The Decline of the West, Volume 1 quotes

Hitherto the possibility of solving a problem so far-reaching has evidently never been envisaged, and even if it had been so, the means of dealing with it were either altogether unsuspected or, at best, inadequately used.

Is there a logic of history?

Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms—social, spiritual and political—which we see so clearly?

For everything organic the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime are fundamentals—may not these notions, in this sphere also, possess a rigorous meaning which no one has as yet extracted?

In short, is all history founded upon general biographic archetypes?

The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every …

… nature, to intellect, what the forms of its manifestation are and how far these forms—peoples, tongues and epochs, battles and ideas, states and gods, arts and craft-works, sciences, laws, economic types and world-ideas, great men and great events—may be accepted and pointed to as symbols.

The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy.

By these means we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.

… handling of history would be nothing but a piece of “natural science” in disguise, and for their part, the supporters of the materialistic idea of history make no secret about it—it is their adversaries who largely fail to see the similarity of the two methods.

What concerns us is not what the historical facts which appear at this or that time are, per se, but what they signify, what they point to, by appearing.

Present-day historians think they are doing a work of supererogation in bringing in religious and social, or still more art-history, details to “illustrate” the political sense of an epoch.

This fact still awaits its theoretical formulation. As Galileo says in a famous passage of his Saggiatore, philosophy, as Nature’s great book, is written “in mathematical language.”

We await, to-day, the philosopher who will tell us in what language history is written and how it is to be read.

Mathematics and the principle of Causality lead to a naturalistic,naturalistic, Chronology and the idea of Destiny to a historical ordering of the phenomenal world. Both orderings, each on its own account, cover the whole world.

The question is seemingly paradoxical, for history is obviously for everyone to this extent, that every man, with his whole existence and consciousness, is a part of history.

But it makes a great difference whether anyone lives under the constant impression that his life is an element in a far wider life-course that goes on for hundreds and thousands of years, or conceives of himself as something rounded off and self-contained.

For the latter type of consciousness there is certainlycertainly no world-history, no world-as-history. But how if the self-consciousness of a whole nation, how if a whole Culture rests on this ahistoric spirit? How must actuality appear to it? The world? Life? Consider the Classical Culture.

… anonymous form that we possess the Indian philosophy—which is at the same time all the Indian history that we have—and it is instructive to compare with it the philosophy-history of the West, which is a perfectly definite structure made up of individual books and personalities.

Indian man forgot everything, but Egyptian man forgot nothing.

Hence, while the art of portraiture—which is biography in the kernel—was unknown in India, in Egypt it was practically the artist’s only theme.

… is the spiritual counterpoise of distance—care for the future expressed in the choice of granite or basalt as the craftsman’s materials,[5] in the chiselled archives, in the elaborate administrative system, in the net of irrigation works,[6] and, necessarily bound up therewith, care for the past.

The Egyptian mummy is a symbol of the first importance.

The body of the dead man was made everlasting, just as his personality, his “Ka,” was immortalized through the portrait-statuettes, which were often made in many copies and to which it was conceived to be attached by a transcendental likeness.

The body of the dead man was made everlasting, just as his personality, his “Ka,” was immortalized through the portrait-statuettes, which were often made in many copies and to which it was conceived to be attached by a transcendental likeness.

There is a deep relation between the attitude that is taken towards the historic past and the conception that is formed of death, and this relation is expressed in the disposal of the dead.

The Egyptian denied mortality, the Classical man affirmed it in the whole symbolism of his Culture. The Egyptians embalmed even their history in chronological dates and figures.

The former conceived of things as they are, as magnitudes, timeless and purely present, and so it proceeded to Euclidean geometry and mathematical statics, rounding off its intellectual system with the theory of conic sections.

We conceive things as they become and behave, as function, and this brought us to dynamics, analytical geometry and thence to the Differential Calculus.[9]

The modern theory of functions is the imposing marshalling of this whole mass of thought.

This, then, is our task. We men of the Western Culture are, with our historical sense, an exception and not a rule.

World-history is our world picture and not all mankind’s.

Indian and Classical man formed no image of a world in progress, and perhaps when in due course the civilization of the West is extinguished, there will never again be a Culture and a human type in which “world-history” is so potent a form of …

What, then, is world-history? Certainly, an ordered presentation of the past, an inner postulate, the expression of a capacity for feeling form. But a feeling for form, however definite, is not the same as form itself.

No doubt we feel world-history, experience it, and believe that it is to be read just as a map is read.

But, even to-day, it is only forms of it that we know and not the form of it, which is the mirror-image of our own inner life.

And the expedient of shifting the initial point of “modern history” from the Crusades to the Renaissance, or from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th Century, only goes to show that the scheme per se is regarded as unshakably sound.

It is not only that the scheme circumscribes the area of history. What is worse, it rigs the stage.

The ground of West Europe is treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it—and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far-away Cultures are made to …

… as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it—and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far-away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty.

It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets!

We select a single bit of ground as the natural centre of the historical system, and make it the central sun. From it all the events of history receive their real light, from it their importance is judged in perspective.

We select a single bit of ground as the natural centre of the historical system, and make it the central sun. From it all the events of history receive their real light, from it their importance is judged in perspective.

But it is in our own West-European conceit alone that this phantom “world-history,” which a breath of scepticism would dissipate, is acted out.

We have to thank that conceit for the immense optical illusion (become natural from long habit) whereby distant histories of thousands of years, such as those of China and Egypt, are made to shrink to the dimensions of mere episodes while in the neighbourhood of …

… no more.[14] It was at least implied if not stated in so many words, that here, beyond the ancient and the mediæval, something definitive was beginning, a Third Kingdom in which, somewhere, there was to be fulfilment and culmination, and which had an objective point.

As to what this objective point is, each thinker, from Schoolman to present-day Socialist, backs his own peculiar discovery.

Such a view into the course of things may be both easy and flattering to the patentee, but in fact he has simply taken the spirit of the West, as reflected in his own brain, for the meaning of the world.

We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form and duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well, are determined by the properties of its species.

No one, looking at the oak, with its millennial life, dare say that it is at this moment, now, about to start on its true and proper course.

No one as he sees a caterpillar grow day by day expects that it will go on doing so for two or three years.

… not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.

These cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field.

They belong, like the plants and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton. I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms.

These cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton.

I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms.

The professional historian, on the contrary, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one epoch after another.

They belong, like the plants and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton. I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms.

The professional historian, on the contrary, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one epoch after another.

But the series “ancient-mediæval-modern history” has at last exhausted its usefulness.

Here there is nothing constant, nothing universal. We must cease to speak of the forms of “Thought,” the principles of “Tragedy,” the mission of “The State.”

Universal validity involves always the fallacy of arguing from particular to particular.

But something much more disquieting than a logical fallacy begins to appear when the centre of gravity of philosophy shifts from the abstract-systematic to the practical-ethical and our Western thinkers from Schopenhauer onward turn from the problem of cognition to the problem of life (the …

These may say what is true for the questioner himself and for his time, but that is not all.

In other Cultures the phenomenon talks a different language, for other men there are different truths.

The thinker must admit the validity of all, or of none.

We have, in truth been only too conscious of our near relation to the Classical Age, and only too prone in consequence to unconsidered assertion of it.

Superficial similarity is a great snare, and our entire Classical study fell a victim to it as soon as it passed from the (admittedly masterly) ordering and critique of the discoveries to the interpretation of their spiritual meaning.

That close inward relation in which we conceive ourselves to stand towards the Classical, and which leads us to think that we are its pupils and successors (whereas in reality we are simply its adorers), is a venerable prejudice which ought at last to be …

The freedom and power of Classical research are always hindered, and its data obscured, by a certain almost religious awe.

In all history there is no analogous case of one Culture making a passionate cult of the memory of another.

Our devotion is evidenced yet again in the fact that since the Renaissance, a thousand years of history have been undervalued so that an ideal “Middle” Age may serve as a link between ourselves and antiquity.

Looked at in this way, the “Decline of the West” comprises nothing less than the problem of Civilization. We have before us one of the fundamental questions of all higher history.

What is Civilization, understood as the organic-logical sequel, fulfilment and finale of a culture?

For every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or less ethical, distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic succession.

For every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or less ethical, distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic succession.

The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become capable of solution.

Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable.

They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic.

They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again.

So, for the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as the successors of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest secrets of the late-Classical period.

World-city and province[23]—the two basic ideas of every civilization—bring up a wholly new form-problem of History, the very problem that we are living through to-day with hardly the remotest conception of its immensity.

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up.

In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form …

… Roman stoicism of Cato and Seneca presupposes a private income;[27] and, unlike that of the 18th Century, the social-ethical sentiment of the 20th, if it is to be realized at a higher level than that of professional (and lucrative) agitation, is a matter for millionaires.

To the world-city belongs not a folk but a mass.

Its uncomprehending hostility to all the traditions representative of the Culture (nobility, church, privileges, dynasties, convention in art and limits of knowledge in science), the keen and cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom of the peasant, the new-fashioned naturalism that in relation to all matters …

… of “struggle for existence” and “natural selection”!), like its other relative the woman-and-marriage problem of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw, like the impressionistic tendencies of anarchic sensuousness and the whole bundle of modern longings, temptations and pains expressed in Baudelaire’s verse and Wagner’s music—are simply non-existent.

The smaller the town, the more unmeaning it becomes to busy oneself with painting or with music of these kinds.

To the Culture belong gymnastics, the tournament, the agon, and to the Civilization belongs Sport.

The smaller the town, the more unmeaning it becomes to busy oneself with painting or with music of these kinds.

To the Culture belong gymnastics, the tournament, the agon, and to the Civilization belongs Sport.

This is the true distinction between the Hellenic palæstra and the Roman circus.[30] Art itself becomes a sport (hence the phrase “art for art’s sake”) to be played before a highly-intelligent audience of connoisseurs and buyers, whether the feat consist in mastering absurd instrumental tone-masses …

To the Culture belong gymnastics, the tournament, the agon, and to the Civilization belongs Sport. This is the true distinction between the Hellenic palæstra and the Roman circus.[30]

Art itself becomes a sport (hence the phrase “art for art’s sake”) to be played before a highly-intelligent audience of connoisseurs and buyers, whether the feat consist in mastering absurd instrumental tone-masses and taking harmonic fences, or in some tour de force of colouring.

