—History and Nature, the physiognomy of all becoming and the system of all things become—destiny or causality prevails. Between them there is all the difference between a feeling of life and a method of knowledge. Each of them is the starting-point of a complete and self-contained, but not of a unique world. Yet, after all, just as the become is founded upon a becoming, so the knowledge of cause and effect is founded upon the sure feeling of a destiny. Causality is—so to say—destiny become, destiny made inorganic and modelled in reason-forms. Destiny itself (passed over in silence by Kant and every other builder of rational world-systems because with their armoury of abstractions they could not touch life) stands beyond and outside all comprehended Nature. Nevertheless, being itself the original, it alone gives the stiff dead principle of cause-and-effect the opportunity to figure in the later scenes of a culture-drama, alive and historical, as the incarnation of a tyrannical thinking. The existence of the Classical soul is the condition for the appearance of Democritus’s method, the existence of the Faustian soul for that of Newton’s. We may well imagine that either of these Cultures might have failed to produce a natural science of its own, but we cannot imagine the systems without their cultural foundations.

Here again we see how becoming and the become, direction and extension, include one another and are subordinated each to the other, according as we are in the historical or in the “natural” focus. If history is that kind of world-order in which all the become is fitted to the becoming, then the products of scientific work must inter alia be so handled; and, in fact, for the historical eye there is only a history of physics. It was Destiny that the discoveries of oxygen, Neptune, gravitation and spectrum analysis happened as and when they did. It was Destiny that the phlogiston theory, the undulatory theory of light, the kinetic theory of gases could arise at all, seeing that they were elucidations of results and, as such, highly personal to their respective authors, and that other theories (“correct” or “erroneous”) might equally well have been developed instead. And it is again Destiny and the result of strong personality when one theory vanishes and another becomes the lodestar of the physicist’s world. Even the born physicist speaks of the “fate” of a problem or the “history” of a discovery.

Conversely, if “Nature” is that constitution of things in which the becoming should logically be incorporated in the thing-become, and living direction in rigid extension, history may best be treated as a chapter of epistemology; and so indeed Kant would have treated it if he had remembered to include it at all in his system of knowledge. Significantly enough, he did not; for him as for every born systematist Nature is The World, and when he discusses time without noticing that it has direction and is irreversible, we see that he is dealing with the Nature-world and has no inkling of the possibility of another, the history-world. Perhaps, for Kant, this other world was actually impossible.

Now, Causality has nothing whatever to do with Time. To the world of to-day, made up of Kantians who know not how Kantian they are, this must seem an outrageous paradox. And yet every formula of Western physics exhibits the “how” and the “how long” as distinct in essence. As soon as the question is pressed home, causality restricts its answer rigidly to the statement that something happens—and not when it happens. The “effect” must of necessity be put with the “cause.” The distance between them belongs to a different order, it lies within the act of understanding itself (which is an element of life) and not within the thing or things understood. It is of the essence of the extended that it overcomes directedness, and of Space that it contradicts Time, and yet the latter, as the more fundamental, precedes and underlies the former. Destiny claims the same precedence; we begin with the idea of Destiny, and only later, when our waking-consciousness looks fearfully for a spell that will bind in the sense-world and overcome the death that cannot be evaded, do we conceive causality as an anti-Fate, and make it create another world to protect us from and console us for this. And as the web of cause and effect gradually spreads over the visible surfaces there is formed a convincing picture of timeless duration—essentially, Being, but Being endowed with attributes by the sheer force of pure thought. This tendency underlies the feeling, well known in all mature Cultures, that “Knowledge is Power,” the power that is meant being power over Destiny. The abstract savant, the natural-science researcher, the thinker in systems, whose whole intellectual existence bases itself on the causality principle, are “late” manifestations of an unconscious hatred of the powers of incomprehensible Destiny. “Pure Reason” denies all possibilities that are outside itself. Here strict thought and great art are eternally in conflict. The one keeps its feet, and the other lets itself go. A man like Kant must always feel himself as superior to a Beethoven as the adult is to the child, but this will not prevent a Beethoven from regarding the “Critique of Pure Reason” as a pitiable sort of philosophy. Teleology, that nonsense of all nonsenses within science, is a misdirected attempt to deal mechanically with the living content of scientific knowledge (for knowledge implies someone to know, and though the substance of thought may be “Nature” the act of thought is history), and so with life itself as an inverted causality. Teleology is a caricature of the Destiny-idea which transforms the vocation of Dante into the aim of the savant. It is the deepest and most characteristic tendency both of Darwinism—the megalopolitan-intellectual product of the most abstract of all Civilizations—and of the materialist conception of history which springs from the same root as Darwinism and, like it, kills all that is organic and fateful. Thus the morphological element of the Causal is a Principle, and the morphological element of Destiny is an Idea, an idea that is incapable of being “cognized,” described or defined, and can only be felt and inwardly lived. This idea is something of which one is either entirely ignorant or else—like the man of the spring and every truly significant man of the late seasons, believer, lover, artist, poet—entirely certain.

Thus Destiny is seen to be the true existence-mode of the prime phenomenon, that in which the living idea of becoming unfolds itself immediately to the intuitive vision. And therefore the Destiny-idea dominates the whole world-picture of history, while causality, which is the existence-mode of objects and stamps out of the world of sensations a set of well-distinguished and well-defined things, properties and relations, dominates and penetrates, as the form of the understanding, the Nature-world that is the understanding’s “alter ego.”

But inquiry into the degree of validity of causal connexions within a presentation of nature, or (what is henceforth the same thing for us) into the destinies involved in that presentation, becomes far more difficult still when we come to realize that for primitive man or for the child no comprehensive causally-ordered world exists at all as yet and that we ourselves, though “late” men with a consciousness disciplined by powerful speech-sharpened thought, can do no more, even in moments of the most strained attention (the only ones, really, in which we are exactly in the physical focus), than assert that the causal order which we see in such a moment is continuously present in the actuality around us. Even waking, we take in the actual, “the living garment of the Deity,” physiognomically, and we do so involuntarily and by virtue of a power of experience that is rooted in the deep sources of life.

A systematic delineation, on the contrary, is the expression of an understanding emancipated from perception, and by means of it we bring the mental picture of all times and all men into conformity with the moment’s picture of Nature as ordered by ourselves. But the mode of this ordering, which has a history that we cannot interfere with in the smallest degree, is not the working of a cause, but a destiny.

The way to the problem of Time, then, begins in the primitive wistfulness and passes through its clearer issue the Destiny-idea. We have now to try to outline, briefly, the content of that problem, so far as it affects the subject of this book.

The word Time is a sort of charm to summon up that intensely personal something designated earlier as the “proper,” which with an inner certainty we oppose to the “alien” something that is borne in upon each of us amongst and within the crowding impressions of the sense-life. “The Proper,” “Destiny” and “Time” are interchangeable words.

The problem of Time, like that of Destiny, has been completely misunderstood by all thinkers who have confined themselves to the systematic of the Become. In Kant’s celebrated theory there is not one word about its character of directedness. Not only so, but the omission has never even been noticed. But what is time as a length, time without direction? Everything living, we can only repeat, has “life,” direction, impulse, will, a movement-quality (Bewegtheit) that is most intimately allied to yearning and has not the smallest element in common with the “motion” (Bewegung) of the physicists. The living is indivisible and irreversible, once and uniquely occurring, and its course is entirely indeterminable by mechanics. For all such qualities belong to the essence of Destiny, and “Time”—that which we actually feel at the sound of the word, which is clearer in music than in language, and in poetry than in prose—has this organic essence, while Space has not. Hence, Kant and the rest notwithstanding, it is impossible to bring Time with Space under one general Critique. Space is a conception, but time is a word to indicate something inconceivable, a sound-symbol, and to use it as a notion, scientifically, is utterly to misconceive its nature. Even the word direction—which unfortunately cannot be replaced by another—is liable to mislead owing to its visual content. The vector-notion in physics is a case in point.

For primitive man the word “time” can have no meaning. He simply lives, without any necessity of specifying an opposition to something else. He has time, but he knows nothing of it. All of us are conscious, as being aware, of space only, and not of time. Space “is,” (i.e. exists, in and with our sense-world)—as a self-extension while we are living the ordinary life of dream, impulse, intuition and conduct, and as space in the strict sense in the moments of strained attention. “Time,” on the contrary, is a discovery, which is only made by thinking. We create it as an idea or notion and do not begin till much later to suspect that we ourselves are Time, inasmuch as we live.¹⁰² And only the higher Cultures, whose world-conceptions have reached the mechanical-Nature stage, are capable of deriving from their consciousness of a well-ordered measurable and comprehensible Spatial, the projected image of time, the phantom time,¹⁰³ which satisfies their need of comprehending, measuring and causally ordering all. And this impulse—a sign of the sophistication of existence that makes its appearance quite early in every Culture—fashions, outside and beyond the real life-feeling, that which is called time in all higher languages and has become for the town-intellect a completely inorganic magnitude, as deceptive as it is current. But, if the characteristics, or rather the characteristic, of extension—limit and causality—is really wizard’s gear wherewith our proper soul attempts to conjure and bind alien powers—Goethe speaks somewhere of the “principle of reasonable order that we bear within ourselves and could impress as the seal of our power upon everything that we touch”—if all law is a fetter which our world-dread hurries to fix upon the incrowding sensuous, a deep necessity of self-preservation, so also the invention of a time that is knowable and spatially representable within causality is a later act of this same self-preservation, an attempt to bind by the force of notion the tormenting inward riddle that is doubly tormenting to the intellect that has attained power only to find itself defied. Always a subtle hatred underlies the intellectual process by which anything is forced into the domain and form-world of measure and law. The living is killed by being introduced into space, for space is dead and makes dead. With birth is given death, with the fulfilment the end. Something dies within the woman when she conceives—hence comes that eternal hatred of the sexes, child of world-fear. The man destroys, in a very deep sense, when he begets—by bodily act in the sensuous world, by “knowing” in the intellectual. Even in Luther¹⁰⁴ the word “know” has the secondary genital sense. And with the “knowledge” of life—which remains alien to the lower animals—the knowledge of death has gained that power which dominates man’s whole waking consciousness. By a picture of time the actual is changed into the transitory.¹⁰⁵

The mere creation of the name Time was an unparalleled deliverance. To name anything by a name is to win power over it. This is the essence of primitive man’s art of magic—the evil powers are constrained by naming them, and the enemy is weakened or killed by coupling certain magic procedures with his name.¹⁰⁶

And there is something of this primitive expression of world-fear in the way in which all systematic philosophies use mere names as a last resort for getting rid of the Incomprehensible, the Almighty that is all too mighty for the intellect. We name something or other the “Absolute,” and we feel ourselves at once its superior. Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible. What is named, comprehended, measured is ipso facto overpowered, made inert and taboo.¹⁰⁷ Once more, “knowledge is power.” Herein lies one root of the difference between the idealist’s and the realist’s attitude towards the Unapproachable; it is expressed by the two meanings of the German word Scheu—respect and abhorrence.¹⁰⁸ The idealist contemplates, the realist would subject, mechanize, render innocuous. Plato and Goethe accept the secret in humility, Aristotle and Kant would open it up and destroy it. The most deeply significant example of this realism is in its treatment of the Time problem. The dread mystery of Time, life itself, must be spellbound and, by the magic of comprehensibility, neutralized.