Then a new fact-philosophy appears, which can only spare a smile for metaphysical speculation, and a new literature that is a necessity of life for the megalopolitan palate and nerves and both unintelligible and ugly to the provincials.

… the money-spirit which penetrates unremarked the historical forms of the people’s existence, often without destroying or even in the least disturbing these forms—the form of the Roman state, for instance, underwent very much less alteration between the elder Scipio and Augustus than is usually imagined.

Though forms subsist, the great political parties nevertheless cease to be more than reputed centres of decision. The decisions in fact lie elsewhere.

A small number of superior heads, whose names are very likely not the best-known, settle everything, while below them are the great mass of second-rate politicians—rhetors, tribunes, deputies, journalists—selected through a provincially-conceived franchise to keep alive the illusion of popular self-determination. And art? Philosophy?

After Zama, the Romans never again either waged or were capable of waging a war against a great military Power.[32] Their classic wars were those against the Samnites, Pyrrhus and Carthage. Their grand hour was Cannæ.

To maintain the heroic posture for centuries on end is beyond the power of any people.

The Prussian-German people have had three great moments (1813, 1870 and 1914), and that is more than others have had.

The expansive tendency is a doom, something daemonic and immense, which grips, forces into service, and uses up the late mankind of the world-city stage, willy-nilly, aware or unaware.[33]

Life is the process of effecting possibilities, and for the brain-man there are only extensive possibilities.[34]

Hard as the half-developed Socialism of to-day is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-expansionist with all the vehemence of destiny.

… petrifacts such as the Egyptian empire, the Roman, the Chinese, the Indian may continue to exist for hundreds or thousands of years—dead bodies, amorphous and dispirited masses of men, scrap-material from a great history—is to be taken as the typical symbol of the passing away.

Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated.

In this phenomenal form the destiny of the West is now irrevocably set. The energy of culture-man is directed inwards, that of civilization-man outwards. And thus I see in Cecil Rhodes the first man of a new age.

Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated. In this phenomenal form the destiny of the West is now irrevocably set.

The energy of culture-man is directed inwards, that of civilization-man outwards.

And thus I see in Cecil Rhodes the first man of a new age.

It is not a matter of choice—it is not the conscious will of individuals, or even that of whole classes or peoples that decides.

The expansive tendency is a doom, something daemonic and immense, which grips, forces into service, and uses up the late mankind of the world-city stage, willy-nilly, aware or unaware.[33]

Life is the process of effecting possibilities, and for the brain-man there are only extensive possibilities.[34] Hard as the half-developed Socialism of to-day is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-expansionist with all the vehemence of destiny.

When we use the risky word “freedom” we shall mean freedom to do, not this or that, but the necessary or nothing. The feeling that this is “just as it should be” is the hall-mark of the man of fact.

To lament it and blame it is not to alter it.

To birth belongs death, to youth age, to life generally its form and its allotted span. The present is a civilized, emphatically not a cultured time, and ipso facto a great number of life-capacities fall out as impossible.

Up to now everyone has been at liberty to hope what he pleased about the future.

Where there are no facts, sentiment rules.

But henceforward it will be every man’s business to inform himself of what can happen and therefore of what with the unalterable necessity of destiny and irrespective of personal ideals, hopes or desires, will happen.

This may be deplorable, and may be and will be deplored in pessimist philosophy and poetry, but it is not in our power to make otherwise.

It will not be—already it is not—permissible to defy clear historical experience and to expect, merely because we hope, that this will spring or that will flourish.

It will no doubt be objected that such a world-outlook, which in giving this certainty as to the outlines and tendency of the future cuts off all far-reaching hopes, would be unhealthy for all and fatal for many, once it ceased to be a mere …

All genuine historical work is philosophy, unless it is mere ant-industry. But the operations of the systematic philosopher are subject to constant and serious error through his assuming the permanence of his results.

He overlooks the fact that every thought lives in a historical world and is therefore involved in the common destiny of mortality.

He supposes that higher thought possesses an everlasting and unalterable objectiveness (Gegenstand), that the great questions of all epochs are identical, and that therefore they are capable in the last analysis of unique answers.

It still remains to consider the relation of a morphology of world-history to Philosophy.

All genuine historical work is philosophy, unless it is mere ant-industry.

But the operations of the systematic philosopher are subject to constant and serious error through his assuming the permanence of his results. He overlooks the fact that every thought lives in a historical world and is therefore involved in the common destiny of mortality.

The scientific dress or the mark of learning adopted by a philosophy is here unimportant.

Nothing is simpler than to make good poverty of ideas by founding a system, and even a good idea has little value when enunciated by a solemn ass.

Only its necessity to life decides the eminence of a doctrine.

The scientific dress or the mark of learning adopted by a philosophy is here unimportant. Nothing is simpler than to make good poverty of ideas by founding a system, and even a good idea has little value when enunciated by a solemn ass.

Only its necessity to life decides the eminence of a doctrine.

For me, therefore, the test of value to be applied to a thinker is his eye for the great facts of his own time.

But question and answer are here one, and the great questions are made great by the very fact that unequivocal answers to them are so passionately demanded, so that it is as life-symbols only that they possess significance.

There are no eternal truths.

Every philosophy is the expression of its own and only its own time, and—if by philosophy we mean effective philosophy and not academic triflings about judgment-forms, sense-categories and the like—no two ages possess the same philosophic intentions.

But question and answer are here one, and the great questions are made great by the very fact that unequivocal answers to them are so passionately demanded, so that it is as life-symbols only that they possess significance. There are no eternal truths.

Every philosophy is the expression of its own and only its own time, and—if by philosophy we mean effective philosophy and not academic triflings about judgment-forms, sense-categories and the like—no two ages possess the same philosophic intentions.

The difference is not between perishable and imperishable doctrines but between doctrines which live their day and doctrines which never live at all. The immortality of thoughts-become is an illusion—the essential is, what kind of man comes to expression in them.

The difference is not between perishable and imperishable doctrines but between doctrines which live their day and doctrines which never live at all.

The immortality of thoughts-become is an illusion—the essential is, what kind of man comes to expression in them.

The greater the man, the truer the philosophy, with the inward truth that in a great work of art transcends all proof of its several elements or even of their compatibility with one another.

We must allow ourselves no illusions as to the gravity of this negative result. It is palpable that we have lost sight of the final significance of effective philosophy. We confuse philosophy with preaching, with agitation, with novel-writing, with lecture-room jargon.

We have descended from the perspective of the bird to that of the frog.

It has come to this, that the very possibility of a real philosophy of to-day and to-morrow is in question.

Truly it is a poor life’s work to restate once more, in slightly different terms, views of a hundred predecessors on the Will or on psycho-physical parallelism. This may be a profession, but a philosophy it emphatically is not.

A doctrine that does not attack and affect the life of the period in its inmost depths is no doctrine and had better not be taught.

And what was possible even yesterday is, to-day, at least not indispensable.

A century of purely extensive effectiveness, excluding big artistic and metaphysical production—let us say frankly an irreligious time which coincides exactly with the idea of the world-city—is a time of decline. True. But we have not chosen this time.

We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time.

Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it we cannot evade it.

True. But we have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time.

Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it we cannot evade it.

He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.

Cognitions and judgments too are acts of living men. The thinkers of the past conceived external actuality as produced by cognition and motiving ethical judgments, but to the thought of the future they are above all expressions and symbols.

The Morphology of world-history becomes inevitably a universal symbolism.

With that, the claim of higher thought to possess general and eternal truths falls to the ground. Truths are truths only in relation to a particular mankind.

With that, the claim of higher thought to possess general and eternal truths falls to the ground.

Truths are truths only in relation to a particular mankind.

Thus, my own philosophy is able to express and reflect only the Western (as distinct from the Classical, Indian, or other) soul, and that soul only in its present civilized phase by which its conception of the world, its practical range and its sphere of …

From this moment on, relations and connexions—previously often suspected, sometimes touched on but never comprehended—presented themselves in ever-increasing volume.

The forms of the arts linked themselves to the forms of war and state-policy.

Deep relations were revealed between political and mathematical aspects of the same Culture, between religious and technical conceptions, between mathematics, music and sculpture, between economics and cognition-forms.

It is my belief that every one of these questions was really aimed in the same direction as every other, viz., towards that one Riddle of History that had never yet emerged with sufficient distinctness in the human consciousness.

The tasks before men were not, as supposed, infinitely numerous—they were one and the same task.

Everyone had an inkling that this was so, but no one from his own narrow standpoint had seen the single and comprehensive solution.

… sign, diagram, in short the number-sign which he thinks, speaks or writes exactly, is (like the exactly-used word) from the first a symbol of these depths, something imaginable, communicable, comprehensible to the inner and the outer eye, which can be accepted as representing the demarcation.

The origin of numbers resembles that of the myth.

Primitive man elevates indefinable nature-impressions (the “alien,” in our terminology) into deities, numina, at the same time capturing and impounding them by a name which limits them.

In the last analysis, the number-language of a mathematic and the grammar of a tongue are structurally alike.

Logic is always a kind of mathematic and vice versa.

Consequently, in all acts of the intellect germane to mathematical number—measuring, counting, drawing, weighing, arranging and dividing[46]—men strive to delimit the extended in words as well, i.e., to set it forth in the form of proofs, conclusions, theorems and systems;

Here every line, every deliberately non-imitative figure of man and beast, reveals a mystic number-thought in direct connexion with the mystery of death (the hard-set).

Gothic cathedrals and Doric temples are mathematics in stone.

Doubtless Pythagoras was the first in the Classical Culture to conceive number scientifically as the principle of a world-order of comprehensible things—as standard and as magnitude—but even before him it had found expression, as a noble arraying of sensuous-material units, in the strict canon of …

… Greek of the mature Periclean age, of any feeling either for ceremonial public life or for loneliness, while the Baroque, differing sharply from the Classical, presents us with a mathematic of spatial analysis, a court of Versailles and a state system resting on dynastic relations.

It is the style of a Soul that comes out in the world of numbers, and the world of numbers includes something more than the science thereof.

From this there follows a fact of decisive importance which has hitherto been hidden from the mathematicians themselves.

There is not, and cannot be, number as such.

There are several number-worlds as there are several Cultures.

We find an Indian, an Arabian, a Classical, a Western type of mathematical thought and, corresponding with each, a type of number—each type fundamentally peculiar and unique, an expression of a specific world-feeling, a symbol having a specific validity which is even capable of scientific …

So far, no one has dared to assume that the supposed constant structure of the intellect is an illusion and that the history spread out before us contains more than one style of knowing.

But we must not forget that unanimity about things that have not yet become problems may just as well imply universal error as universal truth.

True, there has always been a certain sense of doubt and obscurity—so much so, that the correct guess might have been made from that non-agreement of the philosophers which every glance at the history of philosophy shows us.

The Mathematic goes beyond observation and dissection, and in its highest moments finds the way by vision, not abstraction. To Goethe again we owe the profound saying: “the mathematician is only complete in so far as he feels within himself the beauty of the true.”

Here we feel how nearly the secret of number is related to the secret of artistic creation.

And so the born mathematician takes his place by the side of the great masters of the fugue, the chisel and the brush;

This inspired ordering is that which Goethe called “The Idea, of which the form is immediately apprehended in the domain of intuition, whereas pure science does not apprehend but observes and dissects.”

The Mathematic goes beyond observation and dissection, and in its highest moments finds the way by vision, not abstraction.

To Goethe again we owe the profound saying: “the mathematician is only complete in so far as he feels within himself the beauty of the true.” Here we feel how nearly the secret of number is related to the secret of artistic creation.

… does in the pure sciences—Newton, Gauss, and Riemann were artist-natures, and we know with what suddenness their great conceptions came upon them.[49] “A mathematician,” said old Weierstrass “who is not at the same time a bit of a poet will never be a full mathematician.”

The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style-periods.

It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes from epoch to epoch.

… between diagonal and side in a square the Greek would be brought up suddenly against a quite other sort of number, which was fundamentally alien to the Classical soul, and was consequently feared as a secret of its proper existence too dangerous to be unveiled.

There is a singular and significant late-Greek legend, according to which the man who first published the hidden mystery of the irrational perished by shipwreck, “for the unspeakable and the formless must be left hidden for ever.”[50]

The fear that underlies this legend is the selfsame notion that prevented even the ripest Greeks from extending their tiny city-states so as to organize the country-side politically, from laying out their streets to end in prospects and their alleys to give vistas, that made …

In the cubic style of their early architecture the Egyptians, so to say, concealed pure numbers, fearful of stumbling upon their secret, and for the Hellenes too they were the key to the meaning of the become, the stiffened, the mortal.

The stone statue and the scientific system deny life.

Mathematical number, the formal principle of an extension-world of which the phenomenal existence is only the derivative and servant of waking human consciousness, bears the hall-mark of causal necessity and so is linked with death as chronological number is with becoming, with life, with the …

We have already noticed the development of early ornament on funerary equipments and receptacles.

Numbers are symbols of the mortal.

Stiff forms are the negation of life, formulas and laws spread rigidity over the face of nature, numbers make dead—and the “Mothers” of Faust II sit enthroned, majestic and withdrawn, in

In all history, so far, there is no second example of one Culture paying to another Culture long extinguished such reverence and submission in matters of science as ours has paid to the Classical.

It was very long before we found courage to think our proper thought.

But though the wish to emulate the Classical was constantly present, every step of the attempt took us in reality further away from the imagined ideal.

It is the child’s longing, which will presently come into the consciousness more and more clearly as a feeling of constant direction and finally stand before the mature spirit as the enigma of Time—queer, tempting, insoluble.

Suddenly, the words “past” and “future” have acquired a fateful meaning.

But this longing which wells out of the bliss of the inner life is also, in the intimate essence of every soul, a dread as well.

The element of direction, too, which is inherent in all “becoming,” is felt owing to its inexorable irreversibility to be something alien and hostile, and the human will-to-understanding ever seeks to bind the inscrutable by the spell of a name.

It is something beyond comprehension, this transformation of future into past, and thus time, in its contrast with space, has always a queer, baffling, oppressive ambiguity from which no serious man can wholly protect himself.

This world-fear is assuredly the most creative of all prime feelings. Man owes to it the ripest and deepest forms and images, not only of his conscious inward life, but also of the infinitely-varied external culture which reflects this life.

As all becoming moves towards a having-become wherein it ends, so the prime feeling of becoming—the longing—touches the prime feeling of having-become, the dread.

In the present we feel a trickling-away, the past implies a passing.

Here is the root of our eternal dread of the irrevocable, the attained, the final—our dread of mortality, of the world itself as a thing-become, where death is set as a frontier like birth—our dread in the moment when the possible is actualized, the life …

It is something beyond comprehension, this transformation of future into past, and thus time, in its contrast with space, has always a queer, baffling, oppressive ambiguity from which no serious man can wholly protect himself.

This world-fear is assuredly the most creative of all prime feelings.

Man owes to it the ripest and deepest forms and images, not only of his conscious inward life, but also of the infinitely-varied external culture which reflects this life.

The one is not subject to the intellect, the other is its servant. The rôle of the one is purely to experience, that of the other purely to know (erleben, erkennen).

In the Christian language, the opposition of the two world-feelings is expressed by: “Fear God and love Him.”

In the soul of all primitive mankind, just as in that of earliest childhood, there is something which impels it to find means of dealing with the alien powers of the extension-world that assert themselves, inexorable, in and through space.

… the infinite space of our physics is a form of very numerous and extremely complicated elements tacitly assumed, which have come into being only as the copy and expression of our soul, and are actual, necessary and natural only for our type of waking life.

The simple notions are always the most difficult.

They are simple, in that they comprise a vast deal that not only is incapable of being exhibited in words but does not even need to be stated, because for men of the particular group it is anchored in the intuition;

… the Greek tongue—again and again we shall note the mighty symbolism of such language-phenomena—possessed no word for space, so the Greek himself was destitute of our feeling of landscape, horizons, outlooks, distances, clouds, and of the idea of the far-spread fatherland embracing the great nation.

Home, for Classical man, is what he can see from the citadel of his native town and no more.

All that lay beyond the visual range of this political atom was alien, and hostile to boot; beyond that narrow range, fear set in at once, and hence the appalling bitterness with which these petty towns strove to destroy one another.

I need only allude to one of the most elegant orchestral forms of the 18th Century, the Tema con Variazioni.

All proportion assumes the constancy, all transformation the variability of the constituents.

Compare, for instance, the congruence theorems of Euclid, the proof of which depends in fact on the assumed ratio 1 : 1, with the modern deduction of the same by means of angular functions.

The Alpha and Omega of the Classical mathematic is construction (which in the broad sense includes elementary arithmetic), that is, the production of a single visually-present figure.

The chisel, in this second sculptural art, is the compass.

On the other hand, in function-research, where the object is not a result of the magnitude sort but a discussion of general formal possibilities, the way of working is best described as a sort of composition-procedure closely analogous to the musical;

And so indeed the popular mind regards them even to-day.

There is nothing less “popular” than the modern mathematic, and it too contains its symbolism of the infinitely far, of distance.

All the great works of the West, from the “Divina Commedia” to “Parsifal,” are unpopular, whereas everything Classical from Homer to the Altar of Pergamum was popular in the highest degree.

The light itself, as it is made to play upon the form-world of mature Baroque—viz., the period from Bernini (1650) to the Rococo of Dresden, Vienna and Paris—has become an essentially musical element.

The Dresden Zwinger[75] is a sinfonia.

Along with 18th Century mathematics, 18th Century architecture develops into a form-world of musical characters.

It is a pure abstract, an ideal and unfulfillable postulate of a soul which is ever less and less satisfied with sensuous means of expression and in the end passionately brushes them aside.

The inner eye has awakened.

And then, for the first time, those who thought deeply were obliged to see that the Euclidean geometry, which is the true and only geometry of the simple of all ages, is when regarded from the higher standpoint nothing but a hypothesis, the general validity …

“vision is to be carefully distinguished from seeing”—, is that act of experience which is itself history because it is itself a fulfilling. That which has been lived is that which has happened, and it is history. (Erlebtes ist Geschehenes, ist Geschichte.)

Every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated.

It carries the hall-mark of Direction (“Time”), of irreversibility. That which has happened is thenceforth counted with the become and not with the becoming, with the stiffened and not the living, and belongs beyond recall to the past.

They exclude incident and casuality. The laws of nature are forms of rigorous and therefore inorganic necessity. It becomes easy to see why mathematics, as the ordering of things-become by number, is always and exclusively associated with laws and causality.

Becoming has no number.

We can count, measure, dissect only the lifeless and so much of the living as can be dissociated from livingness. Pure becoming, pure life, is in this sense incapable of being bounded. It lies beyond the domain of cause and effect, law and measure.

The true physicist is not deep, but keen: it is only when he leaves the domain of working hypotheses and brushes against the final things that he can be deep, but at this stage he is already a metaphysician.

Nature is to be handled scientifically, History poetically.

Old Leopold von Ranke is credited with the remark that, after all, Scott’s “Quentin Durward” was the true history-writing. And so it is: the advantage of a good history book is that it enables the reader to be his own Scott.

To overlook this is to miss the whole essence of historical treatment.

It is history that is the truly natural, and the exact mechanically-correct “Nature” of the scientist that is the artificial conception of world by soul.

Hence the paradox that modern man finds "nature"-study easy and historical study hard.

In a hundred years all sciences that are still possible on this soil will be parts of a single vast Physiognomic of all things human. This is what the “Morphology of World-History” means.

In every science, and in the aim no less than in the content of it, man tells the story of himself.

Scientific experience is spiritual self-knowledge. It is from this standpoint, as a chapter of Physiognomic, that we have just treated of mathematics.

… of history is made up of all those things which hitherto we have only managed to evaluate according to personal standards, i.e., as beneficial or harmful, good or bad, satisfactory or unsatisfactory—political forms and economic forms, battles and arts, science and gods, mathematics and morals.

Everything whatsoever that has become is a symbol, and the expression of a soul.

Only to one having the knowledge of men will it unveil itself. The restraint of a law it abhors. What it demands is that its significance should be sensed. And thus research reaches up to a final or superlative truth—Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.[82]

Only to one having the knowledge of men will it unveil itself. The restraint of a law it abhors. What it demands is that its significance should be sensed. And thus research reaches up to a final or superlative truth—Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.[82]

The nature-researcher can be educated, but the man who knows history is born.