All that has been said about time in “scientific” philosophy, psychology and physics—the supposed answer to a question that had better never have been asked, namely what is time?—touches, not at any point the secret itself, but only a spatially-formed representative phantom. The livingness and directedness and fated course of real Time is replaced by a figure which, be it never so intimately absorbed, is only a line, measurable, divisible, reversible, and not a portrait of that which is incapable of being portrayed; by a “time” that can be mathematically expressed in such forms as √t, t², -t, from which the assumption of a time of zero magnitude or of negative times is, to say the least, not excluded.¹⁰⁹ Obviously this is something quite outside the domain of Life, Destiny, and living historical Time; it is a purely conceptual time-system that is remote even from the sensuous life. One has only to substitute, in any philosophical or physical treatise that one pleases, this word “Destiny” for the word “time” and one will instantly see how understanding loses its way when language has emancipated it from sensation, and how impossible the group “time and space” is. What is not experienced and felt, what is merely thought, necessarily takes a spatial form, and this explains why no systematic philosopher has been able to make anything out of the mystery-clouded, far-echoing sound symbols “Past” and “Future.” In Kant’s utterances concerning time they do not even occur, and in fact one cannot see any relation which could connect them with what is said there. But only this spatial form enables time and space to be brought into functional interdependence as magnitudes of the same order, as four-dimensional vector analysis¹¹⁰ conspicuously shows. As early as 1813 Lagrange frankly described mechanics as a four-dimensional geometry, and even Newton’s cautious conception of “tempus absolutum sive duratio” is not exempt from this intellectually inevitable transformation of the living into mere extension. In the older philosophy I have found one, and only one, profound and reverent presentation of Time; it is in Augustine—“If no one questions me, I know: if I would explain to a questioner, I know not.”¹¹¹

When philosophers of the present-day West “hedge”—as they all do—by saying that things are in time as in space and that “outside” them nothing is “conceivable,” they are merely putting another kind of space (Räumlichkeit) beside the ordinary one, just as one might, if one chose, call hope and electricity the two forces of the universe. It ought not, surely, to have escaped Kant when he spoke of the “two forms” of perception, that whereas it is easy enough to come to a scientific understanding about space (though not to “explain” it, in the ordinary sense of the word, for that is beyond human powers), treatment of time on the same lines breaks down utterly. The reader of the “Critique of Pure Reason” and the “Prolegomena” will observe that Kant gives a well-considered proof for the connexion of space and geometry but carefully avoids doing the same for time and arithmetic. There he did not go beyond enunciation, and constant reassertion of analogy between the two conceptions lured him over a gap that would have been fatal to his system. Vis-à-vis the Where and the How, the When forms a world of its own as distinct as is metaphysics from physics. Space, object, number, notion, causality are so intimately akin that it is impossible—as countless mistaken systems prove—to treat the one independently of the other. Mechanics is a copy of the logic of its day and vice versa. The picture of thought as psychology builds it up and the picture of the space-world as contemporary physics describes it are reflections of one another. Conceptions and things, reasons and causes, conclusions and processes coincide so nicely, as received by the consciousness, that the abstract thinker himself has again and again succumbed to the temptation of setting forth the thought-“process” graphically and schematically—witness Aristotle’s and Kant’s tabulated categories. “Where there is no scheme, there is no philosophy” is the objection of principle—unacknowledged though it may be—that all professional philosophers have against the “intuitives,” to whom inwardly they feel themselves far superior. That is why Kant crossly describes the Platonic style of thinking “as the art of spending good words in babble” (die Kunst, wortreich zu schwatzen), and why even to-day the lecture-room philosopher has not a word to say about Goethe’s philosophy. Every logical operation is capable of being drawn, every system a geometrical method of handling thoughts. And therefore Time either finds no place in the system at all, or is made its victim.

This is the refutation of that widely-spread misunderstanding which connects time with arithmetic and space with geometry by superficial analogies, an error to which Kant ought never to have succumbed—though it is hardly surprising that Schopenhauer, with his incapacity for understanding mathematics, did so. Because the living act of numbering is somehow or other related to time, number and time are constantly confused. But numbering is not number, any more than drawing is a drawing. Numbering and drawing are a becoming, numbers and figures are things become. Kant and the rest have in mind now the living act (numbering) and now the result thereof (the relations of the finished figure); but the one belongs to the domain of Life and Time, the other to that of Extension and Causality. That I calculate is the business of organic, what I calculate the business of inorganic, logic. Mathematics as a whole—in common language, arithmetic and geometry—answers the How? and the What?—that is, the problem of the Natural order of things. In opposition to this problem stands that of the When? of things, the specifically historical problem of destiny, future and past; and all these things are comprised in the word Chronology, which simple mankind understands fully and unequivocally.

Between arithmetic and geometry there is no opposition.¹¹² Every kind of number, as has been sufficiently shown in an earlier chapter, belongs entirely to the realm of the extended and the become, whether as a Euclidean magnitude or as an analytical function; and to which heading should we have to assign the cyclometric¹¹³ functions, the Binomial Theorem, the Riemann surfaces, the Theory of Groups? Kant’s scheme was refuted by Euler and d’Alembert before he even set it up, and only the unfamiliarity of his successors with the mathematics of their time—what a contrast to Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz, who evolved the mathematics of their time from the depths of their own philosophy!—made it possible for mathematical notions of a relation between time and arithmetic to be passed on like an heirloom, almost uncriticized.

But between Becoming and any part whatsoever of mathematics there is not the slightest contact. Newton indeed was profoundly convinced (and he was no mean philosopher) that in the principles of his Calculus of Fluxions¹¹⁴ he had grasped the problem of Becoming, and therefore of Time—in a far subtler form, by the way, than Kant’s. But even Newton’s view could not be upheld, even though it may find advocates to this day. Since Weierstrass proved that continuous functions exist which either cannot be differentiated at all or are capable only of partial differentiation, this most deep-searching of all efforts to close with the Time-problem mathematically has been abandoned.

Time is a counter-conception (Gegenbegriff) to Space, arising out of Space, just as the notion (as distinct from the fact) of Life arises only in opposition to thought, and the notion (as distinct from the fact) of birth and generation only in opposition to death.¹¹⁵ This is implicit in the very essence of all awareness. Just as any sense-impression is only remarked when it detaches itself from another, so any kind of understanding that is genuine critical activity¹¹⁶ is only made possible through the setting-up of a new concept as anti-pole to one already present, or through the divorce (if we may call it so) of a pair of inwardly-polar concepts which as long as they are mere constituents, possess no actuality.¹¹⁷ It has long been presumed—and rightly, beyond a doubt—that all root-words, whether they express things or properties, have come into being by pairs; but even later, even to-day, the connotation that every new word receives is a reflection of some other. And so, guided by language, the understanding, incapable of fitting a sure inward subjective certainty of Destiny into its form-world, created “time” out of space as its opposite. But for this we should possess neither the word nor its connotation. And so far is this process of word-formation carried that the particular style of extension possessed by the Classical world led to a specifically Classical notion of time, differing from the time-notions of India, China and the West exactly as Classical space differs from the space of these Cultures.¹¹⁸

For this reason, the notion of an art-form—which again is a “counter-concept”—has only arisen when men became aware that their art-creations had a connotation (Gehalt) at all, that is, when the expression-language of the art, along with its effects, had ceased to be something perfectly natural and taken-for-granted, as it still was in the time of the Pyramid-Builders, in that of the Mycenæan strongholds and in that of the early Gothic cathedrals. Men become suddenly aware of the existence of “works,” and then for the first time the understanding eye is able to distinguish a causal side and a destiny side in every living art.

In every work that displays the whole man and the whole meaning of the existence, fear and longing lie close together, but they are and they remain different. To the fear, to the Causal, belongs the whole “taboo” side of art—its stock of motives, developed in strict schools and long craft-training, carefully protected and piously transmitted; all of it that is comprehensible, learnable, numerical; all the logic of colour, line, structure, order, which constitutes the mother-tongue of every worthy artist and every great epoch. But the other side, opposed to the “taboo” as the directed is to the extended and as the development-destiny within a form-language to its syllogisms, comes out in genius (namely, in that which is wholly personal to the individual artists, their imaginative powers, creative passion, depth and richness, as against all mere mastery of form) and, beyond even genius, in that superabundance of creativeness in the race which conditions the rise and fall of whole arts. This is the “totem” side, and owing to it—notwithstanding all the æsthetics ever penned—there is no timeless and solely-true way of art, but only a history of art, marked like everything that lives with the sign of irreversibility.¹¹⁹

And this is why architecture of the grand style—which is the only one of the arts that handles the alien and fear-instilling itself, the immediate Extended, the stone—is naturally the early art in all Cultures, and only step by step yields its primacy to the special arts of the city with their more mundane forms—the statue, the picture, the musical composition. Of all the great artists of the West, it was probably Michelangelo who suffered most acutely under the constant nightmare of world-fear, and it was he also who, alone among the Renaissance masters, never freed himself from the architectural. He even painted as though his surfaces were stone, become, stiff, hateful. His work was a bitter wrestle with the powers of the cosmos which faced him and challenged him in the form of material, whereas in the yearning Leonardo’s colour we see, as it were, a glad materialization of the spiritual. But in every large architectural problem an implacable causal logic, not to say mathematic, comes to expression—in the Classical orders of columns a Euclidean relation of beam and load, in the “analytically” disposed thrust-system of Gothic vaulting the dynamic relation of force and mass. Cottage-building traditions—which are to be traced in the one and in the other, which are the necessary background even of Egyptian architecture, which in fact develop in every early period and are regularly lost in every later—contain the whole sum of this logic of the extended. But the symbolism of direction and destiny is beyond all the “technique” of the great arts and hardly approachable by way of æsthetics. It lies—to take some instances—in the contrast that is always felt (but never, either by Lessing or by Hebbel, elucidated) between Classical and Western tragedy; in the succession of scenes of old Egyptian relief and generally in the serial arrangement of Egyptian statues, sphinxes, temple-halls; in the choice, as distinct from the treatment, of materials (hardest diorite to affirm, and softest wood to deny, the future); in the occurrence, and not in the grammar, of the individual arts, e.g., the victory of arabesque over the Early Christian picture, the retreat of oil-painting before chamber music in the Baroque; in the utter diversity of intention in Egyptian, Chinese and Classical statuary. All these are not matters of “can” but of “must,” and therefore it is not mathematics and abstract thought, but the great arts in their kinship with the contemporary religions, that give the key to the problem of Time, a problem that can hardly be solved within the domain of history¹²⁰ alone.