He seizes and pierces men and facts with one blow, guided by a feeling which cannot be acquired by learning or affected by persuasion, but which only too rarely manifests itself in full intensity.

Reason, system and comprehension kill as they “cognize.” That which is cognized becomes a rigid object, capable of measurement and subdivision. Intuitive vision, on the other hand, vivifies and incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity.

Poetry and historical study are kin.

Calculation and cognition also are kin. But, as Hebbel says somewhere, systems are not dreamed, and art-works are not calculated or (what is the same thing) thought out.

… as a mere sum of past things without intrinsic order or inner necessity, but as an organism of rigorous structure and significant articulation, an organism that does not suddenly dissolve into a formless and ambiguous future when it reaches the accidental present of the observer.

Cultures are organisms, and world-history is their collective biography.

Morphologically, the immense history of the Chinese or of the Classical Culture is the exact equivalent of the petty history of the individual man, or of the animal, or the tree, or the flower.

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.

… 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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]

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]

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.

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;

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.

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);

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.

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;

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.

… indeed, man has never—not even in the “contemporary” China of the Chóu period with its highly-developed sense of eras and epochs[134]—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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We both live and know when we are awake, but, in addition, we live when mind and senses are asleep.

Though night may close every eye, the blood does not sleep.

We are moving in the moving (so at least we try to indicate, by a word borrowed from science, the inexpressible that in sleep-hours we feel with inward certainty).

Suddenly, necessarily, and completely “the” world comes into being out of the totality of received and remembered elements: and as it is an individual who apprehends the world, there is for each individual a singular world.

There are therefore as many worlds as there are waking beings and like-living, like-feeling groups of beings.

The supposedly single, independent and external world that each believes to be common to all is really an ever-new, uniquely-occurring and non-recurring experience in the existence of each.

This is the idea of the Macrocosm, actuality as the sum total of all symbols in relation to one soul. From this property of being significant nothing is exempt.

All that is, symbolizes.

From the corporeal phenomena like visage, shape, mien (of individuals and classes and peoples alike), which have always been known to possess meaning, to the supposedly eternal and universally-valid forms of knowledge, mathematics and physics, everything speaks out of the essence of one and only …

Till we have the constantly-wakeful concern for the life that is not yet past, there is no concern for that which is past.

The beast has only the future, but man knows also the past.

And thus every new Culture is awakened in and with a new view of the world, that is, a sudden glimpse of death as the secret of the perceivable world.

Because every one of them has had his own Nature, though—with a naïveté that was really the salvation of his world-idea and of his own self—every one believed that he had it in common with all the rest.

Nature is a possession which is saturated through and through with the most personal connotations.

Nature is a function of the particular Culture.

The bodily mobility of man and beast is disposed in this sense.

We move forward—towards the Future, nearing with every step not merely our aim but our old age—and we feel every backward look as a glance at something that is past, that has already become history.[185]

If we can describe the basic form of the understood, viz., causality, as destiny become rigid, we may similarly speak of spatial depth as a time become rigid.

but we know that the earth as it moves in space revolves and that the duration of spring consists of ninety such revolutions of the earth, or days.

Time gives birth to Space, but Space gives death to Time.

Had Kant been more precise, he would, instead of speaking of the “two forms of perception,” have called time the form of perception and space the form of the perceived, and then the connexion of the two would probably have revealed itself to him.

The curvatures are so fine that to a certain extent they are invisible to the eye and only to be “sensed.” But it is just by these means that direction in depth is eliminated.

While the Gothic style soars, the Ionic swings.

The interior of the cathedral pulls up with primeval force, but the temple is laid down in majestic rest. All this is equally true as relating to the Faustian and Apollinian Deity, and likewise of the fundamental ideas of the respective physics.

The pathos of this denial can scarcely be exaggerated. The whole passion of the Classical soul is in this act of excluding by symbolic negation that which it would not feel as actual, that in which its own existence could not be expressed.

A world of other colour suddenly confronts us here.

The Classical statue in its splendid bodiliness—all structure and expressive surfaces and no incorporeal arrière-pensée whatsoever—contains without remainder all that Actuality is for the Classical eye. The material, the optically definite, the comprehensible, the immediately present—this list exhausts the characteristics of this kind of extension.

But even the Germanic gods and heroes are surrounded by this rebuffing immensity and enigmatic gloom. They are steeped in music and in night, for daylight gives visual bounds and therefore shapes bodily things.

Night eliminates body, day soul.

Apollo and Athene have no souls. On Olympus rests the eternal light of the transparent southern day, and Apollo’s hour is high noon, when great Pan sleeps.

Symbol has created itself in the graves. That which is thought and felt and silently prayed at the grave-side can be expressed by no word, but only hinted by the boding symbol that stands in unchanging grave repose.”

The dead strive no more.

They are no more Time, but only Space—something that stays (if indeed it stays at all) but does not ripen towards a Future; and hence it is stone, the abiding stone, that expresses how the dead is mirrored in the waking consciousness of the living.

Instead of spinning word-subtleties around its form of extension, its “space” and its “time,” instead of forming hypotheses and number-systems and dogmas, it set up its huge symbols in the landscape of the Nile in all silence.

Stone is the great emblem of the Timeless-Become; space and death seem bound up in it.

“Men have built for the dead,” says Bachofen in his autobiography, “before they have built for the living, and even as a perishable wooden structure suffices for the span of time that is given to the living, so the housing of the dead for ever …

whereas ornament evidences an ego conscious of its own specific character. The former is widely spread in the animal world, the latter almost peculiar to man.

Imitation is born of the secret rhythm of all things cosmic.

For the waking being the One appears as discrete and extended;

and it is this actualizing of physiognomic rhythm that requires the executant to be an adept who can reveal the idea, the soul, of the alien in the play of its surface.

In certain unreserved moments we are all adepts of this sort, and in such moments, as we follow in an imperceptible rhythm the music and the play of facial expression, we suddenly look over the precipice and see great secrets.

The aim of all imitation is effective simulation;

there is a Here and a There, a Proper and an Alien something, a Microcosm and a Macrocosm that are polar to one another in the sense-life, and what the rhythm of imitation does is to bridge this dichotomy.

Every religion is an effort of the waking soul to reach the powers of the world-around.

And so too is Imitation, which in its most devoted moments is wholly religious, for it consists in an identity of inner activity between the soul and body “here” and the world-around “there” which, vibrating as one, become one.

Instead of physiognomic traits overheard in the alien being, we have established motives, symbols, which are impressed upon it. The intention is no longer to pretend but to conjure.

The “I” overwhelms the “Thou.”

Imitation is only a speaking with means that are born of the moment and unreproduceable—but Ornament employs a language emancipated from the speaking, a stock of forms that possesses duration and is not at the mercy of the individual.[212]

And now for the first time we can see the opposition between these two sides of every art in all its depth.

Imitation spiritualizes and quickens, ornament enchants and kills.

The one becomes, the other is. And therefore the one is allied to love and, above all—in songs and riot and dance—to the sexual love, which turns existence to face the future;

… is immaterial that no buildings of the Mycenæan age have survived.[228] But with the dawn of the great Culture, architecture as ornament comes into being suddenly and with such a force of expression that for a century mere decoration-as-such shrinks away from it in awe.

The spaces, surfaces and edges of stone speak alone.

The tomb of Chephren is the culmination of mathematical simplicity—everywhere right angles, squares and rectangular pillars, nowhere adornment, inscription or desinence—and it is only after some generations have passed that Relief ventures to infringe the solemn magic of those spaces and the strain begins to …

The Egyptian style is the expression of a brave soul. The rigour and force of it Egyptian man himself never felt and never asserted.

He dared all, but said nothing.

In Gothic and Baroque, on the contrary, the triumph over heaviness became a perfectly conscious motive of the form-language. The drama of Shakespeare deals openly with the desperate conflict of will and world. Classical man, again, was weak in the face of the “powers.”

This sentence contains the entire morphology of art-history. Styles do not follow one another like waves or pulse-beats.

It is not the personality or will or brain of the artist that makes the style, but the style that makes the type of the artist.

The style, like the Culture, is a prime phenomenon in the strictest Goethian sense, be it the style of art or religion or thought, or the style of life itself.

There is the child’s fearfulness in Bishop Bernward’s building at Hildesheim, in the Early-Christian catacomb-painting, and in the pillar-halls of the Egyptian Fourth Dynasty.

A February of art, a deep presentiment of a coming wealth of forms, an immense suppressed tension, lies over the landscape that, still wholly rustic, is adorning itself with the first strongholds and townlets.

Then follows the joyous mounting into the high Gothic, into the Constantinian age with its pillared basilicas and its domical churches, into the relief-ornament of the Fifth-Dynasty temple.

Being is understood, a sacred form-language has been completely mastered and radiates its glory, and the Style ripens into a majestic symbolism of directional depth and of Destiny.

But fervent youth comes to an end, and contradictions arise within the soul itself.

The Renaissance, the Dionysiac-musical hostility to Apollinian Doric, the Byzantine of 450 that looks to Alexandria and away from the overjoyed art of Antioch, indicate a moment of resistance, of effective or ineffective impulse to destroy what has been acquired.

And now it is the manhood of the style-history that comes on. The Culture is changing into the intellectuality of the great cities that will now dominate the country-side, and pari passu the style is becoming intellectualized also.

The grand symbolism withers; the riot of superhuman forms dies down; milder and more worldly arts drive out the great art of developed stone.

Even in Egypt sculpture and fresco are emboldened to lighter movement. The artist appears, and “plans” what formerly grew out of the soil.

The end is a sunset reflected in forms revived for a moment by pedant or by eclectic—semi-earnestness and doubtful genuineness dominate the world of the arts.

We to-day are in this condition—playing a tedious game with dead forms to keep up the illusion of a living art.

No one has yet perceived that Arabian art is a single phenomenon.

This alone is sufficient to explain the intense vehemence with which the Arabian Culture, when released at length from artistic as from other fetters, flung itself upon all the lands that had inwardly belonged to it for centuries past.

It is the sign of a soul that feels itself in a hurry, that notes in fear the first symptoms of old age before it has had youth.

This emancipation of Magian mankind is without a parallel. Syria is conquered, or rather delivered, in 634. Damascus falls in 637, Ctesiphon in 637. In 641 Egypt and India are reached, in 647 Carthage, in 676 Samarkand, in 710 Spain.

The importance which the “science of art” has always attached to a timeless and conceptual delimitation of the individual art-spheres only proves that the fundamentals of the problem have not been attacked.

Arts are living units, and the living is incapable of being dissected.

The first act of the learned pedant has always been to partition the infinitely wide domain into provinces determined by perfectly superficial criteria of medium and technique and to endow these provinces with eternal validity and immutable (!) form-principles.

If an art has boundaries at all—boundaries of its soul-become-form—they are historical and not technical or physiological boundaries.[274]

An art is an organism, not a system.

There is no art-genus that runs through all the centuries and all the Cultures. Even where (as in the case of the Renaissance) supposed technical traditions momentarily deceive us into a belief in the eternal validity of antique art-laws, there is at bottom entire discrepance.

Thus, musically as otherwise, the castle and the cathedral are distinct.

The cathedral is music and the castle makes music.

The one begins with theory, the other with impromptu: it is the distinction between waking consciousness and living existence, between the spiritual and the knightly singer.

It was we and not the Hellenes or the men of the high Renaissance that prized and sought out high mountain tops for the sake of the limitless range of vision that they afford.

This is a Faustian craving—to be alone with endless space.

The great achievement of Le Nôtre and the landscape-gardeners of Northern France, beginning with Fouquet’s epoch-making creation of Vaux-le-Vicomte, was that they were able to render this symbol with such high emphasis.

But the feeling for long range is at the same time one for history. At a distance, space becomes time and the horizon signifies the future.

The Baroque park is the park of the Late season, of the approaching end, of the falling leaf.

A Renaissance park is meant for the summer and the noonday. It is timeless, and nothing in its form-language reminds us of mortality. It is perspective that begins to awaken a premonition of something passing, fugitive and final.

The Baroque park is the park of the Late season, of the approaching end, of the falling leaf. A Renaissance park is meant for the summer and the noonday. It is timeless, and nothing in its form-language reminds us of mortality.

It is perspective that begins to awaken a premonition of something passing, fugitive and final.

The very words of distance possess, in the lyric poetry of all Western languages, a plaintive autumnal accent that one looks for in vain in the Greek and Latin.

But the feeling for long range is at the same time one for history.

At a distance, space becomes time and the horizon signifies the future.

The Baroque park is the park of the Late season, of the approaching end, of the falling leaf. A Renaissance park is meant for the summer and the noonday. It is timeless, and nothing in its form-language reminds us of mortality.

The Magian felt all happening as an expression of mysterious powers that filled the world-cavern with their spiritual substance—and it shut off the depicted scene with a gold background, that is, by something that stood beyond and outside all nature-colours.

Gold is not a colour.

As compared with simple yellow, it produces a complicated sense-impression, through the metallic, diffuse refulgence that is generated by its glowing surface. Colours—whether coloured substance incorporated with the smoothed wall-face (fresco) or pigment applied with the brush—are natural.

The opposition of painting-style and drawing-style is but a particular aspect of the general opposition of historical and ahistorical form, of assertion and denial of inner development, of eternity and instantaneity.

A Classical art-work is an event, a Western is a deed.

The one symbolizes the here-and-now point, the other the living course. And the physiognomy of this script of the brush—an ornamentation that is entirely new, infinitely rich and personal, and peculiar to the Western Culture—is purely and simply musical.

The aëry web of brush-strokes immediately dissolves the sensible surface of things.

Contours melt into chiaroscuro.

The beholder has to stand a very long way back to obtain any corporeal impression out of our coloured space values, and even so it is always the chromatic and active air itself that gives birth to the things.

The 15th-Century manner of applying colour is a denial of past and future. It is only in the brushwork, which remains permanently visible and, in a way, perennially fresh, that the historical feeling comes out.

Our desire is to see in the work of the painter not merely something that has become but something that is becoming.

And this is precisely what the Renaissance wanted to avoid. A piece of Perugino drapery tells us nothing of its artistic origin; it is ready-made, given, simply present.

Regarded thus, the significance of the brown becomes manifest enough.

When it dies, an entire Culture dies with it.

It was the masters who were inwardly greatest—Rembrandt above all—who best understood this colour. It is the enigmatic brown of his most telling work, and its origin is in the deep lights of Gothic church-windows and the twilight of the high-vaulted Gothic nave.

… the most astonishing bizarrerie ever perpetrated, the artificial ruin, in order to deepen the historical character in the presented landscape.[322] The Egyptian Culture restored the works of its early period, but it would never have ventured to build ruins as the symbols of the past.

Again, it is not the Classical statue, but the Classical torso that we really love.

It has had a destiny: something suggestive of the past as past envelops it, and our imagination delights to fill the empty space of missing limbs with the pulse and swing of invisible lines.

It has had a destiny: something suggestive of the past as past envelops it, and our imagination delights to fill the empty space of missing limbs with the pulse and swing of invisible lines.

A good restoration—and the secret charm of endless possibilities is all gone.

I venture to maintain that it is only by way of this transposition into the musical that the remains of Classical sculpture can really reach us.

Would not the Vatican torso of Heracles lose its mighty impressiveness if, one fine day, the missing parts were discovered and replaced? And would not the towers and domes of our old cities lose their deep metaphysical charm if they were sheathed in new copper?

Age, for us as for the Egyptian, ennobles all things.

For Classical man, it depreciates them.

In China the face is like a landscape, full of wrinkles and little signs that mean something. But, for us, the portrait is musical.

The look, the play of the mouth, the pose of head and hands—these things are a fugue of the subtlest meaning, a composition of many voices that sounds to the understanding beholder.

But in order to grasp the significance of the portraiture of the West more specifically in contrast with that of Egypt and that of China, we have to consider the deep change in the language of the West that began in Merovingian times to foreshadow …

The depth-experience is a becoming and effects a become, signifies time and evokes space, is at once cosmic and historical.

Living direction marches to the horizon as to the future.

As early as 1230 the Madonna of the St. Anne entrance of Notre-Dame dreams of this future: so, later, the Cologne “Madonna with the Bean-blossom” of Meister Wilhelm.

Denis from 1260, a portrait by Holbein or Titian or Rembrandt or Goya, is a biography, and a self-portrait is a historical confession. To make one’s confession is not to avow an act but to lay before the Judge the inner history of that act.

The act is patent, its roots the personal secret.

When the Protestant or the Freethinker opposes auricular confession, it never occurs to him that he is rejecting merely the outward form of the idea and not the idea itself.

He declines to confess to the priest, but he confesses to himself, to a friend, or to all and sundry.

The whole of Northern poetry is one outspoken confession.

So are the portraits of Rembrandt and the music of Beethoven. What Raphael and Calderon and Haydn told to the priests, these men put into the language of their works.

(This problem the fresco-technique, Euclidean that it is, is powerless to solve.)

The whole painting has only one theme, a soul.

Observe the rendering of the hands and the brow in Rembrandt (e.g., in the etching of Burgomaster Six or the portrait of an architect at Cassel), and again, even so late, in Marées and Leibl[337]—spiritual to the point of dematerializing them, visionary, lyrical.

… the Attic sculpture this motive is entirely absent, and although in Hellenistic times the playful motive of the Cupid or Putto came into favour, it was expressly as a being different from the other beings and not at all as a person growing or becoming.

The child links past and future.

In every art of human representation that has a claim to symbolic import, it signifies duration in the midst of phenomenal change, the endlessness of Life. But the Classical Life exhausted itself in the completeness of the moment. The individual shut his eyes to time-distances;

All symbols of Time and Distance are also symbols of maternity.

Care is the root-feeling of future, and all care is motherly.

It expresses itself in the formation and the idea of Family and State and in the principle of Inheritance which underlies both. Care may be either affirmed or denied—one can live care-filled or care-free.

… sculpture gained no foothold, where the Southern music was at home, where Gothic and Baroque joined hands in Giovanni Bellini and the Renaissance remained an affair of occasional dilettantism, had an art of portraiture and therewith a subtle diplomacy and a will to political duration—Venice.

The Renaissance was born of defiance, and therefore it lacked depth, width and sureness of creative instinct.

It is the one and only epoch which was more consistent in theory than in performance and—in sharp contrast to Gothic and Baroque—the only one in which theoretically-formulated intention preceded (often enough surpassed) the ability to perform.

They are on the way, not to Phidias but to Palestrina, and they have come thither not from Roman ruins but from the still music of the cathedral.

Raphael thawed the Florentine fresco, and Michelangelo the statue, and Leonardo dreamed already of Rembrandt and Bach.

The higher and more conscientious the effort to actualize the ideas of the age, the more intangible it became.

For natures of medium size, the Renaissance theme was not too big; it was attractive indeed from its very plainness, and we miss consequently that Gothic wrestling with overpowering imprecise problems which distinguishes the Rhenish and Flemish schools.

The seductive ease and clarity of the Renaissance rests very largely upon evasion—the evasion of deeper reluctances by the aid of speciously simple rule.

To men of the inwardness of Memlinc or the power of Grünewald such conditions as those of the Tuscan form-world would have been fatal. They could not have developed their strength in and through it, but only against it.

He grouped the columns in sheaves or else pushed them away into niches. He broke up the storeys with huge pilasters and gave the façade a sort of surging and thrusting quality.

Measure yielded to melody, the static to the dynamic.

And thus Faustian music enlisted in its service the chief of all the other arts.

The Classical eye absorbs plastic form into itself, but Michelangelo saw with the spiritual eye and broke through the foreground-language of immediate sensuousness. And inevitably, in the long run, he destroyed the conditions for this art.

Marble became too trivial for his will-to-form.

He ceased to be sculptor and turned architect. In full old age, when he was producing only wild fragments like the Rondanini Madonna and hardly cutting his figures out of the rough at all, the musical tendency of his artistry broke through.

Raphael’s paintings fall into planes in which he disposes his well-ordered groups, and he closes off the whole with a well-proportioned background. But Leonardo knows only one space, wide and eternal, and his figures, as it were, float therein.

The one puts inside a frame a sum of individual near things, the other a portion cut out of the infinite.

Leonardo discovered the circulation of the blood. It was no Renaissance spirit that brought him to that—on the contrary, the whole course of his thought took him right outside the conceptions of his age.

Each artist followed the trend in a way of his own. One painted in oils on the bare wall, and thereby condemned his work to perish (Leonardo’s “Last Supper”). Another painted pictures as if they were wall-frescoes (Michelangelo).