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It follows from the meaning that we have attached to the Culture as a prime phenomenon and to destiny as the organic logic of existence, that each Culture must necessarily possess its own destiny-idea. Indeed, this conclusion is implicit from the first in the feeling that every great Culture is nothing but the actualizing and form of a single, singularly-constituted (einzigartig) soul. And what cannot be felt by one sort of men exactly as it is felt by another (since the life of each is the expression of the idea proper to himself) and still less transcribed, what is named by us “conjuncture,” “accident,” “Providence” or “Fate,” by Classical man “Nemesis,” “Ananke,” “Tyche” or “Fatum,” by the Arab “Kismet,” by everyone in some way of his own, is just that of which each unique and unreproduceable soul-constitution, quite clear to those who share in it, is a rendering.

The Classical form of the Destiny-idea I shall venture to call Euclidean. Thus it is the sense-actual person of Œdipus, his “empirical ego,” nay, his σῶμα that is hunted and thrown by Destiny. Œdipus complains that Creon has misused his “body”¹²¹ and that the oracle applied to his “body.”¹²² Æschylus, again, speaks of Agamemnon as the “royal body, leader of fleets.”¹²³ It is this same word σῶμα that the mathematicians employ more than once for the “bodies” with which they deal. But the destiny of King Lear is of the “analytical” type—to use here also the term suggested by the corresponding number-world—and consists in dark inner relationships. The idea of fatherhood emerges; spiritual threads weave themselves into the action, incorporeal and transcendental, and are weirdly illuminated by the counterpoint of the secondary tragedy of Gloster’s house. Lear is at the last a mere name, the axis of something unbounded. This conception of destiny is the “infinitesimal” conception. It stretches out into infinite time and infinite space. It touches the bodily, Euclidean existence not at all, but affects only the Soul. Consider the mad King between the fool and the outcast in the storm on the heath, and then look at the Laocoön group; the first is the Faustian, the other the Apollinian way of suffering. Sophocles, too, wrote a Laocoön drama; and we may be certain that there was nothing of pure soul-agony in it. Antigone goes below ground in the body, because she has buried her brother’s body. Think of Ajax and Philoctetes, and then of the Prince of Homburg and Goethe’s Tasso—is not the difference between magnitude and relation traceable right into the depths of artistic creation?

This brings us to another connexion of high symbolic significance. The drama of the West is ordinarily designated Character-Drama. That of the Greeks, on the other hand, is best described as Situation-Drama, and in the antithesis we can perceive what it is that Western, and what it is that Classical, man respectively feel as the basic life-form that is imperilled by the onsets of tragedy and fate. If in lieu of “direction” we say “irreversibility,” if we let ourselves sink into the terrible meaning of those words “too late” wherewith we resign a fleeting bit of the present to the eternal past, we find the deep foundation of every tragic crisis. It is Time that is the tragic, and it is by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to Time that one Culture is differentiated from another; and consequently “tragedy” of the grand order has only developed in the Culture which has most passionately affirmed, and in that which has most passionately denied, Time. The sentiment of the ahistoric soul gives us a Classical tragedy of the moment, and that of the ultrahistorical soul puts before us Western tragedy that deals with the development of a whole life. Our tragedy arises from the feeling of an inexorable Logic of becoming, while the Greek feels the illogical, blind Casual of the moment—the life of Lear matures inwardly towards a catastrophe, and that of Œdipus stumbles without warning upon a situation. And now one may perceive how it is that synchronously with Western drama there rose and fell a mighty portrait-art (culminating in Rembrandt), a kind of historical and biographical art which (because it was so) was sternly discountenanced in Classical Greece at the apogee of Attic drama. Consider the veto on likeness-statuary in votive offerings¹²⁴ and note how—from Demetrius of Alopeke (about 400)¹²⁵—a timid art of “ideal” portraiture began to venture forth when, and only when, grand tragedy had been thrown into the background by the light society-pieces of the “Middle Comedy.”¹²⁶ Fundamentally all Greek statues were standard masks, like the actors in the theatre of Dionysus; all bring to expression, in significantly strict form, somatic attitudes and positions. Physiognomically they are dumb, corporeal and of necessity nude—character-heads of definite individuals came only with the Hellenistic age. Once more we are reminded of the contrast between the Greek number-world, with its computations of tangible results, and the other, our own, in which the relations between groups of functions or equations or, generally, formula-elements of the same order are investigated morphologically, and the character of these relations fixed as such in express laws.

In the capacity of experientially living history and the way in which history, particularly the history of personal becoming, is lived, one man differs very greatly from another.

Every Culture possesses a wholly individual way of looking at and comprehending the world-as-Nature; or (what comes to the same thing) it has its own peculiar “Nature” which no other sort of man can possess in exactly the same form. But in a far greater degree still, every Culture—including the individuals comprising it (who are separated only by minor distinctions)—possesses a specific and peculiar sort of history—and it is in the picture of this and the style of this that the general and the personal, the inner and the outer, the world-historical and the biographical becoming, are immediately perceived, felt and lived. Thus the autobiographical tendency of Western man—revealed even in Gothic times in the symbol of auricular confession¹²⁷—is utterly alien to Classical man; while his intense historical awareness is in complete contrast to the almost dreamy unconsciousness of the Indian. And when Magian man—primitive Christian or ripe scholar of Islam—uses the words “world-history,” what is it that he sees before him?

But it is difficult enough to form an exact idea even of the “Nature” proper to another kind of man, although in this domain things specifically cognizable are causally ordered and unified in a communicable system. And it is quite impossible for us to penetrate completely a historical world-aspect of “becoming” formed by a soul that is quite differently constituted from our own. Here there must always be an intractable residue, greater or smaller in proportion to our historical instinct, physiognomic tact and knowledge of men. All the same, the solution of this very problem is the condition-precedent of all really deep understanding of the world. The historical environment of another is a part of his essence, and no such other can be understood without the knowledge of his time-sense, his destiny-idea and the style and degree of acuity of his inner life. In so far therefore as these things are not directly confessed, we have to extract them from the symbolism of the alien Culture. And as it is thus and only thus that we can approach the incomprehensible, the style of an alien Culture, and the great time-symbols belonging thereto acquire an immeasurable importance.

As an example of these hitherto almost uncomprehended signs we may take the clock, a creation of highly developed Cultures that becomes more and more mysterious as one examines it. Classical man managed to do without the clock, and his abstention was more or less deliberate. To the Augustan period, and far beyond it, the time of day was estimated by the length of one’s shadow,¹²⁸ although sun-dials and water-clocks, designed in conformity with a strict time-reckoning and imposed by a deep sense of past and future, had been in regular use in both the older Cultures of Egypt and Babylonia.¹²⁹ Classical man’s existence—Euclidean, relationless, point-formed—was wholly contained in the instant. Nothing must remind him of past or future. For the true Classical, archæology did not exist, nor did its spiritual inversion, astrology. The Oracle and the Sibyl, like the Etruscan-Roman “haruspices” and “augurs,” did not foretell any distant future but merely gave indications on particular questions of immediate bearing. No time-reckoning entered intimately into everyday life (for the Olympiad sequence was a mere literary expedient) and what really matters is not the goodness or badness of a calendar but the questions: “who uses it?” and “does the life of the nation run by it?” In Classical cities nothing suggested duration, or old times or times to come—there was no pious preservation of ruins, no work conceived for the benefit of future generations; in them we do not find that durable¹³⁰ material was deliberately chosen. The Dorian Greek ignored the Mycenæan stone-technique and built in wood or clay, though Mycenæan and Egyptian work was before him and the country produced first-class building-stone. The Doric style is a timber style—even in Pausanias’s day some wooden columns still lingered in the Heræum of Olympia. The real organ of history is “memory” in the sense which is always postulated in this book, viz., that which preserves as a constant present the image of one’s personal past and of a national and a world-historical past¹³¹ as well, and is conscious of the course both of personal and of super-personal becoming. That organ was not present in the make-up of a Classical soul. There was no “Time” in it. Immediately behind his proper present, the Classical historian sees a background that is already destitute of temporal and therefore of inward order. For Thucydides the Persian Wars, for Tacitus the agitation of the Gracchi, were already in this vague background;¹³² and the great families of Rome had traditions that were pure romance—witness Cæsar’s slayer, Brutus, with his firm belief in his reputed tyrannicide ancestor. Cæsar’s reform of the calendar may almost be regarded as a deed of emancipation from the Classical life-feeling. But it must not be forgotten that Cæsar also imagined a renunciation of Rome and a transformation of the City-State into an empire which was to be dynastic—marked with the badge of duration—and to have its centre of gravity in Alexandria, which in fact is the birthplace of his calendar. His assassination seems to us a last outburst of the antiduration feeling that was incarnate in the Polis and the Urbs Roma.

Even then Classical mankind was still living every hour and every day for itself; and this is equally true whether we take the individual Greek or Roman, or the city, or the nation, or the whole Culture. The hot-blooded pageantry, palace-orgies, circus-battles of Nero or Caligula—Tacitus is a true Roman in describing only these and ignoring the smooth progress of life in the distant provinces—are final and flamboyant expressions of the Euclidean world-feeling that deified the body and the present.

The Indians also have no sort of time-reckoning (the absence of it in their case expressing their Nirvana) and no clocks, and therefore no history, no life memories, no care. What the conspicuously historical West calls “Indian history” achieved itself without the smallest consciousness of what it was doing.¹³³ The millennium of the Indian Culture between the Vedas and Buddha seems like the stirrings of a sleeper; here life was actually a dream. From all this our Western Culture is unimaginably remote. And, indeed, man has never—not even in the “contemporary” China of the Chóu period with its highly-developed sense of eras and epochs¹³⁴—been so awake and aware, so deeply sensible of time and conscious of direction and fate and movement as he has been in the West. Western history was willed and Indian history happened. In Classical existence years, in Indian centuries scarcely counted, but here the hour, the minute, yea the second, is of importance. Of the tragic tension of a historical crisis like that of August, 1914, when even moments seem overpowering, neither a Greek nor an Indian could have had any idea.¹³⁵ Such crises, too, a deep-feeling man of the West can experience within himself, as a true Greek could never do. Over our country-side, day and night from thousands of belfries, ring the bells¹³⁶ that join future to past and fuse the point-moments of the Classical present into a grand relation. The epoch which marks the birth of our Culture—the time of the Saxon Emperors—marks also the discovery of the wheel-clock.¹³⁷ Without exact time-measurement, without a chronology of becoming to correspond with his imperative need of archæology (the preservation, excavation and collection of things-become), Western man is unthinkable. The Baroque age intensified the Gothic symbol of the belfry to the point of grotesqueness, and produced the pocket watch that constantly accompanies the individual.¹³⁸

Another symbol, as deeply significant and as little understood as the symbol of the clock, is that of the funeral customs which all great Cultures have consecrated by ritual and by art. The grand style in India begins with tomb-temples, in the Classical world with funerary urns, in Egypt with pyramids, in early Christianity with catacombs and sarcophagi. In the dawn, innumerable equally-possible forms still cross one another chaotically and obscurely, dependent on clan-custom and external necessities and conveniences. But every Culture promptly elevates one or another of them to the highest degree of symbolism. Classical man, obedient to his deep unconscious life-feeling, picked upon burning, an act of annihilation in which the Euclidean, the here-and-now, type of existence was powerfully expressed. He willed to have no history, no duration, neither past nor future, neither preservation nor dissolution, and therefore he destroyed that which no longer possessed a present, the body of a Pericles, a Cæsar, a Sophocles, a Phidias. And the soul passed to join the vague crowd to which the living members of the clan paid (but soon ceased to pay) the homage of ancestor-worship and soul-feast, and which in its formlessness presents an utter contrast to the ancestor-series, the genealogical tree, that is eternalized with all the marks of historical order in the family-vault of the West. In this (with one striking exception, the Vedic dawn in India) no other Culture parallels the Classical.¹³⁹ And be it noted that the Doric-Homeric spring, and above all the “Iliad,” invested this act of burning with all the vivid feeling of a new-born symbol; for those very warriors whose deeds probably formed the nucleus of the epic were in fact buried almost in the Egyptian manner in the graves of Mycenæ, Tiryns, Orchomenos and other places. And when in Imperial times the sarcophagus or “flesh-consumer”¹⁴⁰ began to supersede the vase of ashes, it was again, as in the time when the Homeric urn superseded the shaft-grave of Mycenæ, a changed sense of Time that underlay the change of rite.