Some ventured, some guessed, some fell by the way, some shied.

It was, as always, the struggle between hand and soul, between eye and instrument, between the form willed by the artist and the form willed by time—the struggle between Plastic and Music.

We meet these light clouds again, with the same meaning, in the wondrous finale of Faust II.[361] It is just that which does not charm in Raphael, his sublime unpopularity, that betrays the inner victory over the Renaissance-feeling in him.

We do understand Perugino at a glance, we merely think we understand Raphael.

His very line—that drawing-character that at first sight seems so Classical—is something that floats in space, supernal, Beethoven-like. In this work Raphael is the least obvious of all artists, less obvious even than Michelangelo, whose intention is manifest through all the fragmentariness of his works.

In Fra Bartolommeo the material bounding-line is still entirely dominant. It is all foreground, and the whole sense of the work is exhaustively rendered by the definition of bodies.

But in Raphael line has become silent, expectant, veiled, waiting in an extremity of tension for dissolution into the infinite, into space and music.

Leonardo is already over the frontier. The Adoration of the Magi is already music. It is not a casual but a deeply significant circumstance that in this work, as also in his St.

… is made plain that the aim thus finally attained is a union of the artistic and the mathematical spirit, for analysis like music, and Euclidean geometry like plastic, have both come to full comprehension of their tasks and the ultimate meaning of their respective number-languages.

The mathematics of beauty and the beauty of mathematics are henceforth inseparable.

The unending space of tone and the all-round body of marble or bronze are immediate interpretations of the extended. They belong to number-as-relation and to number-as-measure.

The things are not even bodies, but light-resistances in space, and their illusive density is to be unmasked by the brush-stroke. What is received and rendered is the impression of such resistances, which are tacitly evaluated as simple functions of a transcendent extension.

The artist’s inner eye penetrates the body, breaks the spell of its material bounding surfaces and sacrifices it to the majesty of Space.

And with this impression, under its influence, he feels an endless movement-quality in the sensuous element that is in utter contrast to the statuesque “Ataraxia” of the fresco. Therefore, there was not and could not be any Hellenic impressionism;

Rousseau’s tragically correct prophecy of a “return to Nature” fulfils itself in this dying art—the senile, too, return to Nature day by day.

The modern artist is a workman, not a creator.

He sets unbroken spectrum-colours side by side. The subtle script, the dance of brush-strokes, give way to crude commonplaces, pilings and mixings and daubings of points, squares, broad inorganic masses. The whitewasher’s brush and the trowel appear in the painter’s equipment;

Corot, the eternal child, French but not Parisian, finds his transcendent landscapes anywhere and everywhere; Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, portray over and over again, painfully, laboriously, soullessly, the Forest of Fontainebleau, the bank of the Seine at Argenteuil, or that remarkable valley near Arles.

Rembrandt’s mighty landscapes lie essentially in the universe, Manet’s near a railway station.

The plein-air painters, true megalopolitans, obtain as it were specimens of the music of space from the least agitated sources of Spain and Holland—from Velasquez, Goya, Hobbema, Franz Hals—in order (with the aid of English landscapists and, later, the Japanese, “highbrows” all) to restate it …

In Corot and Tiepolo, Mozart and Cimarosa, there is still a real mastery of the mother-tongue. After them, the process of mutilation begins, but no one is conscious of it because no one now can speak it fluently.

Once upon a time, Freedom and Necessity were identical; but now what is understood by freedom is in fact indiscipline.

In the time of Rembrandt or Bach the “failures” that we know only too well were quite unthinkable. The Destiny of the form lay in the race or the school, not in the private tendencies of the individual.

In the time of Rembrandt or Bach the “failures” that we know only too well were quite unthinkable. The Destiny of the form lay in the race or the school, not in the private tendencies of the individual.

Under the spell of a great tradition full achievement is possible even to a minor artist, because the living art brings him in touch with his task and the task with him.

To-day, these artists can no longer perform what they intend, for intellectual operations are a poor substitute for the trained instinct that has died out. All of them have experienced this. Marées was unable to complete any of his great schemes.

Here the contrast of Western music with Greek plastic has reached its maximum. Everything merges in bodiless infinity, no longer even does a linear melody wrestle itself clear of the vague tone-masses that in strange surgings challenge an imaginary space.

The motive comes up out of dark terrible deeps. It is flooded for an instant by a flash of hard bright sun.

Then, suddenly, it is so close upon us that we shrink.

The grand Ornamentation of the past has become as truly a dead language as Sanskrit or Church Latin.[367] Instead of its symbolism being honoured and obeyed, its mummy, its legacies of perfected forms, are put into the pot anyhow, and recast in wholly inorganic forms.

Every modern age holds change to be development, and puts revivals and fusions of old styles in the place of real becoming.

Alexandria also had its Pre-Raphaelite comedians with their vases, chairs, pictures and theories, its symbolists, naturalists and expressionists. The fashion at Rome was now Græco-Asiatic, now Græco-Egyptian, now (after Praxiteles) neo-Attic.

Rembrandt can reveal something of his soul, to those who are in inward kinship with him, by way of a self-portrait or a landscape, and to Goethe “a god gave it to say what he suffered.”

Certain ineffable stirrings of soul can be imparted by one man to the sensibility of another man through a look, two bars of a melody, an almost imperceptible movement.

That is the real language of souls, and it remains incomprehensible to the outsider. The word as utterance, as poetic element, may establish the link, but the word as notion, as element of scientific prose, never.

Certain ineffable stirrings of soul can be imparted by one man to the sensibility of another man through a look, two bars of a melody, an almost imperceptible movement.

That is the real language of souls, and it remains incomprehensible to the outsider.

The word as utterance, as poetic element, may establish the link, but the word as notion, as element of scientific prose, never.

Here there is nothing for us to order. Critical (i.e., literally, separating) methods apply only to the world-as-Nature.

It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting-knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought.

Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither aims nor ways in common. The primitive man experiences “soul,” first in other men and then in himself, as a Numen, just as he knows numina of the outer world, and develops his impressions in mythological form.

Associations, apperceptions, affections, motives, thought, feeling, will—all are dead mechanisms, the mere topography of which constitutes the insignificant total of our “soul-science.”

One looked for Life and one found an ornamental pattern of notions. And the soul remained what it was, something that could neither be thought nor represented, the secret, the ever-becoming, the pure experience.

This imaginary soul-body (let it be called so outright for the first time) is never anything but the exact mirror-image of the form in which the matured culture-man looks on his outer world.

A soul-image is never anything but the image of one quite definite soul.

No observer can ever step outside the conditions and the limitations of his time and circle, and whatever it may be that he “knows” or “cognizes,” the very cognition itself involves in all cases choice, direction and inner form, and is therefore ab initio an expression of his proper soul.

The primitive himself appropriates a soul-image out of facts of his own life as subjected to the formative working of the basic experiences of waking consciousness (distinction of ego and world, of ego and tu) and those of being (distinction of body and soul, sense-life …

and just as even each separate stage—the age of Scholasticism, that of the Sophists, that of Enlightenment—forms special ideas of number and thought and Nature that pertain to itself only, so even each separate century mirrors itself in a soul-image of its own.

The best judge of men in the Western world goes wrong when he tries to understand a Japanese, and vice versa.

But the man of learning goes equally wrong when he tries to translate basic words of Arabic or Greek by basic words of his own tongue.

We may venture the conclusion that the clearest and most accessible conceptions of Faustian thought—as we have it, for instance, in Descartes or in Kant’s “Prolegomena”—would in the same way have been regarded by an Arabian student as nebulous and abstruse.

What for us is true, for them is false, and vice versa; and this is valid for the soul-images of the different Cultures as it is for every other product of their scientific thinking.

The separation of its ultimate elements is a task that the Gothic world-outlook and its philosophy leaves to the courage of the future.

And here our attention is drawn to a feature of Greek tragedy that any true tragedy of the Faustian style must find intolerable, the continual presence of the Chorus. The Chorus is the primitive tragedy, for without it the ἦθος would be impossible.

Character one possesses for one’s self, but attitude has meaning only in relation to others.

This Chorus as crowd (the ideal opposite to the lonely or inward man and the monologue of the West), this Chorus which is always there, the witness of every “soliloquy,” this Chorus by which, in the stage-life as in the real life, fear before the …

… that fill a whole series of dramas like the “Philoctetes” and the “Trachiniæ,” the impossibility of being alone, the feeling of the Polis, all the feminine of this Culture that we see idealized in the Belvedere Apollo, betrays itself in this symbol of the Chorus.

In comparison with this kind of drama, Shakespeare’s is a single monologue.

Even in the conversations, even in the group-scenes we are sensible of the immense inner distance between the persons, each of whom at bottom is only talking with himself. Nothing can overcome this spiritual remoteness.

That this is no superficial contrast we can see by comparing the Gothic plastic, wrapped eternally in “dim religious light,” and the Ionic flute, the instrument of high noon. The candle affirms and the sunlight denies space as the opposite of things.

At night the universe of space triumphs over matter, at midday things and nearness assert themselves and space is repudiated.

The same contrast appears in Attic fresco and Northern oil-painting, and in the symbols of Helios and Pan and those of the starry night and red sunset.

Already in Shakespeare’s time performances took place in the late afternoon, and by Goethe’s this mystical sense of a proper relation between art-work and light-setting had attained its object.

In general, every art and every Culture has its significant times of day.

The music of the 18th Century is a music of the darkness and the inner eye, and the plastic of Athens is an art of cloudless day.

That this is no superficial contrast we can see by comparing the Gothic plastic, wrapped eternally in “dim religious light,” and the Ionic flute, the instrument of high noon.

The candle affirms and the sunlight denies space as the opposite of things.

At night the universe of space triumphs over matter, at midday things and nearness assert themselves and space is repudiated.

In Shakespeare, who was born when Michelangelo died and ceased to write when Rembrandt came into the world, dramatic infinity, the passionate overthrow of all static limitations, attained the maximum.

His woods, seas, alleys, gardens, battlefields lie in the afar, the unbounded. Years fly past in the space of minutes.

The mad Lear between fool and reckless outcast on the heath, in the night and the storm, the unutterably lonely ego lost in space—here is the Faustian life-feeling!

on the contrary, the picture dictates position and distance to him. Lateral limits, too, are done away with—from 1500 onwards overrunnings of the frame are more and more frequent and daring. The Greek spectator stands before the fresco of Polygnotus.