The Egyptians, who preserved their past in memorials of stone and hieroglyph so purposefully that we, four thousand years after them, can determine the order of their kings’ reigns, so thoroughly eternalized their bodies that today the great Pharaohs lie in our museums, recognizable in every lineament, a symbol of grim triumph—while of Dorian kings not even the names have survived. For our own part, we know the exact birthdays and deathdays of almost every great man since Dante, and, moreover, we see nothing strange in the fact. Yet in the time of Aristotle, the very zenith of Classical education, it was no longer known with certainty if Leucippus, the founder of Atomism and a contemporary of Pericles—i.e., hardly a century before—had ever existed at all; much as though for us the existence of Giordano Bruno was a matter of doubt¹⁴¹ and the Renaissance had become pure saga.

And these museums themselves, in which we assemble everything that is left of the corporeally-sensible past! Are not they a symbol of the highest rank? Are they not intended to conserve in mummy the entire “body” of cultural development?

As we collect countless data in milliards of printed books, do we not also collect all the works of all the dead Cultures in these myriad halls of West-European cities, in the mass of the collection depriving each individual piece of that instant of actualized purpose that is its own—the one property that the Classical soul would have respected—and ipso facto dissolving it into our unending and unresting Time? Consider what it was that the Hellenes named Μουσεῖον;¹⁴² how deep a significance lies in the change of sense!

It is the primitive feeling of Care¹⁴³ which dominates the physiognomy of Western, as also that of Egyptian and that of Chinese history, and it creates, further, the symbolism of the erotic which represents the flowing on of endless life in the form of the familial series of individual existences. The point-formed Euclidean existence of Classical man, in this matter as in others, conceived only the here-and-now definitive act of begetting or of bearing, and thus it comes about that we find the birth-pangs of the mother made the centre of Demeter-worship and the Dionysiac symbol of the phallus (the sign of a sexuality wholly concentrated on the moment and losing past and future in it) more or less everywhere in the Classical. In the Indian world we find, correspondingly, the sign of the Lingam and the sect of worshippers of Paewati.¹⁴⁴ In the one case as in the other, man feels himself as nature, as a plant, as a willless and care-less element of becoming (dem Sinn des Werdens willenlos und sorglos hingegeben). The domestic religion of Rome centred on the genius, i.e., the creative power of the head of the family. To all this, the deep and thoughtful care of the Western soul has opposed the sign of mother-love, a symbol which in the Classical Culture only appeared above the horizon to the extent that we see it in, say, the mourning for Persephone or (though this is only Hellenistic) the seated statue of Demeter of Knidos.¹⁴⁵ The Mother with the Child—the future—at her breast, the Mary-cult in the new Faustian form, began to flourish only in the centuries of the Gothic and found its highest expression in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna.¹⁴⁶ This conception is not one belonging to Christianity generally. On the contrary, Magian Christianity had elevated Mary as Theotokos, “she who gave birth to God”¹⁴⁷ into a symbol felt quite otherwise than by us. The lulling Mother is as alien to Early-Christian-Byzantine art as she is to the Hellenic (though for other reasons) and most certainly Faust’s Gretchen, with the deep spell of unconscious motherhood on her, is nearer to the Gothic Madonna than all the Marys of Byzantine and Ravennate mosaics. Indeed, the presumption of a spiritual relation between them breaks down completely before the fact that the Madonna with the Child answers exactly to the Egyptian Isis with Horus—both are caring, nursing mothers—and that nevertheless this symbol had vanished for a thousand years and more (for the whole duration of the Classical and the Arabian Cultures) before it was reawakened by the Faustian soul.¹⁴⁸

From the maternal care the way leads to the paternal, and there we meet with the highest of all the time-symbols that have come into existence within a Culture, the State. The meaning of the child to the mother is the future, the continuation, namely, of her own life, and mother-love is, as it were, a welding of two discontinuous individual existences; likewise, the meaning of the state to the man is comradeship in arms for the protection of hearth and home, wife and child, and for the insurance for the whole people of its future and its efficacy. The state is the inward form of a nation, its “form” in the athletic sense, and history, in the high meaning, is the State conceived as kinesis and not as kinema (nicht als Bewegtes sondern als Bewegung gedacht). The Woman as Mother is, and the Man as Warrior and Politician makes, History.¹⁴⁹

And here again the history of higher Cultures shows us three examples of state-formations in which the element of care is conspicuous: the Egyptian administration even of the Old Kingdom (from 3000 B.C.); the Chinese state of the Chóu dynasty (1169-256 B.C.), of the organization of which the Chóu Li gives such a picture that, later on, no one dared to believe in the authenticity of the book; and the states of the West, behind whose characteristic eye-to-the-future there is an unsurpassably intense Will to the future.¹⁵⁰ And on the other hand we have in two examples—the Classical and the Indian world—a picture of utterly care-less submission to the moment and its incidents. Different in themselves as are Stoicism and Buddhism (the old-age dispositions of these two worlds), they are at one in their negation of the historical feeling of care, their contempt of zeal, of organizing power, and of the duty-sense; and therefore neither in Indian courts nor in Classical market-places was there a thought for the morrow, personal or collective. The carpe diem of Apollinian man applies also to the Apollinian state.

As with the political, so with the other side of historical existence, the economic. The hand-to-mouth life corresponds to the love that begins and ends in the satisfaction of the moment. There was an economic organization on the grand scale in Egypt, where it fills the whole culture-picture, telling us in a thousand paintings the story of its industry and orderliness; in China, whose mythology of gods and legend-emperors turns entirely upon the holy tasks of cultivation; and in Western Europe, where, beginning with the model agriculture of the Orders, it rose to the height of a special science, “national economy,” which was in very principle a working hypothesis, purporting to show not what happens but what shall happen. In the Classical world, on the other hand—to say nothing of India—men managed from day to day, in spite of the example of Egypt; the earth was robbed not only of its wealth but of its capacities, and the casual surpluses were instantly squandered on the city mob. Consider critically any great statesman of the Classical—Pericles and Cæsar, Alexander and Scipio, and even revolutionaries like Cleon and Tiberius Gracchus. Not one of them, economically, looked far ahead. No city ever made it its business to drain or to afforest a district, or to introduce advanced cultivation methods or new kinds of live stock or new plants. To attach a Western meaning to the “agrarian reform” of the Gracchi is to misunderstand its purport entirely. Their aim was to make their supporters possessors of land. Of educating these into managers of land, or of raising the standard of Italian husbandry in general, there was not the remotest idea—one let the future come, one did not attempt to work upon it. Of this economic Stoicism of the Classical world the exact antithesis is Socialism, meaning thereby not Marx’s theory but Frederick William I’s Prussian practice which long preceded Marx and will yet displace him—the socialism, inwardly akin to the system of Old Egypt, that comprehends and cares for permanent economic relations, trains the individual in his duty to the whole, and glorifies hard work as an affirmation of Time and Future.

The ordinary everyday man in all Cultures only observes so much of the physiognomy of becoming—his own and that of the living world around him—as is in the foreground and immediately tangible. The sum of his experiences, inner and outer, fills the course of his day merely as a series of facts. Only the outstanding (bedeutende) man feels behind the commonplace unities of the history-stirred surface a deep logic of becoming. This logic, manifesting itself in the idea of Destiny, leads him to regard the less significant collocations of the day and the surface as mere incidents.

At first sight, however, there seems to be only a difference of degree in the connotations of “destiny” and “incident.” One feels that it is more or less of an incident when Goethe goes to Sesenheim, but destiny when he goes to Weimar;¹⁵¹ one regards the former as an episode and the latter as an epoch. But we can see at once that the distinction depends on the inward quality of the man who is impressed. To the mass, the whole life of Goethe may appear as a sequence of anecdotal incidents, while a very few will become conscious, with astonishment, of a symbolic necessity inherent even in its most trivial occurrences. Perhaps, then, the discovery of the heliocentric system by Aristarchus was an unmeaning incident for the Classical Culture, but its supposed¹⁵² rediscovery by Copernicus a destiny for the Faustian? Was it a destiny that Luther was not a great organizer and Calvin was? And if so, for whom was it a destiny—for Protestantism as a living unit, for the Germans, or for Western mankind generally? Were Tiberius Gracchus and Sulla incidents and Cæsar a destiny?

Questions like these far transcend the domain of the understanding that operates through concepts (der begriffliche Verständigung). What is destiny, what incident, the spiritual experiences of the individual soul—and of the Culture-soul—decide. Acquired knowledge, scientific insight, definition, are all powerless. Nay more, the very attempt to grasp them epistemologically defeats its own object. For without the inward certainty that destiny is something entirely intractable to critical thought, we cannot perceive the world of becoming at all. Cognition, judgment, and the establishment of causal connexions within the known (i.e., between things, properties, and positions that have been distinguished) are one and the same, and he who approaches history in the spirit of judgment will only find “data.” But that—be it Providence or Fate—which moves in the depths of present happening or of represented past happening is lived, and only lived, and lived with that same overwhelming and unspeakable certainty that genuine Tragedy awakens in the uncritical spectator. Destiny and incident form an opposition in which the soul is ceaselessly trying to clothe something which consists only of feeling and living and intuition, and can only be made plain in the most subjective religious and artistic creations of those men who are called to divination. To evoke this root-feeling of living existence which endows the picture of history with its meaning and content, I know of no better way—for “name is mere noise and smoke”—than to quote again those stanzas of Goethe which I have placed at the head of this book to mark its fundamental intention.

“In the Endless, self-repeating

flows for evermore The Same.

Myriad arches, springing, meeting,

hold at rest the mighty frame.

Streams from all things love of living,

grandest star and humblest clod.

All the straining, all the striving

is eternal peace in God.”¹⁵³

On the surface of history it is the unforeseen that reigns. Every individual event, decision and personality is stamped with its hall-mark. No one foreknew the storm of Islam at the coming of Mohammed, nor foresaw Napoleon in the fall of Robespierre. The coming of great men, their doings, their fortune, are all incalculables. No one knows whether a development that is setting in powerfully will accomplish its course in a straight line like that of the Roman patrician order or will go down in doom like that of the Hohenstaufen or the Maya Culture. And—science notwithstanding—it is just the same with the destinies of every single species of beast and plant within earth-history and beyond even this, with the destiny of the earth itself and all the solar systems and Milky Ways. The insignificant Augustus made an epoch, and the great Tiberius passed away ineffective. Thus, too, with the fortunes of artists, artworks and art-forms, dogmas and cults, theories and discoveries. That, in the whirl of becoming, one element merely succumbed to destiny when another became (and often enough has continued and will continue to be) a destiny itself—that one vanishes with the wave-train of the surface while the other makes this, is something that is not to be explained by any why-and-wherefore and yet is of inward necessity. And thus the phrase that Augustine in a deep moment used of Time is valid also of destiny—“if no one questions me, I know: if I would explain to a questioner, I know not.”

So, also, the supreme ethical expression of Incident and Destiny is found in the Western Christian’s idea of Grace—the grace, obtained through the sacrificial death of Jesus, of being made free to will.¹⁵⁴ The polarity of Disposition (original sin) and Grace—a polarity which must ever be a projection of feeling, of the emotional life, and not a precision of learned reasoning—embraces the existence of every truly significant man of this Culture. It is, even for Protestants, even for atheists, hidden though it may be behind a scientific notion of “evolution” (which in reality is its direct descendant¹⁵⁵), the foundation of every confession and every autobiography; and it is just its absence from the constitution of Classical man that makes confession, by word or thought, impossible to him. It is the final meaning of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and of music from Bach to Beethoven. We may choose to call that something which correlates the life-courses of all Western men disposition, Providence or “inner evolution”¹⁵⁶ but it remains inaccessible to thought. “Free will” is an inward certitude. But whatever one may will or do, that which actually ensues upon and issues from the resolution—abrupt, surprising, unforeseeable—subserves a deeper necessity and, for the eye that sweeps over the picture of the distant past, visibly conforms to a major order. And when the Destiny of that which was willed has been Fulfilment we are fain to call the inscrutable “Grace.” What did Innocent III, Luther, Loyola, Calvin, Jansen, Rousseau and Marx will, and what came of the things that they willed in the stream of Western history? Was it Grace or Fate? Here all rationalistic dissection ends in nonsense. The Predestination doctrine of Calvin and Pascal—who, both of them more upright than Luther and Thomas Aquinas, dared to draw the causal conclusion from Augustinian dialectic—is the necessary absurdity to which the pursuit of these secrets by the reason leads. They lost the destiny-logic of the world-becoming and found themselves in the causal logic of notion and law; they left the realm of direct intuitive vision for that of a mechanical system of objects. The fearful soul-conflicts of Pascal were the strivings of a man, at once intensely spiritual and a born mathematician, who was determined to subject the last and gravest problems of the soul both to the intuitions of a grand instinctive faith and to the abstract precision of a no less grand mathematical plan. In this wise the Destiny-idea—in the language of religion, God’s Providence—is brought within the schematic form of the Causality Principle, i.e., the Kantian form of mind activity (productive imagination); for that is what Predestination signifies, notwithstanding that thereby Grace—the causation-free, living Grace which can only be experienced as an inward certainty—is made to appear as a nature-force that is bound by irrevocable law and to turn the religious world-picture into a rigid and gloomy system of machinery. And yet was it not a Destiny again—for the world as well as for themselves—that the English Puritans, who were filled with this conviction, were ruined not through any passive self-surrender but through their hearty and vigorous certainty that their will was the will of God?

We can proceed to the further elucidation of the incidental (or casual) without running the risk of considering it as an exception or a breach in the causal continuity of “Nature,” for Nature is not the world-picture in which Destiny is operative. Wherever the sight emancipates itself from the sensible-become, spiritualizes itself into Vision, penetrates through the enveloping world and lets prime phenomena instead of mere objects work upon it, we have the grand historical, trans-natural, super-natural outlook, the outlook of Dante and Wolfram and also the outlook of Goethe in old age that is most clearly manifested in the finale of Faust II. If we linger in contemplation in this world of Destiny and Incident, it will very likely seem to us incidental that the episode of “world-history” should have played itself out in this or that phase of one particular star amongst the millions of solar systems; incidental that it should be men, peculiar animal-like creatures inhabiting the crust of this star, that present the spectacle of “knowledge” and, moreover, present it in just this form or in just that form, according to the very different versions of Aristotle, Kant and others; incidental that as the counter-pole of this “knowing” there should have arisen just these codes of “natural law,” each supposedly eternal and universally-valid and each evoking a supposedly general and common picture of “Nature.” Physics—quite rightly—banishes incidentals from its field of view, but it is incidental, again, that physics itself should occur in the alluvial period of the earth’s crust, uniquely, as a particular kind of intellectual composition.

The world of incident is the world of once-actual facts that longingly or anxiously we live forward to (entgegenleben) as Future, that raise or depress us as the living Present, and that we contemplate with joy or with grief as Past. The world of causes and effects is the world of the constantly-possible, of the timeless truths which we know by dissection and distinction.

The latter only are scientifically attainable—they are indeed identical with science. He who is blind to this other, to the world as Divina Commedia or drama for a god, can only find a senseless turmoil of incidents,¹⁵⁷ and here we use the word in its most trivial sense. So it has been with Kant and most other systematists of thought. But the professional and inartistic sort of historical research too, with its collecting and arranging of mere data, amounts for all its ingenuity to little more than the giving of a cachet to the banal-incidental. Only the insight that can penetrate into the metaphysical is capable of experiencing in data symbols of that which happened, and so of elevating an Incident into a Destiny. And he who is to himself a Destiny (like Napoleon) does not need this insight, since between himself as a fact and the other facts there is a harmony of metaphysical rhythm which gives his decisions their dreamlike certainty.¹⁵⁸

It is this insight that constitutes the singularity and the power of Shakespeare. Hitherto, neither our research nor our speculation has hit upon this in him—that he is the Dramatist of the Incidental. And yet this Incidental is the very heart of Western tragedy, which is a true copy of the Western history idea and with it gives the clue to that which we understand in the world—so misconstrued by Kant—“Time.” It is incidental that the political situation of “Hamlet,” the murder of the King and the succession question impinge upon just that character that Hamlet is. Or, take Othello—it is incidental that the man at whom Iago, the commonplace rogue that one could pick up in any street, aims his blow is one whose person possesses just this wholly special physiognomy. And Lear! Could anything be more incidental (and therefore more “natural”) than the conjunction of this commanding dignity with these fateful passions and the inheritance of them by the daughters? No one has even to-day realized all the significance of the fact that Shakespeare took his stories as he found them and in the very finding of them filled them with the force of inward necessity, and never more sublimely so than in the case of the Roman dramas. For the will to understand him has squandered itself in desperate efforts to bring in a moral causality, a “therefore,” a connexion of “guilt” and “expiation.” But all this is neither correct nor incorrect—these are words that belong to the World-as-Nature and imply that something causal is being judged—but superficial, shallow, that is, in contrast to the poet’s deep subjectivizing of the mere fact-anecdote. Only one who feels this is able to admire the grand naïveté of the entrances of Lear and Macbeth. Now, Hebbel is the exact opposite, he destroys the depth of the anecdote by a system of cause and effect. The arbitrary and abstract character of his plots, which everyone feels instinctively, comes from the fact that the causal scheme of his spiritual conflicts is in contradiction with the historically-motived world-feeling and the quite other logic proper to that feeling. These people do not live, they prove something by coming on. One feels the presence of a great understanding, not that of a deep life. Instead of the Incident we get a Problem.

Further, this Western species of the Incidental is entirely alien to the Classical world-feeling and therefore to its drama. Antigone has no incidental character to affect her fortunes in any way. What happened to Œdipus—unlike the fate of Lear—might just as well have happened to anyone else. This is the Classical “Destiny,” the Fatum which is common to all mankind, which affects the “body” and in no wise depends upon incidents of personality.

The kind of history that is commonly written must, even if it does not lose itself in compilation of data, come to a halt before the superficially incidental—that is the ... destiny of its authors, who, spiritually, remain more or less in the ruck. In their eyes nature and history mingle in a cheap unity, and incident or accident, “sa sacrée majesté le Hazard,” is for the man of the ruck the easiest thing in the world to understand. For him the secret logic of history ‘which he does not feel’ is replaced by a causal that is only waiting behind the scene to come on and prove itself. It is entirely appropriate that the anecdotal foreground of history should be the arena of all the scientific causality-hunters and all the novelists and sketch-writers of the common stamp. How many wars have been begun when they were because some jealous courtier wished to remove some general from the proximity of his wife! How many battles have been won and lost through ridiculous incidents! Only think how Roman history was written in the 18th Century and how Chinese history is written even to-day! Think of the Dey smacking the Consul with his fly-flap¹⁵⁹ and other such incidents that enliven the historical scene with comic-opera motives! Do not the deaths of Gustavus Adolphus and of Alexander seem like expedients of a nonplussed playwright; Hannibal a simple intermezzo, a surprise intrusion in Classical history; or Napoleon’s “transit” more or less of a melodrama? Anyone who looks for the inner form of history in any causal succession of its visible detail-events must always, if he is honest, find a comedy of burlesque inconsequence, and I can well imagine that the dance-scene of the drunken Triumvirs in “Antony and Cleopatra” (almost overlooked, but one of the most powerful in that immensely deep work)¹⁶⁰ grew up out of the contempt of the prince of historical tragedy for the pragmatic aspect of history. For this is the aspect of it that has always dominated “the world,” and has encouraged ambitious little men to interfere in it. It was because their eyes were set on this, and its rationalistic structure, that Rousseau and Marx could persuade themselves that they could alter the “course of the world” by a theory. And even the social or economic interpretation of political developments, to which present-day historical work is trying to rise as to a peak-ideal (though its biological cast constantly leads us to suspect foundations of the causal kind), is still exceedingly shallow and trivial.

Napoleon had in his graver moments a strong feeling for the deep logic of world-becoming, and in such moments could divine to what extent he was, and to what extent he had, a destiny. “I feel myself driven towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me,” he said at the beginning of the Russian campaign. Here, certainly, is not the thought of a pragmatist. In this moment he divined how little the logic of Destiny needs particular instances, better men or situations. Supposing that he himself, as “empirical person,” had fallen at Marengo—then that which he signified would have been actualized in some other form. A melody, in the hands of a great musician, is capable of a wealth of variations; it can be entirely transformed so far as the simple listener is concerned without altering itself—which is quite another matter—fundamentally. The epoch of German national union accomplished itself through the person of Bismarck, that of the Wars of Freedom through broad and almost nameless events; but either theme, to use the language of music, could have been “worked out” in other ways. Bismarck might have been dismissed early, the battle of Leipzig might have been lost, and for the group of wars 1864—1866—1870 there might have been substituted (as “modulations”) diplomatic, dynastic, revolutionary or economic facts—though it must not be forgotten that Western history, under the pressure of its own physiognomic abundance (as distinct from physiognomic style, for even Indian history has that) demands, so to say, contrapuntally strong accents—wars or big personalities—at the decisive points. Bismarck himself points out in his reminiscences that in the spring of 1848 national unity could have been achieved on a broader base than in 1870 but for the policy (more accurately, the personal taste) of the King of Prussia;¹⁶¹ and yet, again, according to Bismarck, this would have been so tame a working-out that a coda of one sort or another (da capo e poi la coda) would have been imperatively necessary. Withal, the Theme—the meaning of the epoch—would have been entirely unaltered by the facts assuming this or that shape. Goethe might—possibly—have died young, but not his “idea.” Faust and Tasso would not have been written, but they would have “been” in a deeply mysterious sense, even though they lacked the poet’s elucidation.