We sink into a picture, that is, we are pulled into it by the power of the space-treatment.

Unity of space being thus re-established, the infinity that is expanded in all directions by the picture is ruled by the Western perspective;[410] and from perspective there runs a road straight to the comprehension of our astronomical world-picture and its passionate pioneering into unending farness.

We do not know whether our earthly conceptions of the nature of light, and therefore all the theories and laws deduced from them, have validity beyond the immediate environment of the earth.

What we “see” are merely light-indices; what we understand are symbols of ourselves.

The strong upspringing of the Copernican world-idea—which belongs exclusively to our Culture and (to risk an assertion that even now may seem paradoxical) would be and will be deliberately forced into oblivion whenever the soul of a coming Culture shall feel itself endangered by it[412]—was …

Even the souls of the Greeks were assembled in Hades as unexcitable shadows (εἴδωλα) without strength, wish or feeling.

But the Northern dead gathered themselves in fierce unresting armies of the cloud and the storm.

The event which stands at the same cultural level as the discoveries of the Spaniards and Portuguese is that of the Hellenic colonizations of the 8th Century B.C.

And then first the political tension within the Faustian world-consciousness discharged itself. For the Greeks, Hellas was and remained the important part of the earth’s surface, but with the discovery of America West-Europe became a province in a gigantic whole.

Thenceforward the history of the Western Culture has a planetary character.

Every Culture possesses a proper conception of home and fatherland, which is hard to comprehend, scarcely to be expressed in words, full of dark metaphysical relations, but nevertheless unmistakable in its tendency.

In this matter of morale, Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion.

Everyone demands something of the rest.

We say “thou shalt” in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable.

It is just this, the general transvaluation, that makes ethical monotheism and—using the word in a novel and deep sense—socialism.

All world-improvers are Socialists.

And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.

Each Culture possesses its own standards, the validity of which begins and ends with it.

There is no general morale of humanity.

It follows that there is not and cannot be any true “conversion” in the deeper sense. Conscious behaviour of any kind that rests upon convictions is a primary phenomenon, the basic tendency of an existence developed into a “timeless truth.”

A conversion to Theosophy or Freethinking or one of the present-day transitions from a supposed Christianity to a supposed Atheism (or vice versa) is an alteration of words and notions, of the religious or intellectual surface, no more.

None of our “movements” have changed man.

A strict morphology of all the morales is a task for the future. Here, too, Nietzsche has taken the first and essential step towards the new standpoint.

But he has failed to observe his own condition that the thinker shall place himself “beyond good and evil.” He tried to be at once sceptic and prophet, moral critic and moral gospeller. It cannot be done.

One cannot be a first-class psychologist as long as one is still a Romantic.

And so here, as in all his crucial penetrations, he got as far as the door—and stood outside it. And so far, no one has done any better.

When a mankind so historically and retrospectively disposed as we are accepts the superficial as the real sense, and regards ideals as subject-matter for mere knowing, it is really evidencing its veneration for the past—in this particular instance, for religious tradition.

The text of a conviction is never a test of its reality, for man is rarely conscious of his own beliefs.

Catchwords and doctrines are always more or less popular and external as compared with deep spiritual actualities.

We must not let the words of humane formulæ mislead us as to their real significance.

Between the morale that one has and the morale that one thinks one has, there is a relation which is very obscure and very unsteady, and it is just here that an incorruptible psychology would be invaluable.

Compassion is a dangerous word, and neither Nietzsche himself—for all his maestria—nor anyone else has yet investigated the meaning—conceptual and effective—of the word at different times. The Christian morale of Origen’s time was quite different from the Christian morale of St. Francis’s.

… was tired of the town and the Late Culture, and whose “pure” (i.e., soulless) reason longed to be free from them and their authoritative form and their hardness, from the symbolism with which it was no longer in living communion and which therefore it detested.

The Culture was annihilated by discussion.

If we pass in review the great 19th-Century names with which we associate the march of this great drama—Schopenhauer, Hebbel, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg—we comprehend in a glance that which Nietzsche, in a fragmentary preface to his incomplete master-work, deliberately and correctly called the Coming …

for us it will set in from about the year 2000.

Culture and Civilization—the living body of a soul and the mummy of it.

For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800—on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other …

… requires to be relieved, the impulse to overhaul the stock in order by the light of reason to turn it to better account, the fatal imposition of thought upon the inscrutable quality of creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is beginning to tire.

Only the sick man feels his limbs.

When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a “natural law” is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or mastered;

This, at the back, is what all three mean.

The brain rules, because the soul abdicates.

Culture-men live unconsciously, Civilization-men consciously. The Megalopolis—sceptical, practical, artificial—alone represents Civilization to-day. The soil-peasantry before its gates does not count. The “People” means the city-people, an inorganic mass, something fluctuating.

As soon as Life is fatigued, as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities—which are intellectual worlds to themselves—and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a problem.

Culture-morale is that which a man has, Civilization-morale that which he looks for.

The one is too deep to be exhaustible by logical means, the other is a function of logic.

This exchange is a fair measure of the fall from Culture to Civilization. Every ethic is a formulation of a soul’s view of its destiny—heroic or practical, grand or commonplace, manly or old-manly. I distinguish, therefore, between a tragic and a plebeian morale.

The tragic morale of a Culture knows and grasps the heaviness of being, but it draws therefrom the feeling of pride that enables the burden to be borne.

So Æschylus, Shakespeare, the thinkers of the Brahman philosophy felt it; so Dante and German Catholicism. It is heard in the stern battle-hymn of Lutheranism “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,” and it echoes still in the Marseillaise.

Diatribe belongs necessarily to the “religion of the irreligious” and is the characteristic form that the “cure of souls” takes therein. It appears as the Indian preaching, the Classical rhetoric, and the Western journalism.

It appeals not to the best but to the most, and it values its means according to the number of successes obtained by them.

It substitutes for the old thoughtfulness an intellectual male-prostitution by speech and writing, which fills and dominates the halls and the market-places of the megalopolis. As the whole of Hellenistic philosophy is rhetorical, so the social-ethic system of Zola’s novel and Ibsen’s drama is journalistic.

Ethical Socialism is the maximum possible of attainment to a life-feeling under the aspect of Aims;[452] for the directional movement of Life that is felt as Time and Destiny, when it hardens, takes the form of an intellectual machinery of means and end.

Direction is the living, aim the dead.

The passionate energy of the advance is generically Faustian, the mechanical remainder—“Progress”—is specifically Socialistic, the two being related as body and skeleton. And of the two it is the generic quality that distinguishes Socialism from Buddhism and Stoicism;

The Socialist—the dying Faust of Part II—is the man of historical care, who feels the Future as his task and aim, and accounts the happiness of the moment as worthless in comparison.

The Classical spirit, with its oracles and its omens, wants only to know the future, but the Westerner would shape it.

The Third Kingdom is the Germanic ideal. From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen—arrows of yearning to the other bank, as the Zarathustra says—every great man has linked his life to an eternal morning.

From the high and distant standpoint it matters very little what “truths” thinkers have managed to formulate in words within their respective schools, for, here as in every great art, it is the schools, conventions and repertory of forms that are the basic elements.

Infinitely more important than the answers are the questions—the choice of them, the inner form of them.

For it is the particular way in which a macrocosm presents itself to the understanding man of a particular Culture that determines a priori the whole necessity of asking them, and the way in which they are asked.

To choose his material at will is not given to the philosopher, neither is the material of philosophy always and everywhere the same.

There are no eternal questions, but only questions arising out of the feelings of a particular being and posed by it.

Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis applies also to every genuine philosophy as the intellectual expression of this being, as the actualization of spiritual possibilities in a form-world of concepts, judgments and thought-structures comprised in the living phenomenon of its author.

The unconscious longing for that genuine science which (be it repeated) is peculiar to the spirit of Culture-man sets itself to apprehend, to penetrate, and to comprise within its grasp the world-image of Nature.

Mere industrious measuring for measuring’s sake is not and never has been more than a delight for little minds.

Numbers may only be the key of the secret, no more. No significant man would ever have spent himself on them for their own sake.

If the pure numbers of a physical formula represent a causal necessity, the existence, the birth and the life-duration of a theory are a Destiny.

Every fact, even the simplest, contains ab initio a theory.

A fact is a uniquely-occurring impression upon a waking being, and everything depends on whether that being, the being for whom it occurs or did occur, is or was Classical or Western, Gothic or Baroque.

There is no science that is without unconscious presuppositions of this kind, over which the researcher has no control and which can be traced back to the earliest days of the awakening Culture.

There is no Natural science without a precedent Religion.

In this point there is no distinction between the Catholic and the Materialistic views of the world—both say the same thing in different words. Even atheistic science has religion; modern mechanics exactly reproduces the contemplativeness of Faith.

There is no Natural science without a precedent Religion. In this point there is no distinction between the Catholic and the Materialistic views of the world—both say the same thing in different words.

Even atheistic science has religion; modern mechanics exactly reproduces the contemplativeness of Faith.

When the Ionic reaches its height in Thales or the Baroque in Bacon, and man has come to the urban stage of his career, his self-assurance begins to look upon critical science, in contrast to the more primitive religion of the countryside, as the superior …

Every critical science, like every myth and every religious belief, rests upon an inner certitude. Various as the creatures of this certitude may be, both in structure and in sound, they are not different in basic principle.

Any reproach, therefore, levelled by Natural science at Religion is a boomerang.

We are presumptuous and no less in supposing that we can ever set up “The Truth” in the place of “anthropomorphic” conceptions, for no other conceptions but these exist at all.

Any reproach, therefore, levelled by Natural science at Religion is a boomerang. We are presumptuous and no less in supposing that we can ever set up “The Truth” in the place of “anthropomorphic” conceptions, for no other conceptions but these exist at all.

Every idea that is possible at all is a mirror of the being of its author.

The statement that “man created God in his own image,” valid for every historical religion, is not less valid for every physical theory, however firm its reputed basis of fact.

The elements of Empedocles designate states of bodiliness (bezeichnen ein körperliches Sichverhalten) but the elements of Lavoisier, whose combustion-theory followed promptly upon the isolation of oxygen in 1771, designate energy-systems accessible to human will, “rigid” and “fluid” becoming mere terms to describe tension-relations between molecules.