For if it is incidental that the history of higher mankind fulfils itself in the form of great Cultures, and that one of these Cultures awoke in West Europe about the year 1000; yet from the moment of awakening it is bound by its charter. Within every epoch there is unlimited abundance of surprising and unforeseeable possibilities of self-actualizing in detail-facts, but the epoch itself is necessary, for the life-unity is in it. That its inner form is precisely what it is, constitutes its specific determination (Bestimmung). Fresh incidentals can affect the shape of its development, can make this grandiose or puny, prosperous or sorrowful, but alter it they cannot. An irrevocable fact is not merely a special case but a special type; thus in the history of the Universe we have the type of the “solar system” of sun and circling planets; in the history of our planet we have the type “life” with its youth, age, duration and reproduction; in the history of “life” the type “humanity,” and in the world-historical stage of that humanity the type of the great individual Culture.¹⁶² And these Cultures are essentially related to the plants, in that they are bound for the whole duration of their life to the soil from which they sprang. Typical, lastly, is the manner in which the men of a Culture understand and experience Destiny, however differently the picture may be coloured for this individual and that; what I say here about it is not “true,” but inwardly necessary for this Culture and this time-phase of it, and if it convinces you, it is not because there is only one “truth” but because you and I belong to the same epoch.

For this reason, the Euclidean soul of the Classical Culture could only experience its existence, bound as this was to present foregrounds, in the form of incidents of the Classical style. If in respect of the Western soul we can regard incident as a minor order of Destiny, in respect of the Classical soul it is just the reverse. Destiny is incident become immense—that is the very signification of Ananke, Heimarmene, Fatum. As the Classical soul did not genuinely live through history, it possessed no genuine feeling for a logic of Destiny. We must not be misled by words. The most popular goddess of Hellenism was Tyche, whom the Greeks were practically unable to distinguish from Ananke. But Incident and Destiny are felt by us with all the intensity of an opposition, and on the issue of this opposition we feel that everything fundamental in our existence depends. Our history is that of great connexions, Classical history—its full actuality, that is, and not merely the image of it that we get in the historian (e.g., Herodotus)—is that of anecdotes, of a series of plastic details. The style of the Classical life generally, the style of every individual life within it, is anecdotal, using the word with all seriousness. The sense-perceivable side of events condenses on anti-historical, daemonic, absurd incidents; it is the denial and disavowal of all logic of happening. The stories of the Classical master-tragedies one and all exhaust themselves in incidents that mock at any meaning of the world; they are the exact denotation of what is connoted by the word εἱμαρμένη¹⁶³ in contrast to the Shakesperian logic of incident. Consider Œdipus once more: that which happened to him was wholly extrinsic, was neither brought about nor conditioned by anything subjective to himself, and could just as well have happened to anyone else. This is the very form of the Classical myth. Compare with it the necessity—inherent in and governed by the man’s whole existence and the relation of that existence to Time—that resides in the destiny of Othello, of Don Quixote, of Werther. It is, as we have said before, the difference of situation-tragedy and character-tragedy. And this opposition repeats itself in history proper—every epoch of the West has character, while each epoch of the Classical only presents a situation. While the life of Goethe was one of fate-filled logic, that of Cæsar was one of mythical indidentalness, and it was left to Shakespeare to introduce logic into it. Napoleon is a tragic character, Alcibiades fell into tragic situations. Astrology, in the form in which from Gothic to Baroque the Western soul knew it—was dominated by it even in denying it—was the attempt to master one’s whole future life-course; the Faustian horoscope, of which the best-known example is perhaps that drawn out for Wallenstein by Kepler, presupposes a steady and purposeful direction in the existence that has yet to be accomplished. But the Classical oracle, always consulted for the individual case, is the genuine symbol of the meaningless incident and the moment; it accepts the point-formed and the discontinuous as the elements of the world’s course, and oracle-utterances were therefore entirely in place in that which was written and experienced as history at Athens. Was there one single Greek who possessed the notion of a historical evolution towards this or that or any aim? And we—should we have been able to reflect upon history or to make it if we had not possessed it? If we compare the destinies of Athens and of France at corresponding times after Themistocles and Louis XIV, we cannot but feel that the style of the historical feeling and the style of its actualization are always one. In France logic à outrance, in Athens un-logic.

The ultimate meaning of this significant fact can now be understood. History is the actualizing of a soul, and the same style governs the history one makes as governs the history one contemplates. The Classical mathematic excludes the symbol of infinite space, and therefore the Classical history does so too. It is not for nothing that the scene of Classical existence is the smallest of any, the individual Polis, that it lacks horizon and perspective—notwithstanding the episode of Alexander’s expedition¹⁶⁴—just as the Attic stage cuts them off with its flat back-wall, in obvious contrast to the long-range efficacy of Western Cabinet diplomacy and the Western capital city. And just as the Greeks and the Romans neither knew nor (with their fundamental abhorrence of the Chaldean astronomy) would admit as actual any cosmos but that of the foreground; just as at bottom their deities are house-gods, city-gods, field-gods but never star-gods,¹⁶⁵ so also what they depicted was only foregrounds. Never in Corinth or Athens or Sicyon do we find a landscape with mountain horizon and driving clouds and distant towns; every vase-painting has the same constituents, figures of Euclidean separateness and artistic self-sufficiency. Every pediment or frieze group is serially and not contrapuntally built up. But then, life-experience itself was one strictly of foregrounds. Destiny was not the “course of life” but something upon which one suddenly stumbles. And this is how Athens produced, with Polygnotus’s fresco and Plato’s geometry, a fate-tragedy in which fate is precisely the fate that we discredit in Schiller’s “Bride of Messina.” The complete unmeaning of blind doom that is embodied, for instance, in the curse of the House of Atreus, served to reveal to the ahistorical Classical soul the full meaning of its own world.

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We may now point our moral with a few examples, which, though hazardous, ought not at this stage to be open to misunderstanding. Imagine Columbus supported by France instead of by Spain, as was in fact highly probable at one time. Had Francis I been the master of America, without doubt he and not the Spaniard Charles V would have obtained the imperial crown. The early Baroque period from the Sack of Rome to the Peace of Westphalia, which was actually the Spanish century in religion, intellect, art, politics and manners, would have been shaped from Paris and not from Madrid. Instead of the names of Philip, Alva, Cervantes, Calderon, Velasquez we should be talking to-day of great Frenchmen who in fact—if we may thus roundly express a very difficult idea—remained unborn. The style of the Church which was definitively fixed in this epoch by the Spaniard Loyola and the Council of Trent which he spiritually dominated; the style of politics to which the war-technique of Spanish captains, the diplomacy of Spanish cardinals and the courtly spirit of the Escorial gave a stamp that lasted till the Congress of Vienna and in essential points till beyond Bismarck; the architecture of the Baroque; the great age of Painting; ceremonial and the polite society of the great cities—all these would have been represented by other profound heads, noble and clerical, by wars other than Philip II’s wars, by another architect than Vignola, by another Court. The Incidental chose the Spanish gesture for the late period of the West. But the inward logic of that age, which was bound to find its fulfilment in the great Revolution (or some event of the same connotation), remained intact.

This French revolution might have been represented by some other event of different form and occurring elsewhere, say in England or Germany. But its “idea,”—which (as we shall see later) was the transition from Culture to Civilization, the victory of the inorganic megalopolis over the organic countryside which was henceforward to become spiritually “the provinces,”—was necessary, and the moment of its occurrence was also necessary. To describe such a moment we shall use the term (long blurred, or misused as a synonym for period) epoch. When we say an event is epoch-making we mean that it marks in the course of a Culture a necessary and fateful turning-point. The merely incidental event, a crystallization-form of the historical surface, may be represented by other appropriate incidents, but the epoch is necessary and predeterminate. And it is evident that the question of whether, in respect of a particular Culture and its course, an event ranks as an epoch or as an episode is connected with its ideas of Destiny and Incidents, and therefore also with its idea of the Tragic as “epochal” (as in the West) or as “episodic” (as in the Classical world).

We can, further, distinguish between impersonal or anonymous and personal epochs, according to their physiognomic type in the picture of history. Amongst “incidents” of the first rank we include those great persons who are endowed with such formative force that the destiny of thousands, of whole peoples, and of ages, are incorporated in their private destinies; but at the same time we can distinguish the adventurer or successful man who is destitute of inward greatness (like Danton or Robespierre) from the Hero of history by the fact that his personal destiny displays only the traits of the common destiny. Certain names may ring, but “the Jacobins” collectively and not individuals amongst them were the type that dominated the time. The first part of this epoch of the Revolution is therefore thoroughly anonymous, just as the second or Napoleonic is in the highest degree personal. In a few years the immense force of these phenomena accomplished what the corresponding epoch of the Classical (c. 386-322), fluid and unsure of itself, required decades of undermining-work to achieve. It is of the essence of all Culture that at the outset of each stage the same potentiality is present, and that necessity fulfils itself thereafter either in the form of a great individual person (Alexander, Diocletian, Mohammed, Luther, Napoleon) or in that of an almost anonymous happening of powerful inward constitution (Peloponnesian War, Thirty Years’ War, Spanish Succession War) or else in a feeble and indistinct evolution (periods of the Diadochi and of the Hyksos, the Interregnum in Germany). And the question which of these forms is the more likely to occur in any given instance, is one that is influenced in advance by the historical and therefore also the tragic style of the Culture concerned.¹⁶⁶

The tragic in Napoleon’s life—which still awaits discovery by a poet great enough to comprehend it and shape it—was that he, who rose into effective being by fighting British policy and the British spirit which that policy so eminently represented, completed by that very fighting the continental victory of this spirit, which thereupon became strong enough, in the guise of “liberated nations” to overpower him and to send him to St. Helena to die. It was not Napoleon who originated the expansion principle. That had arisen out of the Puritanism of Cromwell’s milieu which called into life the British Colonial Empire.¹⁶⁷ Transmitted through the English-schooled intellects of Rousseau and Mirabeau to the Revolutionary armies, of which English philosophical ideas were essentially the driving force, it became their tendency even from that day of Valmy which Goethe alone read aright. It was not Napoleon who formed the idea, but the idea that formed Napoleon, and when he came to the throne he was obliged to pursue it further against the only power, England namely, whose purpose was the same as his own. His Empire was a creation of French blood but of English style. It was in London, again, that Locke, Shaftesbury, Samuel Clarke and, above all, Bentham built up the theory of “European Civilization”—the Western Hellenism—which Bayle, Voltaire and Rousseau carried to Paris. Thus it was in the name of this England of Parliamentarianism, business morality and journalism that Valmy, Marengo, Jena, Smolensk and Leipzig were fought, and in all these battles it was the English spirit that defeated the French Culture of the West.¹⁶⁸ The First Consul had no intention of incorporating West Europe in France; his primary object was—note the Alexander-idea on the threshold of every Civilization!—to replace the British Colonial Empire by a French one. Thereby, French preponderance in the Western culture-region would have been placed on a practically unassailable foundation; it would have been the Empire of Charles V on which the sun never set, but managed from Paris after all, in spite of Columbus and Philip, and organized as an economic-military instead of as an ecclesiastical-chivalric unit. So far-reaching, probably, was the destiny that was in Napoleon. But the Peace of Paris in 1763 had already decided the question against France, and Napoleon’s great plans time and again came to grief in petty incidents. At Acre a few guns were landed in the nick of time from the British warships: there was a moment, again, just before the signature of the Peace of Amiens, when the whole Mississippi basin was still amongst his assets and he was in close touch with the Maratha powers that were resisting British progress in India; but again a minor naval incident¹⁶⁹ obliged him to abandon the whole of a carefully-prepared enterprise: and, lastly, when by the occupation of Dalmatia, Corfu and all Italy he had made the Adriatic a French lake, with a view to another expedition to the East, and was negotiating with the Shah of Persia for action against India, he was defeated by the whims of the Tsar Alexander, who at times was undoubtedly willing to support a march on India and whose aid would infallibly have secured its success. It was only after the failure of all extra-European combinations that he chose, as his ultima ratio in the battle against England, the incorporation of Germany and Spain, and so, raising against himself his own English-Revolutionary ideas, the very ideas of which he had been the vehicle,¹⁷⁰ he took the step that made him “no longer necessary.”

At one time it falls to the Spanish spirit to outline, at another to the British or the French to remould, the world-embracing colonial system. A “United States of Europe,” actualized through Napoleon as founder of a romantic and popular military monarchy, is the analogue of the Realm of the Diadochi; actualized as a 21st-Century economic organism by a matter-of-fact Cæsar, it is the counterpart of the imperium Romanum. These are incidentals, but they are in the picture of history. But Napoleon’s victories and defeats (which always hide a victory of England and Civilization over Culture), his Imperial dignity, his fall, the Grande Nation, the episodic liberation of Italy (in 1796, as in 1859, essentially no more than a change of political costume for a people long since become insignificant), the destruction of the Gothic ruin of the Roman-German Empire, are mere surface phenomena, behind which is marching the great logic of genuine and invisible History, and it was in the sense of this logic that the West, having fulfilled its French-formed Culture in the ancien régime, closed it off with the English Civilization. As symbols of “contemporary” epochal moments, then, the storming of the Bastille, Valmy, Austerlitz, Waterloo and the rise of Prussia correspond to the Classical-history facts of Chæronea, Gaugamela (Arbela), Alexander’s Indian expedition and the Roman victory of Sentinum.¹⁷¹ And we begin to understand that in wars and political catastrophies—the chief material of our historical writings—victory is not the essence of the fight nor peace the aim of a revolution.

Anyone who has absorbed these ideas will have no difficulty in understanding how the causality principle is bound to have a fatal effect upon the capacity for genuinely experiencing History when, at last, it attains its rigid form in that “late” condition of a Culture to which it is proper and in which it is able to tyrannize over the world-picture. Kant, very wisely, established causality as a necessary form of knowledge, and it cannot be too often emphasized that this was meant to refer exclusively to the understanding of man’s environment by the way of reason. But while the word “necessary” was accepted readily enough, it has been overlooked that this limitation of the principle to a single domain of knowledge is just what forbids its application to the contemplation and experiencing of living history. Man-knowing and Nature-knowing are in essence entirely incapable of being compared, but nevertheless the whole Nineteenth Century was at great pains to abolish the frontier between Nature and History in favour of the former. The more historically men tried to think, the more they forgot that in this domain they ought not to think. In forcing the rigid scheme of a spatial and anti-temporal relation of cause and effect upon something alive, they disfigured the visible face of becoming with the construction-lines of a physical nature-picture, and, habituated to their own late, megalopolitan and causally-thinking milieu, they were unconscious of the fundamental absurdity of a science that sought to understand an organic becoming by methodically misunderstanding it as the machinery of the thing-become. Day is not the cause of night, nor youth of age, nor blossom of fruit. Everything that we grasp intellectually has a cause, everything that we live organically with inward certitude has a past. The one recognizes the case, that which is generally possible and has a fixed inner form which is the same whenever and wherever and however often it occurs, the other recognizes the event which once was and will never recur. And, according as we grasp something in our envelope-world critically and consciously or physiognomically and involuntarily, we draw our conclusion from technical or from living experience, and we relate it to a timeless cause in space or to a direction which leads from yesterday to to-day and to-morrow.

But the spirit of our great cities refuses to be involuntary. Surrounded by a machine-technique that it has itself created in surprising Nature’s most dangerous secret, the “law,” it seeks to conquer history also technically, “theoretically and practically.” “Usefulness,” suitableness to purpose (Zweckmässigkeit), is the great word which assimilates the one to the other. A materialist conception of history, ruled by laws of causal Nature, leads to the setting up of usefulness-ideals such as “enlightenment,” “humanity,” “world-peace,” as aims of world-history, to be reached by the “march of progress.” But in these schemes of old age the feeling of Destiny has died, and with it the young reckless courage that, self-forgetful and big with a future, presses on to meet a dark decision.

For only youth has a future, and is Future, that enigmatic synonym of directional Time and of Destiny. Destiny is always young. He who replaces it by a mere chain of causes and effects, sees even in the not-yet-actualized something, as it were, old and past—direction is wanting. But he who lives towards a something in the superabundant flow of things need not concern himself with aims and abilities, for he feels that he himself is the meaning of what is to happen. This was the faith in the Star that never left Cæsar nor Napoleon nor the great doers of another kind; and this it is that lies deepest of all—youthful melancholy notwithstanding—in every childhood and in every young clan, people, Culture, that extends forward over all their history for men of act and of vision, who are young however white their hair, younger even than the most juvenile of those who look to a timeless utilitarianism. The feeling of a significance in the momentarily present world-around discloses itself in the earliest days of childhood, when it is still only the persons and things of the nearest environment that essentially exist, and develops through silent and unconscious experience into a comprehensive picture. This picture constitutes the general expression of the whole Culture as it is at the particular stage, and it is only the fine judge of life and the deep searcher of history who can interpret it.

At this point a distinction presents itself between the immediate impression of the present and the image of the past that is only presented in the spirit, in other words between the world as happening and the world as history. The eye of the man of action (statesman and general) appreciates the first, that of the man of contemplation (historian and poet) the second. Into the first one plunges practically to do or to suffer; chronology,¹⁷² that great symbol of irrevocable past, claims the second. We look backwards, and we live forward towards the unforeseen, but even in childhood our technical experience soon introduces into the image of the singular occurrence elements of the foreseeable, that is, an image of regulated Nature which is subject not to physiognomic fact but to calculation. We apprehend a “head of game” as a living entity and immediately afterwards as food; we see a flash of lightning as a peril and then as an electrical discharge. And this second, later, petrifying projection of the world more and more tends to overpower the first in the Megalopolis; the image of the past is mechanized and materialized and from it is deduced a set of causal rules for present and future. We come to believe in historical laws and in a rational understanding of them.

Nevertheless science is always natural science. Causal knowledge and technical experience refer only to the become, the extended, the comprehended. As life is to history, so is knowledge (Wissen) to Nature, viz., to the sensible world apprehended as an element, treated as in space and subjected to the law of cause and effect. Is there, then, a science of History at all? To answer this question, let us remember that in every personal world-picture, which only approximates more or less to the ideal picture, there is both something of Nature and something of History. No Nature is without living, and no History without causal, harmonies. For within the sphere of Nature, although two like experiments, conformably to law, have the like result, yet each of these experiments is a historical event possessing a date and not recurring. And within that of History, the dates or data of the past (chronologies, statistics, names, forms¹⁷³) form a rigid web. “Facts are facts” even if we are unaware of them, and all else is image, Theoria, both in the one domain and in the other. But history is itself the condition of being “in the focus” and the material is only an aid to this condition, whereas in Nature the real aim is the winning of the material, and theory is only the servant of this purpose.

There is, therefore, not a science of history but an ancillary science for history, which ascertains that which has been. For the historical outlook itself the data are always symbols. Scientific research, on the contrary, is science and only science. In virtue of its technical origin and purpose it sets out to find data and laws of the causal sort and nothing else, and from the moment that it turns its glance upon something else it becomes Metaphysics, something trans-scientific. And just because this is so, historical and natural-science data are different. The latter consistently repeat themselves, the former never. The latter are truths, the former facts. However closely related incidentals and causals may appear to be in the everyday picture, fundamentally they belong to different worlds. As it is beyond question that the shallowness of a man’s history-picture (the man himself, therefore) is in proportion to the dominance in it of frank incidentals, so it is beyond question that the emptiness of written history is in proportion to the degree in which it makes the establishment of purely factual relations its object. The more deeply a man lives History, the more rarely will he receive “causal” impressions and the more surely will he be sensible of their utter insignificance. If the reader examines Goethe’s writings in natural science, he will be astounded to find how “living nature” can be set forth without formulas, without laws, almost without a trace of the causal. For him, Time is not a distance but a feeling. But the experience of last and deepest things is practically denied to the ordinary savant who dissects and arranges purely critically and allows himself neither to contemplate nor to feel. In the case of History, on the contrary, this power of experience is the requisite. And thus is justified the paradox that the less a historical researcher has to do with real science, the better it is for his history.