By our analysis and synthesis, Nature is not merely asked or persuaded but forced.

The modern chemistry is a chapter of the modern physics of Deed.

Its content follows from the notion of energy, the Will-to-Power in Nature, and therefore it is for us just as necessary as for the Classical thought it is impossible.

Every atomic theory, therefore, is a myth and not an experience.

In it the Culture, through the contemplative-creative power of its great physicists, reveals its inmost essence and very self. It is only a preconceived idea of criticism that extension exists in itself and independently of the form-feeling and world-feeling of the knower.

The mere sense-impression contains only length and breadth, and it is the living and necessary act of interpretation—which, like everything else living, possesses direction, motion and irreversibility (the qualities that our consciousness synthesizes in the word Time)—that adds depth and thereby fashions actuality and world.

Life itself enters into the experiences as third dimension.

The double meaning of the word “far,” which refers both to future and to horizon, betrays the deeper meaning of this dimension, through which extension as such is evoked. The Becoming stiffens and passes and is at once the Become;

But Mechanics, having nothing to do with ageing, should have nothing to do with motion either, and consequently, since no scientific system is conceivable without a motion-problem in it, a complete and self-contained mechanics is an impossibility.

Somewhere or other there is always an organic starting-point in the system where immediate Life enters it—an umbilical cord that connects the mind-child with the life-mother, the thought with the thinker.

This puts the fundamentals of Faustian and Apollinian Nature-science in quite another light. No “Nature” is pure—there is always something of history in it.

Destiny asks: “Whither?”, Causality asks: “Whence?” To establish scientifically means, starting from the become and actualized, to search for “causes” by going back along a mechanically-conceived course, that is to say, by treating becoming as a length.

But it is not possible to live backwards, only to think backwards.

Not Time and Destiny are reversible, but only that which the physicist calls “time” and admits into his formulæ as divisible, and preferably as negative or imaginary quantities.

While life looks on space as something functionally belonging to itself, intellect looks upon life as something in space.

Destiny asks: “Whither?”, Causality asks: “Whence?”

To establish scientifically means, starting from the become and actualized, to search for “causes” by going back along a mechanically-conceived course, that is to say, by treating becoming as a length. But it is not possible to live backwards, only to think backwards.

It cannot be proved, for every proof set forth in a Western language and every experiment conducted by a Western mind presupposes itself. In every problem, the enunciation contains the proof in germ.

The method of a science is the science itself.

Beyond question, the notion of laws of Nature and the conception of physics as “scientia experimentalis,”[487] which has held ever since Roger Bacon, contains a priori this specific kind of necessity.

But, as the habit of verbal speech has now been superadded, understanding comes to be abstracted from seeing, and thenceforward develops independently as reasoning; to the instantly-comprehending technique is added the reflective theory.

Technique applies itself to visible near things and plain needs, theory to the distance and the terrors of the invisible.

By the side of the petty knowledge of everyday life it sets up belief. And still they evolve, there is a new knowledge and a new and higher technique, and to the myth there is added the cult.

The word “God” rings otherwise under the vaulting of Gothic cathedrals or in the cloisters of Maulbronn and St. Gallen than in the basilicas of Syria and the temples of Republican Rome.

The character of the Faustian cathedral is that of the forest.

The mighty elevation of the nave above the flanking aisles, in contrast to the flat roof of the basilica;

Cathedral and organ form a symbolic unity like temple and statue.

The history of organ-building, one of the most profound and moving chapters of our musical history, is a history of a longing for the forest, a longing to speak in the language of that true temple of Western God-fearing.

From the verse of Wolfram von Eschenbach to the music of “Tristan” this longing has borne fruit unceasingly. Orchestra-tone strove tirelessly in the 18th Century towards a nearer kinship with the organ-tone.

Orchestra-tone strove tirelessly in the 18th Century towards a nearer kinship with the organ-tone. The word “schwebend”—meaningless as applied to Classical things—is important alike in the theory of music, in oil-painting, in architecture and in the dynamic physics of the Baroque.

Stand in a high wood of mighty stems while the storm is tearing above, and you will comprehend instantly the full meaning of the concept of a force which moves mass.

Out of such a primary feeling in the existence that has become thoughtful there arises, then, an idea of the Divine immanent in the world-around, and this idea becomes steadily more definite. The thoughtful percipient takes in the impression of motion in outer Nature.

The thoughtful percipient takes in the impression of motion in outer Nature. He feels about him an almost indescribable alien life of unknown powers, and traces the origin of these effects to “numina,” to The Other, inasmuch as this Other also possesses Life.

Astonishment at alien motion is the source of religion and of physics both; respectively, they are the elucidations of Nature (world-around) by the soul and by the reason.

The “powers” are the first object both of fearful or loving reverence and of critical investigation. There is a religious experience and a scientific experience.

… Name, and (as has been shown already) the whole of philosophy, the whole of science, and everything that is related in any way to “knowing” is at the very bottom nothing but an infinitely-refined mode of applying the name-magic of the primitive to the “alien.”

The pronouncement of the right name (in physics, the right concept) is an incantation.

Deities and basic notions of science alike come into being first as vocable names, with which is linked an idea that tends to become more and more sensuously definite. The outcome of a Numen is a Deus, the outcome of a notion is an idea.

As to the meaning of a myth, its provenance proves nothing. The “numen” itself, the primary form of the world-feeling, is a pure, necessary and unconscious creation, and it is not transferable.

What one people takes over from another—in “conversion” or in admiring imitation—is a name, dress and mask for its own feeling, never the feeling of that other.

The old Celtic and old Germanic myth-motives have to be treated, like the repertory of Classical forms possessed by the learned monk, and like the entire body of Christian-Eastern faith taken over by the Western Church, simply as the material out of which the Faustian …

Kaiser Barbarossa sits in the Kyffhäuser cavern and Frau Venus in the Hörselberg. It is as though the Faustian universe abhorred anything material and impenetrable.

In things, we suspect other worlds.

Their hardness and thickness is merely appearance, and—a trait that would be impossible in Classical myth, because fatal to it—some favoured mortals are accorded the power to see through cliffs and crags into the depths.

We can understand this if we can see what it was that made the devout Haydn call Beethoven an atheist after he had heard some of his music.

Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture but with the dawn of the Civilization.

It belongs to the great city, to the “educated man” of the great city who acquires mechanistically what his forefathers the creators of the Culture had lived organically. In respect of the Classical feeling of God, Aristotle is an atheist unawares.

Here begins the spatial-spiritual conception of heresy. A Faustian religion by its very nature cannot allow any freedom of conscience; it would be in contradiction with its space-invasive dynamic. Even free thinking itself is no exception to the rule.

After the stake, the guillotine; after the burning of the books, their suppression; after the power of the pulpit, the power of the Press.

Amongst us there is no faith without leanings to an Inquisition of some sort. Expressed in appropriate electrodynamic imagery, the field of force of a conviction adjusts all the minds within it according to its own intensity.

it would be in contradiction with its space-invasive dynamic. Even free thinking itself is no exception to the rule. After the stake, the guillotine; after the burning of the books, their suppression; after the power of the pulpit, the power of the Press.

Amongst us there is no faith without leanings to an Inquisition of some sort.

Expressed in appropriate electrodynamic imagery, the field of force of a conviction adjusts all the minds within it according to its own intensity. Failure to do so means absence of conviction—in ecclesiastical language, ungodliness.

Things are not functions of motion, but they move themselves. Newton it was who first got completely away from Renaissance feeling and formed the notion of distant forces, the attraction and repulsion of bodies across space itself.

Distance is already in itself a force.

The very idea of it is so free from all sense-perceptible content that Newton himself felt uncomfortable with it—in fact it mastered him and not he it.

In this very century, I prophesy, the century of scientific-critical Alexandrianism, of the great harvests, of the final formulations, a new element of inwardness will arise to overthrow the will-to-victory of science.

Exact science must presently fall upon its own keen sword.

First, in the 18th Century, its methods were tried out, then, in the 19th, its powers, and now its historical rôle is critically reviewed. But from Skepsis there is a path to “second religiousness,” which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture.

First, in the 18th Century, its methods were tried out, then, in the 19th, its powers, and now its historical rôle is critically reviewed. But from Skepsis there is a path to “second religiousness,” which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture.

Men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect.

The individual renounces by laying aside books. The Culture renounces by ceasing to manifest itself in high scientific intellects.

But from Skepsis there is a path to “second religiousness,” which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture. Men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect.

The individual renounces by laying aside books. The Culture renounces by ceasing to manifest itself in high scientific intellects.

But science exists only in the living thought of great savant-generations, and books are nothing if they are not living and effective in men worthy of them. Scientific results are merely items of an intellectual tradition.

But what appears under the fabric is once again the earliest and deepest, the Myth, the immediate Becoming, Life itself.

The less anthropomorphic science believes itself to be, the more anthropomorphic it is.

One by one it gets rid of the separate human traits in the Nature-picture, only to find at the end that the supposed pure Nature which it holds in its hand is—humanity itself, pure and complete.

But what appears under the fabric is once again the earliest and deepest, the Myth, the immediate Becoming, Life itself. The less anthropomorphic science believes itself to be, the more anthropomorphic it is.

One by one it gets rid of the separate human traits in the Nature-picture, only to find at the end that the supposed pure Nature which it holds in its hand is—humanity itself, pure and complete.

Out of the Gothic soul grew up, till it overshadowed the religious world-picture, the spirit of the City, the alter ego of irreligious Nature-science.

… a logical necessity of Faustian reason as a dynamic-imperative causality, then developed into a dictatorial, hard-working, world-transforming science—is the grand legacy of the Faustian soul to the souls of Cultures yet to be, a bequest of immensely transcendent forms that the heirs will possibly ignore.

And then, weary after its striving, the Western science returns to its spiritual home.

1.

The world-feeling that underlies it is so thoroughlythoroughly irreligious, so worthless for any but a “religion of reason” so-called, that every one of its efforts in that direction, even with the noblest intentions (Uhde, Puvis de Chavannes), strikes us as hollow and false.

One instant of plein-air treatment suffices to secularize the interior of a church and degrade it into a showroom.

366. I.e., the “giants” of the great frieze, who were in fact Galatians playing the part. This Gigantomachia, a programme-work like the Ring, represented a situation, as the Ring represented characters, under mythological labels.—Tr.