To elucidate once more by a diagram:

Soul ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯➛ World

{

Life, Direction Extension

Destiny-Experience Causal Knowledge

The uniquely The

occurring and irrevocable constantly-possible

“Fact” “Truth”

Physiognomic tact (instinct) Systematic criticism (reason)

↓ crossed arrows ↓

Consciousness Consciousness

as servant of Being as master of Being

The world-image of “History” The world-image of "Nature"

Life-experience Scientific methods

Image of the Past Religion. Natural Science

Constructive Contemplation Theoretical: Myth and Dogma. Hypothesis

(Historian, Tragic Dramatist) Practical: Cult. Technique

to investigate Destiny

Direction into the Future

Constructive Action

(Statesman)

to be Destiny

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Is it permissible to fix upon one, any one, group of social, religious, physiological or ethical facts as the “cause” of another? “Certainly,” the rationalistic school of history, and still more the up-to-date sociology, would reply. That, they would say, is what is meant by our comprehending history and deepening our knowledge of it. But in reality, with “civilized” man there is always the implicit postulate of an underlying rational purpose—without which indeed his world would be meaningless. And there is something rather comic in the most unscientific freedom that he allows himself in his choice of his fundamental causes. One man selects this, another that, group as prima causa—an inexhaustible source of polemics—and all fill their works with pretended elucidations of the “course of history” on natural-science lines. Schiller has given us the classical expression of this method in one of his immortal banalities, the verse in which the “Weltgetriebe” is stat “durch Hunger und durch Liebe”; and the Nineteenth Century, progressing from Rationalism to Materialism, has made this opinion canonical. The cult of the useful was set up on high. To it Darwin, in the name of his century, sacrificed Goethe’s Nature-theory. The organic logic of the facts of life was supplanted by a mechanics in physiological garb. Heredity, adaptation, natural selection, are utility-causes of purely mechanical connotation. The historical dispensations were superseded by a naturalistic movement “in space.” (But are there historical or spiritual “processes,” or life-“processes” of any sort whatever? Have historical “movements” such as, for example, the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment anything whatever to do with the scientific notion of movement?) The word “process” eliminated Destiny and unveiled the secret of becoming, and lo! there was no longer a tragic but only an exact mathematical structure of world-happening. And thereupon the “exact” historian enunciated the proposition that in the history-picture we had before us a sequence of “states” of mechanical type which were amenable to rational analysis like a physical experiment or a chemical reaction, and that therefore causes, means, methods and objects were capable of being grouped together as a comprehensible system on the visible surface. It all becomes astonishingly simple. And one is bound to admit that given a sufficiently shallow observer, the hypothesis (so far as concerns his personality and its world-picture) comes off.

Hunger and Love¹⁷⁴ thus become mechanical causes of mechanical processes in the “life of peoples.” Social problems and sexual problems (both belonging to a “physics” or “chemistry” of public—all-too-public—existence) become the obvious themes of utilitarian history and therefore of the corresponding tragedy. For the social drama necessarily accompanies the materialist treatment of history, and that which in Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften” was destiny in the highest sense has become in Ibsen’s “Lady from the Sea” nothing but a sexual problem. Ibsen and all the reason-poets of our great cities build—build from their very first causes to their very last effect—but they do not sing. As artist, Hebbel fought hard to overcome this merely prosaic element in his more critical than intuitive temperament, to be a poet quand même, hence his desperate and wholly un-Goethean effort to motive his events. In Hebbel, as in Ibsen, motiving means trying to shape tragedy causally, and he dissected and re-dissected and transformed and retransformed his Anecdote until he had made it into a system that proved a case. Consider his treatment of the Judith story—Shakespeare would have taken it as it was, and scented a world-secret in the physiognomic charm of the pure adventure. But Goethe’s warning: “Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson (sie selbst sind die Lehre)” had become incomprehensible to the century of Marx and Darwin. The idea of trying to read a destiny in the physiognomy of the past and that of trying to represent unadulterated Destiny as a tragedy were equally remote from them. In both domains, the cult of the useful had set before itself an entirely different aim. Shapes were called into being, not to be, but to prove something. “Questions” of the day were “treated,” social problems suitably “solved,” and the stage, like the history-book, became a means to that end. Darwinism, however unconscious of what it was doing, has made biology politically effective. Somehow or other, democratic stirrings happened in the protoplasm, and the struggle for existence of the rain-worms is a useful lesson for the bipeds who have scraped through.

With all this, the historians have failed to learn the lesson that our ripest and strictest science, Physics, would have taught them, the lesson of prudence. Even if we concede them their causal method, the superficiality with which they apply it is an outrage. There is neither the intellectual discipline nor the keen sight, let alone the scepticism that is inherent in our handling of physical hypotheses.¹⁷⁵ For the attitude of the physicist to his atoms, electrons, currents, and fields of force, to æther and mass, is very far removed from the naïve faith of the layman and the Monist in these things. They are images which he subjects to the abstract relationships of his differential equations, in which he clothes trans-phenomenal numbers, and if he allows himself a certain freedom to choose amongst several theories, it is because he does not try to find in them any actuality but that of the “conventional sign.”¹⁷⁶ He knows, too, that over and above an experimental acquaintance with the technical structure of the world-around, all that it is possible to achieve by this process (which is the only one open to natural science) is a symbolic interpretation of it, no more—certainly not “Knowledge” in the sanguine popular sense. For, the image of Nature being a creation and copy of the Intellect, its “alter ego” in the domain of the extended, to know Nature means to know oneself.

If Physics is the maturest of our sciences, Biology, whose business is to explore the picture of organic life, is in point both of content and of methods the weakest. What historical investigation really is, namely pure Physiognomic, cannot be better illustrated than by the course of Goethe’s nature-studies. He works upon mineralogy, and at once his views fit themselves together into a conspectus of an earth-history in which his beloved granite signifies nearly the same as that which I call the proto-human signifies in man’s history. He investigates well-known plants, and the prime phenomenon of metamorphosis, the original form of the history of all plant existence, reveals itself; proceeding further, he reaches those extraordinarily deep ideas of vertical and spiral tendencies in vegetation which have not been fully grasped even yet. His studies of ossature, based entirely on the contemplation of life, lead him to the discovery of the “os intermaxillare” in man and to the view that the skull-structure of the vertebrates developed out of six vertebræ. Never is there a word of causality. He feels the necessity of Destiny just as he himself expressed it in his Orphische Urworte:

“So must thou be. Thou canst not Self escape.

So erst the Sibyls, so the Prophets told.

Nor Time nor any Power can mar the shape

Impressed, that living must itself unfold.”

The mere chemistry of the stars, the mathematical side of physical observations, and physiology proper interested him, the great historian of Nature very little, because they belonged to Systematic and were concerned with experiential learning of the become, the dead, and the rigid. This is what underlies his anti-Newton polemic—a case in which, it must be added, both sides were in the right, for the one had “knowledge” of the regulated nature-process in the dead colour¹⁷⁷ while the experiencing of the other, the artist, was intuitive-sensuous “feeling.” Here we have the two worlds in plain opposition; and now therefore the essentials of their opposition must be stated with all strictness.

History carries the mark of the singular-factual, Nature that of the continuously possible. So long as I scrutinize the image of the world-around in order to see by what laws it must actualize itself, irrespective of whether it does happen or merely might happen—irrespective, that is, of time—then I am working in a genuine science. For the necessity of a nature-law (and there are no other laws) it is utterly immaterial whether it becomes phenomenal infinitely often or never. That is, it is independent of Destiny. There are thousands of chemical combinations that never are and never will be produced, but they are demonstrably possible and therefore they exist—for the fixed System of Nature though not for the Physiognomy of the whirling universe. A system consists of truths, a history rests on facts. Facts follow one another, truths follow from one another, and this is the difference between “when” and “how.” That there has been a flash of lightning is a fact and can be indicated, without a word, by the pointing of a finger. “When there is lightning there is thunder,” on the contrary, is something that must be communicated by a proposition or sentence. Experience-lived may be quite wordless, while systematic knowing can only be through words. “Only that which has no history is capable of being defined,” says Nietzsche somewhere. But History is present becoming that tends into the future and looks back on the past. Nature stands beyond all time, its mark is extension, and it is without directional quality. Hence, for the one, the necessity of the mathematical, and for the other the necessity of the tragic.

In the actuality of waking existence both worlds, that of scrutiny and that of acceptance (Hingebung), are interwoven, just as in a Brabant tapestry warp and woof together effect the picture. Every law must, to be available to the understanding at all, once have been discovered through some destiny-disposition in the history of an intellect—that is, it must have once been in experiential life; and every destiny appears in some sensible garb—as persons, acts, scenes and gestures—in which Nature-laws are operative. Primitive life is submissive before the daemonic unity of the fateful; in the consciousness of the mature Culture this “early” world-image is incessantly in conflict with the other, “late,” world-image; and in the civilized man the tragic world-feeling succumbs to the mechanizing intellect. History and nature within ourselves stand opposed to one another as life is to death, as ever-becoming time to ever-become space. In the waking consciousness, becoming and become struggle for control of the world-picture, and the highest and maturest forms of both sorts (possible only for the great Cultures) are seen, in the case of the Classical soul, in the opposition of Plato and Aristotle, and, in the case of our Western, in that of Goethe and Kant—the pure physiognomy of the world contemplated by the soul of an eternal child, and its pure system comprehended by the reason of an eternal greybeard.

Herein, then, I see the last great task of Western philosophy, the only one which still remains in store for the aged wisdom of the Faustian Culture, the preordained issue, it seems, of our centuries of spiritual evolution. No Culture is at liberty to choose the path and conduct of its thought, but here for the first time a Culture can foresee the way that destiny has chosen for it.

Before my eyes there seems to emerge, as a vision, a hitherto unimagined mode of superlative historical research that is truly Western, necessarily alien to the Classical and to every other soul but ours—a comprehensive Physiognomic of all existence, a morphology of becoming for all humanity that drives onward to the highest and last ideas; a duty of penetrating the world-feeling not only of our proper soul but of all souls whatsoever that have contained grand possibilities and have expressed them in the field of actuality as grand Cultures. This philosophic view—to which we and we alone are entitled in virtue of our analytical mathematic, our contrapuntal music and our perspective painting—in that its scope far transcends the scheme of the systematist, presupposes the eye of an artist, and of an artist who can feel the whole sensible and apprehensible environment dissolve into a deep infinity of mysterious relationships. So Dante felt, and so Goethe felt. To bring up, out of the web of world-happening, a millennium of organic culture-history as an entity and person, and to grasp the conditions of its inmost spirituality—such is the aim. Just as one penetrates the lineaments of a Rembrandt portrait or a Cæsar-bust, so the new art will contemplate and understand the grand, fateful lines in the visage of a Culture as a superlative human individuality.

To attempt the interpretation of a poet or a prophet, a thinker or a conqueror, is of course nothing new, but to enter a culture-soul—Classical, Egyptian or Arabian—so intimately as to absorb into one’s self, to make part of one’s own life, the totality expressed by typical men and situations, by religion and polity, by style and tendency, by thought and customs, is quite a new manner of experiencing life. Every epoch, every great figure, every deity, the cities, the tongues, the nations, the arts, in a word everything that ever existed and will become existent, are physiognomic traits of high symbolic significance that it will be the business of quite a new kind of “judge of men” (Menschenkenner) to interpret. Poems and battles, Isis and Cybele, festivals and Roman Catholic masses, blast furnaces and gladiatorial games, dervishes and Darwinians, railways and Roman roads, “Progress” and Nirvana, newspapers, mass-slavery, money, machinery—all these are equally signs and symbols in the world-picture of the past that the soul presents to itself and would interpret. "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis." Solutions and panoramas as yet unimagined await the unveiling. Light will be thrown on the dark questions which underlie dread and longing—those deepest of primitive human feelings—and which the will-to-know has clothed in the “problems” of time, necessity, space, love, death, and first causes. There is a wondrous music of the spheres which wills to be heard and which a few of our deepest spirits will hear. The physiognomic of world-happening will become the last Faustian philosophy.